The AC Cobra MkIII is a very fast and strong car that came after the first Cobra. It has a bigger body and a more powerful engine, making it one of the best versions of this famous car.
The Shelby Cobra is a very fast and special car made by mixing parts from two countries: a British car body and a strong American engine. It’s famous for being quick and rare, and many car fans love to see lots of them together.
A flathead engine is an old kind of engine where the parts that let air in and out are on the side instead of on top. It was used in older cars a long time ago.
Coils are parts in your car that help create the spark needed to start the engine. If they stop working well, your car might run rough or make popping noises.
In older cars, points, cap, and rotor are parts that help send the spark to the right place in the engine so it runs smoothly. They need to be checked and fixed sometimes.
The Ford Model A is an old car from the late 1920s and early 1930s. It was one of the first cars many people could buy, but it needs some special parts to keep running well.
During the big war, car companies stopped making regular cars and started making things for the army like tanks and jeeps. So, no new cars were made for a few years.
Tail fins are pointy shapes on the back of some cars that look like airplane wings. They were a popular design in the 1940s and 1950s to make cars look cool.
In the 1950s, American cars often had fancy decorations on the front called mascots. These were designs that showed things like airplanes or Native American chiefs to make the cars look cool.
Lincoln made a fancy car called the Premier in the 1950s. It had a special decoration on the hood that looked like a knight with wings, making it look very cool and stylish.
The Volkswagen Bora is a small, comfortable car that is good for everyday driving. It’s known for being reliable and nice to drive, making it a good choice if you want something a bit better than a basic car.
The Ram 3500 is a very big and strong truck that can carry and pull heavy things. People use it when they need a tough vehicle for work or hauling big loads.
The Maserati Quattroporte is a fancy Italian car with four doors that is both fast and comfortable. It has been around since the 1960s and is known for looking good and driving well, but older models might need special care.
The Ferrari 288 GTO is a very fast and rare sports car made in the 1980s. It was built to race and is famous for being one of the coolest and most valuable Ferraris ever made.
The Mazda CX-90 is a big car that can carry many people and has lots of features to keep you comfortable. It’s newer and made to be both nice to drive and good for families.
The Ford Mustang GT is a fast car with a big engine that makes it fun to drive. It's a popular muscle car that many people like because it sounds loud and goes fast.
The Chevrolet Camaro is a popular sports car from America that looks strong and fast. People often notice its shape, especially the back part of the car, which some like more than others. It's famous for being a cool and powerful car.
LIVE
Well, everybody, we're back.
I am Jay Ward.
And I'm Wayne Carini, and this is Talking Classic Cars.
Wayne, guess who I saw last weekend?
So, Jay, who just eat last weekend?
I just saw our friend Chris Jacobs.
All right.
Yeah, so I was at the Cobra Experience Museum in Martinez.
They asked me to do a talk there.
And Chris Jacobs sat down with Drew Serb, the owner
of the museum, and did a little Q&A session with him
about how that collection came together.
And if you haven't been there, you'd never know.
There was that many AC Cobras and Shelby's in one place.
So is this the place it's in wine country?
It's not quite in wine country.
Martinez is kind of East Bay.
It's really in a very nondescript area of the East Bay.
You would not expect this museum to be there.
And this is Drew's collection that he built up over time.
And it's.
Is this the same guy that's got a place up
in north of Pataluma?
And he's got Cobras on the wall in his garage or something.
Yeah, he has quite a bit of stuff in his house.
And he has English wheels and wood bucks.
And he's making bodies at his house as well.
Yeah.
Yeah, OK.
So that's the same guy.
So I was up in Pataluma visiting a friend.
And Bill Friedman, who owns a group of hardware stores
up there.
Yeah.
And we didn't have time.
But he said, next time you're over,
I want to take you over and see this guy's
Cobra collection.
It's crazy.
Yeah, he's actually closer to me.
He's in a little town called Breone's, which is close to me.
And that's where he's keeping all.
Got great stuff.
And then the museum is phenomenal.
And then he bought from one of.
So when Shelby, America shut down,
Carol wanted to get rid of all the stuff.
