December 24, 2008
By Larry Van Zandt
I normally absolutely despise Barrett-Jackson vehicle auctions -- But in the case of this proposed plan, by the Darrell Gwynn Foundation: 1970 Year One Goldberg Plymouth Superbird.....I support the auction wholeheartedly, and am glad for once that such a cash-generating entity exists, nevermind whatever negative thoughts I might have (and keep) about the people who run it.
I used to toy around with muscle cars, having owned 5 1970-1971 Ford Torinos (three of them being modified 351C cars, and one of them being a 1970 Ford Torino Cobra 429CJ/4-speed, with a built 429 SCJ engine in the car), a 1968 Chevy Impala with factory 427/4-speed, a 1967 Fairlane 500 XL with a 428CJ/C6 automatic, several fox-body Mustangs (’79 Cobra with a 460 swap, ’82, ’83, ’84, ’85, and ’89 GT’s, along with several other Fox-body non-mustang products), not to mention working on dozens of customer muscle cars and 1932-1948 street rods first beginning with the various repair shops my father owned, the custom upholstery shop I worked at in my early 20’s (I don’t know why I didn’t stick with that job, my custom interior designs won a few awards at some major shows….oh yeah, now I remember, I can’t run a sewing machine), and finally to the part-time repair shop I ran out of a two-bay detached garage up until June of this year, with my last two tasks being installing BBK long-tube headers on a 1997 Mustang Cobra (not for the faint of heart), and replacing/rebuilding the convertible top and frame assembly on a 1967 Mustang convertible…..oh, and by the way? For those of you pining for a Mustang convertible of the 1960’s, but have never owned one?
It took me two months of late nights just to get the stupid side windows to align properly, due to the shoddy design. Yes, there will be some who say it shouldn’t have taken that long….but I’m a perfectionist. My suggestion is to buy a 2005-up Mustang, and have something that actually drives nice, and gets 20+ mpg on the freeway.
By the way, my current project? A 1992 Ford Thunderbird 5.0 LX Sport, Northwest Edition teal green and black leather interior. I bought this car for my Mom back in 1999, and I have been throwing the occasional modification or two at the car for the entire time she’s owned it. She died in March of this year, and reluctantly, I took possession of the car. However, since she enjoyed my monkeying around with the car, I’m building a bigger engine for it, and adding a T-bird Super Coupe 5-speed transmission, not to mention adding a small air damn under the front bumper (sort of a NASCAR addition, I liked the T-bird stock cars of the 1990’s), in addition to a hundred other minute details that I’m addressing…
I apologize for rambling about my muscle car hobby, but it’s for a reason, and that reason is Barrett-Jackson…However, I will get to that point in a few minutes.
I’m only 36 years of age, but I’ve had to learn about the hobby from an early point in my childhood, as my half-wit father was constantly bringing home different muscle cars from the 1960’s and 1970’s. Right about the time I was just getting used to a Super Sport Chevelle, a Roadrunner would be replacing it two weeks later. One the favorite stories I like to tell about my mother is the year we spent with a 1970 Superbird, around 1980. My Mom and Dad divorced in 1975, so the only time I got to see my father was on road trips to various drag strips during the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, and during the summer….which of course was also spent at drag strips. However, the rest of the time I was with my Mom.
My Father provided cars for my Mom to drive, in lieu of child support (we already had a car, but it was broken down all of the time, and my Father never got around to fixing it…and the child support would have come in handy). However, one particular car the old man dropped off was being rather problematic, it being a 1977 Pontiac Astre’ wagon (Pontiac version of the Vega) with a 350 and a stupidly huge camshaft that loaded up the engine at traffic lights. My mother would spend hours on the phone chewing out my Father about that car…and three weeks or so later, the Superbird showed up. At the time, knowing my Father, he probably didn’t spend a whole lot on the car, but it didn’t have a lot of miles, and was beautiful. Petty blue, base 440 (from what I recall, anyway) with a column shifter and bench seat, and it had a set of 15” Magnum 500 wheels on it, from a Mustang, (It had Mustang center caps on the wheels)…I’ve seen a few pictures of the car since then, to reinforce my memory…
And it was entirely stock. No chrome under the hood. We drove it everywhere. It looked like it came straight off of a NASCAR track, yet you could drive it to the store…I think it even had working A/C. The trunk was huge, the seats were huge and comfy, and it flew when you punched the gas, which my Mom often did on freeway on-ramps. The car started every time you turned the key, and the low rumble that only a late 1960’s 440 creates produced goose bumps. We had that car for about a year (a record, as usually, my Mom never had a car from my Father for more than three or four weeks)….however, one day, in the same manner that he usually arrived at the house……unannounced….. my father showed up with a two-year-old 1978 Plymouth Roadrunner to let my mother drive in place of the existing ‘Bird, and my Father almost had to pry the Superbird keys from my Mom’s hand.
