Antique & Classic Cars Blog

‘Twas the late night of Friday in our bungalow
A deep peaceful slumber before the morrow
When out in the street there arose such a clamor…
A CRASH and CRACK and SCRAPE—Thor’s hammer!?

We threw on our robes and rushed to the street,
where the strangest of sights our gazes did meet:
A car off the road, a woman a wandering
in search of a light for a smoke for her pondering.

She’d knocked down a tree, put her car on its side
what a strange thing to see, in your robe, in the night.
The cops soon arrived, wondered how she’d explain it,
“I’ve been run off the road!” was the way she did frame it.

She didn’t seem hurt; the law had arrived
’twas time to return to pursue more shuteye…
We reflected as we departed the show
That driving up trees is best left to pros.

According to Morgan Plus Four owner, Lloyd Shields, enthusiasts know of about 18 running Morgan sports cars in the state and another 10 off the road. As a Plus Four, Shields’ car runs a four-cylinder Triumph engine, the same one that that manufacturer put in its TR4. There is also a Plus Eight, with Rover’s version of Buick’s venerable 3.5-liter aluminum V8.

Shields has owned this one since 1990; the original owner enjoyed it from ’67 until then. I did a Locals in Motion on him and the car and he was kind enough to offer up the driver’s seat on Tuesday afternoon. It was a day a lot like today–overcast and threatening a heavy deluge that never fell. Temperature was mid-60s, perfect for a British car.

What a treat for a fall-like day. The car looks small as you stand beside it, but that snout is long. At the wheel, it really feels like a vintage sports car–one older than the 1960s (though perceived length is shortened by the fact that you’re virtually sitting over the rear axle).

There’s no synchro on first and the throw on the Moss box is short and crisp. There’s power nuthin’, so everything the car and road surface are doing gets communicated through the controls. While it’s too big to feel much like a go-kart, the stiffness and road feel are comparable. The eight cylinder cars beat 7 seconds to 60, but a Morgan is small enough that the Triumph four-banger offers ample oomph. A trip down the Minneapolis side of the river and back down the St. Paul side was a perfect classic fix for the week. Thanks Lloyd.  (And thanks to Strib photog Tom Witta for the great snaps–you can tell they aren’t mine because neither my reflection, thumb, nor camera strap appears in any of them.)

In the post below on the MG Midget I bought at age 15, reader bjbuster lamented that his head sticks up higher at the wheel of his MG. Being big has its advantages when you’re trying to tackle or wrestle someone, but it can be a challenge if your favorite sports car is tailored to the statistically formulated “average man.”

Wrestler, football-player, TV host (Bill) Goldberg was in my Dream Garages book (his garage is on the cover) with his amazing Mopar collection and he has this photo of himself on his garage wall. This is his kit Cobra with super hi-po engine by NASCAR engine builder, Ernie Elliot (Bill Elliot’s brother). Even with his formidable mass ensconced at the controls, he says it’ll pick up the front wheels at speed if he puts his foot in it.

(He also has the best garage-sign wall I’ve ever seen to accompany a hot collection: “Those found here at night will be found here in the morning.”)

Got out the lawn mower today and began putting gas in it in the driveway. A man in his late 20s walked up to a small Pontiac (a Sunfire) and got in. Moments later, beautiful music boomed from the car. It was loud–as loud as a mid-priced home stereo can get without breaking up. And it sounded very good.

Don’t know what music it was but it had the same sort of crispness as, say, Kansas, on some of their slightly slower instrumental stuff. (Of course this kid has no idea there’s a group, as well as a state, with that name.)

Although most of the time the engine note of an old MG or Triumph is all you need to hear, my MG’s radio is an ’80s era “upgrade” that hardly works and sounds like crap…. I walked over to the young man’s car to learn whether that could possibly be the factory radio. If so, it would be a killer upgrade for an old car.

Apparently being a young man with a loud radio he latched firmly onto the misperception that I was going to reprimand him rather than praise the amazing sound coming out of that Pontiac. As I leaned into the window, he shouted “What the flapdoodle?!” (not an exact quote). I asked, “Is that the factory radio?” and as he peeled away, he shouted, “yeah!”

