Stuck in second gear
Belgian motor museum doesn’t fully engage
Were Top Trumps reimagined as a visitor attraction, Brussels’ Autoworld would provide a useful template. The attraction showcases 250 historic motor cars in a cavernous nineteenth-century hangar of iron and glass. Explanation, beyond notes on their date of manufacture and engine size, is minimal.
Top Trumps, for the uninitiated, is a card game originating in the 1970s and aimed at adolescents. A typical pack might be devoted to ‘super cars’. Each card features one such vehicle, with a list of attributes – engine size, top speed, weight, and year of manufacture – say. The shuffled pack is dealt, then at each turn alternate players produce a card announcing its greatest attribute. To win the round, their opponent must produce a card of their own with a superior vital statistic.
In British playgrounds nearly half a century ago, Top Trumps went viral among ten year old boys. The cards introduced glamorous engineered products, and implied the key to understanding the world, was a handful of facts. Unaccountably the format thrives, and now includes Harry Potter characters, inspirational women, and Disney princesses, among many other titles.
For anyone remotely in touch with their inner ten-year-old boy, seeing Autoworld’s assortment of vehicles at close quarters is thrilling. The variety of shapes, the lustre of the coachwork, and the imagined adventures any of these vehicles might enable speeds the pulse.
There is some thematic organisation, with cars from the dawn of motoring collected together, an area devoted to racing cars, and a modest display exploring Belgium’s contribution to motor manufacture. At heart, though, this is a place of admiration, tyre kicking, and oil sniffing.
There are treats for every taste – the 1922 Daimler TS 6.30 that once belonged to the British Royal family, and boasts a snake skin interior, for example. Or the 1928 Bentley 4.5 litre – the choice of James Bond of the novels – it won multiple editions of the Le Mans 24 in the twenties and thirties. And who can’t imagine an idyllic day at an Italian resort driving Fiat’s Shellete Beach Car of 1967?
The museum’s home is in the the Cinquintiere complex on the eastern edge of Brussels’ ‘European quarter’. Commissioned by King Leopold, it celebrates the 50th anniversary of Belgium’s independence in 1880. The exhibition hall forms a wing of the dramatic triumphal arch that looks down the Rue de Loi. Exhibits come from the collections of two private individuals, Charly De Pauw and Ghislain Mahy, who amassed more than 1,000 cars, that for some time were exhibited in Ghent. The display in the capital opened in 1986.
I spent the first half of my visit marvelling at the unapologetic focus on exhibits. There are no boards exploring the broader impact of the internal combustion on human settlement, no artefacts of motor manufacture and the class struggle, and no oral testimonies unpicking colonialism and the car.
By Autoword’s half way mark, however, my pace gathered. Exhibits blurred, my capacity to imagine myself behind another wheel dulled. I had enjoyed brief transport into my ten-year-old mindset, but I could keep this up only for so long. Why so few open bonnets, I wondered? Why no exploration of the wider efforts to keep so many machines in transit? Why nothing explaining the technical developments represented?
Impressively, the attraction is attracting record ticket buyers. As I motored on my way, however, a thought struck me. If Autoworld aspires to be a museum, rather than a showroom, simply letting visitors see cars is not enough – it should do more to encourage them see cars in a new light.
