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1975 Sterling GT: Raising the Roof and His Profile
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Source: NYTimes
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1975 Sterling GT: Raising the Roof and His Profile
August 3, 2008
Auto Ego | 1975 Sterling GT
Raising the Roof and His Profile
By RICHARD S. CHANG
Media sound/photos
TWO or three times a week, Steve Silverstein drives his 1975 Sterling GT to car shows and cruise nights (gatherings at local parking lots) around Long Island and waits for the people to come.
And they come.
The sleek and modish Sterling is part sports car and part circus act. Instead of entering through doors — there are none — the driver, with the twist of a key, lifts the entire roof structure, windows included, and pivots it forward like the canopy of a fighter jet. This reveals a cramped cabin so low to the ground that once a dump truck driver couldn’t see the Sterling parked right in front of him and drove over the back corner, severely damaging the car.
“It sounded like someone dropped an armful of two-by-fours,” said Mr. Silverstein, who was walking toward the car when the accident happened.
In June, Mr. Silverstein, 43, entered the Sterling in the Coney Island Mermaid Parade and inexplicably won the Best Convertible prize. He put the trophy in his basement with all the others. “The basement is full,” he said, so now he often leaves shows before the judging takes place.
It wasn’t always this way. Before buying the Sterling GT, Mr. Silverstein owned a number of classic cars, including a 1966 Ford Thunderbird, a 1968 Dodge Charger and a 1977 Corvette. All of them had one thing in common: they didn’t win at car shows.
“There was always someone else with the same car I had,” Mr. Silverstein said. And the car show judges would point out something wrong with his car. “For example,” he said, “the hubcaps were not the original ones. I got sick of people telling me how my car should be.”
Five years ago, he came up with a solution. “Kit car,” he said. He wasn’t talking about replica cars, like the Fieroghini, which is a Pontiac Fiero converted (sort of) into a Lamborghini Countach. He wanted an original design. Searching eBay, he found the Sterling GT, which he had never heard of. Bingo.
Mr. Silverstein bought his car in 2003 for $4,000, sight unseen. He said it had been kept in storage for decades. When the car arrived, he took it for a test drive around his block. The car stopped running after five minutes.
It took him six months to get the Sterling going again (he makes most mechanical repairs himself) and painted. Then it had to be repaired and repainted after the dump truck incident.
On a recent Friday night, Mr. Silverstein, an engaging man with a healthy tan and a quick smile, stood beside the red Sterling at the Bellmore train station on Long Island as high school couples, teenage boys, families and middle-aged men in white T-shirts promoting car parts stopped to ask just what the heck it was.
The Friday cruise night is North Bellmore’s version of Arnold’s Drive-In. At dusk, the commuter cars disappear and are replaced by hot rods, muscle cars, the occasional vintage German machine and, two or three times a year, Mr. Silverstein’s red 1975 Sterling GT. There are other cruise nights he attends more regularly. Sometimes he’ll just come across one while driving and stop in.
“I don’t have a wife,” Mr. Silverstein said. “I don’t have kids. This is what I do.”
Mr. Silverstein appeared to be in his element. He explained to several people that the Sterling was originally designed and sold in England, where it was called the Nova. When a California company bought the rights to sell the car in the United States, it changed the name to Sterling because the Nova name was already taken by Chevrolet.
Sometimes, Mr. Silverstein also has to explain that his car has no connection to the more conventional Sterling automobile imported from Britain in the early 1990s.
Today, Sterling Sports Cars is a Pittsburgh-based company that owns the rights to the design and still sells the cars.
Like most kit cars, the Sterling is built using the chassis and mechanical components of an existing production car. The fiberglass body is really the only proprietary component of the Sterling, whose frame and engine were designed for the old Volkswagen Beetle.
“It won’t do 100 miles an hour,” he said.
But the car has an added benefit for the times. “I get between 30 and 35 miles per gallon in the city and around 40 to 50 on the highway,” he said.
With the hatch up and a crowd around him, Mr. Silverstein demonstrated the gymnastic procedure for getting behind the wheel. He put his right hand on the edge of the car and swung his right leg into the footwell, followed by his left leg. Then he switched hands, putting his left hand on the sill and his right hand between the seats while he slid down into driving position.
Once seated, there’s an overwhelming feeling of claustrophobia that is only enhanced when the roof comes down at the touch of a button.
In April, Mr. Silverstein drove four hours to a car show near Hershey, Pa., the farthest he’s taken the car. It’s hard to imagine even four minutes inside the tiny chamber, especially around Hummers on the highway, but he said he didn’t want to stop.
Bellmore is a much more reasonable trip. As night descended on Friday’s festivities, Mr. Silverstein pointed out a Cadillac with double red taillights adorning sharp fins, a new Dodge Challenger, a matte-black rat rod and his favorite car, a 1959 Chevy Impala, in flame red with sparkling chrome.
“That’s a Continental kit,” he said, pointing to the spare tire, which was encased in a glossy red fiberglass shell like an expensive cello. The chrome bumpers had been modified to wrap around the case.
The car’s owner was an older man in a white T-shirt whose long frame was folded into a beach chair. Next to him at the front of the car was a framed photograph of a young man in a winter coat, standing next to an identical red Impala.
“Is that you?” someone stopped to ask. It was, he said, although he bought the current car 20 years ago. Five minutes earlier, someone else had asked the same question.
“See, that’s his entry point,” Mr. Silverstein said, as he walked back to the mob around his car. “Mine is the crazy roof.”
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I used to live near a builder and dealer of these vehicles in the 70s and 80s. Anyone who knows Van Nuys, CA may remember it being behind the Baskin Robbins on Fulton Avenue and Victory Blvd. As a youngster I used to stand at the large bay windows and just look at the floor models sitting there. They were so cool to look at. Here are a few videos of this really interesting kit car.
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