Raymond's Site

When I write or read about collectible Lincolns, I end up thinking wistfully about how Ford’s luxury division once produced cars that people aspired to own because, duh, they were Lincolns. In other words, more or less the opposite of the vehicles badged as Lincolns in the 21^st Century.

High on my list of aspirational automobiles from Lincoln’s proud yesteryear is this machine: The 1956 Lincoln Premiere — the brand’s top-of-the-line model that year as the Capri took the place of the Custom.

Menacing styling, big V-8 power from its OHV 368-cu.in. V-8 (275hp/401lb.ft. of torque) and standard equipment on the flagship that included: power windows, a four-way power adjustable seat, Travel-Tuner Radio, automatic Turbo Drive transmission with “escalator action” and power steering (those last two were standard on all ’56 Lincolns, actually).

Extra cost stuff included: power brakes, Push-Button Lubrication to keep the front end and steering greased, air conditioning and more. The ’56s also boasted 12-volt electricals, dual exhaust, and a standard 3.07:1 gear ratio unless A/C was ordered which dropped the gears down to 3.31:1.

This black ’56 Premiere was donated by its owner to the State University of New York at Canton, in Canton, N.Y., who specified that the car be sold and the proceeds go to the school’s Automotive Technology program. Hopefully this Premiere made an impression on one of the young people at the college while they were prepping it for its next owner.

From the seller’s description:

Stunning 1956 Lincoln Premiere 2 door coupe with red and white leather interior. This car was donated to SUNY Canton, a college in upstate New York, by a donor who requested the money obtained from the sale be allocated toward the Automotive Department. SUNY Canton’s automotive club has enjoyed learning about this beautiful classic car, and have cleaned and polished, restoring it to its natural 1956 beauty. This car was stored professionally for years in a heated garage. All documentation on repairs and maintenance are available upon request.

Photos by Brian Henniker, courtesy Gooding & Company.

Raw speed, indeed, is the only thing that’ll get a racer to the finish line first – chrome don’t get you home, as they say – but developing a professional image counts for plenty more, as Tony Nancy proved. His roadsters not only set records on the dragstrip, they looked good doing so, and perhaps the most successful of them (on both fronts) will head to auction next month.

While Nancy has most often been described as an upholsterer – his upholstery shop in Sherman Oaks, California, certainly paid the bills – he was more of a Renaissance man who, as Ken Gross wrote for Hemmings Muscle Machines, “could do it all, from upholstery to paint, to engine and chassis building, to driving and winning.” His first roadster, built in the mid- to late 1950s, continued to use a flathead Ford V-8 long after the drag racing world had embraced the new overhead-valve V-8s coming out of Detroit, but it was thanks to Nancy’s attention to details that many of his competitors overlooked (along with the honkin’ supercharger atop the flathead) that the roadster often beat out its supposedly better-equipped challengers and made its way to magazine covers.

Then in 1959, finding his flathead no longer competitive, Nancy built another roadster – one that appeared rather similar at first glance, but couldn’t have been more different under the skin. He started by persuading Kent Fuller to build him a complete chrome-moly tube-frame chassis that placed the driver in the center of the car and that, at 1,550 pounds, weighed far less than a traditional chassis. Aluminum hood, cowl, floor, decklid, and doors all helped keep the weight down, as did magnesium wheels.

Though Nancy had, by this time, come to see the advantages of the overhead-valve V-8, he didn’t simply jump on the small-block Chevrolet bandwagon. Instead, he chose a Buick nail-valve V-8, which he bored and stroked to 454 cubic inches and fitted with an Iskendarian camshaft, Jahns lightweight pistons, Scintilla Vertex magneto, and a Hilborn fuel-injection system. The Buick engine produced about 450 horsepower that then went through a 1953 Buick three-speed manual transmission and a Halibrand quick-change rear end.

And, of course, the roadster had to look good with chrome sprinkled throughout and Nancy’s signature seahorse painted on the otherwise transparent panel fitted within the grille shell. Nancy even stitched a snappy tonneau cover for it.

In its naturally-aspirated version, and with Nancy at the wheel, the roadster recorded a best quarter-mile speed of 138 MPH. With a supercharger and Enderle injection unit, Nancy cranked up his best speed to 144 MPH.