My Mom was not happy.
The replacement 1978 Roadrunner was a total heap. I think it broke down at least three times a day during the three or four weeks we had it, even if we didn’t drive it. After one particular breakdown, which had us stranded on a major interstate during rush hour traffic, we eventually got the car started, and turned around for home, where she called my Father, angry as I have ever seen her. Since her hair was messed up from getting grease in it, she took a shower when we got home, and after she got out, with her hair still in curlers, dressed up in a bathrobe, she piled myself and my sister into the accursed Plymouth product, and limped it to my father’s business (I think he was selling engine analyzer tools or something at the time, along with used cars), and upon arrival, she had us wait in the car, and she marched into his office, still wearing the slippers, bathrobe, curlers, and cigarette hanging from her mouth. I loved my Mom more than anything, but you didn’t want to be anywhere within 500 miles of her when she got angry.
The purpose of the lovely visit to my Father’s place of business?
She wanted the Superbird back.
It was sitting not more than 10 yards or so from where we were parked….it looked just like the last time we saw it, other than it now had Centerline wheels on it….with the big black ‘Superbird’ logo on the sides. It seemed to beckon to my sister and I…for some strange reason, I had the movie ‘The Love Bug’ on my mind when looking at the car, thinking that ‘Birdie’ wanted to escape his chain-link-fence prison, punt the ‘Thorndyke Special’ into the weeds, and go shooting down the side of a mountain, with Beatnik music playing in the background. And about the time I had the sudden scary image of Buddy Hackett trying to put love beads on the rearview mirror, my Mom stormed out of my Father’s office, with the familiar Superbird keys in her hand.
She dragged us out of the disaster in engineering that the Roadrunner represented, and after my Father unlocked the fence gate, my Mom opened up the Superbird, and we climbed into the car. Wait a moment….something’s different here.
The column shifter is gone.
In its place is what appears to be a Hurst automatic shifter mounted to the floor, and it was one of those ratchet shifters that women (and some men) have way too much trouble with. My Mom said some not-so-nice things about my Father’s mechanical ability at that point, and she then tried to start the car.
However, the Superbird sounded a lot different than it did a month or so ago….as when it fired off, it sounded like one of my Dad’s drag car engines instead of the nice mellow rumble that the 440 used to make. My Mom was really angry now, as it died 15-20 times as she tried to warm it up.
Well, my Dad being…….my Dad, he had just dropped a nasty dual-carbed Hemi into the car (I saw the engine after we got it home), and had barely broke it in, hence his stern opposition to her taking it back. However, I found out later that since she was not enforcing a court-mandated child support plan, he gave her back the Superbird to drive so she would be quiet and go away….but of course, neglected to tell her that the car was no longer the same.
The problem is that with the new engine, it wouldn’t idle to save anyone’s life, without loading up almost instantly. However, since she’s been driving my Father’s creations for several years now, she’s become a pretty darn good driver, and from what I understand, my mother won trophies doing a bit of local SCCA racing up in Portland and Seattle, yet my half-wit father kept the trophies after the break-up….and peeled her name off of all of them, claiming that they were ‘his’. So while she’s got curlers in her hair, an angry scowl on her face, and half-lit cigarette hanging from her mouth, she backed the Superbird out into the street, revved the engine a few times to clear the carbs, somehow managed to get the car into low gear, and floored it, doing an impressive industrial-block-long burnout, engine going ‘WAAAAAAAAAA!!!!’, with all eight carb barrels open (engaging in ‘Hemi-song’), the car floating sideways, obliterating the rear tires as she banged the shifter from low into 2nd, and then 2nd into 3rd, keeping her foot glued onto the loud pedal, sneer still on her face….and she finally let off towards the end of the block, with the car snapping back towards the center of the street as the rear tires quit spinning and hooked up.
Good thing we immediately put our seat belts on….as we saw something coming from the way my mother looked as she got into the Superbird.
She somehow managed to get the car home without too much incident, but my Father got the point a day later, and dropped off a relatively-mild 1969 Mach I 428 Cobra Jet Mustang with an automatic to replace the now-nasty Superbird. Don’t get me wrong; I loved the Mustang just as much as the Superbird….even more than the ‘Bird……but the Mustang wasn’t anywhere near ‘family friendly’ as the Plymouth. I don’t recall whatever happened to the Mustang, but we never saw the Superbird ever again.
At this point, I apologize for my long story, but there is a reason for my saying all of this, and it applies to Barrett-Jackson.
I’ve been following how much muscle cars and street rods have been selling for since the first pricing ‘boom’ during 1990-1991. Prices dropped quite a bit from that point, however, during the last several years, Muscle car and Street-rod pricing for almost everything from the 1930’s to the early 1970’s has shot through the roof, putting these cars well out of the reach of most mere mortals. At the center of this debacle are Barrett-Jackson and the resulting morass that has occurred with thousands of people similarly trying to make their fortunes on one car sale.
