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FEATURE INTERVIEW

Jeff Allison, Allison Customs : Fifteen Years of The Muscle Car Place

This week marks the fifteenth anniversary of The MuscleCar Place podcast and all of the adventures that have ensued since then. Fifteen years ago I had a dream to start a radio show where I could talk about fast classic cars and meet people that build, race or buy and sell those vehicles. I remember carving out a space in the basement for a small (very small) studio to record interviews with racing legends like Richard Petty, internet personalities like Mike Finnegan, and everyone in between (even a super car-guy dentist)!

The one “guest” that has been on the show more than any of them, and has had a bigger impact than all of them, is Jeff Allison. Jeff is the one that stepped up and took a huge chance and changed both of our lives forever. In this interview we take a trip down memory lane and recollect how we met and built a race car that went to SEMA and made a family out of a podcast.

In the early days people knew about my passion for racing and they understood that I really wanted to have an autocross shredding muscle car to compete with on the weekends. While my ambitions of a racing career my not have blossomed, my ownership of a capable autocross vehicle that is also a world class show car was kicked off by Jeff Allison. He could hear the desire in my voice and knew he could at least contribute, in a fashion, to the future of the show he loved to listen to.

Jeff contacted me about doing the labor as long as I could come up with parts and supplies. We decided to give it a shot and see where this goes…and it turned out go all the way to Las Vegas (and Flordia twice)! It went all the way to SEMA show and beyond and has changed both of our lives and numerous others that got caught up in the mission. Jeff says that he is still getting work and requests for custom parts from that intense trip to Vegas in 2013 with the now reborn Chevelle. Through the entire process though we met friends like Danny Giustino of Muscle Express and Zip Simons and Don Endino of Street Metal Concepts. Zip and Don in particular pulled a 2nd miracle out of the hat and took my Chevelle from rough metal to finished show car body in 50 days!

I refer to Jeff as my “brother from another mother” and in this interview all doubt of that has been erased, as well as any plans of how the conversation would have gone.  Once we got on the phone together it was a stream of memories from day one to now surrounding our favorite topic, muscle cars and in one particular, the Chevelle.

Jeff has a love of creating custom vehicles and leaves his mark on them even in places you would never think to look. In the Chevelle there are locations where Jeff “signed” his work by adding the letters “AC” for Allison Customs cut into the metal just to have a more obvious signature to his creations. He likes to add personal touches like that or maybe the owners name to make the vehicle feel more like family. I know there is at least one spot on the Chevelle where I can see “AC” carved into the steel and smile every time I think about the effort Jeff put into my race car that turned into the Muscle Car Place company flagship.

After building the Chevelle into a SEMA going, magazine spotlighted, race track ripping, head turning masterpiece, Jeff did it again with another Chevelle and went to SEMA a second time. He also developed his website at Allison Customs into a great informational tool, and he started a YouTube channel where he works on many other amazing projects. You can follow along on Project Car TV. Jeff also wrote a blog while he was building the Chevelle if you would like even more nostalgia on what it took to put together a SEMA show car at Jeff Allison’s “Building Your Project Vehicle” series at The Musclecar Place.

Thanks for the amazing memories and the best friendship ever Jeff!

-Rob Kibbe

This episode also includes the return of the  Vintage Air Summer Special! 
Vintage Air are the inventors of high performance air conditioning,
and provide systems for Street Rods, Muscle Cars, and Classic Vehicles.

More info is available on the website as well!

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