?When I was growing up, it was about that car,? said Ray Evernham of the 1958 Chevrolet Impala owned by graduating senior Steve Bolander [Ron Howard] and memorably driven by Charles Martin Smith?s Terry the Toad character in American Graffiti. ?I don?t know if it?s that I see myself as more of a Steve or a Toad than a Bob Falfa [Harrison Ford] or a John Milner [Paul Le Mat], but there?s just something about it. In its 22 minutes of screen time, all the characters interact with it. Even Bob sits on the fender at the end of the movie.?
Evernham had pestered the car?s owner to sell the Impala to him for years, and when the Chevy was finally set to go up for auction in 2015, the NASCAR legend and TV host managed to acquire it through negotiations. Parked since 1974, when its owner enlisted in the Marine Corps, the Impala was in pretty sad shape when it was finally sold. The lacquer paint was literally falling off the car. The original 348-cubic-inch engine had been replaced by a 283 small-block with a four-barrel carb. The interior had faded appreciably. It was, as Milner said of Falfa’s ’55 Chevrolet in the movie, a field car.
His crew went to work with the sort of meticulousness Evernham had used to shave seconds off stock-car pit stops. They went through every scene in George Lucas?s 1973 film that featured the white Chevy, snapping screen shots and cataloguing every detail. Evernham tapped his contacts at Axalta (formerly DuPont Performance Coatings, which m...