Up from the Ashes: A 1940s One-off Streamliner Is Reborn. Again.

More than 5000 car companies have existed in the United States alone, from Abbott-Detroit to the Zip Cyclecar Company. Yet some folks just can’t seem to find the perfect vehicle to buy, so instead, they build their own. This is the story of one of those people and one of those cars, a very special machine that sprang from the mind not of a shade-tree tinkerer or a reckless dreamer but from a talented engineer. Over his long career, Norman Timbs designed everything from mag wheels to a magnetic train, he called Enzo Ferrari his personal chauffeur for a day, and he applied everything he learned building World War II fighter planes and postwar Indy racers to a car he could drive to the hardware store. 

His creation was so special, so beguiling and extraordinary, that over the 75 years since Timbs built it, it has been repeatedly rescued from the verge of the scrap heap by a succession of devotees. One of them is its current owner, who not only fully restored it once but then re-restored it a second time after winching its charred carcass out of the rubble of a cataclysmic fire. People often cope with misfortune by citing the old platitude, “It was meant to be.” If anything was meant to be, then the Norman Timbs Special was meant to be dead, buried, and forgotten. But it didn’t die, because of a few caring individuals who wouldn’t let it. 

In the hills northwest of Los Angeles, the beaver tail of an enclosed trailer dropped and out rolled the mother of all streamliners. In its flowing full-length gown of maroon-lacquered aluminum, it looked like Rita Hayworth reclined and posed for a pinup shot that would hang in Quonset huts, barracks, and ship bunks on the five continents and the seven seas. OK, maybe Rita Hayworth wearing wire-rim glasses and braces, but either way, 5000 car companies never dared to produce a machine like this.

No, it fell to one Norman Timbs, the son of an oil-equipment engineer and a native of LA’s San Fernando Valley. Timbs went to junior high with guys like Bruce Bromme and Bill Scheffler, who went on to be big names in the local sprint-car scene, and as a teenager, he built a Model A Ford hot rod that he claimed to be the fastest car in the Valley. Thus, Timbs arrived at the University of Southern California engineering school in the early 1940s with dirt already under his fingernails. Then North American Aviation came calling. The war was looming, and North American badly needed test engineers to work on its two principal projects, the B-25 Mitchell medium bomber and the P-51 Mustang fighter. For a while, Timbs worked by day at North American’s main plant down in the LA suburb of Inglewood and attended night classes at USC. Then North American sent Timbs to frigid Alaska to help with cold-weather testing.

“Dad was a civilian, but he was given the rank of captain so they wouldn’t think he was a spy because he was up on a military base,” recalled his son, Norman Timbs Jr., himself an aeronautical engineer working on military drones. A photo of Timbs Sr. standing among snowy trees reveals a slight figure in full Army dress with a cap at a jaunty tilt, just one of millions in that moment who were handed extraordinary responsibilities at implausibly young ages.

As a teenager, he built a Model A Ford hot rod that he claimed to be the fastest car in the Valley.

Timbs served out the war at North American, then in 1946 found himself with time on his hands and a restless urge to build something. “He thought it would be fun to design and build his own car,” said his son. Around the same time, Timbs was approached about applying his aeronautical experience to some new postwar race cars being constructed for the big ovals like Indianapolis. 

Howard Keck, the scion of a California oil fortune, had decided to go racing at the highest level and had contracted the great racing engineer Leo Goossen to develop a front-drive Offenhauser power unit. Timbs was handed the job of designing a chassis and a wind-cheating body. He drew some shapes, built some models, stuck string telltales to them, and took them to the wind tunnel at Caltech in Pasadena. The subsequent Blue Crown Special, built by Emil Deidt and Lujie Lesovsky—two racing luminaries of the era who back then operated a shop at 53rd Street and Figueroa in Los Angeles—dominated at Indy from 1947 to 1950.

The Blue Crown is considered one of the iconic postwar Indy cars, but it had one significant engineering handicap: Most racing cars back then were still running on double-laced wire wheels despite lap speeds that had climbed well into triple digits. Wheel failures at speed were becoming common, with deadly consequences. Another aircraft engineer and midget racer, Ted Halibrand, left Douglas Aircraft in nearby Santa Monica in 1947 to start his own company employing aircraft materials such as aluminum and magnesium in racing. After 1950, every Indy winner won on Halibrands for more than a decade. 

