30 • July-August 2010 • ARIZONADRIVER ARIZONADRIVER • July-August 2010 • 31

Laflin expressed his idea in 1990, inthe midst of the demise of the US GrandPrix auto race that for three miserableyears was held on the streets of down-town Phoenix. The world’s top auto rac-ing teams and drivers came to Phoenix in1989, 1990 and 1991—and the eventwas such a failure that the Grand Prix cir-cuit didn‘t come back to race again in anylocation in the United States until the turnof the century.

As if anything related to fast cars was-n’t enough of a pariah, consider that ifnot enough people showed up to partici-pate in the drive, the Men’s Arts Council(MAC) could be stuck not only with a lotof wasted effort, but with a lot of bills—for hotel rooms and catering and such,and that was money the council’s modesttreasury couldn’t really afford.

But Laflin and others within the men’sauxiliary who were enthusiasts not onlyfor art but for automobiles persisted, rally-ing together to buy what they calledMACBonds, making $100 deposits againstany potential loss the council might incur.

To help stage the rally, Laflin called onfriends from inside and outside the MAC,from an editor at a national automotivemagazine to racer-turned-driving instruc -tor Bob Bondurant, who offered to let par-ticipants in the road rally take some lapsaround his school’s private racetrack.Through his connections back in theMidwest, he got former Chicago Bears all-pro running back and sometime profes-sional sports car racer Walter Payton tocome to Phoenix to serve as grand mar-shal for the inaugural event.

Arrangements were made for Payton todrive a Shelby Cobra on the rally, but thecar’s owner became angered when hisname was absent from the event pro-gram, so he took his car and went home.

But fate smiled on Laflin and the rally,which staged from the Chrysler ProvingGrounds northwest of Phoenix. It turnedout that a local man had driven out in hisown Shelby Cobra to see the cars partici-pating in the rally. He was asked if he’dlike to go along—his expenses paid—but,well, there was this one catch: he had tolet Walter Payton drive his car.

From that somewhat frantic start, theCopperstate 1000 vintage sports car rallyhas grown into one of the most signifi-cant annual fund-raisers for the PhoenixArt Museum. Among such automotiveevents it has grown exponentially instature as well, drawing significant carsand their owners from coast to coast andfrom around the globe.

Such was interest in the event’s 20thanniversary running that organizers founda way to expand participation from theusual 65-70 vehicles and welcomed almost100 cars and their driving tandems.

Those participants departed Sundaymorning, April 11, from Tempe DiabloStadium, spring training home to the LosAngeles Angels of Anaheim and—oneSunday each year—to the Field ofDreams car show that arrays the Copper -state cars around the baseball field andfills a stadium parking lot with dozensand dozens of other classic vehicles rep-resenting various Phoenix area car clubsand private owners. Accompanying theCopperstate entrants were an entourageconsisting of a couple dozen supportvehicles carrying everything from theparticipants’ luggage—ever try to fit asuitcase into the “boot” of a Britishsports car?—to spare parts for the carsand mechanics who know the nuancesof vehicles decades out of production.

Terry and Noel Hefty head out of the Valley in their1959 Aston Martin DB4 GT, followed by AndyManganaro in his 1966 Ferrari 275 GTS and DicDowns and Cathy Lewis in their 1969 427 Corvette.Photo by Randall Bohl.

The Field of Dreams preview at Tempe DiabloStadium provided participants and the generalpublic a chance to peek inside the cockpit of Samand Emily Mann’s 1937 Bugatti Type 57SC andunder the hood of David and Marianne Duthu’s1952 Jaguar XK 120 M race car. Arizona DPSmotor cycle officers provide safety and security forthe enthusiasts and their treasures on the road.Photos: Bohl (2), Edsall (1), Bohl (1).

wo decades and 20,000 miles later,

no one still doubts the wisdom of

Louis Laflin’s idea.

But when Laflin suggested that the Men’s

Arts Council could do a lot more than work

on the annual cowboy artists show and

provide volunteer bartenders for functions

at the Phoenix Art Museum, some within the

council were skeptical, especially when

they learned that Laflin’s idea was to

stage a 1000-mile road rally for vintage

sports cars and their owners.

ARIZONADRIVER • July-August 2010 • 33

The route for the opening day of theanniversary event mimicked that of thefirst day of Copperstate history, leadingup the Yarnell Grade to lunch nearPrescott, and then on up past the GraniteDells to Ash Fork and Williams, wherethe cars turned north to their firstovernight stop—on the South Rim of theGrand Canyon.

