We've already seen Jesse's '66 Datsun 411, his '61 Austin Mini, his '70 Puma GT (now sold to a buyer in Denmark), and his '83 Toyota 4x4 truck. Now he's added this classic Detroit cartruck to his stable.

This El Camino is in very solid, rust-free original condition, and the original Tonawanda-built 2-barrel 350 still sounds fresh. Could this be the only '69 El Camino in the world that doesn't have headers and a Holley 750 double-pumper by now?

The one questionable modification that's been done to this machine might be the "vinyl top" made out of protective bed-liner coating. It looks OK and is likely impervious to meteorite damage, but just doesn't seem like a good idea.

I'm not enough of an El Camino expert to know whether the proper term for this one is "El Camino Malibu" or something else; the '69 El Camino being a Chevelle with a truck bed meant that the Chevelle's Malibu trim package was an available option. Any of you experts out there got an opinion on the subject?

And then right next to the great big '69 Mercury coupe is a great big Chrysler coupe. Both cars came from the factory with monstrous big-block V8s- a 360-horse 429 for the Marauder and a 350-horse 440 for the 300. What's wrong with the world, when a pair of over-the-top, single-digit-gas-mileage, two-ton two-doors can survive through all the oil crises and recessions and only now land in the Crusher's waiting room? It gets worse; this is one of the now-defunct NorCal Pick Your Part yards, which means we can assume both these cars have now been rendered into China-bound scrap metal by now.

While you're here, you might as well enjoy a bit of one of Newman's later roles. Sure, sure!

And we really can't talk about Newman's career without an excerpt from this Malaise Era classic:

Not only do you get Porsche 908s, Ford GT40s, and the like wailing through the turns; you also get the race-fevered crowds in their wine-soaked campgrounds, including women in those crazy proto-disco late-60s shades. Thanks, Scroggs!

This all started when I got an email from the captain of the Dai Hard 24 Hours Of LeMons team, who will be bringing the first-ever LeMons Daihatsu Charade to Thunderhill in a couple of months. He'd just bought a '69 Morris Minor woody wagon and had it shipped over here, and he lives a few blocks from me. Did I want to come check it out?
It's not really supposed to be on the street quite yet, what with the utter lack of California-legal paperwork, but what the hell- we put it on the street for this photo session. He's already into the Kafkaesque ordeal of the California DMV Experience, but feels confident that it should be fully legit in the near future. The car is very solid, with hardly any rust (though some of the rotted woodwork will need replacing). And hey, check out the Lucas battery!

I'll admit it, I have a soft spot for Coronas of this era because a $50 '69 Corona sedan was my very first car. And, since we saw a Nice Price Or Crack Pipe Corona just yesterday, I'm inspired to share these photos today. With a tippy suspension apparently copied from the '62 Ford Falcon and a clattery-yet-unkillable pushrod 3R engine, the early Corona didn't really foreshadow much about the slick Toyotas to come.

I spotted this racy-looking beater parked outside a party I attended in the Oakland Hills a few weeks back; these days, I find myself around Alfa Romeo obsessos on a regular basis (24 Hours Of LeMons HQ is crawling with 'em), and of course it turned out that this fine vintage Japanese machine is owned by a guy who drives it when the Giulietta isn't working.

No problem- we'll return to the Thunderbolt another time. Today, we honor the functional scoop that was available as an option on 1969 and 1970 Plymouth Road Runners, a scoop so fearsome that it actually had teeth. Could Citroën's engineers and designers, with all their innovative genius, ever have come up with the Air Grabber? Hell no! Apparently designed by a crew of 9-year-old boys armed with limitless high-sugar-content snacks and a portfolio of every Rat Fink drawing Ed Roth ever made, the Air Grabber was ridiculously awesome (and awesomely ridiculous) and should have been standard equipment on every motor vehicle Chrysler produced between 1969 and today, including the Frank Sinatra Edition Imperial and all those rental Cirruses and Sebrings. And, hey, you can buy repro Air Grabber decals for $15.95 from Year One- just the thing for your PT Cruiser! Thanks to Tonyola for recommending this scoop last week.
Image source: vw-busman

