New Beck Super Coupe

One of my Favorites has to be that Yellow 57 from Hollywood Knight’s that Blower whine was just Bad A$$

@Michael Pickett posted:

So yeah, when we got our popcorn and sat down to listen to the witty dialogue in Le Mans, we had our choice of seats.

It's the rapid-fire banter that pulls you in and doesn't let you loose. The movie fairly crackles with the kind of effervescent and clever discourse McQueen was always known for, and left everyone (even non car-guys) watching glued to the screen.

There is no audible dialog from any of the characters for the first 37 minutes of Le Mans, and precious little of it the rest of the way. Jeanie tapped out at about the 10 minute mark and said something about this being a 24 hour movie about the 24 hours of Le Mans. I tried to explain the tension that was building as the clock ticked down, but she rolled her eyes and moved on to other pursuits.

FWIW, she liked Ford vs Ferrari, which is a cinematic masterpiece - the undisputed best movie of this or any time - so there is some hope for our 36-year long marriage, if we stick with the counseling and get the help we so clearly need.

I have some lightly used black Mechanix gloves, good for all occasions, driving and otherwise. I now they are Mechanix because it's printed on them in white.

My level of sofistimication falls short of Marty's.

For me, the big "Car Movie" memory of the 60's era was watching James Garner in "Grand Prix" in a small-ish theater in Comayagua, Honduras in the summer of 1967.  Several of us had made the one-day trip from the village we were working in for a regional meeting (we were in an organization like the Peace Corps) and had the evening off and saw the billboards around town so, "What the heck!  Let's hit the opening!"

We started the evening with steaks from a small restaurant on the walk to the theater. They tenderized the steaks by hammering them with a quart-size glass Coke bottle, then pan-fried them and smothered them with caramelized onions before serving.  That cost all of $2 bucks US.

The theater was just up the street from the restaurant.  We sat way up in back in the last row.  The place was packed.  It was mid-June.  The theater was wicked hot.  Nobody seemed to care.  The film was in English with Spanish sub-titles.  The flashiest car we had seen around our area was a white Jeep Wagoneer so seeing those race cars was something very special and we thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it.

The next day on our 8-hour drive back to our town in our pickup truck on gravel and clay roads, we found that you can easily drift an F150 through the turns just like in the movie, if the gravel is just right.  Fortunately, in 1967 there wasn't a whole lot of other traffic out there......

... yes my friends, that is thread drift.

"nyuk, nyuk, nyuk... them Duke Boys!!"

This one is a guilty pleasure for me, but right behind the 917s in Le Mans, I absolutely loved the 1969 911T Targa driven by William Hurt in Big Chill. It hit the sweet spot of a purposeful car used unapologetically as driver and not a garage queen. Witty dialogue was a plus in this film. Some say it was Kevin Costner's best performance (kidding, I like him).

"Some say it was Kevin Costner's best performance"

I Absolutely agree.  Costner played a great dead guy......    

Le Mans is a truly great film.....ya gotta luv watching Mc Queen at the outset drive up and stare in silence at his accident scene....real cinematic brilliance .... i read somewhere his personal daily driver 911S sold at auction for $5 million dollars....the price of kool i guess   

Thread drift yes, but at least its car related.

This thread has gone off the rails completely.

I'm glad I did my build a few years ago...

@Stan Galat posted:

I think the question is overly broad, so I'm gonna' cut it down into bite-sized pieces.

The 917 from Le Mans is obviously going to top any reasonable person's list of movie cars they'd like to own and drive, looking through the lens of experience available to us in 2022 - but in 1971, Le Mans was a vanity project for McQueen, and nobody understood it when it was in the theaters. Prototype racing was European, and I suppose guys in Germany and Italy (and France, obviously) cared about it, but nobody besides Carroll Shelby and Ken Miles did here (and H2, once Enzo pissed all over Ford).

I can assure you that nobody in Flyover, USA cared even a _tiny little bit. Neither AJ Foyt nor either of the Unsers raced in it, so I can assure you it wasn't me or my ilk. We'd never even heard of it.

