64
Several
contestants
brought proof
of competition
or on-road use.
Cory and Ashley
Taulbert drove
their ’3 2 more
than 3,000
miles to get to
Pomona.Hot-rodding started with performance-based competition.
The earliest land speed racers weren’t trying to make
something pretty when they chopped and channeled. They
just wanted to lower the car and go faster. When they
hammered out belly pans and smoothed away trim pieces
or moved suspension pickup points and fitted bigger wheels
and tires, they were thinking not of the sweet stance, but of
the improved top speed. That purpose has its own sort of
beauty, and while it may not have been the point of the first
customized cars, it wasn’t lost on the people who saw them.
Soon every car cruise looked like a dry-lakes meet, even if
most of the participants had never raced anywhere but the
local back roads.
The first years of the AMBR award had this straight-off-
the-lake-bed vibe, only nicer. “All the early car shows were
just taking a car that Vic Edelbrock or Stu Hilborn might
have raced and making it as perfect as you could,” says Thom
Taylor, a designer and former AMBR judge. “Because race
cars usually weren’t.”
As the hobby grew and trends changed, the AMBR award’s
focus moved from engineering to aesthetics, and then to a
points-based judging system that rewarded technical fit and
finish. Although it was more objective, the downside of the
points system was that it was easy to lose sight of the whole
when the focus was only on the details. “You’d end up with
a car winning because it had the most chromed bolts,” racer
George Poteet says.
Poteet knows pretty cars and fast cars, too. He’s won
numerous show awards and has exceeded 400 mph on
Utah’s famed Bonneville Salt Flats nearly 40 times. He’s
got a reputation at this point for picking shops that buildwinners, although when I ask how
he chooses a builder, he just shrugs
and says, “I look for a guy with
better taste than me.”
His ’36 Ford was in the AMBR
running, built by Eric Peratt of Pinkee’s Rod Shop. It sits
behind us, a creamy gray-brown that Poteet says reminds
him of the chocolate milk he and his sister would scrounge
up three pennies to buy when they were kids. The Ford
looks like it cost a lot more than three cents, but then,
these days so does chocolate milk. I ask Poteet what it cost
to build a car of this quality, and he laughs. “More than
my house, but when I told that to Eric, he said I obviously
needed a bigger house.”