The cars of my youth: Part I

My colleague at cars4U.com, BT has a beautiful collection of models in his office. They are mostly American cars from the sixties, with some from the fifties, the seventies and some modern cars as well. He has a unique collection of hearses, dragsters as well as a few police cruisers to spice up the display. I’m a little jealous of his collection every time I visit his office, but I realize these are cars from his youth, when his enthusiasm for cars was developing. It made me reflect on the cars from my youth. I was not as fortunate. The seventies in the communist Poland were not the best years for a car enthusiast. The few models available had outdated technology, stolen mostly from the Americans by the Russians in the Forties and Fifties. None offered anything you would remotely associate with performance. The car you see here is a police version of 1971 FSO Warszawa 223. Warszawa means Warsaw in Polish. That’s where the car was built and they named it after the city. The MO on the door stands for Milicja Obywatelska – Citizen’s Militia. This car is like the very first car I ever drove sitting on my father’s lap (I couldn’t reach the pedals) in the back yard of a police station in a small city of Wschowa in western Poland. My dad was the commander of the station's traffic detachment. The car was a handful to drive, with no power steering, no power brakes and all the important parts only loosely connected to each other. The four cylinder 70 hp engine and the three speed manual transmission could take the car up to a maximum of 130 km/h. And you already had GTO’s and Stingrays. Not fair!