'Excessive, over-the-top, wonderful': Petersen's retro car exhibition is brilliant

It’s a 1990s fever dream wrought in neon and overly-complex exhaust tips, imagination cast in fibreglass, hazy memories reflected in the 8-bit screens of an Atari stand-up video game. If you’re of a certain age - and even if not - it’s a little slice of nerdcore heritage that makes you want to dig out certain albums (on vinyl, obviously) and be pointlessly angry at something unspecific. It’s the Petersen Museum’s ‘Totally Awesome’ exhibition, and it is… eponymous.

It’s supposed to be a celebration of the cars and culture of the last two decades of the 20th Century, but in reality is just a delve into the psyche of anyone born in the vague surrounds of the ‘60s. ‘70s or even ‘80s, which covers a lot of hairstyles. It’s also what younger people are now calling ‘retro’, which offends in all sorts of ways.

The fun starts as soon as you enter and are faced with a 1984 Cadillac Seville ‘by Gucci’, a bustle-backed, half vinyl-roofed fabulous monstrosity with white button-down leather and more attitude than and entire cocaine-fuelled stock exchange trading floor. There’s a gullwing Toyota Sera opposite, a ‘limited edition’ Lotus Esprit Turbo bracketing the entrance.

Photography: Dan Read and Dan Pilling

So far, so eclectic. But it gets quite mad from there on in, and not just hung up on the usual suspects. There’s a Merc 560 SEC by ABC Exclusive, an expression of excess that melds the side strakes from a Ferrari Testarossa with the visual arrogance - and most of the fibreglass - of a psychotic fairground ride. A 1986 Citroen BX 4TC - deep want here, I’ve never seen one in real life - a weirdo homologation special for Group B rallying that only produced 86 roadgoing examples and very limited success as a competition car. A Buick Grand National - a GNX, actually - in regulation black looking like the villain from any road movie you care to mention, and the Ford Probe IV economy and aero concept, made entirely of angles. It’s a feast.

But the palette gets side dishes. There are posters and custom neons. A mini video game arcade with contemporary legends (including both Pac Man and the Pac Man Rod from ‘82), and mannequins wearing the very height and excess of those best-forgotten fashion choices. Banks of screens play with the visuals, and there’s a display of youthful memories dedicated to home video game units and the joy of wasted hours.

Of course, it does tend to go heavy on the cars, and there are some of the more obvious ones in there too - a 1995 Mclaren F1, an ’85 Audi Sport Quattro S1 and various racing cars. Remember the Panoz with the flip paint? It’s in there. As is a Cizeta V16 T from the late ‘80s, that near-mythical V16 beast that embraced the counterculture with four pop-up headlamps and Gandini’s signature edgelord obsession.

Next to that is a Lotec C1000 and a Vector M12, similarly not-quite-vapourware that made big impressions back in the day. And then there’s …Bueller?… the Ferrari Modena Spyder from… Bueller? Ferris Bueller’s Day Off of 1985, as iconic a roadmovie as there ever was, at least for a certain demographic. OK, so the 250 GTO is an early ‘60s car and more expensive than life itself, but the iconography comes from the film and the fibreglass replicas.

Personal favourites? Probably the 1981 Jeep Honcho Sportside, a riot of bulky side panels, red paint and vinyl graphics and the 1989 Krauser Domani sidecar set up, which looks like it evacuated from the TRON set before the pixels fought back. There’s even the flying bike from Battlestar Galactica. We’re just scratching the surface here, but you get the idea; this isn’t so much an exhibition as a deep fried set of reminiscences. Or discoveries for the younger crowd. It’s excessive, over-the-top and genuinely wonderful.

Bluntly, museums aren’t supposed to be like this. Play the cliché, and they’re dusty, glass-walled exhibits that preserve and protect, but mostly fail to kindle anything but a flicker of intellectual interest. The same can be said of most car museums. Usually, there’s a couple of cars tucked up under uninspired lighting, static, silent and without the energy that makes them so special.

But not here. The cars are a delight, edited to be genuinely interesting rather than just whatever met the brief. It’s not a big display as these things go, but it’s packed full, staged well, thought about. And that’s before you even get to the rest of the museum, which rotates exhibits faster than a 100-spoke wire. Before we arrived, the celebration of lowrider culture had just finished, the Ken Block exhibition was well underway and Gordon Murray’s S1 LM had just arrived on the back of a lorry fresh from Monterey Car Week.

And that’s on top of all the other concept, production and generally just weird moments of car culture that populate the main floors and bunker underneath. The Petersen exists to celebrate car culture, but in doing so, has become part of that story itself. And on the basis of some of the stuff it’s doing, a visit isn’t so much an attraction as a pilgrimage.