There’s another entry in the race for next design for Indy cars (see the February 27 blog below) and while the company involved is brand new, the players all have very familiar faces.

The new entry is from BAT Engineering. That’s B as in Bruce Ashmore. A as in Alan Mertens. And T as in Tim Wardrop.

Ashmore formerly worked at Lola and Reynard, and crafted the cars that won the Indy 500 in 1990, 1995 and 1996 and 11 CART or IRL championships.

At March and Galmer, Mertens designed cars that won Indy six times and took a pair of series championships. Recently has been designing disaster recovery systems for the nuclear power industry, which certainly seems to qualify him for helping to design the vehicle that will help Indy car racing recover from its disastrous demise in recent seasons.

Wardrop is an engineer whose G-Force cars won twice at Indy, where one of his cars still holds the records for the fastest single and qualifying laps.

Here’s the computer rendering of their idea:

-- Larry Edsall

The Silk Road. The Orient Express. The Pan-American Highway. The Oregon Trail. Route 66: The Motor Road. All of these historic routes were designed to carry people or goods to exotic locations. Decades or even centuries later, just their mention can carry us along on a romantically nostalgic journey.

But that isn’t the case so for the Santa Fe Trail. After all, what could be the big deal about a trail, road, highway, track or trace that linked western Missouri with northern New Mexico? How challenging or exciting could it have been to travel across the plains? Doesn’t the word “plain” pretty much describe it?

Well, if you read Mark Einsel’s new book, The Historic Santa Fe Trail, the route originally known as the Mexican Trace, you’ll learn that blazing and following this pathway was a very big deal for a pair of young nations.

You see, when Sen. Thomas Hart Benton asked Congress for $30,000 to pay a survey team to find a way across the prairie to encourage international trade, the United States was still a very young and eagerly expanding nation. In fact, Benton represented Missouri, then a brand-new and only the 24^th state within the union.

Meanwhile, New Mexico not only was not a united state, it wasn’t even part of this country. Santa Fe, a city with more than three centuries of history, was one of the northernmost cities of the nation of Mexico, although Mexico, too, was a young nation in that it had just declared its independence from colonial rule by Spain.

The Spanish restricted the source of goods that people living under its rule could obtain. If Mexicans wanted cotton goods or cooking utensils, they couldn’t get them from their neighbors to the north but had to pay whatever the Spanish charged them to bring them over from Europe or other Spanish colonies.

An example, a yard of cotton that cost 30 cents in St. Louis cost $3 in Santa Fe.

Note, too, that Santa Fe Trail commerce was a two-way street. Wagons hauled goods both ways. Trade with Mexico brought various goods and especially new foods to the American diet, including chocolate. Both countries also benefited from new medicines obtained from the other.

Einsel and her husband were cattle ranchers in her native Kansas for several decades. She previously wrote a state history -- Kansas: The Priceless Prairie. Now, she tells story the Santa Fe Trail’s story – and the story of those who blazed and traveled the trail -- in very clearly written text.

I sought a review copy of the book ($15.99 retail or $12.47 from amazon.com) because of a personal interest in the pioneer trails across our country, an interest spurred, no doubt, because my great grandmother died on the Oregon Trail.

Several years ago, I drove from the Midwest to the Southwest along paved roads closely paralleling the historic Santa Fe Trail. I only wish Mary Einsel had written this book a decade ago so I could have read it in conjunction with that drive. Or maybe it’s time to take that drive again.

I may be absenting myself from this space for the next couple of weeks as I try to complete a book project with a deadline looming. However, while I’m gone, I thought the least I could do was to leave you with some links that I’m sure you’ll find interesting and even entertaining:

The first is a road atlas for the truly adventurous driver, photographs of what one person considers to be the 19 most complex and dangerous roads in the world. Here’s the link:

www.waze.com/blog/the-19-most-complex-and-dangerous-roads-in-the-world

Now, think about driving those roads when they’re waist-deep in snow, which actually might be possible if Henry Ford had put this amazing 1926 snow tractor into production:

http://forum.treasurenet.com/index.php/topic,213971.0/topicseen.html

Now, we’ll turn the clock ahead a few decades for a look at the 1958 National Hot Rod Association National championship drag races, which were held not far from Ford’s headquarters in suburban Detroit:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqCm7YO2GOI&feature=player_embedded

