Innholdsfortegnelse for February 2023 i Hemmings Classic Car

“I was heartened to find so many vintage vehicles still running and reasonably attainable.” Winter tends to come on somewhat suddenly up here in Vermont—one day it’s a gorgeous “Indian summer” with autumn colors and light jackets and a few days later you’re scraping the windshield under a gray morning sky. Needless to say, the cool cars get tucked away quickly at that point, if you’re the sort who tries to make use every bit of the “good” weather. I had my ’67 Camaro out just a week or so ago as this is written and didn’t even need to slide the heater control over to “warm.” It snowed last night, so that ride was probably the last bit of vintage motoring I’ll get in before spring. But it’s exactly…

Dart Grilles CLASSIC INDUSTRIES • 800-854-1280 CLASSICINDUSTRIES.COM• $399.99 Brighten up your 1973-’74 Dodge Dart with a new reproduction grille. Each is manufactured in injection-molded ABS, complemented with silver accents, just like the ones that were installed at the factory. Further authenticity is built-in with the Pentastar markings in the correct spots as well as spacing for the parking-lamp lenses. These will fit all Dart variants from the base models to the Swinger. The lower grille molding is sold separately. Inquire about p/n 3691476 for more details. 1954 Buick Skylark AUTOMODELLO • 888-212-5160 • AUTOMODELLO.COM $299.95 (ENCOMIUM EDITION); $249.95 (STANDARD EDITION) When Buick’s flagship Skylark convertible returned for its sophomore season in 1954, the glamorous drop-top wore sportier styling and more chrome trim. This low-production two-door inspired a new premium collectible…

“The 1940s were very profitable years for the Little Five.” Would Nash-Kelvinator have done better if World War II never happened? Conventional histories have usually said the American Independent automakers were helped by that conflict, not hurt. That’s because the Independents were awarded lucrative contracts for war materiel that gave them decent profits while enabling them to vastly improve their tools, machinery, and production facilities. That certainly was the case with Willys-Overland, winner of the Jeep contract along with a mountain of other war work. Willys was an insignificant company in the 1930s, but by the end of the war, it had completely modernized its factory and machinery. It also gained the one automotive product—Jeep—that it could sell without worrying about competition. Studebaker and Hudson also made out well in…

In the late 1980s, Chrysler transformed its Town & Country, and most other station wagons it produced, by reimagining it as one of Chrysler’s first-generation minivans, built on the front-drive S platform and sharing its powertrain with Lee Iacocca’s ubiquitous K-cars. That’s notable because for most of the time leading up to then, the Town & Country was a massive, luxury-packed conventional station wagon with a longitudinal layout and an overall length that stretched right out of sight. The Chrysler minivans rocked the automotive world as few new cars before them, defining a new way to carry people and their possessions. Thing was, the redefinition of the wagon erased some of the attributes that made Americans love big station wagons in the first place: Gobs of big-block power, enough to…

AACA 2023 Calendar THE ANTIQUE AUTOMOBILE CLUB OF AMERICA HAS RELEASED ITS 2023 SCHEDULE of national meets, tours, and conventions to take place around the country and Canada where the AACA Ontario Region will host the Founders Tour. For the uninitiated, the 87-year-old club focuses on preserving, restoring, and maintaining automobiles and automotive history. The Annual Convention features a trade show, seminars, and an awards banquet, while the tours are a great opportunity for owners to enjoy their vehicles along scenic and historic highways. The meets feature car shows, car corrals, swap meets, and tens of thousands of like-minded hobbyists and enthusiasts to exchange their knowledge and love of cars. The 2023 gatherings are as follows: January 26-28: MiamiFlorida February 9-11: WilliamsburgVirginia March 18: VeroBeachFlorida April 13-15: CharlotteMotorSpeedwayConcord, North Carolina April…

Most designers aspire to leave a lasting impression with their work, and for more than 35 years in the Chrysler Design studio, Diran Yazejian did just that. With a career that began in 1959 and stretched to 1995, he penned the exterior details for countless production models—mostly for Dodge. For example, that iconic vertical grille divider that makes the 1969 Charger instantly identifiable? You can thank Diran. His immersion in Chrysler’s culture during his career extended beyond the design studio, when he began collecting and restoring vintage Mopars. Plenty came and went from his suburban Detroit garage over the decades, but it currently houses a 1934 Dodge cabriolet, a 1957 Dodge Crown Royal convertible, and the subject of this story: a 1954 New Yorker Town & Country. It’s a comparatively…

When Lee Iacocca left the Ford Motor Company and joined Chrysler in 1978, he was faced with rebuilding a car company on the verge of bankruptcy. One of the reasons for the company’s lack of capital, he claimed, was that the corporation’s diverse number of platforms—five in production at the time—shared few common parts, which in turn had created a complex manufacturing and inventory conundrum. Correcting Chrysler’s fortunes would require a streamlined system of production already in practice in Germany and Japan: fewer platforms with a broad array of shared components, most of which were hidden from buyer’s eyes. While Iacocca stood before the U.S. Congress making his appeal for the great “Chrysler bailout” in 1979, his engineers were busy developing a new chassis: The K-car platform. The new front-wheel-drive…

“I turn to the pages of this title, where I briefly live vicariously through the adventures of fellow enthusiasts.” Monty Python sang “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” at the end of the comedic troupe’s controversial film, The Life of Brian. Ignoring the politics of church and state within the movie for a moment, if you took the song at face value—applying it to whatever happens during one’s day—the outlandish lyrics make some sense. Especially for those of us in the northern climate anticipating the season’s first storm system… of the frozen variety. The days of driving cherished vintage rides are officially suspended. Probably for the next six months. What’s one to do? Admittedly, winter weather driving can be entertaining. I honed my own car control skills courtesy…

I HAD ALWAYS BEEN A CAR NUT BUT didn’t have an opportunity to own one while in high school. That changed between my first and second years of college, when my parents relented and let me bring a car back to school. Given the fact that they had no money to contribute to the purchase, I was obligated to buy something based on whatever money I could save up over the summer. Luck (although I’m not sure I would have called it that later) would have it that a guy around the corner was selling a 1962 Austin-Healey Sprite that met my two requirements: It ran (some of the time), and I had the money to buy it. Of course, you must have a decent sound system in your car…

“I applaud people who keep such cars original and running, so we can all see, hear, and smell what once was.” In the 1990s I did the How-To segment on the My Classic Car TV show, and it was there that I saw my first restored car. This was years after having gone to Pebble Beach and other famous concours d’elegance shows. Let me explain. One of the cars we featured on the show was a 1963 Corvette split-window coupe that had been meticulously restored to the way it was when it left the factory, right down to the slight orange peel in the paintwork and the faint overspray on the chassis. In fact, the owner researched everything to the point that he actually knew how much grease was shot…