“When I was growing up, it was about that car,” said Ray Evernham of the 1958 Chevrolet Impala owned by graduating senior Steve Bolander [Ron Howard] and memorably driven by Charles Martin Smith’s Terry the Toad character in American Graffiti. “I don’t know if it’s that I see myself as more of a Steve or a Toad than a Bob Falfa [Harrison Ford] or a John Milner [Paul Le Mat], but there’s just something about it. In its 22 minutes of screen time, all the characters interact with it. Even Bob sits on the fender at the end of the movie.”
Evernham had pestered the car’s owner to sell the Impala to him for years, and when the Chevy was finally set to go up for auction in 2015, the NASCAR legend and TV host managed to acquire it through negotiations. Parked since 1974, when its owner enlisted in the Marine Corps, the Impala was in pretty sad shape when it was finally sold. The lacquer paint was literally falling off the car. The original 348-cubic-inch engine had been replaced by a 283 small-block with a four-barrel carb. The interior had faded appreciably. It was, as Milner said of Falfa’s ’55 Chevrolet in the movie, a field car.
His crew went to work with the sort of meticulousness Evernham had used to shave seconds off stock-car pit stops. They went through every scene in George Lucas’s 1973 film that featured the white Chevy, snapping screen shots and cataloguing every detail. Evernham tapped his contacts at Axalta (formerly DuPont Performance Coatings, which memorably sponsored Jeff Gordon during Evernham’s tenure as his crew chief), for help with the paint. Before repainting the car, the team measured every stripe. As is common with the slapdash, 20-footer nature of movie cars, the sides weren’t exactly symmetrical. Since that’s how it was, that’s how Evernham kept it. The dent from Toad’s unfortunate panicky reversal? Still there.
Any salvageable chrome trim was pulled from the car, straightened, and replated. The interior was carefully removed and disassembled, then dyed back to its original hue. The fuzzy dice hanging from the mirror? They weren’t actually fuzzy. They were crocheted, so Evernham had a little old lady in California stitch up a new pair. The cardboard license plate worn in the movie was replicated on the same machine that had made the original.
Evernham did decide to replace the driver’s-side window. You might notice that the car features shaved exterior door handles. In another example of movie-car construction haste, the Impala was built with no provision to open the doors from the outside. When someone, either a film crew member or Ron Howard, accidentally closed both doors with the windows up, the driver’s window was smashed as a field-expedient ingress solution.
In the film, Toad said that the Impala features a 327 Chevy V-8 with six Stromberg carburetors. So Evernham went out and found a first-year-of-production 1962 327 and six period-correct Strombergs on an original Offenhauser manifold. “It’s still got a generator,” he noted. The Chevy still wears its original chrome reverse steelies with the original tires, though the front wheels were replaced along the way. The goal was to preserve as much of the car as possible while being the car the characters talked about onscreen. “We wanted to put it back like people pictured in the movie. My vision of all those stars is what they look like in the movie, not what they look like today. We made the car as its movie legend.”
At a ceremony at the 2016 SEMA show, Evernham and actress Candy Clark, who played Debbie Dunham, Toad’s unlikely lady friend in the film, pulled the wraps off the restored Chevy. Clark commented, “I don’t think it looked this good when it was brand-new!” Evernham was beaming with a joy that couldn’t be faked, running movie lines with Clark, and just generally reveling in being the boy with the most cake.
Prior to its official unveiling, Evernham dressed up as Toad and took the car out on the Sunday night before the show, cruising Las Vegas on those original rear tires. The younger crowd mostly just thought it was a cool old Chevy, but he said: “[That] night on the street, I was surprised at the number of people who knew exactly what the car was. A lot of people thought it was a clone, but they knew exactly what it was.”
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