It is that time again already and the first leg of the 2009 edition of the AMSOIL / Street Rodder Road Tour is off to a great start. The Coker Tour started Saturday May 9 with a car show and charity auction at the Chattanooga , Tennessee headquarters of Coker Tire. It was a great day and almost $2000 was raised for the Victory Junction Gang Camp. But I am getting ahead of myself. Let me back up a few weeks and fill in some details about this year's 1952 Chevy 2 door hardtop.
Work was completed on the Chevy at Woody's Hot Rodz in Bright, Indiana the middle of April. It went to the photo studio in Detroit where ace automotive photographer Randy Lorentzen spent two days capturing the beauty of this year's Road Tour car. You can check out the complete feature in an upcoming issue of Street Rodder. As most of you know, our Road Tour cars have to more than just a pretty face. With a summer long cruise that will cover over 15,000 miles, our rides have to be very road worthy. With this in mind, the next stop after the photo studio for the Tour Chevy was NHRA's National Trails Raceway just outside of Columbus, Ohio. A day was spent at the track putting the Chevy through it's paces with timed runs on a slalom course, a skid pad test and some 0 - 60 and 60 - 0 acceleration and braking tests. These results will be compared to the results of the tests that were done on the Chevy before the Art Morrison chassis was installed and before the Smeding motor was dropped under the hood. The comparison will also be in an upcoming issue and the results are pretty amazing.
From the track day at National Trails, I took the Chevy home to Youngstown to get the final preparations completed for the summer long journey. Ace pinstriper Guy Shively put some very cool lines on the hood, trunk and dash that fit the overall look of the Chevy perfectly. The goodie bags were loaded in the big trunk along with my luggage and the 2009 AMSOIL / Street Rodder Road Tour was underway.
The first stop on the way to Tennessee was at Woody's near Cincinnati. The folks at the shop wanted to go over things one more time before the long summer on the road. Everything was in order and I made it to Knoxville by dark. The car ran great. It sure is quite a difference from the open roadsters that I had spent so many miles driving around the country. I pulled into Coker Tire headquarters at noon on Friday. Some of the Road Tourians were already in town. Each year more and more folks are repeat participants on the Tours and of the cars signed up for the Coker Tour, 75% of the people registered had been on previous Tours.
Saturday started off with a little rain but the skies cleared by noon and there was a nice turnout of vehicles and spectators. The silent auction went very well thanks to the generosity of many companies who donated parts and accessories for the auction and also the many folks who bid on the items. Almost $2000 was raised for the Victory Junction Gang Camp on Saturday afternoon. The highest bid went to a Chip Foose autographed Classic Automobilia 75 th Anniversary '34 Classic Hot Rod. We will deliver the funds to the Camp in person on Tuesday.
Sunday morning we all headed to the Great Smoky Mountain National Park for a drive through that beautiful area on our way to Knoxville. Monday morning we will visit Lokar Performance Products and Bobby Alloway's Hot Rod Shop. It is then a 5 hour drive to Charlotte where we will visit Fatman Fabrication and get a look at a private collection of muscle cars.
It is going to be a great week on the Coker Tire Tour as we make our way to our final destination of Cruisin' Ocean City this coming weekend. Check back here for all the updates on our travels. Check out our Road Tour schedule and call the Road Tour Hotline at 1-800-664-1362 for the latest detail. We hope you can join us on a Tour this summer.