The Playboy Cars — 1965

our own selection of those with the style, speed, engineering and distinction to satisfy the urbane owner

A year or so ago I was in a telephone booth beside a road in Upstate New York, listening to a busy signal, looking into a cold, steady rain. My back was to the door of the thing, and someone pushed it in. I looked around. It was a man I liked a good deal, for knowing him slightly, a Dutchman, a grand prix driver, Count Carel de Beaufort.

"We were having lunch down the road; we saw you go by," he said. "Why don't we go the rest of the way together? You know the road better."

De Beaufort had a 230SL Mercedes-Benz, and someone was with him in a Volvo sedan. I had a Porsche SC. We were all going to Watkins Glen for the Grand Prix of the United States. I finished my call and we went off in the rain. I had been running on the wide, winding, almost empty road at 85 or so, and, as I thought, not to bore De Beaufort, I went up to around 90, as much as I felt I could manage. After 25 miles or so he flashed his lights and we stopped to let the man in the Volvo catch up. We stood under a tree, where we could see the road a long way back, rain running off the leaves. We were in the Finger Lakes country, the hills were bright with autumn under an ash-gray sky. When the Volvo came up De Beaufort said to me, "Would you like to trade cars with me?" The 230SL was new then, I hadn't driven one, and I thought it generous of him, and trusting; after all, the thing is in the $8000 class. And since De Beaufort had been driving competition Porsches for years, there could be no excitement for him in an SC. We went off as before, and after he had given me ten miles or so to get used to the Mercedes, De Beaufort came past and began to run. He began to use the whole road, not just his side of it. The rain had gone from a drizzle to a shower to a sluicing flood; the Mercedes, a well-sealed car, was taking water in two or three places, and he was running faster than I could go, alone, in comfort. Still, I had been astonished at the way the Mercedes combined a soft ride with tremendous sticking power. I knew how the Porsche handled, and I decided that if I tucked in behind De Beaufort, stayed precisely on his line, exactly at his speed, nothing but amusement was likely to come of it.

We did 25 or 30 miles like that, we went through the outskirts of Watkins Glen in the high 80s, and when we parked at the hotel, De Beaufort unwound himself out of the Porsche—he was a lot taller than six feet—laughing, as it seemed, all over, and said, "Do you know we came down that last hill into town at 120?" I said yes, I knew, and I knew too that for that we would have caught not just a fine, but a jail sentence. He laughed.

"You, perhaps," he said. "As for me, I have diplomatic immunity. still, I would have sworn you were my cousin!"

I saw De Beaufort half a dozen times afterward, driving this and that, even a 30-year-old Bugatti, when he came to see me in Connecticut, but the run into Watkins Glen sticks in my mind, not only because I will never see that good, kind, amusing man again—Carel de Beaufort was killed on the Nürburgring last August—not only because it was risky and exciting and very pleasurable, but because we were in two such delightful automobiles.

Words change their meanings as time runs around them. The word "playboy" used to mean wastrel, hedonist, wanton. Ten years ago, the word began to change, not only in meaning but in form, so that today the word stands for an attitude, an outlook, a view, a selective, restrained enjoyment of the best that urban, particularly (text continued on page 180) Playboy Cars (continued from page 101) metropolitan living can provide for knowledgeable men of good taste and reasonable means. It wouldn't have been possible, ten years ago, to say that something had a playboy air, or look about it. It's perfectly possible, and in order, today, and so we can say that one motorcar is a playboy kind of car, and another is not. Those that are not are easily set apart: They're clumsy, or ugly, or merely utilitarian. As for the rest ... to begin with, there's the 230SL Mercedes-Benz.

Mercedes-Benz has always cataloged a gentleman's carriage: a comfortable, luxurious, basically two-seater car of enterprising performance. For a time in recent memory there were two grades of such: the 190SL and the 300SL. The trouble with the 190 was that it wasn't as fast as it looked; the trouble with the 300 was that it was a lot faster than it looked. People in very ordinary vehicles successfully picked on 190SLs, and while only Ferraris or Aston Martins or Maseratis could challenge a 300, there were two inhibiting factors in ownership: The thing cost around $12,000 and it could be made to do 160 miles an hour. More money was involved than most people care to spend for a car, and more speed than most can handle. The 230SL replaced both the 190 and the 300 and it is a remarkably successful compromise.

