The next chapter: Caffeine & Classics, now with more classics

27 August, 2018

 


 

The monthly Caffeine & Classics meeting should suffice without an introduction, if you’re in the position to be reading this. It’s a pretty standard formula, and one that the team from Protecta Insurance kicked off over five years ago, becoming a pretty much self-governing event that happens like clockwork — the morning of the last Sunday of each month at Smales Farm Business Park in Auckland is Caffeine & Classics time. 

Of course, like everything that does well — or better than ever intended — the event grew into a bit of a monster, taking over the entire Smales Farm premises, and the relaxed ‘first in, best dressed’ entry began to cause organizers a few headaches. 

Diplomatically, they announced a few changes on social media, to bring the ‘classics’ back to Caffeine & Classics. Essentially, they decided to implement a blanket admission policy, with ‘classic’ cars defined as those at least 30 years old, or newer cars that fit the intention of the meeting — scratch-built, obscure, or exotic. It’s not a difficult concept to grasp, but a handful took the chance to fixate solely on the ‘30 years’ part, decrying the event and promising that it would wither away to nothing as a result of this unacceptable change. 

But it’s easy to be the voice of dissent on an open forum like Facebook. How would things actually go, in light of the drive to make the event a bit less of an automotive free-for-all? 
As it turned out on Sunday, 26 August, things were just fine. The grounds were full without overflowing, and spectators still showed up in droves, despite there being no on-site parking for the public. 

As for the cars? We’ll let this small selection of photos speak for themselves, but at the risk of falling into editorial cliché, there truly was something for everyone. We’ll see you there at the next one — something tells us the monthly Caffeine & Classics isn’t going anywhere. 
 

Design accord

You can’t get much more of an art deco car than a Cord — so much so that new owners, Paul McCarthy and his wife, Sarah Selwood, went ahead and took their Beverly 812 to Napier’s Art Deco Festival this year, even though the festival itself had been cancelled.
“We took delivery of the vehicle 12 days before heading off to Napier. We still drove it all around at the festival,” says Paul.
The utterly distinctive chrome grille wrapping around the Cord’s famous coffin-shaped nose, and the pure, clean lines of the front wing wheel arches, thanks to its retractable headlamps, are the essence of deco. This model, the Beverly, has the finishing touch of the bustle boot that is missing from the Westchester saloon.

Motorman: When New Zealand built the Model T Ford

History has a way of surrounding us, hidden in plain sight. I was one of a group who had been working for years in an editorial office in Augustus Terrace in the Auckland city fringe suburb of Parnell who had no idea that motoring history had been made right around the corner. Our premises actually backed onto a century-old brick building in adjacent Fox Street that had seen the wonder of the age, brand-new Model T Fords, rolling out the front door seven decades earlier.
Today, the building is an award-winning two-level office building, comprehensively refurbished in 2012. Happily, 6 Fox Street honours its one time claim to motoring fame. Next door are eight upmarket loft apartments, also on the site where the Fords were completed. Elsewhere, at 89 Courtenay Place, Wellington, and Sophia Street, Timaru, semi-knocked-down Model Ts were also being put together, completing a motor vehicle that would later become known as the Car of the Century.