In Defense of the Garage Queen

I’m with Zak on this. You need both types of owners.

If you’ve gone through the pain, expense and sheer hard graft of restoring an old car (most people will have to do this, there just aren’t enough gently aged cars with wonderful patina to go round). What happens at the end of that? You have a beautiful thing that displays the craft, artistry and determination of the restorers. When it’s finished that perfection only lasts a short time, that’s when you have a choice, you drive it and the perfection is ‘ruined’, or you blat around the concours scene racking up the prizes. We need people who do both, but personally I definitely want to see the work that those perfectionist can do. At that level it’s all about the artisans and craftsmen who create these things and someone who has the vision and the resources to produce it. Thank goodness they do.

After a period doing the concours scene then these cars might get used, or sold, or put in the garage, and a new project takes over. Call me naive, and I guess it must happen, but I have never met a private owner who has purely bought a car as an investment (examples please?). The vast majority of people buy cars with their hearts then they use them as they see fit.

I have always considered that the garage queen is a failure of intent and among the most selfish of all things. It is doubtful that the people who crafted (by hand, quite often) these cars imagined anything other than the delight they would bring the motorist. When they are kept as garage queens they become little more than currency, to be traded when convenient, or a bragging right to thump your chest about owning without ever really truly owning the car. To own a vintage machine like this without ever engaging it is a supreme waste, and I feel it violates the golden rule of ownership. It becomes a museum piece whose quirks and brilliance will never be known intimately by its keeper.

A part of me understands the desire to keep something beautiful hidden from a dangerous world, but whatever was the point of its creation? The hundreds of people involved in breathing life into these creations is instantly muted when such a beautiful dynamic sculpture is stuffed into mothballs, and even for as beautiful as some cars can be, there is a deeper beauty yet in experiencing, or observing the functionality of that car performing its intended purpose (which wasn’t to be garage art).

And to that end, I suggest that ‘perfect examples’ be nothing more than shells of cars. They should look like the originals; perhaps even rescued from junkyard bits, which have become a blueprint for a real car, but which need never actually run. These machines are appreciated as static art and little else, so why not simply make something to be admired?

To deny a car its destiny just seems… cruel.

I have to agree with Bradley Price. The only argument in favor of the trailer quean is the possibility of people seeing in person the rarest, most spectacular and unique automobiles. They do not need to be modified simply because they were perfect just the way they were (not speed, handling, looks but as a whole with their faults and that indescribable x factor). But These cars are stored away locked from the public because they are to their owners just objects of investment like stock.
The classic car scene is being destroyed by people who not only are no enthusiasts but they simply do not have the slightest idea about the classic car world or the cars they buy and are in just to make money just because the art market has gotten to expensive. The automobile is not a work off art when it stops being driven its whole purpose the soul of the car is being killed. The only way a car like that does makes sense is in a public museum where it is available to the public as a technological legacy of mans progress.

I have no problem with “over restoration” nor if someone converts a classic into a modern DD with modern components. If someone want to take a car and make it the best it could have been, that is fine. Not only that, but it allows the restoration side of the auto-world to be the best they can be. It allows the craftsmen to chase perfection.

My issue with “garage queens” is that many are not driven and many/most are horded away. You can not “tow” and drive tastefully. You can not “park tastefully”. They must be driven (tastefully). Otherwise, they are no longer automobiles. Maybe various concourses might need to put requirements that vehicle achieve XXXX many miles in the last year to enter.

The only real way for it to be moments in time is that if the vehicle is NEVER touched/restored and they should have automotive “patina”. “Perfect examples” can never capture this because that orginalism is lost.

I completely disagree with the thrust of this article. As Matthew Lange pointed out, these trailer queen cars are restored to levels far beyond or different from the way they were made originally. For example, Ralph Lauren’s Atlantic was never black and never had disc wheels. And not every metal surface was mirror polished. Does anyone care? It’s beautiful, isn’t it? The point is that the concours/auction complex has become all about money, status, and a quest for perfection that never originally existed, and not about the cars. There are plenty of enthusiasts still driving or even racing extremely valuable cars regularly, so the notion that trailering is necessary to “preserve” the car is fallacious. My dad’s series 1 E-type consistently beats trailered cars at local Jag concours despite the fact that he drives it thousands of miles a year. He just keeps it up meticulously, and has preserved the original interior. The truth is that the high end of the hobby has been infiltrated by people who really don’t look at cars as objects for use. They are commodities just like the paintings, watches, and jewelry. Things to be amassed and traded for gains to their egos and their bank accounts, which is a real shame.

Just buy two of everything. Problem solved. lol :p