NO GOOD THING LASTS FOREVER
At the core, there is so little to it: fuel burns, a crankshaft turns, a car moves. The result is always motion and often speed, usually noise and occasionally thunder, and no matter what, the utterly irreplaceable sense that the person at the controls has harnessed organic violence for singular end. The noise out the pipe serves as both proof and comfort – small music, in the scheme of human events, but with so much to say.
It’s a machine, and yet… Jaguar’s William Lyons described the car as ‘the closest thing we will ever create to something that is alive’, and not for nothing have many of history’s great cars been compared to animals. Noise is surely at the heart of that. Writers go purple trying to describe this stuff and engineers redesign exhaust systems over and over again because they know – because everyone knows – that the ears are half the battle. A great engine can be muffled to nearsilence, but the ones we long remember shout brimstone over pavement. They want you to know what they are, how they were built and who was thinking what when their parts went together. They insist upon their pulse and react and spit and fight in response to your commands, not always happily. Hell, they insist upon everything that makes them, which is why we remember the legends with a fondness generally reserved for people.
If you are travelled enough, you can close your eyes and hear the big names: the small-arms crack and high-rpm snap of a ’20s Harry Miller straight-eight; the steaming torque of Bentley’s recentlyretired pushrod V8; the impossible crescendo of virtually everything naturally-aspirated and built in Maranello. Vastly different machines united in their ability to hold flame fronts, harness alchemy and turn fuel into so much more. EVs may be the future but they do their work in comparative silence.
If the result at the tyre is often similar, the blood is gone. No sense of a living, breathing thing. You’re going somewhere, yes. Getting something done. But minus an old partner in the dance.
This is almost certainly unavoidable. No good thing lasts forever, and progress is rarely kind to the romantic.