We get a lot of questions here at Hemmings that run along the lines of either “What did I just find?” “How rare is this (car/truck/bike) I just found?” and “How much is this (car/truck/bike) that I found worth?” We like these questions not because we like repeating over and over again “1940 Chevrolet. Not very. Whatever you can get for it.” but because cool stuff like this occasionally pops up.
Eric, posting on our Hemmings forums as clodzilla2000, showed us some pictures of a car he recently unearthed that looks a bit like one of the Mormon Meteor salt flat racers. Or maybe not. On second glance, there’s a lot that doesn’t fit here, like the pedestrian Chevrolet Stovebolt six-cylinder engine, the two-man cockpit and the headlamps and horns.
You can read my direct response to him in the post on our forum, along with posts on the AACA forum and on the H.A.M.B. It seems we all came to the same conclusion – it doesn’t appear like any salt flat racer we’ve ever seen (it’s definitely not any Ab Jenkins-piloted vehicle), but it could very well have been either a homebuilt homage to the Meteors or some sort of movie prop.
And for petesake, Jay Leno is not interested in any and every oddball car of incredible dimension.
Anybody who has information on the car, especially those cool gauges, is encouraged to get in touch with us.
Pic of the actual Mormon Meteor III, as seen at SEMA this year, below:
Then again, Eric’s car could be something more along the lines of the Tornado.