With the 230SL the medieval notion that a fast car that handles well must necessarily deliver a hard ride, banging the spinal disks together like so many castanets, has perhaps finally been laid to rest. The vehicle's comfort is nearly absolute, it will whisper along Park Avenue light-footed as you please, or storm the winding road from Reno to Lake Tahoe at 120. It is one of the few automobiles designed for the specific kind of tires it wears—belted, like the Michelin X or Pirelli Cinturato—and the resulting sense of security is a rare thing.

Absolutes are deceptive, but if the Mercedes-Benz 600 is not the most luxurious automobile in production today, it's a strong contender. The 600 comes in two models, and we may as well consider the larger, the Pullman. This is the biggest motorcar available today, at 20 feet, 7 inches. It weighs two and a half tons and will, believe it or not, transport eight people at 125 miles an hour. And not merely in a straight line. European drivers of respectable sports cars have been driven to the nether edge of despair by the discovery that they couldn't keep up with this thing, black, and looking big as a boxcar, on a winding road.

In the 600 Pullman, automatic and remote control has been taken the whole way: power steering, brakes and windows, of course—also the sun roof and the trunk lid. Every seat, not just the driver's, is power-adjustable in three planes of movement, and even the door latches are automatic: a finger's pressure to start the door on its way is all that's needed. After that, the latch reaches out, in effect, and pulls the door shut in absolute silence. Come to think of it, the idea of slamming a car door shut is a vulgarity we should have been able to abandon years ago. Multispeaker radios, air conditioning, ashtrays and lighters all over the place, 13 interior lights in the passenger compartment ... all this for around $27,000, if you don't mind coping with a long waiting list.

If one does not often need to offer the ultimate in mobile luxury to as many as eight people; if, say, capacity for three and the driver will do, motoring de grand luxe is available for much less money in Cadillac or Continental stores. The new Calais hardtop would be a suitable choice among the Cadillacs, and there are many little niceties available in it. One of them seems to me as humane a device as is worn by any motorcar: a permanent temperature control. One sets it for, say, 70 degrees, and the interior temperature of the car will stay at 70 degrees from then on, whether it's in Maine or the Mojave Desert. Automatic speed control for parkway cruising is standard, the steering wheel adjusts through six angles of tilt and in and out, the trunk locks from the driver's seat and so do all the doors, the head lamps are automatically dimmed, naturally, and so on and on. The Continental, inheritor of the legendary Lincoln honor, is altogether competitive, and the determination of the Ford people to maintain this carriage's unchanging elegance of line is most commendable.

The Porsche I drove into Watkins Glen will not be in 1965, as it was then, the top of the line, but it remains one of the delights of the road. The Porsche SC is big enough to be perfectly comfortable for two people, small enough to be no embarrassment in any traffic, on any mountain road, in any no-parking-here urban environment. The primary virtue of the Porsche is obvious; the company has been building the same model for more than a decade, and the bugs are long out of it. Compared with the encyclopedic list of options most Detroit firms offer, Porsche has few, but they are all worth having: the best wood-rimmed steering wheel on the market, fine leather upholstery, an electric sun roof, automatic AM-FM radio, an indoor-outdoor thermometer, and four pieces of fitted luggage, three leather, one canvas, that two people would be hard-pressed to fill for a month's gala. Coming is the Porsche 901, six cylinders instead of four, faster (130 instead of 115), a bit longer, a bit roomier (four instead of two) and quite a bit more expensive.

Closest to the 901 in domestic machinery is the Chevrolet Corvair Corsa, leader of that line of aluminum air-cooled rear-mounted-engine cars. This, for four passengers, has 3-speed or 4-speed stick shift or automatic transmission on a 140-horsepower engine, with 180 horsepower optionally on call, more than 70 hp over the SC Porsche. If that's not enough, you can have 400 in the Impala. This season these cars are wearing two of the most beautiful bodies that have ever come out of Detroit—clean, smooth, unadorned, balanced, really having to ask nothing of the best Italian custom coachwork, and at one fifth the price and one hundred times the availability.

