Excerpts taken from world famous ‘Hemmings Auto Blog’
Parnelli Jones celebrates his 1963 Indy 500 win. Photos courtesy Indianapolis Motor Speedway. History tells us that Parnelli Jones, driving the #98 Offy-powered Watson roadster, won the 1963 Indianapolis 500. The win was not without controversy, as Jones’s car was said to be leaking oil in the closing laps, yet Read more
We normally associate the trend of drive-in this and drive-in that – restaurants, banks, theaters – with the 1950s, but as we see from this Joseph Janney Steinmetz photo on Florida Memory of the Pasadena Community Church in St. Petersburg, the trend dates back a little earlier. In fact, the Read more
Should a Packard Caribbean have a manual transmission? We’re not asking about the correctness of such a combination, rather its appropriateness. Caribbeans, after all, were meant to be the sporting option for the Packard buyer of the 1950s, and what’s more sporting than a manual transmission? On the other hand, Read more
Emerson Fittipaldi. Still image from video below. By anyone’s measure, Emerson Fittipaldi had an amazing career in both Formula 1 and in Champ Car, surviving an era when, per the BBC’s math, drivers had a 20-percent chance of death over a five-year period. The youngest F1 champion of his day, Read more
1960 Peerless GT in the museum’s current Dayton location. Photo courtesy British Transportation Museum. Editor’s note: This piece comes to us from our latest contributor, Steven Thomas. Look for more from Steven in the coming weeks. Calling all fans of British-built cars and automobilia: The British Transportation Museum is hard Read more
An Ash Flash lantern. Photo by author. It’s funny how collecting one thing leads to collecting other things—old cars has led to old car parts and old tools and old advertisements. I think, at this point, it’s safe to say that I just like old stuff. My latest find also Read more
The idea of mass-production is overrated. In return for expediency, we sacrifice individuality and the hand-crafted experience; in return for amelioration of costs, we sacrifice the tailoring to our specific needs. We’ve seen a lot of rhetoric about returning to our do-it-yourself roots over the last decade or so, but Read more
* Who needs magazines to compare all the passenger cars on the market in 1963? No, that way you can’t make it so your product comes out on top in every test, which is what GM did in Decision at Daytona, a half-hour infomercial for the entire Chevrolet lineup. Even Read more
Good on the seller of this 1973 Plymouth Satellite listed for sale on Hemmings.com for getting the car most of the way toward his late father’s wishes – a plain-jane 318-powered twin to his father’s first new car from decades ago. Not too many people get to connect with their Read more
* Model cars, whether off-the-shelf or built from kits, are a good way to collect a lot of cars when you don’t have the room for any. Collecting George Barris-built cars, whether scale or full size, just adds an added wrinkle of complexity, one that Yoshihiro Hobara has been dealing Read more