12 minute read
Best-of-everything ’37
People fall in love with cars for all sorts of reasons. In the case of this ‘37 cabrio, one look at its paintwork was enough to fi nd it a new home
Words and pics: Dan Fenn
There’s plenty of show here, but no shortage of go either. The 383ci Chevy stroker runs zinc-coated headers and exhaust, an alloy rad and fan and, most importantly, a Greta Thunberg. Despite the latter, Fred says his neighbours tell him they love hearing his car go past
I’m sitting in Fred Wilkins’ living room. His ’37 Ford cabrio is parked outside and we’re talking cars.
Well, he’s talking and I’m listening. When someone who’s had as many of them as Fred talks cars, it’s a good time to listen.
‘I’ve had hundreds of Yanks,’ he says. ‘Thousands. There’s not a lot I haven’t had.’
He’s in his seventies now, and still as enthused as ever by whatever his next car is going to be. ‘I’d like a ’68 Charger,’ he tells me. ‘That’s why I bought this one, really. It was at the right money and I reckoned it would be very part-exchangeable. If I can get what I think it’s worth, it’ll help me get to the sort of money Chargers are worth.’
Head ruling heart? Not a bit of it. Fred has spent his life around cars; he was a trader for a spell, dealing in all sorts of everyday stuff as well as imported American motors he bought straight from the quayside as they arrived in Rainham. So yes, he’s a whole lot better at selling them than your average rodder. But he loves his cars, too. ’To be honest,’ he says, ‘I had already bought the ’37 the moment I saw it. I saw the colour and I thought “I like that.” I had never seen one like it before.’
He goes on to describe how, having fallen for the car, he went on to look for where the seller was based… only to find that it was something like a 700-mile round
Fred waxes lyrical about the custom grille, whose design makes it look from some angles as if it’s fl oating in the air. It’s wonderfully delicate and goes well with the LIL38 identity… which appeared on the car because a previous owner already had LIL37 on a ‘37 Business Coupe
The car was born in 2006 as the result of a best-of-everything build based on a chassis from Pete and Jakes. Independent front suspension arms and rear trailing links were all fabricated from tube and fi nished in chrome before they ever got to see the underside of the vehicle. The rear axle is the classic Ford 9” and is equally classic in that it was built to heavy-duty spec by Currie Enterprises before ever going in place. Suspension is by coil-overs all-round and braking is by Wilwood solid discs, with a separate caliper handbrake
trip to get there. Undaunted, he was there the next day. ‘I left my money, came home and booked a transporter.’
Obviously, this isn’t a story about a man who built his car. To some extent, actually, it’s a story about the cars that built the man. But the car itself was built, and it was built with no expense spared.
Odd numbers
Its history goes back to 2006, when a UK-based punter with a man-sized car collection and a matching taste for anonymity placed an order for an all-steel ’37 whose rotisserie-stripped body sits on top of a chassis from the rodding legend that is Pete and Jakes in Missouri.
Let’s pause there for a moment. You’ll have noticed the number plate: LIL38. But it’s a ’37. ‘It’s not because this was the closest I could get,’ says Fred. ‘It’s because a previous owner also owned LIL37, which he had on a ’37 Business Coupe.’ So, rest assured this isn’t one of those plates…
Behind LIL38’s custom grille, a 383 Chevy stroker runs zinc-coated headers and exhaust as well as an alloy rad and fan. Bolted to the back of it is a Turbo 350 box which in turn spins a Currie-built 9” Ford back axle, and billet alloys measure 17” at the front and 18” at the rear.
Braking is by Wilwood discs all round, with a separate handbrake caliper added to keep the MOT man from throwing his toys out of the pram. He might spend a while searching for the lever, though, because it’s basically flat to the floor beneath the seat.
All the suspension is tubular, with the front A-arms and rear trailing links fully chromed. If Fred ever mows you down, the last thing that goes through your mind will simply be ‘wow.’
Not all of this was done at source, with the vehicle being shipped to Britain (flown, actually – rather a container it arrived in Blighty aboard a cargo plane) in a part-built state before being finished off by a combination of two distinctly A-list names. Jimmy Hibbard at Valley Gas needs no introduction whatsoever, and nor does Tim Hammond Engineering, who between them took care of finishing the car to GB spec and, well, just finishing it full stop.
And as always, the details in the finish count for so much. The cabin has been
exhaust as well as an alloy rad and fan. Bolted to simply
trimmed in leather and fitted with VDO instruments, an Alpine remote stereo and an air-con system that Fred says he still hasn’t worked out how to operate, thanks to all the switchgear being hidden down below the dash. You could argue that it’s not really necessary in a cabrio, but since Fred tends not to put his top down he might as well be driving a sedan.
