* In response to the bit in last week’s Four-Links discussing the potential for restoring concept cars, commenter andy reminded us of Mel Francis’s Mel’s Concept Garage on Flickr, where Mel is currently showcasing the Corvette SS replica project (among others) he’s currently working on.
* Paul Kirchner’s often surreal, more often plain bizarre comic strip “the bus” ran for several years in the pages of Heavy Metal magazine, and Truque this week posted a few of the strips. For those of you looking for more, Kirchner has since released a book compiling all of the strips.
* This past week marked the 75th anniversary of the introduction of the 1940 Packards at the Chicago Auto Show. And because the 1940 Packards were the first to offer factory-installed air conditioning, this past week also marks the official 75th anniversary of in-car air conditioning. A few years back, Automotive News had a rundown of all the fits and starts that came along with trying to get closed cars cooler inside than out.
* Tatra built a sports car? Well, one, at least. The Petrol Stop this week showed us what would’ve been a nice little eastern European sports coupe with a front-mounted air-cooled V-8 had Tatra gone into production with the JK 2500. Instead, only one prototype was built in the early 1950s, and after a few years as a daily driver went missing.
* Finally, this week we saw a comprehensive look at the downfall of Bertone from Road & Track, which includes a few interesting tidbits, including the fact that GM tried to buy the coachbuilding firm in the 1990s, to go along with the main assertion that the company was mismanaged into both irrelevancy and insolvency by one simple act of Nuccio Bertone’s.
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