Cops sometimes like to play the nice-to-start game, where they strike up a chat for a while before chewing you out about something. I’d guess they do this because they want to study you a bit, figure out if there’s more bad to you than the thing they’ve come up about, so they give you some rope in the form of initial, low-key conversation.

I used to park my motorcycle in the wide hashmarked non-spot between handicapped spaces at my local bank when I was just running up to the cash machine. It’s so wide, I didn’t think it would impede anyone and I was trying to avoid taking a full-size spot for a narrow little motorcycle. A cop strolled out one day, talked to me at length about my bike and bikes he rode and mods he used to make to old Nortons all buddy-buddy, then as I was about to leave, he turned back into law enforcement and said, “don’t park there again.”

Guess this young man thought the same thing was coming.

Too bad. I wanted a closer look at that sweet sound system.

Headlines aren’t so encouraging lately. Mortgage crisis; high gas prices; bank employees tapping their fingers wondering if it will be their employer’s across the front of the building tomorrow morning or a big “Office Space For Rent” sign.

And how has this affected the classic car market? Well, if your disposable income fits better in a dump truck than a money clip, the answer is, not much.

After WWII, the troubled BMW company contemplated what direction they would try to go. Even though Germany was in shambles, physically and financially, the company decided to build luxury cars, figuring that no matter what the basic trends of the world economy, there would always be people with money….

That reasoning holds today and their interest in exceptional collector cars is still strong.

Here’s a few figures from a mid-month auction in Carmel, CA:

1930 Alfa Romeo 6C 1750 Gran Sport Spyder $1,107,000
1967 Chevrolet Corvette L88 Competition Convertible $744,000
1972 Porsche 911 2.7 RS Prototype $480,000
1960 Jaguar E2A Le Mans Sports-Racing Two-Seater Prototype $4,957,000
1962 Citroën 2CV Sahara 4×4 $93,600
1939 Talbot-Lago T150 C SS $4,847,000

When a couple cars at auction are pulling in $5 million and a Citroen 2CV that half of us could outrun in flip-flops fetches almost six figures, cash is still flowing for the right vehicles.

Should you rush out today and throw savings at a classic car? Not necessarily. But if
you have something unusual, think carefully. I was at a local restaurant yesterday working on a manuscript and the guy sitting next to me said his grandparents had a 1930s DeSoto and a half-dozen other old cars at their farm. He said they didn’t care about them–thought of them as a burden, something taking up space…. He seemed to think they might unload ‘em as salvage.

There’s still big money in collector cars. Even unrestored cars that look rough can fetch fat stacks if rare enough. If you’ve got one, or a friend or family member does, do some talking and internet searching before parting with it. Could be, just maybe, there’s a guy (or gal) with a full dump truck ready to swing by.

The oldest car in the state has now departed–overseas, apparently, along with the rest of the really old technology that accompanied it.

Built long, long ago–before Henry’s time, or Ransom’s, or even Cugnot’s–in a factory you’d need the Millennium Falcon to reach, if it still exists, this machine was at the Science Museum for ten weeks.

I believe we’ve all seen it before, along with Luke and Obi Wan and R2. Although styled a Land Speeder, and thought to move like a hovercraft, the vehicle actually rides on steel belted radials and steel rims and was moved during its heyday on a long arm like a fair ride. For centuries it was thought lost, until it turned up in some Jawa’s barn and then went into the interplanetary version of Hemmings in an ad touting, “Land Speeder, lo mileage, some blaster scoring, AM/FM/XM/ZZM/RMN230/MindSound/cassette; IonicPhasePulse speakers. Salvage title.”

This is the new owner. I asked him how it ran and he swung his arm and knocked me 40 feet across the room.  I took that to mean it needed some tuning and he may have paid too much.

Mottled together with your first crush, your first bike, your first pet, and those slightly blurry overexposed memories of waiting for the bus as a child, there are magic snapshot impressions of your first car.