Other more advanced dragsters followed, but the roadsters captured the interest of many a budding hot rodder, among them Dan LaCroix, who by the early 1990s had located and restored both of the roadsters. He then sold them both at auction in 2007: the flathead car for $192,500 (against a pre-auction estimate of $350,000 to $450,000) and the nail-valve car for $154,000 (against a pre-auction estimate of $300,000 to $400,000). The flathead car then sold again two years later for $220,000.

The nail-valve car (chassis number 22JR0002) will cross the block as part of Gooding’s Scottsdale auction with a pre-auction estimate of $140,000 to $180,000. The Gooding Scottsdale auction will take place January 29-30 at the Scottsdale Fashion Square. For more information, visit GoodingCo.com.

Photos by the author.

[Editor’s Note: The LeMay America’s Car Museum’s Drive Home road trip kicked off Sunday, and all this week Bill Hall will fill us in on the trip’s progress.]

The last time I was in a Chrysler 300G, Ronald Reagan was president and premium gas hovered at 97 cents a gallon. A college dorm mate had borrowed his brother’s coupe for the weekend – a la Animal House’s Kent Dorfman – and piled five of us in, boiling the rear tires at every stoplight. As a GM guy, I remember being absolutely shocked at the unbridled fury emanating from that Chrysler cross-ram 413 engine. It left quite an impression.

Eager to renew my acquaintance with Chrysler’s early muscle car, I jumped at the chance to pilot another 300 on the first leg of The Drive Home, a 2,900 mile, mid-winter road trip from the LeMay/America’s Car Museum in Tacoma, Washington, to the North American International Auto Show in Detroit on January 11th. Our expedition includes the venerable 1961 Chrysler 300G, a 1957 Chevrolet Nomad, and a 1966 Ford Mustang – appropriate representation for the Big Three automakers, and of the larger American automobile experience as a whole.

The event is the brainchild of LeMay/ACM head David Madeira and NAIAS executive director Rod Alberts. The tour is a salute to the engineering and craftsmanship of Detroit Iron in that most-uniquely American of activities: the trans-continental road trip. Not surprisingly – like most great American ideas – it was hatched over cocktails.

Madeira’s guiding principle with the LeMay/America’s Car Museum has been to make it kinetic, relevant and inclusive. It revolves around the idea that not only are cars works of art to visually enjoy, but unique creations that can – literally and figuratively – transport the viewer/driver into new situations and realizations. Automobiles are among the few art forms that appeal to all five senses: sight, smell, taste, touch, and hearing. But only fully if the car is actually being driven.

So it is that ACM has carved out 11 days of wild space in our otherwise structured and regimented lives. Eleven days time on the road, in which to be transported to new realizations of people, place and adventure with just enough adversity and uncertainty thrown in to make it interesting.

The tour left the LeMay yesterday morning, with a stop in Portland and onto Bend, Oregon, for the night. Subsequent stops include Boise; Salt Lake City; Grand Junction, Colorado; Lakewood, Colorado; Hays, Kansas; Kansas City, Missouri; St. Louis; Bloomington, Illinois;, Chicago; and finally Birmingham, Michigan, where the cars will be displayed at Detroit’s Cobo Hall. Each leg has a public gathering where the general public is encouraged to come out and greet the crews and the cars. The hope is that enthusiasts might bring out their own classics, if only to reassure the crews that insanity indeed loves company.

And there were early clues that indeed this tour may be insane.

One hour outside of Tacoma, the snow started. And it never stopped. It was a quick trial by fire for the three classics, all of which had underdone extensive disassembly and preparation for the journey at the hands of the volunteer mechanics at ACM. The guys were all present for the departure ceremony, and each took pride in their work and their responsibility of our safety, briefing us on quirks and features of each of the cars. Their tips were invaluable.

Though most systems were very well tuned, a conscious compromise was made on the 300’s steering box adjustment, leaving an “age-appropriate” amount of slack lest it be over-tightened and prone to breakage. The result was that the big Chrysler required a fair amount of rudder input; more akin to piloting a riverboat than a sports car. A constant, easy sawing of the wheel served to dampen the yaw, and after a few hundred miles both car and driver settled in to a comfortable rhythm as the 300 found and held its line.

