Rick Sera's Corvette Convertible: How GM Celebrated 40 Years Of 'Vette History...In The '90s

Over the years, the Corvette nameplate has become synonymous with the world's supercar scene. Consequently, GM's beloved flagship has entered a new arena, one where 200 miles per hour is just no longer enough.

But throughout much of the 1980s and early-'90s, the flagship sportster was about style. That's why Rick Sera's C4 convertible is an early-'90s time capsule. Sera is an Oak Park, California resident. But as one who has an eagle eye, I was fortunate enough to spot it in nearby Tarzana.

Upon arrival, I noticed that Rick's C4 featured the 1993, "40th Anniversary" insignia. But what Rick himself tells us, is that all 40th Edition 'Vettes were ruby red. The 40th Anniversary package was available for hardtop and convertible versions that year.

Though not a true, 40th Anniversary 'Vette, Rick's C4 is unique in that it's one of the cleanest convertibles on the West Coast. Rick elaborates further, "It's my idea of American performance: Corvette, convertible and a manual transmission," explains Rick about why he most cherishes his rare convertible.

When Rick bought the car, it had 103,000 miles on the odometer. And according to Rick, the owner before him had only clocked 1,000 miles on the car, and over a 10-year period.

As a proud member of the Ventura County Corvette Club, Rick works on his own ride, and he has for quite a while, "I also do all of my own work on the cars that I own, as I have since age 13," says Rick.

It's great to see the final result. And as for Rick Sera and his lovely C4, it's one anniversary party that doesn't look to be ending soon!

Who Is Sal Alaimo Jr., What Has He Contributed To Motoring And Who Honestly Cares?!

For starters, I don't! Here's what I mean: from a literary standpoint, I'm not interested in reading my own biography; I don't need to analyze my own essay on "Black Air," even though it's inspired. That's because Andrew Fillipone and others are the real car journalists, where I stand, as Paul the Apostle says, "The chief among sinners."

I was born in Tarzana, California with arthrogryposis. That was in 1984, and the reason that you already know this is because I made mention of it in my last blog.

Arthrogryposis is a muscular condition, but in the 1980s, I wasn't the only one to be born with it. The '80s and '90s were chock-full of disabled kids, so what did that mean for the physical condition?

Let's think about this: the 1990s, for those of you who can remember, smelled a little different than the '80s in the extreme sports sense; in the '80s, we had Double Dare, but by 1996...Legends Of The Hidden Temple!

I have arthrogryposis, it does not allow me to grab the wheel in any vehicle, and because we're from the San Fernando Valley, cars are a part of who we are. It's always been a part of who I am, but with arthrogryposis, it's your fingers, wrists and things like that that become fixed; how can you operate a regular vehicle?!

In the meantime, this is where I'm supposed to be, and the only difference is that it's hard for me to translate, to the pavement, that same passion that we all share as enthusiasts. And until it gets done, I'll continue to ask: If not me, then who?!

Uncle Joe, The Buick Grand National And The Ugly: What It Is To Be A Disabled Gearhead...

I was born in February of 1984, so that will make me 32 in 2016. There are only certain car stories that I ever tell, but my angle is that I've been physically-challenged my whole life. So if you Google "Arthrogryposis," it is a muscular condition, and it is from birth. And what it essentially does, is cause one's elbows, knees, fingers and other bodily joints/tendons to be fixed in-place. I will not bore you with a prognosis, but this is what it is; Google-search it on your own!

My point is this: I grew-up in the G-Body era, just as my dad had grown during an age of GM A-Bodies. Anyone who knows their platforms knows that the two derive from each other. My dad raised me on Chevelles and A-Bodies, and when it came to anything Chevelle/Malibu-related, dad was always my go-to guy.

I gotta give mom's side of the family props on this one, however. Because growing-up, I couldn't drive, at all. Our network of family/friends were always good about getting me involved in motoring. But I have to take a time, as I write this blog, to pay spotlight to a family member who I rarely do: Uncle Joe.

My mom's side of the family is strange, but that was okay, because I was born with a disability, that even kept me from climbing the monkey bars at school; how much stranger was I?!

But around the time that my parents had a Monte Carlo SS, mom's Uncle Joe and Aunt Dolly, who reside in Canoga Park to this very day, had that one car that always meant "G-Body giggy," in my mind, Buick's all-black, turbo Grand National. If Rush's "Temples of Syrinx" ever did become a reality, then the Buick Grand National was the last car standing; it was the "Red Barchetta" of midsize muscle.

