WE woke this morning to the news that Chris Bitmead’s XBOSS Falcon had made the Pirelli Great Eight at the Detroit Autorama. This is the first time an Aussie car achieved such lofty heights and puts him in the running for the Ridler Award – probably the most prestigious single award for modified cars on the planet.

Anything can happen, but we can be sure that XBOSS is a very serious contender and has impressed a lot of people, and not just the general public, we’re talking other owners and builders of Ridler contenders and people who have been around the scene a long time. You can check out the Great Eight in the gallery above.

Of course, there is a lot more to the Autorama than the Great Eight – rows and rows of every make, model and style of car you could imagine. We’re talking around 750 cars in total. Everything from traditionally styled hot rods to late model pro tourers are parked alongside each other with no apparent order to things. What that means is, you need to cover every corner of the huge Cobo Center Hall to check everything out, because you never know what might be lurking around the next corner. I even found a couple of Ramblers! Here is just a taste of what we’ve found so far.

This stunning ’67 Chevelle was built by Sal Perez from American Muscle Cars Inc. and featured in season 10 of ‘Chop, Cut, Rebuild’. It’s a pretty simple car but it just gets all the details spot on, improving, not changing what the designer at GM gave us

I can see where a lot of the Torana’s DNA came from in this Chevy Vega

Look honey! I found a new engine for the Rambler!

They called this ’55 Chev ‘Payback’ because it runs a blown 427 SOHC motor. It’s was once a Belair hardtop that’s been converted to a windowless roadster

This awesome dragster was shown at the 1966 Detroit Autorama as well! Amazing piece of history that has survived

A stunning pair of Model A coupes with a couple of killer blown engine combos. The green one has an early Nailhead while the dark blue one is Y-block powered

Just a bad arse Roadrunner

We bumped into our old mate Gene Winfield. He’ll be downstairs most of the weekend chopping a roof, but he did have the Jade Idol 2 on display

This is what Eldred Hot Rod Shop turned out when they decided to a cheap and rough shop truck. Yeah, not so much

The absolutely stunning ’36 roadster of Jon Wright looks killer from any angle

The stunning twin turbo ’66 Belvedere that Rad Rides by Troy debuted at SEMA last year is also on display