One thing that bugs the snot out of us about the rodding hobby is that it's dominated by old, out-of-touch types who operate roughly eight to ten years behind the curve. F'rinstance, last year, the Detroit Autorama folks pulled a page from Rick Perry's San Francisco Rod, Custom and Motorcycle Show and designated an area for traditional rods and customs. And then they called it Xtreme. Please, somebody hand us a bag of Doritos to relieve the contents of our stomach into. In any event, Chip Foose is building a car for the '06 Xtreme display. Which means that either, depending on your point of view, rat-rodding has officially jumped the shark, or the level of competition has just been raised.
We've often said in these (and other pages) that we like Chip Foose on a personal level. Some of his cars have really flipped our switch, and even the cars we're not particularly fond of generally feature details that are so mind-blowing, tears begin involuntarily streaming into our black coffee. And Chip's under-construction P32 will no doubt feature many of said mind-blowing details. Lincoln V-12 flathead, narrowed Zephyr dash, military-issue green oxide paint in a lot of ways, the postwar aircraft-surplus theme echoes shades of Jimmy Shine's brilliant bare-metal '34 Ford Commercial from five years ago, a truck which can pretty much be singled out as the vehicle that brought these types of cars back into the hot-rodding mainstream. We're certainly interested to see what Chip comes up with, even if its debut will be under the inauspiciously unfortunate circumstances of a basement labeled Xtreme. Eep.
The Garage of Chip Foose [Street Rodder]
Related:
You Never Get a Second Chance to Make a Foose Impression [Internal]