Woodward Dream Cruise Gets New Sponsor, Changes Name

The MotorCity Casino has stepped in to become the presenting sponsor of the Woodward Dream Cruise, the annual classic car cruise held in the suburbs of Detroit in August. According to the event's executive director, Tony Michaels, the cruise will now be officially known as the "Woodward Dream Cruise presented by the MotorCity Casino Hotel."

Michaels made the announcement earlier this week at a press conference.

"For nine years, the MotorCity Casino has been a sponsor of the Woodward Dream Cruise," he said. "This year they stepped up to become the presenting sponsor of the 15th annual Woodward Dream Cruise. The Woodward Dream Cruise is here to stay; it will be better than ever with this new sponsorship."

The Woodward Dream Cruise was started in 1995 as a fundraising effort for a soccer field in Ferndale, Michigan. Today, it is the world's largest one-day automotive event, with as many as 1.5 million people and 40,000 classic cars attending from around the world. Market research suggests the event generates about $56 million for the Detroit economy - more than Super Bowl XL or the 2005 Major League Baseball All-Star Game generated.

According to a Detroit Free Press article, the cruise has lost about $235,000 in annual support from the auto industry since 2006. Michaels would not give specific numbers, but said the casino would commit significant funds for the event.

"The casino will help with the cost of entertainment in the participating communities," Michael said. "The casino is in the entertainment business and so will also help line up entertainment for the dream cruise."

The city of Birmingham recently announced that it was pulling out of the cruise and would set up its own event on the same day as the Woodward Dream Cruise. Michaels shrugged off the announcement.

"Woodward has tried several approaches to the cruise in the past," he said. "The important thing is that it's a great event all the way up and down Woodward.

The 2009 Woodward Dream Cruise is scheduled for August 15.

Source

All-Original 1937 Bugatti 57 S Atlante To Be Auctioned in February

To restore or not to restore? That will be the gut-wrenching question faced by the winning bidder for this 1937 Bugatti 57S Atlante. Remarkably, the coupe is in all-original condition, and has traveled but 26,824 kilometers in its lifetime.

Chassis number 57502 was originally delivered to Francis Curzon, a British racing enthusiast, Member of Parliament, and the fifth Earl of Howe, in the summer of 1937. Earl Howe used the car as his primary vehicle, fitting numerous custom touches (including unique bumpers and a luggage rack) until World War Two, when he served with the Royal Navy. Following the war, the car was sold and, like many other 57S models, was upgraded to 57SC specification by adding a supercharger.



The car would only change hands three times afterwards, but its purchase by a Dr. Harold Carr in 1955 would prove to be its last for quite some time. Carr drove the car briefly in his first years of ownership, but stored it away in a barn for the last fifty years. Following his death in 2007, Carr's family decided to remove the car from storage and part ways with it.



Howe's 57S Atlante will headline the Bonhams auction at February's 2009 Retromobile show in Paris, France, and it's easy to see why. Though other cars, including a 1934Bugatti 57 Ventoux, will be up for sale, few - if any - have the provenance of this coupe. To the winning bidder: we'd insist you refrain from restoring this excellently preserved example of one of the finest creations to wear the Bugatti name.

Top Designers Voted Citroen DS Most Beautiful Car Of All Time

A panel of well-known car designers recently voted on what they thought was the most beautiful car of all time. While Ferrari garnered the most votes as a brand, the Citroen DS received the most votes as an individual car.

The Citroen DS is a beautiful car regarded as a technical masterpiece in addition to winning praise for its sculpted exterior. The DS’s self-leveling suspension, power steering, and amazing clutch and brake feel (compared to cars of the time) helped the car achieve its status as a technical wonder and a mechanic’s nightmare. The car’s exterior was styled by Italian sculptor Flaminio Bertoni and became an instant classic.

Classic & Sports Car magazine brought together the judging panel that consisted of well-known designers including Ian Callum, Gordon Murray, Peter Stevens, and Giorgetto Giugiaro. The designers were asked to submit their favorite three cars and nominate the one example of their work they are most proud of.

In nominating personal designs, Gordon Murray chose his McLaren F1 of course, but Ian Callum chose his Jaguar XF somewhat surprisingly. The XF is a gorgeous car, but it rests among Callum’s work on the new XK and several Aston Martins. “It is the biggest challenge I’ve faced, but I think we pulled it off. I don’t think people appreciate how well proportioned it is, given that it’s a five-seater,” commented Callum on the XF.

