The South Side Statement

In 1953, Lyle Bertrand was just another cabinet maker out of South Chicago, working long hours with sawdust in his lungs and splinters under his nails. But his real passion wasn’t wood—it was steel, and the kind of steel that could tear down the street with a purpose. He had dabbled before, sure, but never had the time, money, or resources to build something that could hold its own against the North Side elite. It didn’t take long for him to notice the divide—the cars up north were cleaner, faster, finished to a higher standard. And naturally, with that came the shit-talking. South Chicago, they said, just wasn’t in the same league.
Lyle wasn’t the kind of man to take that lightly. With a steady hand and a grudge to nurse, he set out to build something that would shut them all up. His canvas? A 1939 Ford, slammed onto a 1940 chassis. Mechanically, it was a bruiser—Olds-powered, Lincoln-shifted, juice-braked, and dialed in like a precision weapon. Despite all the lead hidden under its perfect paint, the thing ripped down the quarter-mile at over 85 mph, but brute speed wasn’t the point. Lyle was after something more—a vision of motion, a machine that looked fast standing still.
The body? A masterpiece of calculated aggression. He massaged a modern front end into place, sharp and refined, playing perfectly with the peaked hood and the ruthless chop of the top. To pull it all together, he flipped and inverted 1951 Mercury rocker panels, fusing them into the body like they had always belonged there. Behind them, hand-formed fender skirts trailed into an ass end so smooth and seamless it could make a grown man weep.
The result was pure. Clean. Deadly simple, and finished with an obsessive attention to detail. When Motor Life ran a feature on it in March of ’54, writer Richard Day called it the straightest custom he had ever seen. The photos back him up. The engine bay alone is a masterclass in early ‘50s craftsmanship—before prefab, before kits, before everything got easy.
And you know Lyle had a grin on his face when he rolled up to North Chicago—windows down, exhaust snarling, that unmistakable “fuck you” energy hanging thick in the air. Because that day, the line between North and South didn’t matter anymore. The work spoke for itself.