The superfluous body decoration that spoiled the Corvette Sting Ray for some of us when it first appeared has been erased, and this authentic high-performance motorcar is now certainly one of the most desirable fast two-seater carriages on the world market. Indeed, it can be argued that it is the most desirable, for it will do almost everything that its European competitors will do, offers everything they offer save, perhaps, final elegance and exclusivity. And it offers, of course, something they eminently do not: cheap maintenance.

The first three of these European jobs one thinks of are Ferrari, Maserati and Aston Martin. There is not much left to say about the Ferrari, a legend in its own time. The day Enzo Ferrari dies, or makes good on one of his recurring threats to retire, will be a day on which a chorus of the saddest sighs will go up all over the world, mutterings of despair from the thousands, from Bangkok to Buffalo via Berlin, who have hoped with all their hearts, and half believed, they'd one day be able to buy a Ferrari. My advice has always been, if you can't buy one, don't drive one, because you'll never get over it. It's the old story: When a car is designed and built by an obsessed near genius, an implacable perfectionist who cannot be satisfied or made happy, who is responsible to absolutely no one but himself, who continues the same basic model in manufacture for more than ten years—then you have a vehicle that is, like the Rolls-Royce, unique. Even the unspeakably rich who have owned a dozen Ferraris admit enchantment with the four-passenger 330GT—smoother, softer, easier than the famed 250GT, but just as fast, as roadable, as nearly indestructible. This is a kind of touring Ferrari. If you require performance of a higher order, there are the models 400 Superamerica and the 500 Superfast, this last a bolide offering 175 miles an hour not after it has been expensively worked up by specialists, but just as it comes off the boat. There are fewer Maseratis than Ferraris on the world's roads, and some connoisseurs, for example, Prince Karim Aga Khan, prefer them, perhaps for that reason, since their performance, while intriguing in the extreme, is of a lower order. There is, for instance, the Quatro Porte, the first four-door automobile of this type, running a 260-horsepower V8 engine with, if you please, an optional automatic transmission, in my view an absolutely splendid idea for a Continental high-performance carriage. The stick shift must go; to preserve it for any but race or rallye cars is as silly as to insist on lighting one's cigarettes with flint and steel instead of butane.

Last to let it go, I suspect, will be Aston Martin of England, built for a clientele attaching great importance to the nuances of driving skill. (England is the only country I know where the automobilists cheerfully and seriously maintain an Institute of Advanced Motorists, an august body offering a super license test for expertise on the road, successful candidates to be awarded a car badge attesting their superiority—and a leather cover to mask it when someone else, say one's wife, is driving.)

There is not, and probably never has been, a series production handmade motorcar, but the Aston Martin comes close. It is a superb motorcar, very fast, beautiful—the body is by Touring of Milan—and built with an extraordinary concern for safety. I have been accused, and perhaps justly, of failure in the past to properly evaluate the Aston Martin. I once told David Brown, the head of the company, and a major figure in British heavy industry—production of the Aston Martin is a minor part of his interests, and almost a hobby, but still probably closer to him than anything else he does—that I had found his car heavy in the controls. Two days later, a factory driver brought an Aston Martin to my door, saying, "Mr. Brown would like you to drive this car, and when you are through with it, if you will be good enough to call us, we will come and pick it up." A beau geste, indeed.

I drove the car in London and in the country on as many different kinds of going as I could find, and there was nothing heavy about it, though I must maintain that one I'd had before, privately owned and used, was trucky. It was delightful, and certainly on one level, braking power, it went a long way beyond my previous experience. An Aston Martin DB5 can be stopped from 100 miles an hour in 3.5 seconds. Indeed, it can be brought to a dead stop from 150 miles an hour in 10 seconds! It will go from 0 to 100 to 0 in under 20 seconds. Certainly it is one of the great high-performance motorcars, and to fault it one is driven to such extremes as to suggest that in a 5000-mile flat-out go against a Ferrari, the Italian would probably have fewer minor breakages, and this is perhaps hardly fair, since the Ferrari's reliability under stress is legendary.

