Nearly all of the events that we’ve been to this summer have been nearly unbearably hot. The sun, unrelenting. The cars, panting for cooling air. We try our best to give out free water to everyone we see to make sure nobody falls over, and recently added mister fans to help keep people stay cool while they are signing up for our event website credits. Thankfully, as we rapidly approach the end of August, the heat broke, the cars DIDN’T, and the Larz Anderson Auto Museum hosted one of the biggest Swedish Car Days we’ve ever seen. Enter:
Swedish Car Day 2016
If you weren’t part of the mile long procession that nearly closed down this portion of Brookline Mass, then you were greeted with neighborhood roads lined with Saabs and Volvo’s, shined up, buffed out, and stuck outside. That’s because the venue filled to capacity nearly immediately, something we’ve never seen before. Luckily we were able to set up and pick a couple of our favorite vintage cars to be at our tent, before the melee ensued. And it’s no wonder why so many people were here. The weather was beautiful, the online car communities have never had so much steam, and we only have to assume that a huge amount of people in the region were setting Swedish Car Day as their deadline to get the summer garage projects done.
One of these projects, a build that surely took longer than one summer, parked near our booth. With an unfamiliar roofline upon initial inspection, we soon realized that a few cars away from our tent was a Chevy Nova, (in)complete with a B230FT Redblock Volvo engine, a 4L60E transmission. The turbo was about as big as a basketball, we can only assume that this put a ton of horsepower to the ground, while puzzling onlookers at the drag strip with an orchestra of turbocharged components. Well maybe orchestra is a little far, this is probably closer to Black Sabbath around the Dehumanizer years. I digress.
The classic game was, on point this year, with more classic Saabs and Volvos than we are generally used to. We were positioned in the center of the show, with Vintage Vo to our back, and New Gen Saab across the way. Could you ask for a better view? We will be at the Lime Rock Historic Festival this week, and the car we were able to borrow from a friend is a 1973 Volvo P1800es (the wagon version), so we’ve been keeping a special eye out for them. Not sure if it was this fact, or just that there were more P1800’s than usual. One thing we do know is that life is good when surrounded by these vintage machines.
That’s not to say the new-gen crowd has dwindled, the section of the show on the other side reserved for more of our own bread and butter seemed to almost a swirling and rising tide of 9-5’s, 9-3’s, V70s and C30’s with so little space in between them you could barely open a door. Where the vintage crowd prides themselves on originality and functionality (mostly, of course), the new gen sections featured performance mods and personal touches, aiming to take car that begins with the right foundation to build out with a few tasteful mods, or take a sky-is-the-limit approach and boost to the end of what’s possible.
New England Saabs brought a huge following to rub elbows with the Turbobricks guys, it was a very cool club scene thankfully devoid of the usual haters that show up to the more popular car shows.
Inside the Larz Anderson Museum was a special treat, probably a coincidence but the exhibit felt custom fit to my personal taste when it comes to Swedish departures. Porsche was being featured in the main entryway, with museum quality (of course, we’re in a museum here) Speeders, roadsters, 911’s, and even a homologation 959. It seemed few people really understood what an important car this was, as it was near the pivot point of engineering transition wh….actually I’ll save that for another post. In the next gallery was a very cool selection of rare and vintage BMW’s, paired with a selection of old school racing motorcycles. Again, heaven. Alas, we were here for the Swedes, and the museum was here for shade and distractions. 
Outside the main entrance to the museum, which used to be the carriagehouse for the estate that is no longer here, was Volvo’s newest and brightest offerings. Straight out of the future, these cars featured the latest sensor packages and digital dashes/gauge clusters that I’m sure will make you feel like you’re in the Jetsons, hopefully with the same reliability as the flying cars from the show. Maybe this time, someone has come up with a digital screen that will never fade, lose pixels, de-laminate, or die all together like the ones today.
OK, enough about that, while I go back to compare gauge clusters with a late 70’s Saab 99, here are a few thoughts from our Event coordinator and Swedish Car fanatic Josh Menke:
“This year’s Swedish Car Day was, for me, one of the most perfect in memory. The day itself was a prototype of perfection. With a hot late-summer sun, softened by pockets of brilliant white clouds and a light breeze, it was Larz Anderson at its best. Perfect complement to this epic day was the family that is the Swedish car community. To see these friends and relatives again, some for the first time since SOC or Carlisle, others for the first time since last year’s SCD, is something I’ve grown to treasure. The passion these people show for their machines and for each other is unforgettable. Our eEuroparts.com kiosk was powered up and giving out $15 credits in thanks to the community for its support of us for all these years. We did our best to keep our water coolers full as we encouraged all to have a bit of people coolant on us.
Two o’clock came too soon as it always does for these sorts of things. People across the fields took last looks at rare cars, swapped final stories until “next time” and said their goodbyes and farewells. I had a chance to catch up with Pierre and Susan Belperron, without whom this show would not be the beautiful thing that it is. Thank you both for the hard work and passion you give our community so freely. To all of you who made the trip this year, a toast: “Keep that sensible Swedish steel rolling” See you all next year.”
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