Love.

Love.

Show me a perfectly restored hot rod today. An example that was originally built in say… 1952… and then restored to a polished finish of modern standards. Afterwards, I will ask which drunkard among you designed and built the damned thing. There are lots of examples to the contrary of course, but it’s a common occurrence – many hot rods built in the golden era were oddball mixes of parts, lines, and ideas that quite frankly don’t hold up to serious studies of style and design.

The Jimmy Summers ’32 roadster is one of the most endeared cars in the game. If it were to peak from an abandoned Southern California garage today, rich assholes the world over would outbid themselves to hysteria. A six figure selling price is guaranteed – no matter the condition and no matter the economy. That is what it is. But what is the Summers roadster?

It’s a ’32 roadster with a strangely formed grille shell, a disproportionate channel, an oddly flared windshield, and cycle fenders. (And damnit, fenders don’t belong on hot rods.) The Jimmy Summers roadster is a mess. If some old fart built the thing today and rolled it out to The Lone Star Round Up, you’d say, “This guy gave it the old college try, didn’t he? Lotta work in that one.” And then, you would walk off in search of something more sanitary to take photos of.

The thing is though… some old fart didn’t build this car. Jimmy Summers did. Jimmy. The guy that pioneered custom cars in Southern California. The guy that influenced Alex Xydias.

And then there’s the car itself. This roadster wasn’t just a hot rod. In fact, it was one of the first quad threats in our history. It was driven on the street, the strip, the salt, and at road races. You’d be hard damned pressed to find a car of greater provenance. It’s important. And because it’s important to what we love, we love it.

The Jimmy Summers roadster is in my top-5. I don’t know where it ranks exactly, but it’s near the top depending on my mood and circumstance. It got there through context. The same context that made me turn my nose up at Boyd/Buterra built suppositories. The same context that makes me cringe at the very thought of sitting in a lawn chair at a car show. The same context that…

My closest friends are hot rodders, but to me it has always been all about the cars and not so much the people. I will go to my grave repeating that – especially given the day and age in which we live. But if I dig deeper and think about what I REALLY cherish, it always comes back to this context thing. And that got me thinking – maybe what I really love isn’t the cars? Maybe what I really love is the history of this thing of ours and the people that created it?

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