And just in time. Climbing east out of Sandy, Oregon, on Route 26, the snow started coming down. Hard. Westbound traffic was backed up for 20 miles as the mountain pass became a parking lot. People left their cars; motorists banded together pushing SUVs out of ditches. Plows struggled to get through. At one point, the Nomad pulled away from the caravan and left the group behind, giving true meaning to the car’s namesake. Seeya in Bend.

Which left the Mustang and the Chrysler to face the snowy mountain pass together. The ’66 Mustang had been struggling a bit. The bendix on the starter was not engaging; resulting in some noisy starts, and the car had killed a couple of times; its four-barrel Holley carb did not like being trucked about in the low speeds that the road conditions dictated.

The Chrysler, on the other hand, seemed bemused by all the fuss. It glided past the miles of parked oncoming cars and pulled gamely up the hill, never breaking decorum. An early detonation ping had stopped; probably another astute calculation by the ACM guys to run the car a hair lean so it would perform better at altitude crossing the mountains.

At the top of the pass, at the one lone gas station, a small community of stranded motorists had started to form. We pulled into the station, snow piled 10 feet high, and out of the crowd a gentleman and his scrawny dog approached. I took a double take. The guy was a dead ringer for the man who had sold “Christine” to Arnie in the movie of the same name.

“Had one in high school. Seeing this one takes me back. Good old car,” he said to no one in particular. Then he looked me square in the eye and said, “You be careful on the other side of the hill. Real careful.”

And with that, he and his dog walked off into the snowstorm. And we drove off down the hill, into the darkness.

William Hall is a writer, car collector and classic car broker based in Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin.

In today’s world of meaningless and truly stupid marketing campaigns, it’s refreshing to look back at how the old Detroit PR firms promoted their clients’ products. They smartly focused on the many positive attributes of those products, unlike the ridiculous “hidden” meanings of today’s commercial which truly have nothing to do with the cars themselves.

Take the absurd Subaru commercials, which depict their cars being driven by a “family” of Golden Retrievers. Really? The only thing Toyota talks about is their “Toyotathon,” while the “deep thinking” McConaughey reflects back on the Lincoln he said he once owned. Again, what about the cars themselves, their special features and why it makes sense owning one?

So it was refreshing to read this old Dodge brochure which promoted their new 273 V-8. Instead of having some animal or a martian talk about how well the Dodge looks when parked under a street lamp, the PR firm went right to the heart of the matter and told consumers all the special quality features and engineering specifics of its new small-block engine. “The Great New 273 V-8! Packed with advanced, go-quality features”; now that’s an impressive, attention-grabbing headline!

Within the body copy of the ad they highlighted all the 273’s extraordinary features, followed by a brief and informative explanation as to the benefits of those features. Here, Chrysler chose to bring to light the advantages of the engine’s Chromium-Alloy Cylinder Head; Cast-Iron Cylinder Block; Aluminum-Alloy Pistons; Forged-Steel Crankshaft; High-Efficiency Combustion Chamber; Straight-Line Valve Arrangement; Compact, Lightweight Manifolds; Fuel System and Lubrication System. All these insightful and enlightening details were listed on a single page. Now that’s intelligent marketing.

Sometimes one really strong aspect of a car can totally redeem it when other features might not look as attractive. Take, for instance, this 1969 Cadillac Fleetwood Seventy-Five limousine for sale on Hemmings.com, a car that admittedly could use some cosmetic attention if not a little rust repair. But it also has what looks to be an immaculate interior, one that would make that work worth the effort. Doesn’t hurt that it also appears to be complete and in good running order. From the seller’s description:

I am the third owner of this car. The gentleman I bought it from owned it for the last ten years. He bought it from the original owner. Apparently the original owner did not want an official limousine per se, he wanted it more for personal family use. For that reason he ordered the car special, without the interior divider window nor the tilt steering wheel. The 1969 Fleetwood 75 is a very rare car, with only 1,156 made. This special order car makes it even more rare than the others.

The gentleman I bought it from was not able to use it as much as he had hoped over the past few years. He had three antique vehicles and was selling everything off. For that reason I made sure to go through the car and get everything running properly. Everything that was needed to be done was completed (tune-up, new emergency brake cable, changing of all fluids, new center link, carb rebuild, etc.). The car has been recently inspected and everything works in regards to lights, directional, wipers, etc. The only item not in use is the air conditioning, which was disconnected. The car floats down the road. It has 101k miles.

