Chavik Indy Roadster

The Buick Motor Division of General Motors built 208,000 cars in 1939, of which 198,000 or so were sold in the United States. The remaining 10,000 were dispersed with their overhead-valve straight-eights to the world’s four corners like dandelion seeds on the spring winds. One of those steel dandelions finally landed in central Europe in the late 2000s, rather the worse for wear from the intervening decades. In the Czech Republic, in the little shoemaking city of Zlín, was Chavik, dreaming of American-style hot rods and tired of using his trade school education on the Eastern Bloc cars that dominated the local scene. He bought the Buick, by then not much more than a pile of parts, with vague ideas of restoring it, but life kept getting in the way.