...on TV. It was one of the color episodes of The Andy Griffith Show where Andy is captured by two bank robbers hiding out in a cabin outside Mayberry. Otis and Howard come to rescue him in a gold 1964 Chevrolet Biscayne two-door sedan. I always thought Howard was an oddball. He appears to be the only guy who drives a Chevy in a town where everybody owns a Ford product.
Yeah, Howard was kind of a weird one, but he did assimilate, later on. I recently saw an episode where he picked up a hooker in this '67 Comet wagon.
Well okay, she wasn't a hooker...she worked in a dance hall where the guys paid money to dance with the pretty girls. But, I think that place had a second floor, just like Miss Kitty's saloon in Gunsmoke...or Miss Carrie's place in Westworld! :surprise:
Over 50 bids, over $900K, and reserve not met. Interesting background told by seller with accident history and some unoriginal restoration work along the way. Seller is apparently not the owner, no vehicle inspection offered until after bidding is complete, and there's a buyer's premium added at end of auction to benefit charity.
I thought these cars tend to be traded privately between collectors. I wonder if this particular car has been shown anywhere in recent years?
A time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing.
I sent this out over the Ferrari Secret Information Network, so we'll have the real story in a couple of hours.
If it's the LWB, which it should be, that a one million deduct and shame about using steel on the alloy body--that mistake is going to cost about $2 million reduction in price I would imagine....but, back then, who knew?
So what's it worth? Damned if I know....I think she would bid up to about 2.5 million on a venue like eBay but a no-questions SWB model in alloy would be 3X that.
Still, I can't say more until we find out the real deal on the car (as much as I can discreetly divulge I mean).
well, assuming that the work was done right (and a on a car worth this much, easy to spend the money!), so you can't tell, does it matter? Will something like these even be driven, or put away in a collection or museum and just looked at?
Just for the record, Aunt Bea was a dedicated Studebaker owner and driver http://www.studebaker-info.org/Auntbea/auntbeastude.html . She stuck with Studebaker until the final model year. (I don't know if hers had the overdrive transmission.) :shades:
Today is the 55th aniversary of the date James Dean hit a Ford too. The slide show at the bottom of this page was made on the 50th anniversary and shows that JD might still be alive today if he was driving a Stude. http://stude.net/commander.html
I see Aunt Bea's driving skills haven't improved since she backed that 1955 Ford Sunliner into a tree in the early 1960s, hence the dented grille on the Stude!
yeah it matters, when alloy body parts become steel ones, and lots of bondo go into correcting horrendous damage (picture, if you will, various cars banging around loose in a container ship on the high seas, or, if you will, dragging a car out from a swamp).
Oh someone will buy it, but it can't compete with cleaner comparables with full integrity---not even close. All the histories of these cars are well-known----you can't hide anything about them anymore.
Accident reconstruction specialists have carefully examined the James Dean wreck and estimated that his Porsche was traveling at 75 mph and the Ford at 60 mph, for a combined collision speed of 135 mph. Having owned a '55 Studebaker, I would speculate that James Dean would probably still be very dead. I mean, we're talking the era of no seat belts, no crush zones, no dash protections. When cars collide like that, especially old ones that don't give, the human body goes from 75 to 0 in a very short distance. An army tank, for instance, would be a bad place for an unbelted individual going 75 mph and hitting a wall. Besides that, the Ford was pretty badly smashed up, considering it was hit by such a light car. Imagine had it been hit by one as equally as heavy. The 550 was torn apart.
I will say, though, that if Dean were driving a brightly colored car like that Studebaker, perhaps Mr. Turnipseed would not have crossed in front of his path. I do know that a car like a Porsche 550, done in silver, in bright sun, on a gray, sunlight highway, becomes nearly invisible. We used to call my friend's silver Porsche 914 the "stealth car" because...literally, on a bright day you couldn't see it coming.
So in a way, you could in fact be right, he might have stayed alive, but not because of the car's alleged construction---ironically, more for its color.
Yeah, I imagine that if a similar-weight car had hit at the same speed, that Ford would have fared a lot worse, and whatever hit it wouldn't look too pretty, either.
I agree with everything Mr. Shiftright says about the James Dean crash with two exceptions. First, the Porsche Spyder hitting the Ford was like a bug hitting a windshield because it was so small and light with no engine or bumper up front. Second, the Ford driver did walk away from the crash. (We don't know what happened to the driver that Aunt Bea hit with her Stude, but we know that she survived the crash.)
