Thawing out with a vintage drive in B.C.
OSOYOOS, B.C.— Road trips come in many forms.
For solo jaunts: Find yourself. Do whatever you and only you want to do.
Pair-bonding tours: With a spouse, lover, child, best buddy. Think Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. If you haven’t read it, you should.
Group events: Team up with a gang of like-minded people and make it a social occasion.
The latter definition would encompass the Hagerty Spring Thaw, the ninth annual iteration of which I was invited to join in British Columbia a few weeks back.
It’s a classic car run sponsored by Hagerty, an insurance company that not surprisingly specializes in insuring old cars. It is one of several such events organized by Classic Car Adventures, which is owned by — well, pretty much is — Dave Hord, a transplanted Torontonian now living in Vancouver.
Hord and his merry band of staffers come up with three days of great roads over which owners of vintage automobiles can enjoy themselves and their motor cars.
“Motor cars.” Has a nice vintage ring to it, don’t you think?
Eligibility is limited to cars built before 1979, or, employing what Hord refers to as the “DeLorean rule,” which is “anything newer that’s interesting and the owner will let me drive.”
You would be hard-pressed to find a more eclectic array of cars among the 80-odd participants of the 2016 event: A mass of Minis A posse of Porsches A disproportionately large array of Alfa Romeos — Duetto, Spider Veloce convertible, GT Junior coupe, Giulia sedan A brace of Alvises A Rolls-Royce Phantom III A Citroen DS21 A late-40s Plymouth Businessman’s Coupe
It would have been a bit of a stretch to schlep my 1977 Hornet out there, even though it was eligibl by age, if not by Hord’s “interesting” criteria, although he would be welcome to drive it.
So Hord put me in touch with Fred Phillips of Calgary, who has a remarkable stable of very interesting old cars. For this year’s Thaw, he chose a recently acquired 1966 Shelby Cobra 427 — yes, a real Cobra — and a 1973 DeTomaso Pantera. Nice wheels.
The exact route is not unveiled until everyone arrives and registers, although the start in Vernon, B.C., suggested that the central part of Canada’s westernmost province would be featured.
If there’s a great driving road around here that Hord doesn’t know about, neither does anybody else.
Other than the challenge of getting any vintage car through a three-day event covering some 1,300 kilometres of mostly mountainous terrain, the Spring Thaw is not a competition. Everyone leaves in the morning and everyone who arrives in the afternoon (old-time mechanicals willing), is a winner.
Locals along the route must wonder — what the heck is going on?
Day 1: Vernon to Cranbrook
I was to be “naviguessor” for Phillips in the Cobra. It figures that this was the day it was cold and rainy, and the Cobra was both heater- and top-unencumbered. As long as we were moving, it wasn’t too wet — the rain just rolled on up the windshield and over the car.
But man, was it cold. And fast. Huge fun.
Fred also knows how to drive, so no worries there.
Day 2: Cranbrook to the lovely town of Nelson
I started in the right seat of the Pantera, driven by Phillips’s longtime friend Gerard Mercier. After lunch, Mercier handed me the key and said, “Your turn!”
I had never driven a Pantera, and was just a bit nervous given the car is very fast, very valuable and has a bit of a reputation for being a bit squirrelly, not for the least of reasons be- ing that Tim Horton was killed in a crash inovling a Pantera.
But our car proved to be quite docile, at least at the speeds at which I was prepared to drive. You must drive a Pantera with no right shoe, unless you remembered to bring your ballet slippers. There just isn’t room between the brake pedal and the transmission tunnel for a proper shoe on your throttle foot.
With cars this old, and roads this hilly and challenging, issues are going to crop up. The Cobra had spent much of its half-century of life in a garage. It has only 16,000 original miles on it. Phillips had run a 1,000kilometre event just prior to the Spring Thaw, but carburetor problems started to rear their ugly heads in Cranbrook.
“Be prepared” is also Hord’s motto. He had brought along a crew from RWM, an excellent restoration shop in Delta, near Vancouver, with proprietor Robert Maynard, mechanic Chris Oakley (who looked too young to even know what a carburetor was) and Oakley’s brother-in-law Dave Barr, an airframe mechanic and old car enthusiast. No no, Dave isn’t old, the cars are.
Who knew the Lordco Auto Parts store in Cranbrook, B.C., would have parts for a Holley carb that would fit into a ’66 Cobra? They didn’t really, but Oakley and Barr found some they made work and the car drove on to a strong finish.
Day 3: Nelson to Osoyoos
Oakley and Barr had found a 1950 Fargo stake truck at the airfield where Barr works. For much the same reason mountain climbers climb mountains — because they’re there — they lowered the body of the old Fargo onto the chassis of a 1999 Dodge Ram pickup truck with the Cummins turbo diesel engine.
This was the support vehicle for the event and my ride for the third day.
If it felt odd to be behind the wheel of a truck that looked this old and drove this well; I can barely imagine what drivers of other cars must have thought when we blasted by them, heading up a steep mountain pass.
“What the heck do they have in that thing?” No, it wasn’t a Hemi . . . Every car in the event has a story, from its acquisition, to its restoration, to prepping it for this event, to getting through this event.
Each car’s owner is beyond delighted to share these stories with fellow travellers and local spectators. Or with complete strangers, as I was at the start of the Hagerty Spring Thaw.
But by its conclusion, I most decidedly was not.
The next chapter in each of these stories is planning for the next road trip.
For vintage car enthusiasts in southern Ontario, or anywhere within however many days’ drive you care to subject your vehicle to, that would be the Maple Mille, scheduled for Sept. 23-25, somewhere in the Huntsville region.
For details, see Hord’s website, classiccaradventures.com.