Solid & Striped

The Lokar/Street Rodder ’34 Ford 3-Window Coupe 25th in a Long Line of Road Tour Hot Rods

- Tim Bernsau 

You’ve probably been following the progress of the Lokar/Street Rodder Road Tour 1934 Ford coupe throughout the year. The stunning black and gray 1934 Ford 3-window is finally finished, photographed, and revealed right here.

“It seems like just yesterday that we set out on the highway in a blue 1933 Ford coupe with white racing stripes.” –Jerry Dixey, Road Tour director, 1996-2020

In 1996, the idea of building a street rod and driving it all over the country wasn’t really that radical; that’s been the point of the street rodding since the earliest days. But Street Rodder magazine commissioning a car built entirely from aftermarket parts and then putting it on the road for three months was definitely ambitious.

That very first Street Rodder Road Tour car was a beauty—a Redneck fiberglass-bodied 1933 Ford 3-window coupe, built at Lobeck’s Hot Rod Shop in Cleveland, Ohio. The eye-catching paint job was a combo of PPG Bonneville Blue and a couple of wide white racing stripes running the length of the car. The coupe would have been a smash hit on the car show circuit, trailered from venue to venue for pampered celebrity appearances, but that was never the plan. Instead, Jerry Dixey, the guy behind the whole Road Tour idea, drove that car to those shows, covering 27,000 miles in the course of 82 days. After its season of virtually non-stop cross-country cruising, the history-making rod was given away in a drawing, and was eventually attained by Debbie Walls of Lokar Performance in Knoxville, Tennessee, who has driven it ever since. Dixey has been driving ever since as well, each year planning and hosting Road Tours, always in a brand-new street rod.