HOT RODDER'S PARADISE | INSIDE THE PETERSEN VAULT

hi this is Tony Miller we're at the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles I'm one of the docents here and I'm going to be showing you around the vault which is the underground staging area for cars that are going to be exhibited in the museum upstairs the vault is sponsored by the Haggerty collector car insurance company and this is one of several tours video tours that will be broadcast over the next weeks and months so let's get started Bob Peterson was a magazine publisher who started out by publishing hot rod magazine in 1948 and over the next 40 years he went on to publish something like sixty titles of special interest magazines primarily automotive material although he also published books about guns and photography and all sorts of other guy pursuits the museum has about four hundred cars in it of which roughly 250 are down here in the vault this was originally a department store but it was it became the Petersen museum in 1994 and it's been in business ever since we're going to look today at hot rods and customs both of which are modified American cars typically hot rods are usually early cars pre-war cars that are modified in the interest of performance and customs are sometimes later model cars which are modified to enhance their appearance this first car in the row is the Bosley interstate it could be considered a custom but it was actually a prototype for what mr. Bosley hoped was going to be a series of mass-produced vehicle it was built on a Corvette chassis with a Pontiac engine it didn't happen as a production vehicle so it's a one-of-a-kind the vehicle right here behind it is a 1953 Cadillac with a body by Ghia an italian coachbuilder it's unusual for a custom coach builder to build on an American chassis particularly post-world War two but in this case with Ghia thought that they might build a limited-edition Cadillac which would be sold through Cadillac dealers but which gear would actually build they built a pair of these on spec this one was eventually bought by the then richest guy in the world ali khan and mr. khan was married to Rita Hayworth they were in the middle of a divorce during this period and apparently he bought the Cadillac for her as a sort of peace offering but it didn't work because she divorced him anyway and kept the car it doesn't look a lot like a Cadillac but its size and its presence and it's luxurious detail says that Cadillac is certainly a believable make for it to have been this El Camino next to the wall was a customized El Camino built by a fellow named Harry Brooke Harry Bentley Bradley who was a designer working for General Motors he was hired away from GM by Mattel Toys who were planning to introduce the line of hot wheels diecast toy cars in nineteen what 66 67 this was Harry's personal car and mr. handler who was the chairman of Mattel saw it in the parking lot one day and said that's what I Hot Wheels to look like so in a way this could be considered to be the first Hot Wheels car although it's a much bigger one than most here we have a row of impalas from the 1960s the red one in the middle and the blue one on the far side are both lowriders and they were part of our lowrider exhibit that was open last season the thing to notice on these cars is the incredible level of detail multiple colors fades metal flake and pinstriping all sorts of detail in the paint and if you were able to see the chassis x' underneath they are just as elaborately detailed as the top side is this car is also an Impala in 1862 it's not considered a lowrider it's a custom and it belongs to Billy Gibbons of the ZZ Top band it's actually just a very severely lowered Impala he calls it slam paw and Billy owns a number of interesting hot rods and customs we have his 1948 Cadillac custom that's called catzilla and it's on display upstairs apparently we have an agreement with Billy that will give him a parking space for slam Paulo in exchange for which we get to exhibit catzilla that works out well for both of us this car is the Plymouth Explorer and it's a concept car that was designed by Virgil Exner the head of styling for Chrysler and built by the Ghia company in Italy it's kind of a sheep in wolf's clothing because although it has a very exotic appearance and wears wire wheels and an RD steering wheel and other implications it's actually powered by a flathead plymouth six which might have a struggle of pulling the skin off of pudding so it's really not a very high-performance vehicle in fact but it's it looks high-performance let's wander down here aways this is a 56 Chevy Bel Air convertible it's not really a custom although it was very popular with the same folks who built hot rods and customs now we're into the hot rods this is a math on mr. Mathan was a builder of marine engines and he figured out that he could take two Chevrolet 350 small block cylinder blocks weld them together make a custom 16 cylinder camshaft and crankshaft and have a V 16 marine engine he built several of those and they worked fine in boats so the obvious next step was to put one in a Model T roadster this obviously is about as overpowered as you can get and it's probably not very practical for street use but certainly is impressive this is a Ford 1926 Model T two-door sedan built by Little John Butera and Little John was primarily a builder of dragsters and funny cars but he built a few street rods this one for himself a number of years ago he intended to use it on hot rod cruises which are long 500 miles or so cruises around the country the car was equipped with every imaginable luxury accessory so it's got power everything and tunes and air conditioning and all that stuff it's been said that it's probably the best hot rod ever built in terms of its quality of construction and level of comfort but after a couple of years using it on cruises John said it was an old man's car and he didn't like thinking of himself as an old man so he sold it this car is a 1928 Ford Model A 2-door sedan that's been chopped meaning the top has been lowered channeled which means that it's very close to the ground and it's powered by a supercharged flathead Ford from 1948 or there abouts although it looks like it's so low that it wouldn't be able to run over a bottle cap it actually has an adjustable suspension and can be raised up to drive at a normal driving height once it's underway the next car is