Since September 30 is not on a Friday this year, I am not inspired (obsessed?) to travel the same route today. However,my slide show at my web site posted earlier does show how the crash scene looked on the same day at the same time 50 years later. Images show that Porsche did blend in with the road and it was lower than nearly every other car on the road on that date. Today there are numerous signs in the area telling drivers to keep their headlights on.
Staggering as it seems, by 1955 fully one million Americans had died in cars.
1972 was the highest number of fatalities, but not the highest fatality *rate*, since there were far more cars on the road and far more accidents by 1972.
The fatality RATE drops almost completely in step with the newness of the car, going back to 1900.
2003s fatality rate was 6 times LESS than in 1955 and no doubt is even less today.
Regarding the crash, The Ford driver was not hit head-on, (deflected shot) but the Dean car was crushed in a head on fashion. Had he been driving a heavier car, back in those days what happened was your legs were crushed by the engine and your chest crushed by the steering wheel and/or your neck broken by being elevated into the roof.
The 6X greater fatality rate in 1955 vs. today speaks to the dangerous nature of 50s cars better than anything else.
My brother T-boned a Buick Riviera in his Renault Dauphine and sent the other guy to the hospital. My brother and I walked away. Go figure. We had seat belts, the other guy didn't. We had a worse-off car but a better set of human heads. :P
I found some stats in this article that state a fatality rate of around 6 per million miles traveled in the 1950's. That fell down to 1.26 in 2008, and 1.13 in 2009.
I wonder how much lower that rate would have been in the 1950's, if all cars had seatbelts and, more importantly, if people used them?
The point being that it doesn't matter so much what happens to the *outside* of the car---what matters is what happens in the passenger compartment.
When you hit a wall at 75 mph in your '55 WHATEVER, the car stops but you, unbelted and unbagged, just keep going, right into all those pointy, shiny, chromey bits. And if you were real unlucky, the passenger compartment was visited by unwelcome guests, like a 500 lb V8 engine.
Back then it was a vast, vast universe of difference between being behind the wheel of a foreign sports car versus a 50s American car. The two had absolutely nothing in common except 4 wheels and a steering column. I'm sure people like James Dean got quite caught up in the exotic nature of it all.
50s American cars were not for driving enthusiasts as we know them today, unless you mean cruising down the highway with your elbow on the window sill and a butt hanging out of your mouth. Which I'm sure James Dean did as well in one of his land yachts.
America didn't have anything like a "sports car" in 1955--not even close--unless you built one yourself.
I couldn't imagine driving long distance when you only had roads like US Route 66, US 30 and US 41 etc.
This goes further back than the 1950's, but my grandmother says she remembers as a kid, coming down from Harrisburg, PA, to visit relatives in the DC area, and it was an all-day trip. Well, all-day in that you left in the morning, and it was evening by the time you got down here.
That same trip today is about 110 miles, and about 100 of it is limited-access (Balto-Wash Parkway, I-695 around Baltimore, and I-83 up to H-burg). Grand total of something like 10 traffic lights, and they're all between my house (same house where her relatives lived), and the B-W Parkway! I can almost always do the trip in under two hours.
Back in the old days, the most direct route probably hit every single little town between here an H-burg, and probably cut THROUGH downtown Baltimore. And once you get above Baltimore, I'd imagine the original roads had some pretty steep grades and sharp, windy turns.
Back in the old days though, I imagine once you got out of the bigger city areas, and out towards the Midwest and West, the traveling was a lot quicker, even in those pre-interstate days? I guess the Rocky Mountains and Sierra Nevadas could still be quite and adventure, though.
Here is an image of the James Dean Porsche where you can see the original dashboard. http://images.loqu.com/contents/264/903/image/2009-08-20/1_2.jpg It looks same color as the body. Dean's passenger Rolf Weutherich (sic?) probably would have been killed too if he had been wearing a seatbelt and not been thrown clear of the crash.
This is not to say that driving without a seatbelt is usually safer than with one, but there are times when being trapped in the seat is not as safe as being knocked out of the way. I had a friend who was knocked to the passenger side in his van during an accident and was glad he was not trapped in the driver's seat.
BTW, the 1955 Porsche Spyder did not come with any seatbelt and it was intended to be a race car. I believe that seatbelts were first used in Indy cars around that time but cannot prove it. I am aware that they were optional in passenger cars in 1956 (standard equipment on the Ford Crown Victoria), maybe a year earlier.
