Pick of the Day: 1966 Shelby GT350

Unless they were put away in a bubble, original unrestored vehicles show some sort of wear and evidence of use. Even fully restored vehicles tend to miss something. Engine bays are often detailed to perfection while other areas of the vehicle are pushed to the background. But the seller of this 1980 Datsun 720 longbed listed for sale on Hemmings.com includes photos of the floor mats pulled back and the seat back tilted forward to reveal absolutely pristine surfaces and materials. The bed looks like it’s never hauled even a dropped wayward leaf. Not a single screw shows rust. The area behind the fuel filler door is cleaner than a hungry man’s dinner plate. Every plastic clip, every original zip tie, every factory-applied paper tag is still in place.

According to the seller, that’s because the truck has always seen the inside of a garage and was never driven in rain or snow. Somehow, the odometer shows more than 25,000 miles, and we’re wondering whether those accumulated with a full layer of protective plastic wrap around, over, and underneath the pickup. Maybe around those original tires too. Naturally, somebody that conscientious in the care of the truck would have kept extensive documentation on its purchase and care, all of which are included here. Was this originally owned by a barebones truck enthusiast who wanted to preserve the truck for posterity? A fanatic for car care? Somebody who made few large purchases in life and thus saw this as a precious item to be maintained for as long as humanly possible?

Whatever the case, it’s certain there’s not another Datsun 720 out there—original or restored—in this condition. A good candidate for McCourt’s museum for ordinary and unexceptional cars.

Hot Rodding doesn’t stop at the road’s end. In fact, the mechanized cultural phenomenon has permeated far beyond asphalt and into the hearts of freshwater boating enthusiasts across generations. For 2023, the Grand National Roadster show, held in Pomona, California welcomed hot road boats to join the festivities. Nearly an entire show hall was full of wild, vintage, and immaculately restored offerings to the maritime gods of speed. Feast your eyes on this gallery of hemi-powered, roots-blown, stack injected, and otherwise wickedly fast hot rod boats.

Hot Rod Boats of the Grand National Roadster Show 2023

While Dodge’s Little Red Express may lay claim to the original sport truck monicker, Ford’s Lighting may have rolled out of the showroom at a quicker pace, and GMC’s turbo AWD storm warnings might have packed more era-leading tech, it was Chevrolet’s Silverado SS 454 pickup that had our hearts. The limited run, single-cab, big-block pickup revived a sound and presence that hadn’t been seen outside the muscle car realm in quite some time and was a bedroom wall poster aspiration for many a high-schooler. Today, surviving specimens are few and far between and even fewer are in as solid condition as this prime example that’s currently up for auction.

The truck is said to have been owned by the founder of Royal Purple oil, which seems like an obvious quell for any concerns about oil change intervals. The engine has been rebuilt and the paint resprayed in the original Onyx Black hue. Careful observers will note the cowl hood which is a tasteful, yet aftermarket add-on.

The inarguable star of the show was the 454ci big-block Chevy under the hood. While it only produced 230hp in factory trim, enthusiasts were quick to tap the performance potential of all those cubic inches.

The Garnet Red cloth interior is original and in excellent shape. According to the seller all of the original guages and HVAC controls function.

If you like what you see, make sure to check the auction page for more photos, info, or to make a bid on this 1990 Chevrolet Silverado 454 SS

Kit cars are the automotive embodiment of grand plans. They’re the means by which anybody with ambition and a set of hand tools can build an exotic or sporty car on par with something that would normally cost a few decades’ worth of salary. They’re also supposed to be rather quick to assemble, with the most basic and straightforward versions taking about a weekend to plop onto a running and rolling chassis. Then there’s the Devin-Crosley kit car that Jim Liberty has taken on, a project that will soon come to fruition after 75 years.

“How does a 75-year-old car just sit as it came from Devin?” Jim asked. “The owner’s only concern was whether he had enough juice to finish it.”

