Road Trip:
Man's Motivations Behind Ownership
     and Adoration of Vintage Automobiles
By Scott Pruden / Photographs By Rafael Henin ~ SLIDESHOW
Spring 2007

The garage of Porsche restorer Christopher Radbill is as full of stories as it is cars – maybe more. Situated in the suburbs of West Chester, Pennsylvania, among an innocuous cluster of light-industrial buildings along a quiet side road, Chris Radbill Automotive Repair and Restoration doesn’t overtly speak of the power of a classic automobile to restore lives. That’s up to Radbill.

He points to one 1967 Porsche 912 that at one point had been blue before time and the elements wore the body paint down to the primer. The customer had owned it since before he and his wife married, but it had been in storage for years as the couple raised their family. After going through a scary period of heart trouble that threatened his life, the owner decided to celebrate his recovery by restoring the car to its former glory. Because the customer’s budget was limited, Radbill said he would do just enough to the car to get it back on the road.

Then one day Radbill called the customer’s home and his wife answered. “She said, ‘You know, my husband says I married him because of that car. And he’s probably right, because we lived in California and we used to cruise up and down the Coastal Highway and I just loved the sound of that car,’ and it was like a whole thing for her.”

The result was that the budget conscious owner’s wife gave Radbill the go-ahead for a complete makeover on the iconic Porsche. “They had hung onto the car through raising a family and everything else, so it has a lot of meaning to them,” he says. “And it makes me glad to do that for people. I think that probably the biggest kick for me is when someone comes in here and is excited about what they’ve got. You can really increase the quality of their life.”

And the stories keep coming, all centered on the vintage Porsches Radbill restores as a hefty percentage of his work on primarily German vehicles. There’s the high-powered pharmaceutical sales rep who uses his vintage Porsche 912 Targa as a lunchtime stress-management tool, speeding up and down the suburban Philadelphia highways until the muscles in his shoulders unclench and sanity returns.

The same customer has bought a car specifically to restore with his pre-teen son, Radbill says. The son wasn’t impressed with the idea until the dad drove him to school one day and the son’s friends remarked on his dad’s cool car. “It’s creating something he can do with his son, who’s not a couch potato, but is a computer potato. So the father’s thinking that this is an opportunity to get him outside of that into something they can do together.” 

That cross-generational interest doesn’t just stand as a single anecdote, since Radbill and many others associated with collecting classic cars have noted a boost in the number of younger adults – almost entirely men – filtering into this thriving American sub-culture. 

Witness Daran Thomas, a successful and handsome (think former model, which he was) marketing executive in the Raleigh suburb of Apex, N.C. He admits to a lifelong fascination with classic and exotic cars that he can now afford to extensively indulge. “There’s something everlasting about an old car that today is still beautiful. It has a lot more longevity than a new car,” he says. “Something that had stood the test of time, that really appealed to me.” 

That doesn’t mean he waited until he hit it big to purchase his first vintage car – a used BMW 525, bought when he was 25 years old. He admits it was a more affordable placeholder for what he really wanted, a 1972 BMW CSI. It took 10 years and vastly improved fortunes for him to begin searching for his dream car again. After a few years he found one – in California. A friend on the West Coast examined it, deemed it worthy of purchase and it was shipped east. It’s now a work in progress at Automotive Restoration, the shop Thomas co-owns with a friend who restores cars professionally.

In addition to satisfying his childhood dreams, his acquisitions allow him the very grownup luxury of relief from the stresses of his “day job” creating promotional and marketing material for the pharmaceutical industry. 

“If I’m working on a big project that isn’t going as it should, I can go out to the shop and focus on a piece of metal that is tangible,” he says. “Doing something that has instant gratification, it helps in a business that is so long-term oriented.”

Thomas’ story isn’t an unusual one, says Dennis Gage, host of the SPEED cable channel program My Classic Car with Dennis Gage. As someone whose job is to cover the classic car circuit, he’s noticed that collectors like Thomas represent a subtle, but significant, shift in the collector subculture.

