Collar Button, Carolina Cant, Etc

I thought I’d written up my opinion here before of where the Carolina Cant (Tennessee Tilt) came from on trucks.  That stupid exaggerated low rear end on pickup trucks.  The opposite of the way a truck should look when it is running empty.  I think ti came directly from off road racing trucks.  Baja runners would often add as much front suspension travel as they could get on race trucks, because no matter what you do they are nose heavy.  When that front end goes air borne it comes down hard.  It’s gotten to be such an appearance trend that people started exaggerating it, and putting it on trucks that never see more dirt than that in a Walmart parking lot right after the holidays.  It has its roots in racing, but for more practical driving, even off road it has no use.  Sure more ground clearance and big tires can help in rocks and in sand, but that crazy suspension juxtaposition doesn’t add anything unless its built for taking a truck airborne at high speed.  The thing is its gotten so predominant its hard to buy a basic lift kit anymore that lifts the front and rear the same leaving your truck looking “normal.”    Instead you see “leveling” kits at best.  The problem is a leveling kit makes a truck look like its running with a load when its empty and makes it look overloaded when its running with a “normal” load.  Fortunately, my new (last year) has all the ground clearance I need so I don’t need to mess with it.  Just change out to a better sand tire when I wear out the tires it came with.  Anyway I think the Carolina Cant is an over exaggeration of the “look” from Baja racing trucks.

I think low riders may by the same sort of thing.  If you lower the center of gravity of a vehicle its more stable.  If you do it “properly” its better in the turns, and it may help with the wind envelope at speed.  It might also help conceal if the car has been tubbed out to hide drag racing tires.  Then it got exaggerated, and all kinds of crazy other things were added over the ensuing decades, but it might have been inspired by road racers and to a lesser degree by California’s hill racers.  I know.  Soft suspension and dragging the asphalt on the slightest bump makes for a terrible race car.  I’m not saying what we know of as low riders today would make good racer cars.  I’m saying the look may have been inspired by some of them, taken to extremes, and wild ideas stacked on top.

Which gets me to collar buttons.  The classic low rider driver look in some crowds is a what looks like a garage work shirt or gas station shirt with just the top button buttoned.  I think some of the first car guys building low riders in California were probably mechanics, fabricators, welders, shop machinists, etc.  Today I was standing in front of a manual milling machine decking off a part hard and fast.  Hot metal chips were hitting the floor as much as six feet past the end of the mill table.  Well, most of them were.  A few went down my shirt, and I buttoned up my collar button.  No more hot chips.  I bet a few of those serious guys who started the whole low rider thing in California just went from the shop to the street after work, and that’s where that look came from.