Memories on the road

The mall crowd at UB City on Sunday morning is in for a treat; The ‘Karnataka Vintage & Classic Car Club’ is organising a rally of vintage cars and motorcycles, including some extremely rare specimens, in an effort to foster interest in vintage vehicles and give Bangaloreans a chance to see some of them.

The rally, which is going to take place at 10.30 am, kickstarts at Taj West End and is also being held to celebrate the hotel’s 125th anniversary celebrations. The entire experience, promises Sulaiman Jamal, the president of the club, will be well worth witnessing.

The rally will include a grand total of around 66 cars and 20 motorcycles, which all belong to members of the club. “The oldest car in the rally will be a 1909 Woolseley. Other than this, there will also be a fleet of cars that Bangaloreans haven’t seen in the last two years. Because of the Metro construction, roads have been choked so we haven’t taken the cars out,” said Ravi Prakash, the secretary of the club.

Some of the other cars which will be part of the rally are a 1961 Jaguar E-Type, a Jaguar MK which belonged to the Maharaja of Udaipur and a Mercedes 219.

The participating members plan to start off the rally from Taj West End and then regroup at UB City, so that the Sunday mall crowd can get a chance to see some of the cars.

After this, they will drive back to the hotel, passing the Bangalore Golf Club and Shivananda Circle en route. Ravi Prakash explained that it was consciously decided to keep the route short. “Many of these cars are pretty bad in terms of lights and breaks — so we decided to return to the hotel after that,” he said.

The drivers are very clear as to the objective of this rally. As Sulaiman Jamal said, “We wanted to bring together the members of our club. Besides, people who have never owned a vintage car will be motivated and enthusiastic to get one.” He also adds that a lot of preparation went into organising the rally. Since many of these cars aren’t driven on a daily basis, their owners had to bring them out and familiarise themselves with the route before the actual event. “The owners have to get used to the break and clutch well before the rally. Given the traffic in Bangalore, we decided to limit the number of cars to around 60 — otherwise, it gets out of hand,” he explained.