And he sold everything, lock, stock, and barrel
to one of the mechanic there for 10 grand.
And it had the dynamometer.
It had all the old tooling and dies and everything.
And this guy had it for years and years and years.
And Drew finally bought the whole thing for him.
So he has all the equipment that was used at Shelby, America,
all almost everything.
It's phenomenal what he's got.
I kicked myself.
There was a collector here in the Newport area,
Newport, Rhode Island.
And Paul Andrews was his name.
And I sold three of his cobers.
He had two 427s, one streetcar, an SC, and then a 289
Comcar.
And it was a US RRC car.
And so we sold those cars.
And he had a huge collection of everything co-op.
I mean, jackets, and pens, and signs.
Oh my god, it was unbelievable.
And as he was failing and healthy,
he wanted to sell it all to me.
And he threw out this crazy number, which now
I kick myself.
I mean, he had rings.
And he collected all this stuff all these years.
And then.
So the question is, what happened to all of it?
Yeah, well, I have no idea.
Paul sort of, as his health was declining,
his daughter and his son-in-law took over the stuff.
And I don't know.
Probably sold a lot of it off, yeah.
Yeah, sold probably.
I'm sure sold everything off.
I'll tell you this.
You never know when stuff will come back around.
This is not automotive related.
But yesterday, I just read that Paul McCartney's original
Hofner Beetle base was found after 52 years.
It was stolen in 1972.
Think about that.
The original Paul McCartney Hofner base, the base
from 1961, he played with the Beatles.
I mean, the iconic base.
Stolen in 72, just was found in this guy's attic in Sussex.
And they gave it back to him.
Wow, that's great.
There's some car, Wayne, that you sold a long time ago,
that got stolen and moved around.
And somehow the stuff will come back to you again.
You never know.
Yeah, you never know.
I mean, there's so many things out there.
And as we dig deeper and deeper into the automotive history,
we find all sorts of crazy stuff.
I'll be going tomorrow afternoon.
There's a local guy that's got a 50
Merck that I've been trying to buy for close to 35 years.
And unfortunately, he passed away.
But he left a note to police called Wayne Carina.
Nice.
And so his niece called me last week,
and she's coming up to Connecticut.
And I'm going to go look at the car
and hopefully be able to buy it.
It's just his mercury that he had it since brand new.
And sort of hot-rotted it up a little bit,
put some fender skirts on it, and did little things to it.
Nothing major.
Still flathead powered.
Well, flathead.
OK.
OK.
So I think it's important to save a car like that.
I'll tell you, something happening in the market,
as you know, there's been a bit of an adjustment
and a lot of stuff.
One of the things that have gotten the softest, which
will be, to your advantage is, a lot of the postwar
American stuff, 49 to 51 mercs that were kind of hot for a while
have really cooled down.
They're not big money.
Model A's, not big money.
The only things of those cars that
are kind of holding strong or 32 Ford's will always
hold strong.
But a lot of the other stuff is really
people are having a harder time moving it for the numbers
they want now.
So that, you know.
Yeah.
I think a Model A will always stay in that $25,000
to $30,000 category.
Yeah.
It's one of those cars that always seems to do OK.
I mean, you know, a car might be a strange sale
and sell for $45,000 to $50,000.
But a nice little Model A Roadster pickup truck.
They're great cars because it's easy to maintain.
You can get parts from anywhere.
Yeah.
And basically, you could go across the country.
And all you have to do is you
have to have an extra set of spark plugs, about five
condensers and five coils, because that's
the biggest problem as coils and the condensers go.
The minute you hear your car running very rough
and starts to backfire, just change the condenser.
And the world is all good again and maybe the coil.
But you have points and a cap and a rotor and that stuff.
You can drive across this country.
That's not a problem.
Jonathan Klinger approved it, worked for Hagerty.
And he drove a Model A for one solid year,
which is only means transportation.
That's right.
That's right.
He would drive it in the snow.
He'd have to fly out and sometimes drive down to Detroit
to catch some flights in a snowstorm.
