Custom Of The Year: Part 2

OK… Last week I polled you guys using the “Custom Of The Year” nominations from a 1960 issue of Motor Life Magazine. There were thirty nominations in all… Something like 650,000 unique people looked at the poll itself, but only a few hundred of you actually voted. I suspect some kind of reverse ballot stuffing bullshit is going on, but against my better judgement I’ve decided to validate the results anyhow. And frankly, I’m surprised at the results… or maybe I’m not.

The winner of the first annual and very coveted “Custom Of The Year: 1960, 2018” is Darryl Starbird’s Thunderbird:

Voters in both 1960 and 2018 voted Starbird’s radical custom as the best of the nominations. And I guess what surprises me the most is that so many people over such a long period of time would agree on a car that is so far out there. I mean, there is nothing moderate at all about this car and yet as a group we’ve agreed that this one is the best of the bunch. That’s kind of amazing when you think about it.

Just as amazing is how similar our results in 2018 were to Motor Life’s in 1960. That being said, we weren’t in perfect alignment. In fact, 2018 voter’s selected the Jim Doss 1958 Chevrolet as the second best custom while 1960 voters only had her at 21 (out of 30!).

2018 voters selected the Jim Doss ’58 as the second best of the nominations, while 1960 voters only had her ranked at 21.

The voters in 1960 selected Jim Morgan’s ’60 Ford as the second best while 2018 voters ranked the car 4th.

And this was pretty much the biggest variation of the bunch… Jim Morgan’s Ford got 2nd in 1960 and tied for 4th in 2018. So there’s not much variation there. It does, however, beg the question: What did people in 1960 have against the Larry Watson designed and Doss owned ’58? To my 2018 eyes, it’s just about as good as a ’58 Chevrolet can get.

In any case, you can see the total 2018 results here and the 1960 results here:

What was my choice? I voted for Joe Previte’s 1958 Convert. It’s a car that I’ve always loved. I just have a thing for all black, all simple, all business… And Previte’s ’58 was all that… Here’s a shot of it after it was redone from black to candy apple red by Barris:

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Edit: While tallying the results, I created this terribly done but somewhat useable infographic:

Essentially, this just compares the top-10 from 1960 to how they were ranked in 2018. It wasn’t until I started working on this that I realized we had yet another outlier. It’s Frank Caraway’s 1958 Chevrolet. In 1960, readers ranked the car as 4th best with 5.5% of the vote. In 2018, it didn’t receive a single vote. Here’s the only decent shot I could find of the car:

I think this represents a really good example of a design that just wasn’t timeless. In 1960, the front end treatment on Frank’s Chevrolet was hot shit. In 2018? Not so much…

Which brings me to another point – Moderate cars will always be accepted somewhere in the middle of the pack when done cleanly and smartly. Radical cars are risky from an acceptance standpoint. Go all out and win big and you just might end up with a name like Darryl Starbird. Alternatively, you might swing and miss and end up with no votes almost 50 years later.

Pretty interesting stuff here fellas… Anyway, where did your vote rank in 1960?