Pretty undecided here at Influx Towers about what we actually think about this. Love? Hate? Indifference?

Not being ones to sit on the fence, we're going to have to sit on the fence.

There's something just so wrong about re-creating a 60s concept in the 21st century- and the lines of it look a little ugly. But in essence, we can't help but love that someone has been arsed to do it at all.

This thing is a '1960 Plymouth XNR', was designed and built by one Virgil Exner Sr. and was, according to the webs, built on a Valiant chassis, we're thinking they might mean a Chrysler Valiant, but cannot be sure.

It doesn't touch many of the Bertone-penned yank concepts of the era for pure brilliance and audacity - but there's something quirkily appealing about it's pretence to reference Euro classics like the D-Type in its finned rear three-quarters.

The post Exner Valiant appeared first on Influx Magazine.

Stumbled across an amazing collection of original Motorsports slides today for sale on eBay.

It really brings to mind the glorious beauty of film and transparency photography.

We here at Influx towers are of course obvious revelers in the joys of digital photography. We have utilised the full quiver of readymade tools that have been developed to saturate your pics with that old school, retro feel.

Seeing these slides, though, you can really feel how our user-friendly digital retrospectives can't yet match the lovely feel of the real thing.

Not sure exactly who the subjects are and exactly which motorsports seasons we're looking at here: perhaps you can help?

The post Transparent Nostalgia appeared first on Influx Magazine.

Tom Wolfe is a character in America's unfolding drama

It was a big deal for Wolfe. He panicked and got a terrible case of writer's block and just typed all his notes out in a long memo to his editor, Byron Dobell, who'd arranged for someone else to write the story. But once Wolfe relaxed the easy, impressionistic style in which he wrote the notes made great reading. So Dobell just knocked the 'Dear Byron' off the top of the memo and ran the whole thing in the magazine. The story, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-flake Streamline Baby, is seen as one of the first examples of The New Journalism, even if Wolfe was panicking rather than consciously innovating as he wrote it, and it's one of the best things ever written about cars. I have a copy of the original 1963 Esquire on my desk as I write this, but you can buy the story in the Wolfe anthology of the same name, and there are a few other car-related classics in there too.

I wasn't trying to copy, outdo or update Wolfe's piece. There's no point. What he saw in '63, I saw last year: the great hot-rod builders like the great artists in their studios, building cars of the most perfect stance and proportion for those who could afford them (not cheap), but staying outside the automotive mainstream, with the big carmakers paying attention and doing what they can to capture some of that automotive mojo, but never quite getting it.

Cars like this 'surf woody' helped cement the Barris legend

Counter-cultures don't usually last fifty years, but this one has lasted even longer, and goes back to the end of the Second World War when GIs came home with a need for speed that the old Model A Fords they'd left behind couldn't satisfy. That mixed with the nascent LA art scene and the racing on dry lake beds and illegal late-night public-road drag strips and the weather that encourages summer-night cruising to create the whole kustom kulture. It influenced so much: not just car design but journalism - not just Wolfe's story, but half of America's big mainstream and modded car mags grew out of Hot Rod magazine - and music - Brian Wilson and Little Deuce Coupe - and film. George Lucas's first big flick, American Graffiti, is pretty much the perfect summation of that whole scene. Shot on a tight budget, it was riotously profitable and he wasted the proceeds on some flop called Star Wars.

Ed 'Big Daddy' Roth created a more monstrous myth than that of Barris

And astonishingly, the people haven't changed either. George Barris has been at the chromed hub of Cali's kustom kulture since before the GIs came home. He invented the name. Already, by the time Wolfe met him for his Esquire piece, he was "the biggest name in customizing", and a "solid little guy, five feet seven, 37 years old, and he looks just like Picasso". Wolfe liked the great artist analogy: Barris's ascent, he said, was like "Tiepolo emerging from the studios of Venice, except that Barris emerged from the auto-body shops of Los Angeles".

He was right to make the comparison. While the work of the other great hot-rod builders, like Alex Xydias and Pete Chapouris of the famous SoCal Speedshop focused on pure, perfect automotive form, Barris and Ed 'Big Daddy' Roth pushed on into art, their cars as much free-form scuplture as transport. Roth passed in 2001 but Barris's vast canon of work now includes everything from subtle kustomizations for the Hollywood glitterati of the fifties to the Batmobile of the sixties and countless other movie cars. Detroit was paying attention, and still is. "I was amazed," Barris told Wolfe in '63 about his first trip to Detroit's design studios. "They could tell me about cars I built in 1945. And all this time we thought they frowned on us."

Celebrity hookups were Barris's stock in trade

Artists like Barris and Roth could never go work for corporate behemoths, so instead the global car industry came to them: the biggest change since Wolfe's story is that virtually every major carmaker now has a design studio in southern California, hoping that their hyper-edumacated young stylists will catch whatever it is that makes SoCal cars so great. Meanwhile Barris, at 86 looking like the well-aged pop star he is, keeps at it. To paraphrase William Shakespeare (if you haven't heard of him, think of him as the George Barris of literature): "Age cannot wither him, nor kustom stale his infinite variety"...

The post Kandy Koloured Dreams appeared first on Influx Magazine.

Mind driving may be the preserve of license-less 11 years old, but in the Influx household it remains firmly at the front of our adultescent imaginations.

So we were excited this morning when news hot of the retro Jap wires announces that Mattel are about to raise the stakes and do a series of editions of classic Japanese retro racers like these Skylines.

You can check the full list of 2011 editions here.

Father's days is coming up isn't it? Why not buy the boy of your dreams a piece of his childhood back?

The post Japanese Phatness appeared first on Influx Magazine.

Emerging from the shoestring budgeted British club racing scene of the 1950s, Elva cars was the brainchild of Frank G Nicols - who successfully raced at Goodwood throughout that austere decade — and began marketing special road-going racers for customers after some notable success.

The name Elva is apparently a corruption of 'elle va' meaning 'she goes' in a variety of latin languages - and no matter how quaint this story is, the brand was seen on around a thousand sports racing and road going cars.

Whilst the most famous and popular Elva Models was the Courier - for us their most interesting creation was the GT160 coupé - of which just three were built. The car stood just just 40" high and was based on a BMW racing car chassis, with a body by Italian coach builder Fissore.

One of the three was offered for sale last year. A slice of English auto history, and a pretty one at that...

The post Rare as Hen’s Teeth #2 appeared first on Influx Magazine.

Strange Cornubian happenings continue to emerge now that the bulk of we grockles have gone back upcountry to our landlocked hovels, chained to our TFTs dreaming of halcyon days of summertime surf. Last weekend the World Bellyboard Championships attracted the biggest field of competitors and spectators ever - despite driving rain and stormy seas at Chapel Porth beach, just south of St Agnes.

But the current crop of dedicated revivalists of this ancient parochial art don't merely transport themselves back to a time of ply-wrought innocence at the beach - they also utilise a diverse and attractive fleet of surf vehicles to indulge their retro-progressive passions.

Influx contributing photographer John Isaac (that's him in the knitted cossie) is one of these stalwarts of new-age bellyboarding and the proud owner these days of the lovely Morris Traveller with which graced the Chapel Porth carpark.

We think you'll agree that there could scarcely be a better way to spend a wet weekend.

Thanks to John Isaac & Shayne House for the pictures. To obtain a fine piece of original ply, check out The Original Surfboard Company.

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