And here he is driving his Model A on the highway,
45, 50 miles an hour.
A guy.
Oh my gosh.
Yeah, but he did it.
He plowed through.
I mean, no heat, very little heat coming off the engine.
So yeah, it's kind of a cool story.
But yeah, I know what you mean.
There's some cars that are really starting to falter.
Forties mid and, of course, because of the war,
I mean, they stopped production at 42
and didn't really start back up again.
The 47, 48 was really the true startup because of the war,
because all the manufacturers, the car manufacturers,
shut down to make tanks and jeeps
and every type of war effort type of materials.
And so when they came back, it's like a Cadillac.
Cadillac and 41, 42, they shut down.
And if you look at a 47 Cadillac, it looks exactly the same
except for they put the grille in upside down.
Made it look a little bit different.
Put a couple of pieces of chrome extra on the car.
48 was a new one, because 48 put the tail fins.
It was the last year of the Flathead Caddy,
but the first year of the kind of little kind of P38 inspired
tail fins.
Well, they had a little time to start ramping up
new designs and stuff and Harley Earl was part of that team.
And, you know, it was started some really great things,
of course, and of course with the war, everybody was planes.
Everything was an airplane because of the war effort.
You know, a lot of airplanes were made
and that's what really saved, you know, everything in the war.
So airplanes became very, very famous
and they put them on every car that there was.
I mean, you know.
So I'm writing a story right now for our friend,
David Lilly White over at Octane,
or sorry, over at Magneto.
He has Octane now,
but I'm writing a story for Magneto
about the American mascots of the 50s.
And you're absolutely right,
the aircraft influence on those mascots.
The Oldsmobile rocket, you know,
even the Pontiac chief's head
had these airplane wings going off of it.
The Lincoln Premier was a knight in shining armor,
but even he had little rocket wings on him.
Yeah, they were just great.
Even the Packard Swan, the classic Packard Swan
kind of slowly turned into an airplane.
They just couldn't help themselves.
Everything, everything was airplanes.
We just did a story.
I did a story and I'm looking at my desk here.
I don't have it,
but if you get the new Magneto magazine.
Oh yeah, you're in there.
Have you got your copy yet?
Yes, and you're in there.
Did you see that?
Yeah, it was great.
It was a nice little feature on you.
It's the Ayrton Center for the people who are looking.
Look for the one with the Ayrton Center cover
and you flip inside.
There's a great story about Wayne,
pictures at his shop, pictures at the house
and a little bit of the story of how it all came to be.
Yeah, well, it was funny.
David Lilly, why'd he stop by to just say hello?
And they were at the Australian event last year.
And he said, hey, let's just take some pictures
and maybe we can throw a story together.
So we sat down, had dinner and he took some notes
and bang, this is what happened.
He actually stopped in to get his car fixed.
Cheap repair.
He had gotten a crease in his rental car
and so one of my buddies is a Dent Wizard guy.
So we got the Dent fixed out and I was buffing the car
when he came to pick it up seven o'clock
the next morning in the shop by myself, buffing.
And that's how it all happened.
And then he says, well, while we're here,
let's take some pictures
and let's maybe make a story out of this.
So it was really nice of him to do that.
He and Jeff are just, they're salt of the earth guys.
They just, they love cars
and they have probably, it was funny,
my wife saw the magazine last night and she goes,
oh, what's this magazine?
I said, it's the best damn magazine in the world.
Yeah, Magneto is phenomenal.
I've got every issue, I'm looking at them here.
And now, you know, David started at Octane a long time ago
and Octane was a beautiful magazine.
It's a British magazine.
For some reason, the British really still love
their car magazines.
When you go to the UK and you go to a news stand,
there's a nice selection of Land Rover magazines
and Jag magazines and Porsche magazines.
And, you know, they just,
they really appreciate printed literature
whereas in the U.S. it's, you know,
it's faltered quite a bit.
And Octane was always one of the best.
That one car was a good magazine.
Evo, couple of those, so.
Right on.
Well, it's good, you know,
you could subscribe to magazines,
but I'm a bookstore junkie.