Out here on the Left coast the Pan American Highway was the old 99 running from way down South in CA up through BC which is where the Alaskan Highway connected. Being familiar with only the route between Portland and Seattle, I remember it took from 6 to 7 hours as it ran through every jerk water town in between. Often we would be blocked by an Army convoy and those Deuce 1/2's didn't travel very fast to begin with.
This talk of classic cars and Route 66 reminded me I saw a 1966 Grand Prix that drove all 2000 miles of the Route 66... according to the sign in the windshield.
Dean was actually found in the passenger side of the vehicle, leading to speculation that he wasn't driving.
One can always find exceptions to any good common sense. A person could possibly jump off a 3- story building and land on a pile of mattresses on the back of a flatbed delivery truck, but it's really better to take the elevator. :P
Actually, given violence of the crash, I'm sure seat belt anchors would have ripped right out of there with the seats themselves.
Sometimes, it's just luck. You know, the soldier who was carrying the bible in his breast pocket, etc.
Peoples' mind sets regarding what defined fun behind the wheel was very different then. In '55, since that's when James Dean died, Detroit ruled in terms of production numbers. The U.S.'s large land mass and high average income per household gave our auto industry a huge competitive advantage. Yeah, Volkswagen was ramping up production to some respectable numbers, but most Americans never even considered a foreign car. Most American motorists thought of them as "funny little 'furrin' cars."
Sports cars - and most of the ones sold in the U.S. were British - were a novelty that few appreciated. Those who did were usually passionate about the driving experience, but we're talking small numbers. Of course, the fact that Chevy and Ford introduced the Corvette and the Thunderbird demonstrates that they perceived a potential threat, but these were American renditions of what sports cars for Americans should be. The priorities were American styling, comfort, straight line acceleration and productions costs. Agility, communicative steering, raspy low-torque 4-cylinders, and 4-speed manuals weren't part of the equation. And let's remember that, for the majority of Americans, especially in the heart land, large 6-passenger convertibles defined sportiness. Want even more sportiness? Then mount a continental kit on the extended rear bumper and lower the rear springs. Oh, and let's not forget the loud dual exhausts and chrome tipped tail pipe extensions that that stuck out an inch or two beyond the rear bumper. Those ensured that everyone would know you had a big, honking V8 under the hood.
Hot rods and customs were quite popular with individualistic and creative types, but those who drove these were a totally different breed from people who owned sportscars. There were far more of these domestic based cars than there were sportscars in the mid '50s. Also, a large percentage of the sportscar owners resided in California and the East Coast, or around college campuses.
Exactly. A foreign sports car was a totally novel and unique experience for the American driver. That's what I meant by implying different universes---it wasn't a matter of degree...the difference between a 550 Spyder and an '55 Chevy was profound and total.
Of course, German sports cars were not necessarily raspy low-torque affairs. The '56 300SL was not only able to slap any American car silly, but it reeked of sophistication, luxury and style. Naturally, you paid Cadillac money for it, too, or more. Alfa Romeos, too, were very nicely appointed vehicles, of advanced techology (but no power seats, that's true).
Cars like the MG TC were crates, that's for sure (I mean really, *wooden* cars in 1948---c'mon) but that's the car that the likes of Carroll Shelby learned on.
Fortunately, there was a compromise on the horizon---the 4-speed, V8 Corvette. While never an international contender, due to primitive braking and a big appetite, it was a formidable and true "sports car".
That's really scary, just how little there is to that thing. I mean, I know they're fun to drive, but that thing has more in common with a go-kart than a car!
Most of Dean's body was on the passenger's side of the vehicle, but his legs were trapped on the driver's side of the car near the pedals. That is why Dean did not fly out of the car with Rolf. There are images of the ambulance drivers trying to free his legs from the driver's side of the car. The images also show that there was not much left of the driver's side of the Porsche.
The speculation that Rolf was driving was based upon one witness who was behind the Ford and did not have much time to observe what happened. But less than a mile before the crash, Dean nearly caused another accident by making an unsafe pass and there were three or four witnesses who saw Dean driving as he passed them. Another driver had to go to the side of the road to avoid a head-on collision. They saw the blond guy with the white shirt (i.e., Dean) driving. Rolf had dark hair and was wearing a red shirt. Additionally, Rolf was not insured to drive the car. James Dean at Speed is an excellent book on the subject with many images.
