Tri-Five Chevys

IT’S INSTANTLY RECOGNIZABLE in any form. As a cruiser, a station wagon, a racecar, a model kit, or even a couch, the shoebox Chevy is an American hero and an international superstar. First introduced in 1955, the model only lasted until 1957, when it was replaced by full-size cars like the Impala. Despite this short tenure, the Tri-Five Chevrolets have played a part in every important American car trend from their introduction to today.

The ’55-’57 Chevys moved car design towards the Jet-Age with bold lines and bright colors and featured the first of Chevy’s small-blocks. Chevy offered affordable options with the base 150 and luxury features in the Bel Air. Tri-Fives raced in NASCAR and NHRA and starred in movies and TV shows. Today you’d be hard pressed to attend a car show that didn’t feature at least one Tri-Five, and despite its boxy proportions, it’s still a popular body choice for hot rods and racing.

We spoke to owners, builders, collectors, and historians and asked, “Why Tri?”

Gil Muro

Owner, Hot Rod Ranch

Muro and his brothers run a hot rod shop in Central California that specializes in early hot rods and drag cars, with a particular focus on Tri- Fives, of which they currently house nearly a dozen.

Provide me with some context, what’s so important about Tri-Fives?

In the ’60s and ’70s they were really hot street cars and drag cars. They were fairly lightweight cars, contrary to most people’s beliefs. They basically weigh the same as a Camaro or less so. I think in the 80s, a lot of them got turned back into street cars. And then the show car stuff kind of started getting really popular through the ’80s and the ’90s, which led to the Pro Street era. I’ve got the Sullivan ’57 Chevy. That’s one of the original Pro Street ’57 Chevys from back in the day. In the mid to late ’90s, the billet scene started, and, you know, like kind of the whole lawn chair hanging out of car shows type of thing. And a response to that show car scene was the unrestored racecar trend that we saw in the 2000s.

It felt like a lot of original cars surfaced around then, was it just because the magazines and collectors were getting into them?

I think a lot of it comes into effect because these old drag racer guys who have had these cars sitting in their garages or backyards forever, have gotten to the point where they’re older and they’re like, “I’m not going to get to this,” and decide to sell them and they were still left intact from when the last time they raced them. That’s what we love, bringing those cars back to life again and preserving the way they were, but just with a little bit of a new twist on them.

Do you kind of see this body style sticking around in car culture for a while longer?

I think they’re just a car that’s easily recognized by a lot of people. I don’t see that going away anytime soon. Hopefully not in my lifetime.

Joe, Michelle, and Joey Barry

The Barrys are a drag racing family with an affinity for 1956 Chevys. Joe campaigns an orange-and-white twin- turbo, big-block 1956 Chevy nicknamed “Creamsicle.” Joe and Michelle run BankSecure, a vault and security company, and Joey is finishing a degree in engineering.

So, the whole family loves ’56 Chevys, but Joe, I think it began with you?

Michelle: No actually, when I met Joe, I did not know that he had a car! I met his mom before I met his car. But when Joe and I met, my dad had a ’56 Chevy sitting in the garage. And I just always preferred them to the others.

Joe: I ended up with mine almost by accident. I don’t know if I would have picked a Tri-Five. Obviously now that’s all I want. But it wasn’t that I was looking through HOT ROD magazines and thought, oh, the Tri-Five is the best car. What happened is that my dad’s brother worked for LAPD and during his shifts, he would drive all around and if he spotted a Tri-Five he’d tell my dad and my dad would go out there and flat-tow them back from California to Colorado and then sell them because the cars didn’t have a lot of rust. Normally he’d bring back x’55s. And the one time he brought back the ’56, he couldn’t give it away. No-one wanted it, and that’s pretty much how I ended up with it.

The ’56 is the least popular of the three, even now?

Joe: Less so now, but there was an older guy here in Colorado Springs, Lanier, who ran a speed shop and had a ’55, and he used to give me a hard time, called my car “the dash car,” as in “55-57 Chevy.” The unimportant one in the middle. So, when I had my car painted, I had the painter write “Flash of Dash,” on the back.

Clearly the ’56 won you over, because you guys own, what, five of them?

Joey: Six! Maybe seven? No, six.