You can conjure the names and faces of the people with you when you looked at it and bought it, the first friends you gave a ride to and the first work you did on it. If the smell of your first car could be bottled, you could pick out that olfactory profile from a hundred other blended vinyl and rayon and foam and dust and cologne and cigarette and cocker spaniel scents.

We can no more explain why a particular car stopped us cold in our thoughts than we can articulate why when Susan in the second row smiled, you felt a rush in your chest like a small herd of horses suddenly broke into a run in your ribcage. Cars grab us, reach out with their patina and chrome and yank our minds out of school work or chores or sports thoughts, to set us crafting daydreams at the wheel.

Two cars barged into my teenage head and set up as squatters demanding the right to appear in three dimensions in my parents’ driveway. The first was a yellow ’67 Camaro RS convertible with a black nose stripe and white top. It would sit weekdays at a small industrial park near my house. The second was a green MGB, an early one with wire wheels and a black interior. This one parked at National Liberty Insurance Company down the hill from my neighborhood, a company whose grounds we played on for years, sledding on a grassy hill there in winter, and skateboarding on their perfect asphalt in the summer (this was before we became an ultra-uptight nation, chasing away every potential lawsuit and guarding each piece of private property like the secret to eternal life were stored inside).

Under the wiper blades of each car I placed a note in magic marker offering to buy said vehicle. Neither owner called, yet I became so obsessed with the MGB that I stalked the car one day, venturing to its spot in the National Liberty lot half-hourly until the owner appeared. He was a guy in his late 20s or so—I was 15—and he was politely dismissive. He had just bought it himself to “fix up,” the universal phrase capturing the plans of the old-car buyer until successive breakdowns turn that goal into a “must sell” classified ad.

MGs had their spokes in me and I put out the word that I wanted one. A friend of a friend, older, had a ’71 Midget that my father and I went to look at. It needed a bearing in the transmission and was not really drivable other than to show it would work if fixed. The owner, Craig K—who had got himself an excellent 340 Dart Swinger—gave me a ride and I had to have that car or die. My father was less impressed.

The seller called me a few times to put the pressure on and I was more receptive than my parents. One day, he just brought it over.

There it was. My mother prevailed on my father and I turned over all the money mowing laws and shoveling snow had yielded plus a little more—my mom was a great advocate.

The photo above is the smitten youth, no different from readers here and schemers worldwide, prowling the four-wheeled world from flea-bitten roadside car lots to single-malt auctions where movie stars and billionaires gather to fulfill the very same dreams, forged years earlier when a certain car captures your waking mind and makes you a car nut. Forever.

Was talking with some friends a week or two ago about bees (hornets, wasps) in cars and the surprise they can give you when you climb into something that’s gone unused for a while and stir them up.

Many of you may have seen this photo, which I stumbled across looking for some other information. It’s amazing–so much so it might get your hoax sensors tingling.

I found the picture here, a site that credits Popular Science. Found nothing searching that term, but here’s something from a newspaper site that seems to confirm the story.

There’s a trade-off in the car-writing world. You live in a hole in the ground covered by a tarp, eat Raman noodles for all meals—with frosting on your wedding day, brush with a pine bough, floss with upholstery thread, and get new clothes at a top-shelf store only when a riot removes the windows and distracts the clerks (and the items don’t fit well because it’s hard to try on pants while sprinting through a melee).

The upside is that you get invited to drive some amazing cars. The only caveats are not to stall–because you look like a nitwit, and not to break anything your life’s income couldn’t pay for.

Last Friday, a friend and I were photographing a ’57 Ferrari 250 GT for an upcoming book. After an excellent shoot where we got everything we wanted and then some, the car’s owner asked if I wanted to take a spin.

“Oh, no, the trench and the tarp are all the joys I need….” Not.

We were working on a “blur”—a panning shot with slow shutter speed that put the passing car in focus but made the background and wheels blurry from motion. We got this shot with the owner at the wheel, but since the owner offered a spin in an Italian V-12, the photographer decided to shoot yours truly the same way.

All it took was to go down the road, turn around and come by at maybe 30 miles per hour. And not stall. And not break anything.