So when I want to get a new magazine,
I just go to Barnes and Noble local
and I spend a couple hours there sitting down.
The ones I don't necessarily want to buy
and take home, I thumb through them
to see if there's an interesting article.
And I will buy the magazine to read that article,
but yet it's an experience.
You know, you could subscribe to these magazines
and buy them for 125th of what you pay at the store.
But it's the cost of the experience, I think.
Yeah, that's cool.
Very cool.
And speaking of books, there are a lot of good books.
I did a book report last week.
I'll do one again in the future.
I've been picking up a series
about Italian car designers.
I'll talk about that next time.
But you know, right now I think the big news is
we're getting pretty close to Amelia Island.
And I'm looking at what Gooding's got offering
and what Broad Air has got offering
and you and I have a couple of things going on.
So let's wrap about that a little bit.
Yeah, so Amelia's right around the corner,
one of our favorite events of the year,
if not my favorite event.
This year I'm very fortunate
that my wife is traveling with me.
So she hasn't been in about 15, 16 years down there.
So we're gonna have a good time.
But Broad Arrow is just surprising me
with all the great, great cars they have.
Oh my gosh, their catalog is just beautiful.
They've got a lot of great automobiles.
Of course, Bonham's kicks it off on Thursday.
They've always got some interesting stuff
that most of the other auction houses don't have.
A lot of pre-war stuff, a lot of brass stuff normally.
And of course, the oldest auction house in the world.
So it's always interesting to go over to Bonham's.
I sometimes sell a car over there, but nothing this year.
And then you got Gooding's.
Our friend Ralph Morano's got a couple of cars in Gooding's.
So it's gonna be good to see.
He's got a Chrysler Airflow
and then a 16-cylinder Cadillac,
which are going off on Saturday.
So David always has a good catalog.
We've been preparing a few of the cars
that are gonna be over there.
So we'll go see what those cars,
we got a couple of Bugattis that are gonna be there
and a BMW 315.
So it's gonna be interesting.
And then of course, Broad Arrow are a new auction.
They have taken over the Ritz-Carlton ballroom
and they're gonna have their auction there
like a previous auction house had previously.
But their book is really solid.
I mean, I'm very impressed with the amount of cars
that they gathered together.
Yeah, they knew this was an important one for them,
so I'm glad they did.
It is, it is.
And then of course, unfortunately,
we have another event going on in Miami at the same time.
So it was a situation where we sort of had to change
or make sure that we went to the show
that we really liked the most, which was Amelia,
but it sort of messed up things
because a lot of people would like to go to both events.
Sure, sure, you don't wanna have to choose.
You don't wanna choose.
Maybe that'll get worked out in the future.
And then you and I are going to a new event together
that's going on on Friday.
Is that right?
Friday, yeah, yeah.
So Tim, it's a new event.
It's gonna sort of be the kickoff event.
It's gonna be sort of a cars and coffee event.
It's gonna be in Fernandina Beach
right in a parking lot right down on the ocean.
So Tim...
Suttered.
Suttered is going to be putting that on.
And so it's gonna be interesting.
Of course, Concordia of Lemons
is gonna be part of the event also.
Well, Alan Galbraith is gonna be there.
And I think that you and myself, Bill Warner,
who was the original founder of the Mealy Island Concord
and Alan Galbraith along with Tim
are gonna be on stage or somewhere in the parking lot,
maybe on a back of a flatbed truck.
Some luxurious location.
Yeah.
That's right.
And we're gonna have a little talk.
So it'll be a lot of fun.
Pass some trophies out, make some people happy.
I love it.
And just have a good time.
Tim usually puts on a really low-key relaxed event,
sort of like Lemons,
where we just have some fun,
where we enjoy each other's company.
We laugh and look at some cool cars.
So it's gonna be a lot of fun.
I can't wait.
I'm looking forward to seeing all of you
at Mealy Island.
It should be good.
So what's new with the car?
So we're preparing the Griffith,
the 65 Griffith that was actually built in 64,
but the color is 65.
Griffiths were TBRs, of course, with 289 engines
that I'm putting in.
