They may find you a strange figure in your area. Always brush, every free minute in the garage to tinker with that old car. Why don't you just buy a new Kia and take a hobby like normal people have? Fortunately, you are not alone when such nonsense is thrown at you. You have allies and some are unknown, but just very famous.
Take Jay Leno. For years the number one in American late evening television with the Tonight Show. They don't get much better than the man with the big chin. Leno has a garage full of cars that vary from rather odd such as his beloved Stanley Steamer to enviously awesome. Think of a McLaren F1, Lotus Elan and Lamborghini Miura.
Now Jay could of course keep all that beauty to himself. A man has the right to experience his hobby in peace. As a troubled classic lover, you know all about it. But the talk show presenter also likes to make videos in his free time. He does that on jaylenosgarage.com and takes us in his most beautiful cars.
The latter will have been difficult to choose, but the most recent films include a topic about Leno's heavily modified Jaguar E-type. Applicable in the year that this big cat celebrates its fiftieth anniversary. The format of the videos is always the same. Jay shows the car in his far too well-stocked garage, talks to someone who has restored the car for him and then goes on the road. In the E-type, he summarizes the motivation for his passion - if you have to have it - well. "As a child I could never have dreamed that I would ever have such a car." End of discussion for me.
httpv: //www.youtube.com/watch? v = a_KnFsV5Zvc & feature = related
Do you prefer to look for your classical allies among the intellectually more accepted? No problem. Nick Mason is also crazy about old cars: Pink Floyd's drummer. You know the band that made musical milestones such as Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You were Here. Albums that even the most hardened VPRO member runs away with. A member of that group does nothing better in his spare time than tearing into old racing cars.
httpv: //www.youtube.com/watch? v = pONr1xkQxko
He explains it himself in an American film in which the camera moves around part of his collection. We see a pre-war Bentley, Ferrari 512S and Porsche 962. Mason also gives a wonderful summary of his love for these cars. "They are not classics for me, but metaphors for periods in my life," said the Brit. “From the Bentley in which I saw my father racing to the cars with which I participated in Le Mans. I could have gone to the drink or drugs, but this is what made me addicted. "
That Mason not only talks about it, but really knows what he is doing, is demonstrated by a video made this year at the Goodwood Festival of Speed. The drummer / hobby racer drags a replica of a pre-war Auto Union racer smoothly up the hill of Lord March. The tufts of intermediate gas will still be reverberating with the man who used the camera.
httpv: //www.youtube.com/watch? v = 6KmpSVphsI8
Now, to be fair, Jay Leno and Nick Mason may not be the men you would shut your teenage daughter up to. It may even be difficult to convince your wife with these two graying gentlemen. But it's not just people in their fifties and sixties who are like us. Lovers of beautiful and old can also be found closer to home and in the group of young and hip. Former soap star and now full-time hunk Chris Zegers, for example, also loves old cars. He had or has one Alfa Romeo GTV Bertone for daily use and also likes to race with old Porsches on a regular basis.
httpv: //www.youtube.com/watch? v = Jbi_cDui6J8
For the introduction of his own State Racing team, Zegers had a nice video made of his 911. We will not complain that he cut up the opening scenes of Steve McQueen's masterpiece Le Mans. He shows that Chris is more than a nice head with a helmet on during the historic races in the center of Copenhagen, where he has a verve of Porsche from the collection of textile magnate Albert Westerman. In the same video we also see Jan Lammers and Gijs van Lennep enjoying a classic Corvette and 911 respectively.
You see, if Jay, Nick, Chris, Jan and Gijs like it, there can be nothing wrong with it?