Sunday, September 15, 2013

KCI Airport Cruise: nice cars, nice prizes, nice weather

As summer comes to an end, we start getting more “must attend” car events to wind up the season.  One of those is the KCI Airport Cruise, which took place last Saturday night at the Ambassador Building near the airport.  As usual, there were tons of cars and tons of great door prizes.  Add the beautiful weather, and you’ve got the recipe for a huge event.  The Hovers did their part, as my dad brought out his old Corvette and parked it right next to my truck in the crowded parking lot.

So with this many cars, you might think it would be hard to pick a favorite.  But I’m going to do it anyway.  I think this ’67 Ford Galaxie 500 is out of this world.  First of all, it was perfect.  I mean, I don’t know if I’ve ever seen better paint or a nicer vinyl top in my life.  The restoration was absolutely gorgeous.  It was also an insanely rare car, with an “R-Code” 427 with two giant four-barrels under the hood and a four-speed shifter on the hump.  This was built by Mike’s Classic Cars in Blair, Nebr., and they are known for building the finest hot rod Fords.

Another car that was tough not to like was this ’55 Cadillac Coupe deVille.  Cadillac was undeniably at the top of the automotive heap when this car was built, and styling features like those taillight fins, the Dagmar bumper guards, and the pencil-thin hardtop pillars reinforced that notion.  This car looked extremely original, including the seat upholstery.  What’s more, it had factory air conditioning, which was pretty hoity-toity in 1955.  It was every bit as pretty and nice in real life as it is in the pictures.

This ’67 Camaro RS/SS convertible was no slouch either.  The magic was in the color, Emerald Turquoise Metallic with matching interior.  It is just such a pretty color.  It reminds me of the ocean in Hawaii.  I’ve never actually been to Hawaii, but I watched a lot of Magnum P.I., and it reminds me of that.  This was another car that I really couldn’t find anything wrong with.  Complimenting all this tropical beauty was a 235-hp, 350-c.i. small block connected to a four-speed transmission. 

Take a look at this triple-white ’69 Imperial four-door hardtop. If you were a Chrysler man in 1969, this was as lavish as it got.  They had to buy out an entire ranch to get enough leather to cover these button-tufted seats.  It looks like they used two sofas from Barry Manilow’s living room in there.  And this car looked huge.  I don’t just mean inside.  I don’t just mean lengthwise.  But even the width rivals the length of some cars today.  It’s such a nice car, though.  And thankfully, it has thus far avoided the demolition derby circuit. 

This Cutlass commemorated the 15th-anniversary of the Hurst Oldsmobile in 1983.  These had Dale Earnhardt’s “Man in Black” paint scheme five years before Earnhardt had it.  At the time, these were pretty hot stuff, with a high-output version of Olds’ 307 V8, dual exhaust, and front air dam.  They came with what Hurst called a Lightning Rod shifter.  It was designed for drag racing, and made it so that you could manually shift from low-to-high one gear at-a-time without missing a shift.  I don’t know how useful that actually was on these, but it looks cool with three gear shifters.  This car is pretty rare, as they only built 3001 of these in 1983.

Before I could get from one end of the parking lot to the other, several cars were already bugging-out by 6:00-6:30.  That means that some of them were gone before I could photograph them.  I still took more than 470 pictures, though, and you can look at them in the slideshow below.  Or click this link for a nicer version.

1 comment:

  1. Craig,

    As "Tony the Tiger" would say " GRRRRRRRRRRRRRREAT"
    job again !!!!!!

    Don - Basehor, Ks

    ReplyDelete