The result? I have never seen so many greasy old men trying to push off absolute rusted crap at such incredibly sky-high prices.
And for those of you who might not know? You want to know THE one thing that keeps being echoed by these people who hope to make a ‘lottery’ sale, at your expense?
“I saw one of these go for $(fill in the blank with some stupidly insane amount) on Barrett-Jackson! That’s why I’m asking $15,000 for a plain-jane 1965 6-cylinder Mustang, because I once saw a same-year Mustang GT sell for $60,000!!!”
These greaseballs at Barrett-Jackson have somehow managed to take away almost an entire hobby from one socioeconomic group, and sell it to another, with those not of extended-pocket book that are wanting to get into a car like the one their dad drove being forced to fork over tens of thousands of dollars for cars that really weren’t that great to begin with. Due to the insane amounts some of these over-hyped cars are fetching, potential customers on the lower end of the budget scale are forced to either stay away from the hobby (as I have abandoned anything older than 1990, as I grew weary of trying to dig up replacement parts from scalpers), or settle for some rusted heap that they will end up spending $20K-$40K on just to get them to look as good as new. I can recall a 1970 Torino Cobra (similar to my old one) costing maybe $17K, completely restored, in the late 1990’s…..and now? I’ve seen base models going for $70K-$100K…unless it happens to be optioned out REALLY well.
They aren’t worth it. I’m a little offended when Barrett-Jackson holds my memories for ransom, as I wasn’t aware that trying to re-live one’s childhood or teen-age years should come at so high a price, when at times, the memories are all we have. How many other people have such fond memories of stories similar to my remembrances of my mom in curlers, trying to shift tectonic plates with the Superbird, but are forced to skip their dreams, due to some of these cars costing twice as much as their house? We’re not talking about trying to buy a rare Ferrari here.
Anyone price a 1970-1974 Plymouth Cuda or Dodge Challenger lately, or even a 1968-1970 Dodge Charger? I still can’t find a decent project Cuda or Challenger for under $10K, Chargers being around $15K, unless it’s needing tons of rust repair AND it being a 6-banger car. And almost every one of these ads have ‘Barrett-Jackson’ slipped somewhere into the car’s description.
Don’t even get me started on the residual effect of that particular greed-fest; there are 1980’s cars now showing up with ‘One of these sold for $(fill in the blank yet again) on Barrett-Jackson!’ in the ads…
The bad part about all of this? The people who fight for position on stage, just so that they can be seen on TV spending 500% over market value for a car. They want to be seen on TV, usually blowing $50K to $500K on a completely butt-ugly car (by the way? There is now a sub-genre of car known as ‘B-J cars’, these are the completely-useless, overbuilt tube-frame cars with cartoonish-looking huge wheels, built only for sale on the Barrett-Jackson auction block), and then high-five their buddies when they get back with their ‘prize’ from that particular auction. Another bad part? Want to own a piece of NASCAR history? Depending on where it came from, you might be spending well north of $100,000 on a previous NASCAR ride, or even $50K+ on a ‘clone’ of a popular NASCAR ride.
I am not alone in this regard. Myself, and others, we feel like this hobby has been hijacked away from us by people who don’t appreciate the memories these cars produced….they are simply ’acquisitions’ for guys who want to show off for clients if they come to visit. They are driven rarely, if at all…and at this point, I am now going to stop my rant, switch gears, and talk now about how this auction house does occasionally redeem itself, by selling donated cars for a great cause, such as the Darrell Gwynn Foundation, who provides wheelchairs for children and young adults who have suffered spinal cord injuries, and also assists in paying for their medical treatments, in addition to advocating for that group of people.
Click on the link above (Okay, WAY above or watch the video) to get some background on one of the things keeping Richard Petty busy lately…while I don’t support what Barrett-Jackson has done to my hobby, if I could afford it, I would gladly mortgage my home three times over if I could help generate as much money as possible for the Foundation…even if I didn’t get the car.
Kudos to Barrett-Jackson for assisting Darrell Gwynn help those who aren’t able to help themselves…generous mention should also be given to Bill Goldberg, who made this car possible, and almost made professional wrestling look real, and Richard Petty, who is donating his name to help sell the car. After all, if Richard Petty didn't exist, there wouldn't be a car to sell...
Who knows, maybe one of you out there could actually afford this car….the money would be going to a good foundation...now if only Barrett-Jackson would donate the 'fees' to the same cause....
See you next week...
If at first you don't succeed, call it the 'Car of Tomorrow'.
The thoughts and ideas expressed by this writer or any other writer on Insider Racing News, are not necessarily the views of the staff and/or management of IRN.
You can contact Larry Van Zandt at