THE PROAUTO RUBBER VETERAN AND VINTAGE TOUR
The 2023 ProAuto Rubber Veteran and Vintage Tour took place in sweltering Western Cape weather in early November and drew over 30 car entries and six motorcycles. The tour has been running in South Africa since the mid-1950s when these old cars were mere spring chickens, most of them being less than 30 to 50 years-old back then!
This year, the youngest car was a 1930 Ford Model A at 93-years-old, and the oldest a 1910 Model T Ford. Do the maths and you realise that this car was 113 years-old, and still going strong in the hands of its ultra-enthusiastic owner, Gerhard Breytenbach, from Polokwane. (To qualify as a Veteran car, the manufacturing date has to be 1918 or earlier, while Vintage cars have to be built before December 31, 1930.)
It takes serious enthusiasm to source a car from the pioneering days of motoring in South Africa and many of the cars on the tour had been restored from absolute rust-bucket wrecks. Preparing such an old car for a three-day tour also takes serious commitment, not to mention transporting it to the event. Arthur Duvenage, for instance, now in his 80s, towed his 1915 Ford Model T all the way from Pongola in northern KZN for the event, with his wife Elize supplying flasks of coffee!
Watching Arthur’s Model T haul up the Du Toit’s Kloof Pass on the second day of the event, one was struck by the smooth note of the engine – despite the fact that temperatures were heading for 35°C. He later explains that he had recently balanced the old 2,9-litre four-cylinder motor at his home workshop, weighing and machining each connecting rod to specifications way more accurate than Henry Ford had specified over a century ago.
As for top-quality workmanship on a Model T, it was hard to beat the all-wooden pick-up body that Hennie Marx had created for his wife Corne, to be ready just in time for the tour. The couple had hauled the 1918 machine carefully all the way from Bethlehem in the Free State.
There were 16 Model Ts entered for this year’s event, and despite many of them running without water pumps (these “new-fangled” devices were fitted as aftermarket items back in the 1920s) all 16 of the Model Ts finished the event, which totalled over 600 km.
‘It made me very proud,” said Tour organiser Philip Kuschke, as the organising club was the Model T Ford Club of South Africa, and it was important for the Ts to deliver a good show. Philip and his wife Rosita entered their 1913 Model T Runabout, while club president Emil Kuschke and his wife Hannetjie were also in the thick of the action in their 1914 Model T.
Apart from those old Fords (there were a number of pristine Ford Model As entered), there were more than a few exotic cars on the tour. Alice van Jaarsveld was driving her 1927 Lancia Lambda Torpedo in her usual press-on style, and revelling in the fact that this car was fitted with four-wheel braking, independent suspension and a monocoque chassis-body construction. Incidentally, the Lambda was the first car to be produced without a separate chassis frame, and also had a revolutionary damping system built into the independent front suspension.
Another innovative car entered was the 1913 Cadillac, run by Richard Middelmann, with his wife Philippa navigating. This was the first car to be fitted with an electric-start system, and Richard explained that it needed about six-steps to activate the battery-powered system, which in turn set in motion all sorts of mechanical devices and a solenoid to crank the giant six-litre, four-cylinder engine into life.
This car was fitted with twin ignition and two plugs per cylinder. The engine is beautiful to behold with its copper individual cylinder water jackets. On Day 1 of the Tour, unfortunately, one of the dual-plug cylinder head inserts blew out, punching a neat hole in the Cadillac’s beautiful bonnet. Undaunted, Richard loaded the car up and headed back to the family’s farm in Botrivier, about 150 km away from the Tour headquarters just outside Paarl. He returned just in time for post-dinner snifters that night with the family’s 1930 Graham-Paige, a beautifully-preserved, open-top Tourer.
Meanwhile Richard’s father Robert and his mother Maryke continued on their unflustered way in Robert’s 1922 Bentley 3-Litre, the 24th car ever made by Bentley, just a year after Bentley began production in 1921. Robert says that the chassis is numbered as the 24th car, but the engine is numbered as the 23rd produced.
The Bentley 3-Litre model would go on to international fame in 1924 and 1927 with famous victories at Le Mans. It was a very advanced car at the time, and Robert says his car, fitted with a more sedate Van den Plas four-seater Tourer body, can cruise all day at 80-90 km/h, thanks to a four-valves-per-cylinder configuration and a five main-bearing crankshaft.
A car that was also considered a cut above the rest in those days was the Hupmobile, and well-known Cape Town collector Leonard Schneider had entered his beautiful 1926 example for this year’s tour. He says that for some reason in the 1920s Hupmobiles gained a very strong following in the Free State area in South Africa. The marque was established by the American Hupp brothers, Bobby, and Louis, and produced high-class automobiles from 1909 to 1940. A surprising number of Hupmobiles still survive in South Africa today.
The motorcycles on the tour all had to comply with the DJ Run rules which stipulate that all two-wheelers entered for the commemorative run from Durban to Johannesburg each autumn have to be manufactured before 1936. There were some interesting bikes on tour, notably two ridden by women riders. Bev Jacobs was the most experienced rider with some 25 DJs under her belt on the 1935 Triumph built for her by her father. Benita Palmer had ridden just one DJ on her 1935 Rudge, but she had a flawless V&V Tour in the Cape, aboard her small-capacity machine.
Having covered the event as a presenter for Ignition TV, I was struck by the amazing sense of closeness between all the car and bike competitors, and how they were always willing to stop and help each other when problems of a mechanical sort occurred over the three days. All but two of the cars finished, and five motorcycles were still running well, Bev Jacobs’ Triumph finally succumbing to a strange ignition malady on the final day.
For me, one of the most interesting vehicles of all was the 1919 Ford Model T pick-up run by Adrian Denness, who happens to live just a few km away from the Paarl tour base. Adrian’s car, converted maybe 60 years or so ago from a Runabout model to a pick-up, has covered over 13 000 km in his hands since he bought it decades ago.
Most of those kilometres have been done on gravel, and one of Adrian’s missions in life is to travel everywhere he can in his Model T on rough dirt roads, which the Model T was designed for. He does precious little maintenance on his car either, and just minutes before the start he was seen calmly topping up the oil and water as an after-thought! As for cleaning and polishing, Adrian leaves that to the other guys.
My feeling is they should create a “Best Patina” award for the tourÉ or maybe they could just give him the trophy right now for him to keep in perpetuity!
Story by: Stuart Johnson
