Simplifying life

Bruno von Rotz
12/31/2025

Blick in die Sammler-Halle (© Bruno von Rotz)

As we all know, the end of the year encourages many people to make resolutions for the coming year. One of these resolutions for some classic car collectors during the last months and years was probably to simplify their lives. In fact, this is now even perceived as a trend; it's called "Simplify your life".

It is no coincidence that as baby boomers get older, entire collections are increasingly coming onto the market. And if you don't want to sell all your cars straight away, you can offer at least some of them, especially if the next generation isn't interested.

As you get older, many things no longer come so easily to you. Even things that used to be stoically accepted become a stress factor. Anyone who owns a car collection with five or even more cars knows what we are talking about here. Every single car requires care and would like to be driven regularly. As soon as you let your guard down, the historic cars often "thank" you with increased susceptibility to breakdowns, reduced desire to start or simply incontinence (loss of fluids).

These cars regularly have to be taken to a specialist if you don't do the work yourself. And these specialists are obviously becoming increasingly rare and their workshops are further and further away, which makes things even more complicated. The cars also have to prove their roadworthiness (by the authorities) at regular intervals. And and and ...

It is easy to understand that all these duties, which are often only offset by a few enjoyable rides, become a burden in old age. So it's really no wonder that collections become smaller or are put on the market. And because in the baby boomer generation there is a particularly large number of classic car collectors, this trend is naturally more noticeable.

Now, of course, we hope that our Zwischengas readers are still in good shape and are thinking about other resolutions, such as taking more and longer trips or even finally fulfilling a long-cherished car wish (in addition) ...

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Somehow crooked!

Martin Sigrist
12/30/2025

The Rover 2000TC has a crooked radio and the sticker of the modern battery manufacturer in the engine compartment. The fact that this Rover exists at all - find one, even in the UK the original version of the P6 is no longer to be found on every corner - was reason enough for us to portray the car. What a pleasure to drive the first "European Car of the Year" from 1964 and to share this joy in the form of an article!

I don't care about crooked radios and old stickers on cars if the owner has a good soul and the car has character, is rare and generally stands out from the crowd as a British car. But does a crooked radio really significantly reduce the value of a "technical monument"? Until now, I thought that the Zollverein colliery, the Albula line of the Rhaetian Railway or the Suez Canal were technical monuments.

I see a Rover P6 as a cultural asset on wheels, with its entire cumulative history, right down to the fact that one of its owners, even the current one, has fitted it with a radio. Whether crooked or straight, he will have had his reasons for doing so.

I can remember the first - and last - time I went to a Citroën DS meeting. That was 30 years ago. As soon as I arrived, an expert marched in my direction. Instead of being pleased that a 25-year-old at the time was interested in a car that was almost as old, he criticized the fact that my 1973 DS 23IE Pallas came with chrome steel-edged front indicators and headlight surrounds. But the fine frames lacked the corresponding locks, the connectors that prevent the ends from standing up at some point. I assume these were fitted because of the brushes on the washing lines. With a swelling chest, my counterpart told me how my car was not original here and there and how he, the expert, had had his car restored for a lot of money.

A connecting piece conceals the joint in the frame around the headlight glass

I remember just as well that I had no desire whatsoever to look at his great car. I only mentioned that I had just changed an engine mount on my goddess myself, of course the one on the side where the torque is supported against the frame extension, somewhere under the exhaust manifold on the right. Then I mentioned that I had bought the chrome steel frames for the headlights as NOS for a lot of money, because I didn't like the gray plastic surrounds, they would become brittle in UV light and the chrome on the original indicators, which was vaporized from behind, would flake off after a few years. That's why I would have taken the latter made of chrome steel, as far as I knew at the time only installed at the very beginning of the model-maintained DS from 1967, as new parts from my authorized dealer - for free! "Take them with you, nobody else needs them anyway..."
And the little connectors, they look like little tears, as I thought at the time. A foreign body, I just didn't like them and deliberately left them out.

