Diego’s Friday AutoHunter Picks

Date: circa 1970s

Location: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Source: via Historic American Engineering Record

What do you see here?

When the shark-nose E24 M6 (M635CSi in Europe) first rolled off BMW assembly lines in 1983, it was unlike any other sports car in its day. The “M” stands for “Motorsport,” and the only BMW sports car faster than the luxurious M6 coupe was the legendary M1 supercar. Of the 5,855 examples built, this low-mileage 1988 BMW M6 is just one of the estimated 1,767 models shipped to the United States. Production of the E24 M6/M635CSi ended in 1989, making it one of the last of its kind to be produced.

A perfect blend between European luxury and race-bred power, this high-performance grand tourer seats four and is equipped with the 3.5-liter DOHC inline-six, a modified version of the M1 supercar engine rated at 256 horsepower. The standard five-speed manual transmission has the capability to shift the car from 0-60-mph in six seconds.

The engine bay of the ’88 BMW M6 is so clean you could eat off of it, but wouldn’t want to in fear of leaving crumbs behind.

Offered for sale on Hemmings via a live online auction, the seller states that they originally acquired the fully serviced, showroom condition sports car from its previous 25-year owner. The CARFAX report shows consistent servicing and no known issues.

The BMW M6 supports an unbeatable driving experience with its comfortable plush leather interior.

Unlike the 1987 version that wore the generally less desirable front bumpers, this ‘88 M6 sports the smaller standardized bumpers to compliment its shark-nose styling. The seller says the Cinnabar Red paint is in excellent condition and the interior is very clean, showing no visible signs of wear. The factory stereo comes with the car but has since been upgraded with a Boss touch screen audio and navigation system. The original tools and extensive service documentation are also included with the sale.

Sometimes you don’t have to go far to find a rare ride that’s been hiding in plain sight. Carl Manfra found that out recently when he heard about a 1967 Ford Mustang GTA sitting in the woods in Atco, New Jersey, just a few miles from the famous raceway that bears the towns name.

“I was contacted about a Mustang that had been out in the woods for quite a while. I ran down to look at it. As it turned out, this is anything but a regular Mustang to say the least,” Carl said.

The Ford was in poor shape, disassembled and weathered, and missing most of its front clip. “It didn’t look like much, but there was a catch with this one, and the VIN gave it away,” Carl added. This Mustang was an early build, with its VIN showing it was the 38^th Mustang serialized that year. Usually, these low number cars were built for a specific reason, so the research began.

Once Carl received the Marti report on the Mustang, the mystery started to unravel. There it showed that this car was ordered June 3 of 1966 and was originally scheduled to be built on July 4. Its actual build date was August 21, which was early in the manufacturing year. The release date was October 17; however, its final sale date was on August 3 of the following year. Why was there such a long timelapse before it was sold?

Carl found that out on the Marti Report as well; “This Mustang was classified as an “Introductory Show Unit,” which means it was used as a special car built by Ford to show off the new model and its options. This car was probably destined for a big auto show or something similar. Once it was finished on the circuit, it was released for sale to the general public. It’s a very well optioned car believed to be the first big-block 390-ci fastback produced on the East Coast.”

Found after it was put out to pasture, the VIN on this ’67 Mustang GTA tells us that this pony was built by Ford specifically for the show car circuit.

This pony car pasture find just gets bigger and better

The ‘67 Mustang had an all-new engine lineup for the new model year, which now included its first big-block offering. The car was also redesigned and grew in length and width to help fit the big Ford engines that were available that year. This included the new 390ci 4v “Thunderbird Special” mill pushing out a healthy 320-hp and 427 ft-lbs. of twisty torque. This powerplant would no doubt add a little punch to the Mustang franchise.

The original 390/4v Thunderbird Special is long gone, but a viable replacement is readily available on the secondhand market.

Some other info came to light after finding the car. It was built in Metuchen, New Jersey. It’s an East Coast car, but Carl also found its “sister” on the West Coast. It’s the exact same car with the same options, including the color combo, the only exception is West Coast car was ordered with air conditioning. It was built before Carl’s barn find, with a VIN that ends in 17.

