M3 Not Going Anywhere Fast

When you buy a BMW M3 convertible, you imagine cruising at speed along your favorite back road in July or August. You love the way the semi-slick tires slide the car's arse out at even a dab of the loud peddle. Then you remember you live in Kansas City and it's been sh*tty since Thanksgiving and you can't even get your car out of the drive way.

 

 

 

So, you have to borrow your wife's front wheel drive Mini and leave the sad Bavarian frozen like a block of ice, in the hope that next week the sun will come out...cue orphan Annie singing.

Subarus are the New Volvos

 

Yes, this Subaru is actually stuck in place, look at all the tow bar scrapes on the ground

Right, I've had this theory for quite a while now, with no way to prove it...until I spent almost three weeks in Portland, Oregon.

See, there is a certain type of person, and for the past decade or more they've been inclined to drive older Volvo sedans and Wagons (especially the wagons, and especially the 200 series).

These people see themselves as outdoorsy, even if that is only driving to the mall, they dress up in L.L. Bean and North Face gear. The men like their hair unkempt and a little bit of facial hair, depending on their occupation. The women are similar with longer unkempt hair and less facial hair. They always look like they are either going for or returning from a hike. And the Volvo wagon is the car they use to drive to the hypothetical trail head.

They aren't what you would call "car people," they don't get a stiffy when Porsche announce the latest update to a 911 GT3 RS, but for some mysterious reason they are deeply loyal to their Volvos. And this is precisely the reason a lot of them are wandering over to the used Subaru market.

Their old Volvos were built in Sweden by Volvo, but then the Big Yankee American Uncle from Detroit bought them and decided to show the boys at Volvo how to make Swedish meatballs. When you've been flipping cheeseburgers for near a hundred years it doesn't really qualify you for the meatball game. Ford didn't think they would care, but these non-car people noticed. They no longer saw Volvos, but Ford Taurus' and Contours in drag where their boxy beauties used to be.

The bourgeois among this "class" can afford new Subarus and Subaru's PR and marketing team have done a great job telling them about all-wheel drive and the go anywhere attitude of their Outback wagon, ready to take on the malls and parking lots at a moments notice. But most of this class of people will be looking at older Subarus, no where near as old as their beloved Volvos. But as the Volvos get long in the tooth, scarcer and start to feel like very old cars, they look around the used car market, specifically they look for big dependable wagons and they see, glaring at them obviously, the Subaru Impreza and Legacy Outback wagons. And like some kind of Jungian car theory shift, they've all jumped ship, whether they're in the Midwest or the Pacific Northwest. Just like they all know to wear fleece jackets 365 days of the year: they all know Subaru is the new Volvo.

So, walking around Portland, in the rain, which is like saying, walking on earth breathing air, I got to see these people in their natural state. Some of them were holding on to their decaying Volvos, their babies duct taped into their car seats, others had made the move over to the Japanese Volvo, giving their off spring a better chance of survival in the more modern car with all wheel drive and airbags.

Cruising along the streets on foot I came across a used Mecca of Volvos. They had about twenty or thirty wagons and sedans, I'd say the had the whole 200 range covered from 1974 to 1993 when production ended. Some of them looking like they'd just arrived from 1985. Confirming the supply and demand theory I never listened to in my economic lectures.

So there is still hope for the Scandinavian loyalists, but eventually they'll have to face reality and move to Subaru, unless they are willing to choke down the Ford-parts-bin-Frankenstein that Volvos became post 1999.

Same people, two different cars and never the twain shall meet, whatever that means.

1989 Nissan Maxima

Not exactly what you would call a beauty. Photo Sourced

 

Like putting lipstick on a pig - Photo CarDomain

It was the first car I bought after the Cherokee was stolen. I went for months just sharing my wife's car (then still just the girlfriend). Her car was a brand new 2002 Nissan Altima and was a beauty to drive. So when I went shopping for cars I was in not much of a hurry to give up my driving privileges in the Altima, but as the school year got busier and we needed the extra set of wheels my hunting began in earnest.

I budgeted about $2,000 dollars, borrowed from work at a rate that would make a loan shark feel faint. This being the new millennium and everything was going virtual with the Internet, I ignored the traditional methods of car shopping and started my search out in cyberspace.

