Area hot rodder goes from land to water to land

You never forget your first hot rod.

In 1957, Gary Mitsch worked at Hiawatha and Lake in Minneapolis, pumping gas. One of the cars to cross his path was a 1932 Ford sedan with a 27-tooth Zephyr transmission. Mitsch remembers it well because he bought it for $350 - money he didn't have. He borrowed the cash from a friend's dad and worked it off over the summer at the gas station.

That car had a little magic in it. Mitsch took it to the drag strip in New Brighton, 25 years after Ford built it, and he won trophies most weekends. With triple Stromberg carburetors on an Offy intake, the car ran in the 13.90s for the quarter mile - not bad for 1957. Racing got into Mitsch's blood like oxygen, and in the 1960s he took to the stock car track at Elko. His '63 Fairlane was pretty fast on the straights, not least because legendary performance tuners Holman & Moody built the tunnel-port V-8 under the hood. When that car got bent up, he put a '64 Fairlane body on it and kept racing.

Today, collectors hungrily snap up those Holman Moody cars, but Mitsch's is long gone. He moved to other fast things, namely power boats. If he had good luck at the drag strip, Mitsch found his true calling on the water. He got into boats in 1968, a sport that took him to venues around the country. He also ran at home in the Aquatennial race, making 158 miles per hour oval racing on Lake Calhoun.

If that sounds fast, it is, and so was Mitsch - faster than anyone. In 1975, on Green Lake in Seattle, he won the power boat world championship. Yet the push for more and more speed came at a steep cost. When boat racers started to die in crashes, Mitsch took notice. He had won 48 races in a row, plus the world championship.

"I had two things to look forward to," he says. "Get beat or get killed." Neither one sounded very good.

Mitsch hung up his helmet and parachute-packed life jacket and got on with life off the race circuit. He built up his plumbing and heating business until he was ready to get back into cars - this time as a collector.

He restored a stunning '56 Olds Super88 convertible to top-points standards. He also built a '55 Bel Air and a '56, but these are street rods with custom fenders, engine bays, wheels, gauges, seats. He's got a stock '55 Buick Special convertible and a 2006 Corvette with 500 horses from a factory dry-sump engine. At 3.3 seconds to 60, the `Vette will even beat his Ferrari Testarossa, at least up to highway speeds.

While all of these are worthy vehicles, Mitsch has one that's really special. With a fine stable of cars - and British bikes - to drive and ride, there was still something missing from his collection ... a car from his past, a 1932 Ford sedan. When the idea seized him, it was as right as crossing Lake Calhoun in a blown Hemi Chrysler power boat. Mitsch got on the Internet and found what he wanted from a seller in New Jersey. He bought the car and had it shipped to his friend, hot rod savant Boyd Coddington.

"Boyd and I designed that car together," Mitsch says. They finalized the design and Coddington put the best people in the business on it. Today, Mitsch's second '32 Ford sedan is a sight to behold. With a 1957 Chrysler Imperial 392 Hemi engine, bored and stroked to 440 cubic inches and fed by Hilborn electronic injection, with hot heads, cam and all the goodies, this is one sweet rod. It even has three pedals because Mitsch prefers to run through the gears himself instead letting an automatic have all the fun.