What would have been the best car at the time the movie came out would be an interesting question. Everybody "of a certain age" would have picked the Mustang from Bullitt, but Bullitt (like Le Mans) was an "old movie" by the time I was in high-school. For guys in their late 50s, I'd think that a strong argument could be made for Milner's '32 Ford from American Graffiti (a movie and a car that pretty much summed up my aspirations in the middle '70s). I've always had a soft spot for the "cop motor (a 440 cubic inch plant), cop tires, cop suspension, cop shocks" Bluesmobile, from The Blues Brothers but my wife says it's because I was/am a juvenile delinquent. She's probably (well... most assuredly) correct. Ferris Beuller's 250 GT California should and would definitely be in the running.

But these were nowhere near the most popular and influential movie cars of the '70s. The runaway "best" movie car for guys my age was undoubtedly Burt Reynolds' Trans Am in Smokey and the Bandit. Nothing else even came close. If somebody mentions the DeLorean from Back To the Future, I'm afraid we can't be friends anymore.

Limiting the sampling to TV cars would be a lot tougher. The Torino with the weird stripe in Starsky and Hutch, maybe, or Crockett's Ferrari in Miami Vice (even though Tubbs' Caddy was an order of magnitude more cool), or Tom Selleck's 308 in Magnum P.I. - all OK, I guess. Again, if somebody says "Kit" from Night Rider, I'm going to have to take you out back to "talk" some sense into you.

There was really only one TV car in the '70s and '80s. It was wrong on every level, viewed through our middle-aged and post-everything eyes, but oh-so-right if you were a teenager in middle-America back in the day.

I'm speaking, of course, of the General Lee from the The Dukes of Hazzard, which was the very definition of the term "guilty pleasure". I'm sure we'd all probably be horrified to watch an episode now, but I'm not too proud to say that this was once a show I watched and enjoyed. I was not alone. Everybody loved Daisy Duke, and her shorts have entered the lexicon of Americana.

Hopefully, we've all evolved a bit since then

... but not as much as you'd think.

Projection. That’s the name for the mistaken belief that everyone thinks the same way you do. FWIW, some of us read Motor Trend while others were reading Road & Track.

I don’t remember a time when I didn’t follow F1 and sports car endurance racing. When I saw Grand Prix in CinemaScope when it was released, I knew the name of every real driver that appeared as an extra and instantly recognized them.

OTOH, I could give a rats ass about any American car, save maybe Shelby Mustangs and first gen Camaros.

And, FWIW, AJ won Le Mans in 1967, with Dan Gurney. He’s the only driver to ever win the Indy 500 and Le Mans in the same year.

@dlearl476 posted:

Projection. That’s the name gif thinking everyone thinks the same way you do. FWIW, some of us read Motor Trend while others read Road & Track.

I don’t remember a time when I didn’t follow F1 and sports car endurance racing. When I saw Grand Prix in CinemaScope when it was released, I knew the name of every real driver that appeared as an extra and instantly recognized them.

OTOH, I could give a rats ass about any American car, save maybe Shelby Mustangs and first gen Camaros.

And, FWIW, AJ won Le Mans in 1967, with Dan Gurney.

All true, including the part about Foyt and Gurney (which I had forgotten). My point was not that nobody in the world cared about F1 or endurance racing, but that like Mitch - my world in Flyover, USA was pretty small and insulated. I knew nobody who cared about either.

Out here in the sticks, "racing" meant "drag-racing", with the yearly timeout to watch all 200 laps of the Indy 500. We weren't racing on Mulholland, or "all the way to dead-man's curve" - a race was 10 power poles, start to finish, on the tackiest back road wide enough for 2 cars, but far enough off the off the beaten path to escape the attention of Johnny Law.

I wasn't reading M/T or R&T in my formative years. It was all Hot Rod and Car Craft. The first time I picked up a Car and Driver and read Brock Yates, David E Davis, and Don Sherman, I knew I'd lived a sheltered life.

I'm happy for you that you knew, and maybe still know the names of the extras in Gran Prix.

I feel lucky to remember what I had for lunch.

