Reimagined 1957 ChevyI was rooting through some old files over the weekend and came across these shots from a car feature I shot for the now defunct Chevy Rumble magazine. This is a ’55 Chevy named “Retrolet” that was built by a Scott Winfield in Winston Salem, NC. I haven’t been in touch with Scott since these photos were shot seven years ago, so I don’t know the current status of the car. If anyone knows, please make sure to let us know in the comments section or the forum.

At the time, Winfield owned a paint shop that did a lot of high-end paint work on some really nice cars, but did very little fabrication work. The fact that this car came out of that shop still amazes me. Winfield said that his idea was to create a ’55 Chevy as if it had been imported into the 21st century.  

The car is actually a mix of a ’55 Chevy that Winfield bought sight-unseen for $1,000 and a ’99 Chrysler Concorde that he dragged out of a junkyard for $850. Practically the only parts that remain from the ’55 are the tops of the fenders and the instrument surround–everything else was rusted-out junk. To keep the project moving, he purchased repop fenders, quarters and door skins. But to make everything fit together, 14 inches of metal had to be added to those mile-long rear quarters. The hood is also an interesting mix of scrap metal. The front lip is original ’55, but the curved nose is off a ’56 Buick. The rest of the Buick’s hood was too flat for Winfield’s taste, so the remainder of what you see here is from a ’60 Chevrolet (model unknown). Believe it or not, at the time the shop didn’t even own an English wheel. All the metal work was done with a hammer and dolly.

Winfield had originally hoped to use the Concorde’s skeleton for the framework of the car, but the unibody, front drive design created too many packaging issues. As a result, after the body was 90 percent complete it was shipped off to fabricator Gary Templeton who build a custom tube chassis underneath it. Up front the car rolls on a Mustang II suspension from Fat Man Fabrications, while the back uses an independent rear with four coilover shocks sourced from a (you guessed it) junkyard ’76 Jaguar. The motor is a Crate 502 that sits so far back the firewall had to be recessed to make room.

In 2003 the car was the “Boyd’s Pick” award, given by the late Boyd Coddington, at the Goodguys Nationals in Ohio–the car’s first showing. Seven years later while looking over these shots I think the car still looks great and very little dates it. However, I’m still bugged by that photo shoot. For the life of me, I can’t remember why I thought rolling that car out onto a putting green at a golf course after it had closed was a good idea. I think we were trying to get the feel of one of those fancy concourse events. What you can’t see is all the torn up sod. Every time we repositioned the car, the front wheels would rip up the grass, and we had to make sure all those marks were hidden behind the car. I wonder what the greenskeeper thought the next morning?