Of trunks and tires: The real reason every ’37 Buick came with sidemounts

Posted on Jul 9, 2024 in Featured | 4 comments

The 1937 Buick Limited owned by Lee Gurvey. Since he purchased this 1937 Buick Limited off the lawn at Hershey in 1999, owner Lee Gurvey has driven it all over the West. “We’ve taken it to Colorado, to the Adirondacks, all over the West Coast, to Crater Lake, all over the place,” he tells us. “I could drive it from Scottsdale to Chicago and not think twice.”...

Rats! Chevrolet’s Mark IV big-block V-8 turns 50

Posted on May 25, 2024 in Featured | 4 comments

Larger automobile engines have been built. Smaller engines have made more horsepower. A variety of other engines have won more races. Yet few V-8s have offered massive displacement to performance-hungry hordes and taken on such legendary status like the Chevrolet Mark IV big-block V-8 has. Fifty years after its introduction, the big-block remains as well...

Have you ever wondered why you really bought a vintage car?

Posted on Oct 14, 2023 in Featured | 4 comments

Though I’m partial to muscle cars, I like a lot of different vehicles for more than just their performance potential. Much of what draws me to them are specific visual cues—the way a certain area is styled or particular components or attributes that make me react like Pavlov’s dog to a dinner bell when I see them. Factory vacuum gauges and tachs, and Hurst...

Peter Brock and the ‘Original Venice Crew’ rethink the 1965 Mustang G.T. 350R for its 50th aniversary

Posted on May 12, 2023 in Featured | 6 comments

The donor K-Code Mustangs during disassembly. Photos by Randy Richardson, LA SAAC. Shelby American’s original racing Mustang, the G.T. 350R, captured the SCCA’s B-Production championship from 1965-’67, but its designers still believed the car could have been better. Next month, on the 50th anniversary of the G.T. 350R’s first win, Peter Brock (keynote speaker...

Rides ‘n Smiles – a chance to give something back to children in need

Posted on Nov 12, 2022 in Featured | 2 comments

The author, and a happy passenger, at speed in the SRT Viper GTC. Many of us who earn a living writing about automobiles once had visions of racing professionally, only to learn that our skill sets (or our bank accounts) didn’t measure up to our ambitions. Despite this, we’ve run thousands of laps at tracks across the country or around the world, most in the...

Does this weathervane look familiar?

Posted on Oct 1, 2022 in Featured | 2 comments

If you began reading Hemmings in the 1950s or ’60s, there’s no doubt you’d recognize what car this interesting piece of sculpture represents. But as the hobby has shifted from the Ford Model T and Model A and what the AACA terms “Full Classics” into ’50s cruisers and muscle machines, some of the early history has become a bit obscure even to the most dedicated...

Calamity Jane – a heavy-duty heroine for the nuclear age

Posted on Aug 26, 2022 in Featured | 2 comments

For those of us raised in the United States from the 1950s into the 1990s, the ever-present threat of nuclear war was acknowledged, but not necessarily dwelled upon. Fallout shelter signs were a common sight in cities and towns alike, and most municipalities had their own Civil Defense department, marked with the instantly recognizable blue circle, white...

SCCA creates autocross classes for pre-1975 sports cars

Posted on Jul 18, 2022 in Featured | 2 comments

The Sports Car Club of America has announced the creation of two classes for pre-1975 sports cars in its popular Solo autocross program, giving owners of classic cars a way to participate against cars of similar technology. The rules for the new classes, Heritage Classic Street and Heritage Classic Race, can be found on the SCCA’s website. Howard Duncan, the...

Two-owner, “last-of-its-kind” 1939 Oldsmobile takes Ridler Award

Posted on Jun 2, 2022 in Featured | 2 comments

The catalogs and reference books all say it shouldn’t exist, but according to both its owner and the shop that built it, the 1939 Oldsmobile Series 60 that won the Ridler Award at this past weekend’s Detroit Autorama not only came from the factory as a convertible but is also the last of its kind. The short-lived Series 60 represented the most basic Oldsmobile...

Shockingly, Londoners declare Great Britain world’s greatest automobile producing country

Posted on May 18, 2022 in Featured | 2 comments

Day continues to follow night, grass remains green, and the inhabitants of one car-producing country maintain that their car industry has produced the best cars in the world. The most recent such declaration came toward the end of the recent London Classic Car Show, where visitors voted Great Britain to the top of the show’s Classic Six Nations Cup. The...

Scenes from the America’s British Reliability Run

Posted on Apr 7, 2022 in Featured | 2 comments

Just in time to distract us from our gray Vermont winter comes a batch of photos to remind us of how much fun we had last fall on the America’s British Reliability Run. Nick Zabrecky and Andrew Paolucci of MotorCar Studios in Philadelphia took part in the three-day run, driving a client’s Jaguar E-type (above), and came back with loads of great photos of their...

Sowing Seeds: A handful of Arizona auto shop students receive the lesson of a lifetime

Posted on Mar 20, 2022 in Featured | 2 comments

By his best reckoning, 17-year-old Daniel Gamboa has only driven a stick-shift car about eight or nine times in his life. But he shows no reticence in inching closer to the wheel of Brad Phillips’s 1983 Ferrari 308 GTS QV. Phillips has owned this car for exactly 24 hours before volunteering it for Hagerty’s Driving Experience, a program designed to expose young...