From the bungee cord suspension modification division of the Morris Garages department comes this 1934 MG Magnette, owned and driven by Michael Jacobsen. The car originally came to American shores with a serviceman on his way back from World War II. The bungeee cord front suspension upgrade had already been completed. Michael’s Dad Lars raced, wrecked, and rebuilt the car with the custom body and coach work it still wears. Michael races the car on the vintage circuit, and had run the Special around the bends at the Wine Country Classic at Infineon Raceway prior to heading to downtown Sonoma for the big car show.
The drivers and associated crew of this Toyota Corolla had no idea what model year it was originally. Reading the number of dents and layers of paint like tree rings might set the car’s age at hundreds of years old, but they estimated a more realistic late-seventies vintage. These guys bought and brought their Corolla to race after hearing the Friday night mayhem from work next to the Petaluma Speedway. Rather than fight, they figured why not go racing? When co-workers Darian Valestrini, Sam McCloud, and Jason Weaver spotted this former mini-stock Corolla on a local lawn with a for sale sign on it, they knew they had found their race car.
Dateline 1973. The Bay Area Air Pollution Control District announces the formation of their Vehicle Patrol section in San Francisco. Fourteen agents would patrol California roads, and issue citations to smoke-spewing scofflaws. The agents completed California Highway Patrol defensive driving courses and were trained in patrol driving techniques. Their fleet? Fourteen specially-equipped and painted 1973 Dodge Polaras! Enter John Swanson, who found a similar Polara for a nice price, and has spent the last few years recreating one of these long since decommissioned pollution pursuit specials.
The way Clunkbucket learned about how and why to run a compression test on an engine came only after bolting almost every conceivable replacement part onto a 318 V-8 in a 500-dollar ’67 Plymouth Barracuda. Only after a compression test was it determined that the engine was closer to a V-5 than a V-8. As Foghorn Leghorn often trumpeted, there’s a right way – and there’s a wrong way. Running a compression check only after replacing perfectly good carburetors and everything other engine related part is the wrong way. Running a compression test is one good way to see what’s going on inside an engine without talking it apart. 
From the diagnostic tools division of the garagelet comes the compression tester – or compression test kit. While there is a danger in gathering so many tools with blow-molded cases that you have to start labeling them in Sharpie or ’70s-vintage DYMO labeler to tell them apart, the compression tester can more than pay for itself with the discovery of one or more dead cylinders. Finding out the car you just acquired is in reality a two-and-three quarters cylinder instead of the advertised four-banger makes the compression tester in kit, or cobbled from swap meet parts form, an essential device for those of us who enjoy finding, fixing, and driving the finest past tense automobiles into the future! Being able to figure out what’s going on in that old engine is the first step in fixing it.
From the Cubists and Fauvists together at last department comes this Citroën Ami Wagon. If art history recollection serves correctly, the Fauvists were all about using paint directly from the tube in reaction to all the fussy mixing and blending at the snooty Academy. A dark shadow? Forget tertiary color relationships. Vermillion from the tube! This strategy was evidently successful. Less mixing of paint left far more time for wine drinking and finding the models. Taking Fauvism from a one-ounce tube to a five-gallon bucket by way of a broad brush is the deep ultramarine paint coating parts of this Citroën Ami station wagon. This spawn of 2CV was sighted at the Wine Country Classic show in downtown Sonoma, California. The mixed-influence Ami evidently got there under its own power and was parked in defiance beside the show, like the wild beasts that rejected the established Academy before it.
Rolling the definition of American-style executive level customs out of the late seventies into the new century is Kevin Wood and his ultra-luxurious 1978 Mercury Grand Marquis. This purple and gold beauty looked at much at home on the lawn at the recent Goodguys Rod & Custom gathering in Pleasanton, California as it would on the boulevards of Brooklyn – driven by guys that you didn’t just see driving it. The Grand Marquis not only had 460 cubic inches of V8 under the hood, but had also been upholstered with enough super plush purple and gold velour to outdo even the most regal of coaches. One can only hope Mr. Wood has a matching jeweled purple crown and scepter in the trunk for ultimate motoring authority.
Seeing or talking about a particular automobile can trigger an unusual, yet commonly experienced phenomenon. Recognizing one will suddenly reveal others. A day after running into a first-gen MK1 Ford 
