I was watching the British Grand Prix a week or so ago and the camera panned to a small boy holding up a sign that said It’s hammertime Lewis. This was a home crowd for British driver Lewis Hamilton who is generally considered the best race car driver in the world – as an aside, I say British but I am not sure of the British/English rules, so I only suppose he is British and not English. I once introduced Marion Kaplan, Michele’s cousin who was born in England, as English. Later she corrected me, saying It is not like America where you are American if you are born there, I am British, not English. She went on to explain that English means one’s heritage is English and her heritage is eastern European. End aside – but Hamilton is a crowd favorite almost everywhere.
When I was a boy/man getting interested in cars and racing, my hero was Stirling Moss who was pasty English white guy and my President was primarily Eisenhower, another pasty white guy. Today, my idol would probably be Lewis Hamilton – well, duh! even as an adult, he is – and my president would be Barack Obama, two black guys. I keep thinking how much different this would be growing up than when I was a kid.
“There’s a great opening line in a book called The Go-Between, which I often quote: The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.” Denise McCluggage.
Denise McCluggage, ski-racer, racecar-driver, and writer extraordinary, died a couple of days ago at 88 and, as I sit here, I am tearing up. Both for her and for a lost world that I am a little ashamed I feel so attached to. It is hard to talk about Denise McCluggage without talking about that lost world that she embraced and defied with talent, humor, and enthusiasm. It was a world dominated by White Anglo-Saxon Men, so entitled that it seemed like the natural order of things. It was the world before Nixon lost to Kennedy, the world of the first season of Mad Men. It was also a time when few enough women wanted to be equal to men that they were not a threat and McCluggage was often the only woman in the room.
Denise McCluggage was born in small-town Kansas in 1927, became a writer for the San Francisco Chronicle in its heyday, and dirt track auto racer after graduating summa cum laude from Mills College in Oakland. She moved back east to race sports cars big time and backed into becoming a publisher of Autoweek. She moved to Europe to race and write about racing and, in the process, she hung out with the best drivers in the world. McCluggage never made much money but she always lived life on her terms, enthusiastically and fully.
She was a suburb skier and an even better driver, but I remember Denise McCluggage as a sports writer before there were women sportswriters. She was a great storyteller and probably the best way to talk about her is to let her do the talking.
Originally, I’d ride around Europe with Phil Hill, who got a new Beetle every year. I was headquartered in Modena like most everyone else. Then I got an Alfa Romeo Giulietta, which I raced, including at the Nürburgring. I don’t remember what happened to it, but I went back to bumming rides. I had gone up to the Nürburgring with Alejandro De Tomaso and Isabel Haskell, because I was sharing an O.S.C.A. there with Isabel. The car broke in practice. Henry Manney III offered me a ride to Stuttgart, where I could wait for Isabel to put my passport on the Rapido train from Modena. I had suddenly realized I’d left it in my helmet bag, which I’d stowed in the race car.
So I hung out in Stuttgart for several days, and I visited Mercedes, and then Porsche to see my friend Huschke von Hanstein. There, he had a Porsche 356 just back from a show somewhere. It had an unheard-of electric sunroof and knock-off hubs. It could not be sold in Germany, because knock-off hubs were illegal for street use. He suggested I buy it. Like every other time I bought a car, I had exactly enough money in the bank to cover it–in this case, $3,000 (1959, remember?). I never thought that now I had nothing left. There was always something else down the road. Unfortunately, I’m still like that. By the time my passport arrived, I’d bought the Porsche and was ready to head for Modena.
She was sensitive and funny. The world will miss her, I already miss her, so here is one more sample, writing about Saudi women not being able to drive:
I felt the depth of the cultural abyss one day in the south of Yugoslavia when I was doing the Liege-Sofia-Liege rally in the mid-’60s. I was driving a Ford Cortina with Anne Hall, and we’d been caught in the momentary aspic of some crowded village near the Albanian border. The population was heavily Muslim. Few women were in the crowd and those few were swathed head to toe in black. Only their eyes were visible. At one curving junction, we stopped again for hand carts, bicycles, and trucks to clear. A nearby post of black slowly turned and stared wide-eyed directly at me–interrupted perhaps in her usual lowered-eyes mode by the fact that she had seen a woman–driving a car.
