Lightness prevails…
Photography by Don Hodgdon, text by Pete Vack
After months of digging through an unfamiliar subject, being assailed for mistakes I shouldn’t have made, assaulted for writing about a car which at one time was made behind the Iron Curtain and spending a great deal of time looking for Tatra books that don’t exist, we present below the fourth and final Tatra story.
That having been accomplished below, we can now sit back and take joy in the catchy, silly, enormously bad puns for titles foisted upon researchers by magazines around the world.
Just think what they had to work with…
Look, Vladimir, No Vladiator; Car, September 1973
Party Time..T603; Classic and Sportscar, July 1994
Tatra for Now; Custom Car, August 1973
Reach for your Czech Book; Classic and Sportscar, October 1992
Prague Uprising; Performance Car, July 1993
Czech Mate; Car Australia, December 1993
Czech Matey; Top Gear,May 1994
Bouncing Czech; Wheels Australia, August 1998
And the final blow, yet another article with the very same silly name, “Czech Mate”, from the good folks at Automobile Magazine in January of 2005.
But just one more; we almost forgot, “Czechmate of the Year”, Special Interest Cars, April 1987. Which leads us to our subject car, for that long ago article featured the very same car now owned by David Russel and photographed for VeloceToday by Don Hodgdon.
The T600 was a definitely a postwar car, refined, thought out, ready for mass consumption. It was similar to the ill-fated Tucker, but went into production in 1948 and continued until 1952.