Dear Colin, I have been a car enthusiast all my life and have succeeded enough to be able to indulge my passion to a limited extent. But what I have failed to do is pass it onto my children. My daughter has no interest in cars, my elder son only those built by Elon Musk, my younger only in those he can drive around the computer in his bedroom. How can I – and we – get today’s young people interested in ‘proper’ cars and therefore preserve them for the next generation? Fred Chapple
Dear Fred,
You’ve got to immerse them from day one. From birth my daughter was dragged to autojumbles, shows and race tracks. It worked because by the time she was 25 she’d owned a couple of Peugeot 206s, a mint MkI MX-5 and a Golf GTI Mk5. I was fortunate that my job exposed her to a great number of amazing cars, but had I been, say, a trapeze artist instead of a motoring journalist I would have bought an Austin Seven special and joined the Vintage Sports-Car Club. When you go to a VSCC event you will see many youngsters that have been passed the baton and love and enjoy old cars, many of which have been owned by several generations of the same family.