The interior is the best part of the car: unrestored, original condition in very nice shape, as the photos show. The glass is all good, the chrome is very nice, all stainless is good. The previous owner told me the paint was 75% original, with the exception of the lower half of each side, which had some paintwork done. Those portions are still in primer. There is also some primer along the front of the hood, though only about 3” tall above the hood latch. Other than the primer the paint has a nice shine to it, very presentable, though there are paint blisters in a number of spots, and a few very small dents. I was told the top was also original and in good shape. However, after looking closely it appears the car was originally black. All the door jambs and trunk match the silver exterior, but by looking closely there is evidence of its original black color.

I have an excellent auto body guy who informed me it would cost about $1000 to lightly sand the areas of primer and provide a new base coat and clear coat to match the current silver color. In my opinion that is all that I would do to the paint. I would leave the blisters and dings and enjoy the car as is. As you can see from the photos it will end up being a good looking driver.

The black roof appears to also have been painted, not original paint as I was told. There is some evidence of brush marks in various locations.

As is typical with these cars there is a couple of rust spots under the car at the rear sidemounts. Not crippling, but there nonetheless.

While Dodge built plenty of three-axle trucks, it never came out with a six-wheel-drive Power Wagon, so Legacy Classic Trucks went ahead and built one using a WC63 chassis and turbodiesel Cummins. Jay Leno got a close look at it for his show recently.

Driving halfway across the country in a new car makes for a great time, but to really get the adrenaline going try it in a 50-year-old truck that you’ve just bought and that hasn’t run much in the last dozen years or so like the owner of this 1965 Ford Econoline for sale on Hemmings.com did when he bought it in Colorado and drove it to Connecticut. And with all the repairs done along the way, it’s probably now good to hit the road for another epic trip. From the seller’s description:

This Spring Special is the real deal with a ‘1’ after the axle code. It’s rear bumper is not stock and the engine is a strong running 240 cid rather than the 170 cid when it was originally assembled. Those issues mentioned above have been resolved and the brake linings and drums are new all around. The fuel tank has been cleaned and a new pick up/sender installed as well as new kingpins and bushings on the front axle. The carburetor has been rebuilt (automatic choke). The fuel pump is new and the battery and starter appear to be recently renewed. It has a Ford 9 inch rear axle with tall gears (that were a blessing on the way home). The exterior sports a 15 foot paint job which is why I’m told the original owner, disappointed, parked the vehicle some 12 years ago after mediocre body work was done. The good part is what you see is what you get: lower panels should be replaced as well as a right front section at the wheel opening. The undercarriage is in rather good condition with only a rear gusset that has a thin spot. The main stamped frame rails still have a galvanize coating on them. All the floor pans are solid. The speedometer stopped working after the trip but the odometer appears correct. The interior paint is still the original Poppy Red, the special color for these Spring Specials. The radial tires are recent, of unknown lineage, but then again they’ve proven themselves by getting me home from Denver. The wheel covers a not original. I acquired them about 5 years ago and was delighted to have 14 inch wheels on which to display them. Which OEM produced them? The seats fold forward which is very handy and the original seats come with the deal. An aftermarket black carpet covers the floor ahead of the doghouse.

Progress has claimed another old building with automotive ties: the former Studebaker dealership in downtown Akron, which has stood vacant for some time. According to the Akron Beacon-Journal, the owner, a local high school, never used it and had trouble keeping up with the graffiti that kept popping up on it.

* Atlas Obscura this week took a look not at any sort of physical landmark, but at something else commonly found along U.S. highways: trucker slang, something that they report hasn’t completely died out even in this age of smartphones and apps. (via)

* By order of the Internet, Disney, et al., we’re required to include some sort of Star Wars content this holiday season, so let’s just point to Make Magazine’s collection of IRL Star Wars vehicles, including the Burning Man sandcrawler above.

* Over at the Vanderbilt Cup Races blog, a then-vs.-now comparison of the Long Island Automotive Museum, using photos from the Walter McCarthy collection.

* Finally, good to see the Build Threads project garage up and complete.