And Ford dealership along Island, Griffith Ford
and Jack Griffith did that project.
There was a little under 200 of these cars made.
I think 150 or 160 cars.
So very unusual cars.
So we're prepping that.
We're just actually,
just after this chat we're having here,
we're gonna put the nose on it
and sort of try to button it up
for the truck to come in.
Our city is gonna be here next Thursday for that.
And where's the Griffith getting sold again?
It's not getting sold.
So it's for a client of ours.
I bought it.
I was in the middle of the restoration
for myself to keep the car.
And I have a client that we restored,
his Edwards America,
which you never seen last year.
Yeah.
And this is his new project with us.
So we're gonna show it down there.
He doesn't know it yet,
but we're gonna surprise him.
Oh, that's great.
So he's gonna show up
and it's gonna be on the field.
Now, Wayne, I know we're almost out of time for today,
but if you remember,
I was vacillating about what to get next
for myself for cars.
And one of the cars I was talking about
was a 308 GT4,
the little wedge car,
the Baratoni wedge car.
The other one I like
is the Lamborghini Uraco,
the little baby Lamborghini called the Uraco.
They're around the same period.
They're around the same look.
I found a Uraco, a P250.
So that should be the 250 horsepower, right?
Cause they made a 200, a 250, and a 300 in the Uracos.
What do you think about the Uraco versus a 308 GT4?
Do you think it's as good of a car?
I like the Uraco because it's so unusual.
Now actually the one to really get is a silhouette.
That's a very rare course,
had a wing on the back and, you know,
sort of they were trying to make a mini Qantas shot.
But I restored two silhouettes actually.
I restored one and then somebody found out
I was the fool that restored the first one.
So I might as well do another one.
But the Uraco I think is a very, very cool car.
I seem to like it a little bit more
than a 308 GT4, although I think they're fantastic cars.
Yeah, there's a rarity like you said.
The one car that if you could move up the ladder
a little bit more would be a Bora.
I think the Bora is fabulous.
Now you talked about the Bora
and you think America is a six cylinder version,
but the Bora is a V8 car.
Yeah, so Bora's a V8, a Merak is the six cylinder.
So a little bit different look of the Merak.
It's sort of like a, you know,
the Dino competition that we're coming out with.
But a Bora is a fabulous, fabulous car.
What you got to get it dialed in.
If it's not dialed in, if the shocks are bad
or if the hydraulic system is bad or something else,
it's just a pain in the neck.
Believe it or not, the windows go up and down hydraulically.
Everything runs through hydraulics,
the seats move hydraulically.
That's how my 1949 Lincoln worked.
1949 Lincoln was doing that.
And you're saying they were doing that in the 70s.
A lot of Maserati, I love it.
Well, Citroën got involved with them.
I don't know if it was the financing or whatever.
But of course they were supplying a lot of products
for Maserati at that point in time.
Maserati did change hands quite a few times.
And I think Citroën really probably saved their bacon ones
as Chrysler did.
And I mean, Maserati has such a heritage
when you go back to the 3,500s
and even back to the racing days.
And then it just, in the 60s and 70s,
you know, after the Quattroporte,
it all just started getting torn up and moved around.
I love the Mexico from that time period
and the Sebring from that period.
Sebring is fabulous.
Sebring is a cool car.
There was a Series 1 Sebring,
which is an alloy body car on bring a trailer
that needed an engine rebuild.
And I thought, oh, it'd just be a money pit
to try to bring one of those back.
I mean, just from what you could see.
Matt had a conversation with me
about a Maserati yesterday.
He had a great opportunity to buy
a modern day Maserati and I cringed at it.
I said, you know, be careful.
Let me guess what it was.
Or it must have been the Chrysler TC look
and Maserati that has the Tridents on the quarter windows.
It's nothing more than a K car.
No?
Matt, you can buy a turbo.
What was it Matt?
It was a Quattroporte.
What I told Matt, Matt says it'd make a great coffee table.
I said, yes, except for the thing would blow up
in your living room and then oil would be all over
the floor, antifreeze.
It's not even good for a coffee table.
