2019 Stitch of Excellence Winner

Body

This heavily modified Chevy was put together by the team at Johnny’s Auto Trim and Rod Shop in Alamosa, Colorado, for Greg Hrehovcsik. Every panel of this Chevy has been heavily massaged. A custom top panel joins the rest of the body, which was channeled over the frame rails and sectioned. Sectioning, for those who don’t know, is removing material from the side of a car to make it lower -- obviously that means reworking every piece of sheetmetal.

Powering the Chevy is a 515-cubic-inch Chevy big block that’s force-fed by a pair of turbochargers. The combo is apparently good enough for 1,043 hp, mated to a three-speed automatic transmission -- a TH400, for those counting -- that feeds power to a chromed rear end.

The list of custom-made parts is too long to list, even for the internet, but safe to say if it’s on this car, you can’t readily find it.

2018 Don Ridler Memorial Award Winner

Body Bottom

For every show car you see on a pedestal, probably a dozen more languish in garages across the country, often as painful reminders of what could’ve been. Ironically, it’s not innovation, craftsmanship, or even finances that make a show car so difficult to finish. As curious as it may seem, it’s persistence.

More than an example of the finest quality, the ’57 Chevy that won the Don Ridler Memorial Award at the 2018 Detroit Autorama may well be the finest example of persistence. You see, the car that belongs to Greg Hrehovcsik and Johnny Martin by all accounts should be one of those stillborn examples. That Johnny Martin has any sort of financial stake in the car testifies to the resolve that it took to see this job through.
-SuperChevy