I Finally Realized What This Mystery Car In ‘The Love Bug’ Is: Cold Start

Perhaps its because I’m still shaking off the vestiges of yet another unwanted hospital stay, but for whatever reason I decided it’d be a good time to give The Love Bug, Disney’s 1969 movie about a sentient Volkswagen Beetle with a penchant for mid-century SoCal racing, another viewing. I think it’s just healthy to do this periodically, recharge some deeply-installed automotive batteries and just remind oneself why we do this. Anyway, this time I noticed a car used prominently in at least one section of the movie, and realized i wasn’t familiar with what that car was. So I decided to find out.

The car in question gets used during the Gran Carrera De Vehiculos race scene, a race that I think is supposed to portray a race like the Carrera Panamericana, which was a brutal race designed to celebrate Mexico’s completion of its segment of the Pan-American Highway. The 2,000-mile race was first run in 1950, and in 1954 a series of VW Beetles were entered in the brutal race, by the economically-named Prince Alfonso Maximiliano Victorio Eugenio Alejandro Maria Pablo de la Santisima Trinidad y Todos los Santos zu Hohenlohe-Langeburg.

Whew.

The Beetles all finished the race, managing a respectable average speed of 63 mph from their little 1200cc, 36 hp engines, and proved the Beetle’s toughness to Mexico. After all, out of 150 entrants, only 86 cars finished. VW of Mexico took off soon after that.

Now the movie version of the race is a sort of caricature, and a slightly offensive one, but those were the times. The chaos of a race like this was played up a lot:

Anyway, the car I’m curious about is the one the lead antagonist, Thorndyke, is driving. It looks like this:

Seems a bit of a strange choice for an off-road desert race, but it also does seem quite powerful, even if it ended up quite defeated. So what is this thing?

Interestingly, I think it is a car known as Ol’ Yaller, specifically, Ol’ Yaller Mark IV, made by Max Balchowsky. Here, compare for yourself:

I’m pretty sure that was it. Balchowsky’s Ol’ Yaller series of cars were seemingly crude things made with what seemed like scrap parts and bits of metal from street signs, but were really carefully-engineered racer cars that managed to embarrass many well-known European marques of the era. Dan Gurney and Carroll Shelby both drove Ol’ Yaller cars at some point, and these were very well-respected machines.

Max Balchowsky was friends with Buddy Hackett, who stars in the film, and it seems Hackett got him connected with The Love Bug, production, where he also did some tuning on the Beetles used for the racing scenes.

I’m just glad to finally know what that car is, after all these years of me not realizing it. It’s a fascinating car that we should probably write about more, too, at some point!

I also appreciated the sinister glee that David Tomlinson, the actor who plays Thorndyke, brings to his role. For example, here’s what he says when talking about the concept of “honesty”:

Ahhh, so good! I also took a moment to really look at Buddy Hackett’s metal sculpture from the beginning of the film:

Despite what the closed caption claims, I did not hiss, and in fact, I rather like this work, with its central Edsel grille and variety of interesting parts, like that instrument cluster and the nicely-arranged crown of lights and horns, supported on a bunch of piston con-rods.

It’s a work with some real presence, and I wonder if there’s any surviving pictures of it taken during the making of the movie. It may have just been welded together by the movie’s grips? Who knows?