a 1939 mercury convertible it was customized in the 40s by a young man who was about to go off to war and it's been preserved in exactly the condition that it was when it was first built the top has been chopped again lowered a bit it has a Carson type padded removable top some trim has been removed to simplify it and the car has been lowered closer to the ground we have a 30 a stock 39 Merc convertible here somewhere and it's interesting to see the cars side-by-side because you can pick out exactly what the modifications were to this one in 1950 the Oakland Roadster show opened for the first time it was the first big indoor Hot Rod and Custom Show and they offered a trophy for the America's most beautiful roadster the show still exists it's now called the Grand National Roadster Show and it happens in Pomona every January they still offer the America's most beautiful roadster trophy or the a MBR and the Peterson owns 11 cars that have won the MBR trophy over the years these two orange cars both were built by the same guy Urmi immerse oh and it's unusual he's unusual in that he has won the Amber trophy three times he's the only guy in the world to have one at thrice this one is a 1932 Ford Roadster that's called the orange peeler it's powered by a flathead Ford engine which is what was in it when it was built but it's had hotrod aftermarket cylinder heads made invented and engineered by Zora arkus-duntov those heads allowed the engine to produce a great deal more power so the orange peeler one the amber trophy in one year I'm not remembering exactly what year it was but he came back the following year with this car with the golden star it's made from a 1924 Model T Ford Roadster it's powered by a Ford 4 cam Indy Racing engine with the cylinder head swapped from side to side so that the exhaust headers come out the sides of the car instead of out the top as they did when it was in a rear-engine race car the golden star did quite well it won the amber trophy hermès second but it's first and it came back two years later and won the embr trophy yet again so he won once with orange peeler and twice with golden star the car behind orange peeler here was built by Lonnie Gilbertson it's again a Model T roadster it is unusual in having won the amber trophy twice there are only three or four cars in history that have 1/2 times the gold and star being one of them but Lonnie's car also won twice there's a rule that says if a car is entered in competition for a second time it must be changed significantly so in this cars case the entire induction system was changed the overall body color was changed and the murals on the side were revised to include different scenes the green car behind it is called the alien and it was built by a Bay Area custom painter named art himself it's a completely custom body it's not based on any real production car it's powered by a Ford Cobra engine and the novel thing about it is that the top which is so severely angled that you'd have to stoop way down to look through the windshield but it isn't actually necessary because the center panel of the top is transparent so you can sit normally and look through the windshield I'm sorry look through the top as you're making it down the street over here on the other side we have several more cars that are worth looking at the first one this green coupe is considered a custom rather than a hotrod it actually started out as a 1954 Plymouth convertible it was designed by Chip Foose and built by a Midwest shop belonging to Troy Trapani a Troy believes that show cars should also be competent Road cars so although it looks like a 54 Plymouth modified it's actually a viper underneath it has a Viper v10 engine and the suspension steering and brakes are all Viper components as well it's been driven across country twice under its own power on its own wheels so it's demonstrated that it's real McCoy all three of these roadsters were Amb are winners the yellow one is intended to look like a 33 Ford Roadster it was designed by Chip Foose and built by Barry White although not that Barry White it now well it belongs to the Petersen now but it previously belonged to mr. sidorak who is one of our two co vice chairman of the board I really like that car I think it's very handsomely proportioned the black car is intended to look like a 32 Ford Roadster although neither of these cars have any antique parts in them they're all made from scratch but the shape of them is similar to a 33 and a 32 Ford Roadster the black one started out painted yellow and it was entered in the 1999 Oakland show it was called the Boyd's tur - it's another Chip Foose design but was built by Boyd Coddington when it was yellow and entered as the Boyd ster - it didn't win the amber trophy but chip took it back modified some details on the car and painted it black which is what he said it should have been in the first place and it reappeared at the 2000 Oakland show now renamed the double-o 32 and in that second appearance it won the amber trophy again this car is intended to resemble a 32 Ford Roadster the same as the black car although without fenders it was built by Boyd Coddington and it's built entirely of aluminum unlike the real 32 Ford's which were steel this one has an all aluminum custom body and I don't remember who commissioned it originally here are a couple more customs this is a Cadillac lowrider that was constructed for the actor Armie Hammer it has leopard skin upholstery not real of course all the world's pinstriping and is a pretty sleek Cadillac much lower than it would normally have been this car is a was a 59 El Camino originally from Chevrolet about 30 years ago a fellow started customizing it and he added 1960 Cadillac rear quarter panels and a 61 Cadillac front sheet metal group which changed its appearance considerably but he sold it before he finished it and it went through multiple hands over the next 30 years eventually a fellow finished it added the transparent top painted it added the mono headlight that stretches across the whole front end named it the Triton and started exhibiting it in shows after a little bit he decided that it was better suited to be in a museum than in his home and so it came here and has been here ever since this is another amber winner this is called the XR 6 so named because it has a 6-cylinder dodge slant 6 engine it was built under the inspiration of TechSmith text was the editor of hot