Waiting Its Turn

INTENTIONALLY HIDDEN FOR DECADES, THIS HISTORIC AND PRESERVED EAST COAST HOT ROD WAS LOST UNTIL DAVID SIMARD FOUND IT.

- TIM BERNSAU

There’s a rod shop about an hour west of Boston called East Coast Custom where David Simard and his team build hot rods for customers. The Leominster, Massachusetts, shop also features a spectacular barnful of David’s own iron, traditional prewar Fords mostly, collected over the past several years and in various stages of progress.

We’ve talked about David Simard’s East Coast Custom before. On our website last year, we featured a 1933 Ford five-window coupe called The Devil’s Coupe, a surviving ’30sera hot rod that had been out of commission for more than 50 years before being revived and put back on the street in perfect period unrestored condition.

If The Devil’s Coupe had a brother, it’d be this channeled 1933 roadster—another perfectly preserved piece of hot rod history—with a pedigree just as impressive and a personality just as wicked as the coupe.

“In 1975, a fellow member of the Boston Area Roadsters Club introduced me to Bill Schultz,” David started the story. “Bill owned Country Club Auto Body in Norton, Massachusetts. He had numerous old Fords around his small one-man shop. Sitting outside was the 1934 three-window coupe, which he’d raced on the oval tracks in the area back in the ’50s. But inside, buried under numerous auto parts, was the channeled ’34 Ford roadster that he built in 1950 and parked in 1962. Bill intentionally buried the car in the corner to avoid everyone inquiring about it.