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Spinning My Tires is one man's view of the world of cars. Random thoughts, ideas and comments pop up here, all of them related to owning, driving and restoring cars. I've been doing this car thing as long as I can remember, and have enjoyed a great many car-related experiences, some of which I hope to share with you here. And I always have an opinion one way or another. Enjoy. E-mails are welcomed--if you have thoughts of your own to share, please send them. AdditionalSpinning My Tires editorials can be found on the Archives page. An EpiphanyThis is something I wrote about a year ago, when I was wrestling with the idea of getting out of hot-rods and into old cars again. I think it is suddenly very relevant to my Buick project. This is pretty much the moment I decided to sell FrankenRanger and buy an old car. I hope you enjoy it. 8/20/01 Last Saturday, I had an epiphany. Not a shot of lightning from the heavens kind, but a quiet kind of appreciation for something I’d long since forgotten: the simple joy of being in a special car. It was a parade for the mayoral candidates for the city of Cleveland, where I live. My father is endorsing a candidate, and rolled out his 1930 Model A Ford roadster for the parade. He invited me to join him as co-pilot, which I gladly accepted. We don’t get together much anymore, and doing it over cars is still a great time as far as I’m concerned. So I roll up in FrankenRanger and park it out of the way, somewhere it won’t be noticed for a change. We talk for a while, and eventually, one of his candidate’s people comes up to me and asks, "Can you drive a ’49 Mercury?" "Of course," I say, quickly trying to recall how to shift a car with three-on-the-tree. Turns out there’s a guy who brings his car to these events, but is the shy type who doesn’t like to drive it in the parade, so he needs a shoe who can handle the old Merc. He pulls up in the car, and it’s a clean ’49 Mercury 4-door, mildly modified with skirts, wide whites, spinners, dual exhaust and this elegant anthracite gray paint job. A really nice car. He parks it, hands me the keys and says, "Have fun." And I have to tell you that driving that Mercury at 5 mph in first gear was about the most fun I’ve had in a car in a long, long time. The deco dashboard was wonderful to look at. It had a warmed-over flathead under the hood, but kept its cool for the entire parade. It had crank windows and no A/C, so it got warm inside, but not unpleasantly so. The clutch was light and the brakes firm. Driving it back to the parking lot after the parade, I found that it felt every bit like a real car, keeping up with traffic, shifting easily without double-clutching, stopping confidently, and just plain going about its business without any fuss. So this got me thinking about why I do what I do. FrankenRanger is my calling card, a technical knock-out that wows people when I pop the hood—fuel injection, supercharger, A/C, ABS, all just like the factory would do it. But I had to ask myself, do I enjoy driving it? Usually I’m worrying about whether the A/C is blowing cold enough or whether it’s idling just right or if I’d blown a head gasket on the last hard run or if it’s running just a little bit warmer than it did last time I drove it. I worry about rain and paint chips and the police. But I never just drive it for the sheer joy of driving it. Never. And then it hit me: this guy, the owner of the Mercury, drives the doors off his car. It’s simple, but it works without a fuss all the time. He drives it 10,000 miles a year, he says, and I believe him. It’s the kind of car that makes you want to go out for a Sunday drive in the country, a drive you make because the car and the road and woman by your side are the good things in life. He doesn’t worry about it running, because it’s simple and the combination was perfected forty years ago. He doesn’t worry about the A/C, because it isn’t there. Neither are the power windows or seats or gauges. The car itself is his statement. And it just plain works. So I looked at the polished aluminum 400-horsepower fuel injected wonder-motor under the hood of FrankenRanger and thought about the joy it brings me: only at the very moment I open the hood and someone else says, "Wow!" And I realized that I had missed the journey because the destination is all I thought about when I built it. It’s perfect, it’s fast, and it works like a modern truck should with amenities that only Cadillacs had when the Mercury was built. But I’ve engineered the joy out of it, and derive all my pleasure from showing it to other people. That little Mercury showed me that maybe I need to be inside the car, driving it and just enjoying the feeling of being part of the machine. Maybe I need a car that will talk to me while I navigate it down the road. Maybe I need a car that is as much a part of a perfect evening as the moon and the stars and a fine meal. Maybe the secret isn’t in horsepower or electronic fuel injection or how much like a factory car can I make it, but rather in the ability to enjoy the ride without thinking about any of that other stuff. That Mercury talked to me, and it told me that a car should bring me joy when I drive it, not when I park it. Anyone have a ’49 Mercury they’d like to sell? E-mail me at toolman8@sbcglobal.net This page accessed Thanks, Fidget! |