Copyranter has found this 1969 VW print ad comparing the Volks American product line (which would have been the Beetle, Karmann Ghia, Transporter, Fastback, and Squareback) to the Apollo 11 Lunar Module. Tuesday is the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, so you can celebrate by buying a Moonlander Captiva, or gnash your teeth over the fact that the supah-cool Lunar Rover wasn't used until later Apollo missions.
[Copyranter]

Hanging around with the 24 Hours Of LeMons HQ crew, I've learned that they're the most Alfa-centric bunch of car geeks you're ever going to find; most of them started out on British sports cars and then realized that you have more fun when your ride has performance to match its unreliability… and the next step generally involves ditching the GT6 or MGA or whatever and buying an Alfa Romeo. It's true- Alfa Romeo has made plenty of fundamentally superior cars over the years, and so what if they're all nervous and complicated and all the parts have to be hand-carved from the wood of the True Cross by a 98-year-old man in a dirt-floor Genoa workshop illuminated by a whale-oil lamp? You need an Alfa! And we don't mean some easy-to-find Reagan Era Graduate or 164 here. No, we're talking Sophia Loren-grade machinery from the 1960s! Multiple carburetors or Spica mechanical fuel injection! Partito Comunista Italiano firebrands preaching revolution on the factory floor!

The 2000 Spider sure was a looker, wasn't it? Just concentrated essence of Alfa Romeo, for sure, but it's no easy task to find one for your personal Hell Garage these days. You sigh in relief and start looking for a Miata, right? Wrong! We've found you this 1961 Alfa Romeo 2000 Spider (go here if the ad disappears), just 80,000 miles on the clock and a price tag of just 1,700 bucks… or best offer! No doubt you're already spraining your fingers dialing up the seller at this moment, but we do have to throw in a couple of minor caveats. First, there's rust. Maybe a better way of putting it would be it's rust, as in very few fugitive iron atoms have managed to barricade themselves against marauding bands of oxygen molecules. What the heck, you expect some of the red stuff in Massachusetts, no? The car rolls and the drivetrain appears complete, though the seller acknowledges that the engine is most likely frozen solid. Many trim pieces come with the car, and you even get some glass! Come on, it couldn't be that difficult!

We love Spiders, but say you need to do some grocery hauling from time to time? You need a vintage Alfa Romeo daily driver, we say, and that means you should start shopping for a Berlina sedan. No, no, don't give up- affordable project Berlinas are definitely out there. Say, this $400 1969 Alfa Romeo 1750 Berlina (go here if the ad disappears). Now, if you've ever seen Double Indemnity, you know that a Medford, Oregon, man means what he says and says what he means, and that's just who's selling this car. Ted knows that he doesn't need to go to the hassle of typing out a whole bunch of pointless description when he's selling a classic Italian sports sedan for the price of a clapped-out Olds Ciera with a couple of rods hanging out of the block. Is there an engine? A transmission? Legal paperwork? A plutonium-240-fueled Soviet radioisotope thermoelectric generator kicking out neutrons in the trunk? Hey, we can't say, but all we need to do is repeat the phrase "400 dollar 1750 Berlina" and you get the point.

If you count Ramblers, so far the only Kenosha cars we've seen on the island have been this '60 American, this '61 American, this '65 American, this '69 Ambassador SST wagon, and this '76 Pacer X. While I've got a real soft spot for the Oleg Cassini Edition '75 Matador, most car freaks would suggest the AMX- or maybe the SC/Rambler- as their all-time favorite AMC product. Here's one, with a 4-speed and everything!

This car lives on the same block as the '65 Mercury Comet, seen here in the foreground, and both machines are part of the same family; father owns the AMX and daughter drives the Comet.

Since the Comet DOTS photos resulted in some very Robert Bechtle-esque photographs, I decided to shoot for that effect with the AMC as well. This one's a little dark for true Bechtle style, but what the heck.

It's a still-in-shrinkwrap Jo-Han 1:25 scale kit of one of my two favorite musclecars of all time: the '69 AMC SC/Rambler. The current top bid is just $3.25, but there's a week to go. How much would you pay for this rare red-white-and-blue beast?

[eBay]

The video has no narration and is in black and white, but the soundtrack and the ample helicopter time more than make up for the loss. It’s an interesting period piece from the ultra-rapid decade of aerodynamic development, which took cars from the thin aluminum cigars with no downforce of the mid-60s to the ground effect Lotus 78’s and 79’s which had wings underneath, sucking them to the tarmac.

