They should.
Categories
Does Shell Still do These?
Category: Racing Ephemera
Close your eyes and imagine your perfect racing workshop.
I suspect that no two of you have the same image in your heads. For some of you, it’s a pristine Garage Life-ready half museum, half garage. A few of you have a neon-bedazzled, diner-inspired, American Graffiti-esque explosion of color. For some, it’s a humble pole barn and a lift. Hell, Garage Journal is filled with hundreds of different takes on seeking perfection in automotive spaces.
This series of photographs of Bob Wilson’s shop that Amy Shore shot for Petrolicious comes as close as I think I’m ever likely to see of the image I have in my mind. Not overly sterile; not overly bright; just a cozy little hobbit hole of a workshop with just the right tools and just the right cars to work on. And that unassuming brickwork just visible outside the shop… Gorgeous.
You really owe it to yourself to click over to Petrolicious for the whole series.
Unfortunately this clipping from Popular Mechanics didn’t include the build blueprints. Anyone have one of these in their attic and want to restart the series?
Pull the shoebox out from under your bed and let’s get back to trading some of our Topps World on Wheels cards. This time it’s Lance Reventlow’s baby, the Scarab.
From the card’s reverse: Only three of the powerful American Scarab racers were built in Southern California, but they won many races. Their Chevrolet Corvette engines were modified for racing conditions. Scarab bodies were made of aluminum, shaped by hand. The special frames and brakes were also completely hand-made.
HP: 390 | Top Speed: 165 MPH | Price: $17,000
$17,000! I’ll gladly give you twice that for one!
Categories
Model Cars Magazine
With all the quality makers of die-cast scale racers around today, it’s easy to forget that scratch-building was once popular enough to have a monthly magazine dedicated to the topic. Then again, I’m enough out of this loop that there may well be active publications today—certainly there are vibrant web communities.
Categories
I Am Not This Smooth
“Don’t worry, Mrs. Higgins—I’ll have your daughter in bed before midnight.”
To be fair, few of us are as smooth as Playboy cartoon characters. Then again, maybe if I spent my single years picking up dates in a Speedster I would have been.
via Porsche Classic.
I know I’m cutting it close, but just in time for some last minute stocking stuffers for the racing fan in your life… Or you. Probably for you… it’s OK, you deserve it.
Some of these I’ve been incredibly delinquent in re-ordering, so it’s been quite a while since the Riverside or Legends of the 60’s shirts have been available.
Head on over to the Chicane Shop for more.
Categories
Liveries Matter
“Welcome to Automotive Paint Supplies, Ltd., How can I help you?”
“I would like any two colors of paint, please. Whatever the first two cans of paint you can reach are, I want those.”
Categories
Topps World on Wheels: Maserati
Keep your rookie cards and let’s dig back into the Topps World on Wheels trading cards sets. This time, Maserati.
From the card’s reverse:
“Maserati is one of the great names in racing cars. Some of the most famous drivers in racing history have used the Maserati to win prizes… Wilbur Hatch having twice driven one to victory in the Indianapolis Races. In Italy, the Maserati Company is known more for production of spark plugs and batteries than for racing cars.”
Fascinating to me that they played up the Indy 500 connection and were so dismissive of Masers in Europe.
More Topps World on Wheels in the archives.
Categories
A T-Shirt Shop Experiment
When you sell shirts like we do in the Chicane Shop, there’s a number of questions that need to be constantly asked and answered: How many of that design do we have left? How many of this new design do we think we’ll need? Will this design sell at all? How many of each size should we order?
All of these questions keep me from putting out more shirts, more often. There are services that print shirts on demand as they’re ordered. But they tend to use direct digital printing to the garment and the quality tends to be poor so I’ve avoided them. A recent service has launched that organizes crowdfunding of quality t-shirt screenprinting.
For those unfamiliar with crowdfunding, the basic system is this: A shirt design is proposed and if a certain threshold of people decide to buy it within a certain amount of time, then the purchases are processed, the shirts are printed, and they’re distributed to all the buyers. If not enough people decide they want it, the shirts never happen and no one is charged anything. Anyone who has followed a project on Kickstarter or Indie Go-Go is familiar with this approach to sales.
I’ve decided to give it a go as an experiment. The result is extending the Legends series of shirts we’ve been selling to include the Legends of the 70s; surely one of the most exciting times in international motorsport with some of the most colorful drivers and dynamic moments in racing. If we get 15 people to commit to purchasing the shirt in the next 2 weeks, the shirts will be printed and distributed. Of course we can sell more than 15 too, so tell your friends.
Here is the link to the sales page for the shirt. Head on over and pick one up.
What does this mean for the future of Chicane shirts? It will let us try more different kinds of shirts, more often. Instead of our typical glacial pace of 1 or 2 shirt designs—and infrequent re-orders—a year, we’ll be able to release one a month or one a week. It will also let us take more risks on the kinds of shirts we design. You wouldn’t believe how conflicted I was when I ordered the first batch of Yamura Motors shirts. Would anyone even understand this? Am I going to be stuck with boxes and boxes of this shirt? That shirt has gone on to be our best seller. A crowdfunding model like this takes some of that worry away and essentially puts those questions to a vote. You get to decide which designs make the cut.