Classic Car Gallery: A Journey Through Motoring History

By Lance Cole

In a classic car photography book packed with an eclectic mix of automotive images, Lance Cole (author of the Classic Car Adventure) presents a stunning collection of photographs of old cars of all marques and types captured in many locations. Across Allards to Bugattis, Citroëns DKWs, Porsches, Saabs, Triumphs, Voisins, VWs, and a potpourri of well-known classics, the author has journeyed far and wide to create a wonderful diary of classic car moments amid the great enthusiasm for nostalgia on wheels. A mix of cars, people, portraits, action and atmosphere all blend in to a colorful journey across the classic car world in a diverse blend of marques and eras.

250 color and black and white images populate an odyssey across a landscape of cars in an interesting format that pitches multimillion pound cars alongside more humble names. Seen on the move and static, Lance Cole’s photographs capture the essence of metal sculpture, light falling upon paint and form, and the design hallmarks of old cars prior to the age of digital design authoritarianism when so many cars look similar.

If you love old metal, patina, paint, leather, and enthusiasm, all captured across vintage, veteran, classic and modern classic metal, then Classic Car Gallery is a rare memento of the cars of yesteryear seen in the celebration of their today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pen and Sword
• Release date: Jan 18, 2021
• ISBN: 9781526749123

Lance Cole

Lance Cole has been an automotive and aviation writer for over 25 years and is internationally published and syndicated. A former Sir William Lyons Scholar, and national press columnist, Lance is the author of over a dozen books and is also a trained designer, photographer and illustrator.

Book preview

Introduction

Looking down the bonnet and wings of a truly classic Allard V8 as the road runs away ahead. Classic driving as intended.

The tribes of classic car enthusiasm can be a sectarian people. Some classic car fans like all classic cars, some like several classic car marques, and many are loyal to only one era, or one make, of one classic car badge alone. Inside such single-marque loyalism, there lie further sub-cultures where purists love just one model from that maker – and often decry the same manufacturer’s other models as ‘not quite the real thing’.

My view is, each to their own, and what consenting adults do inside their garages or sheds with their cars is their business, not mine.

My love of classic cars knows few bounds and I am open to the shapes, forms, engineering of whatever I am lucky enough to encounter upon my travels. As it happens, I was brought up away from England amid a bright, tropical world of luxury-wagens, French ‘purist’ design-austerity boxes on wheels, and sports cars of British, European, and American flavours.

I love old Saabs, old Citroens, old Allards and old Bugattis. But I also love old Jaguars, Bristols, Porsches, Lancias, Rovers, Triumphs, American Fords, and the products of BMW and of NSU. But upon my thirty years plus journey across the classic car landscape, I have also come to adore many other types of cars from Amilcars and Bedelias, to Volkswagens. Suddenly, modern classics, cars like the Jaguar XJ-S and the Porsche 928, have also come out of the shadows and become more classic. So, modern classics now vie with classic-era classics for our attention. And if I forget what real driving is, I remember my days at the wheel of a 911, or at the sloppy ‘Marles’ mechanism steering of Blair Shenstone’s Allard L-Type V8 – which you could also steer with the throttle through bends…

Of cars lost en-route? Do not the NSU RO80, Citroen GS, Ami M35, or the Mazda Cosmo – all as ‘rotaries’ head up a list of forgotten cars that reach out across the world, even to the outback of Australia. It is there that you might also encounter one or two people who have heard of Sir Charles Kingsford Smith’s own attempt at car manufacturing through his design for the all-wood ‘Southern Cross’ saloon car and its intriguing flat-four engine of unclear provenance.

Let’s not forget that some of the finest classic cars across all the eras were built by men in sheds. Think of Sydney Allard and his 1930s ‘Specials’ which led to low-volume production and him winning the Monte Carlo Rally in a car of his own design and building, think of him leading the Ferraris, Alfas, et al at Le Mans in his own car built in a London garage. What of French garagistes, men like Jean Redele? Think, Alpine, Deutsch and Bonnet, Jacques Gerin, Pierre Cayla, or the Voisin brothers. And did not Ettore Bugatti cast down the runes for the true sportster of a Formula One grand prix car with his Type 35?

What of Ken Costello and his MGB GT V8 – a piece of shed-built brilliance that British Leyland tried to copy but never quite mirrored. What of Chapman, of the Jowetts, of kit-car builders and a whole cast of men who built ‘Specials’? British motorcycling is also populated with such men – to the point that the town of Gloucester once boasted its own motorcycle manufacturer as the Cotton motorcycle company.

Think of the world’s first electrically powered and then electric-hybrid cars with axle-mounted motors. 1940s? 1960s? Or of today? No, actually first designed and built and made to run circa 1893-1903 by a certain Ferdinand A. Porsche. Think of pioneers like Frederick Lanchester, Vincenzo Lancia, or the Riley brothers, or Jowett of Yorkshire.

Add in to history, the stunning automotive achievements of the likes of the Jowett, Riley, Pierce Arrow, the N.S.U. concern, or the Toyota 2000GT of 1960s and James Bond allure, and you have a veritable dashboard of classic car delights and discoveries all awaiting to be sampled.

I like to sup at all the cups of classic car creeds, to learn as I go and not to adhere to a dogma of marque or model. But I do not criticise those who prefer a single make or a single model within a make. Each to their own – for we all share the love of these old cars and their designs.

Old cars and the men (and women) that made them, have many stories to tell. For the life of me, I cannot understand the desire to take an old car, annihilate its history, its story, its patina of life and learning, and to turn it into a better-than-new, acrylic dipped, new-vinyl and leather ‘tribute’ to something that never existed in the first place. Of course, if an old car is a wreck, dangerous and un-driveable, then yes, it needs total restoration. But the recent fashion of creating shiny, synthetic perfection to please an ego or a concours dogma, has robbed us of many old cars and the cars themselves of their life histories, their owners tenures, and the sheer psychometry of an original, old car.

In such process, all patination, all character is wiped out, swept away amid a plasticised and polymered reincarnation that resets the car as ‘new’ and of immense value – or so we are told we must think.

Of course not everyone adheres to the other extreme of the new ‘oily rag’ philosophy of leave well alone, but there has to be a balancing, a place between total, often knackered, originality, and the over-restoration that is frankly a euphemism for ‘ruined’ in the eyes of many.

I was recently invited to attend the arrival of a half-a-million-pound restoration of a very