And while we’re on a nice, nostalgic trip, take a look at these classic cars, which – believe it or not – are scale models:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/24796741@N05/sets/72157604247

242338/show/with/2346008881/

-- Larry Edsall

Last summer, when I was visiting the Midwest, my youngest daughter – she whose family will grow this summer to husband, wife, son, new baby, and don’t forget, Vegas, the wonder dog, and thus it may be time to move out of the rented town house and into a home with more bedrooms (including one for visiting grandparents), and don’t forget a fenced-in back yard for Vegas…

Anyway, she got me to watching a television show called House Hunters. In the show, someone or some couple hunting for a house is shown three properties, at least two of them in their price range, and one of which they have to buy. The lure to the viewer, I guess, is to see the houses, how the person or couple reacts to them, and to guess which one they’ll select.

Now, I’m not eager to think about moving, though it can be fun to watch, and speaking of watching, I’ve found a website that let’s me dream not only about exotic property but about all of those classic cars I’d like to own.

The website is called CarProperty.com (www.carproperty.com) and was launched three years ago by Bob “B.C.” Cross, who lives between Palo Alto and San Jose in what generally is known as Silicon Valley.

No surprise, Cross built his own computer software company, and later did a decade as an information technology consultant. But then he got his real estate license.

You see, Cross’s father was a car collector, and so were his father’s friends. Cross remembered how his dad and his friends were always talking about needing homes with more garage space for their cars. With the boom in prosperity in Silicon Valley creating new car collectors in need to more space for their cars, Cross recognized a niche market.

While the MLS focuses on things such as bed and bathrooms, it doesn’t go into the details of garage stalls, ceiling heights to accommodate car lifts, etc.

Cross not only did general real estate work, but specialized in properties that would appeal to car collectors. When he realized that he was one of the few agents anywhere providing such a service, he launched his website as a place people could see such properties regardless of where they lived – or planned to move.

But as I’ve discovered while watching House Hunters, even if you’re not planning to move, it can be fun to see what’s available – and, O.K., to dream about owning such a place, and in our car-enthusiast’s case, owning the cars to fill all those garage stalls.

So lately I’ve been clicking through the various ads on www.carproperty.com, where you get to go inside Nicholas Cage’s place on Newport Beach and the 20-car property formerly owned by Steve McQueen. You also get to see lakeside and mountain hideaways with spectacular views – and great garages.

You can dream about buying 17 acres on old Route 66 complete with a 1950’s café, two vintage gas stations, a car wash and plenty of garage space. O.K., they’re real fixer-uppers, but it doesn’t cost anything to dream.

O.K., back to the ads… Hey, I just found a 10-car property not far from my daughter’s town house. I wonder if they’d be interested.

-- Larry Edsall

A couple of weeks ago, I shared with you the four collector cars I wanted to drive home from Arizona Auction Week. As a matter of review, they were: from Barrett-Jackson, the 1959 Cadillac Coupe de Ville restyled by Raymond Lowey; from Russo and Steele, the 1948 Tucker 48 convertible; from RM, the 1954 Mercury XM-800 concept car; from Gooding & Co., the 1948 Cadillac Series 62 cabriolet with coachwork by Jacques Saoutchik.

Of course, I’d selected those cars after reviewing only the auction catalogs. I’d yet to see the more than 2000 collector cars available in the flesh – well, my flesh and their sheetmetal – and thus I reserved the right to change my mind. Which I have.

After hours of walking the tents at Barrett-Jackson, Gooding, and Russo and Steele (and in the later case first while those tents were up and then after a storm took them down), and after several trips around the parking garage where cars are kept during the RM auction, I’ve revised my list.

My choice from Russo and Steele, however, remains the same. I’d still want that Tucker convertible, even though I don’t necessarily believe the story that it was a secret project started within the Tucker factory. Arizona Republic reporter Peter Corbett tracked down Preston Tucker’s daughter-in-law, now 82 years old and living in Scottsdale.

