The other night I saw a documentary on demolition derbies on, believe it
or not, I'm pretty sure it was the History Channel. Could have been
Discovery. At any rate, I was surprised to see that 3 of the cars
featured in this particular derby were Imperials. All of them were
64-66s.
I think this is kind of amazing, because practically everything else in
this derby was a station wagon or a much newer car. As the narration
pointed out, the older cars are getting harder & harder to find. So I
imagine it's even harder to find an old Imperial for use in a derby.
The program showed how derby cars are stripped and prepped for a derby.
It also showed that derbiers are quite willing to travel long distances
to find old cars that are good for derbying. Southern cars are
preferred, because they have less rust (by "southern" I don't mean just
the SE, but the whole lower half of the US). Imperial owners in the
south, beware!
Although this show was amusing, I can't say it changed my mind regarding
derbies. It is really sad and sort of terrifying to see the way these
Imperials were mangled. The derbiers don't make any effort at all to
salvage or save the parts they remove from their cars-- they just tear
'em up. They could carefully remove the dash and other parts and resell
them, but they seem to take a childish glee in destroying everything on
the car.
Don't mean to start a war here, but I think we all ought to be holding
onto our Imperials as long as we can.
Mark M
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