Alhoracing's Mercury Marauder

If I have had to make a guess in January '09 about who among your closest buddies would buy a full-size Ford this year I would have never guessed right :) Well rust-free mid 60's car with freshly built big block, why not.. Reminded me about my cousins' ex white 390 cid '62 Galaxie.

Kaitsu's Ford F100 Panelvan

Some shots about Kai Aulankoski's latest acquisition. Kai is one of the guys who will never run out of class comments (like infamous Finnish phrase "bermit alle ja tonttiin" in around 1997) and when he mentioned about the car over the phone he said "one will never fall asleep driving this bitch" :)

2009 FHRA American Car Show

It said "built from shit" in the display card, I guess the old saying "you can't polish turd" has to be given some re-thinking :)










FVWA was displaying two Tomis with their sunroof-Splits. Tomi 'Heebah' Asikainen did pretty heroic effort in rebuilding his Split over the Winter in 50'/60's racing car theme.










The other Tomi had ditched the 17" Cup wheels to 911 spare wheels.


Skills-wise pretty awesome fake Cabriolet. Style-wise? Not floating my boat :)






I guess my favourite area in the Show this year was the FSRA's salt-flat racing themed display. The guys have read their 50's magazines :)


















Jussi Jyr�nk�'s new Pauter-equipped quarter-mile toy, all the way from Hawaii to M�nts�l�, Finland.








I remember one of my childhood best friend's dad buying an old hot rodded Volvo Duet for their daily car in early 80's, in the day when proper hot rods or 2 door V8s where scarce. I wonder if I had gotten into some other European cars than Volkswagen, how void that scene must feel, not that many other brands than Volkswagen or Porsche have such scene (number of people, parts/knowledge, magazines, events, web sites..) available. Just count the number various of Euro-Ford, Opel, Volvo, BMW what ever magazines in news-stands and compare the results with Volksworld, Ultra VW, K�fer&Co, VW Scene, VW Speed, Super VW etc.

1976 Keimola Drag Race

Unbelievable footage from Youtube :)

Moon subject revisited

Now that I uploaded Sebu's photos I remembered seeing Dean Moon's front-engined dragster in cover of my old stashed Hot Rod-magazines.

As a reminder of coming middle-aged; I've had that issue close to 20 years.

There used to be two second-hand bookshop in Vallila having good stock of old car magazines. The shop owner of the other (cannot remember the name now) spent lot of time in States and in one of his trips he had bought a van or pickup truck to be imported to Finland plus visited several garage sales of private persons collecting all the old car magazines they had. On top of that he started to import new magazines, I think there I became familiar with Hot VWs first time, naturally passed those issues while browsing Hot Rods :)

Among the new magazines were Hemmings Motor News to which I became quite hooked as around the same time some semi-professional wheeler-dealers started to import vintage cars due to the local "25 year rule". So there I was saving money and thinking about what car I would import.. While thinking about cars and continuing studies I focused on old magazines and memorabilia. As this was late 80's / early 90's few years before I got online, 10 years before eBay etc, the only option was to send cash in letter along with a wishlist. I received dozens of parcels and never got screwed, something I cannot trust anymore :)




Moon advertisement from the same magazine.

Mooneyes

Some shots from Sebastian's visit to Moon HQ in California.



Dean Moon's front-engined Dragster









Showroom


While I enormously dig the nostalgia stuff the current stuff somehow reminds me about original EMPI and today's Mr Bug EMPI. Maybe it's the Japanese ownership?

2008 FSRA Nationals

Some photos by Sebastian Vuorisalo from Finnish Street Rod Association's event last weekend.