Category:Hotrods, show cars, Kustom Kars and dragsters

1965: "Surf Hearse", AMT kit based on a car by George Barris [image info]

1965: AMT kit of Don Garlits' "Wynn Jammer" dragster [image info]

Origins

America's Hot Rod culture of car customisation had its roots in the pre-war speed competitions and drag racing, where the idea was to get a car to cover a set distance in the fastest possible time. These competitions encouraged competitors to severely modify old (and affordable) car frames, adding larger engines, stripping away unneccessary cosmetic bodywork such as fenders and bonnets, and paying little regard to conventional car design aesthetics. Freed form the constraints of havign to fit tidily into normal wheel-arches, wheels could be larger and wider, engines didn't have to fit inside a normal bonnet (and could even be completely exposed, helping cooling and spot maintenance) and air intakes could protrude from odd places even if this interfered with driver visibility.

Although these brutal and uncompromising modifications were utterly functional, they created a "look" that imprinted on the minds of spectators and custom car designers, based on "naked" oversized-looking engines, custom engineering, extravagant "paintjobs" and jacked up rear suspensions.

The Nineteen-Fifties

With the expansion of US car culture in the 1950s, many teenagers with the ability to own their own (second-hand) car were keen to customise them with mail-order accessories and custom chromed components, that could turn an old and dated-looking used car into an exciting-looking status symbol, even if the car was never actually raced.

The Nineteen-Sixties

This theme continued through the 1960s, with some particularly talented and inspired car artists graduating from hobbyists to professionals, producing wild designs to order. US culture was embracing Sixties counterculture, anticonformism and the rejection of social norms (and dodging the Vietnam War draft) and psychedelia, comics and artwork were experimenting with LSD-inspired "freaks" and popular television embraced the intersection of mainstream suburban society with monsters (The Addams Family and The Munsters), and magic (Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie), it was only natural that customisers would produce "freak" and "fantasy" cars that emphasised the Hot-Rod design aesthetic, created for their looks rather than for actual speed.

While mainstream auto-industry designers competed to produce slick, streamlined and futuristic motor-show prototypes that looked as if they might one day be put into production, the top hot-rodders competed to produce the most bizarre cars possible, producing the most anachronistic and perversely impractical combinations of designs that their imaginations could conjure up. These cars were often produced primarily as artworks or show cars, "celebrity" cars able to draw an audience to a car show or event. What happened if you combined a souped-up, overpowered beach buggy front with the rear of a funeral hearse? How about a high-speed icecream van, or a police prisoner transport van designed for drag-racing? What was the most extravagant and over-the-top styling and accessorising that one could apply to an ancient Model T Ford, while keeping it recognisably a Model T? And if there was a limit to the size of engine one could find to fit to your chassis, what happened if you tried to fit and cross-connect two engines?

The habit at the time of Detroit car manufacturers producing a recognisably different version of a popular car every year meant that car dealerships needed displays showing "next year's model" before it was actually available, to drive advance sales. This regular business encouraged some small engineering companies to hone their skills in producing extremely faithful plastic model cars. When these companies decided to turn their talents to producing plastic car kits for the general retail market, there was then a slight oversupply of plastic model kit makers specialising in car models, and the need to produce something new and exciting that couldn't be copied by their competitors led to practically every major US model kit company trying to get exclusive rights to produce model kit versions of some famous "Kustom" designer's freakiest creations.