The build

Pics by Valley Gas Speed Shop

What started as a mild brake upgrade and engine refresh snowballed into a full restoration and comprehensive programme of upgrades

There was evidence of former repairs in the floorpans and boot, but everything was cleaned up and protected against future corrosion and then Dynamat’d for sound and heat insulation

Jimmy loves a Ford in a Ford, and a Willys, and an Oldsmobile, and just about anything else. Believe it or not, this big block Ford is the old motor from his Boston Brawler Willys

Engine had to be de-tuned for street use and received a new crank and pistons in the process, as well as top and bottom girdles

Back axle is the rebuilt original ’57 Olds unit, plenty strong enough with its 9.2-inch ring gear, though it’s now held in place by Gaz adjustable coilovers and a triangulated 4-link

Heads are aluminium Ford Motorsport Cobra Jets with a full roller valvetrain

If you thought that sounded fun, then this will really put a smile on your face

First stage mock-up with the Procharger, which Jimmy describes as really a belt-driven turbocharger

If you want to have the ability to switch between mufflers and the sound of hades at the flick of a switch, electric cut-outs are what you need

And wanting to make a feature of them, they now protrude out under the doors, their neat duck bill ends in line with the car’s sills

We don’t want to know what the chrome bill was for that front bumper. Actually we did, and we do, but all we’ll say is S&T Electroplate in Yate made a damn fine job of resurrecting it

Tyear 1957 was a seminal one for car design. The Jet Age was in full swing and car designers took every opportunity to reflect that in their offerings. While the origins of the term can be traced back to the 1940s, it really came to prominence in the 1950s when commercial jet aeroplanes like the British de Havilland Comet and American Boeing 707 took to the skies.

Alongside this, the Space Race was in full flight and by 1955 had become an allconsuming fixation, particularly in America and the former Soviet Union.

Car manufacturers and marketeers – never ones to miss the opportunity to promote and sell their products – took their lead from the aeronautical and aerospace industries and all manner of weird and wonderful ideas came of it. Tail lights reflected afterburners and fins mimicked those on rockets, while logos and model names suggested other-worldly travel.

Every US manufacturer had its own take on the theme, but GM’s upper middle class Oldsmobile division strode boldly forward with names like Starfire, Super 88, Golden Rocket, Jetaway and Power-Ride. Even its radios were sold as Wonderbar. The various models on offer could be loaded with power everything, from windows to seats to steering, brakes and aerials.

Golden oldie

Befitting the image of an upmarket luxury cruiser, in 1957 there was just one engine option, a 371ci overhead valve V8, up from the top dog 324 of the year before. Now officially named the Golden Rocket V8, even the base model 88s came equipped with a four-barrel carb and made 277bhp, while ticking the J2 option gave you a trio of two-barrel Rochesters (for a total of 860cfm) on a special manifold, thinner head gaskets to bump compression to 10.0:1 and a nice round 300bhp, with 415ft. lbs of cruising torque.

If you really wanted to scare your date, you could order a higher lift cam and mechanical lifters under the J2R package – developed through the brand’s successful forays into NASCAR – from your local Olds parts department, and then go out and run the quarter in 17 seconds. At $395, though, that was an expensive and rarely chosen option when compared to the $83 regular J2 set up.

As exciting as all that sounds, with sales figures hugely favouring four-door models, the now legendary Olds performance pack found few buyers and was deleted from the options list in late ’58.

The standard transmission was a threespeed, column-change manual, but who could resist the optional Jetaway, a smaller, improved development of GM’s Hydra-Matic four speed auto.

In addition, ’57 also saw the arrival of balljoints in place of the old king and link pins on the 88-series’ 122-inch Power-Ride chassis, allowing owners to ‘ride in style’ –or so said the 1951 song Rocket 88, often cited as the world’s first rock ’n’ roll record.

Style et luxe

That was all well and good but, for most Oldsmobile buyers, it was the flamboyant exterior styling that drew them in. And in truth, what drew Kelvin into this car in the first place.

‘As I understand it, the car was brought into the country a long time ago, but I first saw it in the late 2000s. At the time, it was owned by a guy called Matt from Southampton. I saw it come across the field at a Thorney Island car show and just thought it was so low, so sleek. I wanted it.

‘I think it’s just the best looking car of the ’50s,’ says Kelvin.

