mod@tech

Inaugural car auction concludes

The debut of Kodner Galleries’s first-ever Exotic Cars Auction, featuring the collection of the late Barry Amstell, took place last week with more than $4 million in total sales. On November 6, two dozen cars, three motorcycles, and some petroliana, automobilia, memorabilia, and a mini-Corvette were all a part of the sale.

The star of the day was a 2005 Ford GT with only 148 miles on the odometer, which found a new owner for $401,500. The GT was powered by a 5.4-liter supercharged DOHC V-8 mated to a six-speed transmission. It was the opening lot and top American car to sell that day as it was purchased new by Amsdell from Maroone Ford in Delray Beach, where the GT was displayed in his commercial garage with minimal miles put on it. It also came with extras including an owner’s manual and a car cover.

Other highlights included a highly coveted 1963 Corvette Sting Ray with the split rear window in red raking in $181,500, a 1965 Ford Shelby G.T. 350 selling for $330,000, a 1981 Back to the Future replica DeLorean reaching $90,200 and the top sale, which was a 1965 Shelby AC Cobra (pictured), generating $814,000.

Full results from Kodner’s Exotic Cars Auction are now available here.

Magnus Walker exhibit

Celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Magnus Walker documentary “Urban Outlaw,” the Petersen Automotive Museum held a special gathering to unveil its limited-time Urban Outlaw exhibit from its Legends of the Vault Gallery. Walker has become a well-known Porsche builder and collector while finding fame in building the Serious clothing brand as well as a career in real estate and filmmaking.

The exhibit features 10 cars and a series of objects personally picked by Walker including his red, white, and blue Porsche “277.” He acquired the car – a 1971 911 T – at the Pomona Swap Meet in 1999 and he transformed it to a 1973 RS replica lookalike by adding flares, a ducktail spoiler, and some striping. After becoming race licensed, he became known as 277 (his birthday 7/7/67 with 277 the only number available) and he would unleash the Porsche at Laguna Seca, Willow Springs, and the Las Vegas Speedway among others. The low-budget build rolls on 15 x 7 and 8-inch Outlaw wheels with Hoosier 225/50/15 tires.

Other cars and memorabilia that will be available for viewing are his 914 art car, his 1976 Porsche 930, and his co-designed Nike SB dunks. The exhibit will run until January 31, log onto petersen.org/outlaw for more information.

Hemmings is proud to announce the promotion of Matthew Litwin to the position of Editor of Hemmings Classic Car magazine. Litwin began his career at Hemmings as an Associate Editor in April 2006 contributing to multiple monthly and daily Hemmings titles and properties. While providing the editorial department with feature stories and event coverage, Matt became a key member of the Hemmings Motor News Great Race from 2013 to 2017. Simultaneously, Matt managed the Hemmings Motor News Concours d’Elegance class structures, car selections, event field layout, event program content, and judging teams from 2013 to 2019, during which time he was promoted to Senior Editor.

In October 2020, Matt began assisting his peers with the planning and day-to-day management of Hemmings Classic Car. Now as Editor, Matt brings to Hemmings Classic Car a clear vision of the title’s future, having recently spearheaded a redesign of the respected title scheduled to debut with the April 2023 issue.

“I’m excited to have the opportunity to manage such a revered title, one that I’ve been subscribing to since issue one debuted in October 2004,” Matt says. “Over the years, Hemmings Classic Car evolved with the interests of the hobby, without sacrificing the core content that made the magazine what it is today.

“It’s something we’ve kept in mind moving forward. I’m thrilled to be guiding the title though its next evolution that will bring more dynamic photography and writing to our readership, while adding a wider array of feature content from a variety of hobby segments. We’re going to dig deeper into the ownership aspect—from driving experiences to DIY maintenance and repairs. We’ll discuss where and how to buy collectible vehicles, the OE-style and aftermarket support network that keep our vehicles on the road, and more technical features that will educate novice and veteran vehicle owners alike. All of this and more in a new, visually dramatic package.”

Today, in most of America, pickup trucks used as cars are an accepted norm —they’re America’s best-selling vehicles for a reason. Whether it’s their unabashedly broad-shouldered macho style, the can-do capability in any weather and over any terrain, or the full-framed toughness baked into every build, a pickup truck makes a statement.

Pickups even make sense in places like California, despite gas nudging up against $7 a gallon there at press time — rugged construction and tall tires soak up ruts and bumps on the notoriously poorly paved freeway system. Pickups offer comfort that a modern car, with its low-profile rubber and Nürburgring-tuned suspension, simply cannot provide.

The use of trucks as cars on the American road has been a full-blown trend since at least the ’70s, but even before this it took years of people realizing that trucks were increasingly comfortable to drive —and that the advertising hyperbole was in many cases true. The increased levels of civility came from product planners seeing beyond truck-as-tool, and the builders engineering increased levels of comfort and style, even across a single generation of truck.

Take our feature vehicle, for example. The truck on these pages is a 1966 Chevrolet C-10 half-ton pickup, brought back to the condition seen here by owner Gary Genoron of Lake Lucerne, New York. It is the ultimate iteration of this generation of C-10, and if you place it next to a 1960 C-10, you’d be hard pressed to see the through-line between them: hoods, cabs, drivelines, and front suspension all changed over the course of seven seasons. Only the 115-inch wheelbase, bed selection, and Chevy’s desire to blend the on-the-road comfort of its best-selling full-size models with legendary truck toughness remained.