Two for each of you. What’s the draw?

Joe: It’s actually a horrible race car. It’s just a square. You don’t have weight on your side, you don’t have any aerodynamics on your side. And even though the car overall looks big, when you actually start putting things together, you run out of room versus a tube-chassis Camaro. It’s not the ideal car to do what we do, but people gravitate to these cars. I know using the phrase “real cars” doesn’t really make a lot of sense, but a lot of people can appreciate them and identify them, and that has appeal.

Mike Finnegan

Former editor at Mini Truckin’, HOT ROD Magazine, host of Roadkill and Faster With Finnegan, current host of Finnegan’s Garage on YouTube. Finnegan’s build of a hemi- powered ’55 gasser named Blasphemi was introduced in the first season of Roadkill Show.

What’s your tri-five experience, Mike?

I’ve only owned one, Blasphemi. I’ve only ridden in, maybe three of them, total in my lifetime.

So, was it one of those ride-alongs or the popularity of nostalgia racing and the return of gasser builds that inspired your car?

I didn’t know they ever went out of style! The reason I bought one was I wanted to be the Dennis Wilson and James Taylor in “Two Lane Blacktop”. I wanted that exact car: primer. American racing wheels, cut the fender wells to fit and I would just street race my way across America. I just thought that was the coolest thing ever. That movie is honestly a pretty crappy movie but the vibe and the way the car looked, the way the guys talked. [he trails off, lost in cinematic wonder].

And has it been everything you hoped it would be?

I love driving that car more than any other car. You know, if you want to be real competitive, it’s not the right way to go, but people respond to it. If you have one, it becomes what you’re associated with. It’s like it’s literally you. Besides that, I think people still build these things after all these years because it’s the one body style I can think of where it doesn’t matter what direction you go with it, it will always look good. If you go small tire, it looks good. If you Pro Street it, it looks good. If you radius the wheel wells and you cut right through the Bel Air trim in the quarter panel, which would be sacrilege to some people, it still looks good and it doesn’t matter. I’ve seen a lifted street freak, it looked good. That tri-five body style is one of the best body styles for customizing that was ever released out of the big three.

Jeff Lutz

Drag Racer, TV personality on Street Outlaws, owner of Lutz Racecars. Lutz owns three 1957 models, each with 4-digit horsepower from twin-turbo big blocks.

How did you end up building your street-legal ’57?

When I was a kid, I saw a yellow ’57 in an ad, the Popular Hot Rodding car, Project X. And I said, “When I get old enough and have enough money, that will be the first car I buy.”

And was it?

Maybe not the first, but around 2010 I bought a ’57 and it made me famous. People were racing Tri-Fives, but not really choosing that car to be streetable and go 200 mph. It made me an oddball, and it became a passion to see how hard we could push it and how fast it’ll go.

Do you think people will keep building Tri-Fives for a while?

Yes. They’ll be around forever. There’s a company that’s remaking the bodies so we’ll probably run out of titles before we run out of people who want ’57s, that’s for sure. Everybody always says, “Oh, my grandfather had one, my dad had one, you know, my neighbor had one.” You don’t find a sexier car. The ’57 Bel Air is the most beautiful car that I’ve ever seen.

Alex Taylor

Drag Racer, former host of HOT ROD Garage, automotive content creator. Taylor races a 1955 Chevy 210 that runs the quarter-mile in the sixes at more than 200 mph.

You grew up around cars [Alex’s dad, Dennis runs a custom hot rod shop], what does a Tri-Five mean to you?

I was 8 years old, and my dad bought a ’55 Chevy, black Bel Air, blue interior. I remember the Pilot transport truck pulled up in front of the shop. It was late at night and the lights were on the chrome as it backed out of the trailer. And I told Dad, “Can I have that as my first car?”

Did you get it as your first car?

It’s the car I learned to drive stick in! We still have it, but no, I started driving and racing a ’68 Camaro.

But now you have a ’55 of your own, and it’s quite fast. What’s that story?