“I find a lot of young people driving these cars,” he says. “They’re going after the cars for the same reason as our generation – they want to stand out. People want to stand out. They want to make that personal statement.” 

The difference is that, because they are pursuing the cars of their youth, a whole new segment of restored and collectible late 1960s and early 1970s muscle cars are becoming more and more collectible. Auction company Barrett-Jackson has, in the last few years, seen a spike in demand for well-kept models like the Dodge Charger, Chevy Camaro or Pontiac GTO, with buyers bidding higher for those models than for glamorous standbys like Ferraris. 

New money plays a big part in the infusion of younger blood, but so do different priorities from those of the masses, especially with Generation Xers, he says. In large part, those who have made it big are “either going for the Porsches or the Beemers – they’re the new yuppies,” he says. “So if you don’t want to be such a yuppie, you go back and get one of these old models. It’s a cool thing, and the cool factor is very high in these cars.”

But what, for lack of a better way to phrase the question, is the drive? What possesses grown-up men – and they are by and large men – to spend so much time, energy and money on what, when it comes right down to it, are obsolete modes of transportation? Gage chalks the already huge popularity up to the massive demographic wave of which he admits he’s a part. “The hobby has historically been driven by aging Baby Boomers, but there is a new focus on youth in collecting,” he says. “These guys are finally able to relive the past they never had. They can have that Shelby Mustang. They couldn’t afford them when
they cost $3,000. Now, when they cost $80,000, they can afford them, because they’re statements. They’re extensions of self.” 

Barry Dougherty, an avid collector and appraiser who lives in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, takes a different but no less philosophical point of view. “I don’t see it as [nostalgia],” he says. “To guys who grow and mature in the hobby, it’s like artwork. You develop an eye and a feel for what’s valuable and why it’s valuable.” 

A good example is Nicola Bulgari, he of the Italian luxury watch and jewelry empire. Among the monied set, Bulgari’s fascination with vintage Buicks is legendary. His love goes back to his first car – a 1937 Model 8 that he found rusting in his home city of Rome and bought for $30. Since then, he’s amassed a huge collection, portions of which are stored in Italy, New York and Allentown, Pennsylvania. He has also donated a number of rare cars to museums. Bulgari, who once described Bugatti and Ferrari as “shit” to a Forbes Magazine writer, doesn’t seem to know why he loves American heavy metal, but he knows he does. Call it nostalgia or call it appreciation – or a mix of both – but it’s clear that the man knows what he likes, is passionate about it and puts plenty of money into it.

Dougherty, a good friend of Bulgari’s through a mutual collector friend, can pull up to various low-slung warehouses in unassuming light industrial neighborhoods throughout Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley, open a garage door and reveal rare gems of automotive design and beauty, all marinating in a delicious bouquet of motor oil and leather. In Allentown, he stops into Precision Motor Cars and chats for a moment with the technicians before heading next door to reveal a piece of Bulgari’s collection – a few thousand square feet of nothing but gleaming General Motors steel, all the product of one very wealthy man’s single-minded fascination.

But it is not in the super-rich collectors like Bulgari or designer Ralph Lauren that Dougherty sees the hobby’s future. Instead, he sees much of the hobby’s evolution coming from younger collectors entering through the segment of “tuners” – stock (mostly Japanese) automobiles that have been tricked out with more powerful engines, thunderous sound systems, elaborate lights and other cosmetic and technological embellishments. “This new wave … that’s involved in tuner cars, they’re going to get older and make money,” and as they do, their senses that have already been attuned to what makes cars special will turn to items that are more rare and valuable.

While collectors might view their cars as art, Philadelphia-based painter Frederick Yohe creates art out of classic cars. His almost photorealistic paintings of vintage automobiles are as highly detailed as the cars themselves, and the collectors, celebrities, and car manufacturers who serve as a good portion of his client base recognize that.

For Yohe, his love of cars comes from an appreciation of their looks rather than from fiddling under their hoods or restoring their chassis. “It’s purely aesthetics with me. I really do not know too terribly much about cars,” he says. “I simply look at the photographs, and if I see a really fine design in that photograph I go after it.”

