Automotive

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Get in your car and drive! A lost weekend in Los Angeles.

In Los Angeles on business, the Friday afternoon meeting over ran, and I was stranded in the city of angels until Sunday evening. Made some calls and found some friends were in town. One of them had a new toy!





The car and the American city have grown hand in hand. Think about it – what other country needs a car to exist. Sure, most countries have a passion for cars, but in America, you NEED a car. The distance just to get from one part of the city to the other is vast. Los Angeles from one furthest point to the other is now 70 miles. There is always movement. There are always cars on the Interstate. So it is no surprise to learn that cars still figure strongly in the psyche of the Angelinos. Car enthusiasts are there, from every walk of life, and every persuasion; that common bond: the internal combustion engine and the horseless carriage!



California’s development is intertwined with the motor car! Think of literature or film. Jack Kerouac, the beatnik in the Foreward of Robert Frank’s ‘The Americans’: “Madroad driving men ahead – the mad road, lonely, leading around the bend into the openings of space towards the horizon… coast of blue Pacific starry night – nobone half-banana moons sloping in the tangled night sky, the torments of great formations in the mist, the huddled invisible insect in the car racing onward…” “Car shrouded in fancy expensive designed tarpolian.. to keep soots of no-soot Malibu from falling on the new simonize job … all under palm trees for nothing in the cemeterial California night.” George Lucas and the California cruise in American Graffiti, or James Dean gladiatorial contest in East of Eden. Cars were built for, and named after California: from Enzo Ferrari, to the royalty of Detroit Michigan.


[Your very own rocket ship to the future! The cruise machine for the interstate to take you to a new world! The incomparable ’59 Caddy]


[American customization at its best: true Americana in car design]


[It looks Italian – designed by Scaglietti – but the car is a Chevrolet! Designed for Americans who wanted the muscle power, but were attracted by Italian styling!]

I spent Saturday at two of Los Angeles motor institutions: “Cars and coffee” down in Irvine (the original and arguably still the best: irvine.carsandcoffee.info ). Car enthusiasts come from all over Los Angeles to simply park, talk, view cars between each other. They come in all shapes, sizes, and ages for that matter. From restored gems from the 1930’s and 40’s, to the very latest speed machines that drove to the meeting (at the regulated speed limit of course).





The crowd I met with were meeting at a garage up on Sunset (about where it crosses with Fairfax). From there, side roads and the I-405 will get you down to the point in Irvine where the I-5 meets the I-405 and that is where you will find Cars and Coffee. Although the start time (around 5am) is a little grueling with or without jet lag, there is something to be said for driving Sunset Boulevard in the early hours of the morning, with almost no other traffic around, and hearing the revs from the engine sing their song of corners and straight. It was the same road through Beverly Hills and BelAir that Clark Gable and Gary Cooper would race their Duesenberg’s; where Jan Berry of 1950’s duo: Jan and Dean nearly died and was immortalized in “Dead Man’s Curve”. Where Sunset meets the I-405, you turn onto the freeway, and its steady hum of the engine down to Irvine as the sunrise sets your course of east by south-east.





The Cars and Coffee meet is a congenial affair and pretty much like any GTG that Purists’ might organize. Only the toys are bigger and so are the number of people. Ideas are discussed, possible deals are done, and one driver enthusiast learns from the other. It is something to see so many exotic and classic cars all assembled in one place and that it happens each week is testimony to the passion of car enthusiasts in southern Cal.



The other part of the day was spent up at the Petersen Automotive Museum (http://petersen.org/). A Los Angeles institution for the past 60 years, the museum is a celebration of the automobile and in particular, the automobile in American life. I had the chance to see some unique and special cars: cars that were the pre-cursors to so much of the design work that evolved the car over the last 50 years.



From the 1950’s and the designs of Bertone, Scaglietti, and Zagato, the car evolved in form to witness the 1970 Bertone Stratos 1. Like any new paradigm, it took time to be accepted. The lines of Stratos led to the Lancia of the same name with the same wedge shape styling. But it could be argued that the design lines go even further. How can you not see the more recent lines from Lamborghini (Gallardo and Avendor) without also seeing the Bertone Stratos It was design genius.




[More than avant garde: the LED lighting panels have only recently found their way into production cars.]



It was a great weekend and my thanks to the friends who managed to carve out the time to drive around the city. If cars are your ‘thing’, next time you are stuck in LA, get a car (you can hire just about any car you can imagine in LA) and drive! Good times and many thanks.









And the incomparable Fiat 8V: brilliance in design and engineering.



Andre