By the age of 12, I owned a fleet of cars that included a Shelby Cobra, a Porsche 911 and a Citroen DS. So how did I buy these automotive legends with the money from my paper route? Downsizing.
The Citroen was a Dinky Toy, part of a miniature fleet that eventually numbered in the hundreds, covering most of the level surfaces in my bedroom. The Porsche and the Cobra came with the slot-car racing set that made 1968 the best Christmas of my life: I tore open the box and disappeared with my new cars and track into the basement, surfacing only as required for school, my paper route and the occasional meal.
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I couldn't fit in the cars, but these were some of the greatest driving experiences of my life. I was lost in my own childhood world of speed – my days were spent working on lap times, repairing shattered cars and building ever-more elaborate tracks, including a miniature Monza with a banked curve that wrapped around the furnace.
Good times. Now I'm a grown man, and I've had the good fortune to drive many of the cars I dreamed about as a boy, including a Cobra and dozens of Porsche 911s. And sometimes I wonder what was better – the real thing, or the toy?
Sliding a full-sized Formula car around a racetrack and ripping down Lookout Mountain in a supercharged Lotus have definitely been highlight moments. But so was the day in 1969 when I built an orange Hot Wheels track that started on the second floor of my parents' house and stretched down into the yard in a giant parabola, ending with a giant ramp that launched cars across the front lawn and into a plastic swimming pool.
So how could a toy equal the real thing? I began to see why after studying Plato back at Kings College in Halifax. My professor, an Anglican priest with a degree from Oxford, taught me the essence of the Platonic approach: physical objects are merely the representations of an ideal that we carry within us and share with others as a common language. He used the example of a chair – the one I was sitting on was merely a piece of wood – the idea of a chair was universal.
I thought back to the Jaguar XKE, one of the most beautiful cars ever built. When I was 10, I made one from a plastic model kit and set it next to my bed, so it would be the last thing I saw as I fell asleep. I studied its perfect, feline shape and imagined the day when I would get hold of a Jaguar that I could actually fit inside.
Twenty-five years later, my wish came true when a newspaper editor gave me the keys to his XKE roadster. But the reality paled compared to the dream – I drove it around for a while, but I didn't love the XKE. When I was a boy, it was the latest thing. Now it was just an old car, with dated mechanicals and performance that wasn't much better than my Honda Civic.
Now I understood. My toy XKE had been a Platonic ideal. The real one was a fading chunk of metal.
The Shelby Cobra was also a bit of a letdown – the toy one I owned in the 1960s fuelled countless daydreams, but when I drove a real one in the 1990s, the cockpit ergonomics were terrible, and I could feel the old-fashioned ladder frame twisting beneath me. The toy had definitely been better than the real thing.
But it could cut both ways. No toy could give you the unforgettable adrenaline rush of a real car, especially when you pushed one too far.
The first car I could actually fit inside was an AMF Pacesetter Convertible pedal machine my father gave me when I was four. I spent the next several months on the sidewalks of Sydney, N.S. My dad, an officer in Black Watch regiment, accompanied me in his combat fatigues and taught me the basics of turning and stopping. I lost control on a hill one day when my dad was one step out of reach. Luckily, I piled the Pacesetter into a snow bank before things went too far. But I was already addicted to speed.
By the time I was five we were living in West Germany, where my dad and his buddies spent weekends racing their cars on weekends at a local airbase. I began collecting Matchbox replicas that matched their real cars – my favourite was a Porsche Speedster that I painted to match the one owned by my dad's friend Punchy Payne, a fighter pilot I considered the coolest guy of all time.
Next we went to Africa, where there was no television. My toy car collection grew, and I started building plastic models, high on the act of mechanical creation (and probably the fumes from the Airfix glue). My brother and I made go-karts out of wooden packing crates and took them to a hill near our house, flirting with the immutable laws of physics. I ended up with six stitches in my knee and a scar in my forehead. Our top speed was probably 30 or 40 km/h, but nothing since has felt faster, not even a brand-new Porsche Turbo that I got up to red-line in sixth gear.
I sat down the other day to try to estimate how many toy cars I owned, and how many real ones I've driven. I gave up at 500 or so. As a boy, I played with toy cars and waited for the day when I could have real ones. Now, looking back, I occasionally wish I could be a boy again, racing my tiny cars in my parents' basement, or losing it on a Cape Breton sidewalk.
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