I've got a Clymer book that was put out to cover the first Carrera Pan America, you can find it on E-bay sometimes just search for Clymer. It has great photos and really cool coverage of the race. There are some kick *** shot s of the NASCAR sponsered NASH! Yep Nash, man those things look cool going full bore down dirt roads.
The Carrera Pan America cars are really cool. Gotta love seeing big ol' Lincolns and Hudsons tearing it up like that! All in all, the history of such cars (and some others, such as Ol' Yeller) is really the part of hot rodding that interests me. Everyone nowadays seems to ***ociate hot rodding strictly with drag racing, but in the early days that wasn't necessarily the case. There were homebuilt "specials" that ran against the biggest names in sports cars, and really they were what we would all call "hot rods". A great example of this cross-breeding is the black T-bird that was posted here a few days ago. It was obviously built by someone that had an appreciation of both hot rods and sports cars. I'm left wondering if the oddity posted yesterday (the one photographed outside Dyersburg, TN) isn't a slightly less stellar example of the same idea. Thanks for posting some pics, guys!
"HOT ROD" magazine and "Road & Track" provided the best chronicles of the Carerra Panamericana at the time. You'll find accurate, detailed accounts of the riace in those magazines beginning in 1952 and carrying through to its end several years later. I don't know if you are aware, but the Panamericana was not an oddity or an anomoly. It was a serious event, with the same serious attention from international teams and manufacturers that was given to the Targe Florio and the Mille Miglia -- long point-to-point races on real roads. This was "no-prisoners" road racing with the full spectrum of the automotive art, from hot rods, to modified new production cars, to purpose-built racers from the World's top manufacturers of high-performance cars. It was a spectacular, exciting event that deserved to continue and grow in status, but one which got caught up in internal government political struggles.
The Jalopy Journal
