By William Kelly
It got me to thinking. An unusual past time for me I’ll concede but when these glacial processes eventually do take place it is quite often a fairly strong opinion will emerge.
And so it has come to pass. I have… An… Opinion…
As desperate as I am sure you are to read all about what it is that I have to say unfortunately there is always background context that is required.
In this case it is setting the scene. Big question time. It’s the ‘Why are we here?’ loose rationale, the ‘Why do we do this?’ philosophical talking points, that cut to the very core of the central tenet of our ‘religion’ – and it is of course: Why are we petrolheads?
Yes. I know. Shudder. Gasp. Nervous twitches and hushed silences…
But it is important. It is perhaps the most important question about the love/hate relationship that we have with cars – the crux, the alpha and the omega of what driving cars is all about. Many will say it’s freedom – the ability to simply get in and go somewhere other than where you are right now.
Others will say it’s a means to an end, a necessity to the drudgery that is modern day life, trudging off to a job that pays the bills and puts your children through school so that they can get a job and send their children to school – that the car, is in fact, the enabler of the cycle of dreary existence that the man has put in place to keep us all under control.
Well of course it is. This is the great thing about being a petrolhead is that even with the increasing crackdowns and enormous taxes on being just a ‘motorist’ these days – apart from being a cog in the government tax machine is that we already know all of this. And we don’t care.
We don’t care because cars still allow us to get into them, to take control, to harmonise mind and body with a complicated mechanical thing, that binds us together into a common fate, man and machine, for common purpose – the vacuous exercise of being somewhere where you’re currently not.
I put it to you, my petrolhead aficionado, that it is the connection between you and your car, the appreciation you can have for it and indeed the genuine affection, devotion if not outright love that you have for your car(s) that is our common ground. We all know what we love in our driving experiences and even though we are all different in our views of them we all share common traits of envy, respect, admiration and even utter hatred when it comes to cars.
Read also: Mustang Bullitt – the last hurrah
We are united in that we all have opinions, even if some of those opinions are about non petrolheads who ‘don’t get it’. I don’t understand how anyone can’t be a petrolhead if they have ever driven a car further than around the block and I have yet to encounter a human being who doesn’t have an opinion on cars, one way or the other.
Look, don’t get me wrong, many of those opinions are obviously wrong and their owners deserve relocation from the rest of society for (preferably) torturous attitude adjustment therapy. However as I get more mature, and giving, the natural mellowing of my character means that I’ll tolerate dissenting opinions with a greater degree of accommodation that I would have, say ten years ago.
That said, there is something about control over a car that binds us to them. Yes, I get safety is all important these days and saving the bloody Pandas is more important than allowing a few more milligrams of emissions. That more and more stupid people are getting behind the wheels of more and more powerful cars leading to more and more potential for truly horrific accidents. And I get that Darwin’s law is not universally applicable in that said drivers are not guaranteed a swift and direct route to a dancing Tanzanian send off richly deserved but that it is their victims likely to pay a terrible price for their ignorance of matters motoring – the consequences of their actions.
But…We lose something in the process. If motoring was solely about sitting in traffic contemplating one’s own navel fluff for hours at a time back and forth to the job from the man, hell, I’d be the first one to off myself over a cliff in a Citroen (doing my part to rid the world of the blight, all 2CVs aside) but it’s not. It’s about those times when the road opens up and the weather is playing ball and the right music happens to be on and for a few moments the sheer magnificence of what it is to be moving under one’s own power under one’s own control takes one’s breath away. It really does.
Can one do that is a leather-cossetted-fully-automated-do-everything-for-you-save-you-from-yourself car? I don’t believe so.
And so it was, that in a very all too short excursion with a 5.0 litre normally aspirated V8 Ford Mustang Bullitt, sending all it’s power to the rear wheels via a 6 speed manual gearbox that the sense of motoring, the sense of control, the sense of real consequence, of action, of being allowed to do what such a car can and should do, and being given responsibility to not cock it up was so refreshing it left me all aquiver.
Sure it’s modern. Sure its traction control was all in place and working well. Sure, it will fall apart in a few years and depreciate faster than a Citroen pushed off the edge of a mineshaft, and I sincerely hope that it does depreciate in that manner because I want one.
Sure it’s hopeless for fuel consumption and it’s hopeless with build quality and it’s too expensive for what it is and and and – yadda yadda you know what’s coming and yes, it’s ‘who cares?’
It’s a car that connects a driver to driving. And that, I think, these days, is becoming incredibly rare. Well done, Ford.
