In the process of research for our forthcoming seventies edition, we came across what is definitely my favourite piece of American muscle.

The 1970 ‘Hemi ‘Cuda’ was the top of the range sports version of Plymouth’s workhouse the Barracuda, and was powered, naturally by the Chrysler version of the V8 Hemi (below).

Whilst most American muscle cars come across as brutal and one dimensional, there’s something about the ‘Cuda’s lines that look almost graceful in an (almost) European kind of way.

See the footage of a beautiful black version of the notchback two-door below to see how much grace the car posesses. We think you’ll agree it glides along the yank highway with uncommon poise.

About this time of year, with the back-to-back bank holidays and the blossom hanging heavy on the boughs, even the most committed drivers among us begin to think of the beauty of sports utility.

Despite the partly justified bad press that the four wheel drive behemoths known as SUVs have received of late, there remains a strong argument for their use. Especially if that use is actually for that which they were designed.

Just look at this mutant wagon (above). Woodied up and loaded down with all the add-ons known to man. It’s undoubtedly stylish and even cool in an ironic kind of way. Aerodynamics, we think, may have been affected by the lifeboat tackle and the BBQ extension. Pure King of the Hill.

And look, then, at one of our favourite pieces of beautifully boxy utility from American company International Harvester. IH was one of those companies that was founded in the protean energy of turn of the century America, and remains one of the venerated founding fathers of the American motor trade. The gorgeous little Scout (above) was their mainstay and has been credited with sparking the original SUV revolution. When kept pristine and preserved in its original state, the simplicity and no nonsense fun of the car shines through.

Even more brawny, rare and desireable is, though, IH’s Travelall. If you can find one this side of the pond it’ll be a miracle. But, what better than a Travelall to tick of your neighbour and the teeth-sucking environmentalists than to load this baby up and take it camping for the weekend. Just better make it a local campsite, lest the fuel bill cost as much as a flight to the Carribean.

But if you needed convincing that these domesticated agriculturals are worthy of note, just take a couple of minutes to look at the video from one of the original US dealers. We would certainly buy a car from this man.

As a European there are certain things about North American motor racing that get us excited. And its nothing to do with NASCAR.

But mention the words Laguna Seca, Can Am and Chapparal, and we get a little sweaty palmed and breathless.

There’s a common fallacy that the fact that America has never wholeheartedly submitted itself to the technological spectacle of F1 is basically because that yankee technology has always been all about brawn and cubic inches, and that the subtlety of Aerodynamic engineering and twisting circuits has been the sole preserve of we oh-so-sophisticated Brits and Euros.

Well, Jim Hall’s tarmac sucking Chaparral 2J of 1970 gives the lie to that.

Hall, born in Texas in 1935 the heir to a huge oil fortune, competed in F1 races in the early sixties and other series, but his real moment came when he started his own racing car brand in the Chapparal. The 2J, his magnum opus, innovated aerodynamic technologies that were hailed as revolutionary much later.

It wasn’t until 1977, For example, that Colin Chapman introduced the F1 world to ground effect aerodynamics.

But apart from the technology that distinguished it, there was an otherworldly monstrosity to the look of the Chapparal 2J that slotted perfectly into the boxy brawn of Can Am racing and echoes down the ages.

You can smell the fumes and hear the growl and wheez of the cars just by looking at them.

Their purposefulness is encoded perfectly into the aesthetic of the design. Cars like the 2J remind us just what a shame it is that F1 design has converged to the point that without the paintwork and branding, few of us could distinguish the cars from one another at first sight.

You certainly couldn’t say that of the Chaparral.

Screen grabs. Social networking. Iphone apps. A world without walls was dreamt up by software marketing people to make you think that working everywhere, any time would be a benefit to your own sense of freedom and transcendence of the bread and butter drudge of making a living.

In reality, this ‘world without walls’ has enslaved so many of us to the computer screen, the SMS and the email account.

Respect then, to people like those at It’s Better In the Wind, who use the tech at their disposal to disseminate a message that when all’s said and done getting out there in the elements on the road, looking for adventure, accepting what ever in real visceral time, may come your way — that that is the way to transcend the dull realities of simply getting by.

Have a great weekend. Load up, and get out there.

LA based artist Andrew Bush graduated from Yale University with an MFA in Photography in 1982 and has been pursuing the Vector Portraits series since he moved to Los Angeles in 1989. For this series of photos he uses his car as a tracking device, strapping a medium format camera and a flash gun to the side of his car, and then, basically, going for a drive and snapping away at his fellow motorists.

The Vector portrait series is eerily intimate – reflecting those fascinating moments of imagination you experience when you peer into someone else’s automotive bubble.