“There never was a convertible,” she told the newspaper. “All the cars were the same, just different colors.”

But whether the idea for a convertible came from within the Tucker factory or years later when someone found a leftover chassis and some body components, the car is unique, appears to have been very well assembled, and comes with something every collector car should have – a story – in this case, a delightful mystery that likely will never be solved to everyone’s satisfaction.

My choice from RM turns out not to be the Mercury concept car – though it is amazingly gorgeous, and unlike General Motors or Chrysler, it was rare for Ford to build full-scale concept vehicles in the 1950s. Much to my surprise, the two cars at RM that sparked my desire were the 1934 Brewster Ford Town Car and the 1930 MG M-type boat tail speedster.

That neither car approaches the Mercury in value isn’t important. The XM-800 sold for nearly half a million dollars. The Brewster went for $77K and the MG for $31,900. But it’s heart strings, not dollar signs, that draw us like iron filings to such sheetmetal magnets. That little MG with its boat tail design is, well, just so sweet, and the design of the Brewster Ford, especially the way its heart-shaped radiator sweeps down and forward into the bumper, makes the car look like its in motion even when it’s parked in a dark garage.

O.K., if I can have only one, I’ll take the Brewster, not only because I like the way it looks, but again, because of the story of how Brewster and Ford got together in the first place. The Brewsters were building carriages as early as 1810, but after the turn of the century they started creating bodies for motor cars, especially Rolls-Royces. When the Depression struck, Rolls retreated to England and Brewster needed a new client. Fortunately, former Brewster designer Eugene “Bob” Gregorie had been hired as head of styling for Ford and, well, the rest, as they say, is history.

As to my choice from Gooding & Co., as much as I find the streamlined Saoutchik Cadillac exotically attractive, the car I want from the auction is the one that was parked just behind it in the pre-auction display area – the 1937 “Tommy Lee Speedster” created by Frank Kurtis. This one had me at “hello,” which in the case of this seductively long and low, Offenhauser-powered and teardrop-fendered roadster was the moment I saw how the four exhaust pipes emerge through the bright metalwork that wraps around the car’s hood and how those exhaust tubes flow into a single tailpipe that runs all the way back along the side of the car.

With a car such as this, it’s no wonder Tommy Lee became such a Hollywood playboy.  And we won’t even get into the fact that the fenders could be removed so the car could be raced against other hot rods on Southern California’s dry lakes.

And now, my choice from Barrett-Jackson: Yes, I really like the Loewy Cadillac, and again it’s a car that combines style and story. But, let’s face it, people go to Barrett-Jackson not for elegance but for entertainment. It’s the greatest show on four wheels, and thus my choice is full of whimsy. It’s the 1926 Hudson Speedster “Grapes of Wrath.”

Now there was nothing whimsical about the Joad family and John Steinbeck’s Dust Bowl tale about the Grapes of Wrath. The whimsy didn’t arrive until Gary Wales got his hands on the ’26 Hudson Super Six that had been modified by Twentieth Century-Fox for the movie portrayal of Steinbeck’s novel. Wales found the car in a garage after termites had spent decades consuming the Hudson’s wooden components. He knew he couldn’t restore the car to either its factory or movie specification, and besides, that’s not his style anyway. Wales likes to redo cars in a way that preserves them for posterity but entertains at the same time.

He’d long liked photos he’d seen of early racecars with long tails that provided a convenient place to carry spare tires like donuts on a dowel, so he and master mechanic Andres Aranada gave the Hudson new life as sort of a racecar recreation.

When I saw the car with its bright red paint and donut-style spare mounted on its finned tail cone, I thought of my grandchildren, and of grandchildren everywhere – and of their parents and grandparents – who would delight at seeing the car parade through the streets of every small town that still celebrates holidays and centennials and victories by the local high school sports teams with parades and picnics.