It's called a mercy killing.
Well, we're talking about here is a mercy killing.
Well, you know, it's not a thing,
they're Ferrari engines, I mean,
but yet they just couldn't get the transmissions were bad.
Everything was bad, the electronics.
The door panels on those things were known
to like droop and fall off.
I mean, they had so many problems.
They had so many problems
and the only way they could sell them
in the United States were leases.
And then of course, when the lease is over,
people beg to, they don't want to buy the car.
They're beg to get rid of it.
Please take it back.
They don't want to do a dealership
on the back of a flatbed and they drop it off,
you know.
Oh, it's sad.
Sorry, Maserati dealers, but it's true.
I know, it's a tough one.
You know, I think it's getting better now,
but it's so tough.
You know, I visited the Maserati factory in 2015.
Trish took, my wife took me on a tour of the motor valley.
So we visited Ferrari, right?
The 458 is kind of finishing up,
they're going into 488.
And the production line was so modern and so up to date.
I mean, hermetically lab where they made the engines
and you know, the bodies moved up and down
the assembly line and they had a robot
that put the windscreens in for Ferrari, right?
Then we go to Lamborghini and Sant'Agata.
Clean as a whistle.
This was right before they started making the Urus.
So it was still a Ventura or SV, the SV, yeah.
And one at a time they're making them.
You can tell Audi has put all the money into the,
keep it at hand built, but high quality, all right?
So we've done those two.
Now we're going to go visit Maserati.
So you go to the Maserati factory
and it was like taking a step back in time.
The assembly line was the old,
you know, chain hook bodies moving around.
The guys going out to a yard to go get their parts
and walk back, but I was like, oh my gosh.
They just, they hadn't updated at that point.
They hadn't quite moved up
and they were making the Alfa Romeo 4C,
the little alpha in a building next door.
So they were really at that last years
of kind of the holdover from the 70s and 80s.
Yeah, I visited all the factories too
on our honeymoon when we went over to Italy
and we went all over Europe.
We went to the Monaco Grand Prix on our honeymoon.
But it was very archaic back then of course.
Yeah.
Just actually when we went through Ferrari,
we went through a Pinoferrina's factory or Scallietti,
I would say.
Yeah.
I should say not Pinoferrino, but Scallietti.
They were just making the 288 GTOs.
Wow.
Did you take pictures on that trip?
That's something never to discuss.
Yes, we did, but we got robbed one night
and all the camera equipment
and all the stuff went away.
That is so sad.
They took my backpack with all the camera,
the film we took, all that stuff.
We got robbed in Nice in our hotel room.
We were sleeping and they broke in.
We were on the second floor.
They climbed up into the balcony and then it came in.
I woke up and I saw two guys in the room
and I thought I was dreaming,
but I slapped myself silly of,
okay, wake up pal.
And the last thing I could see was their fingers
letting go off the balcony and dropping down
to two tables that they propped up
to climb up into the room.
So yeah, I lost my wallet,
but my wife was very smart every night
and I traveled to Europe a lot
and always said, what are you so fearful of?
And she'd hide our passport
and our travel checks every night
and they grabbed my pants
and my wallet was in my pants
and that was it, bang.
Everything was gone.
My backpack with all my camera equipment in it
and my wallet were gone.
Imagine, okay,
we talked about the Paul McCartney base of the game.
I know we're almost out of time.
We talked about, imagine if all these years later
you get a knock on the door and this guy's like,
hey, I think this is your stuff
and you got the photos back and you're,
that would be, you could write,
you could make a book about all.
That blew my mind.
You know, I lost my class ring once.
I really don't like wearing rings.
So I lost my class ring
and I always wondered where it was.
Well, about 10 years ago,
I get an email from a guy and he says,
I have your class ring.
I want to come and see you.
I said, oh my God, where did you find email?
He found it at a bowling alley.
I had taken the ring off to go bowling
and it dropped down into the ball return machine
and he's revitalizing this bowling alley
and there's my ring.
And it was a Glastonbury high school
and he saw the initials in it.
My initials were in it.
