Roadside Attraction: Used Car Culture, Café Racers and a Real Café at Alice's Restaurant

If you want to drive from Monterey Bay to San Francisco Bay, you have a couple of scenic choices. You could take Highway 1 north from Santa Cruz past Pescadero and through Half Moon Bay, and visit a lighthouse or two.  But then you'd miss the culinary and mechanical charms of Alice's Restaurant.  Named after Arlo Guthrie's song about another restaurant, and also after owner Alice Taylor in the late 60s, Alice's Restaurant in Woodside, CA has been a gathering place for gear heads for decades.  So choose Highway 9 instead, and wind your way north through the shady, majestic silence of the Henry Cowell Redwoods, through Felton and Ben Lomond and Boulder Creek, changing to Route 35 (Skyline Boulevard) in Castle Rock State Park after 20.2 miles.  Alice's awaits, at the corner of scenic, tree-lined Skyline Boulevard and Route 84, after another 10 miles.  

For a good while,  Porsche 911s peacefully coexisted at Alice's with artifacts of the Bay Area's flower child past: VW Microbuses in psychedelic colors, Norton Commandos and Triumph 650s. A few years back, a classic car rally called the California Targa stopped at Alice's.  Behind the mid-Sixties vintage BMW 2000 Ti in the foreground is a rare Iso Grifo coupe. That hood scoop, which looks a bit like a parking garage for Dinky Toys, signals the 7 liter engine option, in this case a 427 Chevy.  Superbikes and café racers showed up at Alice's too.

As Silicon Valley prospered and new zillionaires looked for scenic routes to test exotic machinery, supercars began to show up in eye-popping variety.  This is a McLaren Senna...

But this past winter, a couple of experienced Italians provided a bit of relief from the monotonous parade of showroom-fresh McLarens, Lamborghinis and Paganis. This Maserati 3500GT seemed to be calling for a revival of Used Car Culture. The 3500GT was the company's first real production car, and and this one looks like it's been in daily use since the day it was built. Superleggera Touring began building the 3500GT coupes in 1957; this example likely dates from '59-'61 because it has vent windows at the front of the doors, and lacks the movable vents at the rear of the doors that showed up in 1962 on the Lucas fuel-injected 3500 GTI.  The California Melee sticker is in keeping with the relaxed presentation of this car: the Melee is an unpretentious alternative to the California Mille, offering a three-day, 850-mile run through Northern California's scenic wonders the weekend after Labor Day, and "on the cheap", according to the organizers.

The alloy Touring bodies were built according to their Superleggera system, with panels mounted on a network of lightweight steel tubes. Touring built 1,981 of their coupe design before Maserati replaced the 3500GT, overlapping the new Mistral in '63-'64. Vignale built a spider design, but in only 242 examples.  Both cars featured the new twin-plug aluminum block twin-cam six.  Building over 2,200 copies of this chassis was a real change in direction for Maserati, whose previous "production" cars had been the A6G (16 built) and A6G /2000 (59 built).

It's possible that Aston Martin was encouraged to ask Touring to design their new car by the successful launch of the Maserati the previous year.  This same badge appeared on Aston's DB4...

This tarnished grille is a reminder of my one Maserati experience (other than driving friend Walt's magical used Mistral, a $4,000 purchase in 1973), which was looking for a grille surround for a 1960 3500GT I co-owned with Richard Wiles back in the late Eighties.  We'd bought it because it had a rebuilt engine, a whole car at a price lower than the cost of an engine rebuild. And we thought that because it was a production car, trim parts would be easy to find, and we could easily finish the car.  After some brake work and cleaning out the gas tank (no idea why this didn't precede an engine rebuild), all we needed were bumpers and a grille surround. Well, these may have been production cars, but they were hand-built, and the grille surround turned out to be a real challenge.  So we hope the owner of this one keeps all those trim bits attached...

