04. Hugo MORIN - The MyLittleRedCar column in AUTOHEROES #020

"Beautiful like a stolen car"

It is sometimes difficult to distinguish between the result of chance and what some dare to call, not without a twinkle in their eye, "destiny". As a child in the 90s, I spent entire days playing with miniature cars, and today I spend my days selling them at 1:1 scale.

Throughout Sundays and summer holidays, my Majorettes, Buragos, and other Hot Wheels cars would clatter erupt from the wooden crates specially designed by my father. I can still picture my mother's astonished eyes, worried by the upheaval in the sometimes unusual place I chose as my playground. My Christmas wish lists, as far back as I can remember, were dedicated to miniature cars. In fact, I had dozens of them in my rolling crates. But this little boy's collection included some models more important than the others: the miniatures that had belonged to my father, covered with the marks of his own childhood games. There was something indefinable for a little boy about them, a patina or perhaps a smell, something that bound them to my heart, far more than the gleaming models in the toy store. One of my favorites was a Ford Escort Mk1, the make of which I've forgotten, and whose metal bodywork bore only a few traces of paint, so much had my father worn it out on every imaginable road of his childhood. It had become almost uniformly gray, which didn't stop it from running perfectly. But the centerpiece, the one that outshone all the others, was a Lamborghini Miura.
So why? Why her? Admittedly, it must have been built on a different scale and therefore a bit bigger than the others. A rare feature: the front and rear hoods opened like a real Miura! Even rarer: it had small springs under the wheels for suspension, and thanks to this feat of high technology, none of my other cars could match its handling! But the main point was elsewhere. I wasn't really aware of it at the time, since my dad only confessed it to me very recently: this car didn't belong to him, it belonged to his older brother.

"You know, it wasn't mine, it belonged to Guigui. I'd taken it from him when we were little because I thought it rolled better than the others, and so in the hallway, it was the one that went the furthest when I was racing. And I don't know if they're still there, but it had yellow plastic headlights cut like diamonds. I'd take it under the covers and shine the flashlight on the headlights; it made a super bright yellow light, I loved it."

Suddenly, strange feelings washed over me. I identified perfectly with the little boy my father had been, for I too had idealized the object of his desire. It was with a heavy heart that I imagined his torment, a mixture of remorse, envy, and guilty pleasure each time he had to drive the Lamborghini.
What surprises me today is this unconscious attraction to this car above all others. Could there be some kind of transgenerational drive that drew me to this object? Psychoanalysis hasn't yet addressed this question, it seems to me! In any case, I felt a certain relief when my uncle confessed to having no memory of the stolen car, which had never been the result of any resentment.

I went up to the attic to find the Lamborghini and entrust it to Julien, the artist behind "My Little Red Car," so he could photograph it and bring out all the details I'd mentioned. I opened the box labeled "Hugo Cars." The commotion caused by the avalanche of cars on the floor was like an explosion of the senses, and there it was, in the middle, "beautiful as a stolen car," a poem in itself, the kind my father and I would have recited throughout our childhood.

Hugo Morin for MyLittleRedCar

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