Perhaps the most visually stunning carmaking that drive is Michael Hammer’s1963 Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud III drop-head coupe, which is the British automo-tive term for “convertible.” The car is big,long and boldly bright in white paint andred interior—quite the contrast from thetypically sedate, dark-colored Rolls onemight expect.

The car is one of only 27 such 1963Silver Cloud convertibles produced byRolls-Royce, and was purchased new byHammer’s grandfather, Dr. Armand Ham -mer, a flamboyant, philanthropic andoften controversial tycoon whose busi-nesses included Occidental Petrol eum.

Michael explains that his grandfatherprepared well for his business meetings,and when he discovered that a Frenchbusinessman was a car connoisseur, hewanted to make a proper impression ashe drove up to the man’s estate outsideParis. Hammer decided he could makesuch an impression in a Silver Cloud con-vertible, only to be told that Rolls-Roycewas producing only 27 such cars that yearand they all already had been promised.

But Hammer hadn’t become a success-ful businessman without being persua-sive. “Grandfather loved a challenge,”Michael recalls, adding that his grandfa-ther convinced the chairman of Rolls-Royce to sell him one of the cars.“Whoever the car was supposed to be fornever got it and never was told why,”

Michael says.Rolls-Royce delivered the car to Paris,

where Armand Hammer and his chauf-feur picked it up. They drove to the estate,made the proper impression andHammer not only clinched the deal, butbecame lifelong friends with the Frenchbusinessman.

After the business was transacted,Hammer and his chauffeur drove the caron a European tour to Genoa, Italy, wherethe car was put on a boat and shipped toNew York, then sent by train to the

Hammer home in Beverly Hills, California.Michael remembers visiting his grand-

father on Sundays, and that his parentseventually would find him in his grandfa-ther’s garage, sitting in the Rolls and pre-tending he was driving it across the coun-tryside. He also remembers that on someSundays, his grandfather’s friend, actorGregory Peck, would stop by in his 1961Bentley Flying Spur.

“I wanted a car like that,” Michaelremembers.

And now, Michael Hammer not onlyhas inherited his grandfather’s Rolls,

but has discovered that an unrestored’61 Bentley Flying Spur offered for salewas, indeed, the one Gregory Peck usedto own, and he’s bought it and is restor-ing it to the way he remembers it waswhen Peck visited his grandfather. Heplans to park the cars next to eachother in his garage.

From the Grand Canyon, Hammer’sRolls and the other Copperstate carsheaded east along the South Rim andthen on to Cameron, where they turnednorth and eventually climbed through thenarrow V-shaped Antelope Pass as theymade their way to lunch on the shores ofLake Powell. After lunch, they turnedsouth toward the Painted Desert and intostrong, sandblasting winds that tried tostrip the paint from their cars while pro-viding a no-cost dermabrasion to thoseriding in topless roadsters.

Among those in such a car are Tom andSharon Malloy.

Tom Malloy grew up around exotic andfast cars; his father, Emmett, ownedCarrell Speedway in Gardena, California,and racecars driven by the likes of TroyRuttman and Bill Vukovich. Tom liked hisfather’s cars, but saw the cost his fatherpaid, both financially and emotionally.

Tom put off his own interest in suchthings “until I got to a stage where Ithought I could do it without hurting any-one or my business,” he explains.

His business was successful enoughthat Tom Malloy could make up for losttime by buying vehicles such as a FordGT40 Mark IV, a Lister-Jaguar Knobly, a1953 Curtis 500S and some three dozenother classics. Still, he realized, some-thing was missing; Malloy realized that allof his friends’ car collections that he real-ly envied had something in common—each included a “real” Shelby Cobra. He

decided that if he were going to be satis-fied with his own fleet, he needed hisown Cobra.

He not only found one, a real one, butone with some real interesting history.

Malloy’s 1964 Shelby 289 Cobra car-ries the identification tag of CSX 2512. Itwas shipped from Shelby American to Hi-Performance Motors of Los Angeles inthe summer of 1964. In the late 1960s,the Cobra’s owner faced felony chargesand fled in the Shelby. He made it acrossthe California/Nevada state line beforebeing apprehended. While he went toprison, the car went to police impound,where it was parked beneath a tarpaulinand pretty much forgotten for more thana decade.

Even then, when the car was found andscheduled for a police auction, it was list-ed not as an original Shelby 289 Cobrabut simply as a 1964 Ford convertible.

