Whenever Wes Creager drives to the Wood Shed Bar-B-Q on 7th Street—or any diner or drive-thru scattered through the small town of Hopkinsville, Kentucky—flash crowds seem to appear magically around his fantastic roadster.
Creager always seems to start impromptu car shows.
His hot-red roadster is a veritable chimera of a car. Fifty percent Cadillac, and registered as one, it has mixed DNA: Camaro doors, Mazda pop-up lamps, and a GMC grille. But it’s much more. The Creager Hybrid, as he named it, is undeniably a racecar.
He rides low to the ground around town with his grandkids or great-grandkids on special occasions, he says, but it’s always a special occasion.
“Like yesterday, we went out to eat, and we took that car,” Creager, 95, told The Epoch Times. “Everywhere you go, it starts a car show, and we had people taking pictures of it while we were eating. And I drive it just about every week to eat or whatever. I wanted to go in style. I go in my little red car.”
When the Creager clan jump in the convertible to hit the town, the doors close “like butter.” The ride is smooth as silk, floats like a Cadillac, handles like a dream.
The Creager Hybrid is the handiwork of one man, the product of Creager’s dream.
It has “about 10 different kinds of cars” in it, he said, adding that the hood and backend are originally from a 1970 Cadillac Eldorado, and the frame was pieced together from a Chevy Malibu. “The caps are Lincoln Continental,” he said. But more than just a little Creager crept into the roadster too.
His dream of owning a racecar was how it all began.
A lightbulb went off. They thought it sounded great.
The next day, Creager’s phone rang. The racecar driver said he had his car.
How much? Free for you doc, the driver said.
Creager, who was born in 1928 and was about 65 at that time, now had one of the biggest street-legal engines, an 8.2-liter. A physician by trade with a background in carpentry, he knew about cars too, having spent his boyhood gathered around roadster hoods with his pals and years building hotrods in Porterville, California, as a young man.
Creager knew how to turn a wrench.
It was 1992 when the keys of his Cadillac first fell into his hands. “At that point, I had an airplane and a big aircraft hangar,” said Creager, who was also a pilot and still is, “and I just moved the car to the hangar and then built the car in the airplane hangar." He used his carpenter’s tools to work on the car.
The engine stood so tall inside the back of his low-profile racecar that the carburetor protruded through the hood and Creager got a Continental kit to install an ornamental spare wheel cover to mask the intrusion. He installed gauges that met the driver’s eye to a tee, a classic laminated wood interior, and a Ford pickup windshield, and it all hovered on a Mustang Ford kit suspension.
In 1996 the Creager Hybrid was born.
When he finally revealed his Cadillac, many laughed at first. Who wanted a Cadillac—it was the ’90s?
The Creager Hybrid would go on to run laps on the Indianapolis racetrack and shine in many official car shows and countless impromptu ones. A few weeks ago, the manager of O‘Charley’s Restaurant & Bar came outside for a look and said he’d never seen anything like it.
The car also went viral on the internet, gathering millions of views.
Indifferent to fame, Creager shirks all the attention. He is content just standing back to watch the crowds admire his hot-red Cadi. His two-seater is just perfect for cruising the highway with his granddaughter in small-town Kentucky, he says, where he settled to be near family after the loss of his wife of 64 years.
He dedicated the Creager Hybrid to her.
“It is an amazing drive when you get around 60, 70, 80 miles an hour, the wind just holds that car right against the road, and it just hangs beautifully,” he said.
