TEN YEARS AFTER

Murray Pfaff’s Genre-Defying Imperial Speedster Continues to Drop Jaws and Defy Convention

- Barry Kluczyk

It has been about a decade since we first glimpsed Murray Pfaff's radical vision named Imperial Speedster. It first appeared in the May 2010 issue of HOT ROD as part of a project cars issue theme, and the subsequent 10 years have done nothing to diminish the dazzling impression of its bold design statement.

In fact, the car’s category-bending execution—it is part street rod, part custom, part resto-mod, and part ’50s show car—contributes to a timelessness that’s undefined by the era or prevailing build trends in which it was constructed. It has helped that Pfaff has continued to refine the car over the years, including a complete color change and new wheels in the past year or so, which has contemporized a car not otherwise bound by the expectations of a specific genre of the hot rodding world.

“You see many custom-built cars that arrive on the scene, make a splash and then disappear entirely,” says Pfaff. “I never wanted that for the Imperial Speedster. I had always intended this car to make a bold statement but also to live on beyond the initial round of car-show debuts. It was always a car intended to be driven and enjoyed.”

Indeed, it has. After the initial wave of attention subsided during the first couple of years of making rounds at all the big events in North America, Pfaff and the Speedster settled into a cozy cruising relationship. He drove it two times on the HOT ROD Power Tour, where it was dubbed the “trailer queen without a trailer,” and the car remains a fixture on Woodward Avenue in suburban Detroit, where the healthy summer cruising season brings hundreds of hot rods, muscle cars and vehicles of all types to the historic boulevard every weekend.