It’s an often-repeating truism that Americans become who they really are only when they are behind the wheel of a car. Bush tempts us to imagine what that reality consists of.

The work has been exhibited extensively in solo and group shows, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), Davis Museum and Cultural Center at Wellesley College (Wellesley, Massachusetts) and Staatliche Kunsthalle (Baden-Baden, Germany).

For more info on this and other of Andrew Bush’s work, go to http://www.mbfala.com/artists/_Andrew%20Bush/_other%20works/

Sometimes sophisticated industrial processes are over-rated. Sure, we love the hand-wrought curve of fine steel wrapped around a frame and some rolling gear. But luscious curves  alone do not a cool motor make.

The Americans, in particular, have always known how to construct a good-looking box-on-wheels. It wasn’t just the stoic Swedes at Volvo who knew the beauty of form following function.

Many an angular hunk of automotive goodness has been manufactured in the name of utility right out of the foundries and production lines of Detroit.

We can’t be the only ones who have gazed longingly  out of airliners’ port holes at the ultimate utility vehicles – that’s right: those beauties that trundle around airport aprons. But could a milk-float ever be cool?

We think with the right box-like stripped-down aesthetic, there’s no reason why not. Just look at this hunkered down Stud.

We at Influx towers are always looking at interesting ways of presenting stories of people and their cars.

And in the daily hunt for things that inspire us, we recently stumbled upon Joe Goode’s simple but lovely way of presenting a calendar.

The piece dates from the end of the  1960s. All he did was photograph twelve of his friends in a simple square format in their cars. There’s nothing particularly interesting about the individual photos in themselves. For a while we were scratching our heads trying to work out what is so nice about this little piece of incedental automotive art.

Then, it dawned on us. What makes this little piece of interesting is the variety of design in each individual car. That individuality seems to reflect and feed back upon the personality of the person sitting in the car.

The obvious question is: if you attempted to replicate this project in twelve straight-ahead contemporary cars, would the piece be half as interesting?

Rest assured in a spirit of experimentation we’re going to try to do just that.

Watch this space for 2010 update of Joe’s forty year old offering.

The Buick Y Job of 1938 not only had a silly name, but encapsulated an American vision of the future that was postponed only by the Nazis

But by the time he retired he plainly didn’t think much of his – or anyone else’s – ability to predict how cars would look or function in ten or twenty years’ time. He was right: the history of the future of the car is littered with hopeless or plain embarrassing predictions. We can have a chuckle at Ford’s mad fifties plans for a nuclear-powered runabout, but with the car currently undergoing its most radical transformation as we search for a replacement for the internal combustion engine, we’d be wise to be neither too sceptical nor too credulous about what we might be driving in a decade’s time.

The availability of Uranium refuelling proved to be a sticking point for the Ford Nucleon. Combined of course with the possibility of multiple roadside apocalypses

Predictions about the future of transport are usually wildly optimistic, but one early belief went the other way. In the 1820s the speed of steam locomotives such as Stephenson’s Rocket started to exceed that of a galloping horse, the fastest speed sustained by man by that time. Many believed that travelling any faster would cause us to turn to mush, and that trains would never be able exceed around 40mph. In Britain, of course, this prediction turned out to be largely accurate, but for very different reasons.

And what is it about flying cars? Half of the predictions about the future of transport seem to involve them. Over 30 patents for flying cars have been filed in the United States alone; the first was the Curtiss Autoplane of 1917. The most credible was probably the Convaircar of 1947, a lightweight, streamlined coupe with a detachable wing and propeller unit that could be left at the landing strip, allowing the car to be driven as normal. Built by an established aviation firm and the work of Henry Dreyfuss, one of America’s greatest industrial designers, the Convaircar completed several long test flights but later crashed. The bad publicity and high price — around $1500, plus wings — killed the project.

That radioactive Ford was called the Nucleon: revealed in 1958 it had its own on-board nuclear reactor and was good for 5000 miles between uranium fill-ups. Quite what would happen in the event of a heavy shunt was never really examined. Other examples of future-gazing Ford silliness include the ’61 Gyron, a two-wheel car balanced by a gyroscope, and the Leva Car, which was effectively a 500mph hovercraft with no brakes. Needless to say, neither actually functioned. The best-known Ford concept of the period is the ’55 Lincoln Futura. Built by Italian coachbuilder Ghia and fully driveable, it was sold to Californian ‘kustom-kar’ builder George Barris and rotted in his yard for years before he painted it black and turned it into the Batmobile in ’66.