I was new to eBay and after a few days of searching I found an awesome 1992 Mazada Miata that I wanted to bid on. I logged on every day for a week, watching the price climb ever higher and then down to the last few minutes where every bollox Jonesing for a Miata suddenly logged on and put the price through the roof. Fail!

Another couple of days of searching and I came across a 1993 Pontiac Grand Prix GTP. Red with gold wheels, it looked the business. I always had a hard on for this slice of Americana automotive irrelevance, much to my own shame. It's kinda of like admitting to your friends that you do like fat chicks and no it wasn't just because you were drunk.

I kept my cards close to my chest this time and didn't bid to much, too often, I waited until the auction was down to its last few minutes and started bidding closer to my expected price. My newly acquired Internet savvy paid off and I won the auction. A $300 down payment secured my winning bid and I could pick the car up that weekend in El Dorado, Missouri; about two hours south of Kansas City.

Linh was very annoyed that we had to drive so far to collect the car, mostly because just a few weeks before I drove her all the way to St. Joseph to look at a similar car that looked like it just arrived from a demolition derby. But I showed her the pictures of the car and the seller's description and she agreed to drive down with me. God bless her.

After driving forever out into the heart of rural Missouri we pulled up in front of a small used car dealership. I went into the shop with the print-out of my winning bid in my hand and met the man I was going to relieve of one 1993 Pontiac Grand Prix GTP.

He looked friendly, in that six foot five hillbilly way that Missouri country boys possess. He was genuinely excited to meet us and show us THE CAR. We went out the back of the shop and there she was parked in the gravel and mud. From a distance it looked like the pictures on the Internet, but like a mirage it began to dissolve the closer I walked towards it.

The bodywork was terrible, cracks in the spoilers, paint scrapes and broken door mirrors and that was the good news. Inside, and I kid you not, there was mouse shit on the seats, little pellets of poo. Like who the feck sells a car and shows it with mouse shit on the seats? There was what looked like moss growing on the back of the passenger seat and the driver's seat was not affixed. I sat in it and it went all the way back, almost tossing me into the mouse shit in the back seat.

The seller came over with the keys, still genuinely excited, and handed me the keys with the notion that I take it for a test drive with two warnings "smoke comes out of the steering column when you put on the turn signal and the brakes aren't the best."

I could tell from the look on Linh's face that she didn't want to go anywhere in the mouse shit trap and wanted to go straight home. But for some dumb reason I insisted on taking it for a wee drive. We had come all this way after all.

The quick drive affirmed everything we knew was wrong with the car. A small fire in the steering column and plenty of power with no way of stopping. Linh told me to get back to the shop before we killed ourselves.

"So what do you think?" said the big fella now at the front counter of his shop with a weirdly placed wrench on the counter top. He could tell that we were not happy and with the placement of the wrench you could tell he was preemptive in his sales techniques. He knew the car was a sour lemon. Luckily he never had to use the wrench and we spoke civilly, as much a a hillbilly can and we left for KC a few minutes later and he promised to return the down payment. Linh handed me a large bag of "I told you so"s, for the drive home.

After a few days the check wasn't coming and a month of nasty emails ensued, especially after the second place auction highest bidder called me to find out why I didn't take the car. I was honest, even about the mouse shit. Ebay put us in arbitration, but to cut a long story short, I lost my money and gave up on eBay forever.

So I went back to the old fashioned pounding the pavement of used dealerships in the KC Metro area. I saw a lot of shit and met a lot of nice people and saw some great cars and met some people that you wouldn't bring to meet your mother-in-law.

I eventually found my car at a lot half way between the wife's parent's house and Diamond Joe's Strip Club in North Kansas City. It was a gold 1989 Nissan Maxima which left me with a little change from my $2000 budget.

After I bought it I had a friend look it over at his shop and he confirmed my suspicion that the engine was a lot younger than the car and he told me I'd got myself a bargain.

There was a few holes in the body work and I learned how to fill them myself and sealed the spare wheel well and replaced all the bulbs and indicator lights.

The car was perfect for driving up to Park University and over to my job at Pierpont's and the car never gave me a single pause in the years that I owned it. Although, an indicator did blow off the side of the car in high wind (my fault, I didn't seal it after I replaced the bulb.)