What I remember from growing-up: I knew what a Monte SS was, I knew what a Grand National was...and I knew that there was a difference. I knew, as a kid, that there was something odd about that car. Because it clearly looked like a Monte Carlo, back then. But where did the light-up boost bar come from? Where did those weird, "Turbo-6" logos come from?! Clearly, when you are a car kid you are born that way. And in the early '90s, if you would've shown me, as a kid, a Buick patrol car parked on our schoolyard, I would've said, "Wow, that looks like mom's car!" But because you had "car" in your blood, you know that there's something to the car, if not underneath!

The bottom line is that Uncle Joe and Aunt Dolly's very first, '87 Grand National may have been their mid-life investment. But as I would call my mom and dad the first "man-and-woman" in my life, so would I say about Buick's Grand National: it was "my first muscle car," when I wasn't even able to drive.

Uncle Joe was the first to let me experience her inner walls, but that time wouldn't be the last! I have arthrogryposis, it's real and it keeps me from driving...but it never kept me from my favorite muscle.

If it didn't happen then, then it would've anyway, God willing. But whether with Uncle Joe, as a little kid in the late '80s, or in 2012 as a journalist in Woodland Hills, the car that was the Grand National made me know what I want, in life. And because it's a car and a running dynamic that I've experienced first-hand, I can honestly say that the very idea behind the Grand National has helped me to overcome two things: arthrogryposis, from 1984 to the present, and the diagnosis that, for me, was even worse...glaucoma. That surfaced, in both eyes, while I was in college in 2006. But if you know a turbo V-6, then you can learn your own body; the automotive language, as a whole, has helped me to relieve a lot of my symptoms!

So it is important to me, and if I'm the only one who's standing-up, then that's not a good thing. More people, since Uncle Joe, have helped me to get a taste of what they already have. But for me, what do I have that I can pay forward?!

The Story Of Sacred Geometry And A Small-Block: How One Of My First Lessons In Wellness Came From An Olds 350

For those of you who have followed my blogs on wellness and audio entrainment, you no doubt have discovered one thing, if not the only: I really like to compare the human body to a car or truck!

So here we go again, but today's lecture on sacred geometry and engines actually serves as a time portal. Today, the "time portal" in question is one that takes us back to the fall of 2001, and the scenario is one that took place in the auto shop halls of Granada Hills High School in Granada Hills, California.

Now for those of you who have followed my work on GM late-model performance, you already know that I'm a fan of Rick Seitz, GM EFI magazine and the work that they do. But anyone who attended Granada Hills High School, during the 2000-01 school year knows that Japanese performance was all-the-rage on the street racing scene, not leaving much room for shop projects involving American iron.

In that vein, the two guys from Mike Izzo's auto shop who stand out, in my mind, are John Gallo and Steve Erickson. Erickson himself drove a '68 Firebird with a 400 mill, but both he and Gallo were GM guys like myself.

Long before I had ever become a member of CORE Centers in Northridge, California or learned about "sacred geometry," alignment was something that made sense to me, if not for our cars then our bodies, for sure. For anyone who's ever followed Aaron Baker, Leo Gura or any other self-empowerment guru, then you know that alignment is the cornerstone behind using sacred geometry toward wellness.

Not sure if John Gallo or Steve Erickson understood these things back in 2001, as they tried to time an Oldsmobile small-block in Mike Izzo's advanced class. But the fact that they had an assignment to time a small-block V-8 showed that alignment was an important issue for Izzo himself.

It took alignment to get it running. For most motoring enthusiasts in 2015, adjusting rocker arms on a conventional small-block isn't that big of a task; it wasn't a big task in high school either! But look where a lot of us are right now: using alignment to get our bodies and brains running better, using audio entrainment to "dyno-tune" our left-and-right hemispheres, a word that has the prefix, "HEMI" in it?!

Not to bring "spirit science" into the world of gas and pistons, but yeah, timing that Oldsmobile 350 in high school took timing. For Aaron Baker to rise above his own, physical challenge and heal took timing. All-in-all, it seems like we need to start using that "automotive language," the one that only some understand, more from now on!

Rick Seitz, Turbo Buicks And The XK-1: How Did A Common Love For Compact GMs Inspire The GN-Powered Prototype?!

For those of you who have followed my previous writings with Power Auto Media, you no doubt know that Rick Seitz and myself both share an obsession with GM high-tech.

It seemed like during the time that me and Rick were writing about Grand Nationals and T-Types, it fell under the category of what some would call, "niched automotive." But really what it was was that Seitz had a knowledge of everything "turbo Buick." His was, in fact a knowledge that far surpassed my own regarding GM turbo cars.