Of course, I am not immune to a certain rejection of the "machinations" and outrages of other classic car owners. As I've described here before, I find oriental carpets in cars terrible and whitewall tires on youngtimers are a joke. But the worst thing about any classic car meeting is people who trash other people's cars. That's why I - normally, but not here - just keep my mouth shut.

In serious cases, it always helps me to find some love for the offender, to recognize that his car still exists and drives at all, and to raise awareness that there could be a reason for everything. Oh, I forgot about that: My daughter's Studebaker has front GRP fenders and a tire size too small! What an outrage!

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Always ready, the classic car (question of the month)

Bruno von Rotz
12/29/2025

Frage der Woche 274: Bleibt Ihr Klassiker für allfällige Ausfahrten angemeldet über den Winter?

It used to be the case that vintage and classic car owners would deregister their old cars in the fall in order to preserve them and not put them back into operation until the following spring. However, this is increasingly being done without in order to be able to take advantage of any nice days for a drive in January or February. Low insurance premiums for old cars and the costs of registering and deregistering make this decision easier.

But what do Zwischengas readers think? To find out, we asked the following "question of the month": Does your classic car stay registered for any trips over the winter?

The answers from the more than 410 survey participants show a clear trend. Only 20.5% deregister their old car and mothball it.

However, 78.5%, i.e. almost four-fifths, could drive off at any time, although 24.9% (absolute) rarely or never do so, even though the car remains registered. They do not want to expose their car to winter conditions under any circumstances. However, 53.6% (absolute) are prepared to start up their old car at any time, should the weather and road conditions permit.

And one percent found none of the answers applicable.

Graphically analyzed, the survey looks like this:

Auflösung der Frage der Woche 274: Bleibt Ihr Klassiker für allfällige Ausfahrten angemeldet über den Winter?

We have already posed the next "question of the month" , which is: do you adapt the music to the car?

And, of course, all previous "Questions of the week and month" and their evaluations can be found in the corresponding channel.

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Iced coffee and cold feet

Martin Sigrist
12/28/2025

There are two essential machines in my workshop in winter: a gas-powered heat gun - I know, they're called fan heaters - and a coffee machine. My windy shed is so permeable to air that you can see outside through the cracks in some of the walls.

There's always a little bit of the outside inside, or "semi-transparent walls"

This has certain advantages. It's relatively dry in the hall. Unless there is fog, then you can also feel it inside. The temperatures inside and outside are always about the same. This prevents condensation. And the cold also prevents you from dawdling around while working, typing a message into your cell phone or flicking through old magazines that are gathering dust on the shelves. So it's great when it's a bit cold in my workshop.

No, of course it's not! The clammy fingers after an hour become a problem, the cold creeps up your legs from your feet and literally gets to your kidneys. And the dripping nose gets on your nerves at some point. That's why I got myself the fan heater. It's always aimed at me at work. That way I'm heating up the air at certain points, so to speak. But I'm aware that I'm mainly blowing it into the air. You have to be able to work directly under the roof somehow, a high ceiling is not always an advantage. But I haven't had enough money for structural measures yet, the cars come first.

And then there's the coffee for the interior. Lots of it! So the workshop winter should be manageable. Because there is still a lot of work to be done and the next season will - hopefully - come sooner than expected.

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When model cars were still on the Christmas wish list

Gerhard Schütz
12/27/2025

In 1958, a Dinky Toys racing car cost CHF 1.90. That sounds cheap. But the pocket money was two francs a month. That doesn't sound so cheap. Creativity was required from a boy from a car-free household who could only live out his enthusiasm for cars with toy cars. And this creativity had to manifest itself in several concrete measures, as I have listed them individually here:

A) By far the cheapest measure
Buy only the colored catalog - for 25 centimes. But that was still half a week's salary! And then spend days dreaming of all the splendors. Ticking off what I absolutely had to buy, what I might buy and what was definitely not interesting - virtual shopping, so to speak, but structured. Whereby: "buying the catalog"... sometimes it was given to you as a gift in the store. Or sometimes you gave it to yourself - er - in the basement of the hardware and toy store near the model cars, where you were sometimes all alone on Wednesday afternoons.