I agree that most of the time wearing a seatbelt is safer than not. But I would rather not be wearing one IF the vehicle gets hit on the driver's side. When an irresistible force meets an immovable object, I would not want to be strapped to the immovable object. That said, most accidents don't happen that waybut they are not rare events.
That might sound logical, but it's really not IMO. Being hurled around in a car, or thrown out of one, has generally been proven to be grossly more dangerous that staying in place, in crash testing data. In 2010, the James Dean crash would probably have allowed all 3 people to walk away or perhaps have non-life-threatening injuries.
this is why judges don't take points off in car shows for old cars equipped with safety devices. :P
I think if the choice is between getting crushed in place, or getting thrown, you might have a slightly better chance of surviving if you get thrown. But it's quite rare, the accident that actually gives you the choice!
In that James Dean crash, wasn't one of the cars doing something like 65 mph and the other around 70? Even if you used modern, up-to-date cars to try and replicate that crash, there would still be some serious carnage. Remember, those NHTSA crash tests and the like are only done at around 35-40 mph.
If you took two people in a Porsche Boxter, for example, and one guy in a Ford Fusion, and ran them together at those speeds, the results wouldn't be pretty. I'm sure there would be some pretty serious injuries, and I wouldn't rule out the possibility of a death, even.
I saw one that looked exactly like that at a car show last year and I had exactly the same thought. In an accident of any severity you might as well be strapped to the hood, because that body structure would not protect you at all.
I don't know my Porsches all that well, but here's the guy who played Grossman on "CHiPs", trying to stuff one into the trunk of a '66 Caddy! Or rather, the stuntman who's filling in for the guy who played Grossman on "CHiPs" :shades:
The speed the two cars were going in the James Dean crash will always remain a mystery. The accounts of the eye-witnesses say the Porsche flew up on the air did complete flip and landed about 30 feet past the point of impact. That would have shortened the distance the car traveled after impact because the height dissipated the energy. That makes the question; how far and how high did it go?
But then in 2005 there was a documentary made for a TV show called called Crash Science which showed the Porsche spinning on the surface of the road and ending up at the same spot. Therefore, when anyone makes a prediction of the speed of the vehicles in the range from 50-to 80 mph, I don't argue the point because I do not have a definite answer.
The best answer I have for how fast James Dean was going is to know that he left Blackwell's Corner being followed by stunt driver Bill Hickman (who is later the driver of the black Dodge Charger in the Steve McQueen movie Bullitt) and photographer Sanford Roth in Dean's station wagon. Hickman had been ticked earlier for towing the empty car trailer over 50 mph, so he was no slow-poke.
Only thirty miles after they left Blackwell's Corner, Dean crashed at the intersection. Dean was so far ahead of Hickman that the ambulance got to the scene and put out road flares before Hickman and Roth arrived. True, the ambulance was only garaged a mile away, but the drivers were not sitting in it with the motor running waiting for the next crash. If Hickman was averaging 50 miles per hour and if it took the ambulance just 10 minutes to get to the scene, then Dean was averaging 90 miles per hour on a two-lane road on a Friday about 5:30 p.m.(or 6:30 p.m. daylight savings time, which was not used then)
Of course, this is not a firm conclusion because it might have taken the ambulance only 5 minutes to get to the accident scene and/or Hickman might have been stuck behind slow traffic. But the incident that happened just a mile before the crash where Dean nearly caused a head-on collision indicates that he was going very fast and started the race one day early. :sick: Here is the best short version of that day I have found.http://www.findadeath.com/Deceased/d/James Dean/james_dean.htm
Eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable anyway. Any good court attorney will tell us this. It will always be a mystery, and really, I'm not sure it's a mystery worth solving further. This isn't after all, the Titanic.
Sometimes the simplest answers are the best. If you stand in front of a Porsche 550 Spyder, painted silver, walk about 50 years away, and put the sun in the right place, the car virtually disappears. That's probably what happened.
There is no doubt that the James Dean Porsche was hard to see. But the Ford driver did see it and left 20 feet of skid marks before impact. The Porsche left no skid marks. That is why I have my doubts about the documentary that showed it spinning on the road. Where are the skuff marks?
This accident still interests many people and you can see many of them at the intersection on September 30th, especially when that date falls on a Friday. It is fun to drive the route. Over the years, every location where James Dean was that day has changed because the buildings are gone. There is just one exception. The gas station at Ventura Blvd. and Beverly Glen is still there, although it is a flower shop now.
