The Abarth was a tiny two-seat sports/race car powered by an 1100 cc Fiat engine. That may not seem like much of a power plant, but considering the car wasn’t much bigger than a go-cart, it did just fine. Probably the most interesting thing about this car is that is was an asymmetric body design which did give it a distinctive and somewhat odd look.

The Siata looked a little like an early AC Cobra, but predated that car by almost a decade. It was very Italian and very beautiful. This baby was powered by a very unique 2-liter, 70 degree Fiat V8. This is a very rare engine and you don’t want to have to find parts for it!

Fred was a great guy, his cars were beautiful, and he let me drive the heck out of both of them. What more could you ask for?

We were only back from Calgary for a couple days before we were off to the Big Island of Hawaii for Cruisin’ Paradise. Bob McClurg, my good friend, automotive journalist, and now resident of Hilo, Hawaii turned me onto this event, and I’m really glad he did! It only takes place every three years, and this was the third one. (You do the math.) It’s a 10-day happening with runs and activities all over the island, culminating in a big car show in Hilo on the 4th of July.

It was unbelievable, and I clearly made a big mistake by not going over for the whole thing. I did my typical swoop-in/swoop-out thing and only came in for the last three days, with one of those largely being a jet lag recovery day. What was I thinking?!?

At any rate, I did manage to spend one day cruisin’ with Herb Leite, the host club prez, in his ’30 Ford coupe as we led a group to the stunning Waipio Valley and the memorial park at Laupahoehoe which was the site of the devastating 1946 tsunami. We also stopped by a really cool 50’s themed café in the middle of nowhere for lunch. Believe me, I didn’t see that one comin’. Bottom line tho, there are few places on earth more beautiful than Hawaii and what a way to see it!

Hilo is on the wet side of the island and it had rained almost every day that week, but the weather for the car show on the 4th was absolutely perfect. There were in the neighborhood of 350 cars at the show with 24 of them having been shipped over from the mainland and about that many more having come over from the other islands. Now that’s a commitment!

Honestly, I was expecting a lot of run-of-the-mill cars, but was really surprised at the uniqueness, diversity, and quality of the cars in attendance. One of my personal favs was Norm Gonzales’ ’54 Chevy custom. This baby was built from a brand new car back in ’54 and has been in numerous hot rod mags over the years dating back to ’58. Norm’s owned the car for 50 years and this was the second time he had shipped it over from SoCal for Cruisin’ Paradise. I think he likes the event.

The whole experience was topped off by a killer 4th of July fireworks show over Hilo bay which I was able to watch from the balcony of my hotel room. Life is good!

This is going to make a fantastic episode, and I’m already making plans to go back in 2012. And next time, I’m going for the whole thing!

We were only back in E’ville long enough to repack our suitcases before we headed back north of the border, this time to British Columbia, eh? We went up to check out a couple of Chip Foose designed hot rod pickups owned by Don Voth; a ’37 Husdon Terraplane and a ’49 GMC.

We lucked out on the weather again and had a beautiful day for shooting. Chip’s work always just blows me away, and this time was no exception. He’s a “less is more” guy when it comes to design and his creations are nothing short of art. His stuff always runs too, and Don was gracious enough to let me behind the wheel of both of them. A good time was had by all and it’ll make another great episode for 2010.

Most recently, we were up in Hickory Corners, MI for Mopar’s at the Red Barns. This show is in its 21st year, and it’s a bit a Mopar Mecca for the upper Midwest. It’s held on the beautiful and rambling grounds of the Gilmore Car Museum which, as the show’s name might indicate, has a lot of red barns around. (all packed full of amazing cars themselves BTW). But filling up the spaces between those barns on that mixed-weather Saturday were about 350 wild and wooly Mopars of all description.

Probably the wildest thing I saw that day was a ’69 “MopTop” notch-back Barracuda; F3 Green with yellow floral vinyl top and interior. Completely bizarre! The owner brought it specifically because he thought it might catch my eye. He called that one right.

We didn’t shoot this past week because I had a SEMA Board of Directors meeting in Pasadena, and I wrote this on the flight out. I head to Kansas City this weekend and then will be shooting a couple one-off Oldsmobiles in Galena, IL the following week.

Uh, I think that’s it.

Happy Motoring,

This was the 21st year for this show, and while it’s not all that big (about 250 cars) it really brings in some fantastic vehicles. I think my favorite was a ’53 Studebaker Commander coupe that had been made into a convertible.

Now, it’s no secret that I’m a Stude guy, but I don’t think there’s anybody that wouldn’t consider this car drop dead gorgeous.

The day started out bright and sunny, but as clouds started to roll in over the mountains, it was clear that we were going to be playing beat-the-clock to get this show shot before the weather changed. The rain held off till about two o’clock, but then it really came down for about a half hour.