That’s a bold statement, considering some of the opposition, but it’s hard to deny the appeal of that huge chrome front bumper, enlarged but subtly simplified over the previous year to further emphasise its jet air intake treatment, while the ’56’s single ‘rocket’ bonnet ornament was replaced with two smaller ones, leading each peaked front wing forward into the future.

But walk round the back and – blam – that three-piece rear window makes your jaw drop. A one-year-only styling touch, the curved corner windows and pronounced styling ridge that extends through them for the full length of the roof and boot lid is just magnificent.

Add in an even more pronounced sweetheart dip at the B-posts and it’s enough to make you swoon at first sight. It certainly did Kelvin.

‘I tried to buy the car for about four years, but the guy kept saying yes, then no, and the price went up each year. I think it started around four grand, and got up to about nine before I lost track of it.’

Off a cliff

‘Then one day I was at Carolina Classics – I knew Cliff Hepton and the guys there pretty well – and the car was there. Turned out after all that, it had been traded in for a ’90’s Camaro or something. I asked if it was for sale, expecting the price to have gone up even further, and Cliff said: “As it’s you Kelvin, and I know you’ll do something special with it, you can have it for four grand.”’ Result.

Kelvin immediately swapped the rusty, 15-inch chrome reverse wheels for the 17inch Torq Thrust IIs that are on it now and drove the car like that for a couple of years.

‘Just doing that made a massive difference to the way it drove, but when the brakes failed on the drive out from the Hayride one year and the car tried to kill all six of us that were in it at the time, I decided it was time to upgrade things a bit.’

A call was put into Kelvin’s good buddy, Jimmy Hibberd at Valley Gas Speed Shop, and the car booked in to have a set of disc brakes fitted up front. And to give the engine a once over. That was in 2005.

‘Yeah, 17 years and more money than I want to remember later, it’s had a bit more than just a set of disc brakes added,’ laughs Kelvin.

Just to set the record straight, that wasn’t 17 years in at Valley Gas. The car was a bit of an on / off project for Kelvin, which had to be sidelined a number of times over that period while other matters took priority.

All change

The original Golden Rocket 88 motor was long gone, replaced at some point by a 383ci small block Chevy which Kelvin says needed work. The same could be said for the gearbox. And the suspension. And he wasn’t sold on the matt burgundy paint. Or the interior…

‘It came in to us at about the same time as I was selling my Willys,’ remembers Jimmy. ‘I’d taken the engine out to sell

Above left: Like the rest of the car, the interior has also had the works, including a new headliner, freshly painted garnish mouldings, new carpets and a retrim in burgundy and biscuit leather, all by Matt Ellison at Herbert and Ellison in Stockbridge, Hampshire

Above Right: A big old bench for a big old car, but with air con’, dual zone heating, a modern Bluetooth / DAB stereo and some clever trickery with the electrics, it’s a fine place to while away some time

Left: Gone is the three-on-the-tree Jetaway auto’ transmission, replaced with the C6 auto’ out of Jimmy Hibberd’s Boston Brawler Willys drag car. It’s a race ’box originally built by Powered by Ford in Tampa, Florida with full reverse shift pattern manual, needle roller bearings throughout and trans’ brake, though that’s not currently hooked up. Overkill for a street car perhaps, yet still perfectly useable. Jimmy made up the gearshift gate and topped the shifter with a re-purposed ornamental ball he felt suits the colours of the car separately and Kelvin said he’d have it. What are you going to do with it, I asked, and he said we could put it in the Oldsmobile.

‘Trouble is, as soon as you start putting a 9.6-litre engine in, you have to do a lot more work,’ adds Kelvin. Not least because it was a full tilt race motor running on alcohol.

Consequently, the big-inch mill has been completely rebuilt, increasing in capacity to 558ci in the process but decreasing in compression to make it work on the street, and on regular pump fuel.

‘Thing is, all my cars are supercharged,’ grins Kelvin. ‘My Model T is, my Model A is and so was my daily driver at the time, so I thought I best have one on the Olds’ as well.’

The reason for going the Procharger route was primarily because it fits under the stock bonnet and Kelvin wanted to keep the meat inside the pudding, as it were.

