Growing up it didn’t take long to see that cars were the package that excitement came in. By the age of eleven or so I was smitten bad by the sports car love bug. A long time friend of my father appeared one day in front of our modest little house driving an Allard, a Cadillac Allard, with the top down and a sexy blonde at his side. Until then I had accepted that it was self-evident that the automotive universe consisted of cars tied to Detroit car barons. This was an era when a 1949 Ford was considered a cool ride around my small hometown in western Pennsylvania. After seeing the Allard, American cars would seem forever mundane to me. For a few brief years, 1947 to 1957, Allard, this small company in London, England produced a series of competition and road cars that came close to dominating the world sports car racing and rallying scenes. They were fast and possessed handling characteristics that bordered on being evil. Although I was too young to appreciate their legacy, I did grasp that the middle-class America I knew would never own something so impractical. I knew I had seen something special that day and it burned itself into my brain. And while I never owned an Allard I have owned at least one or more sports cars my entire life.
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