In 1960, at the age of 58, John Steinbeck and his dog, Charlie, drove across America. As Steinbeck put it in Travels with Charlie, they undertook the trip to hear and smell and see the land and its people first hand.

Wouldn’t it be great to spend the summer – Memorial Day to Labor Day -- retracing that trip, and meandering off the route as whimsy strikes -- in this Steinbeck Speedster?

-- Larry Edsall

I knew Dario Franchitti was skilled at driving and dating, but I had no idea he had such a delightfully devilish sense of humor.

Franchitti is the 2007 Indianapolis 500 winner and two-time Indy car racing champion. He came to Phoenix yesterday to be the grand marshal for the third annual Wheels of Wellness classic race car show.

Unfortunately, his wife wasn’t with him. She’d spent Saturday watching a University of Kentucky basketball game at Auburn, Alabama, while Dario was in Indianapolis on business. After the game, she then flew northeast to New York City while Dario was heading southwest across the country.

By the way, she, Mrs. Franchitti, is Ashley Judd, the actress.

The Wheels of Wellness kicks off Arizona’s classic car auction week with a gathering of 30 or so historic racing cars, all parked on the grounds around an historic downtown Phoenix home that serves as the base for support and educational programs that The Wellness Community Arizona supplies free to cancer patients and their care-givers.

In addition to racing cars, Wheels of Wellness organizers assemble a group of racing drivers for a panel discussion. This year, in addition to Franchitti, the table included Bob Bondurant, Arie Luyendyk, Didier Theys and Darren Law, with another racer, Lyn St. James, serving as moderator. Among them, that group has a world sports car championship, four Indy 500 victories, four overall victories in the 24 Hours of Daytona and several additional national and series championships.

Almost immediately, Franchitti teased Luyendyk about his hair, which is now nicely cropped but which used to be, well, as Franchitti put it, used to be a mullet.

As Indy 500 winners, Franchitti and Luyendyk both have their images engraved on the Borg Warner trophy. Franchitti chided Luyendyk that on the trophy, Luyendyk’s hair is so long that it “looks like a mud flap.”

St. James joined in, noting that when they both were racing at Indy, Luyendyk's hair always was longer than hers.

To be fair, Franchitti made himself the target of his own remarks. He said he’d spent Saturday visiting John Force’s drag racing shop in Indianapolis, checking out Force’s 300-miles-per-hour Funny Cars. 

“I’d love to drive one,” Franchitti said, but, he admitted, “I don’t think I have the beans to pull the trigger.”

Franchitti left Indy cars for a while to try stock car racing. Asked what the biggest difference was between the two disciplines, he said it had nothing to do with the racing, but hinted that the dimensions of the cars may have an impact on the drivers. For example, before moving into stock cars, Juan Pablo Montoya also raced Indy cars, which have very snug cockpits. Franchitti indicated that since making the switch, Montoya had put on some weight. Indeed, he added, the biggest challenge for the team for which Franchitti and Montoya will be teammates in the upcoming 24 Hours of Daytona sports car race will be wedging Montoya into the driver’s seat.

Asked about the differences he’s experienced racing for the Andretti-Green and Target Ganassi Indy car teams, Franchitti responded: “I thought Michael [Andretti] likes to win, but Chip [Ganassi] takes it to another level.”

As evidence, he said, after winning the Indy Racing League championship this past season, Ganassi didn’t have a team celebration but a two-day debriefing during which the team went back through the entire season to analyze a pit stop here or a corner there where it might have cut a fraction of a second off a lap time.

The drivers on the Wheels of Wellness each talked about how they got started in racing and how the sport had changed over the years.

Bondurant noted that his first race car, a British Morgan, had a chassis made in part from wood. He also said that to prepare for the Targa Florio race in the 1960s, he went to Sicily two weeks before the event and spent eight hours a day, seven days each week, driving the more than 40-mile, mountain-roads circuit over and over and over again in a passenger car.

When it came Law’s turn, he admitted that he might have an early advantage since, “I didn’t have a wooden car.” He also said that to prepare for his debut last summer in the 24 Hours of Le Mans, he’d simply plugged a racing video game with the Le Mans circuit into his Xbox and practiced driving laps from the comfort of his home.

