TRAVELINGWITHTOOLS

A post-war Jaguar, a brass-era Isotta-Fraschini and a pre-war Bugatti Type 35B.

Man, what a place to work.

I remember when I first got the job, I couldn’t really get my head around the way that the guys working there were used to it. The types of cars that came in and out, day after day, they were like rock stars. Top level celebs. If Reilly’s was a music venue, it would be as if the Rolling Stones played one day, the Velvet Underground the next, and maybe the whole Rat Pack came by to watch? Madonna came by all the time! Nobody that worked there seemed to notice. (Although now and then, a car would come by that perked everyone up and they all went and crawled around it looking at interesting details.)

I had been working next door at “the British Car Company”, an independent shop that specialized in Land Rovers and Rolls Royce, as if somehow those two brands were spirit animals, joined in some horrible genetic union. How I ended up there is another story, but while at the B.C.C., I had restored a Jensen Interceptor and built a 440 Chrysler for it. I did some engine work on an Aston Martin Vantage. I replaced numerous head gaskets and gearboxes on Land Rover Discos. Lotus. Austin Healey. Jaguar. You know, your next door neighbor’s cars.

On a nondescript day in that stretch of the early aughts, there was a yellow Ferrari 375 GTB/4 parked next door and I went over to take a peek. It had the keys in the ignition, ready to go (!).

In today’s “one day in the shop” image, I’d been working at Phil Reilly & Co for about 4 and a half years, and I no longer wondered how folks resisted becoming jaded. It was probably long past, the day I became jaded. They are all just cars, at some point. And yet…

The D-Type Jaguar and the XK-SS that remained after it was no longer competitive… well. If you had to pick a rock star to sit in place of the D-Jag, who would be up to snuff? Elvis, maybe? Yeah. The D-Jag is Elvis. Steve McQueen had an XK-SS while Elvis was still alive, I think. How cool is that? It oozes cool. (A little oil too.)

I recall that this car came in to have a replica engine built and fitted, to preserve the original engine that was in poor shape, including a big crack in the block. I also went through the gearbox for reasons lost to time. There was quite a lot of fiddling to make a standard E-type block work, as the D-type had substantial differences in the block features at the back.

Crosthwaite & Gardiner provided the aluminum castings that are unique to the D-Jag, such as the cam covers, the sump and the pumps.

The next car, the Isotta-Fraschini was a soprano opera star that nobody alive remembers, but who was Taylor Swift in 1909. That car was really interesting in that it came from an era where they were experimenting with technologies that hadn’t been standardized yet. The valves, valve seats and valve springs were contained in threaded component inserts that could be worked on external to the engine. You could do a valve job one at a time! It was really interesting.

Also, it had a bevel gear driven single overhead cam, much like the later Bugatti.

The Bugatti has a different character of desirability to it. I mean, they made a quite a few more 35’s and its variants than D-Jags. It certainly isn’t a rock star, to keep the metaphor going, perhaps a jazz musician. A piano player of complex rhythms and melodies. Its engine rips and snarls, but it sings sweetly while doing so.

I’ve written about this 35B before, and I feel like the car and I have a pretty close relationship. I may have spent more time caring for it than almost any other single car in my career, bar the one Maserati Birdcage. We reunited the chassis with the original crankcase and a new Brineton crank back in 2011, which is why you see the cases sitting empty across the frame rails in the main image above. I looked after it again it at the Rolex Reunion last year, 10 years after its previous run in 2014.

As the world is small and everything moves in circles, I found myself last year doing a spot of work on the Bugatti Type 51 that had provided the matching crankcase. Two cars in my life separated by ten years and related to one another by a big aluminum casting from 1927.

I got the job at Reilly’s because the British Car Company was going out of business, and my supervisor, Paul Edmonds, recommended me to Phil, Ivan and Ross, next door at 5842 Paradise Drive.

Thanks, Paul.