A speed shop owner who had heardstories about an impounded Cobra wentto the auction and reportedly was delight-ed to be the only bidder on the “Ford con-vertible.” The car went through a coupleof owners before West Coast collector andvintage racer Don Orosco got it and had itmechanically restored; he was delightedto discover that the aluminum body wasperfect; nary a serious scratch from theroad or impound yard.

Now the car, sans perhaps some sand-blasted paint, is Malloy’s, and thus madeits way from Lake Powell down toFlagstaff and then the descent throughOak Creek Canyon to the red rock ofSedona, where the Copperstate contin-gent spent two nights.

Tuesday morning, the cars did a drivefrom “red rocks to the green zone,” fromSedona down through Page Springs, thensouth on I-17 and west through Prescott

Valley and on to lunch at Bagdad. Afterlunch, the route returned, but this timethrough Skull Valley and then up 89A overthe evergreen Mingus Mountain intoJerome, then across the Verde Valley andback to Sedona.

Each year on the Copperstate 1000,funds not only are raised for the PhoenixArt Museum but also to benefit families offallen state police personnel. Eight“motors” accompany the rally, and fromtime to time, and when the lack of trafficallows, the officers don’t seem to mindwhen the sports cars are driven as theywere intended to be driven.

Each year, the “motors” even presentan award to one of the Copperstate partic-ipants, “for reasons the rest of us don’twant to know,” it says in the route book.That award is one of several given eachyear at the end of the rally. Among theothers are the Louis E. Laflin III SpiritAward, the Directors Award—given by thePhoenix Art Museum to the automobilemaking a unique stylistic and artisticstatement—an award to those who trav-eled farthest from home to participate, aCondolence Award—given to the car thatneeded the most attention from themechanics—and the Participants’ ChoiceAward, in which those on the rally pickthe car they’d most like to add to theirown collections.

This year, the Participants’ Choice wasBill and Linda Pope’s 1952 Fiat 8V ZagatoElaborata, one of only five such cars withdouble-bubble Zagato bodywork.

The car was gorgeous and immaculateand would be welcome in any collection.But beauty, as they say, is in the eye ofthe beholder, and to my eyes, the lust carof Copperstate 2010 was Terry O’Reilly’s1954 Bentley Special, the so-calledGooda Bentley.

Bentleys, of course, are luxury cars, butwhile this one retains its fine wood dash-board, it was specially built not for theroad but for the racetrack. Robert “Bob”Gooda considered the standard Bentley R-type coupe body to be, well, as O’Reillyputs it, “profoundly ugly,” so he commis-sioned coachbuilder Robert Peel to createan aerodynamic body that tapered backinto a cropped “kamm” tail.

Though a two-door, the Bentley R-typeis a large car: its 120-inch wheelbase isnearly half a foot longer than the modernCadillac Escalade sport utility vehicle, butwith its racy bodywork, the Bentley lookssleek and fast to the point of being wellproportioned.

Gooda raced the car with its 5.0-literBentley straight six engine at Silverstone,Goodwood and other British racing tracksand on the European continent. O’Reillyfirst saw the car at The Quail, A Motor -sports Gathering on the Monterey Penin -sula. The Bentley was parked next toO’Reilly’s vintage Lincoln racer, a car hebelieves to be the last surviving Americanvehicle that competed in the originalCarrera Panamericana, the great Mexicanroad race in the early 1950s.

O’Reilly wanted the Bentley and finallynegotiated the price down to what heconsidered to be reasonable, just fourmonths before the Copperstate rally.

Like the Bentley, O’Reilly was born inthe UK. He holds an Irish passport. Hisfamily immigrated to the United States in1960. He works as a trail lawyer, special-izing in aviation issues, though he sayshe’s “deep into this Toyota thing” onbehalf of plaintiffs he represents.

He said he’s drawn to what he calls“weird” cars and owns a dozen or so,

32 • July-August 2010 • ARIZONADRIVER

THE COPPERSTATE 1000

HAS GROWN INTO ONE OF

THE MOST SIGNIFICANT

ANNUAL FUND-RAISERS FOR

THE PHOENIX ART MUSEUM.

THE EVENT HAS GROWN

EXPONENTIALLY IN

STATURE, AS WELL. THE

20TH ANNIVERSARY RUN

WELCOMED SOME 100 CARS.