In the same high-level category with the Aston Martin one might place the Anglo-American Cobra, now newly to be had in a hardtop, and the Italo-American ISO-Rivolta, both offering performance to be used to the limit only by experts or madmen. Carroll Shelby's Cobra is almost too much for the street or the road, and obviously too much, even on the race circuit, for a good many thoroughbred sports cars. It's a Texas-type motorcar, as Mr. Shelby is a Texas-type pilote. The ISO is a Bertone-bodied device running a Chevrolet engine, beautiful and expensive. The street version is mean enough, but there are competition types, the Grifo A31 and A3C, the C being cited by the factory as worth 190 miles an hour. (A somewhat more docile hybrid is the Sunbeam Tiger, a shoehorn amalgam of the Alpine with Ford's 260-cubic-inch engine.) Whither, pray, are we going?

The center value of a very fast automobile is like the ability of a karate master: Virtue lies in the possession of power unused. When a hero-driver rips 90 days' life off the engine of his MGB to run from a stop light ahead of a Maserati, who wins? The fellow in the Maser, of course, serene in the knowledge that if he would, he could blow the MG off the road.

The MGB will indeed go—0 to 60 in 11 seconds—but it is not, compared with the rest of the stuff on the road, what it once was, a lightweight king of the highway. Now it has windup windows instead of the curious plexiglass sheets, and a radio is optional. For most of us ancients, there was only one MG—the high-wheeled, lithe, virile-looking TC, 84 miles an hour flat out downhill, underbraked, bone-shaking but somehow known to greatness. If you go back to the Middle Ages, and remember Watkins Glen 1948, and Ken Miles and Sam Collier running radiator to gas tank in TCs ... in those gone days, the TC could be made to run and hide from most of the big Detroiters, a folly if an MGB were to attempt it now. Sometimes it is hard to convince Europeans that regular go-to-the-supermarket American sedans today run beside each other at Daytona at 180 miles an hour, speeds that are denied to some $30,000 grand prix single-seaters. And these really are stock cars, nothing done to them but blueprinting; that's to say, they've been made to fit together, to a hair, brought to match their makers' specifications. The performance is in them, waiting, as they clank off the production line second by second; it needs only to be brought out.

For comfort and longevity and luxury at a price, the big American V8-engined cars are supreme in the world market, and the choice is almost too wide to contemplate. This year's Fords, under the push of the policy change that has produced the racing GT cars, are full of technical innovation, new chassis, new body-mounting system, the disk brakes that have been used for some years now in Europe and will in 1965 become the world standard, and bigger engines. The delightful Ford Mustang, one of the biggest initial-sales successes since the appearance of the original two-seater Thunderbird, is on the scene in fastback form, an extraordinary value for the money. Buick's Riviera, which can now display a 425-cubic-inch engine under its hood (Oldsmobile has a similar-size monster at its disposal) has been discreetly and tastefully face-lifted; its head lamps have been moved out into the front fenders where they belonged in the first place. The Plymouth Barracuda is another aesthetically pleasing new approach to the problem of the medium-cost gentleman's transport. The Plymouth Satellite and the Dodge Monaco run the 426-cubic-inch engine turning out around 400 horsepower, and the Chrysler 300L, one of the most successful of the world's fast big or big fast cars, has 413 cubic inches. The 300L's comfort level is to the highest Detroit standards, but the success of the vehicle as a competition car has surprised many who couldn't imagine that it would handle on upcountry rallye routes.

The Pontiac Grand Prix Sports Coupe, one of the most muscular of Americans, comes with 333 horsepower as standard and 356 on call in the 421 engine. Modern as tomorrow though it is, the GP amusingly harks back to the "classic" period, when quality cars were rich with wood, showing vestigial walnut in the form of inserts in the dashboard and the steering-wheel spokes. Next, brass head lamps?

