Wichitans win Super Bowl of the hot-rodding world

The Kansas City Chiefs may have lost their Super Bowl bid this weekend, but a couple of Wichitans just won the equivalent contest at the Grand National Roadster Show.

“It’s pretty much the Super Bowl for hot rods,” said Jeff Breault, who owns a car named Lucille that has now been judged America’s Most Beautiful Roadster.

His love of cars started when he was 2 or 3 years old.

“I like everything there is about cars,” Breault said.

“The class, the lines, the personality of them,” he said. “If it burns dinosaur bones, I’m in.”

Breault, a financial advisor with Fortis Advisors who also owns R&J Discount Liquor, collects all kinds of cars. Lucille currently is his favorite.

“Roadster means it doesn’t have roll-up windows,” he said.

The convertible cars have snap-on windows.

Around 2012, Breault said he got lucky online and found a woman in Connecticut who was selling her late husband’s 1934 Chevy Roadster.

“So this car is one of 31 roadsters built by Chevrolet Holden division in Australia,” Breault said.

He said the widow’s husband had said “not to sell it to anyone who was going to cut it up.”

Breault didn’t lie to the widow, nor did he tell her his full plans.

He told her: “I’m going to park it next to my all-original ’32 Chevrolet sedan.”

Breault did that and then set about assembling one of the best custom hot rod and engineering teams he could “to make it way cooler and to make it into America’s Most Beautiful Roadster, which is what (we) just did.”

“I had a vision for the car that Tim Devlin and his team here in Wichita (at Devlin Rod and Customs) with the help of some of the best engineering in the country put . . . into reality.”

Wichita’s National Institute for Aviation Research helped, too, along with national hot rod shops.

It’s taken almost eight years of work to get the car ready.

“Every single piece of the car is bespoke and a prototype piece,” Breault said.

Devlin said a lot of car owners say they want to go the distance but either never finish their cars or make it to the event, let alone win it.

“That does make it pretty special,” he said.

Breault said the Grand National Roadster Show “is the granddaddy, longest-running hot rod show in the country.”

The competition, which started in 1950, is U.S.-based cars from 1937 or earlier in the roadster division.

There’s a catch, though. The cars can never have been shown anywhere else before being unveiled, including any photos of the finished cars. Only pieces and parts in the process of being built can be photographed.

“It has to be unveiled to the judges on Wednesday morning of show week,” Breault said.

That was last week.

The show takes an invitation to enter, and 11 were invited in this category this year.

“We were competing against some of the best builders in the country . . . that are household names in hot-rodding,” Breault said.

Despite that, he said he was confident because his team “had done everything in their power to make this car the most beautiful composite of all of the styles that have ever been seen.”

Devlin said the whole point of a hot rod is to take a vehicle and make it “look better, go faster, sound better . . . than what the original was.”

“That doesn’t mean we don’t respect . . . these original cars for what they are and how they got us to this point.”

Devlin said it was Breault’s end goal for the show and his willingness at every turn “to do things that haven’t been done before” that made the win possible.

“The hot-rodder, that’s what’s in their blood,” Devlin said.

He said the cars “truly are works of art. They truly are skilled craftsmen putting thousands of hours into these cars to make them rolling sculptures. . . . It’s what can we do to wow the world we live in?”

Devlin credits his team, which includes Austin Sacket, Brandon Wegerle, David Wehrheim and Gage Sacket.

“Those are the guys that made Jeff’s car happen. They’re the craftsmen,” he said. “Jeff gave us the ability to try.”

Breault thinks the man who owned the car before him would approve.

The judges certainly did when they revealed the winner on Sunday night.

“I yelled and screamed and cried a little bit and hugged the team and hugged the trophy,” Breault said.

He also received a check for $12,500.

So how does that compare to what he’s spent on the car?

“That’s classified,” Breault said. “It’s not about the dollars and the cents. It’s about the journey, and it’s about the win and now that car will be forever be crowned as a member of a very select club.”

For now, Lucille “stays nice and comfy warm and dry in a trailer,” Breault said, and she’ll be on the road for a year or two.

“She’ll be a show queen for a while, and then I’m going to drive her.”

Even if most Wichitans won’t have a chance to see Lucille for some time, Breault said, “The car buffs in Wichita should be very proud that a local shop and a local car guy went to the birthplace of hot-rodding, which is Southern California, and took the biggest title of them all.”

As for Devlin Rod and Customs, Breault said, “Tim Devlin’s shop is now very famous in the hot rod world.”

Devlin said his website has been viewed more in the past five days than in the previous 10 years.

He said he doesn’t have any grandiose plans following the “pretty surreal” win.

Devlin said when he doubled the size of his shop with a move to the southwest corner of Douglas and Hydraulic in 2014, his goal was “if we could keep that place busy, and we could all do the craft that we love, there’s nothing better than that.”

For Breault, there’s not much better than this moment.

“Anyone who’s into cars knows that I just competed against Tom Brady and Patrick Mahomes and won.”