Here’s an odd way to start a post…have you ever seen the 1979 movie “Porky’s”? Hang with me for a second before you start making police sketch artist jokes. Note the beginning of the film, where cars from the late 1940s and early 1950s are not only present, but they’re just regular old cars. They aren’t classics, they aren’t collectibles. Even Brian’s red roadster, without question the most shiny and probably expensive vehicle that they could get their hands on for the shoot, was just another car on the set. And in my eyes, that doesn’t quite gel. Even in my earliest days of caring about cars (read: very late 1980s) cars from the 1940s and 1950s were either the most delicate and cherished of things, or were a rotted hulk barely dragging itself along. There was no in-between.

At no point in my lifetime has a car or truck from that era just been a car. It was a build. It was a hot rod. It was a rat rod, a lead sled, a kustom, a “bomb” (it’s a lowrider term). It was a perfect restoration, a collectible. It wasn’t the machine that you just pulled out of the garage at will to go play in the snow with. That act would be akin to doing what Ozzy did to the Alamo in 1982. That one act is why this video is worth watching alone. Derek’s Dodge isn’t something one-off or a high-po model…it was just a Coronet with the good engine option. But seeing this Checker-shaped thing powersliding around on the ice? Yeah, that’s fantastic. More of that, please. And not just from YouTubers. Get your old iron out there and put it to work.