We never saw it coming – a dead heat for the title of Car of the Year!
Well, you try to pick between these two …
Words: Dave Smith, photography: Mark Fagelson
The Classic American Car of the Year competition is well into its second decade now, and picking the best of an incredibly good bunch is never easy. But, to make the whole system as fair as possible, there are three sets of judges at the NEC who go over every square inch of each car independently and make sure that they’re everything they’re supposed to be. And, to be truthful, it’s always very tight in terms of scores between the cars. But, at the 2006 finals of the Rybec Shipping/Footman James Car of the Year competition, were tighter than ever – so tight in fact it was a draw.
We always aim to announce the winner between 3.30 and 4pm on the Sunday afternoon, and the judges are usually still doing their inspections up until the very last minute. So, when Editor Ben Klemenzson collected all the judges’ scoring sheets together and took them off to tally the scores, it was a nice last-minute surprise to find that two cars had tied for the top spot. Out of over 3000 available points, the two top scorers had scored exactly the same. What are the odds?! This meant we could either toss a coin or award the prize to two cars.
We decided the latter option was the fairest, so here are our two Rybec Shipping/Footman James Cars of the Year 2006! If you went to some of the major shows in 2006, you can’t have failed to spot them, either on the showfield (being surrounded by admirers with cameras) or at prizegiving at the end of the day. Please, give it up for Mike Denny and his 1957 Chevrolet Corvette, and Mick Barham and his 1958 Chevrolet Impala!
You may remember Mike Denny’s car from our October 2005 issue, when it was first featured. Since that feature, Mike and Karen have added about 3500 miles to the clock of this matching-numbers beauty, going to shows and away for weekend trips. You might remember that the car had been restored in the States, and Mike bought it almost by accident – he was looking for a C5 Corvette at the time – about two and a half years ago. ‘When it was first done it was immaculate,’ says Mike, ‘but it suffered from a lack of use. It was left standing. You have to put some miles on it to shake it down a bit.’
Since then, the whining differential has been rebuilt, though Mike is still on the lookout for a period-correct Positraction unit, and the hardtop has been restored. This is especially pertinent, as the soft-top was damaged whilst parked outside a hotel at a car show – ‘It looks as if someone has stubbed a cigarette out on it, and burnt through it,’ said Mike, who stressed that it was most likely done by someone unconnected to the show. Then, on the way to the Ace Café one afternoon, at 70mph on the M1, one of the catches that hold the softtop to the windscreen header rails popped open, bending the window frame and leaving poor Karen holding onto the softtop to prevent it being ripped away!
‘I’ve always been into Corvettes,’ said Mike. ‘I’m currently restoring a 1959 Corvette fuellie, though all the fuel-injection set-up is long-gone. I took the ’57 along to Rally Of The Giants, and bumped into a chap who was telling me about the Corvette he used to own. He said he’d bought it in 1964 from a team that had raced it in sports car races in the early Sixties, and that it was a beast. He told me the registration, and lo and behold it was my ’59! He sold it on and it passed through more hands until it was eventually bought by musician Jools Holland. He later sold it to one of his legal team, and I bought it from him. Then, at the Goodwood Revival, I was at a stall selling Motorsport photographs from the Sixties, and there was my ’59, being raced by a lady called Mrs P Hall, at Crystal Palace! Apparently, Mrs Hall was American, and brought the ’59 over to England to race when it was new. She raced it until 1963.’ It became uncompetitive towards the end due to lack of braking power, but lack of engine power was never an issue – according to Mike, the fuellie heads have been so beautifully ported and polished they are ‘a work of art’ in their own right!
‘I have been getting more and more retro with my Corvettes! I’ve owned a 1964 convertible whose only previous owner was the chairman on Parker Pens, and a 1972 convertible, and my current daily driver is a 2005 Mustang GT. ‘The ’57 is such a lovely, clean design,’ says Mike. ‘After that they just got too much chrome. These early ’Vettes fit into a UK-size garage, which is always a bonus, especially down here in the south-east.’