Alfa Romeo built quite a few more of these Sprint GTs, starting in 1963.  Unlike the previous Scaglione-designed, Bertone-built Sprint coupes, Giugiaro's  design for Bertone was built at Alfa's factory in Arese, so the cars were badged disegno di Bertone.  For the '67 model year the name was changed to GT Veloce, which signaled a slight hp increase due to a redesigned intake manifold, and trim changes, including a grille with 3 horizontal bars (shown in the Alfa ad) instead of the original lattice shown on this red car.

These  GTVs, along with the alloy-bodied GTAs, still featured the slight indent forward of the hood opening that gained them the nickname "stepnose"...  

This ad from 1967 extolls the 5 speed gearbox, 4-wheel disc brakes and twin overhead cam, all aluminum engine, features that were uncommon or unknown on Detroit iron in that era, and were pretty uncommon anywhere for $4,200.  This was a popular car, with over 21,500 of the Sprint GT built from '63 through '66, and another 1,000 of the Touring-bodied GTC convertible version.

The grille and headlights were revised for the 1968 model below, eliminating the "stepnose" feature. The '68 model was not imported into the US as Alfa sought ways to comply with emissions regulations. The Spica fuel injection system, adopted to meet those regulations, was featured on US-spec.1750 GTVs (and all US Alfa imports) in 1969 and '71; Alfa also missed the 1970 model year in the US.  Despite this, the GTV and its GT Sprint and GT Junior (1300 and late 1600 engines) were a great success, with over 212,000 built before the last 1300 Junior went out of the Arese factory in 1977...

Ford's landmark 1949-'51 design was built in even bigger numbers...over 150,000 of this Club Coupe style (this one's a '50) for 1949 out of a total of over 1,118,000 Fords.  It was the sales leader that year, and was thought by many to have saved the company.  You'd think, then, that we'd know who designed it.  But each of the men on the team, including George Walker (later of '55 T-Bird and Design VP fame), Richard Caleal, Bob Bourke (who later designed the '53 Studebaker Starliner* for Loewy), and Bob Koto, claimed responsibility. Bob Koto was actually working for Loewy and moonlighting for Ford when the car was created.  At least one story is that the Ford was created from a rejected design for the '47 Studebaker, the first modern postwar car and one that saved Studebaker, at least for awhile.  That points to Koto, and is probably the story that intrigues you, so we'll leave it there...

..but not before having a look at the engine.  The stock 239 cubic inch flathead V8 made 100 hp in my Dad's black Club Coupe, but his engine never looked like this. The special Offenhauser heads and twin carbs make more horsepower.  The final Mercury versions of this engine (255 cubes) made 125.  This car has obviously been treated to a good life...

It all makes you wonder if the next generation of motorists will form similar emotional attachments to the electrics that are poised to take over from messy, noisy, climate-subverting internal combustion, and to the self-driving cars that Silicon Valley tells us are are just over the horizon.  As a Bay Area artist suggested over half a century ago, you should probably go ask Alice; I guess she'll know...

Color Photo Credits:  

All color photos except for the McLaren Senna (from reddit.com) were generously supplied by George Havelka, a longtime reader and even longer-time friend (well, since 3rd grade anyway), who was reportedly a tight fit in the Austin-Healey Sprite Bugeye above. 

Monochrome Photo Credits:

Porsches: rennlist.com

Motorcycles:  thesixfifty.com

California Targa cars:  The St. Clair Insurance Agency

1967 Alfa Romeo Ad:  Alfa Romeo SpA

Alfa 1750 GTV:  classicdriver.com

*Footnote:  We posted a photo essay on Superleggera Touring's bodywork on cars of the Thirties through Fifties (including the Maserati 3500GT, Alfa Romeo 2500 and 1900, Ferrari 166 and Pegaso) on Sept. 30, 2020 entitled "Superleggera Touring:  The Italian Line Travels Light."  Bob Bourke's immortal design for the '53 Studebaker Starliner is given the attention it deserves in "Sleeping Beauty from South Bend", posted Feb. 20, 2021.  And the song referenced in the last paragraph is Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit", penned by Grace Slick.