Our motto at MyStarCollectorCar has always been pretty basic: there is a story behind every car.
Some of the stories are simply more interesting than others and those are the stories we chase here at MSCC.
The ones that grab our attention are sometimes visual because we like to follow the crowd at shows.
Any ride with plenty of people around it will also grab our readers’ attention and we will seek out the owner to get the vehicle’s history.The story gets better if the owner has some form of direct involvement with the history of the vehicle, whether through personal family history or a hands-on approach to the actual build.
The story gets less interesting if the owner simply wrote a check for the car and it is a flavor-of-the-week purchase for him or her.
Sometimes we will find unlikely stories at shows when we see a less flashy ride and become curious about its history with the owner. It may be an entry level ride for a car guy/girl who loves the vintage vehicle hobby but cannot afford the high end rides at this point in their lives.
Or it may be a family legacy vehicle that was purchased by an older relative and passed on down to the next generation-or generation after the next generation. These are stories where the current owner takes a trip down memory lane every time they climb behind the wheel and hit the road in the family legacy ride.
Oddball rides work well for us at MSCC, whether they are vehicles built from a defunct automobile company that was unable to compete with the big boys, or a freestyle rat rod designed from the active imagination of its owner.
Customs are always a good bet for us because they are also rolling art-only built with a completely different game plan than a junkyard dog rat rod. The best of the customs are flawless in every way, from their trick paint to their reworked sheet metal, and they get rock star treatment from their admirers at every show.
We zero in on our automotive targets such as the aforementioned ride types at shows and hope we connect with their owners. Sometimes that owner search is the most difficult part of the process. Once we find the owner, we ask them a series of questions from the “who-what-when-and-why” interview list and nail down the details.
Our most important question is the “why” question because we like to know why they chose the vehicle, since that question is the heart of the story for us at MSCC. We spend every summer at many car shows in hot pursuit of stories and we typically run the finished stories 6 months to a year after we interview the owners. We provide this timeline information during every interview and explain their car stories will not appear right away on MSCC, plus we also let them know their stories will not appear in a print magazine.
The entire process takes plenty of time from initially spotting a ride to publishing the story on MSCC-and we love every minute of it.
Jim Sutherland
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