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One Part Rust, Two Parts PassionEvery now and then comes a time in your life when you look back |
By Alex Oagana, Auto Editor
22nd of September 2006, 10:50 GMT
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Of course, many people will disagree, mostly because the normal tendency is to move forward without looking back, to accelerate progress with new ideas and such.
Others will agree, you can't progress without learning from the elders, or from the (smarter than average) people who lived before you. I find myself being part of the second category, without being full of remorse or regrets about past happenings.
The same ideas can be applied to cars. For the past 121 years, the automobile has been repeatedly (and in various ways) redeveloped from the ground up; the changes surpassed even the number of dialects in India, but almost each time the engineers and designers were unable to start work without taking into account past-experiences or past-ideas.
Of course, by taking part in a pre-war cars gathering in a Romanian park (with trees and everything) you can't really say that the information encrypted in your brain after seeing a few rusty old cars can help you in any way, besides making you admit you had a great time there.
So, on the 20th of September, I went with our own little Southpark and other crappy animated series fan - the one and only Tudor Raiciu - to discover what at first seemed a gathering of old people, really old cars and a bunch of trees and benches (did I mention this was in a park?). Thankfully, not all first impressions count, and not every book can be judged by its cover.
We actually found an array of beauuuutiful (R.I.P. Steve Irwin) pre-war cars and motorcycles with probably hundreds of restoration hours before this exhibition. Of course, not all of them looked mint.
For example, a BMW military bike actually had Dacia "Iliescu smile" rear view mirrors for whom "tacky" is too less of a word; a Mercedes 200 Cabriolet from 1936 had the interior badly remade into a seventies communist pub on wheels (although the exterior looked rather nice) and an extremely rare Aero 1000 Roadster had taillights "stolen" from a '60's Wartburg - I have to mention though that the original model had no taillights at all, only two stop sign-like boards that elevated from a hidden cavity on each part of the car while braking, so - according to the new legislation - it couldn't have been registered for driving.
I have to admit though, I'm a big fan of old and rare cars, so some of these vehicles were eye-candy to say the least. From the two rows of cars present (I counted about 35, not that good with maths though), some of them really stood out from the crowd.
One was a cute Fiat 500 "Topolino", which looked like it had just arrived from the factory in Turin; another one was a Skoda 1100 Cabriolet that attracted quite a few curious fans of modern Skodas; and the one which kept me drooling the most was a Ford Model A Phaeton, owned by a mysterious man wearing a Mexican-style moustache and a cowboy-ish black hat.
The owners gang was even more motley, consisting of a very irritated / irritating old woman who kept jumping from behind on every kid who touched the paint of her 1939 Fiat 1100 Cabriolet, two neo-nazi looking fellows, watching after their prides and joys (two BMW bikes with boxer engines) and a rather young owner of a far-from-completely-restored Mercedes 170V from 1938.
The interesting event with the Mercedes guy was when the previous owner of the car (a little old man in his '80's) started having a conversation with the new one. To make it short, the discussion comprised sentences like "I've spent two years working on this car, you'll never finish it!", "Oh yes I will, old man! Ask God to give you enough years to see it finished!" and stuff like this.
Consequently, I can only say that I hate not being able to literally share the passion of these people, and since you don't live twice, I don't think I'll be able to share it in the near future. If any of you has the money, the time and the space needed for a restoration project, I'd suggest you go ahead with it in a blink of an eye. You simply cannot compare the feelings you can have for an old car to those that you have for a modern one, everything about them is just different. So hurry, find a bucket of rust on wheels and start working on it!
Photo: Tudor Raiciu
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