Candy, Chrome and a Coupe for Competition

A few weeks ago, eighteen cardboard boxes appeared in my garage. Their tops sagged under the weight of one another and their corrugated sides frayed at the corners. At one point, these eighteen boxes were deemed perfect, or maybe just good enough, to hold “Paper for High Speed Copying, Laser Printing, Offset Printing & Plain Paper Fax.�? Twenty-something years later, they still contained some kind of paper. Not Xerox sheets. Not fax ammo.

The boxes were jammed with magazines about cars that had been modified during the sixties and seventies. One of those tattered cardboard boxes filled with those magazines (tipping the scales at close to sixty pounds) just made its way to my doorstep in California. I spent the better part of my evening sifting, sorting, smelling and stacking the titles, poring over “just one more�? more times than I’d like to admit. Vibrant colors, loud blurbs and just about every hook, line and attention grabber had been printed into their eight-and-a-half by eleven covers. All of them but one.

This anomaly sat in the bottom of the box—right side—beneath a mint copy of the Rod & Custom “Pleasure Test�? issue. It had no cover. It had no distinguishing markings on the front other than an Autolite advertisement telling readers about spark plugs that will actually clean themselves while they drive. (Amazing!) I pick it up. Thumb through the pages.

Grayscale.

Grayscale.

Grayscale.

Grayscale.

Grayscale.

Grayscale.

Candy Tangerine drag coupe with a chopped top and little twelve spokes and a giant mill mounted up so high and so far back that it cuts deep—so deep—into the cowl and the cabin.

The car is a full sized Monogram kit with AMT parts added in all the right places; it’s a childhood notebook drawing that has come to fruition in full force. Whoever was responsible for this car must have been a master of the craft with an infallible eye and an immense knowledge of speed, power, candy and chrome.

That person, you see, was Mr. Sheldon Schmit of San Clemente, California. The planning of the coupe occupied his mind for eleven years, while the build process took another three-and-a-half with the help of Glen Way and John LoPinto.

The trio started with a ’34 Ford frame and drilled it liberally for weight savings. A dropped I-beam axle was used up front, while the rear was stuffed with 4.11 gears and mounted solidly. Between the rails, they bolted  in a fuel-burning Chrysler pushed to 354 cubic inches and equipped with a Weiand intake, GMC 6-71 and a two-port Hilborn injector. Believe it or not, the power was transferred through a ’39 Ford transmission. Eight chromed pipes snaked from the heads and disappeared from sight.

Inside, the coupe featured exactly what you want to see: Zolatone, sheet aluminum and a rollbar hoop. There’s a seat for sitting (Tijuana fresh!) and a wheel for steering, but other than that there wasn’t a whole lot. Sheldon needn’t worry when the machine was screaming at the top end—he had a ripcord to deploy the draggin’ chute.

With paint by “Harold�? and tuning by a place known simply as “Speed,�? Mr. Schmit had undoubtedly accomplished his goal of creating a coupe that looked fast standing still. (Interestingly, no times were reported in the HRM article.)

Sheldon Schmit’s efforts went far beyond building a suitable competition machine; he and his cohorts created a car that embodied the zeitgeist of our hobby’s most colorful period.

—Joey Ukrop

Photos by Eric Rickman, HRM, October 1962