The last time that we spotted today's eBay find of the day, it was cruising along Woodward Ave in Birmingham, MI this past summer. The RancheroStar immediately caught our attention, but evidently the For Sale sign in the window didn't catch enough eyeballs from onlookers. Thus we now find it again.
According to its eBay listing, the creator of this minivan-trucklet died before completing the project, although he apparently had some pretty serious plans for it going forward. The truncated 1987 Ford Aerostar currently has its stock front V6, rear-wheel drive (not front-wheel drive as in the listing) configuration, but the deceased creator had plans to eventually replace it with a mid-mounted 460 cubic-inch V8. Apparently, the bodywork as it stands today is all metal, with no fiberglass or dreaded Bondo. From what we saw briefly at Woodward, the vehicle seems to be well executed for as far as it got.
If you are interested in an oddball project to complete, this one might be worth checking out. At this point, there aren't any bids, so you might get a good deal.
Talk to most gearheads about induction and they'll be picturing turbos and superchargers. But at this year's Woodward Dream Cruise, seven legendary figures from American racing were chosen for induction of another kind – into the Motorsports Hall of Fame.
Not to be confused with the International Motorsports Hall of Fame in Talladega, the Motorsports Hall of Fame of America is located in Novi, Michigan, on the outskirts of Detroit. This year's induction ceremony, however, was held at the old Fillmore Theater in Detroit proper, where Kenny Bernstein, David Hobbs, Scott Parker, Les Richter, Al Unser, Jr., H.A. "Humpy" Wheeler and Joe Weatherly were officially inducted.
The Woodward Dream Cruise attracts hundreds of thousands of people and some of the best and most creative metal ever crafted. Some vehicles are finished works of art, while others are, well, works in progress. There's also a third kind of vehicle... those rolling tributes to rust and rot that tend to get in the way of the view of the other cars and trucks on Woodward. These are the kind of vehicles, that, if touched, could potentially necessitate a tetanus shot.
This year, instead of ruing the jalopies littering the streets of southeast Michigan, we've decided to embrace them for all the humor they provide. We've collected the best of the worst of Woodward 2009 for your perusal.
Everybody has their own definition of cool, and the Woodward Dream Cruise may be the ultimate microcosm for the wide-ranging tastes of auto enthusiasts. While most cruisers show up with classic muscle cars or perfectly preserved classics, automotive outliers seem to prefer more abstract expressions. We just so happen to love both – because it just isn't a party without the guy with the lampshade on his head.
The 2009 show was no different from past Dream Cruises, with interesting rollers like the bizarre and fascinating BMW Isetta to the disturbing and controversial harbinger of death. If you want the precursor to the DeLorean, Woodward gives you the Bricklin SV1. Heck, you can have the classic Time Machine too. While we know they may be passe, how can you lose with elephantitis of the Truck Nutz?
Want more? Take a moment to browse through our gallery below of crazy cars and trucks from the 2009 Woodward Dream Cruise.
Woodward is always chock-full of interesting-looking vehicles, and in many cases the smallest of details will make all the difference between a good and great classic. Think about some of the classic cars of all time, and chances are that the details will be what pops up in your mind. The fuel cap on a 1970 Dodge Charger, the surfacing of a 1957 Chevy Bel-Air or the hood ornament on any Rolls Royce all come to mind. Badging, hood ornaments, decals, chrome, detailing, wheels and fuzzy dice all count, and we've got plenty for you to look at.
These days, Twitter is all the rage as a means for the digitally inclined to communicate their thoughts in bursts of 140 characters or less. However, that 140 character limit is positively verbose compared to an older and more established means of short messaging. Drivers long ago realized that certain combinations of letters and numbers could be used to send messages in less than seven characters. One of this blogger's all time favorites was a classic Lamborghini Countach with the plate IXLR8.
While that particular Lambo didn't appear at this year's Woodward festivities, there were plenty of other interesting messages sent out. As far as we're concerned, the best plates are the ones that don't take too much brain power to decipher. Sometimes, the license plate phrase reinforces something about the car's behavior – such as the FASSST plate on one Cobra. Other times, drivers use onomatopoeia like the BRMBRUM plate on another Shelby snake. Still others, such as the LVNGLYF plate we saw on a Lotus Elise, are more descriptive of the car's driver.
As we've come to expect from the Woodward Dream Cruise, the vast majority of the vehicles taking part are classic muscle cars from Detroit's heyday in the 1960s and 1970s. Naturally, we had no trouble filling our memory cards with images of rumbling V8-powered Camaros, Mustangs, GTOs and Trans Ams.
While the slow speeds didn't allow these big-inch muscle cars any tire burning or stoplight-to-stoplight antics, we still got to appreciate all those cubes via the ground shaking and unburnt hydrocarbons emitted from their tail pipes as we walked down the avenue. Take a good look at our high-res image gallery below for the best muscle cars from the 2009 Woodward Dream Cruise.
What exactly determines if a car is a "classic?" That's probably an infinitely debatable subject that could spark any number of answers from a given group of enthusiasts. For the purpose of this post, a classic is anything that came before the 1964 GTO kicked off the muscle car era. Sure, it's an arbitrary definition, but it allows us to create yet another interesting gallery of cool cars that drove up and down Woodward Avenue here in Detroit this weekend. So sit back, relax and enjoy the gallery below of classic cars from the 2009 Dream Cruise.
Motorcycles, scooters and trikes make the annual pilgrimage to Woodward Avenue each year for the Dream Cruise right along with all the classic cars and trucks that we've come to expect. This being the case, we dutifully pointed our lenses in the direction of the most interesting two wheelers from the 2009 Dream Cruise and gallerized them for your viewing pleasure. In between all the standard-fare Harleys and Hayabusas, we saw the occasional gem such as this wheelchair-accessible Suzuki Burgman scooter and this Honda 50.
Someday, many decades from now, after all historical records of the late 20th and early 21st centuries have been extinguished by the great internet crash of 2012, someone will be trying to figure out what happened. As paleontologists are combing through the remainder of scrap yards for clues about what we did here, they may come to the conclusion that the Shelby Cobra was the second most produced car of all time after the VW Beetle.
The reality, of course, is that the real Shelby Cobra is exceedingly rare, but the look may well be the most replicated of all time. There are also plenty of Ferrari and Lamborghini "replicas" that are mutated to fit on existing platforms like the aforementioned Beetle and the Pontiac Fiero, but the vast majority of the faux-Cobras look so much like the real thing, that all but the most dedicated observers cannot tell the difference without close inspection.
In a little corner off Woodward Ave just south of Maple Rd. were at least two dozen "Cobras", and not one appeared to be the real thing. None the less, these are generally blindingly fast cars and usually just as thrilling to drive as one of Carroll's babies.
