For all its road-going
embarrassments (just think Mercury Grand
Marquis), we’re sure the U.S. car industry
considers the late ‘70s a time ripe for some Stalinist revisionism. Here was
the era when formerly broad-shouldered U.S. cars first sought a cheap way
of competing with their Japanese counterparts by adopting bizarre aspects of their nipi-zoid styling. It was also an era when GM
diesels smoked and chattered like tipsy mahjong groups, and every make in the
General's lineup from Chevrolet to Cadillac sported a model big enough to fit a
heli-pad on its rear deck. Not that Ford was any better. Nor Chrysler. Remember
the Lincoln Versailles? Or the Corinthian-leather-lined Chrysler Cordoba? “It’s
amazing how well your 1979 Ford Granada compares to our Mercedes-Benz,” said
the German engineers in a FoMoCo ad. Maybe – but just try getting some hot girl in
bed because you drove one. Small wonder then some of us chose this time to remember what
cars used to look like by going to antique car shows.
Of course, antique car shows have their own set
of trim levels, the most famous being the Concours d’Elegances traditionally
held on lawns not unfamiliar with polo
ponies. These are generally held at automobile shows or after racing competitions.
Notable Concours d'Elegances include the Pebble Beach
Concours d'Elegance, the Meadow Brook
Concours d'Elegance, the Amelia
Island Concours d'Elegance, and the Louis Vuitton Classic in midtown
Manhattan. It’s at
these where you’re most likely to see a blindingly perfect maroon-on-black 1954
Facel Vega FVS, a surpassingly mint postwar MG TC or a 1961 Maserati
Quattroporte looking as it might appear in the mind of God.
Then there the far more familiar antique and
classic car show that the rest of us
flock to at raceways, speedways, county fairgrounds, or – as we recall the last
one attended – the parking lot of a strip mall.
This thing came and went like a
summer storm, or some evanescent, internet-generated meet-up. We don’t
know whether or not the fact that this was a strip mall with a strip club
had anything to do with it, but here the cars seemed to flaunt their
work-in-progress states of imperfection while the sun glinted off chrome-plated
cylinder heads and furled tail-pipe extensions. Here was a bathtub Hudson
(rather than one of the old Porsches you'd find at a true concours bearing the same lavatory-related sobriquet) with an
interior as ramshackle as depression-era pool hall, and there a
roll-bar-equipped Chevy II Nova still spotted with primer. On the far end of the lot stood a vehicle that looked like it resulted from an abomination occurring between an AutoCar Diesel and a Dodge LaFemme. Needless to say it
was waay ugly; but this was no Concours – and we weren't there to judge.