Summer is winding down—has your workplace emptied out? For those of us remaining, it can get awfully lonely. Fortunately, BaT’s list of Weird & Wonderful cars is here to provide a distraction, if but for a time. We have a curated selection of the strangest, coolest, and most interesting cars found on BaT within the last seven days. But we say that with a caveat: our “short list” of candidates numbered more than 50 this week, and while we could not feature them all below, we can guarantee that there are a lot more to find over on our Live Auctions Page.
Enjoy the Weekly Weird and Wonderful, and let us know what else caught your eye—the Ferrari 330 America? the Disco Volante Topolino, the Lotus go-kart? There’s too much!
1967 Shelby Cobra 427 from The Gumball Rally Movie
This Shelby 427 Cobra played itself in the 1976 movie The Gumball Rally, where it was driven by the film’s protagonists, Michael Bannon and Samuel Graves (played by Michael Sarrazin and Nicholas Pryor). The movie was an unauthorized dramatization of Brock Yates’s Cannonball Baker Sea-to-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash, which in turn prompted Yates to develop his own star-studded version, The Cannonball Run.
Two Cobras were used in the filming of The Gumball Rally, and this one did the bulk of the driving before taking a hit to the nose while on set in California. After three decades in storage, it was restored by Cobra specialist Mike McLuskey, who thankfully kept the Cibie driving lights and CB antenna.
1970 Alpine A110 1600 S Group 4
This BaT alumnus Alpine A110 1600 S Group 4 car embodies one of the things we love most about BaT, and that’s the knowledge that comes out of the BaT community. During the original auction, Alpine expert Gilles Vallerian (@gvallerian on BaT), @FSJ_Europe, @Wayne962, and others contributed their knowledge and expertise to help untangle some granular details of the car’s early history. As it turned out, this car had long been confused with its sister works car in large part to an administrative factory error way back when. Of course, all the details live in the original thread for posterity.
The car was actually kept by the factory as an unraced backup during the 1970 season, and was sold in 1971 to privateer Jacques Henry, who campaigned it in the French Rally Championship. Bill Noon continued sleuthing out its true history, and even commissioned a mechanical sorting under his ownership (it sounds incredible!). This A110 came back to BaT with a treasure trove of historical documentation and a Gilles Vallerian dossier, to boot.
LS1-Powered 1963 Chevrolet Corvette Split-Window Coupe “V7 Twin Turbo”
Nobody wanted a mid-engined Corvette more than Zora Arkus-Duntov. By the 1960s, Arkus-Duntov was elbows-deep in mid-engine V8 experiments, which evolved from the rear-drive CERV I to the all-wheel-drive CERV II by 1964. Chevy manager Bunkie Knudsen saw the latest prototype as a formidable competitor against Ford’s newest GT40, but GM brass shut down any hopes of taking CERV II to Le Mans in 1966 and instead bolstered Jim Hall’s Chaparrals for that year’s running. But this wild build imagines an alternate automotive dimension where Chevrolet had greenlit a mid-engined version of the split-window C2 Corvette.
Designer Mark Harlan took on this intensive thought experiment, stretching and squeezing its body in nearly every direction on paper before enlisting builder Phil Sommers at American Supercar, who also fitted its wild heart—a twin-turbocharged LS1 V8—mounted amidships, of course.
SCAT X–Themed Link Aviation C-11B Instrument Flight Simulator
We’ve listed some serious sim setups before, but none like this Link Aviation C-11B flight simulator. A bit of backstory: in 1929, Edwin Link invented the first flight simulator, dubbed the Link Trainer or “Blue Box,” which operated using compressed air and organ bellows. By the 1950s, the outfit was developing more advanced simulators like this C-11B unit. We won’t throw any technical information at you (we’ll leave that to the experts in the comments section), but it looks like a big vacuum tube computer console would be needed to operate the whole shebang (like the one shown above from the Tennessee Museum of Aviation). Or retrofit it with modern hardware and power up! The sky’s the limit. Yes, it’s huge, but don’t worry—the whole thing splits in half to fit through the doorway.
Runge Frankfurt Flyer 004
In the lakebound rural hamlet of Alexandria, Minnesota, ex-professional snowboarder Chris Rünge has been building his own cars by hand for 15 years (check out our shop tour video with Rünge from earlier this year). His first model, the “Frankfurt Flyer,” attracted private commissions shortly after it began appearing at car shows, and what began as a personal project soon became a boutique business.
This is the fourth of such cars, inspired by Walter Glöckler’s first custom-bodied Porsche race car, and we’re happy to see it back on BaT after it first sold here in June of 2018. Only nine Frankfurt Flyers exist, but even though only a lucky few will ever own or drive one, we can all appreciate Rünge’s craftsmanship in the listing’s image gallery, which contains something like 20 times more photos than any editorial feature was ever able to capture.