In those early days, Timbs went to work for Halibrand as a freelancer and designed the iconic “kidney bean” mags that became de rigueur at racetracks and drag strips around the world. He also designed the snowflake-like FIA knockoff wheels that famously graced racing Shelby Cobras. There was also a summer spent in Chicago working for Preston Tucker on the ill-fated Tucker Torpedo. “Dad always said he much preferred Alaska in the winter to Chicago in the summer,” said Timbs Jr.

Amid that fertile backdrop, Timbs developed a wild scheme for a car inspired by the Auto Union streamliners of the late 1930s that used their fully enveloping, spaceship-like bodies to cleave the wind at almost 250 mph. As with the Auto Unions, Timbs wanted to sit in front of an engine sealed in bodywork as smooth as water flowing over and around river stones. This created some interesting technical challenges, not the least of which was how to construct the body, how to power it, and how to translate the inputs of his hands and feet into action at the throttle, transmission, and brakes.

Timbs first built a complex wood body buck to get the basic dimensions, proportions, and shape right. His ideal engine was a Cadillac V-8, his son said, but spare units were in tight supply immediately following the war, so he settled for a 248-cubic-inch overhead-valve Buick straight-eight, the so-called Dynaflash Eight with its “Oil Cushioned Valve-in-Head” design. The smaller of Buick’s two postwar straight-eights made all of 110 horsepower with its stock single-carburetor setup, but Timbs found and fitted a dual-carb manifold, a rare prewar option for that engine. Hanging off the back of this three-foot-long cast-iron lump was the three-speed manual that undoubtedly came with the engine, perhaps out of some freshly wrecked base-model Buick Special. Behind that was a mishmash of found parts, including a rear axle from a Ford and universal joints from a Packard.

To operate it and the drum brakes, Timbs fashioned an elaborate system of pushrods, cables, Heim joints, and bell cranks behind the dash. And to clothe it all, he turned to Deidt, a metalworking master who took time out of building Indy torpedoes to shape two large body sections supported by an internal tubular latticework. The single aluminum nose cone, composed of shaped aluminum sections welded together, was held on with many fasteners and is apparently a bit of a project to remove. The hinged tail cone rose on onboard hydraulic jacks. The two sections met at a seam in the car’s middle, together forming what Timbs was after, a continuous sculpture of gently rolling curves.

There was no roof and no doors on this 17.5-foot-long, four-foot-high (at the top of the windshield) dreamboat. Instead, Timbs put one foot on a pad and slung a leg over the side of the cockpit, then slid down onto the bench seat. The space is cozy; the car could be best described as a 1.5-seater. The long column shifter no doubt leads to some unintentional elbowing of the passenger, but as Timbs Jr. reports, his dad was single at the time and, apparently, quite the dancer, so one can imagine him wanting his passengers to sit close.

It took Timbs two and a half years to put the car together at a reported cost of $10,000. When it was done, he used it to cruise the avenues and turn heads at the local circle tracks and drive-in burger joints that were popping up in the rapidly sprawling San Fernando Valley. The car caught the attention of an Associated Press photographer who in June 1949 snapped a shot of Timbs standing next to the raised rear. The photo ran in newspapers from New York to Hawaii with the caption: “Ultra-Streamlined Auto—Norman E. Timbs of Van Nuys, Calif. stands beside his car on which hydraulically-raised rear ‘deck’ covers engine, gas tank, and spare wheel.” Likewise, Motor Trend put it on the cover of its second issue ever printed, in October 1949. 

The audacity of the design may have been its saving grace, but it was also its downfall in its owner’s eyes, said his son. “He was real pleased with it, but he had trouble driving it around the San Fernando Valley because he said more often than not, people would start slowing down around him and they literally would almost stop on the street as people would gawk at it.” You can’t blame them, considering what the average car looked like in 1949 (or even today). “It was hard for him to get around or go anywhere, which he was kind of disappointed in.”

An ever-restless mind, Timbs soon lost interest in the car and sold it to an Air Force pilot. He didn’t stop working for Howard Keck, however, designing some of the first race cars to employ aerodynamic downforce in the Caltech wind tunnel as well as a unique hydroplane racing boat. At Indianapolis in 1951 or ’52, said Timbs Jr., a couple of Ferrari engineers on a mission from the Commendatore to learn more about racing in America stopped by the garage in Gasoline Alley. Relying on his high school Spanish and their limited English, Timbs was only too happy to pull the bodywork off the cars and show them everything.