Comments
Well okay, she wasn't a hooker...she worked in a dance hall where the guys paid money to dance with the pretty girls. But, I think that place had a second floor, just like Miss Kitty's saloon in Gunsmoke...or Miss Carrie's place in Westworld! :surprise:
Over 50 bids, over $900K, and reserve not met. Interesting background told by seller with accident history and some unoriginal restoration work along the way. Seller is apparently not the owner, no vehicle inspection offered until after bidding is complete, and there's a buyer's premium added at end of auction to benefit charity.
I thought these cars tend to be traded privately between collectors. I wonder if this particular car has been shown anywhere in recent years?
If it's the LWB, which it should be, that a one million deduct and shame about using steel on the alloy body--that mistake is going to cost about $2 million reduction in price I would imagine....but, back then, who knew?
So what's it worth? Damned if I know....I think she would bid up to about 2.5 million on a venue like eBay but a no-questions SWB model in alloy would be 3X that.
Still, I can't say more until we find out the real deal on the car (as much as I can discreetly divulge I mean).
That Ferrari does look like a LWB to me.
Some cars have had a hard, hard life. Were it not a Ferrari, would it have even been saved from multiple disasters? Doubt it.
2020 Acura RDX tech SH-AWD, 2023 Maverick hybrid Lariat luxury package.
Today is the 55th aniversary of the date James Dean hit a Ford too. The slide show at the bottom of this page was made on the 50th anniversary and shows that JD might still be alive today if he was driving a Stude. http://stude.net/commander.html
Oh someone will buy it, but it can't compete with cleaner comparables with full integrity---not even close. All the histories of these cars are well-known----you can't hide anything about them anymore.
I will say, though, that if Dean were driving a brightly colored car like that Studebaker, perhaps Mr. Turnipseed would not have crossed in front of his path. I do know that a car like a Porsche 550, done in silver, in bright sun, on a gray, sunlight highway, becomes nearly invisible. We used to call my friend's silver Porsche 914 the "stealth car" because...literally, on a bright day you couldn't see it coming.
So in a way, you could in fact be right, he might have stayed alive, but not because of the car's alleged construction---ironically, more for its color.
Yeah, I imagine that if a similar-weight car had hit at the same speed, that Ford would have fared a lot worse, and whatever hit it wouldn't look too pretty, either.
Since September 30 is not on a Friday this year, I am not inspired (obsessed?) to travel the same route today. However,my slide show at my web site posted earlier does show how the crash scene looked on the same day at the same time 50 years later. Images show that Porsche did blend in with the road and it was lower than nearly every other car on the road on that date. Today there are numerous signs in the area telling drivers to keep their headlights on.
Here is an interesting article about the Dean Porsche. http://www.aolnews.com/weird-news/article/55-years-after-james-deans-death-what-- - - - - happened-to-his-car/19648249
2001 BMW 330ci/E46, 2008 BMW 335i conv/E93
1972 was the highest number of fatalities, but not the highest fatality *rate*, since there were far more cars on the road and far more accidents by 1972.
The fatality RATE drops almost completely in step with the newness of the car, going back to 1900.
2003s fatality rate was 6 times LESS than in 1955 and no doubt is even less today.
Regarding the crash, The Ford driver was not hit head-on, (deflected shot) but the Dean car was crushed in a head on fashion. Had he been driving a heavier car, back in those days what happened was your legs were crushed by the engine and your chest crushed by the steering wheel and/or your neck broken by being elevated into the roof.
The 6X greater fatality rate in 1955 vs. today speaks to the dangerous nature of 50s cars better than anything else.
My brother T-boned a Buick Riviera in his Renault Dauphine and sent the other guy to the hospital. My brother and I walked away. Go figure. We had seat belts, the other guy didn't. We had a worse-off car but a better set of human heads. :P
I wonder how much lower that rate would have been in the 1950's, if all cars had seatbelts and, more importantly, if people used them?
The point being that it doesn't matter so much what happens to the *outside* of the car---what matters is what happens in the passenger compartment.
When you hit a wall at 75 mph in your '55 WHATEVER, the car stops but you, unbelted and unbagged, just keep going, right into all those pointy, shiny, chromey bits. And if you were real unlucky, the passenger compartment was visited by unwelcome guests, like a 500 lb V8 engine.
