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Rare 'Elvis' Chevrolet up for bids

Chevrolet Bel Air Sport. A car similar to Steve’s on auction.

Put on your blue suede shoes and head on down to Pickles classics auction in Perth on Nov 26 with your money, honey, if you don’t want to end up in Heartbreak Hotel.

Because that’s when a prized ‘Elvis Presley’ Chevrolet is going under the hammer. Suspicious minds? Well, that’s all right, because the car, a 1957 pillarless V8 sports coupe, one of the bow-tie brand’s most sought-after collectables, actually belongs to Steve Bumbak, also known as The Chevy Man – and the 54-year-old from Wangara is also one of the world’s best Elvis impersonators.

He placed in the top three in an Elvis sing-off in Memphis a few years ago. His love affair with Chevrolets began when he was a toddler and his dad owned a ’55 Chevrolet. ‘I promised myself I’d have it one day,’ he said. And some years later he did track his dad’s old car down, but it had by then been converted to a ute.

In more recent times he ended up with a variety of Chevys, one of them with a remarkable history. The ’57 Pillarless was quite a find. It was sourced from Hatillo, a town in Puerto Rico, and although 56 years old, is still almost ‘new’. Its odometer shows a scant 2755 miles (4408km) and Steve was told it belonged to an elderly man who barely had time to drive his big hunk o’ love  on the long, lonely highway before the poor boy went to meet the king of the whole wide world.

None of his remaining family drove, so the Chevy remained parked in the garage of his hacienda in Hatillo for the next five decades. But Steve has a lot of other Chevys in his Chevy Man premises in Wangara, and says it’ll be a blue Christmas, but his slightly faded love has to go to someone who’ll take good care of her. ‘Now and then there’s a fool such as I,’ Steve said. If it sells, that’s when the heartache begins.