B) The strictest measure
Not spending any money - except on model cars. A kind of building society model, i.e. a discipline of spending trained early on. In purely mathematical terms, this resulted in a maximum of 12 model cars per year. If it was ever a truck or even a large construction machine for the sandpit in the summer, the number of annual purchases fell accordingly.

C) The cost-neutral measure
Consistently put car models on the wish list: For birthdays, Christmas or on the occasion of passing the transfer exam to secondary school. In 1960, for example, the latter resulted in a Unic Pipeline tube transporter for an impressive eight francs!

D) The most creative measure - with a social component
I had invented a kind of role-playing game for my younger brother and my two younger sisters. I ran a building company, my brother ran a farm and my sisters ran a large house in the doll's house. The three areas were the fields of activity of a fictitious, ramified family, a kind of family holding. There was a lively exchange in improvised dialogs between the farm, the building company and the household, and the respective areas of activity and exchange naturally required the corresponding vehicles, especially as the communal area (fire department, police) also had to be covered. And this vehicle fleet in turn naturally called for regular new investments, which were carefully planned under my management.

The planning work for these investments was catalog-based. The planned purchases were neatly marked with a color for each of the three parties involved and carefully prioritized.
As the chief purchaser of the siblings' car fleet, I kept meticulous records of all purchases. Even the "caravan hole" (trailer coupling hole in the car floor) was documented as well as the tire dimensions with a view to possible replacement. Even model car tires could break at some point.

The problem was, however, that the siblings with their pocket money usually had different plans than me. That's why I had the idea of encouraging them to consider the vehicle purchases necessary for the joint game in a cost-neutral way when making birthday or Christmas wishes, which worked quite well for a while. The fact that my brother once wished for a tractor was of course inconspicuous from a gender perspective at the time. But it was astonishing that nobody in the circle of gift-givers seemed to be surprised when one of my sisters had a tipper truck or a mobile crane on her wish list. Today, some parents would probably - wrongly - celebrate this as an act of early emancipation for their daughter, while others would rightly castigate their son as patriarchal, manipulative machismo.

E) The most professional measure
Going to work. From the 7th grade onwards, schoolchildren could help pick potatoes at the neighboring agricultural school on Wednesday afternoons in the fall. And that brought a proud 5 francs in cash per afternoon, i.e. 10 weekly salaries in one go. Later, unfortunately, the increasing use of the "Samro", the harvesting machine, destroyed these coveted jobs.
During my eighth and ninth school years, I got my first vacation jobs at the local porcelain factory, which gave my model collection a major boost and at the same time relieved the pressure on my siblings, especially as I continued to consistently do without treats, comic books and other short-lived items.
But even at this age, smaller or larger, box-shaped, "hard" Christmas presents - the "soft" ones were the annual woolen socks - were still very welcome.

What was it like for you, dear reader? I hope you received the "right" Christmas presents again this year!

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The big transfer

Bruno von Rotz
12/26/2025

Bentley Vorkriegslimousine (© Bonhams)

One topic that is increasingly being discussed in classic car circles is the "great wealth transfer". This refers to the wealth that the baby boomer generation (born between 1946 and 1964) will pass on to their descendants in the coming years. We are talking about trillions of USD/EUR/CHF that will pass from one generation to the next.

Of course, this also includes various classic car collections, but above all real estate, investments and cash. Regardless of the form in which these assets arrive, they will increase the purchasing power of the next generation.

These will often be people in their forties to sixties and the question arises as to whether they will then invest some of the inherited funds in old cars. This is certainly to be expected up to a certain point. But will the heirs also be interested in the cars handed down by the older generations? In some cases perhaps yes, but not necessarily at the prices that today's sellers imagine.

Classic car buyers aged between 40 and 65 are more likely to go for cars from the seventies, eighties or even nineties. Restomods and very young neoclassic cars could also be of interest to some. On the other hand, very few of the now wealthy car enthusiasts will be interested in a pre-war saloon.