Store bought

‘We bought the whole set up from The Supercharger Store in Tucson, Arizona,’ explains Jimmy. ‘You give them the whole spec of the engine, what power you want to make and what you’re going to do with it and they build a complete kit to suit. They were bang on too. It fired straight up, ticks over like a sewing machine and is great out on the road.’

So out went the entire factory independent front suspension, replaced with a Mustang II-style IFS, complete with power rack and pinion steering and power assisted Wilwood disc brakes with four-pot calipers. In the rear, the big ’57 Olds back axle was deemed up to the job, so was just rebuilt with the stock 3.48:1 final drive. Brakes remain drums on the back.

Out went the stock leaf springs, though, replaced with adjustable coilovers and triangulated 4-link location.

Right: I’m only here for the party. F-1 series Procharger was spec’d specifically for the engine and came complete with a Holley 850cfm carb modified for blow-through use and a two-stage water injection system. In its current state of tune, the 558ci motor is estimated to make somewhere between 700 and 800bhp

Above: Like the trans, the big block Ford engine previously saw duty under the hood of Boston Brawler. As it ran on alcohol then, it’s been completely rebuilt with a new crank and Wiseco pistons to bring the compression down to a more pump fuel and blower friendly 10:1. Heads are Ford Motorsport Super Cobra Jets with a Crane cam and Crane and Comp Cams roller top end

Above: The only external giveaways of a Super 88, as opposed to the base model 88 two door sedan this car is, are a couple of discreet badges on the front wings and some additional chrome trim around the windows. That amazing three-piece wraparound rear ’screen, however, is unmistakably 1957 Oldsmobile

Above: In ’56 you got one enormous rocket ornament on the bonnet and pressings flowing into the windscreen that supposedly mimicked vapour trails. For ’57, however, your 88 came with two smaller rockets, one on each front wing top

The chassis was beefed up to take the additional torque and a new crossmember made to mount the Ford C6 transmission, another ‘only occasionally raced or rallied’ part from Jimmy’s old Brawler.

‘With the exception of the axle casing, everything’s new underneath,’ says Kelvin summarily. ‘I usually like to do all my own work on my cars, but this one needed so much that I’d be dead before I’d finished it if I had tried to do it all myself.’

As you’ll have guessed from looking at the pictures, that work didn’t stop at just the mechanical modifications. It continued into a bare metal repaint, re-chroming and polishing of all the factory trim, a complete new interior and re-wiring, including such niceties as air conditioning, heating, rear ’screen de-misting, DAB / Bluetooth stereo and even central locking. Yep, it’s like a new car alright.

Beauty in the beast

Now, we’re well aware of Kelvin’s antics in pre-war Fords with the VHRA, so were keen to hear how this one compares.

‘It’s certainly a bit of a change from the Flathead stuff I race,’ he says with a smile. ‘It’s just beautiful, though. It’s beautiful to look at and it drives beautifully, nothing like the barge it used to be.

‘It hasn’t been dyno’d yet. We’re hoping for 7-800 horsepower out of the motor, but with the Procharger it’s still very driveable at that. And the suspension and brakes are night and day to how it was before.

‘I like fast cars, but I also like a bit of a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and I wanted something to cruise around in, maybe go on holiday in, and to shows. Something a bit more sedate than my old hot rods. Okay, it’s not exactly sedate, especially not when you open the exhaust cut-outs – then it sounds like a Top

Above: Ironically, Oldsmobile downsized to 14-inch wheels with wider 8.50-14 tyres for the ’57 to visually lower the new year’s model. Kelvin has gone the other way and upsized to 17-inch Torq Thrust IIs with 215/50-17 and 255/5-17 Kumho radials

Fueller going down the strip – but it really is just a beautiful car to drive. And the best thing is, I don’t think I’ve got anything left to do on it now, other than drive it.

‘Oh, and take it down the drag strip. After everything that’s been done to it, I’ve got to give it a go, haven’t I?’

