classic cars

I had always wanted to drive a good ole Detroit muscle car.

Any from the Golden Age in the mid-to-late sixties would have done, but by preference a second generation Dodge Charger R/T: Bill Hickman’s car in Bullitt, Vin Diesel’s in Fast and Furious and the real star of The Dukes of Hazzard, the General Lee.

Warner Brothers had a fleet of twenty-odd General Lees for the 2005 movie, but some were just shells and many were trashed in filming. Aside from wrecks, there are apparently three survivors. I got the chance to drive one of them on a circuit.

It was parked in the pits, dwarfing a modern Camaro. The ’69 Charger is a great big brute of a car: seventeen feet by six and a half, as long and as wide as a builder’s van, but with a seven-litre V8 under what I suppose I ought to call the hood.

The driver’s door closed with an undamped clunk. (At least it was not welded shut.) The black vinyl interior was as battered and bruised as you would expect in a car built back in the year that Nixon was inaugurated, Neil Armstrong walked on the moon and Marvin Gaye Heard it through the Grapevine. It had the faint smell of old oil and unburned petrol which seems always to cling to classic cars.

There were big austere gauges, ringed with chrome, for speed and RPM, a row of smaller ones for fuel, battery charge, oil temperature and pressure, and a few clunky rocker switches for lights and wipers and such like. There was only a lap belt; and the steering wheel was a thin-rimmed wooden thing with three alloy spokes and a big fat boss in the middle. Health and safety had not yet been invented in 1969.

I pressed the brake pedal experimentally and it sank to the floor as if air had got into the system, but that was apparently normal. The steering wheel rocked a couple of inches in either direction before it thought about telling the roadwheels. That was normal, as well.

At idle speed, the General Lee krob-krob-krobbed like a fighter plane from the Second World War. I clicked the gear selector into Drive and moved out onto the track and the V8 snarled and settled into a staccato growl.

The General lurched into the first corner and drifted across to the other side of the track as a drunk might weave home from a late-night bar. It handled the way that a motorboat handles, but I ought to have expected that. Even in Bullitt, with a professional stunt driver at the wheel, the Charger tumbled round corners with all the finesse of a barrel which has bounced off the back of a truck.

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But then I was on the kind of straight which muscle cars were built for and buried the accelerator into the carpet and the General surged forward with the angry roar of a sorely provoked V8 – an awesome sound. Driving it hard on the straight was like surfing down stairs: exhilarating but tempered by the growing worry about what to do when you get to the end.

I braked hard coming into the corner, earlier than I would in a modern car but later than I ought to have done, and it slowed at its leisure and I managed not to lock up the wheels (it doesn’t even have disc brakes, let alone ABS), then flung it towards the apex with a wobble and screech and let it ride across the track and lumber through the chicane.

With each lap, I got a little more confident, learned when to brake and how hard, when to floor it, when to ease off, and how to roll with the weight shift. I got used to the way that it wallowed into corners and stumbled out, wobbling like a fat man promenading down the Las Vegas Strip. It would be terrifying to drive it fast on the roads – at any rate, on narrow, twisty European roads – but it was a lot of fun on a circuit once I knew what to expect, and even more fun to accelerate down the straights, and oh my God the sound!

Then, eventually, I had to give it back and reluctantly walked away.

© Richard Senior 2016

An ancient Beetle, firing on two or three cylinders and with more holes than exhaust, snapped, crackled and popped down Calle De San Pedro.

The diabolical sound echoed between the walls, shattered the peace, outraged the feral dogs which spend their days padding round town and dozing in the shade. For each one that set off barking, another three responded. Those closest ran, barking, after the Beetle, trying and failing to bite its tyres; reinforcements bounded from nearby streets, barging aside old ladies who shouted in protest.

I saw the Beetle again later in the day, parked with its windows left open and doors unlocked, the bodywork slumped on its shot rear suspension. The engine cover was held on with twisted wire; kitchen foil had been crumpled into the hole where the speedo wasn’t; the front wings had been painted in household emulsion, with a brush.

There are classic cars everywhere in Colonia del Sacramento in the southwestern corner of Uruguay. Many – like the Beetle – are everyday runabouts. Others sit at the side of the road in the middle of town, apparently abandoned; some have been made into features.

There is a rare, century-old Model T pick-up outside a restobar. They rest their menu boards against it and store firewood in the back. Restored, it might fetch US$40,000 on the international market, but then where would the restobar lean its boards?

The popular café, El Drugstore, on Plaza de Armas, has a collection of old cars. There is a Model A Ford built sometime around 1930, which they have cut the side out of and turned into an intimate table for two. Behind it, painted in the same matt black, is a Citroen Traction Avant from the Forties, which they use as a planter: fronds erupt from the windows and boot. Round the corner is an Austin 10 from the late 1930’s, in fair condition and not – as yet – converted into anything whimsical.

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Another Model A – a station wagon – has seemingly been forgotten under sycamore trees on the edge of the old town; its white paint is blackened and sticky with sap. All the doors were open when I passed it early one morning, presumably so the dogs could jump in to sleep. They were closed again an hour later, although the streets were still silent and the windows all around still shuttered.

On a quiet corner, shaded by trees, down near the yacht club, there is a Morris Oxford from the 1950s under a thick layer of dust. Much of its paint has flaked off, but the body has not rusted in that temperate climate, as it would have done half a century ago in the soggy country in which it was built.

A Ford Pop of similar vintage is displayed as a conceptual artwork down a side street off the main drag of Avenida General Flores. There are tags sprayed on one door and the boot and six-foot papier-mache fish in the front seats.

There were still Vauxhall Chevettes on the road in Britain when I was a kid. Shove-its, we called them. They were laughable old bangers even then. I had not seen one for years, but saw at least half a dozen in Colonia, along with other European cars from the Sixties and Seventies which I never even knew existed: a Peugeot 404, a Fiat 600 (a bit like the iconic Cinquecento, but with all the charm engineered out), and a very rusty Fiat 124, which I mistook for the virtually identical Lada.

There were Ford and Chevrolet pick-up trucks built before Eisenhower was sworn-in as President, yet still looking surprisingly fresh. There were better Beetles than the one which had upset the dogs in the morning.

I have seen it suggested on several sites that Colonia’s classic cars are a legacy of economic collapse in the Sixties: that a people once rich enough on wool and beef to import new cars from Europe and the United States suddenly found themselves having to make the old ones last much longer. I am not at all convinced, though. That could, perhaps, explain the Morris Oxfords and Ford Pops, but not the Model A’s and Austin 10’s, nor, for that matter, the Chevettes.

Besides, other Latin American countries saw their economies trashed in the second half of the twentieth century; several, like Uruguay, ended up ruled by noxious dictatorships. But with the obvious exception of embargoed Cuba, none has the abundance of classic cars you see in Colonia del Sacramento.

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Travel – Adventure – Food

Driving the General Lee

The Curious Classics of Colonia