A few months ago we featured what you might call a typically British version of what originally was a very American style of vehicle – the 2-door pick-up i.e. a utility vehicle based on a saloon or estate but with just the front half of the car remaining intact and an open load-bay with either a drop down or side-opening tailgate giving access to a flat loading area.
That car was a Morris 1000 pick-up, and you could hardly get something more quintessentially British than that. This week’s Prime Find is an equally quintessential American version of a pick-up, and other than the basic configuration of 2-door front cabin with rear load bay, could hardly be more different.
Before we come to our Prime Find, though, a quick look at how such vehicles came about. The initial concept of a 2-door vehicle based on a saloon or estate chassis goes back to the 1920’s in the US, with so-called roadster utility vehicles i.e. with an open-topped cabin. Ford Australia were the first to build a so-called coupé utility – allegedly created to enable farmers to transport pigs to market, yet be suitable to go to church in – and such pick-ups remained an Australian “thing” until Ford USA introduced the Ranchero in 1957, which was a success and kick-started an entirely new market segment. Chevrolet introduced the El Camino in 1959 as a response to Ford, basing it on the 2-door Brookwood station wagon, and it was a success, outselling the Ranchero, and built this first-generation El Camino until 1964.
That year saw the launch of the second generation El Camino, this time based on the Chevelle platform – indeed, the car carried both the Chevelle and El Camino badges. Engines were to range from a modest 120bhp producing 3.2-litre six up to a mighty and ultra-desirable 325bhp-plus 6.5-litre big block V8, brought in in 1966. Over its four-year production run, Chevrolet built 137,221 second-generation El Camino’s, and it’s one of these that is our Prime Find this week.
Now we come to our Prime Find, which will be sold at auction with H&H Auctions at the Imperial War Museum in Duxford on May 26th – coincidentally my late father’s birthday. The site is a disused RAF airbase and home to a remarkable aircraft museum, a “branch” of the Imperial War Museum. This museum is dedicated to military aircraft and contains some astonishing machines,. One of the buildings is the American Aircraft Museum, dedicated to American military aircraft, and includes a fearsome Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird supersonic plane from 1965 (!!), a number of fighter planes and an astounding B-52D Boeing Stratofortress bomber. This thing is huge – entire aircraft are displayed underneath its tennis-court sized wings, it’s impossible to fit into a single photograph and the impression it’s sheer size gives when you stand underneath it is almost overwhelming – 159 feet long, 185 feet wingspan – not quite as big as a 747, but pretty big nonetheless. If aircraft are your thing, it’s a superb place to visit.
In a much smaller way, our Prime Find fits in with this theme of size, since the El Camino pick-up is not a small car. At 16.5ft (5.05 metres) long and 6ft 1in (1.86metres) wide, it’s not big by US standards, but plenty big enough for UK or European roads. Our car comes from the last year of the second-generation model cycle, 1967, and is equipped with the 4.6-litre small block V8, which back in the day pumped out 195bhp.
Delivered to its first owner on August 7th 1967, this El Camino has the optional Turbo Fire V8 (no, that doesn’t mean it was turbocharged), with Powerglide auto transmission. It’s the more highly-specced Custom model, finished in Granada Gold paint with matching faux-leather bench seat, and from the photographs, it doesn’t look as if this pick-up has led a particularly hard life, and indeed is believed to have covered just 48,000 miles, though this is not warranted.
It was imported to the UK by an American car specialist and road registered as ‘BNH 101E’ on June 1st 2017, and comes with recent paperwork, but doesn’t have a comprehensive history file, although it was completely restored “to competition standard” in 2004.
What it does have, though, is a genuine cool factor – even the name is cool; “What do you drive?” “Oh, an El Camino” – and with an estimate range of £15,000 to £18,000 could well come in significantly under our self-imposed £20k ceiling, which would, as we like to say, be a lot of car for the money. It has long, clean lines, and looks as purposeful as it is practical – I like it.
As per our usual practice, we’ve borrowed a number of photo’s from the auctioneer’s website, and you can see the full lot listing here.
With our Saturday instalment of Prime Find of the Week, we’re offering our services to the classic car community, by passing on our favourite classic car for sale from the week that passed. This top-tip might help a first-time-buyer to own his first classic, or it could even be the perfect motivation for a multiple-classic-car-owner to expand his garage with something different. We’ll let us inspire by anything from a cheap project to a stunning concours exotic, and hope that you will do the same.
Just remember – Any Classic is Better than No Classic! We obviously invite our readers to help prospective buyers with your views and maybe even experiences of any given model we feature. Further to that, if you stumble across a classic which you feel we ought to feature as Prime Find of the Week, then please send us a link to primefindoftheweek@viaretro.co.uk