Eddie Van Halen was one of the rock musicians who loved cars in principle. His collection included everything from classic hot rods, muscle cars, and a Lamborghini Miura, which was a wedding gift from his first wife in 1981, to a much more modern Porsche 911 GT3 RS and a pair of Audi R8s, one with a V8 engine and the other with a V10. Van Halen’s cars didn’t stand still: Eddie was a frequent visitor to the race tracks and loved to ride with the breeze.
To achieve high speeds, Mr. Van Halen subjected almost all of his cars to customization. Even the standard-looking huge 1947 Dodge COE truck, which Eddie used for trips to hardware stores, underwent a complete makeover and received, among other things, a fresh 7.3-liter diesel engine from Ford and a custom turbo system. The most interesting animals in Van Halen’s collection were the 1970 Chevy Nova from Jim Bassett’s Bones Fab workshop, as well as the 1993 Chevrolet C1500 pickup truck built by Boyd Coddington and Chip Foose, who worked in his garage at the time. I would love to tell you about each of these cars in more detail if I could find a little more information about them than one paragraph and three photos.
This street car from Eddie's collection also deserves special mention: a 1934 Ford sedan. An original steel body with a 5.7-liter Chevrolet engine, supercharging from B&M and an exhaust system from MagnaFlow. Under the vintage exterior with a combat engine, there is a full set of modern amenities for a comfortable cruise, including a fully independent suspension, a 4-speed automatic transmission, power windows, power steering, air conditioning and a sound system.
It’s also interesting that Eddie wasn’t the only one in the Van Halen group who was into cars. By some coincidence, almost everyone who has ever been a member of this team was still a motorist. Michael Anthony and Sammy “Red Rocker” Hagar are known for their collections of hot rods, oil cars and Italian sports cars. Boyd Coddington built at least two hot rods for Anthony, and in an interview with Hot Rod magazine, Michael, among other things, said the following: “I love looking at museum collections, but, like… they need to be driven.” In turn, Sammy Hagar made a special mention in history with the song I Can’t Drive 55, which was written after Hagar was stopped for speeding. Over the past few years, Mr. Sammy has been organizing the Hightide Beach Party & Car Show, where you can admire both the latest achievements of the European sports car industry and customized American classics.
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And this Ford, which is the main character of this article, for many years belonged to David Lee Roth, who for several decades was the frontman and vocalist of the Van Halen band. Lee Roth also had a love of American classics and had several matching cars in his collection. In particular, it is his Mercury that appears in the Panama video, while the yellow hot rod depicted in the photos above can be seen towards the end of the Hot For Teacher video.
It’s worth noting, however, that at the time of the video’s filming, the yellow Ford didn’t belong to David yet. Although Mr. Lee Roth is driving a car, in 1984 the owner of this car was his immediate creator, Tom McMullen, who built this hot rod in 1982 and named the car simply: Tom’s Tub II. David would buy a car a couple of years after filming the music video, and sell it sometime in the early 2000s. After that, Ford will regularly appear at auctions, the last of which was held in 2023. The photos show that the car is still in extremely good condition, although after more than 40 years, certain defects began to appear. There are just over 17 thousand kilometers on the odometer, which, of course, is not so much in 4 decades, but the car was definitely not standing still.
As you can see in the video clip, Tom’s Tub II starts very quickly and easily wipes rubber on asphalt. Which is not surprising, because the car’s power plant is a 5.7-liter Chevrolet supercharged V8 with two carburetors connected to a Doug Nash mechanical five-speed transmission, the famous hot rodder and drag racer. All this power is stopped by the disc brakes on the front axle and the drum brakes on the rear.
What immediately catches the eye is the body of the car. Four doors, not a single pillar, a soft roof-why, it’s a phaeton! The peculiarity of phaetons is that there are no side windows in this type of body and, in principle, the design is not provided for. For obvious reasons, as soon as cars learned to drive faster than thirty kilometers per hour, phaetons began to rapidly lose popularity, and by the end of the 1930s they had almost completely disappeared.
Nevertheless, phaetons are still found among antique enthusiasts, and several companies still make phaetons to order. In particular, this yellow hot rod is not a vintage steel car, but a fiberglass body from the Wescott garage. The Wescott company still exists, and on their website you can easily find exactly the same phaeton from 1932. All yours, for just $19,500. In the auction of 2023, it was also separately indicated that the car has a hood cover… but there is not a single photo on the Internet where it would be installed. And anyway, apparently, it is impossible to close it, since the carburettors and air filters are located quite high, and there is no hole in the hood specially designated for such a case. So there is a suspicion that the lid was painted the same color as the hot rod and put aside.
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The toolbar includes a whole set of buttons from zero to nine, and a few more additional ones to boot. Unfortunately, it is not known what they are responsible for, or whether they are responsible at all. But it definitely looks interesting.
The speedometer of the hot rod is marked only up to 140 kilometers per hour. There is a logical assumption that this is not enough: a supercharged engine with two carburetors is probably capable of accelerating a very light phaeton about a hundred kilometers faster. After all, there is very little excess weight in the hot rod: no side windows, no airbags, no sound insulation. But there’s plenty of power. Instead of airbags, a JVC KS-RT311 audio cassette player can be found in the car interior. Nowadays, it is also an artifact, but clearly not from 1982; it began to be produced in the mid-90s. Unfortunately, it is not known exactly when this particular unit was installed, and what alterations the car underwent in general over the decades of its life. The only thing that is noted is that a new aluminum radiator was installed before the sale in 2023, as the old one had to live for a long time. In any case, the car looks extremely vintage. If the furry salon was restored, it was with an eye to the fashion laws of the 80s – nowadays everyone prefers leather. If the paint was also applied anew, it was with maximum consistency with the original: all the pinstripes are in place, all the colors are one-on-one, as in the clip from ’84.
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Finally, I would like to mention the mirrored firewall in a separate line. It looks amazing from certain angles.
All in all, it’s a first-class car with an unusual body. One of the many who directly participated in the unification of custom culture with music. I am very pleased that Tom’s Tub II has survived to this day, and a scattering of excellent photos have finally appeared on the Internet, which, years later, finally allowed us to examine this rock star in all its details.
