[Keith Seymore]

Originally Posted by Dr. Eric M. Schiffer

As I think about it if you want a taste of both the Woodward Dream Cruise and our Saturday mornings at Pasteiner's Auto Zone Hobby's. You need to go to the Royal Pontiac

Club of America's web site.

This link will open over 3,800 pictures. You should be able to pick out many of the current and past industry icons who have stopped by. ie Jim Wangers', (the late) Jack "Doc" Watson, Tom Goad, Jay Wetzel, (the late) Ben Harrison, Herb Adams, Tom Peters, (Harold) Buck Mook, Chris Svensson, Mark Ruess, Ed Wilburn, Ken Lingenfelter, Craig Metros, Peter Brock, Mark Stielow, Dick Ruzzin, (the late) Darwin Clark, Kip Wasenko, Kip Ewing, Allen Grant, Gordon Heidacker, Murray Pfaff,Bill Warner and of course Steve Pasteiner, and so many others I have not named because the list goes on and on! See if you can name more.

Oh, pay attention to cars that have an "M" license plate that I.D the car as being owned by a manufacture. The manufactures also use regular Michigan plates on the cars. GM Tags many of their cars with a small widow sticker CTC (Captured Fleet car) on the lower part of the windshield. Ford does a similar procedure. Only they usually have a large I.D. with the beginning letters PP (pre production) hen some numbers on the top of the windshield on the passenger side. These cars may have parts that will not be part of the production.

Pay particular attention to when the pictures where taken. Many of the "NEW" model cars had NOT yet been introduced or released to the public or seen by the Automotive news yet.

Examples, more recently the Ford Raptor, Lincoln Continental, Buick Envision and the Cadillac XT6. Over the last few year we had some Ford Mustang Shelby GT350s, Lincoln MKT and Buick Lacrosse. See if you can find them.

These names will be familiar to many of you. To others you really need to Google the names to identify the significant's of these people to the auto industry. This will keep you busy for a few hours.

As per usual, Eric is spot on.

A couple additional comments: for GM vehicles the naming convention is "CTF", ie "Captured Test Fleet". We usually start driving the vehicles in daily use about a year before they hit the market.

The M plates allow us to drive a prototype vehicle that cannot be regular plated, like a pre-production unit or a vehicle with a non-saleable VIN. The other advantage is that an M plate is not assigned to a particular vehicle like a regular plate so that it can be swapped (somewhat) at will between vehicles. We do have to keep a log of what vehicle the plate is on at what time but other than that it is relatively free expression.

Lastly - relative to the list of dignitaries that stop by at Pastenier's: that's one of my favorite things about our little group. Not only do you see some cool cars but often you get to meet the guys that designed and built the cool cars.

K