I starred back, in stunned awareness of an odd coincidence: the shape of our windshield and the shape of the eye-opening in her black covering were the same extended oval. We two women, probably having arrived on this planet at close to the same time and in much the same way–kicking, naked and wet–now looked through similar ovals on very different worlds. The brief but somehow endless moment broke. We turned back to our diverse worlds. I, the Woman Driver. She, the eyes-only mystery.
symbiosis: a relationship between two people or groups that work with and depend on each other Merriam-Webster
parasite: a person or thing that takes something from someone or something else and does not do anything to earn it or deserve it Merriam-Webster
Last Sunday morning I went to our local shopping center – if you can call a parking lot with a market, a nursery/gift shop, an art/framing store, several banks, three restaurants, and a coffee shop; a shopping center – to see a, sort-of Car Show. Car Show may be way too grand, what this was, were some cars parked in a parking lot. What makes it different from an average Walmart parking lot is that the cars were, by and large, unusual.
Circa 1967 Alfa Romeo DuettoRolls Royce (I’m going to guess early 30’s)McLaren 650S
When I was in High School, I went to my first car show, the first Hillsborough Concours d’Elegance. Two of my friends actually had their cars in the Concours, one was a 1950 Ford Hotrod and one was a Morris Minor Coupe. Last year, the winner of the Hillsborough Concours d’Elegance was an immaculately restored 1938 Talbot Lago T150C Figoni et Falaschi; my friends cars obviously would not have made the grade. But even today, they would be interesting cars, cherished by their owners. Up until recently, they would have had no place to show them off, but that is starting to change.
I first heard about what is now known as Cars and Coffee – or Cars & Croissants in its more pretentious form – about ten years ago when Malcolm Pearson’s cousin-in-law mentioned going to one in Orange County. Now they seem to be popping up everywhere. The idea is that the owners – with their cars – meet on a Saturday or Sunday morning, in a parking lot that has a coffeehouse, and anybody who is interested can drop by to ogle and talk cars.
Maserati Khamsin, Audi RS4, Deuce RoadsterHonda N600, Honda Z600, Honda Z600 (I’m not sure if this is accurate and I even had one)Circa 1966 Ford GT40 replica, 1955 Chevrolet BelAirPorsche type 550 Spyder – Beck replica
Some of the cars are outstanding but not prepared enough for a official concours, like the Maserati Khamsin above. Some are outstanding but not concours material, like the Audi RS4, a somewhere around 500 horsepower factory hotrod that looks like a regular A4 to the casual observer. Some are not particularly good cars but are still interesting to anybody who is interested, like the Hondas above. And some are replicas of cars that would be in a concours if they were real.
The replicas look like the real thing and are often just as interesting in their own way. After a typical Porsche 550 Spyder was no longer competitive as a racecar – in, say, 1960 – it was not worth very much. They were much simpler cars than a contemporary street Porsche and not very practical as transportation, still they would be great fun to occasionally take out on a crisp fall morning and play in the leaves, as I once read in a book on driving race cars on the street. But, now they sell for north of $3.5 million and that just seems ludicrous. Beck came along and made replicas with newer Volkswagen engines that were faster and more reliable, sold for somewhere around twenty grand, and were just as enjoyable, if not more so. But nobody is going to let one in the Hillsborough Concours d’Elegance – yet – so here it is. The Ford GT40 is roughly the same situation, only on a more expensive scale.
When I started this post, I wanted to make the Beck/Porsche relationship symbiotic but, in telling Richard Taylor about the cars, he pointed out that the Beck/Porsche relationship isn’t really symbiotic because, while the Beck replica depends on the Porsche 550 Spyder price becoming astronomical, the Porsche doesn’t depend on the Beck. Then I thought maybe it could be considered a parasitical relationship but, while the Beck does feed off of the Porsche to a certain extent, parasitical doesn’t quite describe it. Still, I like The Good, The Bad, and The Symbiotic as a headline and want to keep it, so I looked around for another example to allow me to keep the headline.