At a lot of shows, this is when everyone scrambles for their cars and heads for home, but to my surprise, I don’t think a single car left Main Street. Most folks had to come a long way to get to this show, and they weren’t about to let a little rain dampen their spirits. After a while the rain let up, the sun came back out, and the festivities went on. This really was a great show, and it’s going to make a killer episode.

As long as I had come all that way tho, I figured I may as well hang around for a few more days so after we wrapped, the producer and I embarked on a three-day backpack trip up into the Wallows. This is a range I spent a lot of time in when I lived out in that area in the late 70’s, and I’m pretty familiar with it. Ben, on the other hand, had never done anything like this, and I may have forgotten to mention that our packs would weigh about 45 pounds apiece.

The weather was a mix of sun and downpours all three days, but it all worked out. The view from the tent was pretty spectacular although we encountered a fair amount of snow at the higher elevations.

The whole trip was about 20 miles round, and we were both feeling fairly beat up when we got back down.

We flew back to E’ville and were only there one day before we headed up to Indy to shoot the Road Rocket Rumble. This is a great traditional hot rod show that was celebrating its 10th year. It draws several hundred cars and really crams a lot into four days. There were no fewer than 10 rock-a-billy bands performing through the weekend along with seminars, a Burlesque show, pin-up contest, flame throwing, and burnouts. It’s incredibly cool and all the more amazing when you realize that the club that puts it on, the Indy Road Rockets, has all of nine members.

There was everything there from rat rods to a car that was reminiscent of Big Daddy Ed Roth’s space age Beatnik Bandit; not to mention an extremely “colorful” crowd. We had an absolute blast!

Another couple days at home, and I’m now on my way to Calgary, Alberta to do a feature on a very large and diverse collection there. The owner has a little bit of everything, but I’m thinking we’re going to focus on a couple of his unique sports/race cars from the 50’s. After that we’ll be home for two days before heading off for Hilo, Hawaii to shoot Cruisin’ Paradise. Hey, somebody’s got to do it!

It’s actually pretty hard for me to keep track of all the dates and places this time of year. All I know right now is; if it’s Tuesday, it must be Calgary.

Happy Motoring,

Neale, Sam, and I rode from Evansville, IN to St. Augustine, FL last week and shot the sixth episode of our motorcycle touring series, Trippin’ on Two Wheels. Here’s a shot of the bikes we rode taken at an overlook somewhere in NC. As you can see, they look considerably better than we do.

We were headed to St. A for Riding Into History which is motorcycle Concours d”Elegance that is held at the World Golf Village. I was also the Grand Marshal this year, so we kinda needed to get there.

It was an amazing trip, and it will make a killer episode of Trippin’. The bikes ran flawlessly, the concours was incredible, and a good time was had by all! You can see pictures and read Neale’s four-part travel blog about our adventure at the following links to Motorcycle Classics website. They’re pretty entertaining.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

We left the bikes in Jacksonville, FL and had them shipped back to E’ville by my good friends at Exotic Car Transport. (Hey, 1,000 miles in those saddles was enough!)

We all piled into the production van and headed for home via Charlotte, NC. That’s where Neale lives, and I also took the opportunity to stop by SPEED’s offices while I was in town. It was a happy meeting since MCC is pulling some of the strongest Nielsen’s at the network these days. (Yea!).

The next six months will pretty much be a travel blur as we get serious about production for the next season of MCC. It’s startin’ out good tho! I leave next week to shoot the Oregon Mountain Cruise in Joseph, Oregon. This isn’t a big show, but it’s held in one of my favorite places on earth.

I used to live out in that neck of the woods, and I spent a lot of time in the Wallowa Mountains which serve as a backdrop for Joseph. I’m really looking forward to the show, but the coolest thing is that after we wrap, we’re slapping on some backpacks and I’m going to drag the producer’s ass 10 miles up to spend a couple days at a place called Ice Lake at about 9,000 feet. I keep telling him it’s one of those life experiences everyone needs to have. Trust me.

I’ll let you know how all that went when we get back, blisters and all.

Happy Motoring,

We flew out of Evansville, IN on Friday morning at 6:00 am (CST) for Atlanta, which is in the Eastern Time zone where we languished for a couple hours before boarding a plane to San Diego, CA. Four and a half short hours later, we touched down in the Pacific Time zone in sunny California.

After gathering our gear, we made our way over to the rental car facility, located my name on the board, and went to the appointed parking space to see what they had assigned me this time. It was a brand new Nissan Altima; not exactly a ’56 Lincoln, but I figured it would get the job done.

Ben (the show’s producer) and I threw our stuff in the trunk, jumped in, and attempted to fire it up. This is where things got a little confusing. Nissan’s latest “innovation” is that they don’t use a key. They just have a fob and you sort of wave that in the general direction of the dash to let it know you’re there and then step on the brake pedal, hit a start button and theoretically, Vroom!

