Moscow Comes Alive with Classics

Photography by Andrey Smazhilo

I am not a big fan of waking up early, especially on Sundays—even moreso when rain is expected! However, I had to deal with a bit of laziness because I knew that it would be worth it. In fact: it didn’t rain, and that at the L.U.C Chopard Classic Weekend Rally, Sunday turned out to be far beyond my expectations.

I have heard about the L.U.C Chopard Classic Weekend Rally before, but—shame on me—I have never paid much attention to it. Luckily, about a week before the rally, a colleague of mine mentioned that he would be a speaker at this event and had worked out as an invitation for me.

Moscow city center is a beautiful place, but it does lack some charm. Nevertheless, this problem was solved in an expected but a very spectacular way: the city center was filled up with a whole variety of classic cars, some of which were over a century old. What a scene it was!

A Ferrari 250 GT Cabriolet Series II standing beside a Maserati 3500 GT was a marvelous sight. The former turned out to be piloted in the rally by Karl-Friedrich Scheufele, the co-president of Chopard. Far more surprising was that his father, Karl Scheufele III (who is also a co-president of Chopard) would accompany him as a co-driver!

A funny situation happened to me on that Sunday morning, one that only happens with car enthusiasts. I arrived about an hour before the press-conference to shoot the cars before they started leaving one after another—which would make it a challenge to get good photos of them. I noticed a black GAZ-21, or “Volga” as it was also called in the USSR, and decided it was worth some shots.

Imagine my surprise when I was making a shot of its front end, and was tapped on my shoulder by a friend of mine. It turned out that he would also be taking part in the rally, accompanied by his father—except for the fact his father would be behind the wheel of this black Volga.

As the day progressed and I took more photos, my wish to take part in this rally only grew stronger. There’s always next year…even if it means waking up earlier than I’d like to!