Pull Over to the Side

THE KINGS OF THE ROAD (246 pp.)--Ken W. Purdy--Little, Brown ($5).

Most automobiles made ,in the U.S. today are sleek, comfortable and mechanically dependable. Few people ask for more. But there is a small, hard knot of car cultists who would not be caught behind the wheel of a shiny Detroit model '52. One of these is Ken W. Purdy, editor of True, a magazine that specializes in vicarious thrills for the fireside heman. Purdy began fooling around with vintage and foreign cars in 1946, when new American cars were hard to get.

In his new book, The Kings of the Road, he says flatly that any man who wouldn't rather pay out of pocket for an "Aurelia" model Italian Lancia than receive a Cadillac as a gift "just doesn't know how to live."

Horsy Movement. Author Purdy is not living on all cylinders himself, because he does not yet own a Lancia (only a handful of U.S. fanciers do), but by Kings of the Road standards he is not doing so badly: he owns and drives a 1927, two-seater Bugatti. He also owns an Isotta-Fraschini '28, a Peugot '14, and even a comparatively Johnny-come-lately Citroen 1939. He has also owned a Mercer Raceabout two-seater, vintage 1912, a real American beau ty. To drive a 1912 Mercer, says Purdy, is to feel "the movement of a horse under you. You sit in the seat, not just on it, both feet are solidly braced, and you feel very safe, no matter what."

Kings of the Road is part love song and part a dirge over what, and how, the conventional men are willing to drive. Not for Purdy the "chrome piled on chrome and tin upon tin." Lovingly he writes of Designers Ettore Bugatti, Fred Duesenberg, Frederick Henry Royce and of Driver Tazio Nuvolari. To Purdy, as to most addicts, Nuvolari is II Maestro, "indis putably the greatest driver who ever lived." Not on "dull" tracks like the Indianapolis Speedway did II Maestro show his genius, but in grueling road races run day & night. Nuvolari, now 60 and retired, was "hard on his mounts, a great flogger of automobiles, a car killer."

Close the Eyes. There are lively descriptions of the early Vanderbilt Cup races, in 1904, 1905 and 1910, which were denounced from the pulpit but drew crowds like a magnet: "Louis Chevrolet wrapped his Fiat around a telegraph pole on Willis Avenue . . . Harold Stone, driving a Columbia, leapt the Meadowbrook bridge and shot into the mob, killing his mechanic and injuring a mixed bag of bystanders."

Author Purdy is a romantic, but all over the U.S. there is still a scattering of men whose hearts leap up when they be hold a pre-World War I car, its brass shined to a dazzle, its head lamps staring proudly ahead, its exhaust pipes exposed for all admiring eyes to see. There are even some, as delicately geared as Author Purdy, who can close their eyes and "imagine a string-straight, poplar-lined Route Nationale in France on a summer's day. That growing dot in the middle dis tance is a sky-blue Bugatti coupe, rasping down from Paris to Nice at no miles an hour . . ."

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