The GTG: A New Concept For The Past 50 Years

Philip Powell, writing over at the always great Classical Drives, cops to the new and happening wave of car oriented Get-To-Gether (or GTGs, as they are referred to here in America) that seem to be sweeping Australia.

He goes into it thusly:

“There seems to be a trend sweeping the country … towards weekly classic car meets adjacent to coffee houses and restaurants. These are not organised car clubs, just get-togethers of like-minded people.”

Really? This is new?

Wait, it gets better:

“Incidentally, credit the Brits with this concept.”

Man, both of those are news to me, because as near as I can always remember, “weekly classic car meets adjacent to coffee houses and restaurants, [ that are] just get-togethers of like-minded people,” have been happening all my life.

Has no one seen American Graffiti? Have we lost sight of what is, to me, one of the most basic tenets of our car culture: That car people will, spontaneously, show up at one or more local or fun watering holes on a loosely scheduled basis to look at one another’s cars and talk about same.

Dear God, I’ve been seeing this on a regular basis in every place I’ve lived (except Hawai’i, where cars are short-lived, transitory things). When I was in High School, the spontaneous accretion of cars & car guys & girls got so bad at the local Dairy Queen that the town fathers saw fit to enact Draconian levels of law enforcement.

I can still see the look on Ricky Blevin’s face when that cop gave him a ticket for “parking on the sidewalk” and his right front was literally over the line by a quarter inch (the cop even showed Ricky his cop ruler to prove it).

Nah, nothing new here … except for the possibility of getting Australians into the whole concept of American-style GTGs … Australians know how to have a good time, I can tell you that. So introducing them to this pastime sounds like a good idea.

Source: Classical Drives

Filed Under: Misc