Ben Thomas is the owner of Rancho Deluxe, a vintage car shop in Melbourne, Australia. He got the car bug from his Father, as he explains in the video below, and even though he left the industry for a period, it drew him back.
As a shop owner now, Ben spends his time building traditional hot rod classics and components, and assembling period correct cars. As car crazy as he may be, there has to be a clientele needing support and certainly Australia has more than its share of automotive enthusiasts – both conventional and oddball.
The 1932 Ford Model B roadster that is seen through much of the video was a six-month project for Ben, who gathered parts from around the country to complete the project. By fitting the roadster with a Flathead V8, it would actually be more correct to call it a Model 18, but we’re splitting hairs here.
With it complete now, Ben drives the roadster regularly and can easily conjure up simpler times when dry lake racing was common and life less complicated overall. If you don’t think that things are more complicated now – and this has nothing to do with Ben – I was told a story a few weeks back of a guy who took his new Caddy CTS-V to a track event to check it out.
Rancho Deluxe from Bandit Films on Vimeo.
In the middle of one session, he’s flying around with his helmet on, and he gets a call from OnStar! They had detected excess G-forces from the car and were checking to see if he’d had a crash. Answering a call like that, with your full face helmet on, while ripping around a track…yeah, that gets complicated.
We don’t know if Ben has had a challenge like that, but he does say that the little roadster is pretty quick with the car’s light weight and some modifications he’s completed on the engine. Given that a significant portion of Australia’s land mass qualifies as desert, sourcing components for older cars is merely one of persistence, rather than tilting at windmills.
Sounds like Ben’s got a good thing going down under.