Recently celebrated the 80th anniversary of the birth of the legendary Russian bard Vladimir Vysotsky. In addition to being a singer-songwriter, he was also an avid car fanatic. Most of his fans know about his blue Mercedes-Benz 450 W116, which at the time was an incredible audacity. But Vysotsky had not only this car.
His first car was the Volga GAZ-21, which the rebellious singer quickly smashed. In 1971, he bought the upper part of a social autotaber — VAZ-2101. The car was gray, number 16-55 MKL. It was one of the first batches of cars that did not even bear the name Zhiguli, but only the Russian Fiat. The fate of this car is also sad — on July 31, after a football match, Vysotsky caught a perch with a neighbor football fan, who of the two will give way first, running into each other in their cars. They both proved to be stupid and stubborn enough to hit each other on the head and turn cars into piles of garbage. After the restoration, the car was sold.
Vladimir’s first car of a foreign brand was a Renault 16TS with European numbers, which was given to him by his wife, French actress Marina Vlady. A six-year-old car was bought for 3,300 francs, or 500 rubles at the then exchange rate. And on the first day, the bard had an accident with him — he got into a bus. The car was repaired despite the lack of after-sales services for foreign brands in Russia. Vysotsky and Vlady intended to travel by car from Moscow to Paris, but a car with a foreign registration could not travel more than 100 km from Moscow. Only in 1973 they received permission and the car returned to France, where it was sold.
A year later, Vysotsky again began to drive a Western car — after touring Germany, he brought two BMW 2500 (E3) cars. He only managed to register one because the other was stolen. But he drove both with the same license plate. In the end, Interpol took the stolen item, and with the second car, Vysotsky again went to France, where he successfully sold it.
In 1976, the first Mercedes appeared — the famous W116 in metallic blue. There are a lot of stories connected with this car, and according to one of them, when they saw a Mercedes, all the “traffic cops” stood peacefully. Because, in fact, the car at that time was extremely rare in the USSR — there were only two or three of them, registered with Russian numbers, and the other two were kept in the garage of Secretary General Brezhnev, also a big lover of cars and fast cars. driving. The car had a 4.5-liter eight-cylinder engine, an automatic transmission and the world’s first ABS system, and in 1974 received the title «Car of the Year». The model was discontinued in 1980 and, it seems, it was in honor of this that Vysotsky crashed into a tram. In 1979, a year before his death, he bought his last three-seater, a Mercedes 350 SLC two-seater sports coupe, 3.5 liters, 202 hp.
Добавить комментарий