Revs Institute’s 1919 Ballot Type 5/8LC might have raced in the Indy 500 but its story continues to build
WOUTER MEISSEN/REVS
Scholarly. That’s the best word for this discussion on the future of automotive history. It’s hard to summarise how much long-time collector and archivist Miles Collier packs into this wide-ranging work, with its references to Neolithic axes and Degas paintings. When he talks about the “artefactual narrative” inherent in a historic vehicle – the history recorded by the physical evidence of patches, reshaping, old paint, plus photos, records and memories – you’ll realise that this is neither a history nor a guide to restoration nor a defence of collecting. Rather it’s a thought-piece on what the car has meant to us culturally and technically, what the place of the historic automobile is becoming as we move out of the internal combustion era, and how to preserve it and the history that goes with it.