After college graduation the car saw less and less drive time, to the point where I took it off the insurance and put it in the garage with a cover over it. I'd covered maybe five thousand miles during the three years that I owned it.

A neighbor heard I had the car stowed away and told his cousin about it. He showed up one day with $1600 cash in his hands and with his lack of English and my lack of Spanish, I wasn't even sure I wanted to sell the car, we made a deal somehow and I was a few dollars richer and no poorer for passing on what was truly an ugly, but sound car.

So, if you cross a Rolls with a Ferrari you get a Nissan Maxima, mmh?

Wacky Racers

I was reading Car Magazine this week and they had a great article about real life Wacky Racers, commissioned by Lord Marsh for the Goodwood Festival of Speed and they are going to be on show this Fourth of July Weekend (2009).

So, I went onto YouTube this morning and wasted about an hour of my time watching old episodes of The Wacky Races. I still want to be Peter Perfect in his Turbo Terrific and Penelope Pitstop is still smoking hot.

I also learned the cartoon was inspired by a 1965 movie called The Great Race, staring Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis, and that lead to another hour of time wasting on YouTube.

So if you are like me and you love cars and cartoons, do yourself a favor and waste some time watching this great classic.

1991 Jeep Cherokee Limited

Impulse shopping is not something I indulge in often, I can walk around a GAP sale and want a hundred things and walk out with out spending a dime, but put $3500 in my hand and point me in the direction of a four-wheel temptress and I'll blow the whole lot in seconds.

My CRX was going fine, no problems at all other than it wasn't a Jeep Cherokee. I started snooping around the classifieds on Sunday mornings and logging on to AutoTrader way too often. I was getting the bug, every time a Cherokee drove past me on the road I was salivating.

I needed some expertise help as I wanted a good, clean, reliable car. My friend Adam was the right man for the job: he was from Iowa and drove an old truck, the perfect Cherokee hunter.

The first one we looked at was a mess, they were looking for $800 for it and Adam said it wasn't even worth $500, so we let it pass. There was another one close by so we headed over there to check it out and the lady at the door said the car would be back in a few minutes. So we waited and ten minutes later the $800 piece of crap showed up again. We jumped into Adam's truck and got the hell out of there.

Half an hour later we were in a much nicer neighborhood and looking at an immaculate 1991 black and gold Jeep Cherokee Limited. I literally jizzed in my pants at first sight.

I should have played hardball and haggled the price down, but I didn't I just told the guy I'd be back in a few day and have all the paperwork ready.

I never got a chance to feel buyer's remorse as the entire KC area got hit by an ice-storm and the Cherokee's four wheel drive proved invaluable. I was an errand boy for my friends and one of the few people able to show up for school at Park. With five seats I was able to bring loads of chicks out to the bars, to paraphrase Swingers "I was so money."

I once came to a road blocked by a timber log and with images of the A-Team van crashing through a secured gate I backed her up and bust through...it was a priceless moment in car ownership.

Fast forward 6 months and the Cherokee is parked outside my new girlfriend's house (this one became The Wife). I got up in the morning to drive to school and looked out onto the street and didn't see it. At first I thought I must have left it at work the night before, but no, I drove it home and parked it right out front. It was stolen, bollocks.

After a lot of BS with the police department in KCK I found her at a wrecking yard, compacted by about 3 feet. I could have cried and the pisser was I'd just paid $300 on new brakes and rotors. It was a short lived relationship with the Cherokee, but not a moment of regret.
Check out this fast Cherokee

Here is the inspiration for most of my Jeep driving

Rally Breed

 

Pictures Sourced from - Mitsubishi EVO, Corolla Twin Cam, Opel Manta

Ford Escort Cosworth

Kenny McKinstry goes “right into crest, left 90, ” Gwendaff Evans in a pink Ford Escort Cosworth spitting fire from its exhaust around Phoenix Park, David Llewellyn in a Castrol coated Toyota Celica leaping into the air at 100 miles an hour: poetry and mechanical madness embraced by a small, esoteric segment of the populous.

As youngsters our Dad brought us into the fold and we embraced the culture like hungry pups on a fat nipple. Up the back of Clar chapel, inches from the graves, perched on a freezing-cold stonewall. Marshals in yellow bids blow their whistles and yell for people to get off the road. The first car to come around the corner is a wee Starlet, hammering on at a speed that is was never meant to do while picking up groceries from the car park at Dunne’s Stores. Followed by a black Opel Manta, spiting chips in the air from the back wheels and a fat lip stuns me for a second, a cool drip of blood mixing with the taste of adrenaline.