In reality, it would not have been hard for Rick and myself to write a book. The working title: "Turbo 6: GM's 'Little Engine That Could.'" For all anybody knows, that hypothetical book of General Motors history may have never sold a single copy.

But if Rick Seitz, with his childhood knowledge of turbo Regals, would have been the author, then that book may have became among New York Times' bestsellers, or at least in regards to fuel-injected, GM performance.

With that, I am proud to endorse Rick Seitz and GM EFI magazine, for without Rick and the crew, along with Martyn Schorr and others, that very knowledge of "Turbo-6 Madness" would have never found its way into my career as an automotive journalist, especially in the realm of high performance.

Speaking of GM's "little engine that could," it seems that there is a time and place to re-evaluate that historic platform. And in my humbled opinion, none of us would have ever known the potentialities of compact motor performance in America, were it not for GM's experimentations with turbo performance from the late 1970s into the early '90s. Why? Because anyone who ever lived during the '80s and '90s knows that Japan's automotive market was the one, back then, that reigned supreme.

What does have to do with General Motors? The truth of the matter is that by the time the EPA started cracking-down on smog prevention during the '70s, that craft which we call the "horsepower war" was brutally being chopped-down. And all of a sudden, Buick became a "teenager" for the first time in their car building history!

Not only this, but Buick, the "banker's car," started going through puberty in a way no one, not even Jon Moss, could've seen coming. Buick's voice started changing like Peter Brady, and they grew hairs where they never had them before! Oh, and by the way...Elon Musk did the same thing with Tesla Motors; figure that one out!

So...Buick decided to go hog wild and mess the whole thing up. How else, but by turbocharging the life out of a car that our grandparents used to drive, either to church, bingo or both. But we don't need to expand upon the history of the Grand National again, really! Because "puberty" is not really something that's exclusive to any one genre or decade.

Come to think of it, a lot of us are going through it in our '30s and '40s. You know who else is going through "puberty" in 2015, if not ideologically?! The physically-challenged community! Again, figure it out...America's government cracks down on the muscle car movement; Jon Moss and Buick made the Grand National. Oil tycoons raised the prices of gas; Elon Musk and others started Tesla Motors...see the connection?!

So you take some guy in a wheelchair. He's at the drag races, he's sipping a beer and he's mobbing some nachos. This same person thinks to himself, as he watches every door-slammer go by on the tarmac, about how he may become part of the horsepower game. That same guy in a wheelchair may go, at a later time, to his dad and some of their mutual, motoring buddies.

A lot of these guys, disabled or not, are hardcore into GM muscle anyway, so the conversation in the garage may arise about stuffing dad's LS1 motor into the wheelchair. Or perhaps these same guys may have gotten a little stoned, drank a little too much or whatever, and started seriously considering what it would be to take the disabled guy's wheelchair, bolt a 9-inch rear up to it and retrofit it with the small-block in question.

For myself, it seemed like a straight-out outlandish idea to even suggest, but even Google's search engine was able to draw the connection between "car," "sand rail" and "power chair." In a similar spirit, anyone who's ever followed wellness gurus, Aaron Baker and Elliott Hulse know what binaural beats are; synchronize some of those the right way, and the resulting frequency resembles a Buick 3.8 motor.

With this synchronization of wellness and automotive intact, the project that this document is proposing is the creation of the "XK-1," the world's first Buick V-6 powered, tubular power chair. Featuring a custom-sectioned, Quickie F55 frame, retrofitted for all-terrain tires, the XK-1 would feature 6-inch-wide tires in the front, along with 14.5-inch-wide meats for the rear. From both ends of the unit, the XK-1 would be equipped to run both on and off-road.

The idea is to have the F55 frame sectioned and reinforced to handle either a stock or turbocharged, Buick 3.8 V-6. The V-6 throttle and chair steering would have to be simultaneously controlled by adaptive electronics, it may have to be retrofitted on to a pre-existing, small car chassis, such as an MG or Triumph, and it would have to be mated to a TH400 overdrive transmission, allowing for smooth-and-automated gear shifts.

As of right now, something like this simply does not exist. But the reason for open-sourcing the idea online is so that the vision, the very awareness of the idea itself, may be raised significantly.

I know, probably just as well as Mike Alexander or anyone else from GM EFI, that "Shadetree mechanics" like Paul Huizenga and Rick Seitz have the know-how to pull off the wackiest of hot rod builds. But how would our world change, how could it change, were a person in a wheelchair to pull up at SEMA with a Buick V-6 behind them?!

