Understanding question of the Week: What’s Your Most Unlikely Car Sighting?—WINNER’S UPDATE

WINNER’S ANNOUNCEMENT:

We’re back to announce the winner for our Question of the Week, where our victor will accept a $25 credit for a hat or T-shirt from the BaT Gear Store and the acclaim of their peers.

Our question this week: What’s your most unlikely car sighting?

Thanks to everyone who chimed in! After reading all 100+ of your neck-snapping stories from this week’s discussion thread, we’re exercising our Editorial Privilege by awarding the prize to the comment that stood out the most to us. The prize goes to BaT member @Fantod13, who nominated a particular 1928 Bentley 4.5-Liter:

Ca. 1988, age 19, I was driving my first car, a W114 Mercedes 250 up Rte. 3 to Boston on a glowing summer evening, windows down, cruising at 70.

Running along through Weymouth, I heard an incredible growl and looked over to my left to the extraordinary sight of Everett Dickinson, at that point about 98 years old, bombing along in his open 1928 Bentley, I think with his son (who didn’t drive) as navigator. Dickinson gave up driving a few years later at the nice round age of 100 & lived several more years. Here’s the car after some later restoration/modification, but this is substantially what I saw blitz past me at speed that glorious evening: https://www.flickr.com/photos/45676495@N05/50803422641/

Keeps a fellow young!

The photo below shows the late Everett Dickinson—a founding member of the VSCCA who raced Bentleys back in the 1920s—in his Bentley 4.5, registered as KYR 31, sometime before it received its supercharger.

Congratulations, Fantod13! Be sure to check your email to claim the prize.

Now, let’s take a look at some other popular nominations, starting with a comment from @bodhi1601 that received plenty of love this week:

Pre-highschool. Eleven years old. My father was driving the family back to Boston after a day of skiing in New Hampshire. It was the end of the season, and the snow was melting fast. Half asleep, staring out the back seat window, I saw a pile of snow in front of a farmhouse and was instantly convinced that what I had seen was a Shelby Mustang convertible. It hit me like a thunderclap from heaven, and I suddenly saw the light. No one else had seen it, but I insisted it was real, and furthermore, since it was outside and buried in snow, the owner probably didn’t want it anymore. I was certain I was right, and I proceeded to make everyone in the household miserable for the rest of the week because we had driven past the find of the century. My father indulged and encouraged each of his sons’ passions, and for me, that week, it was that car in a snowdrift in New Hampshire. The following weekend he rented a car trailer and hooked it to the back of our VistaCruiser. My mom sat this one out, but my three brothers and I rode North with my father till we came to the farm where, sure enough, there was a Mustang partially buried in a rapidly melting snowdrift. But not just any Mustang; it was a Shelby convertible. Smart, smug, self-satisfied doesn’t begin to describe how I felt. I was vindicated. I was right.

A Shelby Cobra in a snowdrift. My brothers and I clustered around the car while dad walked up to the farmhouse. The convertible top had collapsed, and the melting snow would have filled it with water except that the floors had completely rusted away. I’m talking Flintstone mobile. The dashboard and the console were gone, but a Hurst shifter stuck out of the transmission tunnel, and although we could only pry the hood open a couple of inches, we immediately recognized a big block engine. It was a GT-500. We literally danced with joy. The farmer knew it was a special car. He had bought it for his son, hoping it would keep him on the farm, but he had left anyway. The farmer said it could pull his plow better than his tractor. He was pulling our leg, but at the time we fully believed him, and he did want to sell it. The motor was seized; it hadn’t run in years, and my dad bought it for me for $500. This seems unspeakably cheap, but the owner was so happy to have unloaded this scrap pile that when we found it impossible to roll onto the trailer, he summoned inhuman strength and picked up the back of the car, shoving it onto our trailer. I spent the next two years restoring that car, eventually selling a running, driving but sad-looking Shelby to a man who lived a couple of blocks away. He paid $5000 for it. I was so proud to pay my father back that, at the time, I didn’t realize that the only reason the project happened at all was because my father was so proud of me.

That definitely was an unlikely car sighting for your dad’s co-workers. 

@Stopwatch writes:

I was walking down a sidewalk in Minato/Akasake in Tokyo last March, turned a corner, and was confronted with a murdered-out Plymouth Prowler with a prefectural license plate that simply read “2”. It was parked in the traffic lane, and a couple of serious-looking gents in black suits were standing nearby. A Japanese friend said the car was likely the property of a Yakuza member and to not look very long and to certainly not peer inside. The nearby M-B S-Class and G-Wagon, both also fully murdered-out, sort of disappeared in comparison to the Prowler.

I snapped a couple of pictures – from a distance – because I figured none of my U.S. friends would believe me. The entire scene was very discordant, but also so, so Tokyo.

@Gary_T1 says:

I was looking through my current copy of Motor Trend, and their recurring one-page feature of some interesting car caught my eye. It was a Mk II Jaguar that has been totally covered in 12″ Redwood strips like a lake boat from the ’50s. It was a beautiful job that must have taken quite a bit of time and money to complete. I like old cars, and I like wooden boats, but for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why someone would combine the two. Fast forward a few years to 1975, and I’m walking into the Mecca Delicatessen in Seaside, CA, just outside of Ft Ord, and there it is! The redwood-covered Jag I saw in the magazine. I waited a bit to see if the owner showed up, but being late from lunch was definitely not an option with SSG Rumley, so I had to hightail it back to post. I looked often, but I never saw it again. I’ve searched the net for a photo of the MT feature, but haven’t been successful. Anyone here know anything about this car?

