In Summary
- Even though a 1950 Jaguar Mark V won this year’s Concours D’Elegance, the Rolls Royce Silver Dawn on display stole the show.
- The people who own these vintage cars are often from the thick and rich upper crust of society, who can afford to keep a car whose only purpose is to look pretty.
Ngong Racecourse is probably not the best place to host the Concours d’Elegance.
The dust and mud do not go well with the polish and preening of these vintage cars.
The Concours is all about celebrating cars from a previous age of motoring.
The owners would claim a golden age. It is a throwback to when cars were about making a statement, when they were still innovations and not background noise of the modern world.
These are cars that were meant to stay stationary and be looked at rather than driven.
We are meant to remark, how fortunate that cars that predate the discovery of the polio vaccine can still purr.
There was the endless stream of eager gawkers, all of whom were partial to convertibles and desperate to immortalise this outing as pixel dust on Instagram.
The men, as expected, had on Ray Bans, leather jackets and were all probably considering pre-ordering the iPhone 7.
The cloudy weather be damned, the women had on heels, sundresses and garden hats — and a slight wind left many contorting to protect their modesty.
Unsurprisingly, and perhaps notably for a car show, the beer tent got more attention and patrons streaming through than any of the car stands, showing that now at Concours d’Elegance, the vintage cars are peripheral to what is a family outing for the upper middle class.
Even though a 1950 Jaguar Mark V won this year’s Concours D’Elegance, the Rolls Royce Silver Dawn on display stole the show.
This particular Rolls, owned by Rajesh Lakhani, reaches back to 1951 and still looks exquisite. Everyone wanted a photo with it.
The car looked so stately that it came as a surprise that the owner actually drove it around.
It seems wrong to actually put kilometres on the odometer of a car so pretty.
It deserves to be hoisted onto the back of a lorry and chauffeured around as any vintage Roller should.
LOOKING PRETTY
Concours d’Elegance is perhaps the most exclusive outing open to the public.
The people who own these vintage cars are often from the thick and rich upper crust of society, who can afford to keep a car whose only purpose is to look pretty.
The public is allowed once a year to gather around and marvel at these ancient beasts and if they are lucky, hear their growl.
The cars are often labours of love for the rich, detailed and obsessed over to a degree that makes putting a value on them pointless.
You can’t really put a price on the amount of work and detail you need to reanimate these pieces of junk, the kit to make many cars work is obscure, many of the original manufacturers have been sold or have been driven out of business.
Only the Volkswagen beetle remains in recent memory as a car still visible on the street.
The nostalgia the cars evoke seems misplaced. The truth is that most of them were death traps, but it isn’t nice to point that out.
The golden age of motoring is actually today, when the airbag is a standard feature and a crash test dummy gets to ride in every new model before it leaves the factory.
Concours remains a premier event on the Nairobi social calendar, attracting competitors as far out as South Africa, but at this point, you get the feeling that the cars aren’t as important as the bouncy castle, the hotdogs and all the other family-friendly activities on display.
Source :Daily Nation