-- Larry Edsall

I picked up my press credentials today for what Barrett-Jackson modestly proclaims to be “The World’s Greatest Collector Car Auction.”

By the way, that phrase, “The World’s Greatest Collector Car Auction” is a registered trademark. Given that fact, I think somebody should trademark “The World’s Greatest Collector Car Auction Week” and apply it to what’s going to take place hereabouts in the coming days.

Until that occurs, however, we’ll simply refer to what is about to unfold as Arizona Auction Week, which begins Saturday with the International Classic event at the company’s home grounds in Gilbert, an East Valley suburb of Phoenix, and a Kruse International event that’s scheduled on the west side of town, at the hotel that is part of the complex in Glendale that includes the stadium and arena where the Arizona Cardinals and Phoenix Coyotes play their games.

Barrett-Jackson starts on Monday at WestWorld in Scottsdale, Russo and Steele on Wednesday, and more or less kitty-korner across the highway from Barrett-Jackson, with RM at the Biltmore on Thursday, and Silver at the casino in Fountain Hills and Gooding at the Scottsdale Fashion Square shopping center on Friday.

Yes, that’s seven events, at which something like 3000 collector cars (and trucks and a few boats and even an historic airplane) will be up for auction. Prices will range from hundreds of dollars to more than a million – and, for some vehicles, most likely several million.

Like me, you probably don’t have several million to spend at the auction. In fact, like me, you might not even have several hundred to spend at the auction. But that doesn’t mean we can’t pretend. So let’s pretend: If we could afford it, what would we want to drive home from the auctions?

I’ve picked four vehicles, one from each of the major auctions. Here they are:

At Barrett-Jackson, I’d want the 1959 Cadillac Coupe De Ville (right) that was modified by famed industrial designer Raymond Loewy. Loewy disdained big fins and flashy chrome and his transformation of the ’59 Caddy is stunningly sleek and delightfully detailed for its day. (Loewy had the car built in France and used it for a European tour with his wife and daughter, then brought it to the U.S. and parked it at his home in Palm Springs until 1970, when he sold it to a neighbor.

At Russo and Steele, I’d want the 1948 Tucker 48 convertible (left), even if, as some critics contend, the car isn’t really a factory prototype started while Preston Tucker was still building his three-eyed, rear-engined cars.

Tuckers were cherished by car collectors long before Francis Ford Coppola cast Jeff Bridges in the title role of the movie Tucker: The Man and His Dream. Tucker production ended after 51 sedans. This convertible, which rides on chassis No. 57, was either a prototype for an anticipated convertible version or a one-off Tucker was building for his wife, Vera. Regardless, it was not finished until last year, the work being done at Benchmarks Classics, a classic car restoration shop in Madison, Wisconsin.

At RM, I’d want the 1956 Chrysler Plainsman concept car, or maybe the 1954 Mercury XM-800 “dream car,” or maybe the green and copper-colored 1941 Chrysler Thunderbolt concept. Or, hey, since I’m bidding with play money, I’d bring home all three. I know, I said I’d pick one car at each auction. I really like station wagons, and the Plainsman concept something of the ultimate statement of the 1950s family transporter. But if I can pick only one car at RM, it’s the Mercury concept (above), in part because it is gorgeous in a grotesque sort of way, in part because unlike General Motors and Chrysler, Ford did relatively few concept cars in the 1950s.

At Gooding, I’d want the 1948 Cadillac Series 62 custom cabriolet with coachwork by Saoutchik (left). Some might think the amount of chrome and the purple and black two-tone paint job are hideous, but this car is one of just two post-war Cadillacs with bodywork by Jacques Saoutchik, one of the masters of 1930s streamlining.

Those are my selections – for today. A disclaimer: The selections I’ve made are based only on what I’ve seen in the auction catalogs. I’m liable and readily eager to change my mind once I’ve been to each of the auction venues and seen each of the cars in the flesh… oops, I mean in the sheetmetal. I’d post another blog after the auctions and share a new list of what I wish I could have driven home from each.

