Thursday, January 05, 2017

Happy 80th birthday Mopar!

one owner all stock 37 Willys, yes, he just died and the car finally got out of the garage

drag racers in Vancouver might get a 1/4 mile dragstrip built


The Vancouver Island Motor Sports Association (VIMSA) racers are proposing to build a ¼ mile track and a road course next to the local airport with the plan to host drag race events every two or three weeks.

This facility would be similar to the Portland racing venue but without the time and costs wasted to ride a ferry to get there.

http://vancouverisland.ctvnews.ca/video?clipId=965473&binId=1.1180928&playlistPageNum=1

https://www.facebook.com/bonestockcars/posts/1002247783232093

You didn't know you wanted one until now



you're welcome

1971 4x4 Mini, in rallycross? Whoa, that would be terrific!


"Built by the Special Tuning department the car had a propshaft taken from the normal diff to drive a Sprite diff which was mounted to the boot floor. Standard Cooper S driveshafts were used at the back with radius rod location." and on the window info sheet it says "that it used an available platform of the Austin Ant, an experimental military 4x4"


http://tentenths.com/forum/showthread.php?t=143380
thanks Steph23555!

At age 26, Jim Bush ordered the muscle car of his dreams, 8 months later, the 1 of 8 Plum Crazy dual quad hemi auto Barracuda was onto it's 2nd owner, then he spent 45 years trying to get it back, 18 months of restoration, then sold it again. It only has 12k miles due to a spun bearing









It was left in the band in Eau Claire Wisconsin for decades, though it once made a try for life with a 318, but after 2000 miles that engine had problems too, and it was back into barn storage again


he tried selling it on Ebay, but instead of a million dollars he thought it'd bring, it topped out at only 155k

So he sold it to Fusion Luxury Motors in Chatsworth Ca. (just west of Burbank) and they are trying to flip it at $270,000 www.fusionmotorco.com/vehicles


https://www.facebook.com/bonestockcars
http://lacrossetribune.com/news/local/jim-s-hemi-cuda-comes-back-home-four-decades-later/article_f7b3aca7-4bf2-5b43-8d10-5a998deb42b6.html

the LSR record holder in Australia just found that the Australian Tax Office is reneging on the tax incentive for Research & Development exemption of $180,000 they were already given, and have spent, on the "Aussie Invader 5R" jet car

After 2 years the Aussie Tax Office decided they did not qualify for a $450,000 tax exemption they had received, and demanded repayment of the $180k with interest and in 2 weeks. Since that money isn't laying around, they are threatening to seize and liquidate auction the under construction jet car.

The tail fin took 600 hours of machining to make, was recently delivered and is one of the last major parts to be constructed and the local team helping to build the car is anxious to fit it so testing can begin.

The project has taken seven years to get to this stage and has been built entirely from Australian business product donations, and the mums and dads who contributed by joining The 1000 MPH Club.

The engine for the car is a 200,000hp bi-propellant rocket typically used for sending people to the moon and satellites into space.

Bloodhound sent them a consolation letter, which is cool

https://www.facebook.com/AussieInvader/?hc_ref=NEWSFEED
http://www.communitynews.com.au/joondalup-times/news/rosco-mcglashan-to-attempt-land-speed-record-again/

Sears goes bankrupt - again. This time sells the tool brand Craftsman to Stanley/Black and Decker for $0.9 billion

Stanley, which makes and sells tools under the DeWalt and Black & Decker names, wants to grow the Craftsman brand by selling its products in more stores outside of Sears. Today, only 10 percent of Craftsman products are sold in other stores. Sears said it will continue to sell Craftsman, including at its Kmart and Sears Hometown stores. The Hoffman Estates, Illinois-based company first took control of Craftsman in 1927 when it bought the trademark for $500

Stanley will pay Sears about $900 million for Craftsman, which includes $525 million when the deal closes this year, $250 million after three years and a percentage of sales for 15 years. After 15 years, Sears will start paying Stanley 3 percent of the Craftsman sales it makes.

http://chicago.cbslocal.com/2017/01/05/sears-selling-craftsman-tools-brand-for-900-million/

Last May, Sears announced it was putting Craftsman, along with other iconic brands like Kenmore and DieHard, as well as its Sears Home Services repair business, up for sale, in an effort to sell off other attractive assets to maintain financial liquidity. In recent years, Sears has sold off the Lands' End (LE, +1.27%) clothing brand, its stake in Sears Canada, and it also spun off some of its best locations into a real estate investment trust, helping to raise billions of dollars.