However when I hit the start button, the dash lights came on but nothing else happened. I hit the start button again and the dash lights went off. I repeated this sequence five more times, each time with the same result. Ben suggested that maybe it was running and it was just really quite. I dismissed that as patently absurd, but after I hit the start button the next time, I put the car in drive and to my amazement, it moved forward. It was at this point that it hit both of us that this Nissan was a hybrid. Duh. We sheepishly and stealthfully made our way to the exit of the rental car facility, hopped on I-8, and embarked on our three-hour drive over to Yuma.

I had never been in this neck of the woods before, and it really has some strange and diverse geology. Not far out of San Diego, you climb up over a range of mountains that appear to be comprised of huge piles of boulders unlike anything I’ve seen. The pass is at about 4,200 feet and then you drop back down to sea level on the other side. Farther along, you come into an area that looks like the Sahara Desert. Apparently this is where Patton trained his tank commanders for warfare in North Africa. Now days tho the tanks are replaced by battalions of ATV’s and Sandrails bombing around on these seemingly endless dunes. The dunes eventually give way to more typical sage brush and sand, and then things finally turn agricultural as you start to near Yuma. All the while, you catch periodic glimpses of the fence on the Mexican border which is no more than several hundred yards away.

Well, that was sort of the travelogue part of the trip, and we were feeling pretty good as we rolled in to our hotel in Yuma about 3:00 pm; or at least that’s what we thought.

Midnight at the Oasis kicks off with a parade on Friday, and they had asked me to be the Grand Marshall. I thought that the parade started at 5:30 pm, but I didn’t have any of the details about it nor was there any info awaiting us at the hotel. No prob, we still had plenty of time.

When I got to my room tho, I noticed that the clock read 4:00 pm. I checked my cell phone and lo and behold, it corroborated that time. Yuma was apparently in Mountain Time zone. Imagine that. I had just lost an hour, but I should still be OK for the parade if I hustle a bit (and figure out were it is).

It was just about at that moment tho when my hotel room phone rang and on the other end was a semi-panicked event organizer wondering where I was since the parade was going to start in less than a half hour, there were 500 cars waiting, and the natives were getting restless.

Less than a half hour?!? I thought it wasn’t supposed to start at 5:30! Apparently not. Holy crap!!!

I called Ben and apprised him of our latest crisis and sprung into action, throwing on an MCC shirt and cranking up my mustache in record time. We bolted from the hotel, dove into our trusty Nissan hybrid, floored it and silently glided off. Something about that last part just seemed sort of anticlimactic.

We immediately hit rush hour traffic and as the minutes ticked by, we inched ever closer to the parade staging area. After what seemed like hours but in fact was only about 10 minutes, we arrived at our destination, There were several police cars and motorcycles waiting for us with lights flashing and they parted the crowd and escorted our mute Nissan toward the head of the parade to cheers (and occasional jeers) of the crowd. When we got there, I hopped out of the Nissan and into the driver’s seat of an awaiting ’66 327/350HP Corvette roadster and the parade was underway, a mere 15 minutes late!

From that point on, everything went pretty smoothly. The parade followed a five mile route and there were thousands of spectators lining the streets along the way. The shoot the following day went off without a hitch, and we really saw some fantastic cars and met some great people. But the whole time warp thing wasn’t over yet.

That night, most of the nation switched to daylight savings time. A notable exception to that rule tho is Arizona. We were still facing a three hour drive back to San Diego Sunday morning to catch an 11:40 am flight back home. Considerable discussion ensued between Ben & me as to when 11:40 am Pacific Daylight time really was relative to where we were and therefore when we actually needed to leave Yuma so as not to miss our flight. I was told there would not be math in this job! At any rate, we ultimately sorted it out, and I am on the plane headed home. Yowza!

BTW, does anyone have the correct time?

Happy Motoring,

The event was the Gran Feria de Autos Antiguos; loosely translated, the Grand Festival of Old Cars. It’s held at an exhibition center in San Juan, and it’s the biggest car show in the Caribbean, boosting over 2,000 cars. When we got there tho, we found that the vast majority of these cars were under large tents; row after row of them. It was like a huge tent city.

The tents are there because the sun can really roast you in San Juan, and it could just as easily be pouring down rain at any time too. It was actually pretty nice for spectators, but it was clearly going to present some challenges for shooting.

There was definitely a festival atmosphere there. It was like somebody threw a huge party and a car show broke out. The place was packed and there was all sorts of stuff going on. There was even a roving band of musicians playing high-energy island music complete with multiple drums and horn section. These guys were really working up a sweat!