He finds that among the collectors who appreciate his work, much of the appeal is in the level of detail he is able to capture in his paintings. It’s that attention to the minutia of the machine that he believes drives many in the hobby. “I’m really only able to satisfy the guy who is into the detail,” he says. “They’re really looking at the painting to see if they can find anything that’s not right.”

Dr. P. Murali Doraiswamy, a psychiatrist at Duke University Medical Center who is friends with Daran Thomas, says that it is hard to pin down the motivations of a vintage car collector or owner. The collector’s attention to detail – which he calls a mild and socially appropriate form of obsessive/compulsive behavior – is about the only common factor that links vintage car owners.

“Is it any different from a person who’s restoring an ancient painting? Probably not,” he says. “Most of them are highly accomplished, successful, well-balanced people who are not letting their car collections interrupt their normal lives. The car collectors I know seem to come in all different flavors.”

Still, Thomas, who is single, admits that it takes a special woman to put up with the depth of his interest in his restoration projects. A former girlfriend was with him during much of the time he was restoring a 1969 280 SL convertible Mercedes two-door coupe as a retirement gift to his father. His hobby, he says, did contribute to some friction over the course of their three-year relationship. “Obviously, she would have liked that attention on her,” he says, laughing. “And aside from car parts in the sink – because I like to do a lot of the stuff at home – like anything, she could have blamed the car. But if it wasn’t the car, I probably would have spent that time working on the house. It would have been nice if she’d had the same level of enthusiasm, but I haven’t met that many women that had that much interest in the car.”

In fact, if it’s not a wife or girlfriend supporting her significant other, or a midriff- baring model paid to shill for a specialty brand of car wax, women aren’t a big part of the collector hobby. Doraiswamy notes that much of vintage car collecting does involve a bit of “alpha male” behavior, including competition for bragging rights that helps serve as an ego booster, particularly for a population that is so heavily steeped in testosterone. Mechanic and restorer Radbill speaks from experience. As someone who regularly attends car shows and parts swaps, he’s seen the extremes of male competitiveness. Negotiation sessions can last all day, with customers repeatedly returning to vendors in an attempt to get better prices. Ego wars ensue, and have occasionally ended only with threats of bodily harm.

A look around a show and swap like the annual Spring Carlisle Event in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, leaves little doubt that this is a hobby for guys. The sight of adult men pulling their kids’ modified Radio Flyers full of seemingly random parts is a reminder that many of them are living their childhood fantasies of “cool car” ownership. Women are sparse and often accompanying the kind of men who would refer to them as their “old lady.” Others are middle-class couples indulging a husband’s fascination, or fathers/daughter pairs indulging in quality time before the girl’s interests turn toward make-up and boys.

The women, it seems, are less interested in the minutia of collecting and restoring and – as cliché as it sounds – more in the extensive social and shopping aspects the shows offer. Every second booth seems to offer either car-related kitsch or some auto-themed antique, and it’s obvious many couples are reconnecting with people they only see at car shows.

To listen to Radbill, who knows better than anyone that there’s a story under the hood of every classic automobile, it’s obvious that along with the hefty dosage of male hormones, the hobby is quietly helped along by a smidgen of estrogen. His own wife, Charlotte, fondly recalled the Porsche 912 he owned back when they first began dating. “I let her drive it and she just loved it, and then I just let her drive it [all the time],” he says. “I knew it was in good hands because she had so much fun.”

That car eventually succumbed to the demands of family life. When he recently found a similar model to restore for himself, Charlotte asked for one of her own. Radbill is now restoring a Targa for her. The levels of their interest still remain at significantly different degrees, but it’s something they can share and indulge in together. And Radbill says that is a big part of the appeal to doing what he does, and is also a big part of what the hobby offers. “I’m happy to see it bring people together like that,” he says. “My wife likes to say, ‘You restore cars, but in the bigger scheme of things it’s a restorative thing for people, for their lives.’”

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