I lost a good couple of hours yesterday watching the well-crafted short films in the Petrolicious YouTube channel featuring classic car owners talking about their machines. There's some wonderful quotes, like the Ferrari 250 Lusso owner who talks about how the process to start the car up is like a ritual that gets you re-acquainted with the car every time you do it (and what a sound it is once the car is started), or the Porsche 911 owner describing how he only ever wanted one car that can do it all, or the Ferrari restorer saying that you can only ever be a careful caretaker of a classic car, or the Italian owner of an Alfa Romeo Zagato describing how the whole look of the car orginates from the shape of the engine and how the metal bonnet folds around it.
But my absolute favourite was this charming film about the Porsche 356 that has been with one family for almost fifty years and done almost a million miles, and whose owner still invents errands in order to have an excuse to keep driving it. Wonderful stuff. In this age of constant technological upgrades it's so refreshing to see these kind of long-term relationships between man and machine being chronicled. I too have an old car. I may not be able to put a million miles on it but I do hope that I can keep it for the rest of my life.
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