If you’re old enough, you may have seen this car before, perhaps when it was featured in the July 1958 issue of HOT ROD. Since then, the hot rod hill climber originally built by Bob Davis of Boone, North Carolina, has been a few places. Now it’s back, completely restored and updated to modern specs for hot rodding, hill climbing, and vintage road racing.
Bob Davis built this car during the winter of 1953-1954, after serving in the Army in Europe and going to a few hill climbs, which are far more popular there than here. He got a Second, a Third, and a Fourth with it in the first season, and blossomed in 1955 with a win at Pilot Mountain. Davis passed the car around to other drivers, dominated the Grandfather Mountain Hillclimb three years in a row, and won four times in a row at Chimney Rock, North Carolina, with drivers Ed Welsh and Phil Styles. Styles, who bought the car in 1957 for $600, road raced it at tracks in Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia.
After that, though, the car spent more than 25 years in a junkyard in Waynesville, North Carolina, rusting away until vintage sports car enthusiast Jimmy Dobbs of Memphis rescued it from obscurity in 1992. The cost of restoration was so high that Dobbs sold the car to Chuck Rahn, a talented fabricator based in Phoenix. Rahn attempted to sell it to Jim Herlinger, who owned a similar car, the Baldwin Special, in northern California. Herlinger passed, but called a friend of his in Michigan to tell him about the car.
Enter Garrett Van Camp, of Bingham Farms, Michigan, who bought the car from Rahn in 1995 as a complete wreck. Van Camp, his wife Maggie, and their talented friends spent nights and weekends over 17 years until the car was not only completed, but updated for vintage racing rules with a master electric shutoff, an onboard fire system, four-point seatbelts, and a fuel cell, all well hidden to preserve as much of the original car’s looks as possible.
On May 18, 2013, Garrett and Maggie Van Camp trailered the car back to the town where it was born, Boone, North Carolina, to show it to Bob Davis’ widow and family. Maggie Van Camp says, “Joyce Davis, her daughter Kathy, and about a hundred of their friends gathered at the Chevy dealership where Bob Davis used to work. It was a magical weekend to have the car back in the town where it was built.”
Since then, the Van Camps have been busy showing and racing the car at such venues as Thunderhill Raceway in Northern California, Schenley Park in Pittsburgh, Put-In Bay in Lake Erie, Waterford Hills, Michigan, and at the vintage racing extravaganza over Labor Day weekend in Lime Rock, Connecticut. He swaps the street tires for Dunlop vintage treaded racing tires, and he’s swapped out the 4.11 gearset for a more reasonable 3.78, but other than those changes, the car is raced as-is, in between the Van Camps’ Formula Vee sessions.
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