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SIA Flashback – Mopar’s Star Cars
While GM and Ford messed around with unconventional engine architectures and driveline layouts during the 1930s, Chrysler didn’t just sit on its thumbs. Indeed, under project manager Ken Lee, they...
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SIA Flashback – The First Fliptop? and The Cavalier
Two articles appeared in SIA #50, April 1979, that dealt with the histories of unusual, essentially one-off body styles. First, W.E. Gosden chronicled Ben Ellerbeck’s “shiftable top,” or what we would...
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SIA Flashback – Cars Worth Collecting: Cheap Wheels
Thirty years ago, the old car hobby was different than it is today. Just how different? Take a gander at Michael M. Self’s article from SIA #50, April 1979, in which he argues for plucking...
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SIA Flashback – Hillbilly Genius: The Great “Boss Ket”
Most men are content doing one thing and doing it well. Charles Kettering, however, did many things well and almost singlehandedly steered the American auto industry toward modernity: He refined the...
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SIA Flashback – Marmon’s Last Gamble
When we last saw the Marmon V-12 HCM, it was headed to RM’s Meadow Brook auction in 2007, and RM had a decent writeup of the story of the prototype. Now we see that Frank Robinson Jr. wrote the HCM’s...
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SIA Flashback – A Half-Hour History of Turbochargers
Funny how history repeats itself. During the fuel crises of the 1970s, many automotive engineers latched on to turbochargers as a means of reducing weight and thus saving fuel while maintaining the...
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SIA Flashback – Resurrection in Moscow
Classic car enthusiasts know there was some sort of link between Packard and ZIS/ZIL – postwar ZIS-110s looked like near-perfect copies of pre-war Packards, as did later ZIL/Chaikas resemble later...
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SIA Flashback – Oddballs and One-Offs
I have but one bone to pick with Keith Marvin’s article from SIA #56, April 1980: At the end, he argues that the day of the custom car was restricted only to the pre-Depression era. Not so at all, as...
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SIA Flashback – Rescued in Tangiers
Frank Kurtis was – and still is – known for many things in the American high-performance world, thus our profile of him as a Hot Rod Hero in HMM #71. Less known accomplishments of his – but just as...
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SIA Flashback – Half-Hour History of Four-Wheel-Drive Autos
While it was a stretch for Jan P. Norbye to suggest that, with the contemporary AMC Eagle exploring production four-wheel-drive passenger-car use on American roads, an avalanche of four-wheel-drive...
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SIA Flashback – Dearborn’s Camaro-Eater
In October 1980, the first wave of muscle car madness was still several years away, but the memory of those cars remained fresh in the minds of enthusiasts, who bemoaned what had come out of Detroit...
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SIA Flashback – 1956 Gaylord: A Grand Turismo in the American Manner
The Gaylord, when mentioned nowadays, draws a lot of criticism for its, um, quirky looks. (It’s a Brooks Stevens design – what’d you expect?) Most people trot out the big-headlamp prototype, yuk it...
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Cars I’ve Loved and Hated – Michael Lamm’s Unauthorized Auto Biography,...
After owning his 1967 Camaro for 31 years and writing a book about Camaros, Lamm felt there was nothing left for the car to teach him. So in 2000, he sold it along with his Hudson and two Panteras and...
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SIA Flashback – SIA’s First 200 Issues
If you’ve been paying attention to the SIA Flashbacks, you’ll have noticed by now that we’ve been creeping up on the last couple of issues in the magazine’s 30-plus year run, #200 and #201. Because we...
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SIA Flashback – Mighty Muscle: Pontiac’s Tri-Power-equipped 1958 Bonneville
Not only does this post mark the last SIA Flashback for the year, it also marks the last of the series, with a look at Arch Brown and Bud Juneau’s article on the 1958 Pontiac Bonneville from SIA #201,...
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