When built, the interior of this Mustang was stuffed with options like a tilt steering wheel, stereosonic tape system and am radio, deluxe seat belts harnesses, and tachometer with trip odometer. The floors are in poor shape, but sheet metal is readily available.

Carl’s fastback was born in Wimbledon White and has a nicely contrasting blue vinyl interior. Like stated before, it was stuffed with the new 390-ci powerplant, backed by a C6 transmission. Of course, it has the GT package which consisted of front disc brakes, grill-mounted fog lights, dual exhaust, GT gas cap and rocker paint stripes. Other options include styled wheels, deluxe steering wheel, am/eight track stereo radio, tachometer and trip odometer, and shoulder harnesses, among others.

This Mustang came with the popular styled wheels and F-70 Firestone Wide Ovals.

So, what’s the future for this very collectible pony car? “I’m still getting all the parts together, but I will be putting it up for sale shortly,” Carl said, “It will make a great restoration project and a great example of Ford’s big block pony car for muscle car aficionados, especially for any Mustang fanatic.”

In the 1990s I did the How-To segment on the My Classic Car TV show, and it was there that I saw my first restored car. This was years after having gone to Pebble Beach and other famous concours d’elegance shows. Let me explain.

One of the cars we featured on the show was a 1963 Corvette split-window coupe that had been meticulously restored to the way it was when it left the factory, right down to the slight orange peel in the paintwork and the faint overspray on the chassis. In fact, the owner researched everything to the point that he actually knew how much grease was shot into the fittings on the chassis!

Even the original chalk marks made by the inspectors on the assembly line were in place, despite dealers having usually erased them when they prepped the cars for sale. Also, the car’s hubcaps were stowed in the back of the car, wrapped in the correct brown paper that the factory used for shipment. It took years, a lot of money, and a lot of research to make the car as painstakingly authentic as it was, and of course the owner never even started it. The car was strictly for show and was shipped in a closed trailer everywhere it went.

I say kudos to this true restorer who presented us with such an exact restoration of this unique car. I will not take a position on whether it is advisable for anyone to go to such incredible effort to recreate assembly-line mediocrity, though. Or for that matter, why restorers try to exceed the original with a lovingly hand-built fantasy of what the car could have been. That’s because I also enjoy seeing the great classics over-restored to what they could have been.

The great classics on display at the prestigious concours shows are stunning to behold, and yes, they were hand built by craftsmen to very high standards, but they were never done to the level of perfection that you see at Pebble Beach. People who were alive at the time they were built would tell you so, and that includes my late father, who once shot paint for Howard “Dutch” Darrin back in the late 1930s.

Pop said that Dutch used a lot of lead, rather than the best metal finishing, and that some of his early Packard Darrins had problems with cowl shake after being sectioned and channeled, and the doors would pop open without warning. He then resorted to a cast-aluminum cowl. Apparently, Dutch relied on the designer’s dictum: “If it looks good, it IS good,” which is great for static art, but not necessarily ideal for kinetic items such as cars.

I have over-restored half a dozen cars to show-winning standards myself and have the trophies to prove it, and I have gone to a great deal of trouble to make them as factory-original as possible. But I like to drive classics too, so I have subtly upgraded and changed some of them to make them more usable in today’s traffic.

For example, I have added more durable roller-type front-wheel bearings to my 1958 Chevrolet Apache parts-chaser pickup, and vented the brake drums for extra stopping power. I added aftermarket air conditioning to my 1955 Chevrolet Beauville station wagon so my wife and I can be comfortable on hot summer tours. I used the original factory-correct inlets in the passenger compartment, but I had to add an alternator to deal with the extra amps required to run the system.

With my 1940 Packard 110 coupe, I installed the correct original R9 Borg Warner overdrive available that year, but left the non-overdrive differential in place because it had a higher (numerically lower) gear ratio that allows me to drive at freeway speeds without over-revving the engine. Also, the Packard’s paintwork is the original Harbor Gray hue, but it has been color sanded and polished to a gleaming perfection using modern materials that the carmakers were never blessed with at the factory.

So, what’s my point? Just this: I admire and applaud people who restore cars to exact originality, though I have only ever seen one, and I also admire those who over-restore to concours d’elegance standards, based on the original French meaning of the term that originated in Paris in the 19th century, when people tarted up their horse-drawn vehicles and toured them around that city.