The engineers were grateful, astonished at the Yankee openness as everything in Formula 1 was so secretive. The following year when Keck sent Timbs to Europe on a similar fact-finding mission, the engineers invited Timbs to stop by Modena. Upon his arrival, Timbs was greeted by Enzo himself, who showed him all around the factory and then around Modena and Maranello in his own car. “The joke in the family was always that Mr. Ferrari thought he was still a race car driver, but he was actually a really, really rough driver,” said Timbs Jr. As a parting gift, the Old Man presented Timbs with a silk Ferrari scarf, which hangs framed in the family house to this day.

After Keck pulled out of car racing because, it was said, his wife preferred the “classier” crowd in horse racing, Timbs worked for aerospace companies as well as continuing with Halibrand and founding a youth shooting league in which local kids could learn how to maintain and fire guns. He designed wheels and quick-change axles and the 1964 Halibrand Shrike Indy car when the company decided to build its own racer. Later in the decade, still intrigued by engineering challenges, he worked for Garrett designing a linear induction motor train for the U.S. Department of Transportation. Boosted by surplus Air Force jet engines to help it get up to speed on a 6.5-mile test track in Colorado, the magnetically levitating train set a speed record of 255 mph. “His philosophy was good engineering design makes the complex appear simple and eloquent,” said Timbs Jr. “He also liked to keep it simple. ‘If it’s not on the car, it can’t break,’ he said.”

Separated from its creator, Timbs’ car had its own less glorious journey. Jim Davis, the Air Force pilot, owned it for a while, repainting it white. Then it somehow landed in the front yard of a restaurant in Saugus, California, which in the mid-1950s was a dusty stopover between LA and the northern high desert. There it became a lawn sculpture and battered jungle gym for kids, who would run up and down its back and play sky pilot in its cockpit. It’s thought the car lay there for 40 years, sinking into the earth as parts vanished from it. When the restaurant closed, the car’s remains were trucked to a scrapper, where it was destined to be chopped up until one of the desert’s many hermit hoarders took a fancy to the bent and bruised but still sleek body and hauled it home.

It sat there for a number of years, near the Willow Springs Raceway in Rosamond, California, until it was discovered in the late ’90s by a movie props man scouting for items to decorate the set of a forthcoming remake of the great car-theft crashfest Gone in 60 Seconds. If you watch the Nicolas Cage action flick closely, you’ll see the Timbs Special in the yard of the gang’s garage underneath LA’s famous (and now replaced) Sixth Street Viaduct. After the production wrapped, the props man acquired the car and then, hoping to cash in on its sudden sliver of notoriety, consigned it to the Barrett-Jackson auction at LA’s Petersen Automotive Museum in 2002 with dreams of making a fortune.

“I was just sitting there with some friends tossing out little bids, and I bid 15 grand,” said Gary Cerveny, a former Hollywood stuntman, local entrepreneur, and noted hot-rod collector. “The car looked terrible, but they had it in the catalog at 50 to 60 thousand. I wasn’t paying any attention, and they dropped the hammer on me at $15,000, which was $17,200 with the commissions. So I had bought this car that was in really ratty condition, but it looked neat.”

The space is cozy; the car could be best described as a 1.5-seater.

Cerveny thought he would make a hot rod out of it, maybe drive it in the Hot Rod Power Tour, and he started taking it apart with his son and father, a sheetmetal shaper retired from the Lockheed Skunk Works. “I started wondering, ‘Who is this Norman Timbs,’ and I did some research and found out he was a very interesting guy.” Making a connection with Norman Timbs Jr. and getting access to his father’s extensive scrapbook helped spur the project. “It was a good news, bad news type of deal,” said Cerveny. “The good news is that there was unbelievable detail, it showed everything about how the car was done, what instruments were used, how it was put together, everything. The bad news was it showed all of that, so now we had to restore it, and it had to be correct.”

After four years of working on it at home, Cerveny surrendered, handing the project to Custom Auto in Loveland, Colorado, for what he thought would be a year of finishing work. Three years later, the car finally came back, now trailing a stack of bills many multiples of the original gavel price. The car debuted to much fanfare at the 2010 Amelia Island Concours, then did the rounds of various events including Pebble Beach in 2012, where the organizers built a class around it. The fully restored and feted Norman Timbs Special then joined Cerveny’s extensive 76-vehicle collection of hot rods, muscle cars, and motorcycles in modern barns on his property in seaside Malibu, California, surely a lucky and privileged pasture for any old horse to retire to.