rod magazine at the time this car was built and the car was constructed by number of different custom shops George Barris was among them and George put his crest on it that says Barris Kustoms but actually there were three or four different custom shops that built the the ends of the car the middle portion of it is a 1927 Ford Model T roadster once again I think it's fair to say about this car that the criteria for most beautiful was different in the 60s than it is today this is a particularly historic winner of the amber trophy because this one the very first one when the show opened in 1950 this was built by Bill nee Kemp who was a mechanic at a Chrysler agency here in Los Angeles it's a 1929 Ford Roadster with a sprint car type nose powered by a flathead Ford v8 he won the amber trophy with it in 1950 the car was then sold and passed through several hands and was modified over and over again repainted different colors it had a Buick engine in it for a while but eventually it was bought by another famous hot rodder named Jim Jacobs and Jim restored it completely he is not the first guy sorry he's not the only guy to have restored a famous period hot rod but he was the first guy to do it and it's a pretty unique piece as a result this Roadster was built to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Hot Rod Magazine it again is a Model T roadster with a sprint car nose the car that was on the cover of the very first issue of Hot Rod Magazine in 1948 was a competition roadster that belonged to a guy named reg Plummer it looked just like this car it had flames of the same design and when Hot Rod Magazine celebrated its 50th anniversary in 1998 this car was built by the raw Brizzy Oh shop in South San Francisco to commemorate that 50th anniversary and this car looks exactly like the red Schlemmer car did although it's powered by a modern Ford small-block v8 rather than the flathead Ford that was in it originally these two cars are called Cobras although they have nothing to do with Carroll Shelby they were built by two brothers who decided that they wanted to have two-seat roadsters that were distinctive in their appearance didn't look like everybody else's cars so they built a model of this body in plaster in their garage took fiberglass molds off of the body and then laid up fiberglass body parts in those molds and fused them together into complete bodies they made three they sold the third one to a friend and it's never been seen again but these two were finished by the two brothers for themselves the one on the left is on a 1940 Ford frame and has a Cadillac engine in it the one on the right has a is on an shortened Oldsmobile chassis the brothers are still around and they've told us that they wish that it had occurred to them to copyright the Cobra name because it might have been worth something to them but they didn't and so when Carroll Shelby started building the Cobra he didn't owe them anything this car these two cars actually are both Boyd Coddington constructions the yellow one is called the Illuma coupe and it was designed by Larry Erickson who was the head of the Cadillac design studio it's built entirely in aluminum and it was inspired by the competition coups that hot-rodders used to run at the dry lakes in the years after World War two this one is powered by a turbocharged mitsubishi engine which is mounted in the rear and the red one is it's both a hot rod and a custom but it's also a sports car it's called the sports star and it was designed by Chip Foose and built by Boyd Coddington it's powered by a Lexus v8 engine and the running gear is also lexus derived Foose and Cottington collaborated on hundreds of cars but virtually all of them were hot rods this one is a sports car of sorts and as far as I know it's the only sports car that those two guys ever built and this is a 32 Ford Roadster powered by a Chrysler Hemi v8 it was built by the Roy Brizzy Oh shop again but I'm sorry that I don't know for whom it was built certainly is a handsome 32 though this is a drag racing car called a funny car when funny cars first happened in the 60s they were full-sized stock American cars but powered by dragster engines and running racing fuel like nitromethane over the 50 years or so since they were first introduced funny cars have changed shape considerably they're longer sleeker lower and no longer resemble the passenger cars that they were intended to or that they represent this one for example is claimed to be a Mustang but it doesn't really look very much like a Mustang at all it was campaigned by John Force who is arguably the most successful driver in drag racing history he's won 16 World Championships in the funny car category and he has three adult daughters who all became professional drag racers two of them have now retired but one of them set a track record at 335 miles an hour at some track in the Midwest within the last couple of years and this car I think this will be the last one we talked about this is a dragster using two flathead Ford engines the flathead Ford was used from 1932 to 1953 these appear to be somewhere in the middle 1949 or 1950 engines it was built by a fellow named flathead Jack who deals in speed parts for these flathead engines and complete engines that he assembles himself I don't know if this is actually a serious competition car or if it's primarily a showpiece but I like it either way I think that kind of wraps up our collection of hot rods and customs how are we doing on time I know you sorry I gotta keep talking I've run out of things okay so we'll wrap up now and please tune in to YouTube and see other Petersen segments I hope you enjoy what you've seen and please come and visit the Petersen and see the vault sponsored by Haggerty and that's all I had to say

Channel: Petersen Automotive Museum

Views: 153,038

Rating: 4.8833776 out of 5

Keywords: hot rods cars, hot rods racing, hot rods car show, hot rods builds, deuce coupe beach boys, deuce coupe hot rod, deuce coupe drag race, deuce coupe burnout, deuce coupe american graffiti, chip foose drawing, chip foose overhaulin, chip foose and boyd coddington, chip foose cars, boyd coddington wheels, lowriders, lowriders cars, ford v8 sound, ford v8 rebuild, petersen vault, petersen vault cars, petersen vault tour video, classic cars, roadster show

Id: rvSgXFnKUYg

Length: 28min 22sec (1702 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 20 2020