And so, and so he shows up and I says,
oh, thanks so much.
He says, no, no, thanks so much.
He says, that'll be $500.
You can keep the ring.
I don't wear rings anyways for 500 bucks.
And finally I got him down to $25 on the 500 bucks.
I said, here's 25 bucks.
That's all you're gonna get out of me.
All right, it's better than nothing.
You imagine holding me hostage
for some class ring to probably cost $50
when I was a kid, you know?
I got it back and now I have no idea where it is.
It's lost again.
Well, I think we've covered everything today.
We've asked rings, glasses.
Glockos.
We've been all over the place.
This is what happens when Matt lets us off the leash.
We just kind of pontificate
but hopefully you guys had fun listening in.
It's always fun talking classic cars
and another great one.
Oh, really quick before we wrap up.
Wayne, what are you driving this week?
What do you got for a modern ride?
A new car!
So I've got a Subaru.
I just gave up a Mazda though, the new Q or CX-90.
Oh, yeah, the big SUV.
The new SUV? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Super nice. They're very nice.
Mazda's got some good stuff.
Good looking car and it's a little noisy the engine
but once you're going down the highway,
I drove it from Boston last week at the Press Association.
We had our winter driving experience
so we were up for that and I got that to drive home.
Great little car this week.
I've got a Crosstrak Subaru.
So it's a little strange with the cladding
on the side and stuff but still, no.
All cars are really great.
Just some are better than others.
That's right. I've got the new Mustang GT
and it's got now it has two digital dashes
so it has a digital binnacle
and then a digital infotainment screen
and I'm still getting used to it.
I really miss analog gauges.
There's something about looking at a flat screen
in a muscle car that takes a little bit of the flavor away.
I'll say that the motor is great.
It's 480 horsepower from the factory now for a GT.
They pushed it way back.
So I mean, the back two cylinders are underneath your dash
so the motor sits nice and back.
It doesn't feel front and heavy at all.
They did a good job of really belying
that big V8 in the front.
They're independent suspension in the rear now
so they behave well around corners
and it's the six speed manual
which is a great transmission.
Nothing to complain about.
It's a pretty great car.
It's got tons of bite, tons of bark.
I'm not sure about the looks.
I think they put a little too much Camaro going on
in the rear hips for my liking.
A little too much but otherwise
the front looks really mean and the back looks good
and yeah, I love the fact that we're still making V8
naturally aspirated muscle cars in the year 2024.
It's not gonna last forever.
According to Jim Farley, it's gonna continue.
Good.
Yeah, it's not going away this year
at least we'll see what happens.
I just bought my RS6 Avant station wagon
and it said this is the last one.
Well, of course the factory comes out.
It says, well, not quite yet.
They're gonna make 600 versions of the rally.
I saw that, that white one is cool looking.
The white one with all the graphics on it and stuff.
It's gonna be $250,000
and there's not gonna be any more improvements
on performance, on power, on anything.
You're basically gonna get a white one with graphics on it
and you're gonna have to pay a hundred grand more.
And it's raised up a little bit, right?
It's like rally height.
They did a lift kit for a hundred grand.
Come on, I don't know what you're complaining about.
Jay, we'll see you down in Florida.
We really look forward to seeing you and Matt
down in Florida and we're gonna have a great time at Amelia.
Absolutely, I'll see you guys down the road.
About this episode
Wayne Carini and Jay Ward dive into the impressive Cobra Experience Museum in Martinez, highlighting its rare Shelby and AC Cobra collection and the story behind its owner Drew Serb. They reminisce about notable collectors and the fluctuating classic car market, especially postwar American models. The hosts also discuss the influence of aviation on 1950s car mascots, share insights on classic car maintenance, and preview upcoming events like Amelia Island. Personal anecdotes and magazine features add a warm, insider perspective to the conversation.
On this episode of the Talking Classic Cars podcast, Wayne and Jay catch up before heading to Florida for The Amelia 2024. Jay tells us about the Cobra Experience Museum, the classic car market, 1950s car designs, Jay seeks advice on his next Italian car purchase and the story of a missing ring.