Sears Holdings has lost some $10 billion since 2010 and the company, created by a Sears-Kmart merger engineered by Lampert in 2005, has yet to report a year of comparable sales growth, despite hundreds of store closings. In its most recent quarter alone, it lost $748 million, its worst performance in years as comparable sales, which exclude the impact of stores closed in the preceding year.

http://fortune.com/2017/01/05/sears-cash-lampert/

a couple of cars from the full-size, big-block Chevy collection of Jody Schmeisser, one even is a less than 20k mile 427 SS Impala

It's all about the right tool for the job, the right bike for the track.

Looks like the Hudson Museum in Shipshewana Indiana, Eldon Hostetler's collection, may have closed since Halloween 2016, he passed away in Jan 2016

Eldon Hostetler surprised his community and his world when he left the Amish religion. The 1st of 13 kids, (and that is a lot of siblings) he had the natural gift to be an inventor and entrepreneur, and eventually stopped creating new stuff but only after  with more than 65 patents to his name,

He had a formal education until the 8th grade graduation (not unusual at the time) and switched from Amish to Mennonite.

His Grandpa had tractors and threshing machines, and he helped his grandfather renovate machinery. He was Amish, but he traded his steam engine in for a gasoline-fired tractor a 20-40 Huber tractor.

The tractor went three times as fast as the steam engine would go in high gear, and it pulled a wagon that he used to haul a 50-gallon drum with his fuel and oil and things on it, for hundreds of miles around the country doing threshing.

Hostetler said that when he was 18, he was helping his Grandpa Shrock in his shop one day when his grandpa told him if he promised never to tell his mother where I got the money, he would loan me $350 to buy my first car, a 1938 Hudson,”

Hostetler said. “I was the only person in our community who had a car, and so I hauled a lot of Amish people around. They paid me so much per mile and gave me gas ration stamps so I could buy gas. It was during World War II, and I couldn’t get tires. I had to recap those tires until I couldn’t recap them anymore.”

So he traded in the 1938 Hudson for a 1940 model with 27,000 miles, the second of many cars he owned in the coming decades.

In 2005 Eldon donated land, a building and endowment fund to start the Hostetler’s Hudson Auto Museum, building the largest collection of rare and unusual Hudsons.

http://millerstewartfuneralhome.com/OBITS/EldonHostetler.html
https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g37526-d1422373-Reviews-Hostetler_s_Hudson_Auto_Museum-Shipshewana_Indiana.html
The Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/HostetlersHudsonMuseum/ stopped posting in 2010

https://www.hemmings.com/magazine/hcc/2006/12/Eldon-Hostetler/1382310.html

Wednesday, January 04, 2017

be aware, some really old absent minded people are a danger to be around


a 94-year-old man whose BMW was parked in front inadvertently backed over a 1979 Moto Guzzi SP1000 belonging to Moto Coffee Machine owner Antony Katz and on to the hood of a Toyota. The BMW crushed the motorcycle and smashed the front of the Toyota before flipping on to its side.

“The poor guy driving,” Katz continued, “it was his first accident ever.”

Predictably, Katz is now in a negotiating battle with the BMW driver’s insurance company. NADA book value for the model in excellent condition is nearly $6,000, and that’s what the underwriter is offering. The stumbling block is that Katz has put $9,000 in parts into the bike and 350 hours of labor. It terms of sentimental value, the SP1000 is priceless.

“It had been sitting in a barn for 10 years,” he said of obtaining the bike. “It had been outside for three hours (when the accident happened). I was just about to bring it in to change the tires.”

http://www.ride-ct.com/?p=18691

Victory and Indian motorcycles dealership busted scamming the factory for rebates based on program to get vets a $1000 discount

Shark Cycles (ironic) in Stafford Springs Connecticut was raided by the feds in May of 2016. The owner and 2 employees were arrested and released on bail.

Charged with larceny, money-laundering, and 12 counts each of identity theft and forgery for allegedly scamming Polaris Industries.

The investigation began nine months ago when a lawyer for Polaris, which makes Victory and Indian motorcycles, Slingshot three-wheelers and Polaris-branded ATVs, alerted authorities that the dealer might be committing government document fraud.

“It was determined that the employees of Shark Cycle were stealing the personal information – names, birthday and Social Security numbers – of customers who were veterans. They would then use the factual information on fraudulent Department of Defense documents, which were submitted to Polaris for a $1,000 credit. Polaris was running a rebate called ‘Hero’s Medal,’ so that anyone with a military, police or firefighter identification who bought a new Victory motorcycle from a licensed dealer would get a $1,000 rebate.

“It was found that the fraud scheme was done so that Shark Cycle could present lower prices to customers, thus spiking its sales numbers. In turn, Shark Cycle received an additional monetary bonus from Polaris for high sales numbers,” Fox 61 explained in its online story.

http://www.ride-ct.com/?p=19264
http://fox61.com/2016/12/19/police-3-arrested-in-fraud-scheme-at-stafford-springs-shop-for-using-veterans-information/

Something you may not have known about Steve McQueen

He gave a lecture at Loyola Marymount University in 1978 about his life.

