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A place to admire the artistry in automotive engineering.
Here is the bottom/business end of the Hyabusa engine I posted in an earlier Car Photo of the Day. On a rest stop of the 2009 Annie & Steve Norman Classic Motorcar Rally on Vancouver Island we stopped at the shop of Super Seven Cars Inc. The shop is run by an ex-Can Am racer who has a fascinating collection of cars in and around the shop. They specialize in this Lotus 7 replica with the Hyabusa engine. Seems like a natural fit really. Insane coupled to crazy.
Can you name the car from just this view of the engine. Plenty of clues abound, so I doubt this one will withstand much scrutiny before being named correctly.
OK, so this isn’t a great photograph, but there’s a lot of interesting things going on here for my car-spotting crowd. Can you name the car and the engine?
Today’s CPotD Mystery Guest was another car seen on a lunch stop at a car collection on the 2009 Annie & Steve Norman Classic Motorcar Rally. The car was parked under a temporary tent behind the main building that housed the collection. Sadly, it appeared as if it had not moved under its own power for quite a while. Can you name the car?
As many of you know, I’m not a big fan of car shows. It all boils down to the fact that to me the natural habitat of an automobile is on the road. Static displays detract from the object’s purpose. Overlay the static display with judging, and all sorts of unrelated to cars – but ingrained in human behavior shenanigans ensue.
One such set of shenanigans are cutesy decorations. Those bizarro “leaning kid” dolls lie atop this pile, followed closely by Elvis mannequins, and drive-in trays with plastic burgers on them. Restoration photo books are one thing, as they are at least directly related to what you are looking at, as are period-correct materials about the history of the machine. Lying somewhere between these two extremes is captured above. This display is in a weird grey area between “period correct accessories” and “too cute” (if you could call it that!) I saw this vehicle at the only car show I regularly attend, which is the one put on every June by my little home town of Arlington, WA. I feel like it is important to “show the colors” so to speak and bring my car if I can. Militaria is always sort of an oddball category anyway, and the guys that collect these machines are a tad wacky. The car show organizers never have a judging category for them, so they end up pooled with other oddball (meaning not STOCK OR HOT-ROD DOMESTIC VEHICLES FROM 1925 THROUGH 1975… they always manage to squeeze 20 judging categories out of THAT group!) machines … such as imports, and race cars, and other miscellanea lumped into a giant pot called “Specialty Cars.” Of course guys with 69 Camaros and C2 Corvettes also throw themselves into “Specialty Cars” because they feel like they have a better chance of winning there… go figure. See what I mean about shenanigans?
Anyway the poor Jeep and armored car guys don’t have a hope in hell of winning anything so they usually just congregate in small, camouflaged groups and look a little PTSD’ed. This particular year though this one guy made a run at success with a full-blown Vietnam Era accessory display. If he’d pulled off a hovering Huey squadron he may have won Best of Show, but I think he struck out with just a toy M-16.
Bathed in the warm yellow glow of a vintage tire sign, here’s the guillocheur-created engine-turned cylinder head of a pre-war Mercedes-Benz 540k with various internal and external bits scattered about the workbench. Seen at the “garage mahal” of a noted M-B collector in Stanwood, WA.
I’d be willing to bet that the same exact Italian craftsman who made the chromed pipes from the previous CPotD also wrought these pipes. Seen on a workbench at RPM in 2008.