Father Bought a Car
The III International Festival of Vintage and Exotic Cars Autoforum-2004 has ended
A car can mean a luxury or collector’s item, a hobby, or an opportunity to join the international movement of vintage car enthusiasts, representing years of work and thousands of hryvnias. One hundred and forty such cars arrived at the festival from all regions of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia. One vintage automobile buff came from as far away as Macedonia, which helped him win the prize in the Longest Car Race nomination.
Where do these wonders of technology come from? Most of the vehicles that took part in the festival were hotrods, cars with antiquated bodies and modern gadgets, and homemade cars patterned after a vintage make and often assembled from the components of several different cars. A small proportion of the Autoforum-2004 exhibits — 15 to 20 cars — were well restored original makes that their owners had inherited or bought from people who were not exactly vintage car aficionados.
“I saw this car in horrible condition. Then the number plate helped me find the owner, an elderly widow, and I cajoled her for two years into selling me this car,” says Serhiy, owner of a GAZ-675, very popular during World War II. “The old lady kept refusing, saying that the jeep reminded her of her husband. But I insisted and in the end I got the car for 2,000 dollars.”
“You have to be a freak in the finest sense of the word to take up a hobby like this,” says Oleksandr Osetrov, president of the Kharkiv-based Samokhod occupational club. “You must have very strong willpower and adore vintage vehicles.” In addition to satisfying their own esthetic and technical whims, vintage automobile buffs also pursue a globally important goal: vintage cars should not be relegated to the pages of books alone, they should be kept in real life. To tell the truth, few dare to drive these pieces of art every day — they pity their retro-pets. All motorists unanimously claim that our roads are inferior and that, in general, the older the car is, the more care it needs. So members of the Vintage and Exotic Vehicle Enthusiasts’ Club are sure that a vintage automobile is a luxury item, not a means of transportation.
Still, vintage vehicle freaks sometimes take their “hobbies” to city streets, shocking the public. “I can hear jaws dropping, and once a man chucked himself under the wheels of my Ural ZIS-5 truck, crying out, “Hang on, let me have a little look!” Oleksandr Osetrov says, laughing. Without a doubt, none of the automobiles exhibited at Autoforum-2004 could have driven down the streets of Kyiv unnoticed.
The festival awarded prizes in fifteen categories. The Grand Prix went to a 1956 Mercury Montclair from Dnipropetrovsk, which most festivalgoers described as “really cool.” The winner of Most Active Participant, Kharkiv’s Samokhod club, exhibited up to twelve cars and five motorcycles. A pickup trailer was voted Most Unusual Design. The pickup was assembled out of two Zaporozhets cars and the trailer out of still another Zaporozhets’ front and rear parts. The owner, Oksana Denys from Lviv, said she had been offered a Zhiguli Make 10 in exchange for the trailer, but she refused. Still, the “most unusual design” is going to be auctioned off. Many owners want to sell their homemade vintage cars and use the money to build a new, more sophisticated, vehicle.
A Mercedes that once belonged to Leonid Brezhnev won the prize for Richest Historical Past. The former Secretary General’s grandson brought it to the festival. “I thank granddad for the car,” said Sergei Brezhnev, in contrast to the other prizewinners, who thanked the organizers.