A while later and arses still numb from the cold there’s another stage down towards lough Eske. We park and walk along with the hoards of rally nuts. License plates from the North, from Mayo, Galway and Cavan, attracted to the thrill of speed in their wanna-be rally cars – Subaru’s and Twin Cams, old 3 series BMs and a souped up old-school-Supra.

We get a great spot where we might see a car roll on a high-speed natural chicane, so Dad says. The first cars come through cautiously, just nipping the green edges of the road, then the big boys come rallying through at blistering speeds. Modified and broken exhausts howl through the ears at deafening decibels and sure enough the back diff of a Twin Cam can’t control the power and she slides off, the driver barely straightening her up inches from a solid famine wall.

The blood in the veins of these men is like thick oil, lubricating their hot, over-boiling hearts. White knuckles, pace notes, adrenaline at full pump, eyes darting to see over the next crest, a special breed of evolved man, evolved from farm lads and mechanics, soon to be engineers. Men that consider a Massey Ferguson an alternative mode of transport.

Another day and my arse is still cold sitting on the wooden-slat seats of Mondelo Park. Will Gallop’s 6R4 is blazing around the place like a demented supersonic gnat. More than 420bhp ripping through the back wheels in a wee car based on your Granny’s Metro was complete insanity. Banned from group B rallying years ago and found a new home on the rally cross circuit. Along with old RS 200s, Audi Quatros and Lancia Delta Intergrales.

We walk through the infield to warm up; Josie McCloskey has a funny hat on, looks like a tire warmer and big Pat Johnson is cracking another joke and Jimmy is egging him on. Dad and Derek are watching a pit crew re-treading tires as it looks like it’ll be wet.

We had to leave the house at five this morning to get down here in time for the qualifying. The big 5 series BMW was redlined all the way out of Donegal, across the Petigo Road, never under a hundred through Fermanagh and up to 150 through Cavan. A few years later on the Virgina Road a wee boy would be killed and the cops would put an end to the speed too late.

The drive down had been as exciting as some of the driving that day, until Gollop celebrated his win by doing donuts on the manicured grass in the in-field. Totally maddened the folks in charge as they called out over the loudspeaker system for other drivers to refrain from doing the same, but the crowd was going wild. Grass roosters were shooting twenty feet up the air as he ploughed the field with his Metro.

The night before the Birmingham motor show we drove down to Dublin in the Pajero and Dad got pulled over on the Virginia Road and when the young Garda asked him if he knew how fast he was going he said “No” and the cop said “86mph” and Dad stupidly replied “I didn’t think she would go that fast” and the cop said “That and plenty more.” Then he gave the whole people dying on roads speech. Dad had a silly grin on his face ‘cause he knew he was in trouble.

The next day in Birmingham as we walked through the parking lot of the NEC admiring all the fancy cars, a security man came up quietly behind us ready to apprehend the three of us! We had to quickly explain that we were just car enthusiasts and we’re on our way into the show. He looked at us like he didn’t believe us, but after a long awkward moment he let us go and just told us to not look so obvious, especially with those Northern Irish accents, must have thought we were a bunch of terrorists! So off we went to hear Jeremy and Tiff do their car stand-up routine.

Will Gollop was in there to meet us in his usual black, red and gold livery, but this time plastered all over the body of a wide body Peugeot 306, a total beast of a machine. He was putting around 600hp down around the track, setting a pretty amazing pace. Then came a whole herd of blue Scoo-barus with 555 logos and the essential gold wheels. I think wee Colin McCrae was behind the wheel of one of them, years before he would become one of the most famous men in racing with video games based on him, bags of world titles under his kilt and a persona that made you wanna be him flying through a forest road with NO FEAR. Like many bright stars, his burned out early, fecking helicopters.