Elegance on a smaller scale lives in the Rover 2000, the first new model of that make for some time. This is a compact-size sedan full of remarkable technical innovation clothed in a flowing, clean-lined body. Rover still uses wood lavishly—not walnut, but African cherry. So does Rolls-Royce, of course, and the nearly identical Bentley, with an extra refinement: spare cuttings of the figured walnut that goes into the cocktail cabinet, for example, are kept at the factory, keyed by number, so that if replacement is ever necessary, a hairline match is assured: Your walnut veneer will not go into someone else's car.

Spirited renderings of Rule Britannia accompanied the very recent news that the medium-size Van Den Plas Princess sedan, formerly the Austin Princess, would henceforth be available with a genuine Rolls-Royce engine. The engine is made by R-R, but it is emphatically not the one powering present Royces—it's a modification of a line of truck and heavy-duty engines Rolls-Royce builds for military service. The vehicle will sell for around $5600 in London, and British status seekers are trampling one another cruelly on the way to the showrooms.

A fast medium-size sedan is the Jaguar 3.8S, the top of that series, with the well-known E type and the Mark X rounding out the line. The 3.8S is a bit longer than the regular 3.8 and carries four-wheel independent suspension. Time was when a vehicle like the 3.8 could be sure of pretty well dominating the highway among four-passenger cars, but that was before the Mini-Minors revolutionized everything. These square little-wheeled boxes, front-engined, front-wheel-driven, handle so well and are capable of transmitting so much power to the road that they have destroyed very nearly the class structure of British motoring. A bit more than a couple of thousand dollars will buy a Mini that will do 100 miles an hour. (Some of these go-cart-size sedans have been clocked at 128 miles an hour.) The shocking accelerative power of the thing, combined with its very small size, makes it a giant killer in heavy traffic. It is the answer to city congestion. (But British insurance companies charge a premium to cover a hot Mini, because they know it will be driven hard and probably rashly.) I know a boulevardier wealthy enough to buy what he pleases, who travels for choice in a black Mini-Cooper with canework body, tiny square cut-glass side carriage lamps, chauffeur-driven. This miniature carriage is perfectly elegant, and he's halfway home before his friends in bigger limousines are well into the traffic stream.

If you value exclusivity, there are three small-production British makes well worth pondering—Alvis, Jensen and Bristol. The Alvis runs rather old-fashioned engineering under a beautiful Swiss-inspired body. The Duke of Edinburgh's personal car is an Alvis. The Jensen and the Bristol have exotic-looking bodywork over big American V8 engines for plenty of go—a sound combination.

The Italians do make cars other than the Ferrari and the Maserati: Fiat is one of the world's major industrial complexes. The Fiat 1500 is pleasant, if not madly exciting. The great and long-lived Alfa Romeo is still rushing along, and of the Alfa line, the six-cylinder 2600 is probably best made to U. S. tastes and requirements. The stick-shift devotees love it: five speeds forward. The Lancia Flaminia, not new but still showing lots of advanced engineering, is a connoisseur's item, will never be common in this country or anywhere else. The Lancia Flavia is smaller, and famous for its engineering refinement, comfort and quiet. A new Italian make is the Lamborghini, very much a high-performance car, 12 cylinders, 4 camshafts, 6 of the brutally expensive Weber racing carburetors sitting on top of it all. Not new in name is the 1800 BMW—BMW is an old-line German firm—but this smallish sedan is new in design and one eminent authority of my acquaintance swears it's the best motorcar of its capacity in the world. I have never driven one, so my opinion would be weightless. There is a new 1500-cc. front-wheel Renault on the way of which much is expected, and there is now a Facel Vega running the Austin-Healey six-cylinder engine—the Facel 6, it's called—as well as the Facel III powered by Volvo. Elegant and, in this country, rare, both of them. Elegant, not so rare as to be troublesome in maintenance, and eminently desirable is the 1800S Volvo itself—tough, fast, a car that has since it appeared been on my list of the six best two-seater coupes. It has many unique virtues. Among them: the thing looks at least twice its price.

Just in sight over the brow of the hill: the Honda. The first Japanese grand prix car went into competition last August, and sports and gran turismo types are on the way. They are certain to be very good.

Japanese, German, Italian or American, the distinctive ties that bind all of these makes together as playboy transport are style, spirit, elegance and a purpose attuned to the needs and proclivities of the urbane male.