Very few hot rods can claim to have been in as many homes and hearts as Darryl Starbird's Big T. Not that it made that many personal appearances, but in 1/8th-scale model kit form, the Big T hooked a whole generation of motorheads on the idea of owning a hot rod. Back in the early '60s, Monogram began a relationship with Darryl and the first kit to come from that merger was the Big T, and it made a huge impact as the first full 1/8th-scale model. This large-scale model was so well detailed that it almost felt like building the real thing.
While the kit made its impression, a full-scale version built by Darryl was a hit on the show car circuit and was seen in all the magazines of the day. After a couple years of promotion, the fullsize Big T was given away to a model contest winner and quietly disappeared. Forty years later, Darryl noticed a hole in his collection that could only be filled by the Big T. With the original car long gone, Darryl got together with Predator Performance in DuBois, Pennsylvania, to build not one, but two Big T replicas. One replica would go home with Darryl to his museum and the other would be given away as a promotion on "KOOL Radio," a Clear Channel radio station in Tulsa. With Chad Vogele leading the build team for Predator Performance (owned by Dennis and Becky Raybuck), the pair of Ts came together in record time.
Chad began the project with a stack of pieces from Total Performance and body pieces from Spirit Industries. To support that body, Chad, along with his assistant, Joe Manfredo, took the host of parts from Total Performance and massaged them to resemble the pieces Darryl had fashioned into a chassis more than four decades before them.
With the chassis portion under control, the focus of the project returned to the body, with Dave Curry matching the proportions of the original with a Model A bed shortened to 28 inches. This differs from later T-buckets that would run a shorter bed-usually a good foot shorter than the early bucket jobs like the Big T.
Inside the Big T, additional intense research ended with an exact recreation of the original red and white vinyl interior that was stitched up by Chris Trout. Slip behind the steering wheel and you will be transported back to 1962 thanks to a spoked steering wheel in your left hand and, in your right hand, an exact copy of the original skull shifter that Monogram supplied from their archives.With the recreated Big T on display in his Starbird Museum, Darryl has been more than excited about the overwhelming response the car has received. In fact, he's so excited he hopes that a recreation of his follow-up big scale kit, the Big Deuce, is not too far off in the future. This would truly be a dream come true to the many generations of model builders and eventual hot rod builders who cut their hot rod teeth on these rides.