Also thrilling to me is seeing well-preserved original cars, because they are the most accurate tangible artifacts of automotive history we have left, and I am a history buff. Such surviving originals are the closest things to time machines that exist and are able to transport us back to another era. I applaud people who keep such cars original and running, so we can all see, hear, and smell what once was.

Instead of restoring, maybe all such preserved cars need is careful re-storing, not restoring, to make sure they survive for future generations to appreciate.

With rows upon rows of Shelby Mustangs, Hemi-powered Dodges, Yenkos of all stripes, and other production-line Detroit performance vehicles, the American Muscle Car Museum seems an unlikely place for the 1956 Mercury XM-Turnpike Cruiser, a recently restored chrome-laden one-off show car, to wind up. But museum founder Mark Pieloch thinks it’ll still fit in nicely.

“The car struck me – it’s stunning from a color perspective,” Pieloch said. “I like to have a tremendous variety of colors in the museum; I’m not a black and white guy.”

Pieloch noticed the car at last month’s Mecum Kissimmee auction, where restorer Tom Maruska had consigned it after a restoration odyssey that started with a car that had been vandalized, left out in the elements in Detroit, and rusted to the gills. It was far from the gleaming, pearl-orange turntable twirler that John Najjar and Elwood Engle designed with rocket-inspired side sculpting, butterfly panels above each door, and a dual-quad Y-block as a precursor to the production 1957 Mercury lineup, but Maruska, no stranger to restoring unique concept cars – he’s done both the Ford Thunderbird Italien and the 1954 Mercury XM-800 – took on the Ghia-built concept car figuring it’d be just a two-year job.

Photo courtesy Tom Maruska

Four years later, Maruska, working on his own out of his shop in Duluth, Minnesota, ended up having to replace much of the rusted-away frame with sections from a 1954 Mercury’s frame, fabricate an entirely new floor and lower sections of the body panels, nearly re-create the entire interior, and teach himself how to shape plexiglass to shape the unique rear wraparound windows. He researched just about every aspect of the car, from how the Ford and Ghia workers put it together to the exact color they painted it (a 1956 Mercury production color called Persimmon with a coat of pearl sprayed over it), discovering a number of oddities about it along the way, including the fact that it used F-250 chassis components and that one of the butterfly panels ended up being longer than the other by a couple inches.

From the beginning, Maruska was clear that he was only restoring the XM-Turnpike Cruiser to sell at auction, and after wrapping up the restoration in the fall of last year, he consigned it to the Kissimmee auction, where Mecum staff estimated it would sell for $1.25 to $2 million. While it failed to meet Maruska’s reserve, bidding up to $350,000, it did bring Maruska and Pieloch together.

Photo courtesy Tom Maruska

Pieloch, who’s been mainly collecting muscle cars for 30 years, opened the American Muscle Car Museum in October 2016 in Melbourne, Florida, in a purpose-built 123,000-square-foot facility. Though it’s not open to the public, the museum does host more than 100 activities throughout the year, including car shows, autocross events, and student tours. As a result, more than 20,000 people go through the museum every year.

“I know people down here in Florida with $20 million to $50 million worth of cars in their garages that nobody ever sees,” he said. “I’d rather show my vehicles than put them away where nobody sees them, and I told Tom that’s exactly my plan for the XM-Turnpike Cruiser, to put it on prominent display and to show off his restoration work. It’s going to be seen.”

Photo courtesy American Muscle Car Museum

Of the more than 400 cars in the collection, about 200 of them have less than 100 miles, and another 80 of them have less than 10,000 miles. And while that – plus the fact that Pieloch insists on maintaining every car in running condition – makes the collection fairly unique, he said there’s not many truly unique individual vehicles in the collection. He could only point to a one-of-two Alan Mann lightweight 1966 Ford GT40 and a one-of-10 1955 Chevrolet Bel Air Indy pace car as standouts in that regard. That said, “I try to have a couple pinnacle examples of every car,” and the XM-Turnpike Cruiser fits that bill.

As for Maruska, he’s an avid restorer of Amphicars and already has another one, a 1964, on the rotisserie in his shop. But he’s not averse to taking on another concept car project, especially if it’s a Ford from the Fifties or Sixties.