But not before he had a key, and somewhat disruptive, role in ushering another Chevrolet icon into the toy car realm. Elliot Handler, the president of Mattel, saw that car in a driveway and told Bradley to make a car like that for Hot Wheels.” The result: another first-year model named the Custom Fleetside.īradley was concerned that Hot Wheels would not succeed, so he remained at Mattel for just a few years, departing in 1969 to create his own design consultancy.
“Back then, he drove a really wild-looking 1964 El Camino that he had customized. “He moved out to California to work for Mattel,” Pascal says. A graduate of the industrial design program at the prestigious Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, Bradley was a prominent car customizer when he was hired by General Motors in 1962, where he worked for four years before being poached by Mattel to lead its new toy car project. “The first designer for Hot Wheels was a guy named Harry Bradley,” Pascal says. What’s more, nearly all of these original designs were penned by a gentleman directly connected to the Chevrolet brand. “So when you talk about the history of Hot Wheels, it all started with the Camaro.” “I call this the Dead Sea Scrolls of the hobby, the original blueprint for the first Hot Wheels car ever made,” says Pascal. But the earliest one, from 1967, was the plan for the Custom Camaro. Most of the preproduction plans were ascribed to early 1968, just prior to the brand’s rollout that summer.
This position of primacy was little more than a rumor until Pascal purchased some blueprints that Hot Wheels designers used to make the molds for the original 1968 run of 16 cars. “Chevrolet definitely has a special place with Hot Wheels, and one reason for that is that the first ever made was a Camaro,” Pascal asserts.
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