The Evil Seville Was One of the Wildest Customs California Ever Saw

At this year’s Grammy Awards, a star-studded cast came together to sing Randy Newman’s I Love L.A., acknowledging those affected by the fires in California, and paying tribute to the firefighters who fought the blaze. You might remember the 1980s video for the original song, which featured Newman tooling around Los Angeles in a 1955 Buick Super convertible, interspersed with typical scenes from city life.

But, in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo that’s barely a second long, there’s a car that’s about as far from typical as you can get. Pulling out from behind a Ferrari 308 GTSi and flicking on its big auxiliary lights, it’s the Evil Seville, and it might just be the most insane machine Los Angeles ever produced.

This 1979 Cadillac Seville, if you can even call it that, was fairly notorious at the beginning of the 1980s, but has faded almost entirely from the digital record. Rumor suggests that it may have been scrapped years ago, but you can find it mentioned in old copies of magazines, including, bizarrely, a Norwegian motor and sport publication. There are few photos to be found. It’ll crop up in the odd forum discussion by veteran hot-rodders who remember seeing it out on the street or at a shop. There’s even a photo of the band ZZ Top posing with it.

Things are made even harder by the fact that the builder of this car is named Jon Ward, the same as the founder of ICON 4X4, the restomod specialist based in Los Angeles. They’re not related, and most of the creator of this Cadillac’s work was in film. Specifically, he ran a successful advertising production company, the history of which we’ll get to in a bit. It’s perhaps even crazier than the car.

As you’ve no doubt already sussed out from its blistered fenders and steamroller-width tires, this is not a stock Seville. In fact, it is a NASCAR tube-frame chassis wearing the skin of a Seville the way the alien bug from Men In Black wears Vincent D’Onofrio. Under the hood is a propane-fueled Chevrolet LS7 454 cubic-inch V-8, twin-turbocharged to between 750 and 1100 horsepower, depending on boost levels. The transmission is a Doug Nash five-speed manual, the brakes are six-piston Wilwoods, and under instrumented testing by Car and Driver in the desert in 1983, at low boost and heat-soaked, this thing hit over 170 mph on a public road.

Reportedly, the bumper fell off.

Banzai Midnight

One of the great tall tales of the automotive world is that of Tokyo’s Mid Night Racing Team, a group of necessarily secretive street racers in Nissan Skylines and Porsche 911 Turbos, scorching up Japan’s smooth toll highways in the wee hours of the morning. The group really did exist (and still does, though the speeds are now confined to the track), and interestingly, in the days before Supras and Skylines, American V-8 muscle was an option.

Of course, V-8s were also often the weapon of choice in some earlier, dead-of-night street racing stateside. Here, one group was informally known as the Banzai Runners, and yes, there was a very mediocre movie made in 1987 about their antics. The reality seems better than the fiction, as the cars these guys were running were spare-no-expense affairs. Modified Countachs. Hopped-up Porsches. Dan Haggerty, the actor who starred in the TV series Grizzly Adams, piloted what was basically a roadgoing racecar: an enclosed Lola T70 body draped over a T165 racing chassis.

Ward’s Seville crops up regularly in early 1980s accounts of these racers’ night-time speed runs. Because of the obviously illegal speeds, details leaked out pretty slowly, with little news reaching the public in the 1970s. By the early 1980s, however, the tales were too good not to be told, and while surely some embellishing occurred, the speed was real.

The specific hunting grounds of the Banzai Runners was I-15 between Temecula and Escondido. Most of California’s highways are typically clogged these days regardless of the time, but in the ’70s and ’80s, when you hit 2 a.m. or so, they were usually deserted. The only other cars out there might be other speed demons, and more than a few owners of exotic machinery might have been surprised to find a Cadillac Seville chasing them down and blasting right past.

Paisley Productions: James Garner drives off a cliff

In the 1983 Car and Driver feature where most of the hard facts about the Evil Seville can be found, there’s a pricing breakdown on building this car, and it was not cheap. All told, Ward shelled out over $81,000 for his brutally fast four-door. For your reference, that’s about four times as much as a regular Cadillac Seville cost out of the showroom.

Where’d the money come from? Hollywood, but the 30-second kind. Ward’s production company, Paisley Productions, had made some movies early on, but by the 1980s was mostly involved in commercial shoots. In the Car and Driver piece, he points out how he likes the in-and-out nature of the work: get the contract, film the piece, get paid. For many of the shoots, Ward would build the stunt cars.

Paisley Productions had big clients like Charmin, Princess Cruises, Bank of America and Right Guard, and among them were several car companies. Things did not always go as planned: When shooting a Ford commercial where several pickups were air-dropped in the desert, the parachute for one failed to open and the truck pancaked into the dirt at 200 mph. In another Ford shoot, 30 horses were lined up to run alongside a Mustang convertible as it drove down Pismo Beach. A poorly timed release meant the horses escaped, stampeding all over Highway 101. The cops had to shut down the road, and a local paper ran a story with the headline, “Filming of Ford Loses Horsepower.”

Another time, Paisley landed the contract for a Mazda shoot, with longtime RX-7 spokesman James Garner, star of The Rockford Files. Garner, a respectable hotshoe in his own right, wanted to do his own stunt driving, but overcooked it in a turn and went off the side of the road, flipping his car. Luckily, besides the Mazda, only his pride was hurt. Paisley Productions lasted until 1989, by which time Ward had moved on to other projects.

Devilry in the details

Part of the reason the Evil Seville was such a real-deal terror, despite being so bizarre, is that Ward was, himself, also the real deal. He might have worked in Hollywood, but he was no phony, a kid who came up working in automotive shops since the age of 12.

He could drive, too. You can find proof in the results from the resurrected Carrera Panamericana races of the early 1990s, where he placed on the podium at least once. Because of his success in this race, he went into partnership with the son of Arlen Kurtis, founder of Kurtis Kraft. About six examples of the continuation Kurtis 500S roadster were made.

The formula for the Evil Seville may have been crazy, but the execution was thoughtful. It had a roll cage and ran 13.5-inch medium-wet Firestone racing tires, but also had power windows and functioning air conditioning. When tested by Car and Driver, the 170 mph figure was reached without using the nitrous oxide he had installed. Later, he got as much as 1100 horsepower out of that LS7, inching closer towards 200 mph.

Out on the road, all you’d see of this car are its taillights, and perhaps not even those. As the icing on the cake, Ward fitted the rear of his bad Caddy with a retractable license plate, behind which was a dazzlingly bright aircraft landing light, bright as the spotlights at a Hollywood premiere. You gotta love L.A.