In fact, he admits to not really liking cabrios at all. And yet, we point out, he bought one. In response, he asks how many other hot rods we’ve seen in this colour.
The man’s got a point. It’s a Candy Green from House of Kolor in Ohio and, he’s found, getting a match for it is like trying to nail jelly to the ceiling. As in, those companies who specialise in being able to match absolutely any paint colour in existence were putting their scanners on it and their scanners were coming back with twisted melons. This is when you know you’ve got something unique.
Mixed grille
Also unique is the aforementioned grille, which was handmade and is pretty good at playing tricks on your eyes, especially when you view it from side on – when it takes on the most amazingly delicate appearance, seeming almost to float like a net curtain in the wind.
The tail light clusters trick the eyes of all those who gaze upon them, too. Or make that cluster, singular, actually. It’s a single full-width LED strip, frenched in to the rear panel below the trunk, and it covers tail, brake, indicator and hazard functions while also being more or less completely invisible while it’s switched off. As with the grille, Fred remarks that he’s never seen another one like this.
Which means something, when you remember the number of cars he’s owned. And not just hot rods and classic Americans, either; he’s had more Land Rovers than your average Land Rover collector, too. But the story we’re not going to forget in a hurry dates from when he was living in London – at a very familiar address.
‘I used to live in Albert Square. There are two of them in London – mine was in Stratford. The one in Eastenders is sort of based on it, but we would still get coach tours coming to visit! The pub used to be called The Albert, before they changed it into The Queen Vic. There’s apartments in its place now.
‘When I lived there, I used to watch to see which of my neighbours didn’t have
It’s trimmed in leather inside, and the dash features a bank of VDO instruments – neatly distracting attention from the complete absence of switchgear. It’s all hidden away underneath the lower part of the dash, which looks cool but less than an ergonomic treat; Fred told us that he still hasn’t fi gured out how to make the air-con work
cars, and I would ask them if it they didn’t mind me parking one in front of their house. So when you went into Albert Square, you would see American cars everywhere, all over the place in every direction you looked. People who didn’t know about me must have wondered what was going on!’
Among those cars was a ’67 Camaro he used to race in RWYB at Santa Pod, and a 57’ Chevy which started life tearing up the strips of the US under the name of Super Pumpkin. This was brought to the UK in the mid-70s by Pete and Maggie Devlin before moving on to Dave Mingay, who renamed it Hellraiser. Fred took it on after it had reached the point where its weight was preventing it from going any faster and reimagined it as a street rod running the engine from an Iso Grifo; it’s now in Sweden, in the hands of owners who are restoring it back to its Super Pumpkin days.
He also owned a ’68 Chevy truck which went on to appear in the original Superman movie (‘I had sold it to a friend, then before he even had it the production company came along wanting to hire it… they needed the cabin to be a different colour, so they offered to retrim it for him, and the paint was likely to get damaged during shooting so they said they’d respray it as well!) and a ’63 Thunderbird which appeared in the Netflix feature Blood Diamond.
Voracious
Many of us are, to put it tactfully, better at buying cars than we are at selling them. Fred is good at selling them, too, having done it so many times – but the difference is that he still has a voracious appetite for buying them, too. As we’ve already mentioned, a ’68 Charger is on his to-do list, but in his own words ‘I do need more nice Yanks I’ve never owned before I die. A nice ’67/68 Caddy Eldorado, or perhaps another ’41 Willys or ’32 Ford… or maybe another Tri Chevy… or possibly a ’64-’66 fastback Mustang…’ Not to put too fine a point on it, he ain’t slowing down.
But for now, what he’s got is this little green giant, which has brought home a gong from every show it’s been to and gets approving comments from everyone who sees it. And hears it, too: ‘The ladies who live in my street always say they love hearing my car going past!’
Having cost someone upstairs of $100,000 when it was new, this ’37 was a best-of-everything build in 2006 and today it’s a car you could take down the shops – if you didn’t mind arriving home with words of praise echoing in your ears and your shopping defrosting itself into a sorry mess beside you. ‘It’s the kind of car you see at hot rod shows being driven by old men who’ve been doing it all their life and this is where they’ve got to,’ concludes Fred, and that describes it pretty much perfectly.
It’s the kind of car people spend their lives aspiring to one day own. And once they do, they tend to want to keep them forever. Unless they’re Fred Wilkins. He loves all things American… and in his quest to have owned, literally, all things American, LIL38 is destined to become yet another hot rod that’s fast-moving in more ways than one.
