Why 11-year-olds care more about YouTube than a naturally aspirated V12 supercar
Porter recalls the struggle of finding your tribe as a car-crazy kid in a pre-internet world
Remember when you were five or six and you’d see another kid on a playground or a beach or at some boring gathering of grown-ups and you’d sidle ever closer to them until, by some unspoken small-person lore, you were somehow instant best friends? That goes away after a while as the strange and subtle codes of social interaction get in the way and you can’t become immediate mates with someone just by standing near them and having a brightly coloured bucket. But that’s no problem in 2026 because if, like my firstborn, you’re an 11-year-old boy, it’s extremely easy to make friends with people of your age. Not because kids have got more outgoing or are taught better social skills at school, but because children of that age seem to have an incredible shared experience that becomes an instant conversation starter, and it’s the gaming holy trinity of Fortnite, Minecraft and Roblox. Any one is an instant conversation opener that, as far as I can work out, is guaranteed to get traction.
When I was a kid we had computers, but also a split platform loyalty that meant different games and different tribes. ZX Spectrum people didn’t really talk to Commodore 64 people, and we still had the Amiga/ST war to get through before games started to become a truly unifying force. When gaming was divided by the platforms on which the games were played, it was as tribal as football, something else kids could bond over as long as they were on the same team. Unfortunately for me, I didn’t support any football team. And I had a BBC Micro B because my parents thought it would be educational. I’m sure there was some learning benefit in Chuckie Egg and Elite but I can’t quite remember what it was. My main avenue of chat was the one thing I knew and cared about, which was cars.
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Cars are tricky things when you’re barely out of short trousers. Kids like supercars, because they’re rare and low and sometimes painted bright yellow. I think that still holds true today, even though what generally seems to wow children in cars now is tech. Being able to watch YouTube videos on a massive central dashboard screen impresses 11-year-olds more than having an actual V12 behind your head. ‘Dad, can you turn off that noisy engine? I’m trying to watch some vids of V12s revving.’
There was none of that back when I was a kid in an age when having a telephone, camera, torch, calculator, computer and video viewer about your person would involve looking like a Dixons version of a one-man band rather than someone with a slender rectangle in their pocket. Supercars were impressive because there were only four TV channels and not much else to do. But normal cars, not so much, then or now. Today, my 11-year-old son just mutters something about realms or servers or something and instantly he’s besties with a kid of his age. In my day, ‘Psst, did you see they’re doing a turbocharged version of the MG Montego…?’ never quite cut it.
I don’t remember many hardcore car chats in the school playground. Thank God for telly and pop music, though these too were less useful for making new friends in out-of-school locations. Attempting to befriend a similar-age kid from a gaggle of American tourists with ‘Have you ever seen Howard’s Way?’ was never going to work. You might as well ask their opinions on the MG Montego Turbo.
As an 11-year-old, my son’s tribe comes to him, online and in the real world, to talk about the games that captivate his imagination and occupy his evenings until the allotted hour when I have to tell him six times to get off screens. But the good news for me as an adult is that my gang is easy to find these days too. There’s the internet, for a start, where you can always find a place where people nerd out over rare Volvos or pictures of rejected styling proposals for the Fiat Uno. But it’s better than that because, being an adult, I have a degree of free will not afforded to most 11-year-olds. I remember thinking about this when, for reasons mostly relating to poor impulse control, I had a takeaway curry for lunch with a bottle of Ribena and no one could stop me. But, less weirdly, now I’m an adult I can go to car shows all summer.
There’s lots to enjoy about the vast range of auto-related events that happen in Britain during the less drizzly months, but one of them is that, finally, amongst members of your tribe, you can engage in random, on-topic conversations with strangers who care about the things you care about.
It’s not quite the universal language of current gaming but, to my delight, it’s often a space where you can, without reservation, ask someone what they think of the MG Montego Turbo.
This story was first featured in evo issue 332.
