Why I love being a car guy in Brazil -and sometimes hate it-
#Brazil

Brazilian people tend to be associated with their receptiveness, carnaval, footbal beaches and women. However, we have a strong and enduring passion for cars and motorsport. With a well-known cultural diversity, Brazil mirrors this diversity on the car scene as well. We have multiple fan clubs for many cars and automakers, different car cultures and so on. None of this comes without issues: everything is expensive to do (mods, maintainance etc.) and road conditions are a far cry from the ideal. So here is why I love being a car guy in Brazil, but sometimes hate it.

The car scene is huge

The car scene here, despite not being so widely known, is relatively large. There are loads of fanclubs and organized events for cars. Classics and antiques, JDM, Muscle, even lowriders, you name it, if you search, you will find a group with special love for some type of mod/car. Specially the beetle (Called Fusca here), this picture is an example of the “Dia nacional do Fusca” or National Beetle day. This day, beetle owners take their veedubs and make huge meets.

We have a very rich motorsport history

Cars have for long been a thing here. The first car in Brazil was a 1891 Peugeot, which was imported by inventor Alberto Santos Dumont. It didn’t take long for racing to become popular; the first race occurred in 1902. Since then, Brazilians have been famous for being excellent drivers; Chico landi, José Carlos Pace (who names the Interlagos circuit are some lesser known examples. And then are the three multiple world champions, Emmerson Fittipaldi, Nelson Piquet and legend Ayrton Senna (all bragging rights for them). Also, we have some mythical race tracks, such as Interlagos and Jacarépaguá. Racing is plenty and karting locations are very common.

However, Brazilian motorsport has taken some large hits recently

Unfortunately, motorsport has been going downwards for some time. Few pilots with potential are being found and many race tracks have been closed. The Rio de Janeiro autodrome, circuito de jacarépaguá, has been shut down and demolished for construction of the infrastructure necessary for the Olympic games. Another very famous race track in Curitiba was taken down to be turned into a residential condominium. It is a shame to see such history being just taken away with no acknowledgement of its importance.

We have some excluve classic gems

As car importations were prohibited for 25 years between the 60’s and the 90’s, automakers have come up with some cars designed exclusively for our market. There were many sports cars designed entirely in Brazil, such as the VW SP2 and the Chevrolet Opala SS. Moreover, Dodge came up with a national Charger R/T and Ford brought the Maverick and its lovely 302 V8. These cars have some real large fan bases and meets come up often. Also, our hot hatches are very unusual. VW has done a Gol GTi (The Gol is a smaller brother of the Golf) and Renault has brought the lovely Sandero RS recently!

Anything car related is expensive

Every car in Brazil costed almost twice as much as in the US for a very long period of time (Now staggering inflation and Real’s value relative to Dollar plummeting have somewhat diminished this). Now if you want to tune your car, good luck with that. It will cost a lot. Prices aren’t high now compared to foreign ones, but as average income is still pretty low, it will eat up a fair chunck of your hard-earned money. Just to give you an example: The Sandero RS will cost R$ 60k (about US$ 15k or 12k quid), but the minimum wage is R$ 880. So many people will not be able to afford it, even being relatively affordable in other countries. Moreover, road conditions are far from ideal, making trips to the mechanic much more recurrent than it should be.

This is compensated by the brazilian people’s inventiveness and love

Nonetheless, you will still find awesome builds and people who really appreciate and love working on cars and are just happy with that, not to mention the out-of-the-box solutions found to solve the problems we will face. Would still be nice to have affordable, powerful and tunable cars tho.

This is it guys! What do you think of our Car scene? Would you like a Brazilian car? Leave your opinions in the comments below!