Olds Rocket-Powered 1950 Ford “Caballo de Hierro” Carrera Panamericana Tribute and 32-Years-Owned 1931 Chrysler CD-8 Sport Roadster
These two special tribute cars come to us from the Swig Family Collection, having been commissioned by family patriarch Martin Swig—father of our own Howard Swig, who has headed up BaT Auctions since the beginning. The “Caballo de Hierro” (Iron Horse) tribute emulates a car from the heyday of Hot Rod Magazine, when the editorial staff weren’t content to merely write about racing, but took it upon themselves to sponsor and drive competitive cars in a variety of series. The original Caballo was a homemade special created by Ak Miller and Doug Harrison, and it was the only American-built-and-driven car to complete the final running of the original Carrera Panamericana in 1954. Even at low speeds, driving this tribute seems pretty raw.
The Chrysler CD-8, similarly, is patterned after a racer campaigned by French driver Raymond Sommer in the 1931 24 Hours of Le Mans. Sommer was a privateer piloting one of two Chryslers that qualified for the race. This was the end of a six-year run at Le Mans for Chrysler and was the last time one of its products would make the grid until 1976, when NASCAR racer Herschel McGriff was invited to bring his Charger over to the Circuit de la Sarthe. This replica has provenance of its own as a vintage racer, and has been driven in the California Mille, the Monterey Historics, the Mille Miglia Storica, and the 1,000 Millas Sport in Argentina.
1965 Chevrolet Corvette Coupe SCCA/Trans Am Race Car
This 1965 Corvette Coupe was transformed into a big-block killer during the late 1960s and began its long career in racing in the SCCA A-Production class, then was promoted to the Trans Am series from 1976 until 1983. By the early 1980s, the car would’ve been anachronistic amid a field of increasingly box-flared silhouette Trans Am racers of the era, and that makes it that much cooler! It was refurbished in the 1990s and has been campaigned in a number of vintage racing events since.
South Florida Local Partner @Bulletmotorsportsinc brings us this arguably streetable track weapon, and has graciously included some rolling footage so we can all enjoy hearing the song of its (apparently very angry) people.
1918 Ahrens-Fox M-K-4 Fire Truck
St. Louis Local Partner @hymanltd always does a great job presenting interesting prewar vehicles, and this grand old fire truck is no exception. Ahrens-Fox was an early rival to American LaFrance, and had been making engines for just a few years when they turned out this pump-and-hose truck for the Mount Vernon fire department in Westchester County, New York. By 1953 it was already an antique, and was purchased by a fire chief in Branford, Connecticut, in whose family it remained for the next 70 years.
350-Powered, Steam Locomotive-Style 1952 Dodge B-3-F Pickup
This locomotive-style 1953 Dodge pickup was built in the 1950s as a parade vehicle for the La Société des 40 Hommes et 8 Chevaux, commonly known as the Forty and Eight, which was founded in 1920 by American GIs returning from France. The name is a World War I reference; American troops were transported to the front lines aboard French narrow-gauge boxcars with a load capacity of 40 men or 8 horses. This one would be pretty tight with 40 fellas in the bed, and good luck getting a horse up into that tender.
Fuel-Injected, Supercharged 352-Powered Dragmaster 112” Dart Dragster
This dragster wasn’t completed until 2017, so it never competed in-period, but its Dragmaster frame is an awfully cool piece of racing history. Dragmaster was Jim Nelson and Dode Martin, two SoCal hot rodders who raced and built chassis so good they were chosen by the likes of Dean Moon, Mickey Thompson, and the Dodge factory team.
Image: Hot Rod
Martin himself examined the frame and determined that it would have been from 1959 or 1960, just a couple years before Dragmaster took a Winternationals win in a similar Wedge-powered Dart.
Honorable Mentions
Coyote-Powered 1957 Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud w/”Spirit of Ecstasy” Statue and Modified 1958 Facel Vega FV4 Typhoon
If you love unlikely hot rod builds, give these two listings a gander. The Coyote V8 in the Rolls gives new meaning to “adequate power,” and whomever thought to put NASCAR-style wheels on a Facel Vega is a mad genius.
Single-Family-Owned 440ci-Powered 1965 Rayson Craft 18′
This is perhaps one of the best applications of a Mopar 440ci V8 that we’ve ever seen. This 18-foot 1965 Rayson Craft ski boat has been in the same family since new, and was gifted an utterly unreasonable amount of power in the form of a 440 at some point in the 1990s.
1971 Plymouth Sport Fury Dukes of Hazzard Tribute
This Sport Fury sedan has been done up in the style of what Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane drove on the TV show The Dukes of Hazzard. Kew, kew, kew, we love it, we love it!
1988 Mazda 323 GTX Turbo
The AWD Mazda 323 GTX Turbo is an obscure and underrated homologation special. Just 1,240 were made, and we were excited when this one first came to BaT back in 2014 as Lot #55. It’s seems to have been treated well by the seller, looking to be in even better shape than we saw it 12 years ago.
Thanks for checking out this edition of the Weekly Weird & Wonderful! Follow this page to get updates when new installments post, and tell what caught your eye or what you think we’ve left out!