No doubt, also roads are designed safer today to and I'm sure the interstate highway system helped cut down on fatalities too.
I couldn't imagine driving long distance when you only had roads like US Route 66, US 30 and US 41 etc.
I'd guess that only determined how much extra time the mortician was going to need to get the unlucky subject to open casket condition:(
50s American cars were not for driving enthusiasts as we know them today, unless you mean cruising down the highway with your elbow on the window sill and a butt hanging out of your mouth. Which I'm sure James Dean did as well in one of his land yachts.
America didn't have anything like a "sports car" in 1955--not even close--unless you built one yourself.
This goes further back than the 1950's, but my grandmother says she remembers as a kid, coming down from Harrisburg, PA, to visit relatives in the DC area, and it was an all-day trip. Well, all-day in that you left in the morning, and it was evening by the time you got down here.
That same trip today is about 110 miles, and about 100 of it is limited-access (Balto-Wash Parkway, I-695 around Baltimore, and I-83 up to H-burg). Grand total of something like 10 traffic lights, and they're all between my house (same house where her relatives lived), and the B-W Parkway! I can almost always do the trip in under two hours.
Back in the old days, the most direct route probably hit every single little town between here an H-burg, and probably cut THROUGH downtown Baltimore. And once you get above Baltimore, I'd imagine the original roads had some pretty steep grades and sharp, windy turns.
Back in the old days though, I imagine once you got out of the bigger city areas, and out towards the Midwest and West, the traveling was a lot quicker, even in those pre-interstate days? I guess the Rocky Mountains and Sierra Nevadas could still be quite and adventure, though.
This is not to say that driving without a seatbelt is usually safer than with one, but there are times when being trapped in the seat is not as safe as being knocked out of the way. I had a friend who was knocked to the passenger side in his van during an accident and was glad he was not trapped in the driver's seat.
BTW, the 1955 Porsche Spyder did not come with any seatbelt and it was intended to be a race car. I believe that seatbelts were first used in Indy cars around that time but cannot prove it. I am aware that they were optional in passenger cars in 1956 (standard equipment on the Ford Crown Victoria), maybe a year earlier.
http://i86.photobucket.com/albums/k110/imidazol97/DSC07698.jpg?t=1285888998
2014 Malibu 2LT, 2015 Cruze 2LT,
One can always find exceptions to any good common sense. A person could possibly jump off a 3- story building and land on a pile of mattresses on the back of a flatbed delivery truck, but it's really better to take the elevator. :P
Actually, given violence of the crash, I'm sure seat belt anchors would have ripped right out of there with the seats themselves.
Sometimes, it's just luck. You know, the soldier who was carrying the bible in his breast pocket, etc.
Sports cars - and most of the ones sold in the U.S. were British - were a novelty that few appreciated. Those who did were usually passionate about the driving experience, but we're talking small numbers. Of course, the fact that Chevy and Ford introduced the Corvette and the Thunderbird demonstrates that they perceived a potential threat, but these were American renditions of what sports cars for Americans should be. The priorities were American styling, comfort, straight line acceleration and productions costs. Agility, communicative steering, raspy low-torque 4-cylinders, and 4-speed manuals weren't part of the equation. And let's remember that, for the majority of Americans, especially in the heart land, large 6-passenger convertibles defined sportiness. Want even more sportiness? Then mount a continental kit on the extended rear bumper and lower the rear springs. Oh, and let's not forget the loud dual exhausts and chrome tipped tail pipe extensions that that stuck out an inch or two beyond the rear bumper. Those ensured that everyone would know you had a big, honking V8 under the hood.
Hot rods and customs were quite popular with individualistic and creative types, but those who drove these were a totally different breed from people who owned sportscars. There were far more of these domestic based cars than there were sportscars in the mid '50s. Also, a large percentage of the sportscar owners resided in California and the East Coast, or around college campuses.
You mean 250s of course.
All the Spider pictures I've seen show black dash tops and black dash faces.
E.G.>
Of course that's not to say an influential customer couldn't special order it with body color.
2001 BMW 330ci/E46, 2008 BMW 335i conv/E93
Of course, German sports cars were not necessarily raspy low-torque affairs. The '56 300SL was not only able to slap any American car silly, but it reeked of sophistication, luxury and style. Naturally, you paid Cadillac money for it, too, or more. Alfa Romeos, too, were very nicely appointed vehicles, of advanced techology (but no power seats, that's true).