What arrived in 1960 was a big step forward from the 1955-’59 “Task Force” models. The ’50s rigs had solid axles and leaf springs at both ends; Chevy’s ’60 C-10 two-wheel-drive half-tons arrived with torsion-bar independent front suspension and coils holding up the 12-bolt solid rear axle. (A heavier-duty leaf-sprung rear was available for the pickup traditionalist.) A drop-center ladder frame with X-shaped crossmember allowed bodies that were simultaneously lower and roomier. They were also wider, offering useful increases in shoulder, head, and leg room, along with six inches of additional hip room. Noise-deadening insulation lived between the roof skin and a ribbed inner panel. The windshield was 26 percent larger and wrapped around, as windshields did in those days. Engines included the 235-cu. in. inline six and a 175-hp 283-cu.in. V-8.

There were subtler changes at work, too. The lower ride height—up to seven inches at the roof compared to a ’59 — meant that it felt more car-like to drive, not to mention a lower center of gravity to get rid of that wobbly, up-high feeling. The lower cab also made the ’60 C-10 easier to get in and out of, and the wider cab meant that it was more comfortable too. Moving the front axle back nearly two inches and adding more than five and a half inches to the back of the cab not only made it roomier, it also granted better weight distribution.

But evolution soon took hold —and we don’t mean the usual grille changes and fender-badge placement that were part-and-parcel of most American cars and trucks in the ’50s and ’60s. The hood was changed first: a pair of jet-age-looking nacelles over each headlamp cluster were smoothed out in 1962. At the same time, a single-headlamp-per-side grille replaced the previous four-eyed look. Small potatoes, perhaps, but an indicator of what Chevrolet had up its sleeve. A year later, Chevy ditched the front torsion-bar set-up in favor of more traditional coil-sprung double-A-arm suspension, and added a new base inline-six engine. A whole new cab greeted buyers of 1964 trucks: The wraparound windshield and its vertical A-pillar were retired, replaced by a traditional A-pillar that matched the windshield rake. Chevy claimed “increased cab torsional strength” at the time, but it’s just as fair to say that wrap-around glass was old hat by then and needed freshening. For 1965, both air conditioning and Chevy’s 220-hp 327-cu.in. small-block V-8 were on the option sheets. Automatic-equipped V-8 C-10s were given the new Turbo-Hydramatic transmission in 1966, and reverse lamps appeared beneath the taillamps on Fleetside models like the one in our photos.

Gary’s truck, filling that ever-present nostalgia hole that often presents itself when a parent (in this case, Gary’s dad) owned a similar vehicle, turned out to be nicely equipped —not loaded with air conditioning or automatic transmission, but built with Deluxe heater (from a time when heaters were optional!), chrome side moldings and bumpers that gleam nicely against the clean Tuxedo Black flanks, and the optional 327-cu.in. engine (painted seafoam green for truck applications) under that broad hood. The standard transmission, a three-on-the-tree, is on board. Gary found it in 2014, though not in the shape you see it here.

“After an online search, I found this one,” he says. “It had a good-condition body and frame and had the 327, which is rare. I’d say that the paint and body work were 90 percent done when I bought it, but the mechanicals were only 30 percent done.” That meant finding all manner of period-correct pieces to make it not just run right, but to look and feel absolutely period-perfect correct.

Gary notes that “some of the engine parts, wiring, tires, and interior” were missing. A few parts were reproduced, like the 7.00×15 bias-ply Firestone tires and a complete correct black-and-white interior from LMC Truck. Some parts, particularly in the engine bay, took a lot of searching—to the point that his C-10 wasn’t completed to Gary’s satisfaction until 2020. When a truck as simple as a ’60s Chevy pickup, with the enormous parts support that this generation of truck gets from the aftermarket, gets stuck in a seven-year turnaround, you know that the owner is refusing to cut corners and is making everything right.

And when we say right, we mean correct for this particular era of truck. The block code was shared between trucks and cars, but the casting 3782461 “camel-back” cylinder heads (with their 1.94/1.50-inch valves, correct for 1964- ’66) had no accessory holes for mounting options like, for example, power steering. Nothing less than factory-, vehicle-, and era-correct would do.

At this point, Gary has achieved his goal, winning trophies and awards all over upstate New York—not to mention a photo shoot here in HCC (and, we’re willing to wager, a slot in next year’s Pickups and SUVs Hemmings calendar too…). The only thing left to do, Gary figures, is a correct contrasting squirt of white paint on the roof–tough to see from most angles but a good hedge against the sun heat-soaking the top surfaces of the truck at car shows. Well, that and drive it about a hundred miles a month.

Look, no one is going to believe that a bigger small-block V-8, automatic transmission, air conditioning, and a roomier cab are going to single-handedly call up the truck-as-car revolution we’ve experienced over the past few decades. No one is going to mistake it for a Cadillac. At the same time, it’s easy to see how Chevy’s engineers scrambled, within a single seven-year generation of truck, to go from a plain ol’ bare-bones pick ’em up to something that had a good deal more usability and comfort (and therefore consumer appeal) baked in. Trucks like this one played their part in the mainstreaming of these commercial haulers into America’s driveways: a total of 57,386 C-10 half-tons on a 115-inch wheelbase were built for the 1966 model year. It’s a crucial stepping stone between the hearty agricultural models of the not-so-distant past and the uber-plush cruisers and/or unrelenting rock crushers (or both simultaneously) of the not-so-distant future. Gary’s V-8-powered 1966 C-10 is a terrific example of a big, important marker in the evolution of the Great American Pickup Truck.

Date: 1982

Location: Brooklyn, New York

Source: Jet Lowe, via Historic American Engineering Record / Library of Congress

What do you see here?

Photo by Jet Lowe