A cd of that is included in the book "Steve McQueen: A Tribute to the King of Cool" by Marshall Terrill

And I can't find any transcription of it, or you tube audio of it online. 

hope for a loophole in the rules, then exploit it. But don't think you're going to just buy some property to make a private museum without the neighbors causing problems


When Peter Mullins wanted to make an underground garage for a dozen of his prize Bugatti and other exotic French classics below his bungalow house in West LA, he ran into zoning laws the were possibly meant to keep people from creating earthquake related problems for houses and insurance companies.

It seems the rule is that an underground garage can only be 1/4 the size of the building above it.

That's just not going to fit more than a couple cars. So... he got a really smart architect type person who knew of a simple little loophole. A garage known as a "private museum" has no size restrictions. Problem solved.

Other people had a lot more headaches with trying to make a place for their collection, like Peter Nettesheim in Long Island, who was balked by neighbors for 5 years when he tried to build a detached garage for BMW car and motorcycle restorations. A hobby that needs some garage space. He had bought a 2 acre lot with big trees that would give some privacy screening, but without 1st getting all his plans approved.


In one corner sits the oldest BMW motorcycle to date, a 1923 R2 with a confirmation from BMW hanging above it.

Take a moment to look at http://www.ride-ct.com/?p=9364 photos of the inside of the collection garage.

Most of his vintage bikes were obtained in Germany, a couple in Poland, but none in the USA. Many of his bikes are extremely valuable, worth into six figures apiece.

Nettesheim began restoring cars, but then reality hit: “After I was done with each car, I put so much time and effort into them I couldn’t sell them. What I realized was that I didn’t have enough garage space. So I started doing motorcycles; you can fit more inside the garage.”

By the mid-1990s, Nettesheim, whose day job is as the Freightliner dealer for Long Island, N.Y., had an architect draw up plans for a 32-by-48-foot two-story barn with two doors at one end. “It is the largest legal garage in town,” says Nettesheim. He has 53 motorcycles and four cars at his home, and he says that is only three-quarters of what he has.



http://www.garagestylemagazine.com/  Garage style magazine Fall 2010 issue
http://autoweek.com/article/new-yorkers-bmw-passion-fills-two-garages
http://www.motorcycleclassics.com/classic-german-motorcycles/classic-bmw-motorcycles-zmmz07jfzraw
http://www.limws.org/Thumbnail-folders/Nettesheim/index.html
http://tbrnewsmedia.com/museum-like-house-holds-huge-collection-of-bmw-motorcycles/

Good use of a visual theme to promote your tires with the Pioneer name while crossing the continent in 1913 to demonstrate the durability or your product

a hot wheels collector



Aston Martin DB4 pulled out of the woods. In the early 70s, it was driven from Colorado to Massachusetts, where it was parked outdoors at its new owner's home.







Only about a thousand DB4 coupés left Aston Martin's factory in wearing the Superleggera by Carrozzeria Touring, and this Series 2 was bought by a famous voice actor in Los Angeles in 1962.

http://ca.pressfrom.com/autos/enthusiasts/-6475-this-aston-martin-db4-spent-the-last-45-years-in-the-woods/
http://www.worldwide-auctioneers.com/auctions/details.cfm?vehicleID=18&id=57

if it looks new... it's because it was ever only used once, for about 14 minutes in 1969 when blasting up Pikes Peak


notice the tires are Goodyear Blue Streak dirt tires.... I've never seen any before





I posted about it 9 years ago, and the article from the magazine still is defintively the best I've read about it yet, but this is the first time it's been shown publicly in decades, and finally some new photos are available.

It was a win at all costs built car, and the gears in the axle cost $35,000 all by themselves.... in 1969. The Boss 429 was built by Smokey Yunick.

It was used the one time, then it was retired as Ford decided they were done with racing, and they paid for everything to get the best, and win without doubt.

So they hired the fastest guy to get up Pike's Peak, Bobby Unser, who had already won 10 times previous to 1969 (with open wheel cars 1956, and 1958-62 with the Unser Special, 1963 and 66 with a Chevy, (1964 with Sports Car), and 1968 with the Rislone Special) (He also won in 1986 with an "Unlimited" car)

Bobby Unser drove it the one time, and that run set a record (Super Stock Car 13 minutes 40 seconds) that stood for 5 more years until he broke it with a Dodge Dart.

http://www.rodauthority.com/event-coverage/car-shows/mcacn-2016-muscle-car-show-par-excellence-2/
http://www.riggsboysracing.com/69%20Torino.htm
http://www.ppihc.com/race_winners_by_year/

you can preview the first 50 pages of the Linda Vaughn biography book on Google Books now


And tells some hilarious stories in it too... she was sued for knocking over a porta potty with a hot air balloon by the woman in it at the time,

When she won the Miss Pure Oil Firebird, she got free gas for a year

https://books.google.com/books?id=mPwYDQAAQBAJ&pg=PA7&dq=Linda+Vaughn:+The+First+Lady+of+Motorsports&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiw85yx9ajRAhWpxlQKHZ9pBZQQ6AEIGjAA#v=onepage&q&f=false

Don't let friends borrow your car if they are going to get drunk and stoned

In June 2016, a man borrowed a friend’s BMW in Scotland and drove south to Manchester to catch a concert.

