Harold and Christy Sullivan came all the way from New Albany, Mississippi, for the festivities, their 8th consecutive trip up north for the fun.
“It’s like family here, everybody in the Midwest is so friendly, the facilities are always first class, and we love the car show, on a real parking lot that has tons of room,” Christy said as she and Harold were detailing their 1976 50th anniversary Trans Am before judging.
“We love the Tipp City cruise-in, packs of cars heading up I-75, everybody honking and waving at us, then downtown Tipp, it’s just a great Saturday night in a cool small town,” she added.
For the Sullivan’s, the Trans Am disease is pretty serious. “We have six right now, two 76’s, a ’78, a’79, a 1980 Pace Car and an ’81. I’ve been crazy about Trans Ams since I saw Smokey and The Bandit, and this ’76 I’m showing is really my favorite style,” explained Harold. The 1976 model was the first Trans Am painted black and the black and gold trimmed car was featured in the film.
“We’ve won a couple of first place awards at this show, and I’m hoping this one does well today,” he said. “It only has 25,800 original miles on it, it was stored in a barn in 1991 and I just bought it out of the barn about 6 month ago.”
Sullivan is a strictly original kind of guy. “This car has obviously been repainted and has new decals, and we pulled the engine out, replaced the gaskets, seals and hoses and it fired right up,” he said. “After that, everything else on this car is original except for the tires. We just spent a lot of time cleaning and detailing.”
Sullivan’s ‘76 is actually a very rare car among the more than 46,704 Trans Ams built in 1976. Only 2,590 cars were painted black and featured the 50th anniversary emblems. Of those, only 643 cars featured the T-top and Sullivan’s is one of 543 T-Tops with the 400 horsepower engine. “It gets pretty tricky here,” Sullivan then explained. “It’s believed that fewer than a dozen of these cars actually left the factory with the black chrome exhaust tips, which mine has. They were only put on the first few cars built, and then dropped. When I saw those tips on the car in the barn, I knew I had a special one.”
This whole Trans Am deal is quite a family affair for the Sullivan’s. “We have three kids, 19-year-old twins and a 13-year-old, Christy said. “On Sundays, we’ll all get one out and go for a drive, except for the 13 year old, but he already has his Trans Am picked out.”
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