What do our readers think? Simply comment ...

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Home-alone parody on the streets of Zurich

Bruno von Rotz
12/26/2025

Home-Alone-Parodie (© Adi Aeschbacher)

We're not really big AI fans when it comes to creating photo, video or text material. We're probably too old-fashioned and too attached to facts and originals for that. But, hats off, for once we have to make an exception for this video and nod our heads in agreement. Because what Adi Aeschbacher has published here, in keeping with the season, is funny and a great parody of the problems drivers have in Zurich (and presumably in many other big cities too). We, who have our editorial office in Zurich, are also sometimes among the long-suffering drivers who suffer from the ever-shrinking traffic and parking spaces, who occasionally get upset about nonsensical traffic light controls and one-way streets.

But to wrap the whole thing up in a "Home Alone" spoof - and of course an "old-timer" is also used - is actually almost great cinema.

Decide for yourself, we found it very entertaining:

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An elf for Santa Claus

Martin Sigrist
12/25/2025

It is said that he lives at the North Pole and travels on a sledge. However, it is highly questionable whether this is true. There are too many contradictory factors. For example, it seems to be a huge logistical effort to transport the presents and the associated paper and packaging material there so that it can be prepared by the Christmas elves, according to the Anglo-Saxon version, and transformed into pretty presents - all for the dear little children. Then the reindeer team, together with the white old man, have to get the whole story out to the people. You can just about imagine what animal welfare has to say about all this stress. The fact is, the story is controversial and we at Zwischengas, who specialize in investigative journalism, wanted to finally get some clarity. Coincidence played into our hands.

Zwischengas has received mail

The editorial team at Zwischengas has been working on the issue for some time. Some editors have been talking about nothing but Christmas since the summer. To the annoyance of the boss, some draw lines on their desks with a marker. For some, the Christ Child is supposed to bring an engine, for others an exhaust silencer, for others a little less stress and more time for their own projects.
What do you mean? "Christ child"? Yes, here we already have the dilemma: who is it who - or that? - brings the presents? We have agreed that it has to be both of them, because otherwise the effort would be impossible to manage. And a Christ Child dropping a 4.8-liter cast iron engine from the 1920s would probably be a gross mischief.
Now we received a letter in November saying that Santa Claus had heard that the editorial team was looking into the essential core questions, but couldn't find a conclusive answer: Does Santa Claus exist and how does he really get around? And what about the Christ Child? The sender of the letter was none other than Santa Claus himself.

Conspiratorial meeting above the clouds

They wanted to meet, it said. Preferably just to the left, in the parking lot above the winter clouds. We didn't need to worry, Santa knew that we didn't particularly enjoy public transport, so no Christmas train or fairy tale streetcar or anything like that. We should just take a car. No sooner said than done! So there we were in the middle of December in the parking lot, very-very just above the clouds, and lo and behold, Santa Claus came roaring around the corner. He got out, shook our hands and said there were a few things to sort out.

Animal welfare had long since advised him to do without the reindeer. They are now only used for show purposes, but the gang mainly hangs around and makes comments, for example about the outfit of their "old man", which they described as terribly old-fashioned with its red and white basic design and fur edges. Of course there are elves, said Santa Claus in response to our question, they had to use a crane to maneuver the darned engine around, after all, you can't do magic, not even they, the Christmas elves. But the rear silencer was now OK, they had given the supplier a few nightmares in his sleep, now he had rebelled and finally pinched himself in the - we'll spare the exact words here in favor of Santa's dignity.

Secret meeting place above the clouds

The special elf

Santa has addressed many issues: Reindeer food had become more expensive again, but he hadn't received any speeding fines for years. And of course the North Pole thing is complete nonsense, Santa's headquarters are in a run-down warehouse in the port of Rotterdam, where most of the Chinese plastic toys that children want today come from. This makes the logistics easier to handle. And very special elves are responsible for the deliveries, but it is no longer so easy to get them. They haven't been made for more than 50 years because, we could hardly believe it, Santa Claus had driven up in a tiny little old British car. Now he was standing there and what we initially interpreted as rust trickling down turned out on closer inspection to be stardust, shining gold and scattered on the ground under the car.

