A couple of weeks ago Geoffrey Horton loaded his trailer up with his Jaguar XK140 and headed for Palm Springs and the Desert Classic Concours d’Elegance. Toady’s blog features photo’s Geoffrey kindly shared of some of the US built cars that were taking part.
By 1925 Cadillac founder Henry M Leland had sold the second marque he had founded, Lincoln, to Henry Ford for $8m but Ford continued to up date the L-Series first seen in 1917, until 1930. The 1925 Lincoln above features a nickel plated radiator shell first seen in 1924.
Need a 2 door convertible with plenty of room for occasional passengers and cargo in the boot / trunk the 1930 Cadillac V16 Series 452 is just the car you are looking for.
Winner of this years Desert Classic Concours d’Elegance was the 1933 V12 powered Packard 1005 Twelve Convertible Coupe seen above. The 1005 was the tenth Packard series car and shared 11 different body with the V8 powered Packard Super Eight.
1935 the Cord 810 was the sensation of the New York Auto Show, by 1937 when the supercharged 812 convertible above was built the company had a less than complimentary reputation for reliability and the following year the remains of the company were sold to Avaiation Corporation which today is part of Textron Systems Corporation.
Following a tip from some quail hunters the owner of this rugged 1949 Diamond T Model 201 1 ton pickup abandoned in a field near Globe Arizona, dented and rusted it was 90% there and the Hercules six cylinder motor still turned. After restoration this Diamond T won the 2010 Desert Classic Concours d’Elegance Best Non-Passenger Vehicle award.
Visiting Paris Retromobile in the 1990’s Californian Carl Schneider came across some drawings by Pininfarina of a Packard that was never built. After purchasing the drawings Carl and Peter Portugal built the likeness of the Pininfarina Packard, seen above, using a 1952 Packard 250 series Mayfair two-door hardtop as a starting point.
In 1958 Lance Reventlow started building a successful series of sports racing cars, above is a continuation model.
In the early 1990’s Corvette racer Dick Guldstrand approached General Motors with a plan to build his own vehicle based on the Corvette asking for 15 chassis and a few million dollars to get him going, he got one car and GM’s blessing. Dick ended up building six of the $200,000 dollar cars, the one above is the second of them, built in 1993.
Nearly three times more common than the Guldstarnd Corvette is the Vector M12 of which 17 examples were manufactured from 1995 to 1999. The Vector was built on a modified Lamborghini Diablo Chassis and is powered by a 499 hp Lamborghini V12.
My thanks to Geoffrey for sharing his photographs more of which will be seen tomorrow and next Wednesday.
Thanks for joining me on this “Classic Americans” edition of “Gettin’ a li’l psycho on tyres” I hope you will join me tomorrow for Ferrari Friday to see a work in progress.
