1937 Talbot-Lago. THE car of the 30s French Playboy.
1937 Talbot-Lago 150cc Figoni and Falaschi. Pretty nice, right?
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Monthly Archives: January 2012
Top Five Ways to Modify Your New 1956 Chevrolet.
Chevrolet El Morocco
Congratulations on your new car, the 1956 Chevrolet. As you take it home for the first time, let us make you aware of the most popular ways to rip it apart and make it almost unrecognizable:
Replace the Front Bumper Guards. Almost anything will do. You say you have 1937 Dodge truck headlamp shells lying around? That’s perfect. Sand them down and plug them in.
Line the Sides with Olbrich Castings. The side trim is one of the most distinctive hallmarks of a luxury car, and your modified Chevy won’t look the same without it.
Replace the Wheel Covers. Put on some classic Sabre-Spoke wheel covers, making it look as if they belong to a car twice the price.
Customize the Steering Wheel. Add a touch of class to your new car by imprinting it with your own name.
But the number one way to modify your new Chevrolet to increase its resale value by nearly a thousandfold is…
All of these things actually happened to the 1956 Chevrolet as it was modified into a completely different automobile, the El Morocco. But to discover what the El Morocco’s most distinctive feature was, you’re going to have to tune in to One of a Kind: Cars tonight, only on the Velocity Channel.
1933 Delage D8S. Tuesday night on Velocity at 9:30ET/8:30CST! Who needs a lift?
Chromed out and loving it.
Tomorrow night on Discovery’s Velocity Channel we’re featuring two all new OOAKs. This award show stunner is chromed to the gills. Tune in for more.
Too Sexy for My Barn. ’39 Bugatti Type 57C only on “One of A Kind:Cars” on Velocity!
The Beautiful Bugatti…A Passion for Design. All New Episodes Tonight!
by Eileen Marable
The ultimate barn find!
I am biased. I love Bugattis. There is just something so elegant about their curves and so debonair in their styling. Just thinking about them takes me back to the golden age of old Hollywood. Men wore suits and dressed for dinner and the women had impossibly tiny waists and never had a hair out of place. Their homes were filled with art deco furniture and they drove luxurious, stretched out Bugattis.
Katherine Hepburn drove one in 1933’s Christopher Strong. A Bugatti had a cameo alongside Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in 1934’s The Gay Divorcee. Another pops up in 1935’s Remember Last Night.
For those of you who are aren’t into old Hollywood I’m delighted to report a classic Bugatti even makes an appearance in a chase scene in Magnum P.I.
Now that’s what I call a timeless classic! (Continue reading on the Velocity Blog).
One of A Kind. The Genius of Ferrari. This Tuesday.
When you stop to consider the brand that is Ferrari, you’d assume that company founder – Enzo Ferrari – would be proud. There is the Ferrari name on everything from the cars themselves to headphones and the name is recognized around the world. Proud? Nope… he’d probably be downright pissed off.
Enzo Ferrari was a car man. A racing man. He didn’t much care for the fact that he had to sell cars to finance his racing team. In fact, he was said to dislike the people who bought Ferraris because he believed they were simply interested in the prestige of the name and not the car itself. (continue reading at Velocity Blog)
For more OOAKs check out our Facebook page. And for more about the battle between Ford and Ferrari pick up author AJ Baime’s masterful book: Go Like Hell: Ford, Ferrari and their Battle for Speed and Glory at Le Mans.
Auburn Cord Duesenberg Museum. A Big Thanks from “One of A Kind:Cars”.
For the good folks at ACD who helped us tremendously with the “One of A Kind” Mormon Meteor episode, here’s a hearty thanks. They have many spectacular American cars and we hope to return for another season!
New “One of A Kind” Episode Tonight.
1955 Chevrolet Biscayne. Welcome to the Future.
Sent to the Junkyward
The 1955 Chevrolet Biscayne should not exist.
Crushed. In a landfill. Recycled. Pulped. Unrecognizable. General Motors signed this car’s death warrant in 1959, and watched as a junkyard took it apart, piece by piece.
This car should be dead.
It’s amazing what we lose when we don’t pay attention. We throw things away because they’re taking up space, or because the new hotness comes along. We have a blind spot in our rear-view mirrors that doesn’t see the value in things that fall between old and new.
Rescued and Restored
General Motors was spending too much money keeping its museum pieces in storage, and they decided to clean house. We’ve all made that decision. We’ve tossed out old class notes, or clothes we’ve outgrown, or a pot we used to make pasta night after night. And it’s not until those things are gone that we realize that it had more value than we thought.
Someone managed to grab this car before it hit the crusher. A priceless ancestor of a generation of GM cars was saved. But the way it was brought back to life is simply unbelievable.
That’s why we built a show around it. Tuesday, check out a brand-new episode of One of a Kind: Cars, on Velocity TV. It’s a car show that’s so much more than a car show, but we’re biased.
Velocity by Discovery
9:30 Eastern, 6:30 Pacific
America’s Most Awesome Car.
1935 Duesenberg SJ Special
If you’ve never driven on the salt flats of Utah and Nevada, you may not know that it’s exactly like driving on the surface of the moon. I personally managed to drive my poky little Saturn on the salt flats, taking an ill-advised shortcut, and managed to drive in a straight line, as fast as I could, for hours, in absolute silence. It is an incredible feeling of spacelessness. Nothing moves. There are no signs. You have no sense of place. You could be anywhere.
Eighty years ago, someone did the same thing, and fell in love with the feeling. In the 1930’s, automobile racing was the Wild West. Anyone could do it, anywhere, anytime. And one man, living in Utah, drove his race car out in the middle of nowhere for days at a time, which gave him time to dream.
Out of this nothingness, this unknowable void, came one of the greatest cars in history, establishing the salt flats as the world standard for land speed records. One man designed a car with an engine powerful enough to compete against airplane engines, which most people were using at the time. One man designed a body that was aerodynamic, so that the flow of air would help it achieve his dream.
This car would become known as the Mormon Meteor, and it is one of the most important cars still in existence. It defeated cars the world over. It put Utah on the map for land-speed enthusiasts. Epic films could be written about this car. Brad Pitt could play the lead.
But you can find out about it on Tuesday night, on the world premiere of the “Mormon Meteor” on the new show, One of a Kind: Cars. It’s a show we created and developed ourselves. It’s the untold story about the most unique automobiles on the planet.
But it’s also about the people crazy enough to build and restore them, and hunt for them the world over. Please join us.
One of a Kind: Cars
9:30 Eastern/Pacific