Once again the South Town Expo Center in Sandy, Utah played host to a medley of cars and exotic vehicles at the Utah Autorama Car Show. Custom restorations of cars older than the state of Hawaii were the show’s bread and butter, however, amidst all of the 1930 roadsters and hordes of Mustangs were exotic head turners, custom bike displays, automotive vendors, BMX stunt rider shows, and celebrity appearances and autographs.

Our highlights started with a quite modern and very out of place Noble M400, surprisingly the second Noble we’ve seen in Utah in a year. A handful of other supercars were scattered about the showroom floor including a Lamborghini Gallardo and Mucielago, a 2008 Dodge Viper SRT-10, and an absolutely stunning red 1973 DeTomaso Pantera (or a Ford GT according to the brilliant 15-year-old kid behind me).

But our “holy crap!” moment came when we stumbled across a  1972 Fiat 500 in perfect condition and decorated with Ferrari symbols and a Scuderia racing stripe. It’s the Fiat that wants to be a Ferrari– how cliche yet absolutely wonderful! This small Fiat is, without a shadow of a doubt, the coolest car in the history of the world.

Moral of the story? We went to Autorama expecting to get another informative Utah Auto Expo. Instead we stepped into an entertaining time warp to a generation where ‘MPG’ didn’t mean a thing and Plymouth cars were ‘just swell.’

[Chad Waite]

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