Back in ‘88 or ‘87 his Dad, Jimmy, battled Bertie Fisher in their near identical blue and white Sierra Cosworths in the Circuit of Ireland. Our hometown of Killybegs was a stopping point for them and Derek and I were in car-porn heaven with all the mad rally cars parked in the town. That weekend was the first time I saw a real M3 in the flesh, or a Cossie for that matter. I stared at them in awe, as a French farmer might a UFO if he found it in his asparagus patch. I reached out and touched them, slid my hand over their big rear spoilers and could still feel the heat radiating off their exhausts. These were the fantasy machines that only existed on telly or in a magazine and now here they were in fish-stinking-Killybegs. A visit from the Pope would have extracted less revere from me.

You don’t see the likes of them anymore, only an EVO or STI can instill that kind of passion in a young boy’s heart these days. I’ll glance at a Ferrari when one passes me, like once every three months on average, it’s the least appreciation I can give a piece of art. But five or six Scoobie and EVOs could pass me in a single day and I’ll stop and stare, crane my neck, nearly run off the road looking at them every time, much to the annoyance of my wife “Jesus Christ, just dive!” You know when archeologists and the like find some fish off the waters of Africa that they thought had been extinct for millions of years, but then it’s in some fisherman’s net, a living fossil, well, that’s kind of what EVOs and STIs are. Supras and Celicas are gone, M3s have become soft luxury cars. The last of a dying breed, I lament and paraphrase; Where Have all the Good Cars Gone.

Richard Burns died not long ago, McCrae is driving the big gold wheeled Subaru in the sky. None of the newer drivers make me wanna use their name in my head when I’m driving. We, the rally breed, need new heroes and often in a time of need they come from the strangest place, like Krypton, but this time it might be America, the good old US of A. They aren’t known for their rally skills, but your man Pastrana having leaned his skills from McCrae knows how to fling a car around. And he’s got the youth and charisma to spawn an entire generation of rally half-breeds. The next day I’m trying to go sideways in my M3, I think I will be him in my head; fast, ferocious and fearless. Until my wife yells at me.

Maybe what I really need is to go on a man trip with Dad and Derek. Find some nice cold, soggy weather and stand around with my hands in my pockets for a ten second glimpse at the arse end of a Corolla Twin Cam. To stand among men who worshiped the back-wheel-drive diff of a carbureted, not injected, Twin Cam 16v. Men who after the races will drive home sideways, with death only a heart beat away.

1991 Honda CRX

 

My car looked more like the first picture than the second one, but with Walmart hubcaps. 

With the CRX coming back, I could be tempted again...

My first real Japanese; slick, sexy and fast. This was the other woman I was checking out while the Colt was in getting her surgery. A used car lot down in Kansas City, Kansas had her into Bob's to get a full service. I asked Bob what he thought of it and he said it was sound.

It was way out of my price range at the time, but I got Dad back in Ireland to send me a small loan, one I'd pay-off during the summer.

Even though only three years younger than the Colt, it was light years ahead in power and refinement. Almost felt like a modern car. It's tuned 1.6 liter engine revved freely all the way to the red line every time. Reminded me of the AX Gti that I use to have.

The blue CRX was my first automatic car and my left leg didn't know what to do with itself for the first few hundred miles in that car. But at times traveling at over a hundred miles an hour on hwy 152 at three in the morning my brain-sensory more than made up for the loss in my left leg.

The CRX was a complete workhorse of a car. It would go anywhere, anytime, anyhow and even though it was a two-seater, it had a trunk that was enormous, you could have easily fit five dead bodies in there on a desert run if you found yourself in such a predicament; a Japanese mafia man's dream.

It made the weekly 183 mile run to North-East Missouri a breeze. A fill of gas went forever and back then when gas was practically been giving away for free, I could fill it for about twelve bucks.

Only problem I ever had was to change the water pump after a year or more of hard driving. However, since I was living out in the country I took her on a lot of dirt roads and into fields that should be the preserve of 4x4s. I could have opened a coffee shop with the amount of donuts I made in the fields. One night I tried to go up a little hill and the dart shaped nose of the CRX stuck into the side of the grass hill, like er, a dart. I had to back her out, pull a bunch of grass out from the front grill and learn to live with a split front splitter.

A few years later I posted her for sale in the KC Star and a young man in King City, MO desperately in want of a CRX answered the add and when I saw his sad little face and hundreds short of the asking price, I practically gave him the car. I felt a sweet car like that, needed a sweet driver like him. It was like giving a child up for adoption, my little Japanese orphan.

Can you believe "Extra Window" was a selling point?