“Win on Sunday, then, Sell on Monday.” It is one of the clarion calls of NASCAR, the venerable “stock car” racing Classic car Hornetsanctioning body that has become one of the hottest success anecdotes of the Nineties and now the new millennium. But, unfortunately, Hudson Motor Car Company was the exception that proved the rule in the early 1950s. The Hudson Hornet was one of the vehicles that made NASCAR a viable series in its infant and toddler years, but while the Hudson Hornet assisted  NASCAR in inestimable ways, NASCAR didn’t really help Hudson, at least not enough to stave off its inevitable  death  just a few short years after racing domination had thrust it into the limelight. Read more . . .

The conventional wisdom says that the original Ford Thunderbird was a direct response to Chevrolet’s launch of the Corvette. Classic car Ford ThunderbirdThe Corvette was displayed  at the 1953 Motorama, and immediately Ford designers pulled out their drafting pencils and went to work. But the real story is that the Ford Thunderbird was just the kind of car that many designers dream about, so when the formal call to work on a 2-seater came from management,  Ford designers just reached into their desk drawers. Read more . . .

How the dreams of youth become the monotonous remnants of middle age. Ford Skyliner classic carSo it is with the retractable hardtop, a phenomenon that made the mid-1950’s boy consider that in America, everything is possible, from putting a satellite up in space to creating a convertible out of a sedan before one’s very eyes. Sadly, today the retractable hardtop car, like many of our youthful symbols, has lost its novelty. They are, in fact, getting to be more common than the canvas-topped convertibles of old.

Modern hardtops in abundance

Mitsubishi was the car company that initiated  the latest retractable top trend. It started selling its 3000 GT Spyder Read more . . .

The first lesson to be learned here is simple: don’t ever piss off a guy with a billion dollars. Just who committed this grievous mistake?Ford GT40 classic car  And just who was ultimately made to pay for it?  None other than Enzo Ferrari, the former mechanic turned owner-operator-maestro of the legendary racing empire that bears his name. Though the Italian never acknowledged it, the experience did  show him a peculiarly American life’s lesson. Namely, paybacks are a bitch. Read more . . .

Talk about French cars in the USA and get ready for five minutes of snickering. Facel Vega classic carIn the land of the free and the home of the brave, cars with a French pedigree have a reputation just slightly south of that reserved for French postcards, but while the postcards do deliver their own precise entertainment value, the cars seem to bring their proprietors  little but grief. Peugeot was the last French brand to try to survive in the caldron of the American market, but it was finally drummed out of the country with the same lack of remorse that had followed the death of Citroen’s American adventure and the disastrous tenure of Renault on these shores. Read more . . .