A relationship that does fit is between the circumstances that led to the gourmet food truck. In the collapse of 2008, construction – especially residential construction – was one of the biggest losers. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Construction employment fell by 1.5 million during the December 2007–June 2009 recession. By 2007, most guys working in the field were buying their lunch from food trucks – affectionately known as roach coaches – and, as the construction industry collapsed, the roach coach biz collapsed with it. That resulted in lots of food trucks being taken back by lenders. At the same time, restaurants were laying off scores of very qualified cooks.
In November 2008, Roy Choi, a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America, and Mark Manguera bought a well used roach coach and converted it to Kogi BBQ, an Asian Mexican fusion restaurant on wheels. They say they were peddling $2.00 Korean barbecue tacos on the streets of L.A., but, really they were selling cheap gourmet food from a food truck. This would not have happened without the happy – for us – availability of used food trucks and out of work gourmet cooks.
As I was thinking about symbiotic and parricidal relationships, I couldn’t help but think of Walmart and the U. S. Government. Walmart doesn’t pay enough for their employees to live on. As an aside, when I say employees, I don’t mean the top executives, C. Douglas McMillon, the President and CEO, had a total compensation of $25.6 million last year and that is enough for anyone to live on. End aside. The average sales associate, however, got $8.86 per hour, or a salary of $17,841, according to Walmart. That is not enough to support a family, but it is low enough to qualify for Food Stamps in most cases. It seems that Walmart is only able to get people to work at that low pay because those same people can get government assistance (now including government subsidized health insurance). According to Americans for Tax Fairness, Walmart employees get about $6.2 billion annually in mostly federal taxpayer subsidies. If you are still looking for Reagan’s, Cadillac driving welfare queen, look no further, it is the parricide, Walmart.
In a comment on the Art of Bugatti post, Michele made the very good point that a lot of Bugattis, including all the existing Royales, have bodies designed by outside coachbuilders. But Bugatti did make complete cars, in a variety of flavors, as the picture above can attest to. Still, when almost everybody says Bugatti, they mean Ettore Bugatti, Le Patron, and the art of his machinery. However, some of the most beautiful Bugatti bodies were designed by Jean Bugatti, Ettore’s son.
Jean Bugatti was born in Germany in 1909 just as the making of automobiles started changing from backyard tinkerers to actual companies. Almost all the companies were the progeny of hard-driving egomaniacs who, of course, usually named the company after their own magnificent selves. Think Henry Ford, or the Swiss racecar driver turned engineer, Louis Chevrolet, or the Duesenberg brothers, former bicycle and, then, motorcycle racers. Some got rich enough to join the 1%, some were always on the edge of bankruptcy, like the Duesenberg brothers, but they were all Alpha Males. Jean’s father was one of the Alphaist of them all.
Our collective myth is that powerful men produce weak sons and I suspect that it is usually true. As an aside, one notable exception is the Rothschild family with three generations of Alpha Males. By the third generation, the family was rich enough to finance the British purchase of the Suez Canal and Japan’s war with Russia, End aside.
In this case, Jean Bugatti was as talented as his father and became very influential while he was still young. He was only 18 when he designed his first car. It was a two seat coupe in what is known as the Fiacre style (to save you the trouble of googling Fiacre which I had to do, it is a small, horse-drawn, carriage).
Photo by Michael Furman, courtesy Mullin Automotive Museum
By the time Jean Bugatti was 20, he designed one of the all-time, classic Bugattis, the Type 46 Semiprofié (from Fiacre to Semiprofié in two years seems like a steep learning curve to me).
During the 1930’s, Jean Bugatti became a bigger influence on his father and Bugattis became more modern for it. By 1935, at the age of 26, Jean designed the Bugatti Type 57 SC Atlantic.