-- Larry Edsall

Like a swell that builds until it’s a full-fledged tsunami, car culture seems to incubate in California until it builds into a wave that crashes inland from the Pacific Ocean and rolls across the country toward the nation’s eastern shore.

For classic car collectors, the newest wave building in California is something called the GreenRod Project – and that’s green in more than one of its definitions because it’s going to cost you money while it cleans up your classic vehicle’s emissions.

But it could have been much worse. It could have taken away the keys to your cherished collector car.

“This has been brewing for about five years,” said Steve McDonald, vice president of government affairs for the Specialty Equipment Market Association (SEMA), the trade association for automotive aftermarket product manufacturers. “It originated because the attorney general’s office in California was going after illegally titled and registered specialty construction vehicles (SCV).”

SCVs include kit cars, hot rods, replicas and vehicles such as the so-called restomods that have been restored to other than factory specification.

A big part of the problem was collector vehicle owners’ tendency toward titling and registration that may be, well, let’s just say it can be less than truthful. For example, you buy a brand new kit to build what looks like a genuine 1932 Ford-based hot rod but you register the vehicle as a ’32, thus understating its true value and avoiding the state’s strict emission regulations for late-model vehicles.

According to McDonald, the California AG’s office estimates there are 70,000 such vehicles in that state.

The AG’s office also was ready to set up traps at car shows and other classic car gatherings, confiscating vehicles and charging their owners with felonies.

As it did when it took action to prevent the recent Cash-for-Clunkers program from crushing classic collectible vehicles, SEMA became involved. Legislation was crafted in Sacramento that instructed the California Dept. of Motor Vehicles had to develop a program to deal with the situation. That program, the GreenRod Program, provides amnesty throughout 2010 if owners of SCVs report the vehicle’s true value and age, pay any back taxes and penalties, and make sure the vehicle passes the appropriate emissions test.

The program includes emission exemptions for 500 vehicles under a first-come, first-served basis. If a car owner does not get one of the exemptions, the alternative can be expensive. It could mean installing an emission-compliant engine or a SEMA-engineered “retrofit kit” that includes an electronic fuel-injection system, controller, exhaust headers, camshaft, mufflers and catalytic converter.

Based on what it cost some car owners who were prosecuted, those fines and taxes figure to average around $4,000 per vehicle, says SEMA.

At the moment, only General Motors produces a fully California emission-certified crate engine. That LS3 V8 will cost around $7,900, plus nearly that much more if you have to hire someone to do the installation. The cost of the SEMA-engineered retrofit kit is less, around $6,000, but that figure nearly doubles if you need to hire someone to do the mechanical work.

Jim McFarland, a Tennessee-based technical consultant who worked up the retrofit kit for SEMA, said switching from carburetors to fuel injection provides benefits beyond emissions. “For the emissions level we were trying to -- and did achieve -- switching from carburetors to electronic fuel injection was almost a foregone conclusion,” he explained. Not only were those emission levels achieved, he said, but there are other “significant benefits.” Such as? “There are power gains and better fuel economy, too,” said McFarland.

McFarland added that while only GM makes a compliant crate engine (the E-Rod powerplant it unveiled late last year at the SEMA Show), Ford, Chrysler (Mopar), Honda and Roush Performance have had discussions with SEMA about producing such engines.

“It’s wonderful to know that SEMA is out there attempting to fix something that allows these cars to live and to be enjoyed on the roadways, and allows the owners to be free from this cross they bear every time they take this car out,” said Steve Davis, a long-time California classic car collector, dealer and activist who also is president of the Barrett-Jackson collector car auction company.

Davis has personal experience dealing with California's legal system. Several years ago, he led the grassroots drive -- collecting 50,000 signatures on petitions and arguing in the state legislature -- against an emissions proposal that threatened to destroy the collector car hobby in the state.

Davis says classic car owners in the other 49 states need to pay attention to what’s happening in California.

“It’s going to increase awareness in other states,” he said. “Each state is different in how they look at these cars, but historically, what happens in California does ripple across the nation.”

--Larry Edsall