Though it’s obviously far less significant than the loss and life and damage to residential property, one of the impacts of the recent Los Angeles wildfires was the burning up of various classic cars. You see them here and there in pictures of the devastation, scorched bare metal that was once someone’s pride and joy. With many too badly damaged to restore, what’s there to do but just send them off for scrap? Well, there’s at least one alternative.
When a similar wildfire tore through the Malibu Wine Safari winery back in 2018, it took out a small vintage car museum. The winery also played home to a small zoo of sorts – a menagerie of exotic animals, including a giraffe called Stanley who has a huge Instagram following – and the staff made saving those living beings a priority. Luckily, none were harmed, but there wasn’t time to save the cars.
There’s not a complete list of what was burned at the time, but at the very least there were several 1950s trucks of the kind that might be good advertising for a winery; a Jaguar E-Type; some prewar Fords; Bentleys; a Sting Ray Corvette; 1920s Buicks; a Ferrari Daytona Spider; and many others. The most significant loss was a 1903 Darracq, one of just three said to have been remaining at the time. Darracq was very successful in the years before the First World War, and in 1905, its cars held half-a-dozen speed records, including the outright land speed record of 175 km/h (108 mph).
Ron Semler, who founded the winery and owns the ranch it sits on, is no stranger to hardship. The place was originally planted as an avocado farm, but a snap frost in the early 1990s killed the entire crop, a loss of millions of dollars. It was replanted as a winery, the vines of which were also badly damaged in the 2018 fire.
Still the Semler family vowed to rebuild. And, as a sort of symbol of that rebirth, a towering sculpture was created out of the remains of the family’s car collection, incorporating the burned chassis. Semler recently showed off this art project on Instagram and YouTube.
Some of his collection of vintage wagons (including the actual prison wagon from the first Planet of the Apes movie) are now being relocated to Texas. That’s where Stanley the Giraffe ended up, living on the Semler’s new ranch down there with a female eight-year-old giraffe. It’s not clear whether the structure will also be relocated, but it shows that you can rebuild something, even out of scrap.
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