On these shortest days of the year, the dampness clinging to the North Shore seems like it'll never leave. There's a pretty good reason for that: it doesn't.
However, it's still a contemplative time, a time when we gaze contemplatively out at our lawns of contemplative moss and our gutters jammed full of contemplative pine needles, and the contemplative fluttering of a green plastic bag full of dog poo on the sidewalk (why do people do this? Worst Christmas present ever). It's been a heck of a year, one filled with triumphs and disasters, and you hardly know how rambunctious 2015 is going to be.
Will North Korea somehow manage to stop Ben Stiller from making movies? Will Stephen Harper tour with The Roots? Will gasoline soon be so cheap that putting 20 bucks in actually makes the fuel needle move again? Who can tell?
However, when I look back on my driving year, a pattern emerges. Along with my regular column here, I also write for a few other papers, as well as online for BBC America and the odd thing for Road and Track, and you'd think that most of my best stories found their way to me through the major outlets. They didn't - either I tracked them down myself, or the lead came from here, from home. An email would arrive, as one has just done, and the message attached would say something along the lines of: "I read your column in the North Shore News, and I have this old/interesting/weird/fascinating car. Want to take a look at it?" Yes. Yes I do. Very much so. Of all the little bits of memorabilia that clutter up the desk where I work, none are as precious to me as a note from a reader, even if they're disagreeing with something I've written. Even if it's a How Dare You sort of note, at least that's a response. Often times it can feel like you're firing stuff off into the void.
So what did I do this year that was interesting? Well let's see: I talked to a gent who holds a Bonneville speed record with a streamlined Triumph Triple and tows it down there with a 1950s Rolls-Royce. That was a pretty unique gent, and while I kind of think he's a maniac for hitting 200+ miles per hour on two wheels on the shifty rutted surface of the salt flats, we could have chatted all day about cars.
I did end up chatting most of a day away with Walter Wolf. Wolf made a tonne of money back in the day with oil exploration and essentially bankrolled Lamborghini RD through most of the 1970s. He owned his own Formula One team, was friends with Jacques Villeneuve, and had front row seats to some of the best racing in the world. An affable gent, he offhandedly told me a story about winning a bet with Enzo Ferrari over the outcome of the 1976 Monaco Grand Prix. As you do.
I also managed to secure an invitation to get a sneak peek in Mazda's secret basement below their Irvine, Calif., research and development centre. Here, a volunteer team of staff maintain and restore dozens of old Mazda racing cars, as well as some historic vehicles. All the original Miatas from the launch were there, as well as ex-IMSA RX-7s and former LeMans racers. The real surprise was just how grassroots the whole operation was: these are PR guys and management staff working together on their weekends to get old racecars up and running, and then they flog them on the track at historic races. If you've ever wondered why Mazda manages to build some fun-to-drive excitement into even their most-basic machines, this is why: the people that work there are nuts.
You'd also have to be nuts to hit up Craigslist looking for a Hyundai Pony, but I did that too. I actually ended up driving a totally pristine 1986 edition with the smaller engine. It had 113,000 kilometres on the odometer, was a B.C. car its whole life, and had never been in an accident. What a total time capsule: I couldn't help humming Bryan Adams the whole time I was driving it. The gent who owned it was a Korean immigrant, and he planned to ship the car back to Korea where his father could take care of it. By essentially pestering people until they gave in, I also managed to lay hands on the Impala from the TV show Supernatural. The car is stored over in Burnaby along with six stunt-car versions, and the show just wrapped up shooting on something like a decade of filming in B.C. The guy who takes care of it has what I consider to be one of the best jobs in the world: he essentially sits down with the producers and comes up with a list of cars that match the characters in a particular episode. Then he has to find them - he has a pool of more than 1,000 cars in the Lower Mainland and beyond that he has amassed since he started his career working on The X-Files.
I also managed to find, thanks to the help of Nigel Matthews of Hagerty Insurance, who knows about every cool car in the Province, an extremely rare Honda. It's called the Coupe 7 and just predates the Civic. It was never available here, but a gent up in Kelowna brought one back from Australia when he moved. As it was the last project ever personally overseen by Dr. Honda, it provided both an insight into the company's beginnings and was like shaking hands with the man himself.
Other owners of other odd cars were also generous to offer a drive of their pride and joy, and I was all too eager to accept. I had a go in grey-market machines like an Audi RS2 and a BMW Alpina, lit up the tires in a ferocious Noble M400, and then had the drive of the year in a factory-made 1969 Lotus Super Seven. Still grinning about that one.
Some of this fun stuff came from asking, but much of it was also offered. The gearhead world is a small club in a way, and there's all kinds of interesting stuff tucked away in sheds all over this province.
But the cars are only the smaller part of it - the stories they have to tell are only interesting because of the people involved. I've driven lots of cool stuff this year, but better than that is the friends I've made, from the folks I see every year up at the Edgemont car show, to the crazy Japanese gents in Tokyo who drive LeMans cars on the streets.
Christmas is coming - in fact it will be here by the time you read this - and while I'll hope I get a Hot Wheels in my stocking (I mean my kid's stocking! I'm a grownup! I swear!), my one true wish is that I hope 2015 has more of this. Drop me a line sometime. Shoot me an idea or tell me a story. I can't wait to hear it.
Watch this space for all the best and worst of automotive news, or submit your own auto oddities to [email protected]. Follow Brendan on Twitter at @brendan_mcaleer.