1969 was only the second year where aerodynamics was in play in Formula One and you can clearly see the results. Every car is equipped with a solid rear wing and various front wings. At the Flugplatz straight, where the no-downforce cars of 1967 would take to the air, ‘69 cars hunker down and stick to the ground.

Also visible is a token nod to safety—roll bars!—accompanied with its total disregard otherwise. People stand inches from a track with no Armco—not even bales of hay.

The race was won by the Jacky Ickx of Belgium in a Brabham. The guy in the ditch at 04:07 is his teammate Piers Courage, who crashed out on lap one. He would become Formula One’s next casualty in less than a year’s time, when he burned to death in his magnesium De Tomaso at the 1970 Dutch Grand Prix. And in just seven years, following Niki Lauda’s famous—and similarly fiery—crash, Formula One would be gone from the Nürburgring Nordschleife for good.

Photo Credit: Lothar Spurzem/Wikipedia (the picture depicts Bruce McLaren driving his M7C during practice for the race and you can download it at 2,098×1,529)

Alameda has a fair number of early Cougars (for example, this '67 (which ended up getting junked), this '68, and this '68) but so far I've found just one Farrah-grade example: this '75.


I have now decided that this Mercury's neighborhood is the DOTS-iest of the entire island. There's the '56 Lincoln you see here. There's another Cougar in the driveway, and the owner of these fine Ford products also drives this '70 Lincoln Continental Mark III when he needs a change of pace. We've got the '67 Imperial and the '69 Volvo P1800 around the corner. The '67 Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser is just down the block a ways. I haven't even shot the early CRX and late-60s GMC pickup yet!

Ford's marketers seemed to have a special focus on pitching the Mustang's transformative powers to the ladies. A dowdy, lab-coated scientist- no doubt cooking up new varieties of napalm to drop on Charlie Cong- becomes an irresistible man-magnet when she grabs the keys to a new '68 Mustang, while an '81 turns your average Jane into the Queen Of The Club Herpes Discothèque. We've got some good examples of this in our Top Ten Mustang Ads (plus a bonus pair of Mustang siblings to round out the selection).

You like the old-timey car ads? Oh, we got us plenty more! When you're done here, you can head over to the Top 20 Vintage Renault Ads, Top 20 Vintage GM ads, Top 20 Vintage Chevrolet Ads, Top 20 Vintage Datsun ads, Top 20 Vintage Toyota ads, and Top 20 Vintage Chrysler ads. Not enough for you? Go to the Top Car Commercials Of The 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.

1981 Mustang	1978 Mustang II Ghia	1985 Mustang
1968 Mustang	1986 Mustang	1979 Mustang
1969 Mustang Mach 1	1968 Shelby Mustang GT	1974 Mustang II
1968 Mustang	1980 Mercury Capri	1968 Mercury Cougar

It's all there: Tires for Volkswagens! Bias-ply tires! Glass-belted tires! Rated at 125 MPH! Non-metric size designations!
[Los Angeles Times Blogs, thanks to West-Coaster for the tip]

I figured it would be best to celebrate the series with a car that combines two of my favorite automotive themes in one: France and station wagons! Here we've got a Citroën that was marketed as a DS Safari, a DS Familiale, or DS Wagon, depending on where it was sold; in the United States, it was called simply the Citroën Wagon.


When I found this car, I contacted the Citroën experts at Hanzel's. Of course, not only could Henry Hanzel identify the year and model, it turns out that he's done plenty of work on this very car (the Northern California Citroën universe is a small one) and knows the owner.


This car's owner is in the process of moving to Alameda, and it's hard to imagine a better wagon for moving large quantities of stuff, with that auto-leveling hydropneumatic suspension utterly refusing to sag. Another great thing about the DS is that it inspired philosopher Roland Barthes was inspired to write a lengthy essay about it. Here's an excerpt, courtesy of the totally addictive Citroenet:

