The road to hell?
Either you are from what I label as the “knitted cardigan brigade”…the hunchback be-moaners who sit in their wing backed armchairs, awaiting that inevitable day they expire from this planet to go off to do something more useful.
You know the type… The ones that when a conversation breaks out about cars, they always pull the phrase, “it’s only supposed to get you from A to B”, outta their ass. They’re the cheapskates who buy all the 1.2 diesel compact cars to clatter about, clogging up the roads and claim they can do eighty million miles per gallon; like their personal, over-imaginative MPG is a better achievement than the discovery of penicillin.
I get them at filling stations… “that must drink a lot”, they’ll say, as they fill up a Range Rover Sport that guzzles more gas than a cargo ship and depreciates just as quick as it would had you set fire to it and turned it to a crisp.
Or, like the rest of us in these forums, you have a pulse and like a little excitement…
A car can also be about character and style, like clothing more suited to your personality. You wouldn’t wrench your car in a boob tube and hot-pants now would you? …well some in the forums might. For us, a classic car represents more pleasant driving than the humdrum mundane drive-a-long-a-coma’s we have forced on us today. No matter what the brand, we have sales forecourts all over the globe covered in all the same shapes, the same grey dreary interiors encapsulating as much appeal as a dishwasher.
Outside of the classic car bubble, aspiring, bored people that are fed up driving these dishwashers, have those nostalgia moments when they read that classic mag in the doctor’s waiting room; to begin the dream and journey of buying their particular classic. That idyllic sense that with a classic car, life is smoother and better, there is an increase of excitement, and in the case of our cars, we do that weekend time travel back to 1971,72 or 73.
However, we know things are different …that idyllic vision shatters when you realise that YOU have to wrench on YOUR vehicle this weekend. Your contribution in that constant war being waged against ratting bolts, gasket leaks, a vibration you can’t locate, farting dashboard, complete strip downs of major parts only to find it was something else, pipes perishing, squeaks, creaks and sleepless nights trying to figure what’s wrong with it.
Those aspiring to own a classic do NOT know of the the toil and sweat; nor have knowledge of the climbing list of horrors that exist beyond those glossy photographs of beautiful cars that came from an age long past.
And when you have truly sold your soul to the Devil and made your final contract with Beelzebub to decide to go up the classic ladder to the next value level, and move your current classic on to fund the next project… what turns up to look at it?… The penniless drifters, incompetent space pilots, tyre kickers, nostalgia seekers and the ignorant putz’s with an IQ slightly south of a tea bag, that have no idea what they’re looking at.
Tell me this isn’t the road to hell.
