by meteorite » Thu May 24, 2012 9:14 pm
When I bought the new Ford Escape last August I felt very daring - instead of the black-white-grey spectrum everyone else was buying, I got bored with a colourless word and bought a red one - somewhere between the Ferrari and candyapple shades. It was a hard choice - the new electric blue that's popped up this year really appealed to me too. But I went with the red.
I was out on a short errand today, taking Mrs. M to one of her doctors. On the way we encountered no fewer than four new red Ford Escapes coming towards us. Did we start a fashion? seems like now the whole city is buying them! In fact from being an oddball eccentricity, the things are getting as common as my old Safari van. And now the blue is starting to turn up too.
A number of familiar cars were out, including the old Dodge Coronet convertible (early 60s if I recall) and a roughly contemporary Buick sedan. The new black Maserati sedan was around too, but the outstanding recent car was a bright yellow Ferrari roadster, though identification was prevented when traffic obstructed the view.
With summer apparently planning an early arrival, wonder what will turn up next?
Aug. 6: The game you see when you don't have a gun! On my daily heart walk about the neighbourhood, spotted a dark green truck with far from modern lines parked at the curb near my route. On closer inspection it appeared to be an older restoration of a 1951 Chevrolet 3800 One Ton pickup. And of course I didn't have my camera with me, and now that I'm trying to sell a vehicle not buy one, it was for sale.
May 29th: Answer, a nice red Maserati GT coupe - unfortunately going in the opposite direction in heavy traffic, and the current design has been around since at least 2004, so can't specify the year, but it was very tidy.
Aug.8th: The coupe in the plaza had fine Italian lines. The five-spoke wheels were as characteristic as the prancing horse badge on the fender, and the script was correct for the Ferrari badge on the trunk. But, saints preserve us, it was BLUE!
Oh well, the silver convertible that parked beside me at the grocery was undoubtedly a BMW 325, but what year? the CHMSL on the rear deck lid had that afterthought look of cars that had new models in production just before the law was introduced, and weren't about to buy new stamping dies for a year or two yet, and it had "no-draft" style vent segments in the front windows. That would make it mid-70s, about the age of the equally well preserved blonde driver. Nice.
Aug. 13th I called into a body shop that is the joint venture of an eight-dealer group, where the most eye-catching. specimen was an apparently brand new deep black Jaguar XJ sedan being buffed up for delivery. Man, that machine is monstrous! But the most fascinating machine by far was an honest-to-Sir-Henry-Lyons Jaguar XK-120, the first of the fabulous XK series. The machine was in pieces, with the 3.5 litre double-knocker six, grille and headlamps among other things out for rebuilding. But the shop manage emphasized to me that the car was not being restored but just being repaired, with the original parts going back in when tweaked.
The car was first introduced in Canada, IIRC, in 1951. On one of my first university football weekends, I saw one parked at the curb on the street in Kingston, Ontario. This was in the time when the styling of the more modern cars tended to resemble a matchbook sitting on a brick, and most cars still around still had separate fenders (as does the XK-120 itself). But the sleek, streamlined, incredibly low-slung styling was already effectively launching the XK series dominance as the greatest crumpet collector of all time. Unforgettable - and to see another returning to the road made my day. By comparison coming face to face (so to speak) with a nice new silver Maserati sedan ws no more than the cherry on top.