Harley Earl’s explorations at GM were hugely influential

But despite his self-deprecation, Harley Earl regularly almost got it right. His greatest concepts were the three Firebirds, shown between 1954 and ’58. Like other designers of the jet-age Earl was obsessed with aircraft. Unlike the Convaircar the Firebirds couldn’t actually fly, but they looked like they might; all had jet-style fuselages, gas turbine engines and Firebird III had seven fins and separate bubble canopies for driver and passenger. But in some respects these concepts really did predict the cars we drive today, with lightweight titanium bodies, keyless entry, rear reversing cameras and features that bear a remarkable similarity to modern sat-nav, I-drive and collision-avoidance systems.

Mr Barris may have known how to pen a cool car, but his jackets rocked too

The latest attempt to predict the future is the Government-commissioned Foresight report on transport in 2055. It sets out a series of different scenarios, which include everything from self-driving mobile offices to driverless buses we summon by PDA. Its gloomier predictions see a dystopian world in which journeys are rationed by carbon credits, and ‘tribal’ communities compete for energy resources after oil runs out, the banking system fails and society collapses. Maybe you ought to switch off your computer and go out for a drive, while you still can.

But we’d rather look to the future with a little of that fifties optimism. There’s no question that the car will be forced to change quickly and radically, whether through excess carbon dioxide or insufficient oil. The race to find a replacement for petrol and diesel engines is being run right now, but it’s a marathon rather than a sprint, and the new technologies that seem to be in front now might not even make the finishing line.

Is the Tesla Roadster an exciting glimpse of a potentially sustainable automotive future – or little more than a rich man’s trifle?

But we have been able to test all these competing new technologies, if only in prototype form in some cases, and they’re mostly exciting. Take the Tesla Roadster, the all-electric supercar you can actually go out and buy now, albeit at an eye-watering six-figure price tag. It will out-drag some Ferraris and Lamborghinis to 60mph, its absurd, instant, warp-drive acceleration made to feel all the more Star-Trek by the silence in which it’s produced.

Or there’s the Honda FCX Clarity, the world’s first ‘commercially-available’ hydrogen fuel cell vehicle. It’s a sexy, streamlined four-seat hatchback with a decent boot and a useful 270-mile range. 200 lucky customers will get to lease them, though at a very heavily subsidized rate: the tech is still too expensive to go on sale.

But the cost is steadily declining, and when it comes down far enough for Honda to sell them alongside – or maybe instead of – its regular line-up by around 2020, we’ll all get to experience the entirely new kind of driving pleasure it offers. It doesn’t rely on noise or speed or image: it simply marries the same unconstrained mobility we enjoy now with the utterly guilt-free conscience that comes from emitting nothing but water from the tailpipe. And it’s as silent as the Tesla; inner and outer peace combined.

The future of motoring – or an ultra expensive dead-end?

Will hydrogen be the fuel of the future? We’ll heed Harley’s words, and won’t make that prediction. But we’ve been to the future, and can report back that it might not be as bad as some think.

Star Trek’s colourful imaginary inspired many an American vision of the automotive future

In the western states of America, with more space and cheaper fuel than the rest of us, a bunch of good old boys have been carrying on a nice little alternative endurance series that owes more to banger and stock car racing than the elegance of cocktails on the Mulsanne. The 24 Hours of LeMons, in an age where the beauty and utility of old cars are undervalued by officialdom, is just the sort of thing we want to bring to these islands.

Each LeMons race is for cars purchased, fixed up, and track-prepped for a total of 500 dollars or less. But before reaching the grid, drivers have to survive trials like the Personal-Injury-Lawyer Anti-Slalom, the Marxist-Valet Parking Challenge, and the Wide Open Throttle Rodthrowapalooza.

Twelve hours into the race, the car voted People’s Choice is called in and awarded a cash prize; simultaneously, the car voted People’s Curse is called in and summarily destroyed. At the end of 24 hours, a gala awards ceremony plies the survivors with trophies, plaques, and four-figure purses in canvas bags full of nickels.

Races are scheduled all though next year, from Texas to California and back again. When will they bring the series to the UK? I have at at least two cars fully prepped and ready for entry. Check out the victory parade for some inspiring mods.

Now we might be accused of being a little obsessed at Influx towers with the year 1969. But dammit, it seems that so much cultural products of that very special year remains continually interesting, and spangled with the elusive stardust that is known as COOL.

The 1969 Camaro was chosen as the Official Pace Car for the 1969 running of the Indianapolis 500 and as the Official Car of the ‘500’ Festival. This was a repeat performance for Camaro since it had also been chosen as the 1967 Pace Car. To help them stand out on the large expanse of track, the 1969 pace cars were designed to be visible: Dover White RS/SS convertibles with Hugger Orange Z28 style stripes and orange houndstooth cloth seats.

All the deep info available on the video. But we just dig the car for it’s don’t give-a-crap attitude.