Petrolhead!

By Isabella Sanai

In September 2024, the final Grand Tour episode came out — the last thing Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May would ever film together. It’s been 22 years that the trio have been producing car shows — since the year I was born. I grew up with them, or rather, I grew up with the Top Gear DVD boxset, one of those ones that folded out like a cardboard concertina. Great preliminary training to folding up a Michelin roadmap, I think. DVD boxsets are an example of things from the 2000s that felt worth having — it’s the tangibility of the media we used to read/watch/listen to that constitutes so much of what we lack here in 2024.

My father and I often go to classic car shows together. Occasionally these are the Concours d’Elegance type shows with some of the rarest and most beautiful vintage Ferraris in the world. But the shows we prefer are the ones with the most bog-standard daily drivers from the 1980s and 90s that have now taken on an appealingly dishevelled look. ‘Vintage’, as Gen Z have it. (A term that seems to be indiscriminately ascribed to any manner of junk from at least the last 10 years.) I doubt, though, that the kinds of cars at these shows would go viral on TikTok for their aesthetic. An example of such a show is the Festival of the Unexceptional which takes place every summer in Lincolnshire and is exactly what it says on the tin. I often notice that the people at these auctions, almost all middle-aged white men, look sympathetically at me standing beside my father — the daughter who’d been dragged along to a car auction.

This couldn’t be further than the truth, as it is I who finds most of these auctions in the first place. It is also I, and not my 56-year-old father, who is a Facebook ‘Top Fan’ badge- holder of some of the most unexceptional, boring classic car groups (Retroshite, Sitting There Rotting On A Driveway, etc.) The other day in a university tutorial, I made a comment on a car-themed translation we’d been working on. ‘Petrolhead!’ exclaimed my tutor (a Harley Davidson fanatic himself), ‘What do you like then — F1? Harley Davidson?’ Neither — I had some difficulty explaining I’m not particularly interested in “the trendy”. It’s the old daily drivers — sludge brown, tank-like Mercedes 200TEs or baby manatee-resembling 1983 Ford Sierras that give the most authentic insights into the past.

Over the summer when news of Oasis’ reunion started to ricochet around, Noel Gallagher’s daughter Anais criticised the ‘ageism and misogyny’ amongst the group’s fans over tickets. Condemning those saying that long-term fans were more deserving of tickets than Gen Z women who’d recently discovered the band, her words were a reminder of how deeply engrained stereotypes still are in the entertainment industry. Glancing recently at a YouTube recording of one of Oasis’s last concerts back in 2009, nine out of ten heads I counted were white males. It’s a similar story with the early Top Gear live audience studio shows. For me and I imagine many others, not conforming to target audiences in the car world creates a feeling of needing to prove your knowledge and interest to take part. And though there is a growing appreciation amongst certain younger circles for the looks of mid 80s cars such as ‘boxy’ BMWs or ‘fun’ Peugeot 205 GTIs made famous in series like The Sopranos, as a girl with both a considerable knowledge of as well as an appreciation for these kinds of cars, you’re still going against the grain.

ISABELLA SANAI is the founder of the world’s first and only quinquennial fish-inspired magazine, The Halibut.

Art by Ginger Vidal