Classic & Sports Cars magazine lists all the nominees in addition to the top vote. As the list is rather extensive, we’ll give you the top ten:
1. Citroen DS
2. Jaguar XK120
2. Ferrari 275GTB
4. Cord 810/812
4. Ferrari 250GT Lusso
4. Ferrari 250GT Short-wheelbase
4. Jaguar E-type

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1985 Pontiac Trans Am Kammback Wagon Up For Grabs

Wish you could mix the versatility of a wagon with the hairy brawn of a Firebird? You may want to hit RM Auction’s Automobiles of Amelia Island auction on March 13. One of two prototypes for a 1985 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am Kammback will be sold to the highest bidder.

We're not sure how they contracted the sickness, but for decades Pontiac engineers seemed hell-bent on crafting a Nomad-esque wagon from their F-body. Although one almost went into production in 1970, the division’s engineering ranks built four additional concepts -- two in 1977 and two in 1985, respectively.

While one of the 1985 cars was later updated to resemble a Trans Am GTA (a model launched in 1987), the white car you see here remained relatively unscathed. John McMullen, a longtime Pontiac dealer, found the car hidden in GM’s warehouse back in 1998, and used his leverage to purchase the car for his private collection.

McMullen auctioned this car (along with most of his collection) back in 2007, but it seems the Pontiac is back up for grabs. Apart from the wagon roofline -- which bolts in lieu of the standard fastback glass, much like the GTA’s optional notchback insert -- the car is otherwise a stock ’85 Trans Am. Power comes from the “high-output” 5.0-liter V-8, mated to a five-speed manual transmission. Still, as the car wears a VIN tag that leads with “EXP,” it will be tough -- if not impossible -- to title and register.

RM anticipates the Kammback will bring between $50,000 and $80,000 when it rolls across the auction block -- much more than your typical ’85 Trans Am. For more information, visit www.rmauctions.com

Higher Station

A rare completed piece of his utopian Broadacre City, Wright’s only gas station opened in Cloquet, Minnesota, in 1958.

A slice of Frank Lloyd Wright’s auto-utopia marks its golden anniversary.
By Michael Silverberg
Posted October 15, 2008“Watch the little gas station,” Frank Lloyd Wright wrote in 1930, just as he was beginning to conceive what would become Broadacre City, his plan for a sprawling, automobile-based utopia. The gas station was its social nexus and its symbol. Wright’s vision was incredibly prescient—he anticipated the current suburban landscape of endless cloverleafs and mammoth truck stops—and it strongly colored the last 25 years of his work, which was largely dedicated to the kind of small-scale residences called for in his decentralized city of the future. “In one sense, everything Wright built post-1932 was a piece of Broadacre,” says Tim Quigley, a Minneapolis architect and a Wright scholar. Yet only a handful of buildings from the project were ever fully realized; one, appropriately enough, was a gas station in the small town of Cloquet, Minnesota, and it celebrates its 50th anniversary this month.


In the early 1950s, Wright built a house for a local family, the Lindholms, after Joyce Lindholm, whose father distributed gasoline and home-heating oil, studied the architect in college and encouraged her parents to seek him out. “Wright had designed a gas station for Broadacre probably thirty years earlier,” Mike McKinney, Joyce’s son, says, “and when he learned about my grand-father’s business, he basically took that concept and applied it to the station.” The Lindholm station is reminiscent of the architect’s Prairie homes, with a cantilevered, copper-clad canopy and skylit service bays. “The mechanics are always working in natural light,” says Jennifer Webb, a professor of art history at the University of Minnesota Duluth. “If you ask them, they say that that is absolutely the greatest feature.” The design was never replicated en masse as the architect had intended, but, according to Wright Sites, it helped popularize the now ubiquitous overhang, and other elements (including an angled plan that afforded sight lines, and generous, slanted windows) were appropriated for Phillips 66 stations across the country.