Jim, who is based in Costa Mesa, California, and is best known for his Porsche 356 restorations, isn’t above taking on something a little more unique. His shop truck is a lightly modified Crosley CC pickup, and he’s restored a 1960 Austin-Healey Sprite to recapture the feeling of his first sports car. It was the former, however, that led him to the long-dormant Devin project—the longest, in fact, that we’ve come across.

“I was buying parts for the pickup from the owner and he told me he just had too much work over the years to ever get started on it,” Jim says.

Photo courtesy Jim Liberty

According to the story that the owner related, the project began sometime around 1948, even before Devin started building fiberglass bodies. The prior owner of the project had a 1946 Crosley station wagon that caught fire and, rather than scrap it, he socked it away in his Ohio basement. Then, sometime after Devin established Devin Enterprises in 1954, the station wagon owner bought a Devin fiberglass roadster body.

Bill Devin, once called “the Enzo Ferrari of the Okie Flats,” only grew up in Oklahoma; other than a few years in Iowa, he spent most of his adult life in California. Cars, however, were a constant throughout his life, from the Chevrolet dealership that his father ran to the Chrysler-Plymouth dealerships that he operated and on to the Crosley Hotshot in which he started his sports car racing career and the Ferraris and other European cars he bought, sold, and raced. While other California-based hot-rodders and racers had already discovered the benefits of fiberglass bodies, Devin taught himself how to work in the medium and quickly became one of, if not the most, prolific manufacturers of fiberglass bodies for existing car chassis. He started by splashing a mold off a Deutsch-Bonnet for his Devin-Panhard, according to Kevin Callahan at Devin Sports Cars, then progressed to developing his own molds, patterned after an unnamed small Italian spider (reportedly a Scaglietti-bodied Ermini 357 Sport, one of three built). Rather than produce a single mold for a single chassis, Devin instead produced as many as 50 sections of molds from which he could mix and match to lay up bodies in dozens of sizes for multiple chassis.

Bill Devin with some of his production fiberglass carsPhoto via Devin Sports Cars

While Devin later went on to offer his own body and chassis combination under the name Devin SS as well as versions for rear-engine applications after the Volkswagen phenomenon took hold, the owner of the now-stripped Crosley chassis bought a front-engine body along with a couple of fiberglass racing seats direct from Devin. As Jim told the story, the builder got as far as extending the chassis by 24 inches and placing the body on the chassis before other priorities obviously took over. After Roughly 60 years, that owner then took the project to the Crosley Automobile Club‘s Nationals in Wauseon, Ohio, where he offered it for sale in the swap meet and where the Sioux Falls-based owner spotted it.

“It was 100 percent virgin when he bought it,” Jim says.

Photo courtesy Jim Liberty

Other than adding some Dayton wire wheels to the car, though, he never did anything with it either, so he sold the project to Jim. While the Devin came with a Crosley 750cc four-cylinder, presumably the station wagon’s original engine, and a Sprite four-speed transmission, a common upgrade over the Crosley’s unsynchronized three-speed manual transmission, Jim said trying to mate the two “turned into a nightmare” so he substituted a supercharged 1275-cc four-cylinder out of an MG for the Crosley engine and kept the Sprite transmission. He also widened the rear axle to accommodate the wider wire wheels, but left the rest of the chassis alone and focused on the bodywork necessary for preparing a 60-something-year-old fiberglass body for the first paint ever to coat its surfaces. Plans call for it to be black with red racing stripes and a red vinyl interior using those original Devin seats, Jim says.

Photo courtesy Jim Liberty

And while it’s not a 356, Jim says it’s still getting the same treatment as any of his projects, which benefit from a number of specialists within walking distance of his shop. “The best of the best,” he says.

According to Jim, the Devin will be titled in California as a 1948 Crosley and will be going up for sale sometime this fall.

Date: 1968

Location: Helsinki, Finland

Source: Laitila Unto, via Helsinki Photos

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Photo by Laitila Unto