Vintage car and truck restoration is an incredibly nuanced and complicated activity. More often than not, even very expensive and extremely time consuming restorations are not 100 per cent accurate when it comes to returning the car to exactly how it rolled out of the factory the day it was completed. Is that a bad thing?
This topic comes by way of a recent YouTube video from Ferrari master Tom Yang. A recent visitor to Yang’s shop is a beautiful green Ferrari 330 GTC. I say beautiful because the car is assuredly that, but after you hear Yang start in on the items that an expert (and veteran concours entrant) of his background so quickly and easily points out, your perception might change.
Not just acorn nuts, the correct acorn nuts.
Yang has driven this car in previous videos, and according to his experience, it functions and drives like a vintage Ferrari should. By functional standards, then, this car is restored. But there is no better example of articulating restoration objectives than hearing Tom talk through the hardware and small-part finishes on this car. This piqued my interest as someone who prioritises function in a vintage car.
As you would expect, the judging standards of the Platinum Concours level for the Ferrari-only Cavallino Concours events (and other top-flight concours as well) require that not only the experience and function need to be correct, but the appearance does, too. Like many points-based judging events, the exacting details of original cars have been documented and a restoration is compared to those. Points are deducted for incorrect items. Yang is the kind of knowledgeable person who calls out five or six items that would need addressing under the hood before even getting closer than five feet away.
In this case, he shares bits of hardware that are either incorrectly finished or are the wrong type of hardware completely. Some covers and pivots on the engine should be held with acorn nuts but instead have regular nuts, while a few spots have acorn nuts but not the right shape of acorn nuts. It gets that specific.
Is this kind of thinking too much?
I say no. It’s fascinating to me the level of detail that is known and how that information was figured out, confirmed, and agreed upon by those who care. And this sort of anorak knowledge is not unique to the Ferrari world, either. Plenty of clubs provide quite specific documentation to help members restore their car old motors down to the most exacting detail. Knowing exactly how a car was assembled prevents the creep of inaccuracies into restorations and fosters the preservation of historically accurate vehicles.
Add in that restoring to this level is a task taken on willingly – no one is forcing anyone else to do certain things when restoring their own car – and suddenly the picking apart of a restoration like this Ferrari becomes fascinating rather than frustrating. The fact that we collectively know exactly how these cars were built down to the finish of each piece of hardware is fascinating. If you don’t want to restore to that level, that doesn’t mean we can’t appreciate those who choose to document this history for us.