Wanting motorists to think of the gas station as a social space rather than a pit stop, Wright designed a glassed-in lounge on the second floor with commanding views of the river, and he hoped that residents would gather there over coffee. But as with his grandiose plan for Broadacre (“He imagined that we were all going to have pseudohelicoptors and nuclear-powered barges,” Webb says), he got the broad strokes right but failed to anticipate how the small social connections would eventually fray. Customers didn’t want to spend time in a gas station—and those who did often had unseemly ideas. “People did unpleasant things in it, spit gum in it,” Webb says. “All the things that people do when they think they’re not being watched.” Ultimately, after the lounge was vandalized in the 1960s and ’70s, the family locked it up. But this summer’s anniversary celebration—which brought Robert Pond, the Wright apprentice who supervised construction, back to Cloquet—could help restore Wright’s vision. McKinney and his brother, who own and lease the station, refurbished it before the festivities and are considering a sweeping renovation, in anticipation of perhaps turning it into a museum one day. McKinney shared his idea with Pond, now 82 and living in Montana. “I said, ‘I wish we could have spent more time,’” he recalls, “and Bob says, ‘I want to come back and finish this job.’”

Source: Metropolis Mag

1950 Oldsmobile Futuramic 88 - Rocket Launcher

Did Oldsmobile inspire the first rock 'n' roll song? Possibly, but its Futuramic 88 was the first modern musclecar

Source: http://www.motortrend.com/classic/roadtests/c12_0612_1950_oldsmobile_88_coupe/index.html#ixzz0YnWGHbOe


Ike Turner's Fats Waller-like stride piano sets off two minutes, 51 seconds that changed music and signaled a new age of automotive power in America. The fuzz guitar, reportedly the result of a speaker damaged while Turner's Kings of Rhythm were on tour, that quickly joins in is part of the new sound. Raymond Hill's tenor sax break, taking 56 seconds, could've come from blues or jazz. It's the beat that pulls this all together into something new, although the tune owed much to rhythm and blues songs of the era. Indeed, the tune made the R&B charts-after all, there was no rock-'n'-roll Top 40 at the time, since many consider "Rocket 88" the very first song of the genre.


Click to view GalleryWhether you agree, there's no denying the impact of the opening line of "Rocket 88," sung by Jackie Brenston. One manufacturer, Oldsmobile, had successfully challenged the garage-built street primacy of the hot rod with a smooth, quick car, shiny and new and straight from the factory. The 1949 Rocket 88 came with the same high-compression (7.25:1) overhead-valve V-8 installed in the larger, heavier Ninety-Eight; thus, the Great American Musclecar was born. And it was launched with a high-compression, short-stroke power to match a postwar exuberance that had automobile styling mimicking the conveyances of the emerging space age.


Click to view GalleryBefore this, General Motors's hierarchy was clear, with only Cadillac/LaSalle producing V-8s, Buick building inline-eights, Olds and Pontiac straight-eights and sixes, and Chevy sixes. Cadillac experimented with OHVs to replace its L-heads in the 1930s, while after the war, Olds looked at new engines to power more stylish models for the "experimental division" known mostly for introducing the Hydra-matic four-speed automatic.

GM engineering wiz Charles F. "Boss" Kettering wrote a paper for the Society of Automotive Engineers that posited a compression increase from 6.25:1 to 12:1 could boost gas mileage by up to 40 percent and horsepower by 25. Better postwar availability of premium fuel also gave high compression a push.

Olds experimented with a 288-cubic-inch V-8, but Cadillac management complained. Olds switched to developing 60- and 70-degree V-8s and V-6s until GM approved a $9.4-million budget for Olds's 90-degree engine. With Kettering in charge, Olds upped its 90-degree V-8 to 303 cubic inches, prompting Cadillac to increase its 1948 models' V-8 from 309 to 331 (remember the word "hierarchy").

The Olds 98 was new for 1948, a year ahead of the rest of the Big Three, save for the Cadillac lineup. But Kettering and his crew were still busy working on the 303 V-8, and so the flagship with "Futuramic" styling had to launch with the carryover 110-horse, 257-cubic-inch L-head inline-eight. For 1949, the three-model Oldsmobile line featured Futuramic styling, including the six-cylinder 76 and the OHV 88s. Harley Earl's new two-door hardtop design was offered in the 98 series only in 1949 and trickled down to the 88 and 76 Holiday Coupes, with their wraparound rear windows, for 1950.

Vintage Cabovers & Transporters

I wonder if anyone remembers this type of car haulers of the 1950's. I found these pictures online I just wanted to share them with you.









Source: The Jalopy Journal