The Right Of Passage...

[Willis]

Evening all!!!

A good friend of mine has just sent me a great article, it hit a nerve with him after recently celebrating the birth of his first child, Jacob, and it hit a nerve with me too. It's taken from CAR Magazine, so some of you who read that may have already seen this. But anyway, here it is...



Article by Ben Oliver,

I think I’ve just read the two best words ever written in a car magazine. Unfortunately, they didn’t appear in this magazine. Bill Thomas is the editor of ‘Wheels’, the best car mag in Australia, and one with a history (almost) as long as CAR’s. Bill wrote a drive story about the Mercedes-Benz SLS Roadster, in which he turned up at a photographer Thomas Wielecki’s house in the SLS, revved its V8 to 7000rpm, and made Wielecki’s two year old son Enzo cry. Enzo! What a great name for your boy, but I’ll get onto that in a minute. “Sorry, Enzo,” Bill wrote. “Soon mate.”

Soon mate. At least part of the secret of good writing – like good cars – is efficiency. In two words Bill nailed the moment we all had early in childhood when something changes in your head, and a noisy engine stops being something that disturbs the last part of your busy eat-****-cry-sleep routine, and instead makes you smile and giggle and your willy tingle. You don’t remember it happening, but as a rite of passage it’s up there with puberty, popping your cherry and finding your life partner. And, possibly unlike the latter, it really does stay with you for life, this realisation that some machines have a soul. You went through it, and it’s the reason you’re reading this magazine now.

It hasn’t happened for Enzo , yet. Bill’s ‘soon mate’ reassures him that it will, probably within a year, and that when it does, mate, you’ll be one of us. Let’s be honest; it is mainly a man thing. And it will probably hit Enzo harder than most. He’s called Enzo, for chrissakes: it would be a shame if his great passion in life turned out to be ornithology, or chess. And not all kids have a car photographer for a dad, whose idiot colleagues turn up outside the house late at night and kick a deafening 563bhp 6.2-litre AMG engine in the guts. You might not remember the moment you started loving cars, but the expressions of that love are probably some of your earliest memories. Enzo’s will be better than most. Thirty years hence he’ll have dim, warm, sepia memories of rides in new supercars we haven’t heard of. Bill’s ‘soon mate’ drop-kicked me back more than 30 years. I can’t remember ‘the moment’ happening, but my earliest memories are almost exclusively car related. Unlike Enzo’s dad, mine didn’t know a bonnet from a boot, and Belfast in the 1970s didn’t provide much automotive eye-candy. No long-nosed, multi-cylindric supercars rocked up outside our house: just armoured personnel carriers. But I inherited a big orange plastic bin full of battered die-cast models from my uncle Chris – I can still smell its plasticy-metallic tang – and I staged what I would later discover to be unlikely race between a Citroën Dyane and a Lola T70 around the tatty yellow rug in my bedroom while mum sang along to Barry Manilow downstairs. I wasn’t much older than Enzo is now: maybe three-and-a-half, so ‘it’ had probably just happened, and in my case it turned into what passes as a career. And I think it’s the responsibility of all car enthusiasts to pay it forward, and help create those memories in kids who are already showing an unhealthy appetite for combustion. I had an SLS Roadster here for a week. Inspired by Bill and little Enzo, in the five minutes in which it didn’t rain took a mate’s car-obsessed boy out for two thunderous , roof down passes through the A27 tunnels near Shoreham. I don’t think he’ll forget it.

So, Enzo, if you’re reading a yellowed, dog-eared copy of this in 2040, how did it all turn out? What did your old man christen any future sons? Did he try to start some sibling rivalry with a Ferruccio? I just hope he didn’t turn to the leaders of our British F1 and road car makers Lotus and McLaren for inspiration; no modern child will thank you for being christened Colin, or Ron. But more importantly, did ‘it’ happen for you? Do you remember it happening? Did it bite you all the harder for all the great cars your old man and his mates brought home? Are there still great cars for us to drive? Are there still car magazines to read? And please, please tell me you’ve named your first son Dino.

 

[Willis]

So, this begs the question, when did YOU first feel it rumbling inside you like a V8?

For me, there's always been cars/trucks/tractors around since I was nothing more than a bag of organs in the womb. My Grandparents on Dads side were farmers (Grandad was WW2 RAF Engineer) and as such I would have been used to the noise of machinary before I'd even entered the world... Strange as it may seem, my Mums Dad actually used to work for Massey Ferguson. If you ever wanted to grasp at signs of fate that my parents were always going to meet and were destined to have me then you could grasp at that tractor link!!!

There's a few things I remember that are hard to put into chronological order...

I always had toy cars and car mats, always had Scalextric too from being a toddler and younger.

I remember my Grandad having an old Ford tractor, in blue, and I used to sit on that and pretend to drive it. I must've been 2 or 3, toddler anyway.

I remember that the local Thresher used to have a Martini Lancia Delta Intergrale model in the window display that I always used to pester for when we went in/past. I can't have been older than 3 or 4.

I remember going to Oulton Park, again no older than 3 or 4, and Mum and Dad getting chatting to some Sidecar racers who let me have a sit in their sidecar and a fiddle about with the controls etc., the guy who owned it was a giant with a fantastic ginger beard!!! Funny what sticks in the mind...

Then there was the lad, Anthony, who lived across the road from my parents when I was growing up, he always had the best and newest company cars. The one that sticks in my mind was a green Cavalier SRi, it was immacualte and I used to wash it for him every weekend in return for a couple of cans of Coke or some bags of sweets... Again, I can't have been much older than 4 or 5. This leads me to the first performance car I ever had a ride in, the lad across the road moved out and about a year later he popped back to visit and show us his latest toy. It was a Porsche 911 (930) Turbo in Guards Red with the huge pop-up spoiler. I vividly remember being crammed in the back of it whilst Anthony took me and Dad out for a blast down the lanes. It was EPIC. From that day on and still now, I want a 911. It was a mixture of the noise and the rarity that did it for me I think, speed didn't mean much to me at that age as I don't think you have a real perception of it when you're so young.

Then to the present day, my son Lewis Jenson, could say ''car'' and ''brummm'' before he could say Dad. He loves Cars and Roary The Racing Car, he sits and watches F1 and BTCC and he loves sitting in Nicole and beeping the horn.

It's in the blood!!! :thumbup: