“If there’s a burnout contest, I’m getting in it. I’m in it to win it, and if I do get in it, I will win it,” Annie Koehler says. We dare you to doubt her. [CARISMA is our show exploring car culture through the eyes, lives, and rides of different enthusiasts across America. See the full playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHa6PXrV-yIjdroCPPYISm4OyNQOV6z4V ]
Annie knows people expect her to act a certain way as a kindly 79-year-old grandma in rural Illinois, and she delights in shattering those expectations. Having already lived a full life, she’s now in what she calls her “season of foolishness.” And what better way to celebrate than roaming the Midwest and smoking the whitewall tires on her bored out big block 1957 Cadillac Series 62 Coupe de Ville?
We first learned about Annie when she randomly emailed us asking if we knew of more contests to enter. Delightful. We shared her story on our site [https://www.thedrive.com/news/79-year-old-grandma-seeks-burnout-contests-for-her-big-block-1957-cadillac ] and posted a video of one of her burnouts on Instagram, where it went viral and picked up millions of views. So we had to take a trip out to Illinois and pay her a visit.
When Annie was a girl in the early 1950s, the road outside her family’s home near the border of Illinois and Missouri was finally paved. It quickly became a magnet for local hot rodders.
“My sister and I learned to identify the cars that were coming up the hill by the sound of the pipes or even the engine. We could recognize a six-cylinder Chevy with a split manifold from a V8 Chevy. We knew the difference. And the Ford, We could tell the difference. We got interested then in who had the best car and that’s the fellow you wanted to chase after for a little bit, and see if for one thing, if he’d let you drive his car.”
She’s been hooked ever since then. Her son Jamie has a great story of her buying a new Buick and taking it to the dealer with clutch issues, where the service manager dismissed her complaints because she was a woman. She proceeded to dump the clutch and lay rubber across the entire dealer lot.
Jamie has his own engine shop, and a while back he acquired two beat up old Cadillacs in a trade. Annie took a liking to one, so Jamie decided to build it into a laid back hot rod. 489 cubic inch Chevy V8, hydraulic roller cam, Edelbrock heads, 700R4 transmission, MSD ignition, and the original interior. “Standard old stuff, nothing special,” as Jamie undersells it.
He didn’t expect her to go out and start using it for burnouts, but that’s exactly what she did. It’s all an extension of a feeling she had when she was a little girl sitting in her family’s 1937 Ford. She wants people to notice her behind the wheel.
“People see the white hair, the white car, the crazy old lady and the white smoke and they just go crazy,” she says.
Annie’s lived her whole life along Route 66, and a few years ago she and Jamie took the Cadillac on road trip to California. Even though a big part of her joy comes from how other people react to the car, that special week cemented it as something she treasures for herself.
“Nine days, 4,200 miles. 400 gallons of gas, 80, 90 miles an hour with the windows down. Just the two of us chit chatting all the way, Well, I’ll never forget it and I don’t think he will either.”
Subscribe to Annie’s channel here → https://www.youtube.com/@UCAPhooroHL9W6NT5BdqTZZQ
Produced, shot, and edited by → https://www.instagram.com/tomgorelik/
Previous episode → https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBjyOrEV8Ss FOLLOW US! WORK WITH US → youtube@thedrive.com
The Drive is the chronicle of car culture. We write stories you actually want to read. → https://www.thedrive.com/
Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/thedrive/
Facebook → https://www.facebook.com/thedrive
TikTok → https://www.tiktok.com/@thedrive_official
X → https://x.com/thedrive
Threads → https://www.threads.net/@thedrive
