Yahoo Autos Opinion Column: Failure Is Always an Option
It was going to be awesome. A 1973 Chevrolet C10 Stepside pickup powered by the current Camaro ZL1's 650-hp supercharged LT4 V-8 and riding on a custom chassis from Art Morrison. Big Wilwood disc brakes, ginormous Michelin Pilot Sport tires, BMW steering gear, and comprehensively tweaked bodywork. An old truck that swallowed a new Corvette Z06. Killer.
But it was a failure. For all the usual reasons. By which I mean one reason: money.
The project truck was my nephew's, and it started off so promisingly. There was about $60,000 worth of parts acquired, Chris Jensen at Central Coast Hot Rods in Santa Maria, California was doing some brilliant work, and I was having a blast throwing out ideas for the thing. Then my nephew and his business partner got testy with each other, the funds dried up, and work on the truck stopped.
Right now, there are at least a couple dozen TV shows about hot rod shops and another couple hundred people posting variations along the same line on YouTube. "Damn it," the shop owner inevitably yells at the lovable misfits who work for him, "either we get this car done in time for SEMA or I'll have to close the business!" Clipboards are thrown. Then new parts from often-mentioned sponsors show up, everything is welded together, the car comes out of paint right at the deadline, and the fat cat who bankrolled the thing sees it for the first time and says, "You guys really outdid yourselves. Wow." Then someone does donuts in the parking lot.
In the real world, practically every working hot-rod shop has at least one car that has been lingering in a corner, untouched for months, waiting for someone to pay the bills. It's covered in dust, the interior is filled with pieces accumulated when there was money to spend, and there are spots of surface rust developing on unpainted sheetmetal. Deadlines have blown by, a couple of SEMA shows have come and gone, and except for the accumulation of storage charges, it all doesn't matter.
Because it's just a hot rod. A hobby. Something fun. Not the center of a multimedia marketing enterprise. Miss a deadline, and nothing happens.
I'm as addicted to car-centered TV shows as anyone, but they are shows. The amped-up drama is phony: a structure imposed on events to build resolvable tension and keep casual viewers hooked. And things are happily resolved at the end of every episode. There's never a true failure, and the bills are always paid. It's TV the way TV has always been.
The essence of being passionate about cars isn't drama. Instead it's that Venn diagram where history, science, art, ambition, and inscrutable fascination overlap. Whether it's karts, Porsches, or Top Fuelers, the nature of car love is about, you know, cars. Everything there is to know about cars.
In real life, we learn from our failures and move on. A Facebook friend of mine, Eric Miller of Squarebody Specialists, bought the project at a whopping discount, put it on a trailer, and hauled it back to Minnesota. The chassis and LT4 will, if things go right this time, find their way under another project truck called Ollie that Miller is building for a client. The rendering is of Ollie, which has a confirmed spot for display at the 2019 SEMA show.
But if Ollie doesn't make it to the SEMA show next year, so what? Success is better, but failure is always an option.
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