ROBERT COUCHER
The Driver
Nouveau riche. The dictionary definition is ‘one who has recently acquired wealth and is typically perceived as ostentatious or lacking in good taste’. In the good old, bad old days of the ’80s, to be described as ‘nouveau riche’ was the ultimate put-down. Social ostracism would surely follow; to be a flash show-off was absolutely non-U.
How the world’s social tribes have changed. ‘Nouveau riche’ has gone; everyone now aspires to being newly minted. What is the handle that everyone wants today? ‘Entrepreneur’, meaning ‘a person who sets up a business, taking on the financial risk in the hope of profit’. Today, bright young things don’t want to go into law or banking. They’d rather set up a craft vodka company, a minicab outfit or a home-delivery grocery operation.
The classic car world could be said to have gained traction in the ’80s. Things moved on from old cars as a hobby to classic cars entering the broader consciousness. In those heady days Punk had largely shot its bolt, New Romantics were flouncing off stage and the Sloane Ranger ruled. In 1982 writer Peter York and Ann Barr, features editor of Harpers & Queen, launched the The Official Sloane
Ranger Handbook, which became an international best-seller. The French had their BCBG (bon chic,
bon genre) and in the US the preppy scene took off. These upper-middle-class types and their wannabes embraced classic cars as part of their lifestyle, along with country pursuits and attachment to careworn ‘old stuff’ which included Barbour and tweed coats and corduroy trousers. Proper Sloanes would never venture into a smart emporium on Bond Street, instead grabbing their kit from Jeremy Hackett’s shop down at the wrong end of the King’s Road. Shirts had to be from Thomas Pink – the louder the butcher-boy stripe the better – and shoes were proper welted Church brogues from Northampton.
The enthusiast’s motor was the ubiquitous Golf GTI, red if you were in the City but better in dark green to match the Range Rover. Many of these ’80s public schoolboys entered the classic car trade via smart auction houses (except Clarkson, who went on television). The trade is still largely run by these unreconstructed Sloanes, which I really like. Some have slipped into Old Fogeyism in South Kensington and the Home Counties, and I know of one still living out a bit of New Romanticism in Geneva, even while the world changes around them. Hackett London is now owned by a Lebanese company, Thomas Pink sold out to a French conglomerate, Church shoes went to the Italians, and no-one willingly buys their clothes from a second-hand shop any more.
So it is with motor cars. Remember ‘badge engineering’? British Leyland practised this dark art and met with much derision. Now it’s ‘shared platforms’, all sorts of disparate vehicles the same under a different skin. To a Sloane, where oldfashioned, horny-handed craft lineage is all, this is anathema because it lacks authenticity. But today, ‘discerning’ motorists don’t give a fig as long as the badge on the bonnet carries enough social cachet in Cap Ferrat, Connecticut or Cadogan Square. Mechanicals? Naah…
Volkswagen made a serious mistake here with its excellent Phaeton. Who wants a luxury limo with two of the biggest VW badges in history stuck onto the front and rear? Toyota learnt this with its Lexus offshoot but Wolfsburg missed the point. VW boss Ferdinand Pïech liked to pit his engineers against each other, leading to a luxury VW to take on Audi. Apart from some sales in China, the Phaeton failed and is no more. Had it been sold as a ‘Phaeton’ (good word) and not a ‘VW’ writ large, it could have worked. Hubris, anyone?
But the Phaeton’s well-engineered underpinnings formed the basis for the most successful Bentley motor car ever – the Continental GT. With its svelte coupé body and aspirational badging the Conti went on to great success, and the fact that a lot of it is VW under the skin doesn’t matter any more.
A recent AA report reveals that a million UK drivers don’t know how to open their car’s bonnet. They regard the oily bits as no more interesting than the guts of their mobile device. The latest Continental GT has a better Porsche-based chassis, while the PR bumf harks back to the original Bentley Continental of 1952 which was really a Rolls-Royce. Every Sloane knows that. And the new entrepreneurs? They don’t care.
‘THE CLASSIC CAR TRADE IS STILL LARGELY RUN BY UNRECONSTRUCTED SLOANES, WHICH I REALLY LIKE’