The 2014 Bonneville Racing Season was intended to be a celebration of 100 years of Speed on the Salt. It seems that the 2014 weather did not cooperate with all of the planned events. Both events organized by the Southern California Timing Assoc. (SCTA) and Bonneville Nationals, Inc. (BNI) were cancelled due to rain...
Most old car clubs are suffering these days. Some say it’s due to the “graying” of the hobby and young people not liking cars. I don’t know if that’s 100 percent true, but I do know that people in general aren’t “joiners” anymore. Whether it’s a snowmobile event I help out with or...
The Firebird you see in these pictures has flown to a speed of 193 mph over the salt flats at Bonneville, Utah. That was back in 2011, when the car was painted red and we took it to Bonneville Speedway with a student team from Fox Valley Technical College in Appleton, Wis. Things have...
When we first got involved in the old-car hobby in 1972, we tried being a flea market vendor. It was a lot of work to load and unload the merchandise we were trying to sell. For the most part, sitting in a field or parking lot hoping for a sale was boring. To top...
Our last blog was posted in mid-August, but we’ve actually been sick since the last day in July. We made it through a month in the hospital and have a long recovery ahead. Things like this lead us to reflect on the direction our life was going in before reality caught up with us....
What made the one-day July 20, 2014 Appleton Auto Show (www.applewtonoldcarshow.com) so big this year? A lot of organizers of other hobby events would like to know why the number of participating show cars seemed to suddenly grow by several hundred cars. The trend for most shows today is fewer show cars and...
The question I was asked the most after the 2014 Iola Old Car Show was “How did they get the Chevy on the mountain?” The people who asked that were mystified b how a new Chevrolet pickup truck was hoisted on top of a fake mountain about 15 ft. high. The dark blue...
Are you kidding me? I heard something about certain magazines not wanting to run photos of nice muscle cars because they had Keystone mags or Cragar wheels in place of factory rims. Back in the real muscle car era, when GTOs, Cobras and Super Bees were new, nobody wanted a car with factory...
This little racing car is a real “Champ Car” because it has a 1940 Studebaker Champ engine. It is called the F. Davi Engineering, Hillegass Studebaker Special. It is a full midget racing car from the prewar era and also raced as a dirt tracker. After sitting for 30 years, the car was resurrected...
Oakie Allen is a veteran firefighter — a former Battalion Chief who worked at Station 3 in Eau Claire, Wis. That’s the city where the Chippewa Valley Chapter of the Society for the Preservation & Appreciation of Antique Motorized Fire Apparatus in America (www.spaamfaa.org) gets its mail. “Like the name SPAAMFAA says, we’re...
