Petrolicious, the creator of high quality, unique movies and articles for traditional automotive fans, has launched its newest video, that includes Dan Maly’s Volvo 242 Group A homologation particular.
After a few years away, the Petrolicious web site and YouTube Channel has been just lately rebooted by duPont REGISTRY Group, and new movies are actually dropping each Friday. Petrolicious celebrates the innovations, the personalities, and the aesthetics that ignite a collective lust for nice automotive machines, and it seeks to tell, entertain, and encourage its group of aficionados and pique the curiosity of those that have been lacking out.
As we speak, Petrolicious takes up Dan’s story…
We title the issues that matter. We’ve been naming the issues that carry us for hundreds of years. Ships have been named to make sure protected passage, to present one thing intangible like destiny a goal to bless or curse. They’re the primary generally recorded named objects as a result of they have been essential to survival, commerce, and mythology. Horses have been named as a result of they have been companions, usually the one ones on lengthy trails. Wagons, bicycles, locomotives, planes… if it moved and mattered, it obtained a reputation. Names give them a penchant for tales. Tales make them actual. It provides them legacy.
This Volvo is known as Gertrude. Not as a result of it’s cute, or quirky, or “only a factor we do.” It’s named Gertrude as a result of the person who constructed it, Dan Maly, wanted to call it after somebody who meant one thing. His grandmother. She had 13 children. She held the household collectively. She was robust, and filled with grit.
Gertrude the automotive is a 1983 Volvo 242 Turbo Intercooler. Certainly one of round 500 homologation-spec vehicles Volvo constructed to fulfill FIA’s Group A necessities. Group A was FIA’s touring automotive components that demanded producers construct road-going variations of their race vehicles – at the very least 500 of them – to compete. Volvo answered with the 242 Turbo. It seemed like a field, however hit like a… brick. Backed by the Eggenberger Motorsport workforce, the Volvo 240 Turbo shocked the motorsport world in 1985 by successful the European Touring Automobile Championship outright. The automotive was pushed by the likes of Thomas Lindström and Gianfranco Brancatelli, who constantly outpaced the BMW 635CSi and Alfa Romeo GTV6. That yr, the 240 racked up six wins and a number of podiums, and clinched the title regardless of being up towards a lot flashier and supposedly quicker competitors. It was, in each sense, the underdog. A brick with a grudge. And it left BMWs in its wake. In 1985, the motorsport press dubbed it the “automotive to beat.” And so they have been proper.
Dan’s automotive isn’t bone inventory. It’s not a museum piece. It’s a restomod. One he in-built his storage with instruments handed down from his father and his grandfather. When it got here time to color it, he kicked the Firebird out of the storage, hung plastic, and sprayed it himself. “I see the failings within the paint,” he says. “Others would possibly see them too. That’s tremendous. I like her as a result of she’s not good.”
Underneath the hood is the unique B21FT block, the holy redblock. Forged iron. Overbuilt. Named for the crimson paint they wore from the manufacturing facility. These engines are legends not as a result of they made large energy out of the field, however as a result of they don’t die whenever you throw a bunch of enhance at them. Dan saved the block however for higher head circulation he gave it a brand new high finish from a ’97 940 Turbo. A 16T turbo, blue injectors, and a four-speed with overdrive maintain it shifting. It’s hybridized, he says, “but it surely works.” And it does.
There’s 5 years of his life within the automotive. And if you happen to pay attention for the eagerness he has for the automotive, you’ll be able to hear each single one among them in his tone. And Gertrude? It isn’t only a title. It’s a badge of honor. It’s respect.
We used to call vehicles extra usually. Again whenever you saved them lengthy sufficient to belief them. Again when breakdowns didn’t imply replacements. Again whenever you knew what was beneath the hood, not simply what was due on the lease. However as vehicles grew to become extra disposable, extra nameless, the names went away. You don’t title one thing you intend to flip. You title one thing you reside with.
Gertrude isn’t solely a automotive. She’s a reminiscence with a key.
And he or she’s in all probability going to outlast all of us.
Photographs courtesy of Volvo Automobile Company
