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Porsche Club of America
The Northeast Region

By Tom Tate
NOR'EASTER Online - September 2002

The Dog Days of summer are upon us. Unusually hot weather for New England when the mercury stays in the nineties for more that a couple of days. Here we are looking down the barrel of an entire week that the weatherman says will all start with a nine.

Now I remember why I never liked black interiors. They're great in the wintertime because every time you get back to your car you've got heated seats without the high tech wiring. But they sure get hot sitting in the sun in the middle of August. Hot enough to burn the back of your legs if you're wearing shorts. While that was a greater risk for your date with the short shorts (remember those?), the real treat was grabbing that big black plastic steering wheel. Only the top half was really too hot to touch, so for the first few minutes you had to drive the car using only the bottom half of the wheel. That was easy to do as long as no real turning was required. However, if the car was boxed into a parking spot at the curb and required a few "up and backs" to get it out, it was easy to forget where the top went. I saw a modern Carrera Cup steering wheel recently that had a half-inch wide piece of yellow tape at the very top. I can't imagine that those fellows leave them parked at some curb in the heat but I know that little piece of tape would've come in handy 30 years ago.

I had forgotten what had prompted me to always carry window cleaner and paper towels in every car (besides that attentive thing). A few days of summer heat on a closed car brought it all back. It seems that the interior components of German cars gave off a kind of vapor that on a really hot day would leave a film on the inside windows. When I had my first VW (with vinyl seats and door panels) I was told that the smoky film was from the plastic seats. The inside of the windows required twice as much cleaning as the outside, to prevent the glass from looking like the inside of an aquarium.

There were endless discussions at the Potomac Region monthly meetings about the source of the inside film. Some thought that it came from the vinyl seat coverings but we discovered that even the cars with leather interiors had the problem. It was concluded that the glue used to secure the carpet to the floor was probably the culprit. Most of the carpet was held in place by screws and nails (yes, nails that were driven into the metal) but there was some glue used up under the dash and on the thresholds. The real discussions involved the solution to the problem (pun intended). While we had window cleaner, that just seemed to move it around, not really remove it. There was no endless array of cleaning products like we have today. No Simple Green, no 409 and no Fantastic. All sorts of ideas were tried with the 50/50 mix of ammonia and water at the top of the list. Of course this could only be wiped clean with newspaper and it couldn't be the funnies (remember those?). In those days using paper towels was like using a Kleenex for a wash cloth. This fix had the benefit of not only cleaning the glass but also clearing out your sinuses.

It could have been worse. I had a classmate with a Renault Dalphine that came with lots of a new wonder material. While Dustin Hoffman was being advised to "go into plastics" my friend's car was melting in the school parking lot. The instrument panel had a light colored plastic surround that not only melted, but also shrank up at the same time. In the middle of the day in the school parking lot we went out to find what looked like a morning glory blossom closing up for the day. You could still see the gauges by peaking under the edge but it really wasn't important since there was only a speedo and a gas gauge. The speedo only went to 70 mph and the gas gauge just waved to you. The real impact of the Florida heat was seen on the two stalks that came out from behind the steering wheel. One was for the turn signals and the other was for the horn. Yes, I said horn. The French had a way of throwing American drivers off guard. Like the window cranks that always wound backwards. The stalks both wilted to where they were pointing at the floor like the ears on an LBJ beagle.

My guess is that we get older we become less tolerant of cars with strange quirks. Quirks like no fresh air system except windows, and small ones at that. We could always just open all the windows and keep our speed up, but with today’s traffic a lot of time is spent sitting still. That old trick of keeping the windows up to make people think you had air conditioning might have worked when you were twenty but not anymore. Still the fun factor makes the inconvenience worth it. Just check the weather report for the largest number and decide if a ride after dinner might be more comfortable than taking that 35-year-old car to work.

Keep the Faith.

Porsche Club of America The Northeast Region

Porsche Club of America
The Northeast Region