Your Grandpa's Nash Re-imagined: Nash Cooper Airflyte Wagon

I recently had the good fortune to have a tour of Dennis Varni's garage.  My old friend George happens to live down the hill from Dennis, noticed his '47 Hudson pickup truck tooling around downtown Los Gatos, and asked about it. This led to George's first tour of the premises.  When I got to town, he said, "If I can get you an invite to see this, you've gotta go."  And so, on a recent Saturday morning at eight sharp, we went.  If the Varni collection were a piece of music, it would be one of those modern jazz suites that begins quietly, almost unobtrusively.  The first thing you see it this non-threatening 1951 Nash Rambler Airflyte wagon. That's Dennis pottering under the hood.

I'd thought Dennis was kidding when he'd said, "It's really a Mini Cooper S", but a look under the hood revealed he was not exactly kidding.  The transverse engine, drivetrain and interior of the car are indeed from a modern (as in BMW) Mini Cooper S, and the amazingly tidy installation was handled by artist and fellow gear head Richard Biggs.  The first of these installations was done in Biggs' own Rambler Airflyte wagon.  People of a certain age will recognize the friendly, rounded contours of the Rambler shape from the convertible that Lois Lane drove in the Superman TV series from the early Fifties.  The Rambler, like the Porsche 356 from the same era, was one of those cars that looked like it would follow you home if you whistled.  Luckily for anyone who'd like to hide a modern Mini Cooper platform under one, the Nash Ramblers from 1950 through '53 share the same 100-inch wheelbase*.

One clue which I'd noticed, but shrugged off, is in the detail and mounting of the wheels.  They sit closer to the flanks of the car than the originals, and while they have convincing Nash hubcaps, the round perimeter slots are different from the original rolling stock.  Well, the reason for that is they're special wheels used for ice-racing Minis (mostly by crazy Scandinavians) and are available from BMW in Europe.

At the end of our garage tour, which concluded with the Hudson pickup after we'd ogled a '57 Maserati 200S, '55 D-type Jaguar, an award-winning Graber-bodied Alfa Romeo as well as a unique Studebaker Bulletnose woodie*, Dennis demonstrated the practicality of the Nash Cooper by driving off in it, headed for his San Jose workshop.  The little car slipped deftly and easily into downtown traffic, as smoothly as a piece of banana cream pie sliding onto a dessert plate... 

*Postscript:  We're not going to ignore those other cars, of course, and will feature them soon in another posting.

*Footnote:  At least the 2-door Ramblers shared the 2-door Cooper's wheelbase.  The 4-door Rambler introduced for 1953 had a 108 inch WB.

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