That's right, the car! It's a Riley Elf! We now have scientific proof of this and can also say that Santa is a gear-head, because his car is an automatic, as one of the editors was astonished to discover. Santa then kicked the left front wheel with his heavy boots and said that the manual version would have been impossible to master with his big knobbly feet, that he likes to drive like a wild man and shift the gears to the max, but for reasons of common sense he would have opted for the automatic version.

As experts as we are, we supported him in his decision and confirmed that he was right. Then Santa started talking about a 998 cm3 BMC A engine, Hydrolastic springs from 1966 and things like that, whereupon we had to put the brakes on him a little, because we hadn't come to discuss technology. But Mr. Santa insisted on explaining the technical advantages of his car to us. The engine had a brute 38 reindeer, maybe even more, he said, not realizing that the horned fur-bearers had completely different characteristics to horses, the latter being quite sissy and constantly getting red noses during a sled test. We asked about Rudolf, the reindeer with the same red nose, but Santa ignored our comment and stayed in his car.

The fan shares his enthusiasm

He shared our opinion that his 1968 Riley Elf had a color scheme that took some getting used to. The fact that the car never looks like it has a consistent color, sometimes the doors look a little lighter, sometimes the fenders, is due to the fact that his paint elves didn't knock the stardust out of their coats and it got into the paint can. On the other hand, the original leather in the interior and the walnut-covered dashboard are flawless. We wanted to point out that with walnut wood, care is taken to use only veneers without knotholes, but that seemed like a smart-ass remark to the old man in the red jerkin. He was now in top form, talking about the Lucas toggle switches, but he didn't know which one was for which purpose. "Weihnachty" never forgets which child did or missed what and when, but otherwise he is a forgetful scatterbrain. And the owner of the Riley insisted that we take his company car for a test drive.

Santa Claus with superior - er - strength

We could have said it straight away, the first few meters we drove ourselves confirmed our suspicions: they are horses after all, not reindeer! And they really pull themselves together. But we spared ourselves the comment about long strokes and things like that. Meanwhile, the automatic gearbox shifted up perfectly in the D position and occasionally down again. Santa Claus is a jovial fellow and his car radiates this. But the Riley drives, quite well in fact. It's amazing how it manages to land precisely on the roofs with these brakes! First of all: it remained a secret. But that's really the only thing that remained hidden from us during this encounter. Everything else was completely cleared up. For example, the fact that the car smells slightly of burnt gingerbread when the accelerator is released ...

In our editorial office, we can now get back to the important things: Do coffee cups have to go in the dishwasher every evening or should they only go in when there's not a single one left in the cupboard and the leftover coffee from the dirty cups is already as hard as concrete?

We happily said goodbye and reviewed the information from Santa Claus: From 1961 to 1969, the Riley Elf was built by BMC in three series. It was the last model with the traditional name. As the Wolseley Hornet, the "Mini with a trunk" was then history in 1970.

Back at the editorial office, we were soon disillusioned: the Christ Child had also written to us and told us in his letter that our Santa Claus information was nonsense: a warehouse in Rotterdam, that was completely absurd, people order everything online from Temu these days!

Well, and so the editorial team stands there and wonders. What's more, shortly afterwards we found Santa's car for sale at a well-known Zurich car dealer.

This raises a dark suspicion? Were we being fibbed to? Did Santa take advantage of our naivety and pull the wool over our eyes? It all sounded so reasonable - and the Riley Elf drove like a dream...

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In memory of Chris Rea (obituary)

Bruno von Rotz
12/24/2025

Chris Rea is probably known to many people, because he certainly wrote the almost perfect music for drivers. He also recorded one of the better-known new Christmas songs ("Driving Home for Christmas"), which is frequently heard again these days.

