Bertone NY showcar story in Hemmings

[foggydogg]

Online short story, interesting note form the author
https://www.hemmings.com/stories/2021/0 ... -spotlight

[matthew1]

Fantastically interesting story. Thanks for sharing.

I felt equal parts awe and sadness as I drank in the derelict-looking car before me. How could the shabby, scabby Bertone coupe sitting in Davies Owens’ driveway be the same car that stopped me in my tracks, gleaming in shimmering, blue-tinted pearlescent white up on a rotating turntable, 27 years earlier? There was no doubt it was that unique 1990 New York International Auto Show 780 Turbo that I remembered well, a car whose awkwardly cropped image remains affixed to a yellowing page in an old photo album on a shelf in my living room. It felt like lifetimes ago, coming back around.

Volvo 780 historian Davies Owens, your author, and the 1990 NYIAS 780 Turbo show car, 2017
I came to know Davies through his amazingly researched and written 780 history articles that periodically appeared in Rolling, the Volvo Club of America magazine, and through his comprehensive website and registry. I corresponded with him for a couple of years before 2017, when my sister moved to a city close to his home. That was when I took advantage of proximity during a visit, and got to meet him and see his impressive collection of 780s, including the New York show car that he’d just recently acquired. The 43-year-old me got to sit in the driver’s seat and hold the steering wheel, imagining my 15-year-old self doing the same, starstruck under those hot, bright show lights, with my dad looking on and thousands of people milling around.

This car's fourth private owner reunited it with its original display wheels.
Davies showed me the 17-inch alloy wheels it had originally worn—by then, stripped of their body-color-matched paint—which he’d acquired before he found the car itself, and pointed out the damaged and missing body kit components that ASC had custom-made in fiberglass for this car in late 1989, commissioned by Volvo Cars of North America. And he told me how he’d made contact with Oluf Bendixen, the talented man who, as a young designer employed by ASC in Michigan, had sketched the body kit components that made this car so special.

Davies kindly asked Oluf Bendixen, the former ASC designer who penned the NYIAS show car's body kit, to autograph a press photo for me as a surprise gift.

Oddly enough, there doesn’t seem to be much printed evidence of this car’s appearance in New York City’s Javits Center. I knew it was there, though, because I remembered it with vivid clarity well beyond the single 3.5 x 5-inch glossy print in my album, which was dated April 19, 1990. That was a life-changing day, the first time I attended a major new-car show. My father drove the two of us down to the Javits Center, and my head virtually exploded over all the incredible things that we encountered in that massive complex’s three stories. I was already a Volvo nut at that point, and it was a thrill to see the impressively large area this Swedish automaker claimed on the main floor, with multiple displays, including a crash-tested 760, an incredible ceiling-height recreation of “The Stack” using historic models from different decades, and our feature 780 Turbo.

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