Boyd Cottington CheZoom
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Chopped, channeled, sectioned. Sliced, diced, pared, and peeled. Boyd Coddington estimated that when it was done, perhaps 10 percent of the original external sheetmetal remained. It began as a '57 Chevy, but when it was done, it was a '57 Chevy as envisioned by Salvador Dali. They called it CheZoom.
As the story goes, speed equipment tycoon and Chevy collector Joe Hrudka was paying a visit to Coddington's shop when he was shown a rendering of a highly stylized Bel Air hardtop. It had been sketched by hot-rod artist and designer Thom Taylor, the creator of Frankenstude, among others. "I'll take one," Mr. Gasket said, and the cutting began. Discarding the original chassis-it sat too tall to accommodate Taylor's radically lowered roofline and still fit humans inside-Coddington's crew fabricated a tubular cow-belly frame using C4 Corvette suspension assemblies front and rear. An LT1 Corvette engine and matching 700-R4 automatic transmission were installed as well. The high concept was that all the mechanicals on CheZoom could be serviced by any Chevrolet dealer-once the dealer got over the shock of seeing it roll in the door, one presumes.
Taylor's design drew a neon highlighter over all the trademark '57 Chevy styling features, with exaggerated tail fins, a low pillar-less roof with a nearly horizontal backlight, sensuously arched front fenders, and rolled pans front and rear. The paint selected for CheZoom was a fabulous hue called Peacock Teal, which was not a factory Chevrolet color in 1957 but somehow looked like it should have been. And naturally, CheZoom received a set of Boyd's custom 17-inch billet rims and a matching steering wheel. Constructed in 1995, the car may now look a bit strained or dated from some angles, but maybe that only shows how far the art of all-out customs has advanced in the past decade. And no one can deny the quality of execution or the sheer ambition involved in constructing the wildest '57 Chevy custom the car world has ever seen.
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