Quatrième de couverture
The California Look is the most popular style of Volkswagen customizing in the world. It's a classic look with clearly defined features that set it apart from all the others - and to many there's no better looking Beetle than a classic California Look sedan - but it's not just a 1980s and '90s fad.
The history of the California Look goes right back to the mid-1950s, when hot-rudders in Southern California seized on the slow, small Beetle as a car they could really do something with. Their cars' amazing successes on the drag strips gave birth to an automotive performance industry and a close-knit social scene centered on the Beetle, and led to VWs appearing on the streets in the style of the race cars, stripped of chrome, with lowered suspension, a very hot engine, and quality paint jobs. The California Look had arrived, and here is its story : the pioneers on the drag strips, the tuning shops, the VW clubs and events of the era, and the way the Look developed into the sophisticated style that reigns supreme today.
Author Keith Seume is editor of VolksWorld magazine, wrote the VW Beetle Custom Handbook, co-wrote VW Beetle Coachbuilts and Cabriolets, and is the successful campaigner of his own self-built 400bhp Beetle race car. The culmination of more than two years of research, this book contains in excess of 250 photographs in color and black-and-white, most of them never published before, and is the first to tell the full story of the California Look.