He parked the vehicle in one of the area’s parking garages and promptly forgot which one. After the concert, he searched and searched, and ultimately spent five days trying to find his friend’s wheels before giving up.

In August, the owner, who’d emailed local companies and government to see if it had been found, reported the vehicle lost or stolen. Now officers say they happened upon an abandoned car in one of the area lots just before midnight Friday and, after seeing it had been reported lost or stolen, tweeted that they’d found the car that had been lost since June.

http://fox5sandiego.com/2017/01/03/bmw-found-six-months-after-driver-lost-it-in-parking-garage/

Jo Ramirez, mechanic for the legends

Dan Gurney, Senna, Prost and Stewart were all people he worked for.

Wow. That is incredible.

He left Mexico in 1962 bound for Italy as he looked to pursue a motor racing career.

Ramirez came from the same Mexican town as the Rodriguez brothers - Ricardo and his brother Pedro - and although he had similar racing ambitions he did not have the money to achieve what they were able to.

He studied mechanical engineering at Mexico City University but dropped out to go to Europe in 1961, when the Mexican went to rent a factory Ferrari for the Italian GP at Monza in which Rodriguez sensationally qualified on the front row of the grid.

Through Ricardo Rodriguez, he managed to get a job as the Ferrari team’s ‘Gopher’ before taking a role with Maserati working in sport-prototype cars, then a job with Lamborghini.

 In 1964, he moved to England to work at Ford Advanced Vehicles and then secured a job with Dan Gurney’s Eagle F1 project. He secured his first F1 win at the Belgian GP in 1967.

After the F1 team closed down Jo spent three years with Gurney in the United States, working in CanAm, Indycars and TransAm racing but in 1971 he returned to Britain to work as chief mechanic for the John Wyer Automotive Gulf Porsche sportscar team.

During his 17 years at McLaren, he worked with Ayrton Senna, Alain Prost, Keke Rosberg, Gerhard Berger, Nigel Mansell, Mika Hakkinen and David Coulthard winning 10 Drivers’ World Championships and seven Constructors’ Championships.

Jo Ramírez retired in 2001 after 40 years in the business.

http://www.motorsportmagazine.com/history/f1/mechanics-tales-jo-ram-rez
https://www.amazon.com/Jo-Ramirez-Memoirs-Racing-Man/dp/1844258610
http://www.gpmechanicstrust.com/the-trustees/jo-ramirez.html
http://www.grandprix.com/gpe/cref-ramjo.html

the 1968 ZL1 engine... ever wonder why GM made less than 100? Sure is a lot of r and d, and millions of dollars of engineering and production involved in rolling out a new engine, to install 4 in production cars, and sell the rest to racers.

well, consider that GM wasn't "really" out of racing.

Then consider that 69 were put in COPO Camaros for racing, and I don't even know how many they made and sold to Can Am racers.

Yeah, I think it's obvious that GM was out to win, and Jim Hall's Chaparral's were the motivation to get them made, but, McLaren was the real beneficiary.

McLaren was putting out about 620 hp from the 460 pound engine. Nice. 

Tuesday, January 03, 2017

Canadian John Cannon, in the McLaren Mk2B, in the 4th race of the 1968 Can Am season, at the Monterey Gran Prix didn't just win, he defeated all competition

http://www.tamsoldracecarsite.net/JHawes0005.html

it started raining, and Cannon had been the Firestone rain tire test driver.

He went out and ran laps two to four seconds faster than Denny Hulme and Bruce McLaren, in a used up old race car, vs their state of the art new great machines.

He started out the backmarker in 15th position, and was in 8th place by the end of the 1st lap, and was in 1st place on the 6th lap.

By the 20th lap, he'd LAPPED that entire field up to 8th place.

People said they could see Dan Gurney's shocked face through his helmet visor when he was passed by Cannon.

Cannon won, a lap ahead of Hulme, the winningest Can AM racer. It's one of the greatest upsets in racing history


(Cannon was the USRRC driver for Nickey Chevrolet and the Vinegaroon in the first Can Am race at St Jovite)

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/480407485225337706/