Call him mad or brave, but Daman Thakore dared not just to dream but to strive to make his dream come true as well. And what an incredible, impossible dream to bring to reality! A 13,500-kilometre road trip in a 73-year-old classic car, all the way from home in Ahmedabad to London. This is the story of the love of motoring and a passion for his 1950 MG YT, combined with a passion for road trips. But what is most incredible about his road trip, if you didn’t think it incredible enough already, is that this was a journey he undertook with his family.
“My daughter was 21, I was 50, and dad was 75,” he chuckles, before adding, “I wanted my daughter. One of the things that you keep thinking about is how to pass on the legacy.” The legacy in question is the stylish 1950 MG Y tourer (convertible, in non-classic terms) that is painted a shade of red and is affectionately called Lal Pari (the red fairy). She even has her own space on the ‘Gram. Lal Pari entered the Thakore household in 1979 and has been with the family for 46 years. She’s not the only car in the garage, which also houses a 1932 Chevrolet Phaeton, a 1947 Buick Super, a 1949 Fiat Topolino, and another MG YT, but Lal Pari has a special place.
“We had actually used Lal Pari on quite a frequent basis. You know, birthday parties, trips to the zoo, trips to the drive-through cinema. More than 15 family weddings,” remembers Daman. And not one was accomplished without trouble. “We inevitably had to push the car for the final 25 to 30 metres. Either the radiator would not work properly or a gasket would blow. Something or the other would happen to it,” he laughs. This further adds to the improbability of the dream. It’s audacious enough in its own right, but to attempt it with a car that has had a history of unreliability? That, is on another level.
The dream, though, was not really a new one. “This dream actually was implanted 46 years ago, because all the bedtime stories that my mom used to tell me, when I was 3, 5, 6, 7, 10, whatever, were about adventures in Lal Pari. It would take us through forests, it would go through jungles, cross rivers, and fly through the sky,” Daman says of his childhood. When overlanding started to become popular in the mid to late 2000s, Daman got inspired.
Daman, who is part of the family business of dealing in JCB heavy machinery and solid waste management in Gujarat, began the arduous process of restoring his lovely MG YT to its original spec. By then, lots of spares had been replaced with other bits and bobs to ensure that Lal Pari continued to enchant the roads of Ahmedabad. “I started doing research. That’s when I found out that this is an MG YT and that only about 900 were ever made. I sourced parts from all over Europe, Australia, the US,” he tells me. Fully restored to factory spec, the Thakores’ 1950 MG YT went off to participate first at the Cartier Concourse de Elegance in 2019 and then the 21 Gun Salute in 2020 where it won the prize for the best in the MG Class.
Having restored the car all on his own and fully aware of its troubled past, Daman knew that to fulfill his dream he would need a ready backup of spares in case of the inevitable breakdown. Spares for a classic car are never easy to source, but eventually, he found a donor car across the world in Canada. Did that stop him? Nope. The Canadian MG was duly imported to India. Over the course of time, a third car would also be acquired to provide an additional safety net.
The original plan was to set off in 2020, but then the pandemic struck and the world went into lockdown. So, when life was looking up again and borders had opened up once more, Daman set off. From his home in Ahmedabad, the first stop was Mumbai, where the car was put on a ship to the UAE.
“Initially, I thought we would go through Turkmenistan, but we couldn’t go through China at the time because it was closed, and then Pakistan was closed. So we started in Dubai and drove up through Iran, Turkey, Greece, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Montenegro, Albania, Slovenia, Croatia, Italy, Switzerland, France, and then on to the UK,” Daman recounts the names of all 14 countries that Lal Pari drove through without breaking a sweat.
Speaking of sweat, the initial part of the journey was accomplished in really difficult conditions, driving through the heart of the UAE and then Iran through peak summer. “In Dubai and Iran, we drove through average daytime temperatures of 45-50 degrees Celsius. Almost 2,500km or around 25 days of tremendous heat in an old convertible. And we would drive for 14-15 hours each day because we were going so slowly,” he remembers. For most of the duration of the trip, the MG YT was driven at 30-40 km/h. “The car’s achievable top speed today is 50!”
Needless to say, the Thakore family in their ubiquitous red MG YT, followed by a modified van acting as support vehicle, cut quite a sight across the Arabian landscape and then the Iranian and on to the European. Special treatment from enthusiasts across the world who shared their love of motoring was found in plenty. “In Dubai, we were put in touch with the Arabian Radio Network (ARN). We started with a single interview and then, over the course of that day, ended up doing interviews for all nine of their FM stations,” says Daman. In Modena, Italy, he met one of the top bosses of the Jaguar Daimler Heritage Trust, who thought Daman was mad to do this trip in his MG. He invited the Thakores to the heritage collection in Coventry – a prized opportunity. He and his family’s enthusiasm saw them get nominated for the Historic Motoring Awards. “They put me at the centre of the first table. So, I find myself sitting next to the designer of Ferrari. It was all unreal,” he recalls.
The country that truly blew his mind, though, was Iran. “Beyond all expectations, Iran by far. You know, the love that they have for motoring is unbelievable. I counted in one hour in Iran, there were 550 cars, so 550 families which honked, smiled, and waved at us. So, my goal of doing this was spreading smiles over miles. When you are in a position of privilege, people generally donate money. I wanted to donate smiles. Because Lal Pari, or any other vintage vehicle, wherever it goes, it brings a smile to people's faces. And that to me is priceless,” he says with conviction.
The experience has also shaped Daman’s views. “There is no border, there is no gender, there is no religion. The passion that people have for motoring is absolutely universal, without boundaries, without class,” he says without hesitation. His advice to the vintage and classic vehicles community is also without hesitation. “Start using them because the amount of joy and happiness they give others is immense. Use them because they have a character, you know, they have some sort of an attachment with you or someone in your family, because of which you have kept it,” he says.
Daman, Lal Pari, and the rest of the Thakore family, and the support van reached the UK after 73 days on the road, during which they drove across 13,500km, braving extreme weather conditions – 45-50 degrees in parts and chilling 8 degrees and rain in others. “For us, starting itself was an achievement. We had no idea whether we’d be able to get to London. I mean, that was the goal, but we didn’t know when we started how far we’d actually get. So at the end, there was a sense of gratitude more than any sense of achievement,” says Daman.
Goes without saying that the family returned with a repertoire of experience and memories that one only gets to hear once in a lifetime. There were mementos and memorabilia, too, but one in particular stands out. Back in the 1930s, there stood a factory in Abingdon on Thames. The original site of the MG factory. Today, of course, there is no factory there. Only a small shed that serves as a reminder of what once was. That, and the MG Car Club that greeted Daman and his family in the MG YT with the registration plate from distant Gujarat. “They actually honoured us with the original brick of the MG factory, which was demolished. They saved about 500 of them and I have brick number 226.”