Car nuts could be strangers from opposite sides of the globe, but give them a shiny vehicle to ogle, and they bond like rubber and road.

It might not even matter what kind of car it is, as long as it has wheels and an engine. And sometimes it doesn’t even need to have that.

On a mild December afternoon, a group of strangers convenes on Steve Cowdin’s driveway in the middle of a forest in Larkspur. Cowdin has gathered them together for the shared love of one vehicle — a 1955 Meteor SR-1.

The men introduce themselves, and just like a modern-day Ali Baba uttering the secret words, “Open sesame,” Cowdin opens his unassuming garage door to reveal a wealth of historical treasures in the form of old, restored and not-so-restored vehicles.

Like the Meteor. There it sits, a hunk of rusted junk that Cowdin rescued from a swamp in Florida, where it sat for almost two decades. To the unpracticed eye, it seems something only a junkyard owner would love. But to this group, the fiberglass car, designed to resemble a sleek Ferrari and built to house a hot rod Ford engine, is a crown jewel.

Cowdin bought the Meteor, along with a dilapidated 1955 Studebaker Stiletto, another Colorado-designed and built car, from a car historian and collector friend in Florida, who owned so many cars he wasn’t able to get around to them.

“I’m one of the few people who care a lot about the history,” Cowdin said. “We’ve been digging in history for a couple of decades on these cars. If we don’t get some of this history written down, it’s just gone. Luckily, I was able to meet the man who built this before he died. Me and this friend I acquired them from are really trying to get history saved and save some of the cars.”

But the Meteor is more than history for Ken Jones, who’s driven from Elizabeth with his two sons to meet

Cowdin and see the car. It’s a family heirloom.

This is the car Ken’s father, Dick Jones, designed and built in Arvada in the 1950s. It’s the third one his dad built, though the only one he never quite got around to finishing. Today is like a family reunion.

“It feels very warm, to sit here with my two sons and to know someone like Steve has such a great interest and that the car is being cared for and cleaned up,” Ken said. “And the car may have a future. It’s funny, these things weren’t that important to my dad. He never made a big deal out of it.”

But the Meteors were a big deal back in the day. People loved a tight-looking little sports car in the early ’50s, but most couldn’t afford them, says Ben Jones, Dick’s grandson. Dick, a mechanical engineer who graduated from the University of Colorado in Boulder, decided the answer was to design a cheap, good-looking, Ferrari-like car people could make fairly cheaply from a kit.

“You could get an original body for $250 if you wanted to build your own,” Ben said. “The bodies got sold to other people to turn into cars. Over the years, we’ve tried to hunt some down, and so far, we’ve identified 15 built cars. Four of them are missing.”

The popular Meteor enjoyed quite a heyday, including a 1955 centerfold story in Road & Track magazine, a second-place win in the 1956 Buffalo Bill Hill Climb in Golden, and a turn as the grand marshal car at the Torrey Pines Road Race in California.

In addition to his two full and one partially-completed Meteors, Dick also built up to 30 other Meteor bodies that got sold. And Ben has been on a mission to find them. Today, he’s brought along a binder packed with information about the ones he’s been able to track down around the world, including one that’s part of New York Times best-selling author Clive Cussler’s Cussler Museum in Arvada, which is home to more than 100 significant cars.

Another got shipped to New Zealand after its owner died in the Vietnam War. Its new owner, who named it after Dick Jones, still races it in competitions.

The most expensive Meteor still out there is owned by the Cunninghams, a famous car family. It’s still being raced. Another came out of a barn in Minnesota, was sold at auction, and is now being restored by its owner in Ohio.

After Dick died, his son sold the unfinished Meteor to the car broker in Florida, from whom Cowdin eventually bought it. He plans to restore both it and the Stiletto.

Dick Shelton, another car lover who’s helped restore Cowdin’s other old cars, is once again on tap to bring both swamp mobiles back from the brink of the boneyard.

“We need to pick which one I could finish in my lifetime,” he said. “I can make it look like a car in six months, but making it work…?”

It’s been 17 years since Ben last saw his grandpa’s unfinished Meteor.

“We never thought we’d see it again,” he said. “It’s been incredible learning about the history of the cars, and that we live 20 minutes from here. So that Steve brought it full circle is really cool. And he’s the right guy to have it because they’re turning a raw fiberglass body from the 1950s into a driving car.”