TIME MACHINE; Where were you in '52? Hot rodding, perhaps?(News)

Byline: MARK VAUGHN

Alex Xydias started the So-Cal Speed Shop in 1946 when he was 23 years old, the same year he got out of the Army Air Corps.

``Looking back, I have no idea where I got the confidence to do that,'' Xydias said recently. ``But that was my life's goal, to be in the speed shop business, that's what we'd sit around and talk about, all those years in the Army.''

There were few things in the world more representative of the roots of hot rodding than So-Cal. It didn't take long for the shop to establish a reputation, on both the dry lakes and at Bonneville. The team's streamliner went 210 mph at the second Bonneville meet in 1950, mighty quick for hot rodders building their own cars. So-Cal's accomplishments soon caught the eye of another pioneer hot rodder, magazine publisher Robert E. Petersen, and it wasn't long before Xydias' cars were on the covers of Hot Rod and other magazines of the time.

``We started the racing because it was good for business and, well, because we were hot rodders, that was what we did,'' he said. ``Pretty soon we had built up such a reputation that people from back east would come to see us. They'd get off the freeway in Burbank and see Lockheed and think it was us.''

Xydias kept the shop until 1963, when he went into movie-making, filming the races at Sebring, Daytona and the Indy 500 and showing them to paying audiences days later in Los Angeles and other cities, charging admission like pay-per-view boxing today. (They're still available on video from Xydias at P.O. Box 11316, Burbank CA 91510.) Later he worked as a publisher for Petersen and then as a trade show organizer for Mickey Thompson.

The So-Cal shop was just a memory until Los Angeles collector Bruce Meyers bought the original So-Cal belly tank racer and took it to hot rodder Pete Chapouris' shop for restoration seven years ago. Chapouris was making street rods in Big Bear and consulted Xydias for details on the belly tank. The two hit it off so well that Chapouris negotiated a deal to rename his business the ...