The Great Indoors

Can we get a loud amen, please, for the indoor car show? A couple of weekends ago, we got up very early on a Saturday morning, shot through the morning ritual, and headed our trusty ride from the suburbs down to the beating heart of Detroit to attend the 58th annual Detroit Autorama at Cobo Center, one of the oldest, largest and most widely respected indoor hot rod and custom car shows on the planet.

Auto show pioneer Bob Larivee and his right-hand man Bill Moeller have been doing this show and the other Autorama shows for a very long time now, and we are of the opinion that A nobody does it better and B, the Detroit show is among the very best of them, right up there with the Grand National Roadster Show, aka the Oakland Roadster Show, which is senior to the Detroit show by only three years (this year was the 61st). OK, the GNRS went from Oakland to San Francisco and is now more or less permanently located 400 miles south of Oakland in the L.A. suburb of Pomona. That’s OK, because the Detroit Autorama didn’t start out in Cobo Center in Detroit, either, because Cobo wasn’t finished until 1960. Its first home was the Coliseum at the Michigan State Fairgrounds on the north end of the city.

Anyway, we have these two wonderful shows, one in the California sunshine in January, the other in the cold, dark, wintry slush of February, a stone’s throw from the Detroit River and a thousand yards from Canada. In California, one day is just like the next, but in Detroit, there are seasons, and having this amazing display of color and shape and chrome indoors while it’s solid gray from horizon to heaven outdoors really means something to us. Call it cabin fever, call it midwinter doldrums, call it seasonal affective disorder, it’s what we get after four months of ever-shorter days and lousy cold weather, and going to an event as bright, exciting and warm as Autorama makes it go away.

If you go into Cobo Center and start subtracting the commercial spaces, everything from popcorn to tattoos, around the perimeter of the hall, the yogurt stands, the lemonade stands, and the T-short hucksters, you are still left with lots of space devoted to the worship of the automobile as art. Subtract any and every car that’s rigged for drag racing, from funny cars to dragsters to Pro Stocks, altereds and gassers, and there are lots of them, and you start to get to the core of the show:  resto-rods, hot rods and kustoms (sorry, but we will always spell that word with a k instead of a c, an indicator of our age and our position). These are the kinds of cars that we walk around, inspect, critique, examine and pour love over, up and down the aisles, all day long. At Cobo, they make it easy to see all of the design, art and craftsmanship that goes into each automotive artifact on the floor. The cars here are mostly shown with driver’s door open, hood up, and trunk open, and many are shown in the classic car show style, with mirrors on the floor.

There were hundreds of cars, trucks, race cars and motorcycles at Autorama, of course, but we found ourselves gravitating to the really cool historic stuff: Don Morton’s rescued ’56 Thunderbird kustom that he’s had forever, winner of the show’s special award for preservation. John “Top Hat” Jendza’s ’42 Cadillac resto-rod, all black, all stock on the outside, with a huge Chevy bigblock under the hood. Jimmy Addison’s ’67 Plymouth Satellite GTX Hemi street racer, “The Silver Bullet,” the winningest street racer in the history of Woodward Avenue, no owned by collector Harold Sullivan. Chuck Miller’s entire collection of wacky hot rod creations, displayed this year in a special space as the show honored him for his entire body of work. Maybe we like these cars because their owner/builders are as old as or older than we are. Maybe we like them just because they’re cool.

Aside from these standouts, there were Fords galore on the floor, and we like Ford hot rods better than any other kind, probably because they are the very roots of this sport and hobby, simple mass-produced cars turned into one-of-a-kind works of mechanical art. Full disclosure: we worked at Ford for almost 10 years, and we have owned and operated a ’30, a ’40, a ’50, a ’56 convertible, a ’50 Merc, a ’51 Merc, a Lincoln Mark VII, a couple of Escorts, and a Sierra XR4X4 along the way. The 2010 Autorama hosted an entire collection of 1940 Fords, 70-year-old coupes, sedans and convertibles that still look wonderful with their Art Deco design licks, fabulous headlamp escutcheons, and gracious, shapely bodies and fenders. Beyond that, there were Ts and As and Deuces and Thirties Fords all over the joint with everything ahead of the firewall from blown Hemis to simple, timeless, elegant flathead V-8s.

And that brings us to the most special element of the Detroit Autorama, the Ridler Award, Michigan’s answer to the America’s Most Beautiful Roadster award given annually at the show in Pomona. Named for athlete, coach, and entertainment producer Don Ridler, who died in 1963, the Ridler award has been presented annually to the best new car in the show (you get only one chance with each new creation you build here). This year, 33 car owners asked to be considered, eight graduated to the Pirelli Great 8 list of finalists, and then there was one.

The Great 8 contenders were: Tammy Ray’s ’33 Ford phaeton, The Udell’s (Rich, Paige & Hoochie) ’34 Ford roadster, Scott & Jan Burton’s ’34 Ford 3 window, Sue & Bill Keck’s ’37 Chevy Master Deluxe, Jim & Dana Linton’s ’34 Ford 3-window, Bob & Jean Walrich’s ’33 Ford Victoria, Francis J. Roxas’ ’34 Packard Boat Tail Coupe, and Steve Frisbee’s ’33 Dodge pickup.

This year, the Ridler award went to Tammy Ray of Dahlonega, Georgia, and her golden-hued, chopped ’33 Ford phaeton, Gold Digger, built for her by T&T Customs.  Ray is the first female car owner EVER to win the Ridler award on her own.  The proportions, the curvatures, and the details of this car made us swoon every time we circled around it on the show floor.  Spectacular.  Just like every other car in the show, only more so.

If you’re not doing anything on the third weekend in February next year, buy a plane ticket, fly to Detroit, and catch the Autorama. You won’t be sorry, and Detroit needs the money you will undoubtedly leave behind.

58th Annual Detroit Autorama Gallery

Jim McCraw is a former editor of Motor Trend, Hot Rod, and Super Stock, and a veteran automotive freelancer for such titles as Car and Driver, Road & Track, AutoWeek, Penthouse, The New York Times, Popular Mechanics and Popular Science. He is an avid racing fan, high-performance car freak, seeker of nutballs and nutball cars, and lover of fast motorcycles who lives in Dearborn, Michigan. If he comes back as a car, he wants to be a 1968 Ford Mustang 428 Cobra Jet lightweight.