Ross Williamson (welcome to the list, Ross!) asks a number of questions
about Land Rovers; well, I've ridden in a Land Rover once, so I'm hardly
an expert on them, but I think they've got more character than a fleet
of Toyota 4x4s, in spite of being about as quick as the boat that carried
them across the ocean. There's more to life than sheer whizzing speed
(well, a little more, anyway.)
His other question, however struck to my heart:
What do the people who are on this mailing list think is so good
about British cars in particular?
There are certainly some ordinary cars, some awful cars, and a lot of
ho-hum cars that have been produced in the British Isles. But what is
so wonderful about Britain is the way small entrepreneurs -- such as
my own personal favorite, Cecil Kimber of MG (and his gifted successors,
Syd Enever and John Thornley) -- were able to make some really wonderful
cars for a small market.
US cars are built on such a vast scale -- and most Japanese cars, and
most modern European cars as well -- that they have to please an equally
vast number of people. And as a famous American president once said,
you can't please all of the people all of the time. Trying to please
everyone usually dilutes the end product for someone. And there's nothing
much diluted about British sports cars (except, in the sad last days of
many of the marques in this country, for their performance).
So what do I like about British cars in particular? Their personality,
in a two-word answer. How do I define their personality? It's the sum
of a lot of details about them, some intentional, some accidental. It's
the weight of all the controls, the feeling of using muscle and sinew to
make the car go.
Interesting that the new Mazda RX-7 ad campaign says that they think
driving a sports car should be more like firing a neuron than like
using a machine. Interesting because my initial feeling for the Miata
(as wonderful as it is in its own ways) was that it didn't feel
mechanical enough -- that is, the efforts of the controls were very
light, the noise from the engine was all from the tailpipe instead
of from the gearbox (and tappets and loose downpipe bolts and etc.);
all in all it felt more like an abstraction of a sports car (albeit a
very competent one) than my very real, very mechanical, 21-year-old
MGB. There's no question in my mind that the Miata is quicker around
an autocross course than the green car, but I haven't sold my MG. (I
*have* fixed some of the, ah, excess of character in the pedals
caused by the clevis pins being worn to the point of looking like little
crankshafts instead of like little smooth bolts without threads...)
So that's one of the things that I like about the English cars I've
owned and driven. They feel more as though they were designed to please
one particular man. And no, I don't mean one particular person, I mean
one particular man; there's a sort of unapologetic masculine character
in the sports-car milieu of the Fifties and Sixties. Not to say that
TeriAnn, Lydia, Judy, or my daughters for that matter don't enjoy MGBs, if
not perhaps as much as I do. (And that last isn't sexism; I don't think
ANYBODY enjoys MGBs as much as I do, and I think all of the women I
mentioned in the last sentence would readily concur. :-) But British sports
cars were generally the result of one man's vision -- Donald Healey,
Cecil Kimber, David Brown, Colin Chapman to name the first who come to
the top of my head -- and they retained individual quirks that mirrored
each man's idiosyncratic view of his ideal sports car, given the money he
could get for the cars he could build. Kimber liked nimble, beautiful
cars that went far faster than their displacement said they should.
Brown liked big, beautiful cars that competed with the best of the world
on the great racetracks of Europe. Healey liked going fast, and he liked
the United States, so he liked understressed engines with overdrive gearing
(the Sprite is a wonderful, improbable anomaly). Chapman was obsessed
with excess weight, even at the expense of durability. And the cars that
these men built are as different in their own ways as the paint spots on a
Seurat painting of a day by the Seine are different from the bold smears
of a van Gogh sunflower, or the swirls of color in a stormy Turner sky.
British sports cars are slightly daffy; one can't help but wonder how an
island with as miserable a climate as Britain's could possibly make such
wonderful, soaring vehicles that are best enjoyed on a sunny day. In a
way, though, where else *but* on an island with such a miserable climate
would the sheer joy of top-down motoring be such a fleeting pleasure,
and therefore one to be savored beyond all imagining?
So what is so good about British cars in particular? It's really, for
me, a question of what it was about Britain between the Thirties and
the Sixties that made it possible for such wonderful cars to come to be?
The worst excesses of British Phlegmsucking Leyland and their predecessors
are as moribund, as ubiquitous and as soulless as the worst products of
Japan or Detroit (if not quite as bad as the French); I'd rather have a
number of Japanese cars than, say, an Austin Allegro or a Montego or a
new Rover (what we call Sterlings in the States). But the classics were
cars that, for the most part, these men went off and made of their own
accord, risking their own finances and reputations and livelihoods (and
in many cases, lives, such as when Donald Healey went 198 MPH in one of
his own cars on the Bonneville Salt Flats) to do something that they
cared very passionately about. And it's that passionate caring that
I respond to in all these cars, what the Spanish call aficion. Nowhere
else on earth did so many cars with so much aficion arise for so little
money.
And their makers often made no money on them, or little money, or lost
fortunes pursuing their dreams. Kimber died disappointed, in a railway
accident at the close of WWII. Donald Healey fared better, but only
after seeing his company sacked by the wretched moneychangers at BL;
at least Healey lived to see his cars become classics, and classics
that are used daily rather than hoarded away out of the light like
rare orchids. But it's been proven, first by General Motors and more
recently by Japan Incorporated, that the best way to make a lot of money
is to offend the fewest possible potential buyers. The best of British
sports cars were, by their sheer existence, an affront to most of the
world, a statement that the owner didn't give a hang for the rest of
the world's feelings on convention, on utility, on luxury, on status,
on practicality, on reliability -- on conformity. People bought MGs
and Lotuses (and, when they could afford them, Aston-Martins) not to
impress the neighbors, but for the sheer sensual joy, the pleasure
unique to the twentieth century, of sports motoring.
Excuse me, I think I'm going to drive home in my MG now.
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