***

And it was, until November 8, 2018. At 2:22 p.m., a loose guy wire supporting a utility pole about 17 miles north of Cerveny’s property flapped around in a strong wind until it came close enough to a 16,000-volt transmission line to cause a blinding electrical arc. Red-hot metal fragments rained into the brushy hillside below, and flames ensued. Stoked into an apocalyptic fury by southwesterly Santa Ana winds, the so-called Woolsey Fire killed three people and consumed 97,000 acres over the next 13 days, hopping an eight-lane freeway and chewing into the mountains and canyons and posh coastal estates of Malibu. Until flames reached the storied beaches on the Pacific Ocean and were ultimately extinguished, a 20-mile-wide river of smoke and ash clouded Southern California and was visible from space.

Of the 1643 structures burned in the fire, several belonged to Cerveny, including his house and garages. Firefighters never reached the property, and every single vehicle was reduced to ash and mangled metal. The heat was so intense that the aluminum body simply melted off the Timbs, the carburetors oozing down into the intake ports as molten blobs. Later, weird translucent pancakes were found among the wreckage, all that remained of a glass-block skylight that had been above the car.

We were basically starting from an evaporated car, from schrapnel.

Surveying the wasteland that had once been his home, Cerveny decided to salvage what was most important to him. He brought in a 250-foot construction crane that was large enough to reach into the ash pile from solid ground and pulled out the remains of a belly tanker hot rod that held sentimental value, plus all that was left of the Timbs Special. He let the local Hemi club dig out whatever valuable engines they could find and some Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost aficionados sift the cinders for parts. The rest was shoveled into the dumpster.

With a Hagerty claim check in his pocket that amounted to not much more than a down payment on another restoration, he sent the blackened heap of the Timbs to Douglas and Company, a shop in Costa Mesa, California, that specializes in prewar vehicles. “We were basically starting from an evaporated car, from shrapnel,” said owner John Bothwell.

It’s definitely the most difficult restoration that we’ve done.

A couple of lucky breaks made the restoration possible. First, nothing in the building of any weight fell on the car, so it wasn’t bent. Second, the fire department failing to arrive was actually a good thing. It meant that the chrome-moly steel tubing that Timbs used in the frame was never doused with water, which would have irrevocably altered its chemical composition such that it could never safely be reused. As it was, said Bothwell, “It got really hot and then it slowly cooled down by itself. We were trying to establish early on if the chassis was salvageable, and we did Rockwell hardness testing on it and it’s in good shape.”

Also reusable was the engine block and the aluminum front belly pan. “I don’t know why that didn’t melt,” said Bothwell. Relying on old and recent photos of the car plus known dimensions such as overall length and wheel size, Bothwell’s wife, an industrial designer, was able to extrapolate an accurate 3D computer model of the body, from which a carpenter could cut new wood forms just as Timbs did back in the day. “Even after we made the buck, it was something that had to be fine-tuned in terms of the contours,” said Bothwell, “because we would blow up photos and we would really get into the geometry of the stuff, and we would say, ‘You know, I’m just not sure about that curve.’” It took two years of fine-tuning to get the body to where everyone was satisfied that it represented the original, and another two years to finish the rest of the car.

Besides re-creating the complex control linkages without any engineering drawings and getting them all to work through trial and error, another snag proved to be the hubcaps. Timbs had used period Oldsmobile hubcaps, which were plentiful then but nearly impossible to find today. Mere weeks before the car was to go to the 2024 Amelia Concours, where it would close the loop by re-debuting, the crew discovered that the hubcaps they had sourced were slightly more convex than the originals and the tail cone would not fit over them without scraping. A mad scramble ensued, Cerveny eventually finding a box marked “hubcaps” that was left over from the first restoration and containing a few usable units. Sent out for repair and re-plating, the hubcaps arrived two days before the truck to Amelia.

“It’s definitely the most difficult restoration that we’ve done because of the condition it was in and the lack of any information that we could reference,” said Bothwell. “If you did a Duesenberg or a Rolls Silver Ghost that had been through a similar fire, they would be hard, but at least there is information on those cars. There’s no ‘Timbs guy’ you can call.”

For Cerveny, who over two restorations has now shelled out more than 80 times the car’s original auction price not counting the hundreds of hours he and his father and son have worked on it, the Timbs Special is part of the family, a car that means much more to him than just money. “It certainly wasn’t a wise financial investment, but sometimes you just have to do something because you think it’s right and you love it, and you think somebody should do it, so why not you?”

This story first appeared in the January/February 2025 issue of Hagerty Drivers Club magazine. Join the club to receive our award-winning magazine and enjoy insider access to automotive events, discounts, roadside assistance, and more.