The month’s missives from Jay Leno, Derek Bell, Stephen Bayley and Robert Coucher
The Collector
Page 47
L ast month I was in Wisconsin Dells, the heartland of America. I’d had a comedy show the night before and stayed overnight to check out a car show – at which they expected about 1200 cars. Much as I like Pebble Beach, Amelia Island and Villa d’Este, at this show there were no Duesenbergs, no Ferraris, no Rolls-Royces – just a lot of people with one old car, and for many it was also their daily driver.
People said it might rain. And, oh my God, this was rain. Yet I could see people lining up and pulling into the fairground. Though only just, it was raining so hard. So I put my coat on and walked over and people were as surprised to see me as I was to see them. These were real car people. People huddled over in makeshift tents, offering me everything from bratwurst to beer.
The stars of the show were the Ring brothers, a couple of true craftsmen who make amazing hot rods, and they spend as much money per car as a Ferrari or Alfa Romeo restorer does on theirs.
I enjoy these summer car shows because at the upper-echelon events you tend to hear about how much things cost, how long the restoration took, what it was worth at auction. This show is different – a lot of talk about dreams. Lots of talk about what they’re going to build when their kids are done with college. A lot of stories about how they had to sell their first car, to buy their first house. Having come from a small town, I could relate to these sessions. In New England, when I was growing up, anything with less than four doors might as well have been a Ferrari.
The organisers asked me to give a trophy for my favourite car and I chose a six-cylinder ’64 Pontiac Le Mans convertible. Nothing special, but it was maroon, black top, three on the tree, column shift. The guy had spent seven or eight years restoring it and it looked fantastic in a way that only a really well-done amateur restoration could. Instead of brand new chrome meticulously re-done by a specialist somewhere, this had just been polished to within an inch of its life, and the guy drove it in the rain and was thrilled to win an award.
These are the kind of car shows where people show up with a car with no expectation of winning a trophy or getting a Best in Show. I’ve always advocated that, at some of the fancier car shows, there should be a written test for the owner: how many cylinders does your car have? W ho was the designer? That kind of thing. Because a lot of times, these vehicles get paid for by people who don’t have an emotional attachment to it.
Whenever I’m asked to speak at a car show I like giving out what I call my rattle-can award – for the guy who did the most work on his car himself. Maybe he painted it with spray cans in the backyard, and it doesn’t look quite as good as a professional restoration, but it’s pretty damn close. And there will be more emotion invested in this car than some of the fancy ones.
One thing I noticed going to this car show. Ask what kind of stuff people like and you’d get, ‘When I was in college, a buddy of mine had a 396 Chevy and it was yellow, it was a Bel Air, with wind-up windows and fourspeed and dog-dish hubcaps – it didn’t look like anything but it was fast, you know…’ It was funny just talking car dreams. And nobody aspired to a Ferrari or a Lamborghini or anything like that. It was always some sort of local hero car.
A few times I’ve been in England and gone to local car shows. It’s always MGs, Austins, Wolseleys, maybe a Ford Consul, regular cars that regular people have. Looking on my website, we do the Lamborghinis and all that kind of stuff and they get a lot of hits, but we also did a B210 Datsun that a guy restored. It got two million hits! It was obviously a car that struck a chord with people. This guy had done to his what everybody wished they could have done to theirs. The real car versus the dream. The dream cars are fun, but they’re not ones that drive the hobby. What drives the hobby, at least in America, is the Mustangs and the Camaros and those sort of regular cars that everybody has a memory of.
It’s a bit like going to the Westminster Dog Show (America’s Crufts), and then going down to the local pet show or rescue centre. Everyone appreciates a beautiful dog but has an emotional connection to one they had as a kid or one they rescued. And it’s the same thing with the cars. The guy with the six-cylinder ’64 Pontiac Le Mans, that I picked as my favourite car, he loved that thing probably more than any Ferrari owner loves his car. The guy with the Ferrari probably has a dozen cars. This guy just had this one. And here it was in pouring rain, looking great, and he couldn’t have been prouder of it.
‘WHERE I GREW UP, ANYTHING WITH LESS THAN FOUR DOORS MIGHT AS WELL HAVE BEEN A FERRARI’