Surf's up
Richard Hartley has been at this hot rodding game for a long time now. Just in Custom Car features we can trace him back to November 1997 when his Keith Atkinson-built "glass 3-window graced the cover, but a quick skim of that feature reveals he’d already owned some pretty trick cars prior to that, including Keith Baker’s old very black ’32 highboy.
It goes back much further than even that though. “It was seeing Black Cherry [dig out your November ’78 issue for clarity, if needed] and Jeff Beck’s Super Prune sedan at Alexandra Palace in 1979 that got me into all this. I had a Capri there called Tropical Feeling with a Clive Miles paint job on it. I was on the reserve list and spent most of the weekend helping Gary Belcher polish his V12 T, but in between that I’d pop downstairs and just stare at those two cars. The chop, the stance, everything about Black Cherry blew my mind.
That was the car