GMs At Mecum: Pontiac's "Swiss Cheese" Catalina

Truth be told, the Beach Boys probably never wrote a song about a Pontiac B-body. It may have been attributable to the fact that it was the Bowtie influence of the performance scene that inspired so much of drag race folklore. But in the midst of the Chevy 409's quarter-mile success, there was Pontiac's twist on the B platform, one that came along just before the end of GM's Super/Stock legacy.

Featured at the Mecum auction block this month at Indy is this rare specimen of Pontiac muscle, one of 14 "Swiss Cheese" Catalinas to run in NHRA's Super/Stock category, sporting a dual-quad, Super Duty 421 V-8. Extensively modified, the hopped-up Catalina is notorious for its modded, U-section frame and 120 "Swiss Cheese" holes drilled into the car's frame rails.

Incorporated into the 1963 drag race season, the SD Catalinas were equipped with Borg-Warner three-speeds, chasing a Posi rear differential with 4.30:1 cogs. Most of the cars, however, were converted to B-W, close-ratio 4-speeds with either a 4.56 or 4.88 rear cog.

Further enhanced with lightweight panels and other weight-saving components, the 410-horse Catalina ran 12-second passes at trap speeds of up to 120 miles per hour. An elimination of sound deadening materials, along with the car's 120-hole framerail setup and missing front sway bar, made for a 3,308-pound whip that put Pontiac in the game, even before the GTO.

It's one of the Pontiac performance world's rarest gems, and it will be featured at Mecum in Indianapolis on May 17th. Be sure to keep a lookout for this bad-ass, B-body!

The Black Sheep Of The Black Pickups: One Of Ten Marlboro Syclones Hits The Web Community At A Fat Price

All image credit: Desert Autosport

About 20 years in retrospect, there are several pop icons from the late 1980s and early '90s that we have taken for granted. For anyone who grew-up in the "Smog Era," Grand Nationals and 20th-Anniversary Trans Ams were probably among the very last on your list of sport and muscle car favorites.

But for anyone who's ever owned a GM from that era, where the General was most involved in turbo motor experimentation, you understand the "sex" that goes behind the small, but powerful 6-cylinder lineup.

Many have described the turbo-6's wastegate opening as something of a "horse sneeze," but it's a sound and feel that have become a General Motors signature nonetheless. Besides being compact and relatively economical, GM's turbocharged 3.8 and 4.3-liter V-6s offered an overall performance package for the automaker that was far less rough and tumble than your traditional small or big-block.

In the "SyTy" world, the Typhoon SUV that lasted from 1992-93 was far more practical and varied in option than its Syclone predecessor that only lasted in '91. The Syclone pickup was lighter and more uniform than the Typhoon, and in comparison to its SUV sibling, the tuxedo black Syclone carried an attitude of no-joke street race, while offering a visual upgrade consisting of stealth cosmetics.

  

The Syclone and Typhoon's dignified breed of acceleration, backed by a feathery-soft exhaust note, is a thing to be celebrated in the realm of all things GM performance, but this is especially true of the General's high-tech department. A boost gauge rises, RPM builds and with barely a sound, the turbo trucks move with speed that's as graceful as it is turbulent.

Statistically, less than 3,000 Syclones were built in '91, with about 2 or 3 trickling out for 1992. For the '92 production year, there was a white truck, and other color options were allegedly in mind, but to this day, it's the black-on-black scheme that's ingrained into the minds of SyTy buffs.

The exception to this being the Marlboro Syclone, a limited-edition variant of which only 10 were ever built. Modified with a removable back glass and T-tops by the American Sunroof Corporation, the Marlboro Syclones were given away as prizes in a 1992 contest sanctioned by Marlboro Racing. Featuring "Hot Licks" red paint, Recaro seats and a Momo wheel, this rare, turbo truck specimen was cranked-up using a "PROMPaq" chip and Borla exhaust.

It's one of GM's first apexes in high-tech motoring, and our featured example from Jalopnik and Supercar Sunday regular, Jon Betancourt hits the collector's market at a somewhat controversial price tag of $79,995.

Again, it is one of 10 Marlboro editions made, so whether $79k is justifiable depends on what kind of enthusiast you are. If you're a Barrett-Jackson romantic who cares about originality, than our featured Marlboro Syclone could be a rather smart buy. But if the 4.3 turbo motor is too outdated for your contemporary senses, then maybe not so much.

In either case, it's a GMC truck of historical importance, and if you're looking to add to your garage, then it's something to look into!