I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.
It is obvious that the new Citroen has fallen from the sky inasmuch as it appears at first sight as a superlative object .. We must not forget that an object is the best messenger of a world above that of nature: one can easily see in an object at once a perfection and an absence of origin, a closure and a brilliance, a transformation of life into matter (matter is much more magical than life), and in a word a silence which belongs to the realm of fairy-tales. The D.S. - the "Goddess" - has all the features (or at least the public is unanimous in attributing them to it at first sight) of one of those objects from another universe which have supplied fuel for the neomania of the eighteenth century and that of our own science-fiction: the Deesse is first and foremost a new Nautilus.
This is why it excites interest less by its substance than by the junction of its components. It is well known that smoothness is always an attribute of perfection because its opposite reveals a technical and typically human operation of assembling: Christ's robe was seamless, just as the airships of science-fiction are made of unbroken metal. The DS 19 has no pretensions About being as smooth as cake-icing, although its general shape is very rounded; yet it is the dove-tailing of its sections which interest the public most: one keenly fingers the edges of the windows, one feels along the wide rubber grooves which link the back window to its metal surround. There are in the D.S. the beginnings of a new phenomenology of assembling, as if one progressed from a world where elements are welded to a world where they are juxtaposed and hold together by sole virtue of their wondrous shape, which of course is meant to prepare one for the idea of a more benign Nature.
As for the material itself, it is certain that it promotes a taste for lightness in its magical sense. There is a return to a certain degree of streamlining, new, however, since it is less bulky, less incisive, more relaxed than that which one found in the first periods of this fashion. Speed here is expressed by less aggressive, less athletic signs, as if it were evolving from a primitive to a classical form. This spiritualization can be seen in the extent, the quality and the material of the glass-work. The Deesse is obviously the exaltation of glass, and pressed metal is only a support for it. Here, the glass surfaces are not windows, openings pierced in a dark shell; they are vast walls of air and space, with the curvature, the spread and the brilliance of soap-bubbles, the hard thinness of a substance more entomological than mineral (the Citroen emblem with its arrows, has in fact become a winged emblem, as if one was proceeding from the category of propulsion to that of spontaneous motion, from that of the engine to that of the organism).
We are therefore dealing here with a humanized art, and it is possible that the Deesse marks a change in the mythology of cars. Until now, the ultimate in cars belonged rather to the bestiary of power; here it becomes At once more spiritual and more object-like, and despite some concessions to neomania (such as the empty steering wheel), it is now more homely , more attuned to this sublimation of the utensil which one also finds in the design of contemporary household equipment.
The dashboard looks more like the working surface of a modern kitchen than the control room of a factory; the slim panes of matt fluted metal, the small levers topped by a white ball, the very simple dials, the very discreetness of the nickel-work, all this signifies a kind of control exercised over motion rather than performance. One is obviously turning form an alchemy of speed to a relish in driving.
The public, it seems, has admirably divined the novelty of the themes which are suggested to it. Responding at first to the neologism (a whole publicity campaign had kept it on the alert for years), it tries very quickly to fall back on a behaviour which indicates adjustment and a readiness to use ("You've got to get used to it "). In the exhibition halls, the car on show is explored with an intense, amorous studiousness: it is the great tactile phase of discovery, the moment when visual wonder is about to receive the reasoned assault of touch (for touch is the most demystifying of all senses, unlike sight, which is the most magical). The bodywork, the lines of union are touched, the upholstery palpated, the seats tried, the doors caressed, the cushions fondled; before the wheel, one pretends to drive with one's whole body. The object here is totally prostituted, appropriated: originating from the heaven of Metropolis , the Goddess is in a quarter of an hour mediatized, actualizing through this exorcism the very essence of petit-bourgeois advancement.

This particular junkyard had a little pocket of Saabs within a section dominated by Jaguar XJ6s. You don't see many early 99s these days, on the street or otherwise, so this was quite a find. Looks like this one is pretty much complete, even down to those super-cool gauges with the old Saab "airplane" logo.

Not only that, but Williamson Henderson also pointed out- correctly- that there is no such thing as a Coupe DeVille convertible; only two-door hardtops were so named. So, I was wrong on the year and wrong on the name of the car; sorry about that, Cadillac lovers! During the course of my Cadillac history lesson, I learned a bit more about Mr. Henderson's car, which is known throughout the LGBT world as the "Stonewall Cadillac," and this Cad has quite a story:



Back in 1969, a routine-harassment-of-gays police raid on the Stonewall Inn in New York City touched off the not-so-routine Stonewall Riots. Henderson was there, and his brand-new DeVille was parked in front of the bar. It was spared any damage in the chaos that followed, the police impounded it, and since then the legend of the Stonewall Cadillac has continued to grow. These days it's pretty much a parade car, getting plenty of duty in the annual NYC Gay Pride parade and other events. Check out the official Stonewall Cadillac site here for the whole story.

