The story of the long lost AMC AMX III

uh my name is ian earl dawkins uh it was my dad's car it was kind of like this long story he used to tell it was kind of fun so unknowingly i met scotty dawkins the spring of 1997 at the northport cars in the park didn't know it was scott dawkins just he had overalls on a long beard it soon turned into a conversation about the car that he owned and how cool of a car that he owned and how rare it was and and i asked him well what is it and he said i can't tell you and i said well why not he's like oh there's security issues and i don't want to expose me or my family to any type of threats because the car is just that rare i go okay and so we started chit chatting about his time in detroit his time working for american motors was a pretty good mechanic and he told me he would take care of dick teague's personal cars and then that was it we shook hands we said goodbye never seen him before never saw him again but when he walked away i turned to a mutual friend and i said i think this guy's got the amx 3. ten years ago or some somewhere around that time frame chet brought up to me that he thinks there's this prototype car somewhere up in the peninsula we were pretty sure it was an amc and if there's going to be a rare prototype amc it's going to be the amx 3. 1997 i wrangled all my friends in leelanau county and i said who is this guy i don't know who you're talking about you sure nobody's seen a mid-engine two-seater sports car there's no mid-engine two-seater sports car in lenox county nobody nobody's got that kind of money chad it's pipe dream so i forgot about it [Music] and then it kind of fizzled out it was like we knew it was up here and that was that because yes people knew about the car they just didn't know where it was specifically it was it was one of those things it was like parents had moved houses we had to move it down to another garage essentially and we buried it in the back of that garage where it sat for well basically until you guys saw the photos some random facebook photo and then there was the infamous facebook post december of 2012 scrolling through facebook and i saw a social media post by one of my buddies up here post about mike kelty i don't i'm not sure it was a picture of him there's a garage full of stuff boxes everywhere he had a big bow he was wearing like a big i don't know maybe my memory is wrong and he was holding a red ribbon up i look in the corner of the shot and down in the corner of the shot there's maybe a less than a third of a vehicle in the shot i believe it was the front corner of the car it could be wrong it was really crusty just a really crusty little corner of the car was showing and i'm like holy that is the amx [Music] 3. and so i think it was at that point that we had kind of tasked johnny or asked john to get some more information or dig up some information if he could like please man can we find out where this car is i knew who was in that photograph and i understood what they were doing and whose car they were working on and in the background there's the mx3 that chat and kyle have been looking for to me the amx 3 was nothing but a black and white photograph in a magazine or a matchbox car really this was something to compete with the likes of lamborghini maserati all those mid-engine grand touring automobiles and this was amc's like halo vehicle for dad it was a very special memory but it was also a very painful one for him like when he would look at the car he saw like his past and so he just like hold this moment in time fast forward to 2019 at that point we had heard rumor that the car was going to go to auction mom was getting hot to get out of the garage i think she got tired of waiting you know i think she'd waited 20 years already to see something happen with the car she had started talking to different auction companies sending this to auction was not the answer because they'd go to auction and i'd never see it again it tore me up man later on when things got hot and heavy and we were like it was actually going to be a thing that we might be able to purchase this car you know i think the first thought that was going through both of our minds is like well hey is it real you know i don't know i did as much research as i could and i found pictures of the actual car in in front of a building that i recognized in my hometown my whole life i knew where it was it all was making sense i'm seeing the photograph i'm recognizing the background and the information under the photograph didn't make any sense at all it was completely incorrect but when you started to kind of like fact check everything back and forth you could tell like okay this is one of the cars it was also important for us to kind of find out if it was the number one car you know which it took me a while to to really understand and realize that it truly was the number one car so we sat down and had dinner with kathy dawkins and told her you know what we were willing to do and over the next week or so we put we put together a deal and bought the car michael and kyle we were able and fortunate enough to build a relationship you know over 15 20 years of our interactions you know i saw their collection and how they handled it and the people they brought on board for it and what they were doing in the community where i i i will be dying up here the the uniqueness of leelanau county's connection to the automotive industry in detroit is epitomized right here with that car so the first thing we did we started working with our good buddy george hussman at classic design concepts and we george said we got to show this car at the muscle car corvette nationals in 2019 november of 2019. we went from a facebook page with 20 followers an instagram account with 20 followers to in 48 hours we had 10 000 followers boom you know the rocks started rolling down the hill it was overwhelming i mean i think within five or six hours of it showing up in chicago i was pretty much accepting accepting accepting follows and answering questions about the car immediately it was a feeding frenzy i mean you think about it george is the guy that's quoted in most of the press be on earth possibly but in his words the rarest american muscle car in the world of course with all the social media we got a lot of feedback what people think we should do with the car and a lot of people a lot of people out there are saying that we're nuts to even touch it it's it's it is what it's supposed to be in its current condition we're not going to do that with all the tools we have available to us today and all the package products we have available to us today why wouldn't we do a restoration modification and make it a great daily driver well we're not going to do that either even before we had purchased the vehicle it started i wanted to be as true to the design intent of the original car to me that's the ultimate expression of that car because that's how dick teague and his team of designers would have wanted it we're going to try to keep everything as period correct as we can but we're going gonna we want the car to function i i don't want to use parts in the car that are obvious or visible that are not from that era i don't want to rest oh mod it with the design horsepower we have i don't think anybody's going to be offended by what we do to it i think it belongs on the road it doesn't belong in a static collection it belongs in northport so we're going to just take it easy we're going to make the right decisions it's a once-in-a-lifetime deal i mean i've been chasing this car since 1996. you know that car might have snuck off to auction without us even knowing about it and it might have sold at auction without us even knowing about it i mean there's nothing like it it's just a goosebump feeling you

Channel: We the Committee

Views: 128,288

Rating: 4.8820639 out of 5

Keywords: AMC AMX 3, American Motor Company, AMXIII, AMCAMXIII, AMX, Michael Chetcuti, We The Committee, The Committee, Andrew Miller, Northport, Northport Michigan, Barn Find, Rare barn find, rare muscle car, American Motors

Id: xRS31EGEjjo

Length: 9min 45sec (585 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 14 2021