RARER-THAN RARE AMERICAN CLASSICS
Kobus Mostert is a car collector extraordinaire. He recently opened a private museum in George to house some amazingly rare and valuable American cars that form just part of his vast collection, inviting members of the Southern Cape Old Car Club for a preview to drink in cars that have world-wide collector value.
Kobus was inspired on his old car journey by a 1970 Cadillac De Ville convertible that was owned by his father when his family lived in Zimbabwe, and he has great memories of wafting along narrow strip roads in the Caddy with the roof down, and revelling in the huge power from the giant 7,7-litre V8. When his father sold the car Kobus vowed that he would one day own it when he had enough money, and he achieved that a few decades later when the second owner finally decided to sell the car. Kobus had the car restored to as-new condition, and the Caddy now takes centre stage in a collection of rare and wonderful Americana from the 1950s through to the 1980s.
“I have owned many cars from manufacturers all over the world, and I still rate the American cars highly in terms of the way they were built, their performance, and the amount of equipment they offered compared to other nations’ offerings,” he says.
In terms of rarity, one of the most eye-catching examples in the collection is a 1958 Bonneville coupé, one of just 26 examples built world-wide with the special fuel injection V8 offered in that year. The Bonneville is in fact a very sexy two-door coupé version of the Pontiac, and deemed so special that it doesn’t carry any Pontiac badges. To have a version of a car of which just 26 were built in America at that time is amazing, considering that in the US car production was generally measured in hundreds of thousands in those years.
Alongside the Bonneville is a 1956 Continental Mk II, another super rare car of which only 3 000 were built between 1956 and 1957. This car was the most expensive American car you could buy at the time, with a price just shy of 10 000 dollars, in an era when Cadillac prices ranged from about 4 600 to 7 500 dollars.
What made the Continental so special was that it was largely hand-built and was marketed against the Rolls-Royce and Bentley models from the UK. It was equipped with power-everything – steering, brakes, seats, windows, air-conditioning. It was designed and built by Ford’s new Continental Division, established to reclaim the glory days of the Lincoln, and included special speed-sensitive shock absorbers to achieve a superlative ride quality. With a 6.0 litre V8 producing over 300 horsepower, the big, sleek two-door coupé was certainly as fast as it looked!
There are many other rarities in this collection, including a late 1930s Packard with right-hand-drive, one of just two r-h-d Packards made that year. And the Chrysler company’s exclusive Imperial division from the late 1950s is represented by a 1959 Crown Imperial Southampton hardtop coupé, with the desirable Flitesweep boot lid, with an ornate moulding to create extra space for the spare wheel.
Rare coupés abound in the Mostert collection, notably a beautiful 1958 Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight coupé in black to offset the beautiful side mouldings that seem to have been inspired by musical notation.
When it comes to elegance, few American model lines could match Buick’s Riviera in the 1960s and 1970s, and Kobus has a number of these two-door coupés housed in his new George premises. I particularly liked the mid-1960s first-gen Riviera. The Riviera began life with a curvaceous coke-bottle sweep to its fender line that was a trademark feature of the car through all its significant years, well into the 1970s.
A Riviera model that is contrary to this design philosophy is the 1979 example. With its boxy exterior and vertical upright rear window, it seems an anomaly amongst all the flowing lines, but Kobus enjoys driving it very much, pointing out that it has a genuine 4 569 miles (7 350kms) registered on the odometer. I recently followed Kobus in this car over a few sections of rather bumpy road in the George industrial era, and I was able to note how composed this car seemed over indifferent road surfaces. It behaved like a brand-new car, which of course it is, except that it just happened to have been built 45 years ago.
That Buick mileage, incidentally, translates to an average of 163,3 kilometres per year!
Cadillacs, of course, are more known for their dramatic statements than subtlety, but they have their own beauty, not least because they rendered in metal some of the most outlandish musings that car designers ever had the cheek to submit to product planning committees. The fact that these 1950s exercises in excess were built is testament to the amazing optimism that pervaded the American psyche in the post-World War II period.
By the 1970s lashings of chrome and gigantic tail fins had given way to crisper styling, and yet even these Cadillacs still managed to look special enough to stand out in a crowd. But for sheer presence, it is hard to beat the truly massive black four-door sedan from the 1940s, which keeping company with a very elegant 1930s Oldsmobile in the display, the Olds being finished in a deep burgundy colour.
Another car in a rather eye-catching red was a Chevrolet Corvair, the rear-engined compact car that General Motors introduced to an unsuspecting world in 1959. The Corvair was unlike anything that General Motors had ever produced before, with a “flat” horizontally opposed, air-cooled six-cylinder engine mounted in the tail – along with independent rear suspension.
It seems as if the Corvair’s configuration was inspired at least in part by the enormous import success the Volkswagen Beetle enjoyed in the U.S. in the middle-to-late 1950s, and this was GM’s take on what a “super-bug” would be, designed by Americans for Americans.
Unfortunately, the swing-axle rear suspension and lightness in the nose section made the Corvair’s handling a bit tricky in certain situations, especially for drivers used to nose-heavy full-size sedans pinned down by large V8s up front.
A politically ambitious lawyer by the name of Ralph Nader picked up on accidents that were said to be caused by the Corvair’s waywardness, and subsequently produced a best-selling book entitled “Unsafe at Any Speed”, which castigated the Corvair in particular, and the American automobile industry in general.
This trail-blazing crusade for consumer-responsibility made a career for Nader (he would run for the U.S. presidency a few decades later) but signalled the death knell for the Corvair. Of course, it mattered not a jot that his disparaging claims about the Corvair were vastly overblown, or the fact that a relatively straightforward fix for the rear suspension turned ensuing models into excellent handling cars. Incidentally, the example in Kobus’ Museum is one of the 1960s revised second-generation Corvairs, with handling at least on a par with the average American sedan of the time.
Another controversial car in the collection is the Studebaker Avanti, a sporty car that preceded the Ford Mustang, and was a last gasp attempt to save the financially ailing Studebaker corporation from demise in the early 1960s. The first Avanti’s were rushed into production and resulting customer complaints sullied the name of what is, in retrospect, an excellent four-seater coupé, with innovative styling inspired by industrial design guru Raymond Loewy. Later appraisals of the Avanti have recognised it for the ground-breaking car it was, and one that deserved to succeed, which unfortunately never happened, due to Studebaker’s untimely demise in the mid-1960s.
To give some perspective to this hefty collection of massive cars, Kobus had parked a few survivors of a micro car collection he once indulged in, saying that he loved the little cars, although their upkeep is complicated by the two stroke engines that most of them employ, as the mix of oil and petrol in the fuel systems causes regular gumming up of the works.
Kobus joked that he decided to scatter a few of these about the place to fill up space in the corners, much as you would do using pot plants in an entrance hall. And comparing the size of a Goggomobile to a Cadillac parked alongside it, one could see that in the context of 1950s and 1960s automobilia, these German microcars were about a third of the size of an average American post-war car!
There are over 30 cars in the collection at present, and the mix will no doubt shift as time goes by, as Kobus has a good few more collectable cars in his possession, scattered in various storage units around the country. We look forward to seeing how the collection evolves as he happens upon yet more rare and wonderful example of cars that made a difference to our lives over the sweep of the previous century.
Group visits to this amazing collection can be arranged by e-mailing Kobus Mostert on Kobus@tranacon.co.za.
by Stuart Johnston
