Yahoo Autos Loving Ugly Cars Comes Easy for Me
Beat to hell, used-up, chunked, rotting junk isn't better than gleaming perfection. It's just that ugly is almost always more interesting.
Abel Morales drove his 1985 Mazda RX-7 past my house here in Santa Barbara the other day. But 'drove' is an understatement. He roared past with the guttural growl of a big V-8 under that flyweight sports car's hood. It's an ugly mongrel with patchy paint, missing body parts, no dash, and a front license plate held on with zip ties. It's anti-social, brutal and to all appearances, ludicrously dangerous. God knows, I loved it instantly.
I chased him down and got him to stop outside a hotel for an interrogation. The engine is a pink-painted GM LS2 6.0-liter V-8 out of a late-model Pontiac GTO, there's a TH400 three-speed automatic transmission behind that which in turn feeds the stock rear axle. "You'll blow that rear-end up sooner rather than later," I told him sagely. "Nah," he replied, 'it just spins the tires. It could only break if the car ever hooked up.'
The single most encouraging trend in the automotive zeitgeist is an appreciation for piles of crap. Not pretend 'patina' that's used to cloak pristine high-tech machinery, nor junkyard-bound rust sculptures, but cars and trucks that have lived long, full lives and those lives are continuing without the erasure of history that comes with a restoration.
Last Saturday I decided to drive down to Long Beach about 115 miles south of Santa Barbara to attend 'Toyotafest.' The best thing about this particular car show is that it doesn't yet take itself too seriously. So alongside perfectly preserved Celicas and six-figure restored FJ Land Cruisers, there are grotty MR2s, molted Cressidas, and insane Starlets. This isn't Pebble Beach where rich people wearing seersucker suits sip from champagne flutes while swapping misinformation about Hispano-Suizas and Horches. This is the multi-ethnic mélange of flip-flop wearing Southern California brought together at dinky Marina Green Park by an appreciation for the mass-produced vehicles of the world's largest car maker.
But it was during the drive down that I saw my favorite car of the day; a cruddy VW Squareback with surfboard racks on the roof and plastic shopping bags visible through the windows. All stock, just used hard, and still being used.
That Squareback is on the road because someone is working to keep this slow, old car on the road. Someone is committed to fixing it when it breaks and to keep driving it despite a lack of air conditioning, power windows, radar-based cruise control, lane-keeping technology or Apple CarPlay. Someone has found something worth sustaining under that faded blue paint.
It doesn't take much imagination to conjure an entire history around the dented body panels of that VW. A lifetime of parking lot thwacks, long commutes, family vacations and early morning surf runs. Yeah, I'm reading a lot into a car I saw only for a few moments southbound on the 405 freeway, but that's what's great about old cars that are still being driven.
Back in 1970, Parnelli Jones was driving Bud Moore's Boss 302 Mustang in the Trans Am round a Riverside Raceway. He was punted off by one of the back-markers early in the race and the Ford was wounded-it was dented and the front-end pretty much shot. But Jones applied his ferocious talent to the task before him and was steering the car by bouncing it off the track curbing. He set lap records and won. And the car was trashed. To me, those dents and damage looked so tough. It was a truly ugly win and great history.
That Mustang is still around today. But they fixed it. That sucks.
In 1973 Peter Gregg and Hurley Haywood took the overall win in the 24 Hours of Daytona in a Porsche 911 RSR that, by the end of the race, was totally beat. It looked so cool. They shouldn't have even wiped the bugs off the front bumper. But it's been restored. Damn.
During the 1997 Daytona 500 Dale Earnhardt rolled his Monte Carlo with 12 laps left, but he had it taken off the wrecker, the team taped it back together and he finished five laps down in 31st. That Monte Carlo couldn't have been uglier, but it's part of the Earnhardt legend now.
It's easy to get into a pristine and perfect car. Dealers lease them out to people who don't care about cars every day. They get driven and in three years or so, they're returned with nary a tear. Commodities. But each ugly old car is its own thing sustained by someone who, well, loves it. Who loves its history, its present, and has a vision for its future.
Look again at Abel Morales' RX-7. He's 33, works for a moving company and is married with two kids. He has plenty of responsibilities that should distract him and his bank account from screwing with an old Mazda he bought four years ago for $1300. "This build has been a dedication to my dad," he explains. "Doing this V-8-swapped RX-7 was always my dream. My dad was killed in 2012 and I really wish he could have been here to see this. Because I loved him."
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