Petrolhead

Following Henry Catchpole’s views on the subject last month, Porter ponders the surprising importance of miniature model cars

NNOT FAR FROM MY HOUSE THERE’S A chap who really likes American things. I’ve deduced this from two things about him. Firstly, he wears a cowboy hat and clothes that would be unnoticeable in South Dakota but seem a little conspicuous in north London. And secondly, because he has a small collection of American cars. To kick off, there are a couple of Jeeps that seem to act as his daily drives. Although you can’t say ‘drives’ if you wear a cowboy hat, can you? You’d have to say ‘rides’. Finish your grits, spark a Lucky Strike and saddle-up your ride for a mosey down to Marks & Spencer in Muswell Hill to buy some socks and a ready meal.

This chap also has a Pontiac Firebird, one of the 1990s models when the styling went to cock and the creaking, ’60s-spec underparts were kept going only with liberal dollops of turd oil. It’s a pony car, but only in the Cockney sense of the word. Slumped on a street in west Texas it would cut a pretty sorry figure, enveloped in the stench of Four Loko, failed marriages, and a fiftyyard exclusion zone around six different high schools. In Britain it’s even more wretched, serving as a sad plastic totem of an Americana enthusiasm that teeters between obsession and mental illness.

Yet my pretend American near-neighbour has another car that completely makes up for the awful, ageing, whoop-yah nonsense he whips on weekdays. It’s another Pontiac, but this one is different. It’s a late-’70s Firebird Trans Am and it’s simply brilliant. I mean, obviously it’s not. I’ve never driven it, but I’d bet you a dollar it’s vague and clonky and does nothing especially well beyond making a delicious V8 noise, yet none of this really matters, because it looks fantastic and I covet it greatly. There’s a simple reason for this: when I was a kid, I had a remote-control toy Trans Am in a very similar spec. Long before I’d seen that badly steering, battery-powered replica with a scale 0-60mph time of one second cemented a Firebird fetish that I haven’t lost in 30-odd years.

This stuff gets under your skin at a formative age and then just stays there, largely based on the things you played with as a nipper. It’s why I prefer the Ferrari 250 LM to the 250 GTO. It’s why I can’t resist a Ford Capri 3.0S. It’s why I have a slightly weird obsession with the Austin Metro. These were the die-cast models with which I took chunks out of my parents’ skirting boards. Or, in the case of the radio-controlled Trans Am, it was the car that, with a long runup and a steely control of the steering, could be made to do little jumps from a rudimentary ramp on the patio. Now I lust after the full-size versions, all because of those toys.

And this set me thinking about my son, who is currently two. He’s obsessed with cars and he’s not very keen on eating vegetables. The gene pool runs deep. Currently, his favourite toys are a microscopic facsimile of a Dodge Charger with a stripe up the side and a much larger model of a Land Rover Defender, which makes an unrealistically revvy noise on demand and vaguely annoys me, not because of the sounds, but because some of the detailing is wrong. These are fair things for a toddler to smack into the dog’s face as she lies on the living-room rug, but are they giving him a good grounding in cars he will become powerlessly drawn to in adult life?

The other day I took to him to a nursery where, I was delighted to notice, they had a titchy model of a Ferrari 512M and a Matchbox

‘The nursery staff might have these models as battered distractions to keep my son amused for a few minutes, but I saw them as a vital part of his overall education’

version of the Ford RS200. The staff might have regarded them as battered distractions to keep him amused for a few minutes, but I saw them as a vital part of his overall education.

Yet even this is not enough. Next time I’m in the local toy megastore, I’m going to have a good look around for other bits of interesting metal that can gently seep into his little brain at this ever-so-impressionable age. Maybe a 1:43 Golf GTI. Perhaps a weeny E30 M3. Is it possible that Hot Wheels makes a Pagani Zonda or an original Aston Vanquish? Suddenly these things seem important because, if he’s anything like his dad, this is going to have a profound effect on his later life and the kind of random metal he’ll drool over in the street and lose hours browsing in the classifieds.

I might even let him play with a little model of some old muscle car. But not too much. After all, I don’t want to fastforward 50 years to find him wandering around Finchley in a cowboy hat.