And here’s one final tip that Mike shared with us. ‘On these dual-quad engines, you spend most of your time running on just one carburettor; the second carb is only used when you floor it, and while it’s not in use, it can suffer from fuel vaporisation. This happened to me on the way back from Billing (Where he won Best in Show, incidentally), and I stopped at a fuel station where I met a racing team who were coming home from Santa Pod. We got talking, and they told me that modern petrol has a much lower boiling point because all modern cars use fuel injection which doesn’t suffer from vaporisation! So I’m going to fit heat-proof spacers between the carbs and the manifold, which should cure the problem.’
Now, while Mike set out to buy one car and ended up with another, our other worthy winner, Mick Barham, knew exactly what he wanted. In fact, he’d had his heart set on a ’58 Impala for very nearly 20 years now. ‘I’ve been mad about cars from a very young age,’ said Mick, ‘I had my first – a Triumph Herald convertible - when I was 13 years old, then I moved up through Escorts, 3.1-litre Capris, BMWs and Jaguars to real American cars – a Camaro SS350, Ford Mustang, Pontiac Formula 400, a Pontiac T-top 4.9 turbo, and a black Trans Am.’ About 19 years ago, Mike and his family took a trip to Florida, the best parts of the trip was the Old Town Cruise at Kissimmee, where he saw cars to die for, and one in particular caught his eye – a really sharp first year 1958 Impala in white. He set his heart on owning one of these beauties one day.
Eighteen years of hard work and saving-up later, the right car turned up on the Internet, two weeks before Christmas 2004. ‘I phoned the seller, but he wanted a non-refundable deposit of $5000 to hold the car until I could get there in five days’ time. It was the right car, but the wrong time. Eight months later, in August ’05, my 12-year-old son shouts “Dad, I’ve found a ’58 Impala on the Internet!” It looked like the right car for me, so I phoned the seller and beat the reserve price out of him! I could afford it, and then it got really exciting …
‘The auction ended two days later, but I told him I would be with him within the week – he must have thought I was a nutcase! I was highest bidder at one dollar below reserve, which meant I wasn’t bound to buy it. I’m in the motor trade and have imported a few Lincolns before, which was a massive help, but panic was still setting in! By day three I had the flights, airport transfers and hotels booked, and had arranged a wire transfer through NatWest – one phone call to say yes or no, and the money would be wired straight to the seller’s account. I phoned Dave at WT Shipping and told him about my dream car, and he said I should call him as soon as I knew whether I’d be buying it or not, and he’d hold the container for me.
‘I flew into Portland, Oregon, though the Impala was in Long Beach, California … 1400 miles away. My friend Dave had come with me, and we shared the drive over three days, with a stop-over in San Francisco. It was the best road-trip of my life! I bought the car on the spot. I called the bank to transfer the money, then called WT Shipping who assured me my car would be on the docks at London in four to five weeks. Great. The only thing I didn’t do right was the return flight to London – rather than drive 1400 miles back to Portland for the return trip, I just booked another two tickets from LAX to London!
‘So, mission accomplished, all I had to do was wait for my dream car to arrive. Unfortunately, the shipping was delayed due to Hurricane Katrina – not many people wanted to ship their cars, and the shipping company couldn’t fill the container. I told them I couldn’t wait and I’d pay for the whole container, so I got the ship’s name and the container number and tracked it on the ’net day-by-day. ‘The car was due to arrive on October 29th, my girlfriend’s birthday, but the day before, Dave from the shipping company called and told me the container had gone overboard into the sea. Remember I said it was a car to die for? I nearly did! It was a bad joke, but funny now!’
So there you have it, two very different stories, but two very similar cars in terms of show-winning condition, now was ever there a more perfect pair?! Watch out for next year’s Car of the Year competition which will once again be touring all the major American car shows in the UK, starting at the Wheels Day show. Will your car be a Car of the Year contender? Who knows, it could be your pride and joy on the front cover of February 2008’s Classic American!