Thanks

Just a massive thanks to my good friend Jimmy really, and all the ‘unhinged crew’ at Valley Gas Speed Shop, for their hard work and making it the car it is. I really can’t thank them all enough

Below: …if you were to look behind all the restored original switches and sliders, you’d find modern switchgear and various microswitches to control such interior niceties as the heating, air conditioning and rear ’screen de-mist. ‘We just tried to make it a little bit more comfortable, more useable all year round,’ explains Jimmy

Below: Where Chevy and Cadillac peaked their ostentatious fins, Oldsmobile designers chose to work with the oval shape, neatly finished at the rear end by the chrome-embellished tail lights. One of Kelvin’s favourite parts is the way the complete new stainless exhaust exits through the bumper openings, just as it did originally. Similarly, the fuel filler, which hides away behind the 88 logo on the nearside rear wing

Words and pics: James Webber

The annual Hot Rod and Bike show at Wendron Cricket Club in Helston is fast becoming a must-do event in the southwest. Organised by the 46-bike crew, it’s just £5 on the gate and all money raised goes to Cornwall Air Ambulance.

A great selection of bikes filled the middle of the field, while cars started to fill the back row. There were a few cars less than the previous year but with so many events jostling for space in the calendar it’s hard to try and get to them all. A few traders were pitched up, including Bumpy’s Powder Coating, LCA Upholstery and Tyrefinders, as well as catering from The Wonka Wagon, Cold Start Coffee and KC Grill.

A few of the winners come prize-giving included Best Hot Rod Paint Job, which went to Roger Flamank’s ’47 Tudor, Best Hot Rod in Show for Barry Aimable’s ’65 Thunderbird and Best Home Built Chopper, Dale Reardon’s custom green machine.

Afterwards, John Hinder of the 46 Crew, gave me a run down of how the day went. ‘It was a very busy day with huge support from the bikers and the Yank owners,’ he said. ‘The weather was great all day which made it all the more enjoyable. In total we raised £3986.77 for the Air Ambulance, which shows the generosity of people even during the cost of living crisis.’ From a punter’s point of view, it was another thoroughly enjoyable day with a relaxed, stress-free vibe. This is becoming a great show to mark on your calendar –it’s getting bigger and better each year, and of course it’s all for a great cause CC

Words and pics: James Webber

In 2021, the team at The Bearded Brewery did an outstanding job of helping the south-west’s car lovers to blow away the lockdown cobwebs with their Americana Show. And they did it again last summer, bringing a heady combination of cars and music to their venue near Newquay keep a happy crowd entertained all day long.

Cars were parked on the main show field and bikes on a hard standing area, allowing plenty of space for people to wander around and check out the stunning variety of vehicles on display. Music was provided throughout the event by singers and bands including Laura Kate, The Sugar Bullets and Lost in Space, while food was served up to perfection by the team putting on a BBQ, along with the on-site Dough and Base pizza shack. It won’t come as any great susprise to hear that the company’s awardwinning ciders were going down a treat.

With so many other events also going on, the number of cars wasn’t quite as high as the previous year. But that didn’t dampen what was a glorious afternoon and evening in the Cornish sun.

A couple of prizes were awarded, with Treve Farley’s ’65 Mustang winning best of show and Robert and Hilary Gunson taking the runners-up spot with their 3100 Chevy truck.

The Bearded Brewery’s venue is fast becoming a great social hub for the community in and around Newquay, and many events are in the planning for the coming year. So be sure to check out their social media pages for news of future car shows. There’s a pretty temping range of ciders on there too… CC

Words and pics: Vic Peel

By the time you get to this page in this month’s issue of Custom Car, chances are you’ll already have cast your eyes over Kelvin Helsdown’s stunning ’57 Oldsmobile. It has spent the last while in the workshop of dreams that is Valley Gas, which is where we went to meet up with the guys there prior to doing our photoshoot. Naturally, it wasn’t just a case of turning up, fetching the car out of the yard and setting off to do our thing. With so many exciting projects on the go, declining the opportunity to take a nose round would be little short of criminally negligent –especially when so many of them are earmarked for future CC features.

In particular, one of them – a ’41 Ford pick-up – is getting very close to being finished. And by an enormous stroke of luck, on the day we visited Valley Gas they had the signwriters in. Not just any signwriter, either, but Neil Melliard. Words like ‘legendary’ and ‘world class’ get thrown around way too often – but you won’t find many people who’d begrudge him this level of praise. There are so many incredible cars out there on which his artistry and technique have gone together to provide the finishing touch. these pages very soon. In the meantime, what a pleasure it was to watch an artist at work… there’s no such thing as an ordinary

The ’41 is going to join them, and we’re delighted to say that it’ll be appearing in look around the Valley Gas workshop, but this one was very special indeed! CC