Out of the blocks, I worked the pedal well enough to take off, went to a wide stretch down the road and pulled over to hang a U-bee. No side mirror, so you have to check the rearview, then crane your head to confirm. There was a huge tri-axle dump truck up the road.

How fast could that wheeled-mountain move? We were on the clock, so I pulled out. And stalled directly across the road.

Murphy—or his ghostly handmaidens—was on the scene spontaneously to take away the instant tick-over that marked all previous key turnings. The car and I were sitting perfectly square to the oncoming juggernaut. Obeying a physical law solidified by Hollywood action films, the car-across-the-road would not start. Unlike the movies, it was not a glaring Nicholson in the truck cab but a man capable of smiling at, and avoiding, another’s misfortunes. He swung wide, went around, and the Ferrari, on cue, fired right up.

Two quick passes went fine. Isn’t three lucky? Perhaps, if you’re in the Ferrari transmission repair business. Ignoring the voice that says, “well done, now pull over before something stupid happens,” I made one more pass, pulled into a side street and stopped to double back—and the car would not go into first gear. Little throttle blip, tried the other gears, back to first…nothing. Or rather, two for two–stalling (in front of dump truck) and breaking (gearbox).

I told the owner it wouldn’t find first, so he took the wheel with the same result. When we got back to his driveway, he said it had done this once before and that it returned to normal when the car cooled down.

A couple days later he called and said it was working again, so I reassumed my identity and returned from the remote Alaskan wilderness where I was pretty sure a mailman with a repair bill could not find me.

Next time, when a person with a phenomenal car asks if I’d like to take it for a spin, I think I’ll say….. heck yeah!!

When my brother and I were little kids, there was a museum on the Pennsylvania turnpike called Automobile-o-rama. Every year when we drove from our transplanted home of PA to my parents’ familial home in Minnesota, my brother and I would clamor to stop at this glorious assortment of antique and classic cars.

Classics are certainly great–and fast and stylish and sexy–but there’s something uniquely appealing in the oldest cars–the wild horseless carriages entrepreneurs created out of buggy parts and engine technology emerging in the railroad and agricultural environs.

My friend Tom, who runs an old-school engine shop in Blaine, has been after me for a couple years to join him in viewing the cars on the New London to New Brighton run. The Brass-Era car event mimics with “New” its otherwise namesake event in England, the London to Brighton run.

The cars hit their halfway point in Buffalo, where the local school provides a nice big parking lot to stage the cars for an adoring crowd scurrying with cameras, as well as a large, comfortable cafeteria for burgers, brats, or hot dogs and a little rest out of the sun.

These cars are inventions and works of art. Something about their craftsmanship, curves, stately leather and brass and tall antiquated wood-spoke wheels sets youthful minds dreaming. These machines changed the way this nation’s European-American immigrants lived, opening up our vast nation to travel for pleasure and widespread settlement.

We’ve all seen Brass Era cars in movies. Hearing and seeing them run live, in three dimensions, increases the thrill fivefold.

These huffing, chuffing, air and water-cooled, gas and steam powered, chain-driven relics have a charm somehow lost on the modern automobile. Lucky attendees saw cars by REO, Ford, Maxwell, Franklin, Stanley (Steamer), Brush, Buick, Cadillac, Duro, Le Zebre, International Harvester Company, Locomobile, Overland, Schacht and others.

Most visitors to this blog have dreamed of unleashing a Cobra or Vette or GT40 or Offy-powered sprint car on a well-kept racetrack. Amazing how these cars that competed with actual horses prompt a different dream–pulling on a pair of gloves and chugging down a country road with your best gal by your side, rarely exceeding the pace of a high-end golf cart.

This event may have you peering at barns in a completely different way, hoping that a car that tops out at fifty sleeps inside instead of one that throws down three times that top end.

This is a wonderful automotive celebration–one created for drivers and mechanics and adventurers.

When next August rolls around, track down the dates for the New London to New Brighton run and bring the family. Believe me, you’ll fall in love with these cars.