I LIKE OLD cars, I like them a lot. I miss them and that more visceral connection between driver and road inherent of a time when life was simpler and likewise the technology packed into the four wheeled stuff. So naturally, whenever classic-ride scribes such as Mike Monk or Adrian Burford put a story together it usually involves a metally creature from the world before ABS, Aircon and electronic everything. Sometimes the content tickles my love of Japanese sports cars or scintillates my desire for good ol’ Yank Muscle – but this time a more intimate link to my own past came across my desk in the form of a Golden Anniversary Chevrolet 4100. Now, my earliest memories and in fact my formative motoring career began in my dad’s metallic blue 4100, a straight six rear driven wonder that would be my second (mobile) home for the first 18 years of my life. First as a rear seat snotgat passenger, graduating eventually to shotgun, then two years after my dad passed away – I finally got upgraded to the driver’s pew. Now, writing from memory is usually a recipe for disaster but there’s something so lucid, so vivid about childhood memories that they seem to last forever. Long rides with the family, cruising above Gordons Bay with the sun illuminating all inside, refracting through the soft blue tint at the top of the windscreen and radiating from my dad’s leopard print vest. Good times. As for glossing over the faults with nostalgia’s rose tinted spectacles - like every meaningful toy that breaks in your hand as a kid I remember every bugbear of Suzie; my dad’s 4100.

THAT CLASSIC LOOK
Now, it’s hard to rate an old car as anything other than a classic, a hopefully timeless aesthetic as opposed to comparing it to the porcine whips one has access to in 2011. I loved the looks of it, proper muscley stuff, especially to an 8 year old. Having been massaged into life from the skeleton of an Opel Rekord, the Chevy was clearly premium. I say it was metallic blue, but it was actually two toned if you count the cream vinyl top. A bonnet bulge hinted that the six cylinder engine pumped out 100kW and enough torque to spin up a small storm in the Strandfontein parking lot I found myself at on Matric Ball night. In each corner were 14” steel wheels – hey, pretty much all wheels were steel, only these came out with massively shiny hubcaps with a little blue bowtie on each. The pert little rear had the C H E V R O L E T lettering spaced across from light cluster to light cluster and our car even had a sunroof, also a fun accessory on Matric Ball night. Black-backed halogen headlamps in the shape of two circles looked mean, and was a look I sought to achieve (so misguidedly) later on in life on my first Opel, a Kadett. I owned many Opels since then, perhaps trying to keep the connection to dad’s 4100, perhaps.