Speedobilia: 11/04

Essential Musclecars
Pin It

Feature Article from Hemmings Muscle Machines

November, 2004 - Daniel Strohl

Essential Musclecars
Mike Mueller
Motorbooks International

As coffee-table books go, this one fits right into the genre. Big flashy pictures, extensive graphics and brief textual interludes make up the majority of "Essential Musclecars," also referred to as "The Essential Muscle Car" on Motorbooks' website.

Grand, sweeping overviews dominate this full-color, 160-page hardbound book. Five chapters cover nearly everything from the pre-muscle car era, including the 1955 Chrysler C-300 and the 1961 Ford Sunliner 390-6V, to the traditional muscle cars of the mid- to late-Sixties, to modern interpretations of the theme, including the 2003 Ford Mustang Mach 1 and 2004 Pontiac GTO. We appreciate such loose definitions of the type here at Hemmings, but have to wonder why some more definitive cars, including the '49 Olds 88 and the fuel-injected '57 Chevys, got the lip-service treatment while multiple iterations of the Camaro and the Mustang, along with many limited-production, barely-street-legal cars, made the cut.

But the writing style is more than approachable - it's told both from the viewpoint of someone who lived the era and from the desk of a researcher, so you get the flavor to go with the substance. Mueller, in his profiles of each car, also tries to loosely chart trends that many other authors tend to miss, like the late entries from FoMoCo into the mid-size muscle game and the niches that each car tried to fill.

Hemi T-shirt
California Car Cover Co.

Fashion is a fickle beast. Remember bell-bottomed jeans? Then remember despising them? Then remember them coming back into fashion? Yeah, weird. So, as fair warning, we're either in the midst or on the tail end of a fashion trend of "trucker chic" or "redneck chic" or whatever those Madison Avenue types are calling it.

Why the fair warning? Because you're a car guy - you wouldn't be reading this otherwise. And you'd likely wear this gray Hemi T-shirt we came across recently regardless of the fashion trends. You likely see Hemi and know, "Hey, that's a V-8 engine produced by the Chrysler Corp. in two different stints in the 1950s and '60s using hemispherical cylinder heads." The cutaway line drawing of the engine featured on the backside likely won't confound you. And you know what the 426 on the lapel pocket stands for. Safe to say, you'd have worn this shirt 10 years ago when it wasn't in vogue.

But nowadays, trucker hats are selling for upwards of a hundred bucks and every bubblegum pop star is taking after Kid Rock by making intimations of a trailer park past. So you're bound, over the next few months, to see one of these shirts draped on a kid who knows nothing more about Hemis than the recent commercials. Don't worry, fashion will move on to something else within a year or two, leaving the car guys to appreciate these shirts for the high-performance history, rather than the fashion, that they represent.

The shirts come in medium to extra large sizes for $17.99. Add two bucks for XXL.

Kirban's Guide to 1986 and 1987 Buick Turbo Regals
Dennis Kirban
Kirban Performance Products

Journalists have often described a scenario they call the "note dump" in which the reporter collects all the information for a story, sits down to write it and jams every iota of information into the span of several paragraphs. It's one sure-fire way to enlighten the reader on that particular topic, but too often, it makes for a thick read more suited to a reference book than to a newspaper article.

Good thing, then, that Kirban's Guide to 1986 and 1987 Buick Turbo Regals falls into the former category. This is what the experts on modern performance and collector cars should be doing now and what they should have been doing 30, 40, 50 years ago - preserving in excruciating detail every aspect of these cars when they are relatively new and when the information is still fresh from the dealers and manufacturers. Kirban has filled more than 400 pages with just that kind of information about these two years of cars and all their various sub-models: The T-type, the Turbo-T, the WE-4, the Turbo-T Limited, the Grand National and the GNX. Want to know what all those blacked-out panels in the dash are for? Want to know the exact placement of every badge installed on these cars? It's in here.

Kirban noted that he chose this narrow range of cars for this book both because it's his area of expertise - he claims to have bought and sold more than 60 different Turbo Regals over the last 17 years - and because these two model years represent the last and, ostensibly, the hottest of the Turbo Regals, with their intercooled, turbocharged, fuel-injected V-6 engines.

The book, filled with dozens of black-and-white photos, lacks only color and some kind of overall discussion of how these cars came about and the essential differences between the various sub-models.


Order Backissues of Hemmings Muscle Machines       |       Subscribe to Hemmings Muscle Machines

Reader Comments

Hemmings Muscle Machines

Order Backissues of Hemmings Muscle Machines