1951 Hudson Hornet Club Coupe

Can a cartoon excuse us, animated feature film influence the collector car scene?

Will Cars stoke interest in old iron the way Toy Story fueled a surge of nostalgia for little green plastic army men? If there’s a collector car to watch as a barometer of any such Cars effect, we nominate the 1951 Hudson Hornet Club Coupe, model for the character voiced by Paul Newman, “Doc Hudson.”


Jack Miller, proprietor of “The Last Hudson Dealership” in Ypsilanti, Michigan, has sold the example in this photo a couple of times over now, most recently for $23,450 through RM Auctions at its February sale in Boca Raton, Florida.

Sold new in New Jersey in 1951, this Club Coupe somehow made its way to Dexter, Michigan, before being acquired by Miller Motors Hudson in the early 1990s.


“I sold it here in the Detroit area, and it was refurbished by that owner in ’95 and ’96, with a new Naugahyde interior to a high standard—it wasn’t a restoration to stock, but the owner liked it,” Miller says.

“He had the same attitude toward paint; it’s the same color as they used as reference for the movie, it’s called Pacific Blue, but he put some [non-stock] metallic in it.”

The inspiration for Cars' town mechanic and judge brings 50 some years of experience to the job, and numerous stock car wins to boot: Real Hudson Hornets dominated stock car racing throughout the early 1950s.

The inspiration for Cars' town mechanic and judge brings 50 some years of experience to the job, and numerous stock car wins to boot: Real Hudson Hornets dominated stock car racing throughout the early 1950s.

Miller bought the car back from that owner’s estate last November, put a rebuilt Hydramatic transmission in it (an option over the standard three-speed manual), replaced all the brakes and lines, replaced the exhaust and detailed everything under the hood. It was a good driver, in other words, in show condition but in some ways less “authentic” than the cartoon car over which John Lasseter and company sweated so many details. It showed up in the classified ads in the May issue of Hemmings Motor News at an asking price just under $30,000.

Stout cars, these old Hornets. The famed “stepdown” chassis that made them handle so well that they dominated NASCAR racing from 1951 to 1954 was overbuilt—essentially a unit body with a vestigial perimeter frame for added stiffness, plus subframes for major assemblies. All the mass sat down low where racers like Mar-shall Teague and Herb Thomas could make best use of it in cornering.

The big 308-cid inline six-cylinder used chromium in its iron-alloy block. The head—though of the old-fashioned L-head or flathead valve layout—was cast of aluminum alloy. Detroit-built Hudsons were generally engineered and built to a high standard and meant to compete with Buick for upscale customers.

Teague got a Hornet straight off the dealer’s lot at Milford Motors in Jacksonville, Florida, and used it to win the 1951 Daytona 500 on the beach (he repeated in 1952), setting off a string of Hornet Grand National wins, including 13 races that first year, 27 in 1952, 22 in 1953 and 17 in 1954. Had Hudson invested in a V8 instead of the ill-fated 1953 Jet economy car, the string might have kept going, but the overhead-valve V8s from Olds, Chrysler and Chevy were too much for the flathead-six to overcome.

The factory helped by adding “severe usage” parts to its catalog, engineered under the direction of Vince Piggins, who rose to later fame doing similar magic for the small-block Chevy. These parts included high-compression heads, dual exhaust and heavy-duty suspension components. The ultimate 7X “police package” squeezed up to 220 hp out of the 5.0-liter flathead-six, rated at 145 hp stock and 160 hp with the optional Twin-H dual-carb setup.


The severe usage parts inspired many to build their own Hornet racers; Miller holds up an old black-and-white photo of six such cars, drifting side by side on some fairgrounds’ dirt track, and says, “This is why Club Coupes are getting so hard to find now.” These lighter two-doors comprised only 7 percent of the 131,628 Hornets built from 1951 to 1954 (there were also sedans, convertibles and the pillarless Hollywood hardtop).

Hudson merged with Nash in 1954 to form American Motors (which makes it part of the DaimlerChrysler heritage today, and gives Dodge the right to use the Hornet name on its upcoming small car). The Detroit factory was closed with the merger, and 1955-57 Hudsons were really just rebadged Nashes built in Kenosha, Wisconsin—what collectors call a “Hash,” and not the same thing.

As late as 1959 old Hornet race cars were still sought after, and one served young immigrant twins in Pennsylvania named Mario and Aldo Andretti, who campaigned their old Hudson on dirt tracks near their Nazareth home. Mario, of course, later came to drive for a CART team called Newman-Haas. This pretty much brings it full circle to that cartoon car with Paul Newman’s voice. If nothing else, a batch of prepubescent moviegoers is about to learn a Hudson was a special kind of car, and perhaps find motivation to preserve the remain- ing examples for another generation.