Jos van der Aart

My name is Jos van der Aart, I’m 65 years old, and I was born in De Engel (a small village near Lisse). I am married to Monique and I have 3 beautiful daughters, Rosey, Simone and Marieke. From the age of 16 I’ve been working at Castelijn Furniture, where I’m delivering furniture to costumers through the country and install it for them too. This is my last month (Dec. 2024) working a full-time job because it’s finally time to enjoy my retirement and focus more on my hobbies - the Datsun Z car and cycling.

I think I was around 14 years old when I saw my first Datsun Z. I was on my way to train at the local football club, and in the parking lot I noticed a beautiful sport scar – I had never seen anything like it. It was love at first sight, and from that day on I was infatuated by the Z virus.

5 years later when I had driving lessons in a Datsun Violet, a new car that was introduced by Datsun. It was the Datsun 280ZX. Way too expensive for me, but a few years later (after driving a Datsun Sunny a Cherry, and a nice Datsun 180SX) I could finally buy it and I loved driving it - it was a 1983 280ZX 2+2 T-bar in red. It was a wonderful car to drive, and I became a member of the Dutch Z & ZX club. It was great fun, we went to meetings in Switzerland, England etc. I also wrote a lot for the clubs’ magazine and also managed the clubs’ shop for a few years. When our first daughter was born, the 280ZX was not very practical, so it had to be replaced by a station car.

The 280ZX was the one and only Z I ever had, but I never lost interest in the Z series, so I started collecting model cars, magazines, posters, manuals, brochures etc. At a certain time I had the largest collection of model Z cars in the world: over 1500 of them!

Now there’s a lot more to obtain, but at that time with no internet you actually had to go to shops and swap meetings. With the internet, it became much easier to obtain certain models, and it was more about how much you wanted to spend: everything was for sale. This was the moment I decided I wanted to sell my collection, also because of a lack of space. Especially those model kits take up a lot of space! Most of my model cars went to the USA and Japan. But I continued collecting magazines and brochures, I have hundreds of Z and ZX brochures and almost 100 folders filled with magazine articles

I'm always on the hunt for new items and when it takes too long I buy things on eBay, which is not the best way to get new things because the shipping costs are rising each day. Sometimes I buy big collections of different car magazines and go through them just to find Z items.

In 2013, I had to get heart bypass surgery, which meant I had to start going to the gym after that. But I didn’t enjoy it one bit, so I decided to buy a mountain bike and started cycling instead. Together with my wife Monique we now go on nice trips, last year we even cycled over 10,000 kilometers! I also bought a racing bike, so when I go to bike on my own, I take that one. One time each year we go to Limburg with our caravan and do 2 weeks cycling in the Dutch mountains.

Our daily car is now a Lexus IS250. I drove one for 7 years, a black one from 2006. We trade the car in for a BMW Touring, but within 6 months I wish I never sold my Lexus. Luckily, we found another IS250 with low mileage from 2013 in a nice blue color.

One of my other hobbies is taking pictures. I started in the analogue period and developed my own pics. Now that most things are digital, it’s so much easier. I used to never leave my house without my camera, but since mobile phones take such good pictures nowadays, I almost take all my pics with my phone now.

10 years ago I started my Facebook page "Datsun - Nissan Z cars", just to share nice pics of all type Z and ZX cars. At this moment I have almost 40,000 members. 2 years ago, I took over the Facebook page "A tribute to the famous Datsun Z works rally cars" from Guus van der Bol. This Facebook page is focused on Datsun Z cars from rallies all over the world like the Safari rally, RAC rally, Monte Carlo rally and lots of smaller rallies. I do a lot of searching on the internet trying to find new (old) pics – at this moment I have over 20 folders full of rally car pics, and I’m trying to make it as complete as possible.

Luckily, I get a lot of help from Alan Thomas. This guy seems to know almost everything!

6 years ago I met Chris Visscher, which is when he showed me his passion for the S30 - he bought lots of donor cars and was restoring them. I got to borrow one for a week to drive and that was absolutely fantastic. Together with a friend we went driving and taking pictures, lots of pictures. It was one of the best weeks in my life.

Now that I’m going to enjoy my retirement, I will have more time to expand my collection, and I’m really excited to share this with you!