Reasons why I should never read Hotrod while drunk
http://www.hotrod.com/thehistoryof/53078/index4.html
180+ mph in an ugly American garden shed of a car that destroys a rainforest every time it crackles into life. A thing nearly as old as me that's had a hatfull of money spent on it to make it stop and go around corners in a manner that the original designer never intended.
I should hate the thing and lust after howling Italian metal like sensible people. Or hate it for its fuel hoovering and terrible waste like even more sensible people.
Bollocks to that. Fuck the lot of them.
See, I could probably blame exposure to Bullitt and The Dukes at an impressionable age (oh, and seventies footage from Santa Pod on World of Sport's Sports Special One) but I suspect it was the lungful of nitromethane (don't stand downwind of a fuel-car when it sparks up. You go deaf and the unburnt fuel works just like teargas.) that I experienced in 1990. At the time, I'd every intention of buying some Detroit iron while I was still young enough to have a laugh with it, but as is the way of these things, poverty got in the way.
A few years later, while house-hunting in Bristol, I met a chap with the same ambitions. He'd settled for scale models of the things in display cabinets in the living room.
Fuck that for a game of soldiers. 'Settling' is an anagram of 'mediocrity', and that's a terrible place to live.
(And in the meantime, the car-hacking movement called 'pro-touring' had become popular. Take V8 shed of a car, make it stop and go around corners, profit! And with any luck make the Clarksonistas shit themselves with hatred.)
180+ mph in an ugly American garden shed of a car that destroys a rainforest every time it crackles into life. A thing nearly as old as me that's had a hatfull of money spent on it to make it stop and go around corners in a manner that the original designer never intended.
I should hate the thing and lust after howling Italian metal like sensible people. Or hate it for its fuel hoovering and terrible waste like even more sensible people.
Bollocks to that. Fuck the lot of them.
See, I could probably blame exposure to Bullitt and The Dukes at an impressionable age (oh, and seventies footage from Santa Pod on World of Sport's Sports Special One) but I suspect it was the lungful of nitromethane (don't stand downwind of a fuel-car when it sparks up. You go deaf and the unburnt fuel works just like teargas.) that I experienced in 1990. At the time, I'd every intention of buying some Detroit iron while I was still young enough to have a laugh with it, but as is the way of these things, poverty got in the way.
A few years later, while house-hunting in Bristol, I met a chap with the same ambitions. He'd settled for scale models of the things in display cabinets in the living room.
Fuck that for a game of soldiers. 'Settling' is an anagram of 'mediocrity', and that's a terrible place to live.
(And in the meantime, the car-hacking movement called 'pro-touring' had become popular. Take V8 shed of a car, make it stop and go around corners, profit! And with any luck make the Clarksonistas shit themselves with hatred.)