by Wallace Wyss –
The informal run-what-u-brung cars and coffee in Malibu at Cross Creek Road and Pacific Coast Highway continues each Sunday, running from 9 am to 10:30 am more or less.
This is the event with no organizer, no spokesperson, nobody deciding who gets in. And it’s free. In the last few months it’s been a respite from the pandemic.
But last week it was a welcome relief from the fire with three fires raging across Southern California, including one started by a gender reveal party, where, some parent was so glad his child was a boy or a girl he set off fireworks (blue for boys, pink for girls I think) and last I heard the fire started by these fireworks burned 46,000 acres and four houses. (If ever there was a kid that deserved the name “Fireball” this was it!)
Oddly this modern day McLaren parked next to an “old” front engine Corvette shows similar profiles only a couple inches different here and there, making you wonder why did the Corvette have to go mid-engine when the shape was close to an exotic already? But I guess if you want to corner at 1G, it’s gotta be a mittelmotor.
The air was smoke free in Malibu and in the 60s temperature wise compared to in the 90s inland. And there were no police to be seen. They mostly regarding the event as a turf war between parking lot owners.
There were the usual Ferraris, including a Daytona with a huge rectangular-shaped hand made air filter for the six carburetors, and many modern day models including an 812 and in oldies a Dino coupe. Lamborghnis matched them one for one. McLarens have been also challenging their drawing power.
In a town where the smallest shack costs a million, you can expect the wheels to be wild…
In British cars there’s some Rolls and Bentley buffs. One owner of a rare bentley T-series (the one that shared its body with the Silver Shadow) told us his car was once $200,000 new and is partly coachbuilt, with some razor edge coachwork on the roof, but now has fallen to below 10% of its as-new value. How the mighty have fallen.
This event is always a parade of Porsches, each other one the latest model with all the bells and whistles, this one a GT2.
Also in his garage is a Vector, a supercar developed in So Cal that was a stillborn American competitor to the Countach. We both are glad to see Vector founder Gerald Weigert finally make some money, selling some leftover prototypes at auction for millions.
This visit I decided to talk to people about their car’s history and was blown away by the fact that the Avanti convertible I have seen there many times is not a Studebaker underneath but a Mustang!
The owner, who brought three books on Raymond Loewy, the French born designer of the Avanti, explained how that came to be. An American investor had bought the right to produce the Avanti convertible, based more or less on Raymond Loewy’s original design, but after starting a company in the resort town of Cancun, Mexico and showing a prototype this developer was busted back in the USA for a Ponzi scheme in another field unrelated to cars.
Avanti
So the three prototypes that had been built were sold dirt cheap, one of them being his car which he has owned since the first decade of the 2000’s. He invited me to lift the trunk lid. I could not, and then he asked me to open the door. It felt like it was made of lead but turns out the whole car is a body attached to the body of a Mustang convertible. It’s even registered as a Mustang! You read that right, the body is OVER a Mustang, they didn’t replace the Mustang body panels just attached them OVER the Mustang. I’m guessing it weighs 5500 lbs!
Avanti
So this just goes to show you that what you see may not be what you see….ya wonder what ol’ Raymond might have said….
Let us know what you think in the Comments.
THE AUTHOR: Wallace Wyss is a historian who makes portraits in oil of significant cars. He can be reached at malibucarart@gmail.com.
UPDATE ON MALIBU VILLAGE:
Is it still happening? Yessir, yessir, three bags full, each Sunday. Well, got there late at 10 a.m. on October 4th but the lot was jammed. Most people wearing masks. It was worth going, I saw my first Koenigsegg for the first time, parked right next to a McLaren Senna, The Swedish car had a cheap interior compared to the glitz of Pagani. Orange Lambo Miura, very well restored. An Alvis drophead coupe, looks like Bentley S1 in front. And the second Panoz in two weeks–that’s a front engined two seater car invented by a pharmacist who thought up some drug that sold by the millions. Well built car but not a trend setter.
No sign of gendarmes but damn hard to find a place to park by 10 a.m.. Since it’s a non-sponsored non-organized show you still take your chances going there, the City fathers might yet find a way to block the lot (and lose that outdoor restaurant all their customers)