Cars - for those who love them

That delicate nervous system and all, mostly is shown when sitting next to a male driver who thinks he is the best driver on the high way.
(Sorry couldn´ resist it)

And to think I used to like you.

Used to have several diff kinds. I wound up specializing in 68 to 71 cougars and TVR Tuscans. Long ago I raced, smacked em up, rebuilt, and raced and smacked up many different foreign cars (I was an (unlimited) C and D modified Hill climber).
My most exotic car was a Porsche speedster and later, an RSK which I got in a private divorce estate sale and sold it less than 2 years later and made a handsome profit. It was a dream car I did not race the RSK. It was easy to dent the body.
Ive pretty much gotten all that out of me . I still have to do a lot of off road travel so Ive had several favorite SUVs and, surprisingly, a Jeep Grand Cherokee is still up there.

When I hill climbed, We team ran a BMW 2002. It was also modified with the more modern tuning and "ground" fuel injection" and -like several insert truck springs because BMW's of that age always (to us) had a goofy suspension and rack. The best I ever got with that was a second, but with the Speedster I set a track record at the old Giants Despair which held for several years.

My attorney has a Z and he likes it. Ive driven it and it still feels like its holding back on the corners. I think Porsche engineers should trick their suspensions out and get em up on "tracks". Then youd have something worthy of a modern hill climb (which is , seemingly, only won by modified Japanese and Korean cars) .

My wife got me a ride in a NAscar chevy camaro at Pocono when I turned 60 (6 years ago ). That sumbitch really got up to plane reaally fast but I think they werent allowed to take the tourists any faster than 160.

66, such a sunny age..

I'll be starting my discursive romp re my cars any many minute now. Hang in, it will take a while (waves to saab). Even putting them in order is a bit of a task. Not all of these are roadsters, live with it.

1) First car paid for by me, a brand new 66 VW convertible that I had immediately painted chocolate brown instead of beige, and not long later scraped against my parents' house' narrow driveway. I called it "Hershey". Later, it was egged on halloween and I washed it off with hot water, the direct wrong thing to do.

I got my first ticket in it, going 68 in a 65 mile an hour zone. The cop told me VWs shouldn't try to go that fast.

I just put in for Soshl Sekerty so I got allll the time n the world. Take yer time (ignoring the organic biotic-systems proclivity toward apoptosis, I mean)

I think there was a second blurp, maybe mixing it up with the third one. I'm not in the mood for looking at my old files.
On the second, brand new, it killed itself on my trip to San Diego soon after purchase, was towed back.
I was beginning to learn. Understand I wasn't a person with money, just an idiot.

Next was the new Fiat 524, and against it's rep, it wasn't bad, trusty. Would that I had kept it, but that was when I was moving and starting an art gallery and needed a van, buying a new chevy van, criminy another mistake - dying all the time. Yes, I took it back to the dealer but, yada yada..

I sold it to the guy downstairs, who took over the payments - the guy who put together his own speedster (blank, until I remember his name and the car, and there is already a thread on it). Then I bought a million year old vw van, and had it painted bad ugly blue.

John (husband) and I were stopped by the police in that van, searched, going down the nice street, not far from where I was renovating my mother's house. I was showing him the trees on that street.

This is nothing to whine about when others get this stuff all the time.

Ironically, I had a landscape design client on that lovely street some years later.


More later.

Yes, ok, I'll get to cars.

I was not familiar with the RSK and had to look it up. There can't be many of those left in North America. Beautiful thing and understandable you didn't race it. I knew nothing of your car/race history. I've never raced but hopefully next summer I'll get some tutoring on a track just to become a more competent driver and to get closer to feeling out my car's capabilities.

That cop was a ridiculous human. If you see him again, tell him I said so.

ain't nobody in a hurry around here.

The last time I was down in Texas, Jane/Lola was getting her hair cut and I was just walking about. Rich neighborhood blocks from where W now lives. Turned a corner and there at the curb was one of these in this color



That a million and a half worth of car. McClaren P1. Very, very beautiful.

I just did hill climbs . I wish I had the RSK today. It was the later RK years but even those bring a good amount. Iheard of a 58 718 RSK bringing several million bucks. It was perfect and was never restored and there were less than 50 made.

Many tracks have car lover days where you can bring your own or rent one. Porsche is very big on that in Germany. I think Sebring still does it, and Pocono has an inner RR track . They were going to build an amateur track up near Reading Pa but tht got squelched by some locals (they already have a drag racing track and everyone complains about the noise on Sundays) .

If yours is a convertible, get a roll bar at least. is the BMW have a frame or is it monocoque?

I'm not sure what I think and I'm the last to know how to make the machina move faster. A tad blousy, but not bad. Understand I don't begin to get the dynamics, so my response is really just noise. I will agree to beautiful on consideration, even just looking at it, it is beautiful.

Whats really eird is how ttuned these sales systems are . I have NOT taled about SLingshots or BMW's except in this thred. SOmehow, in my normal traipsing around in YOUTUBE (Ive been looking up pictures of Olla Bell Reed to assure the banjo I bought has some provenance). ON YouTube, Ive gotten a whole bunch of crawler ads trying to introduce me to the wonders of a Z or a Slingshot (3 wheeler)

Blasphemy! The E30 fans would boil you in used motor oil for that.

I wanted a 2002 (the car, not year) in those days but that was when I didn't have 2 nickels to rub together. I lost interest in Bimmers after the E90s when bloat set in but the M2 looks like it may be the reincarnation of the 2002.

Z3's are unibody but have factory roll bars behind both seats. They are one of the few convertibles that tracks will allow on track day events.

@blatham
NASA (National Auto Sports Association) is a good outfit to join for track day events. They can take you from newbee driving with an instructor (free instruction) to full on racing if you want.

Hey saab, did you ever drive or know anything about a 60s-ish vintage Saab that had a 3 cylinder two stroke engine? There was one in my neighborhood I used to listen to every time it drove by. Don't know if the car was any good or not but it had the most beautiful exhaust note.

Yes. I figured production must have been very low indeed. Though I was not familiar with the car, my nerd brother would have been familiar with it.

Westwood, where Jim got his driver's training and began racing (he rolled his mini on lap one of first race after locking his brakes on the hairpin - we kept waiting for him to come around again) was a Mosport level track. It was up in the hills near Vancouver and some of the roads to it were themselves quite lovely to drive and at that time, quite unpopulated. On sunday race days, aspiring racers driving them made careful attention necessary. The track itself succumbed to the financial pressures of growing population and real estate values. We spent a lot of lovely summer sundays up there. One car that ran regularly was mazda with a wankel engine. The track had to force him to muffle the thing as the sound frequencies, unmuffled, were bloody torturous. If you were down the straight stretch a ways and he came around the corner onto it, you could see all the spectators immediately slamming their hands over their ears. One beautiful summer sunday on our way back home and driving up the TransCanada highway, my twin was salvaging remaining bits of the lunch mom had made, found that the big garden-grown tomato was all mushy and unappealing, just tossed it haphazardly out the window. No kidding, it got a hitch-hiker smack in the face. That memory was refreshed when Jim was in hospice.

My Z3 is a roadster and has factory roll bar setup. Steel monoque.

I'm in Canada are rather isolated mid Vancouver Island. But there are options I'll investigate as the season rolls around.

Isn't that an important element to all this. I hung around for the longest time down in Dallas when I encountered that McClaren just to hear it but eventually had to leave disappointed.

In a recent car mag, a writer described the exhaust note of some car he was reviewing as sounding like a lion fighting with a chain saw. It was a compliment.