Now that MotorTrend is part of the Hearst portfolio, we dug into the archives and found this piece in the February 1975 issue of MotorTrend. Enjoy!

@Sparrownaut writes:

I may have everyone beat with this one, and it’s a true story.

Driving through Houston’s glitzy Uptown District maybe 30 years ago, something caught my eye that my brain could not immediately process. A second or two later, I blurted out,

“That was Chitty Chitty Bang Bang !!!”

I made the most acrobatic U-turn of my life and circled back into the parking lot of FAO Schwarz. Indeed, there it was, parked for a photo-op, one of the iconic hero cars built for the film.

Folks, that was THE car which, back in 1968, got me interested in cars to begin with.

And unfortunately, 30 years ago I was still carrying a pager—no cell phone, and thus no camera—but the memory lives!

@Nowak tells us:

Circa 2001, I took my 1986 Shelby GLHS to work. On the way home, I stopped at a gas station to fill up. The gas station had a car wash at the other end of the lot, so I went to use it, and when I finished, I had to backtrack past the pumps to get back on the highway I needed to get home.

As I made my way back past the same bank of gas pumps where I had filled my own tank five minutes earlier, I saw a strange sight: Somebody was filling my gas tank in my GLHS! No, that can’t be right; I was sitting in my car, and that was an identical 1-of-500 GLHS that coincidentally happened to be in the same place at the same time.

I got out to talk to the owner. Similar to mine, his was not a daily driver; it was one in the rotation from a fleet that had similar other stablemates to my fleet, including GM turbo and E-body Mopar holdings. We were in the same profession, too, though he was about a decade older.

What are the odds!

Chrysler had a test fleet of 50 cars in period and lent them to over 200 people from 1963 to 1966. That means you came across one of those loaner cars in ’64!

And we’ll wrap up this week’s discussion with a comment from @Fleche_dOr:

Il Tempo Gigante at speed on a highway.

What is “Il Tempo Gigante” you say?

Oh, just a home-made jalopy. Not a very significant car at all. Just the car that inspired Christian von Koenigsegg to make his own car.

Oh, now I got your attention. Good. Follow me down a small rabbit hole and I shall share the rest of the story.

1) Once upon a time there was a stop motion movie named the Pincliffe Grand Prix. Il Tempo Gigante was the starring vehicle.

2) The movie director made a real life version of the movie car. Built on a 1970s Cadillac ambulance chassis, it is a bit on the large side for a two-seater at 22 feet long and 8 feet wide. It has a 550 hp Chevy 454 V-8 engine sourced by Niki Lauda that replaced the original Cadillac engine. Mr. Lauda took the car for a spin on the Nurburgring. It reportedly has a top speed around 140 mph. The roughly 1,000 hp gas turbine engine is not used due to noise restrictions. The car is street registered in Norway and was used for international promotions of the movie back in the day.

Here it is (turn up the volume):

3) Don’t laugh. Christian von Koenigsegg said this was his inspiration to build his own car. I can hear a collective “Nah, never happened”, but what if you heard the man himself say so? Well, here you go (watch the first about three minutes):

[However, I think Mr. Koenigsegg is mistaken when he says “the film maker’s son” made the real version. Italian coachbuilder Ermanno Martinuzzi led the construction of the full-scale model of Il Tempo Gigante. I am pretty sure it was commissioned by the Ivo Caprino (the film director), not his son Remo. Back then I knew the author of the books/characters the movie was based on.]

The “race” mentioned in the above video:

4) One day, out of the blue, I saw the actual car cruising down a major highway at a pretty good speed. The car had just been completed earlier that year, so it was a big surprise to see it on the road.

5) What are the odds that on a random day you will see the one and only car built by a car builder mimicking a car that only existed in a book and on a movie screen, just casually cruising along?

That’s why the Il Tempo Gigante is my most unlikely car sighting.

But I do have a runner up.

A Porsche 930 that passed me while rotating 540 degrees before crashing upside down into a cluster of small trees and bushes. You don’t see that every day either!

P.S. — Here is the full stop motion movie, The Pinchcliffe Grand Prix (1975), dubbed in English:

A bit of trivia about the movie from IMDB:
“Since its premiere on 28 August 1975, the movie was shown at a cinema somewhere in the world every day of the week, for 28 years. Mainly in theaters in Norway, Moscow or Tokyo, the non-stop run ended in 2003.”

That’s it for this week’s Question of the Week! Thanks again to everyone who participated, and congratulations once again to our winners, Fantod13. Question of the Week will be on hiatus this week, and we’ll be back with a new question next week!

ORIGINAL POST:

Welcome to the BaT Question of the Week! For those unfamiliar, here are the rules: we ask an automotive-themed question, and the author of our favorite answer from the comments is awarded a $25 credit to the BaT Gear Store.

It’s officially Monterey Car Week, where the world’s most exotic automotive treasures somehow seem commonplace, and incredible car spotting is the norm. Of course, unexpected vehicular sightings go well beyond manicured greens and racetracks, and that’s what inspired this week’s question:

What’s your most unlikely car sighting?

Sometimes you’ll see one of automotive history’s most rarefied automobiles crawling along in traffic or turning up at your grocery stores and local haunts.

But even a car that was once commonplace can crop up in the unlikeliest of places, like the old Chrysler that recent QotW winner @Paul_Allen spotted at a Swiss airfield back in the 1980s.

Sometimes you find an amazing car where you’d least expect it. So now we turn it over to you:

What’s your most unlikely car sighting?