1962 Renault Dauphine Gordini

My old Dauphine Gordini in front of Shadetree-

5th Ave. Wharf, Oakland, CA
February, 2010

I was a young starving artist/art furniture intern, and living in a burned-out warehouse on one of Oakland's seedier wharves. I quickly learned that buying lumber in my convertible MGA was a tricky proposition, so I sold it and began looking for a more suitable car. Still more style than sense, I bought a 1962 Renault Dauphine Gordini from a race car mechanic in Pt. Richmond. The car was in prisitine condition, and came with enough spares to build most of a second.

In 2007, Time Magazine named the Dauphine one of the 50 worst cars of all time:
"The most ineffective bit of French engineering since the Maginot Line, the Renault Dauphine was originally to be named the Corvette, tres ironie. It was, in fact, a rickety, paper-thin scandal of a car that, if you stood beside it, you could actually hear rusting. Its most salient feature was its slowness, a rate of acceleration you could measure with a calendar. It took the drivers at Road and Track 32 seconds to reach 60 mph, which would put the Dauphine at a severe disadvantage in any drag race involving farm equipment. The fact that the ultra-cheap, super-sketchy Dauphine sold over 2 million copies around the world is an index of how desperately people wanted cars. Any cars."

Actually, the limited edition race-modified Gordini model was zippy enough for a small car, and was raced and rallied successfully for a couple of years of its production life. It was a cheap POS tin can...but quirky in a mid-century French sort of way, and suited my needs well enough. Driving carefully, I could squeeze almost 50mpg out of it- important when you are working for slave wages- and with a roof rack, I could pack 50 board feet of lumber before the springs started to bottom out.

Several years later, I moved to rural Mendocino County and needed a truck to navigate the miles of unpaved roads to my remote cabin, so I sold the Dauphine to a local guy who bought it for his girlfriend, visiting for the summer from France. Of all of the stuff I've let go of in my life, I most regret selling this car. When he brought it by a couple of days later- fully detailed and polished- I nearly sat down on the sidewalk and cried.

Flash-forward 20 years:
A while back, I took my wife and daughter to see some of the places that I had lived and worked "back in the day", and there, parked in front of the old warehouse in it's old designated spot was "my" Dauphine. Somehow, over decades and miles, she had found her way home.

1959 MGA 1500 Roadster

1959 MGA 1500 Roadster

Vintage MGA advertisement

Lucas pin from Moss Motors

Reading through Walker Lemond's excellent blog 1001 Rules for My Unborn Son got me thinking about the vintage cars that I've owned.

Rule No.166 Drive a vintage car before you are 30

The key concept here is "before you are 30." After that, you will find that you've accumulated enough responsibility that a vintage car ceases to be transportation, and becomes a toy.

My early 20s found me living in Southern California for a spell, and I set out to find a classic British roadster- my first car purchase. After test-driving a number of Austin Healey 100's, and a nice early E-type Jaguar, I settled on a 1959 MGA 1500 roadster. The above photo shows a nicely restored example. Mine was BRG with a black interior- clean and well-preserved, but far short of concourse material.
Hella fun to drive with the top down on a sunny day, the MGA boasted a number of vexing idiosyncrasies:

• Twin SU carburetors that required frequent tuning
• Cooling system way under-engineered for California driving
• Mechanical oil-dampened shock absorbers
• Lucas electrical system

Lucas electrics- the butt of jokes among vintage British car owners- have a nasty habit of short circuiting and wafting the acrid smoke of an electrical fire from behind the dash or under the bonnet.

Rule No.372 If you drive a vintage car, be able to wrench it yourself

On an ill-fated jaunt into Northern Baja, the engine overheated and threw a push rod. I managed to limp the car back to San Diego, where it sat DOA until I moved back to Northern California.
I got a crash course in auto mechanics restoring the car. I bought a Chilton's manual and a set of tools, and set about rebuilding the engine, electrical system, and hydraulic system.
Restoring this car from the ground up was an immensely satisfying experience; not one I've sought out since, but knowing that I had the skills was worth the skinned knuckles, spitting and cussing, and the seemingly endless search for rare parts.

Eventually, I sold "the stagecoach" to a collector in Marin County to make way for another vintage car, and was not too sad to see it go.