Bugatti Type 57 SC Atlantic
This was, in almost every way, a modern car. It was low, lightweight, had a straight eight, double overhead cam engine, hydraulic brakes, and could go 130 miles per hour. The prototype which was made of Electron, an alloy of magnesium and aluminum, no longer exists. As an aside, one story is that, because the Electron was so flammable, the prototype had the ridges on the fenders and over the top to hold the parts together, thinking that the actual holding together problem would be solved later. The car was shown to Lord Philippe de Rothschild who was looking for a suitable car for his college bound son and he was told that the ridges would be removed, Rothschild said that he wanted the car but he liked the ridges and wanted them to stay. End aside.
Only three more Atlantics were made – although a total of 710 Type 57s were made with other bodies – one Atlantic was destroyed when it was hit by a train, was re-manufactured, and is now owned by Nicolas Seydoux (who Business Week says is very, very, rich). One of the 57 SC Atlantics is owned by Ralph Lauren, and the last one, the 57 SC pictured here, the Rothschild car, is now owned by Peter Mullin in whose museum it resides. As another aside, the blue metallic color matches the original color which got its metallic sheen from ground-up fish-scales. End aside.
On August 11, 1939, Jean Bugatti was testing a racing version of the 57 SC. The car was often referred to as The Tank because of its streamlined body shape and it had won the 24 Hour Le Mans race in June of that year. It was a hot afternoon, all the better to check the cooling on the streamlined car – and Bugatti had arranged to close a section of the road near the factory. Unknown to everybody involved, a bicyclist somehow got onto the road – the stories vary as to how, it may have been a postman cutting across the road or a drunk that didn’t heed the closure signs – and Jean Bugatti, traveling at a speed somewhere in excess of 125 miles per hour – swerved to avoid him. The car hit the trees along the side of the road and Jean Bugatti was killed almost instantly.
The hopes and future of Bugatti died with him, all that was left were unfinished drawings, unexecuted ideas, and a broken-hearted father. Three weeks later, World War II started and Bugatti never built another meaningful car (Volkswagen has built some very nice cars under the Bugatti name, but they were not really Bugattis).
As a Postscript, Malcolm Pearson and I have had several discussions on very rich people and their cars, which we are allowed to ogle. Malcolm is …well, here, let him tell you in his own words: I for one am grateful to those One Percenters for sharing their beautiful toys with us. Each one of those fabulous cars is a museum, each one of the owners a curator. In the case of Peter Mullin and the Mullin Automobile Museum, I completely agree, especially in regards to the last Jean Bugatti design.
The last chassis designed by Jean was the Type 64 and three were built; however, only two of the three had bodies the day be died. Somehow, Peter Mullins acquired the remaining bare chassis. He decided to have a body made for his new chassis and after a couple of years, thinking about it, decided to have it done in the style of Jean Bugatti based on some preliminary sketches. Then to make it more authentic – and harder and much more expensive – he decided to use the same materials and techniques that would have been done in 1939.
He found a coachbuilder, Kleeves Automobile Metal Shaping, near Detroit that did various concept cars and they found a 1940s hammer press used by the General Motors Tech Center. Using mahogany forms, sheet aluminium was formed into a new, old car. Well, an almost car. The project is not finished and may never be finished. The chassis is exquisite with aluminium beams riveted together, wonderful sand cast aluminium mechanicals, and a double overhead cam, straight-eight engine, with all the distinctive Bugatti details. For a long time, the chassis sat by itself in the Museum and covering it must have begun to seem like sacrilege. Now the unpainted, hand-made, aluminium body levitates over Jean Bugatti’s last work of art; for us to admire.
I was watching the British Grand Prix a week or so ago and the camera panned to a small boy holding up a sign that said It’s hammertime Lewis. This was a home crowd for British driver Lewis Hamilton who is generally considered the best race car driver in the world – as an aside, I say British but I am not sure of the British/English rules, so I only suppose he is British and not English. I once introduced Marion Kaplan, Michele’s cousin who was born in England, as English. Later she corrected me, saying It is not like America where you are American if you are born there, I am British, not English. She went on to explain that English means one’s heritage is English and her heritage is eastern European. End aside – but Hamilton is a crowd favorite almost everywhere.
