Metallica front-man ditches his heavy metal

Iain Kelly

Contributing Journalist

1 min read

The lead singer and rhythm guitarist for Metallica, James Hetfield, isn't just a legend in heavy metal music. He's also an internationally renowned car collector who has built a swag of hand-built custom cars to call his own.

But now the famous gearhead has donated 10 of his most well-known custom car creations to LA's Petersen Museum, and they'll go on display from February 2020. Along with a cool space cab 455 Oldsmobile-powered '56 F100 there is a heap of Rick Dore-built one-off custom cars, including the Black Pearl based off a '48 Jaguar, the Delahaye-styled Aquarius, his '53 Buick Skylark, '52 Oldsmobile, a bare-steel '36 Ford hot rod, and his amazing Lincoln Zephyr called Voodoo Priest.

Such is the scope of the donation Hetfield has been named a Founding Partner of the Petersen, an honour only given to the most generous donors to the legendary museum.

Iain Kelly

Contributing Journalist

A love of classic American and European cars drove Iain Kelly to motoring journalism straight out of high school, via the ownership of a tired 1975 HJ Holden Monaro.  For nearly 20 years he has worked on magazines and websites catering to modified late model high-performance Japanese and European tuner cars, as well as traditional hot rods, muscle cars and street machines. Some of these titles include Auto Salon, LSX Tuner, MOTOR, Forged, Freestyle Rides, Roadkill, SPEED, and Street Machine. He counts his trip to the USA to help build Mighty Car Mods’ “Subarute” along with co-authoring their recent book, The Cars of Mighty Car Mods, among his career highlights.  Iain lends his expertise to CarsGuide for a variety of advice projects, along with legitimising his automotive obsession with regular OverSteer contributions. Although his practical skills working on cars is nearly all self-taught, he still loves nothing more than spending quality time in the shed working on his project car, a 1964 Pontiac. He also admits to also having an addiction to E30 BMWs and Subaru Liberty RS Turbos, both of which he has had multiple examples of. With car choices like that, at least his mum thinks he is cool.
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