Every year the staff of STREET RODDER goes through the annual ritual of registering our latest Road Tour car, and each year it turns into a job nobody wants. For whatever the reason, I continually lose the rock-paper-scissors contest and end up spending a good portion of my life at the local Department of Motor Vehicles explaining why I want to register a new old car! It's true that dealing with the DMV is akin to being dragged naked through a field of broken glass while your lips are duct-taped to a hot exhaust pipe! You get the picture?
For starters, for even the simplest of years, for instance when we built the 1936 Chevrolet, it wasn't simple. Remember, we are part of a rather large publicly held company so we are expected to do things by the ol' rulebook-letter of the law stuff-especially when we are dealing with the law. The '36 Chevy was a car we literally purchased from the used car lot of a Chevy dealer in the South. So far so good. Here we had nothing more than a used car that had registration records going back for decades, but little did we know there was more to the picture.
As many a street rodder knows, especially Chevy buffs, the vehicle identification number (VIN) is located on the engine in these cars (and also in those made until the early to mid-'50s) and not the frame. Well, what do you think the odds are that our Chevy had its original engine? Zero, nada, zip, no freaking way! And so the saga continued when it came time to perform the VIN verification at the local DMV. "The numbers don't match; is this car stolen?" And the rest, as they say, went downhill from there. Oh well, I should have known it wouldn't be easy. Understand, while STREET RODDER is a magazine read worldwide and our corporate offices are in New York, the fact is anything we do around the SRM offices is subject to California law. While California has long carried the mantle as the birthplace of rodding, the hot bed of innovative performance ideas, the land of fast cars, etc., the fact remains: California can be a downright unfriendly place when you have a special interest vehicle.