Cars like the MG TC were crates, that's for sure (I mean really, *wooden* cars in 1948---c'mon) but that's the car that the likes of Carroll Shelby learned on.
Fortunately, there was a compromise on the horizon---the 4-speed, V8 Corvette. While never an international contender, due to primitive braking and a big appetite, it was a formidable and true "sports car".
Let's see if I can find a 550 dash photo.....
Here's a REAL ONE
The speculation that Rolf was driving was based upon one witness who was behind the Ford and did not have much time to observe what happened. But less than a mile before the crash, Dean nearly caused another accident by making an unsafe pass and there were three or four witnesses who saw Dean driving as he passed them. Another driver had to go to the side of the road to avoid a head-on collision. They saw the blond guy with the white shirt (i.e., Dean) driving. Rolf had dark hair and was wearing a red shirt. Additionally, Rolf was not insured to drive the car. James Dean at Speed is an excellent book on the subject with many images.
I agree that most of the time wearing a seatbelt is safer than not. But I would rather not be wearing one IF the vehicle gets hit on the driver's side. When an irresistible force meets an immovable object, I would not want to be strapped to the immovable object. That said, most accidents don't happen that waybut they are not rare events.
this is why judges don't take points off in car shows for old cars equipped with safety devices. :P
In that James Dean crash, wasn't one of the cars doing something like 65 mph and the other around 70? Even if you used modern, up-to-date cars to try and replicate that crash, there would still be some serious carnage. Remember, those NHTSA crash tests and the like are only done at around 35-40 mph.
If you took two people in a Porsche Boxter, for example, and one guy in a Ford Fusion, and ran them together at those speeds, the results wouldn't be pretty. I'm sure there would be some pretty serious injuries, and I wouldn't rule out the possibility of a death, even.
The odds are in your favor to stay belted and bagged, that's all I can say with confidence---but a guarantee? No way.
Oh the other thing I can say with confidence---new cars are way safer than old ones.
Speaking of Porsches, do you know this one? Look *carefully*
SHIFTY'S Box 'o Hints:
look at rear fender for clue to year
look closely behind the aluminum targa bar
it's not exactly what it looks like
2017 Cadillac ATS Performance Premium 3.6
I am not seeing a whole lot of fender flare, so my guess is 1967...
A rare car but personally I wouldn't pay extra for one.
But then in 2005 there was a documentary made for a TV show called called Crash Science which showed the Porsche spinning on the surface of the road and ending up at the same spot. Therefore, when anyone makes a prediction of the speed of the vehicles in the range from 50-to 80 mph, I don't argue the point because I do not have a definite answer.
The best answer I have for how fast James Dean was going is to know that he left Blackwell's Corner being followed by stunt driver Bill Hickman (who is later the driver of the black Dodge Charger in the Steve McQueen movie Bullitt) and photographer Sanford Roth in Dean's station wagon. Hickman had been ticked earlier for towing the empty car trailer over 50 mph, so he was no slow-poke.
Only thirty miles after they left Blackwell's Corner, Dean crashed at the intersection. Dean was so far ahead of Hickman that the ambulance got to the scene and put out road flares before Hickman and Roth arrived. True, the ambulance was only garaged a mile away, but the drivers were not sitting in it with the motor running waiting for the next crash. If Hickman was averaging 50 miles per hour and if it took the ambulance just 10 minutes to get to the scene, then Dean was averaging 90 miles per hour on a two-lane road on a Friday about 5:30 p.m.(or 6:30 p.m. daylight savings time, which was not used then)
Of course, this is not a firm conclusion because it might have taken the ambulance only 5 minutes to get to the accident scene and/or Hickman might have been stuck behind slow traffic. But the incident that happened just a mile before the crash where Dean nearly caused a head-on collision indicates that he was going very fast and started the race one day early. :sick: Here is the best short version of that day I have found.http://www.findadeath.com/Deceased/d/James Dean/james_dean.htm
Sometimes the simplest answers are the best. If you stand in front of a Porsche 550 Spyder, painted silver, walk about 50 years away, and put the sun in the right place, the car virtually disappears. That's probably what happened.
This accident still interests many people and you can see many of them at the intersection on September 30th, especially when that date falls on a Friday. It is fun to drive the route. Over the years, every location where James Dean was that day has changed because the buildings are gone. There is just one exception. The gas station at Ventura Blvd. and Beverly Glen is still there, although it is a flower shop now.