@Former Member posted:

Mine has to be:

@Stan Galat posted:

I'm happy for you that you knew, and maybe still know the names of the extras in Gran Prix

AFAIK, a Gran Prix is a horse race  

“I feel lucky to remember what I had for lunch.”

My nemesis is phone numbers. I have to look them up 3 times: Once for the area code (by which time I’ve forgotten the rest) then the exchange, then the last 4 digits.

OTOH, I can still remember the number I had when the exchanges still had NAMES!

Mine was Franklin3-0857

@dlearl476 posted:

With all the protein Fred was eating I'm certain there were emissions coming from somewhere.

This is my emission free car I don’t think I’d have enough stamina to get her out of the shop!! AbaDabaDoo

honorable mention?

I would also throw in the MP Lafer which appeared in Moonraker, not because of its breathtaking performance but because it is, in spirit, so very close to the kind of thing we ourselves are doing here...

I'll throw in the Lamborghini Countach from Cannonball Run. The first few minutes of the movie is all you have to see.

Here is a film about that car and how the real cannonball run was started by Yates.

I'm not sure if it's been posted here already. I did have oatmeal for breakfast though.

We shouldn't forget the friend we've just about all needed as we pursued this little hobby of ours.

34 minutes into that Cannonball documentary there's a moment of truth.

Since then, the cars got too fast, the roads got too crowded and lumpy, and the drivers got too engrossed in other pursuits.

It was a beautiful moment though.

Here is another feat that could no longer be duplicated today. It was taken in one take. It was actually run with a Mercedes and later dubbed with Ferrari sound.

I cannot like Carlos' post about Le Rendezvous enough. That is just a sublime film.

Any actual Super Coupe news?  Just askin' ... for a friend.

@DannyP posted:

I cannot like Carlos' post about Le Rendezvous enough. That is just a sublime film.

Except for the sound track. Anyone who’s ever seen film of a real Ferrari getting “a bit of stick” knows the car isn’t going anywhere near that fast.

It’s too bad they didn’t put a nagra and a Sennheiser 421 on a shock mount in the Mercedes.

Here is the latest update from Carey on my build:

They now have my chassis in their shop. They are fabricating and attaching the motor mounts. Then they will take measurements and do mock-ups for the suspension to see if they can use the 911 suspension. Once they make that determination, we will then know what size wheels/tires/brakes we can use.

They have my engine and will be sending it out to LN Engineering shortly to do a full rebuild.

Carey was able to find and acquire a brand new, OEM 996 (G96) transmission for my car.  Congratulations to Carey, this was a score.

The body is waiting its turn.

That's the latest. More to come.

Joel

"The body is waiting its turn."

So many jokes, so little time.

Joel. It’s going to be a great rival to the IM6 which may not ever be produced in the future. Thanks for the update.
But back to movies. One of my favorites. Against All Odds. Great acting. Beautiful people. Great music. And a great car race.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BYmgLO16ul0

"It’s going to be a great rival to the IM6 which may not ever be produced in the future."

Now that's a sad statement for those of us who are Intermeccanica fans.

@Bob: IM S6 posted:

"It’s going to be a great rival to the IM6 which may not ever be produced in the future."

Now that's a sad statement for those of us who are Intermeccanica fans.

Joel, I look forward to the end project.  Bob, your 911, I mean IM6 356 aka a 911 is totally bad ass.  When you whomp on the accelerator, all the passenger can say or feel is "oh my Jesus"

I am confident that Carey can deliver an equally bad ass product. 

I'm sure Carey will be able to do the same, too.

But I'll always be glad I have my IM6.  Like me, it will be part of a dying breed...

Well, IM filled a niche in our country and the fact that Henry was/is a great builder and his family started the whole repl-cation industry is a statement in and of itself.  IC cars from them may become truly collectors and maybe an heirloom for your kids Bob :> ) ... but not too soon Bob hang around for a while longer

SE has a history of building great cars as well and may well be on their way to creating the next generation of repli-cars. At least, it certainly looks that way.

We might have to have our IM's reevaluated for cost of replacement shortly if the price keeps going north, oh gee we are north.  Driving season starts shortly.... Yipee