My ’55 was out back, pile of junk. I wanted to build a 6-second car, and a ’55 Chevy isn’t the first thing you think of, but I wanted something we didn’t feel bad gutting, and that body was sitting there. When we pulled it out, I mean the thing was an atrocity. But once we power washed it, all the years of grime and grunge went away. And this really pretty teal started to show through and I liked the patina. The body is steel, but the doors, the trunk lid, and the front clip are like a mix of fiberglass and carbon fiber that we laid up ourselves, and rather than make a fake rust patina on the composite pieces, we let the carbon fiber shine through. So now it’s a tube-chassis car. The drivetrain is a big block Chevy with a Turbo 400 transmission and a Gear Vendor overdrive and a 9-inch rear end, with twin turbos which make it really streetable.

You’ve driven a lot of different cars, what’s special about the ’55?

I love the ’55 because it’s like I’m in a fishbowl. I can see everything. It feels like it’s this big hug that I feel safe in. We’ve talked about building another car, something more aerodynamic, but I love this car, it’s notable. You do what everyone else does and you lose character.

Brendon Vetuskey

Lead Redline Club Diecast Designer at Hot Wheels. Vetuskey’s Tri-Five build was an olive-green gasser ’55 named “Triassic Five” with a tunnel-rammed big-block under the hood.

Are Tri-Five models as popular in Hot Wheels form as in real life?

There’s been a ’57 Chevy since the ’70s, the one with the engine sticking out of the hood. Larry Wood designed a ’55 Chevy, a two door hard top in the early ’80s. And that was a popular casting. Even if you go back to, I think ’69 or ’70, there was the classic Nomad, which then was recast or retooled into the “Alive 55.” And that casting is still retooled and used in the line today. There’s a whole bunch of them. I did a ’55 Chevy Gasser in 2013. And that has been a very popular casting ever since. The collectors are just very passionate about it. I mean, in Indonesia, there’s a group of Hot Wheels collectors that formed a club called the Gasser diecast community, the GDC. I don’t know that there’s many ’55 Chevy gassers over there. Probably some of the members have never seen one in real life. They made a club in a country that doesn’t even have many of that kind of car, that’s how passionate they are.

Did you build your full-size car before or after you designed the Hot Wheels ’55?

After. I was in the midst of building a different car, my ’67 Firebird. As a fellow car person, I’m sure you understand the itch of working on one, and deciding you want another. And that’s what happened to me. I was halfway through my Pontiac build and I decided I really needed to get that ’55 I’d been wanting my whole life. So, I bought it around 2013, but I didn’t start building it for a few years.

Is it just like your model design?

In the model you’ll see the big block Chevy, the fender well headers, the wheel opening in the back, the dash mounted tachometer. Little cues you can put in at 1/64 scale. I took some liberties, of course. When I got my car, I changed it up a little bit. I made the tilt cowl and a couple other things just to make sure it was different enough from the Hot Wheels one that it has its own identity.

You have a bunch of flashy cars in your collection, what gets the most attention?

The Firebird is more flamboyant of the two with the bare metal clear coat and the Hot Wheels graphics all over it but the Triassic Five, that car stole the show. That just put the Firebird in the back seat. That car is really loud with the nose-high stance. It was just a very in your face thing. You would see it coming a mile away, and it would always draw a crowd. You see the engine, you see the different colors, the white headers, the, the polished aluminum against the black and the green and the patina. Even at a show with lots of Tri-Fives — and they’re always at every car show in America — it’s still great to see them. It’s neat seeing the variants.

David Freiburger

Freiburger is a former editor of HOT ROD, HOT ROD Deluxe, Car Craft, Rod & Custom, 4-Wheel & Off Road, founder and host of Roadkill and Engine Masters, and current host of the David Freiburger channel on YouTube.

David, you’ve seen all the trends come and go. Do you think it’s surprising that the Tri-Five Chevy is still so popular today?

From the beginning, it was the very first car with a small block Chevy in it, and people started racing them. ’55 Chevys have been popular drag cars since time began. It’s an iconic Gasser, so when the retro craze kicked in 20-, 30-year-olds who didn’t care about Model As and ’32 Fords and ’33s felt that a ’55 Chevy was a car they were comfortable with, it’s closer to a muscle car. I don’t think anything running today is groundbreaking. That’s just the regular flow of things. They’ll be around throughout our effective lifetime. The most popular cars always stick around.

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