These Are the Days, My Friends

This article first appeared in Hagerty Drivers Club magazine. Click here to subscribe and join the club.

David Zenlea's story about whether we are in the waning days of affordable sports cars that go very fast reminded me of a recent driving adventure in which I drove a car that goes very slow.

The car: a 1903 Knox made in Springfield, Massachusetts. Top speed: about 26 mph if I gunned it and was going downhill. With a tailwind. The occasion: the 2023 London to Brighton Veteran Car Run, the oldest car rally in the world, dating back to 1896.

I participated in this glorious slow-motion tradition for the first time in 2007, but my steed-a borrowed 1904 Rambler-wasn't up to the task of chugging 54 miles from Hyde Park in central London to the coastal town of Brighton. Instead, to my great disappointment, it broke down outside Westminster Abbey. Twelve years later, I completed the journey aboard the Knox. We finished again last November, along with hundreds of other Veteran cars, some of which have completed the Run 60 or 70 times. Think about that. Vehicles over 120 years old still driving on public roads-albeit early on a Sunday morning. These were among the first cars ever built, and yet all these decades later, they haven't lost their ability to transport both our bodies and our souls, mine included. It's an amazing experience, and it gives me hope for the next century of motoring fun.

Which brings me back to David's splendid think-and-drive piece, which tests out five fantastic new sports cars-with, key point, manual gearboxes-that you can buy right now for $50,000 or under: the Acura Integra Type S, the Mazda Miata, the Subaru BRZ, the Toyota GR Corolla, and the recently refreshed Mustang. I'm sure you'll agree that these are all inspiring machines in an era when many cars barely get our attention. I would love to drive all of them on a twisty road like the ones our editors found in southeast Ohio, and I bet you would, too.

That alone tells me that we aren't in the end times of affordable sports cars at all. To the contrary, I think it's proof that we are living in-and have been for some time now-a golden age of motoring performance. I'm quite serious. I've been a sports car fanatic since I can remember, and I can't think of a time when there were more sports cars-foreign and domestic-with today's combination of drivability, dependability, affordability, and raw power. Can you?

There are those who will say, "Yes, but it's all going to end soon!" Car people are the best people in the world, but we do like to worry. The concern, of course, is that EVs will ruin everything. But what if they change nothing? Or very little? Porsche has already said it will keep producing gas-powered 911s for as long as it can. They get it. Others do, too, I suspect. I personally know many of the executives running our car companies, and I can tell you they bleed high-octane fuel and are committed to serving enthusiasts.

Maybe there will come a day when no one makes gas-powered sports cars anymore, but even so, that doesn't mean the fun is over. I've driven some of the best EVs out there, and they are truly a blast. The torque alone wins you over. They add to the sports car world, not detract from it, in my view. The more, the merrier. EVs will be an ever-increasing part of the mix, but it's not a zero-sum game. The sports car market is likely going to be a hybrid environment-a mix of electric and gasoline engines-for the foreseeable future. Let's also not forget that the millions of cool, fast internal-combustion cars that are already out there aren't going to disappear overnight. Like my Knox, a lot of them will be on the road and in our garages for a long time to come.

Love endures. So do great cars.

I would love to hear what you think. Please be sure to leave a comment below.

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