Every one of Fred Phillips’ cars tells a story
CALGARY – “Take the second entrance and make an immediate right. Drive to the mailboxes and wait there. Someone will meet you at 7 p.m. sharp.”
A prairie thunderstorm is just blowing itself out over in the foothills toward Canmore, the sky blue and black, and filled with drama. It’s late in the day and the dropping sun lights up the yellow canola fields in a startling contrast. In this vast and open landscape, the buildings are squat and boxy, secretive and filled with treasure.
When I arrive, there’s already a cluster of people waiting for their guide. A new Porsche Cayman shows up, its slender driver wearing a sharply-pressed suit. There’s a minivan, a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, trucks aplenty, an orange 1970s Porsche 911 and a Jeep Grand Cherokee SRT.
Right on the dot, a little Fiat 500 Abarth shows up, snorting with cheery forced-induction hooliganism. The driver, a darkhaired young man, leans out the window.
“You can just follow me,” he says. The convoy forms, tailing the little Fiat out to a hidden parking lot.
We all climb out of our cars. There’s a silver Mercedes-Benz E55 AMG wagon parked over by one of the outbuildings. Crunch across the gravel. Reach for the door handle. Fred Phillips opens it up.
“Hello,” he says with a grin. “Welcome! Glad you could make it.”
Beyond him is an Aladdin’s cave of wonder. There are three more warehouses to follow, collectively containing perhaps a hundred or more cars. One-offs. Icons. Forgotten prototypes. Tiny Italian race cars and wedgy 1980s poster pin-ups.
Before we can go any further, let me just say that I’m not going to list all the cars in this collection, nor show you photo after photo of gleaming metal to blow your mind. This is not merely in deference to Phillips, who is somewhat private about his collection. It would be a disservice to you.
The thing is, unlike almost every other collection of this nature, these nested boxes of wonder aren’t secreted away from the public and covered up. Instead, every so often Fred throws open his doors and gives a guided tour of his collection. If you happen to be in Calgary at the time, do everything in your power to attend.
You won’t just be getting access to one of the most fantastically varied car collections in the country. You’ll also be getting access to Fred Phillips. Trust me, this is well worth the price of admission — a donation to AARC, the Alberta Adolescent Recovery Centre.
So, we’ll pull back the curtain a little here, but put touring this collection near the top of your bucket list.
“Cars,” Phillips starts off, with an exaggerated sigh. We are surrounded by three tiers of stacked vehicles. “They’re like terminal cancer for me.”
Certainly it’s been a spreading disease. Phillips has his four buildings of cars sorted into approximate themes, but to the untrained eye, it just looks like he buys anything that takes his fancy. How else, I ask you, does someone come to park a Messerschmitt Kabinenroller next to a Rally Red Oldsmobile W30 442?
But Phillips has a story for every car, a personal anecdote ranging from a particular drive to dream come to fruition. Microphone in hand, he’ll talk nearly nonstop for the next four hours. Not a droning docent, but a true car-guy drawing from a deep well of personal stories.
He’s not what you’d think your typical high-end car collector might look like. There’s no whiff of Pebble Beach finery. Just a pair of plaid shorts, an affable air and a pair of red-rimmed reading glasses which he uses to read us excerpts about the essential liveliness of a prewar Alfa Romeo.
Phillips also says “dude” a lot. He doesn’t gloss over into dry facts and figures. Every car comes with a first-hand tale: what it’s like to drive, why it’s important to preserve this one and how he chased the car for years.
“Death, divorce, and taxes are my best friends in getting cars,” Phillips says with a chuckle. “They make people do silly things.”
In the first barn, there are a number of AMC products, ranging from drag racers to prototypes to a Renault wearing a Classic Car Adventures rally number. Parked near a custom-bodied Bentley once purchased for a mistress of the King of Spain, there’s one of the most ungainly looking machines AMC ever produced: an SC/Rambler. But not just any Scrambler.
If you ever had one of those plastic Hot Wheels carry-cases from the ’70s and ’80s, this is just like that, except with full-sized machines. Will you find Ford’s most famous Le Mans racer here? You might even see more than one.
On to bay three, which Phillips describes as being filled with the products of guys who had a vision. Thus there’s plenty of DeTomaso machines, a collection of the tiny but hilariously enraged gnat-sized racing cars of Carlo Abarth and an entire squadron of little-known Kurtis speed machines, including Frank Kurtis and Virgil Exner’s thesis car, which Phillips calls “the Enzo Ferrari of North America.”
Time for bay four. “I like bay four,” Phillips says. Well how could you not? There’s a Ferrari F40 and two — TWO! — Lambor … I’ve said too much. Wait and see for yourself.
As he talks, Phillips puts us all in the passenger seat with him, chasing a prewar Alfa Romeo into a canyon road in Colorado. We can feel the icy, eye-watering wind, the squelch of rain-soaked seats beneath us, the clench in our stomachs at tripledigit speed on 1930s-era tires and suspension.
We’re there, too, when he tells us of the personal connection with AARC and how the centre helped his family personally.
“The cars are really the keys to me opening your hearts,” he says to the crowd.
As a last act, Phillips auctions off a charity ride in one of his fantastic machines: your choice of a weekend breakfast run to Canmore, a Tuesday European Cars & Coffee meet or attending Wild Wednesdays hot-rod/ muscle night.
“Who pays for breakfast?” somebody jokes. The winner ends up shelling out $500 for the privilege.
At the end of the tour, it’s back to the first room, where people line up to sign the guest book. Some have been here several times, each goround getting a new story and seeing something new as the collection shifts and changes.
When we sign the guest book, we’re asked to put a favourite car down beside our name. But don’t ask Phillips to choose.
“Every one’s my favourite car at that given moment,” he says.
Interested in a tour? Requests can be made to tour the Fred Phillips collection by sending an email to tours@focusauto.com.