We shot a little on our reconnaissance day with a small camera, but we hit the show the following day with a full crew. It was even more packed than the previous day, and it became obvious that these folks were huge fans of My Classic Car! I don’t think I have ever taken more pictures with people at a show than I did that day.

There were some really great cars at this show and some that I have never seen. There were also a lot of cars that you just don’t see any more on the mainland, like early 60’s Toyotas, Mazdas, and Hondas. VW’s were plentiful, and I saw a nearly perfect Mustang II. When was the last time you saw one of those?

To shoot specific cars tho, we had to move them out from under the tent into the aisle between tents to get them in better light. Sometimes this was relatively straight forward, and other times it required more extensive rearrangement to free the car we wanted, but everyone was more than accommodating and we came up with some pretty interesting interviews. English is not the first language for a lot of these folks, but using the universal language of “Car”, we always managed to get thru them.

The people of Puerto Rico were wonderful, and it is a beautiful island. All in all, I think this is going to make an interesting episode.

While we were there we also shot a day with Jaime Del Valle and some outstanding Jaguars. Jaime has the Jaguar dealership on Puerto Rico, and he and some of his friends have some really nice specimen of these sleek cats.

We basically assembled the entire line of Jag’s XK series. We had a ’52 XK120, a ’56 XK140, a ’57 XK 150, and Series I, Series II, and Series III E-Types. I was in Jag heaven! These were gorgeous cars, and we had them in a striking setting. It was really interesting to see the evolution of the technology over the years, and you could see Jaguar’s racing heritage in all of them.

The coolest thing tho is that in addition to all these complete cars, Jaime also has a running, licensed ’52 XK120 chassis. You rarely get such a clear picture of what’s under the skin of those beautiful cars, and this was a real treat. But the biggest treat of all is that we fired that chassis up and took it for a spin into old San Juan. You can’t believe the looks we got.

The ride was cut short due to a stuck thermostat that caused to engine to overheat, but just when we started to get a little steam out of the overflow, I was able to shut her down and coast to a stop in front of the 500 year old fort overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. What a view! This turned out to be the perfect place to close the episode, which is fortunate since that chassis was done for the day.

Check out this sneak behind-the-scenes peak.

A week from now, we’ll be shooting in Yuma, AZ. I’ll let you know how that one goes too.

Happy Motoring,

This is the 14th year on TV for MCC, but it is the first one that has been shot in High Definition. The cars look spectacular in HD, although I probably look better in standard def. The lead-off episode premieres on Feb 22, and it’s a good one for HD. It was shot last spring in Lehi, Utah at the UVSC car show. The show is held at a facility called Thanksgiving Point, and it is about as nice a setting as you could imagine.

The cars are all on grass, and the whole area is rimmed by snow capped mountains. The weather was perfect that day too. In fact, the biggest problem I had at that event was deciding what five cars to feature since there were just so many interesting and high quality cars in attendance.

We did manage tho, and I think the result is one of the best looking episodes we’ve ever done. We’ve only finished editing about four of this year’s 26 episodes so far, and they all look really good. Initially, I wasn’t all that thrilled about going to HD because of the increased cost, but I have to admit, it does look awesome!

As you can see, we have also done a radical redesign on the website. We’re a TV show, but our old site really had very little video on it. However, web technology has come a long way in the last couple years and we’re now able to offer fairly high quality video without ridiculous download times.

You’ll be able to watch clips of the new episodes, entire Eastwood Garage segments, and even some behind-the-scenes stuff. I’ll probably do an occasional video blog too. Bottom line, there’s going to be a lot more going on at the MCC website than ever before and I encourage you to stop by often.

I’ll be blogging from the road and in fact, I am en route to Puerto Rico right now to shoot a big car show in San Juan. I end up spending a lot of time in airport lounges waiting for my connecting flights, so I may as well put that time to good use. I’ll probably let you know how the San Juan shoot went on the flight home.

I’m getting close to having my production schedule pinned down for this year. We’ll be in Arizona, Vermont, Michigan, and British Columbia just to name a few of the locations. Actually, I learned about most of the events we’ll be shooting from viewers who submitted them via this website. I know a lot of folks and I’m pretty well connected in the car hobby, but this is such a big and thriving hobby that there’s no way I can be aware of all the great events and collections that are lurking out there. I really need to hear from you about what events you think we should cover and what type of things you’d like to see. So please submit your ideas, because I really can’t do this show right without you!

I’ll also be posting our production and travel schedule (once I get it figured out, that is) in future blogs so you’ll know where we’ll be shooting. If we’re going to be in your neck of the woods, I encourage you to come by and say hi. I always like meeting fans of the show.

I guess this is a good place to wrap since the flight attendant has just come on saying it’s time to shut down all electronic devices in preparation for landing in San Juan. Wish me good weather and lots of cool cars!

Happy Motoring,