Youngtimers’ Nostalgia

Word by Christian Parodi / Photo by Federico Vandone dell’Acqua

The 80s, so distant yet so close. A time that marked the lives of some of us through photographs in which we show off hairstyles to be ashamed of, reprehensible clothes and colors that today we would call kitsch. The music was bad, rock almost died in that decade and the love for beauty that blossomed in the 50s and 60s seemed even more distant than it is today. However, if we look at that period from an automotive point of view, with all of its difficulties also due to the oil crisis that broke out in 1979, the desire to amaze was undeniable, both in terms of design and for the increasingly targeted performance towards the achievement of what would have soon become two fundamental voices to differentiate a supercar from a sports car: acceleration and top speed.

After all, when it comes to emotions it is natural to awaken our inner child and I challenge anyone – at least until their fifteenth birthday – not to have stuck his head in a cockpit and immediately going to look for the last number on the speedometer, noting with great amazement that the numbers were slowly rising towards the incredible 300 figure. Let’s come back with feet to the ground, moreover what we call youngtimers should not be sought in the highest end of the price list of the era, but rather in what the automotive production between the 1980s and early 2000s offered to a larger portion of motorists. These are the cars that could be seen on the streets, the ones on which the parents of those who have a few white tufts on their sideburns made their girlfriends fall in love thus allowing them to experience emotions on four wheels with an increasingly large slice of drivers.

Automobile as a sense of freedom, but also as an instrument of pleasure, without forgetting those bits that were introduced to distort the concept of life on board. In short, these were cars that did not miss anything and that seemed to really represent everything we would need. And so, in addition to the introduction of safety systems such as ABS and the first Airbag systems, on-board telephones and the likes, we were challenging our childhood friends to see whose father got the dashboard with the most buttons. Those were years in which you could have recognized a model in the dark, simply by the shape of the headlights and where each brand had distinct characteristics, a much smaller price list but a great desire to grow and probably to go as far as they are now.

But nostalgia is a subtle rogue and it is legitimate to ask whether these memories are not actually deformed by the emotions we feel by connecting them to such important moments of our lives. Maybe a mere sedan looks like a special car in our eyes just because we spent some of the happiest years of our childhood on the back seats. It’s easy to become sentimental when you try to remember something that can no longer exist, at least not as it once was. Everything seemed bigger, quieter, more beautiful and perhaps it really was like that, but the years pass and time is an inexorable judge. Yet, with their thousand defects and that clear distance from the glories of the past that were myths already at the time, we look at youngtimers with a tear that falls on our face but that starts from the heart, because they do not represent the collective dream, but that of our memory.

That’s a treasure that belonged to each of us and this counts more than any figure, any reselling value and in spite of the numerous limitations they may have had. Those 80s are long gone, we thought we didn’t have to worry about anything, yet things took a different turn, but this does not prevent us from breathing again something that seemed left in the past, after all you just need to find a specimen in good condition or maybe even well preserved – always keep in mind that in most cases these are cars that were used on a daily basis – so putting one of these cars in the garage is pretty much within everyone’s reach. They are not exactly classic cars, but compared to today’s ones they keep intact that analog feeling, those smells and those mechanical sensations now long gone, not to mention that at the expense of the thousand limitations designers have today with their super computers, they were the result of the inspirational spark of those who still put an idea on paper. That same idea that would become emotion and that after at least four decades beats as loud as that day dad arrived home with our new car. Nothing else mattered back then.