Michael Hammer’s 1963 Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud IIIDrophead Coupe overtakes the author in the highcountry. Bill and Linda Pope’s 1952 Fiat 8V ZagatoElaborata took the Participants’ Choice Awardthis year. At the first overnight stop, the South Rimof the Grand Canyon competes with all this finemachinery for beauty and sheer grandeur. TerryO’Reilly’s 1954 Bentley Special was built race-track-ready, rebodied as a two-seater fastback.Photos: Edsall, Bohl, Edsall, Bohl.

some typical collectibles and some, likethe Bentley, rather special.

The 20th anniversary Copperstate1000 ended on Wednesday, when thecars made their way back to Phoenix,crossing the Verde Valley and then climb-ing to the Mogollon Rim and drivingthrough Payson on the way to lunch atSaguaro Lake, and from there down theBeeline to dinner at the Camelback Inn.

Among the 90-some cars participatingin the rally are more than a dozen eachJaguars and Ferraris, half a dozenMercedes—including a pair of Gull -wings—assorted Chevrolet Corvettes andShelbys—both Cobras and Mustangs—apassel of Porsches, several Aston Martinsand Alfa Romeos, a couple each of Austin-Healeys, Packards and Pontiacs, a HudsonHornet, a Siata, and even a Toyota.

A Toyota? Toyota made a car that’s nowconsidered a classic?

Indeed. In 1967, Toyota produced the2000GT, the first Japanese supercar. Of337 cars, fewer than 65 were shipped tothe United States and only 36-38 of themare known to survive. A Toyota dealer inFlorida collects them; he and his fatherand brother have 15. Half a dozen are inmuseums. Toyota’s American head -quarters has three. Another half dozenare in various states of restoration atMaine Line Exotics, which is whereBrown and Sara Maloney found theirs.They are only the car’s third owners.

Brown Maloney says he’s been fasci-nated by cars ever since his parentsbought a 1956 Ford Thunderbird—a carhe still owns, along with some 20 others,including the Toyota.

The 2000GT not only has a long, low,muscularly exotic and aerodynamic bodywith pop-up headlamps and a wrap-around windshield, but a 2.0-liter, inline

six-cylinder engine built for Toyota byYamaha and tuned to spin to more than6000 rpm and propel the car to a succes-sion of international speed records,including one 72-hour stint in the mid-’60s during which the Toyota supercaraveraged nearly 130 miles per hour.

In the decades since Louis Laflin firstsuggested an automobile rally, theCopperstate 1000 has done much morethan raise money for the Phoenix ArtMuseum. It has led the Phoenix art com-munity to see the automobile as a form ofartistic expression.

“Having the Copperstate led us to havethe Curves of Steel,” said Phoenix ArtMuseum director James Ballinger said,referring to the 2007 exhibit of classic andespecially streamlined automotive designfrom the 1930s (see Arizona Driver,MayJune 2007, online). Ballinger calledCurves of Steel a “groundbreaking exhib-it” that brought people to the art museumwho never before had entered the build-ing. Several of the cars on exhibit, henoted, came from the collections ofCopperstate participants.

The museum is working to offer anexhibit of automotive art from the firsthalf of the 20th century, and there’stalk of staging another Curves of Steel-type exhibit of vehicles, this time per-haps featuring something as elegantlyexotic as Bugattis or as modernly artis-tic as hot rods. ■

ARIZONADRIVER • July-August 2010 • 3534 • July-August 2010 • ARIZONADRIVER

After working as a sports editor for daily newspa-pers in Michigan, LARRY EDSALL was on staff for12 years at AutoWeek, most of it as managing edi-tor. He has driven more than half a million milestesting cars on four continents. He helped launchwww.izoom.com and also helped found PAPA, thePhoenix Automotive Press Association. His booksinclude Masters of Car Design (Genius), Miata 20Years and his eleventh, Camaro: A Legend Reborn,all available at amazon.com.

Copperstate 1000 rally cars head up Antelope Pass,a steep climb leading to Page and Lake Powell .Photo by Larry Edsall.

Tom and Sharon Malloy’s 1964 Shelby 289 Cobra,identification tag CSX 2512, is well suited for theopen road, with a history as an actual getawaycar. Brown and Sara Maloney are the third ownersof this red 1967 Toyota 2000 GT. After lunch onMonday, the cars find a massive, Interstate-clos-ing dust storm awaiting them around the turn.Budd and Laurie Florkiewicz pilot their 1959 JaguarXK 150S roadster. Photos: Edsall (3), Bohl (1).