Perhaps less well known is his film "La Passione", which he made almost 30 years ago. The film is about a ten-year-old boy who, as the son of an immigrant family, is fascinated by Wolfgang von Trips. Chris Rea had the Ferrari 156 (Sharknose) and the Ferrari 250 TR1 built especially for this film.

The movie with autobiographical elements was not a great success, but Rea said in an interview that the opportunity alone to sit in (his) Ferrari 156 was worth the effort of the movie.

In any case, Chris Rea was a car fan, driving a Lotus Elan 26R, a Lotus 6 and Lotus 7 as well as several Ferraris. He even worked as an F1 mechanic in the pits at Jordan in 1995.

Chris Rea died on December 22, 2025 at the age of 74 just before Christmas. However, his songs such as "Josephine" and "On the Beach" are likely to remain immortal.

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Lots of light at the third Zurich X-Mas Drive

Martin Sigrist
12/23/2025

It soon gets dark in the evening and many people are not entirely comfortable with the run-up to Christmas anyway. There's the threat of Christmas shopping stress, the end-of-year spurt and reflecting on the year that is drawing to a close - keyword: projects that will still be relevant in the new year, despite resolutions to the contrary.

The question with all these points is whether you want to do them to yourself. So it's all the better if the answer is a definite "yes" and there's something to distract you in between. One option - and certainly not the stupidest for those of us with the notorious "old metal disease" - is to take part in an X-Mas drive. In classic German: to take part in a Christmas decoration drive with the car.

Third edition

This is the third time that Chris Wyer has organized such a drive, and the operator of the DriversApp wanted to keep the whole thing "low key", as he says. In other words: the character of a spontaneous action, a kind of rolling flash mob, should be retained. The caravan of Christmas-decorated classic cars that rolled through Zurich on December 20 was neither widely announced nor widely advertised. The announcement of this third edition only made the rounds on the DriversApp channels, on social media and in a small network of rather younger classic car enthusiasts.

Right from the start at Zurich's Utoquai, it was clear that the 2025 X-Mas Drive would be even more popular than the first two events. The event started with a coffee at Emil Frey Classic, the first opportunity to take a closer look at the participants' imaginative creations. Held at dusk for the first time, the decorations were dominated by lights both outside and inside. One resourceful participant even had a train make its rounds around a mini Christmas tree in the lavish interior of his 1964 Oldsmobile. Christmas trees in general were accompanied by illuminated reindeer, entire towers of presents or even a wobbly Santa strapped to the roof.

Eyes closed and through

After the rendezvous, the colorful procession mingled into the hustle and bustle of the pre-Christmas Stamstag evening in the city of Zurich. Thanks to the cool weather, however, no incidents were reported due to the stop-and-go traffic and engine temperatures remained within the normal range. Nevertheless, some people must have been happy when the traffic slowly cleared towards Wollishofen on the left bank of the lake. After that, a leisurely cruise along the lakeside road was the order of the day before the convoy left the shores of Lake Zurich in the direction of Horgenberg. For the first time, the X-Mas drivers were treated to a culinary finale.

Cheese at the end

The scribe's modest garage served as a shelter for the Christmas drivers to enjoy a hearty raclette. In the freshness of the unheated workshop, not only did the cold air flow in through the cracks, but the clouds of cheese also flowed out again. It was easy to find the decorated cars outside in the pitch-black night as they were parked in rows, competing with each other.

The third X-Mas Drive was therefore undoubtedly a success and a worthy end to a truly eventful classic car year. Although there is still to be a DriversApp New Year's Eve meeting on Zurich's Albis Pass, in the hopeful expectation of some snow, some people are likely to mothball their cars for the season after the drive, or perhaps not yet?

For a fourth edition of the Drive, however, something has to be thought of. Because with the annual doubling of participating cars, the limit is quickly reached. Perhaps it will become a rally in the narrower and wider sense of the word. But the next Christmas is still a long way off and now it's time to get the 2025 edition behind us.

Pictures: Marius Egli mariusegli.ch

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