You can't make out the car photos in the new/improved page layout anyway, so we'll put the "traditional" PCH image after the jump. Right, back to business as usual in the Hell Garage: last time, the turbo rotary-powered Datsun 510 just barely beat the small-block-Chevy-powered Austin-Healey Sprite, according to the results of the Choose Your Eternity poll. It may be that the certain rage of 510 worshipers upon seeing that blasphemous engine swap tipped the balance in favor of the Datsun- or against it, depending on how you interpret these things- and so we'll continue with a couple of cars with heavy zealot followings: Chevy Corvair and Renault Gordini!

Never mind that Dan Neill wrote that the Renault Dauphine was "a rickety, paper-thin scandal of a car that, if you stood beside it, you could actually hear rusting." The nerve- he probably got that Pulitzer at a yard sale! The Dauphine was a fine motor vehicle, and then that Renault hot-rodder Amédée Gordini worked his tuning magic on it and upped the horsepower by nearly 16 percent. Yes, the Renault Dauphine Gordini packed 37 French ponies in the back (not the measly 32 you got with the regular Dauphine) and you can get yourself this '65 (go here if the ad disappears) for under a grand! The seller is asking for $900, but you won't have to pay that much once you point out that those "newer tires" are space-saver spares (though we can't help but think that driving on four of those things would be quite entertaining). There's rust. Lots of rust. It doesn't run, but you'll be ditching the Renault engine and swapping in something a bit more powerful, like f'rexample this 2165cc VW unit. Add some turbocharging, a beefed up Type 4 transaxle, and you'll be broke driving the quickest Dauphine in your time zone!

Rear-engined cars from the 60s are deadly exciting, but why go with European oversteer when you could drive patriotic American oversteer? The Chevrolet Corvair is the obvious choice, and the 1969 model may be the very best one. It's also the very last one, so they're pretty rare; The General was only building '69 Corvairs to prove that he wasn't going to knuckle under to that paranoid communist agent, Ralph Nader, and so the cars were all assembled by hand in the "Corvair Room" in Willow Run, Michigan. That's right, lovingly handcrafted by the same perfectionists who made the Nova the envy of the Mercedes-Benz quality-control department! The '69 Corvair is hard to find these days, but we've found a pair of them for just $2,875 (go here if the ad disappears). Both are running, Powerglide-equipped hardtops, and one is the sporty Monza model. These Southern California survivors have "very little" rust, though decades of blazing Ojai summer days mean that the upholstery is likely on the crumbly and/or faded side. While you're searching for repro carpets and getting the seats recovered, you can also go shopping for a bulletproof leisure suit; you'll need one to protect yourself from the high-velocity projectiles fired at you by Corvair zealots, once you stuff this Porsche 997 six in the back of the Monza (which leaves the other car available as an "instant junkyard" parts car, to be deposited on your front lawn). In fact, you'll probably have the Porsche guys after you as well, so better add some Kevlar longjohns to your sartorial shopping spree. You won't have to worry about the Corvair guys catching you on the road, though- not with 385 horsepower behind you!

That's what happened to Bill, California Melee and 24 Hours Of LeMons veteran (and housemate of TheEastBayKid), a couple weeks back. You see, Bill lives in the Laurel District of Oakland, a pleasant neighborhood in a city that gets a mostly undeserved bad rap from the rest of the country; however, much as I (a former Oakland resident) love the place- it is true that it's a tough town for cars. The OPD deals with matters more pressing than traffic-law enforcement, and happy hour tends to be a 24/7 affair for many Oaktown drivers. You're rolling the dice every time you park your car on the street, and this time the dice came up snake-eyes for Bill's '69 MGB-GT. Your classic hit-and-run wreck, with the MG mashed into a tree and the only clue left behind by the perp (probably behind the wheel of a late-70s Pontiac Bonneville) a broken Olde English 800 40-dog, no doubt dropped out the driver's window at the moment of impact. Bill hasn't decided whether he wants to let sentimental value trump rational thought and try to fix the car in a massive sheetmetal weld-a-thon, or just pull all the snazzy aftermarket performance bits off it and start over with another MGB. Check out Bill's blog to get the whole story.
[Bill's Buckets]