The weekend before Memorial Day, I took my customary road trip down to “The Vintage” in Asheville, North Carolina. This is the biggest vintage BMW event on the East Coast, with 600 cars in the village of Hot Springs nestled in the mountains north of the city, and the event hotel in Asheville is a non-stop, three-day hoopla where walking round the parking lot is as much fun as the official event itself. I’d missed it last year due to a family health issue, so I was looking forward to returning.

In addition, I decided to drive Hampton, my 49,000-mile survivor BMW 2002. I’ve written quite a bit about Hampton in these pages, describing how I’d bought the car from its original owner in 2019, how I revived it while taking care not to disturb its remarkable originality, how it didn’t sell on Bring a Trailer because people may say that they love survivor cars but what brings the money are shiny powder-coated vapor-honed mirages, and how I gradually warmed to the car’s survivor vibe. It’s not a quick 2002 like my 2002tii, but it’s an incredibly solid car, virtually free of the usual thunks, klunks, and rattles that haunt 50-year-old vehicles.

Even though it appeared that I would be keeping the car, the 50,000-mile rollover strongly affected how I used it. I know, it was stupid; it’s not like it was some ultra-low-mileage vehicle. It was already a survivor car, not some Cosmoline-coated hangar queen, but I still felt that the mileage was something to be hoarded like Bitcoin or virginity or something equally silly. But between one road trip to Vermont a few years ago and the required back-and-forth to the Monson warehouse on the MA/CT border where I store cars, the mileage had crept to 49,900. I had this epiphany: Do you want it to roll over on the way out to Monson, or do you want it to happen when you’re doing something big and fun?

So big and fun it was. Hampton was going to The Vintage. I took it for a shakedown drive, found a sticky front brake caliper, replaced it, drove it again, and by the time I got back, I was within 28 miles of the big rollover.

Then something unexpected happened. Two days before departure, one of my two road-trip companions called me saying that his BMW 2002 had problems and couldn’t make the trip. I thought about how I have these cars in the Monson warehouse gathering dust, and offered him my ’73 BMW Bavaria. After all, the Bavaria ran fine when I used it a few years ago for a mini-road trip to upstate New York to be used in a movie, and in my recent piece about how all my cars seemed to be rising in revolt, the only issues with the Bavaria were a dead battery from sitting and low-rpm buffeting from imperfectly synchronized Webers.

However, something occurred to me. I’m a big proponent of replacing convention mechanical ignition (points and condenser) with an electronic triggering unit such as a Pertronix (you can read about the debate here). The main reasons are A: points can wear down and close up, causing the car to die, and B: the quality of new points and condensers is absolute garbage these days. And yet I was about to head off on a 2,000-mile round trip in my only two vintage cars still running points. Why? Well, when I was trying to sell Hampton, I wanted to keep it original, and now there wasn’t time to order a Pertronix. With the Bavaria, after its first trip to The Vintage in 2014, I tried installing Pertronix, but for reasons unknown, the car didn’t want to rev over 4000 rpm with it installed, and I never figured out why (I’ve never had this happen on any other car), so I reversed back to points. So both of these cars were not only running points, but were still running the points that were in them when I bought them. (Spoiler alert: Point gap would figure prominently in repairs on this road trip, though not in the way I expected.)

So early on a Wednesday morning, my two companions met me at the Monson warehouse. We put a charged battery in the Bavaria and checked the fluids, then I checked the point gap in both cars with a dwell meter and adjusted it. Then we headed south for Asheville.

Oh, Hampton’s big mileage rollover? It happened 30 minutes into the trip. Over and done. I did my best impression of Paul McCartney singing “Let Me Roll It.” She’s a road trip car now.

We made it to the night’s destination Winchester, Virginia, a little over halfway, without incident. Hampton seemed genuinely happy to be free of its cloistered stored-in-a-barn-in-the-Hamptons-for-10-years-then-treated-like-a-wallflower existence.

When we were about to go to dinner, I got a phone call from a friend—professional vintage BMW mechanic Paul Wegweiser. He said that his friend and customer Mike was about 30 minutes south of me with a dead 2002, and asked if I could help. I called Mike and learned that he and the car were safe in a gas station parking lot with several hotels within walking distance. I said that it made the most sense for me to look at the car in the morning (daylight, it’s on my way to Asheville, auto parts stores are open, etc).

So the following morning I found Mike and his 2002. I’ve written over and over about the common things to strand a vintage car on a road trip (ignition, fuel delivery, charging, cooling, belts, and to a lesser extent clutch hydraulics). A car that goes from driving to dead is highly likely to be a victim of one of the first two. You can give a blast of starting fluid down the carb throat to test which it is (if doesn’t start, it’s ignition, but if it starts and runs for a few seconds, it’s fuel delivery), but for some reason I went right for the points—I yanked off the distributor cap and watched them while Mike cranked the engine. They clearly weren’t opening.

Setting the point gap is usually easy, as points usually have a notch that sits between two little bumps on the distributor plate that allows you to put a screwdriver in the notch and lever it against one of the bumps to increase or decrease the gap. However, the nylon block on these points was so badly worn that the slot wasn’t between the two bumps, and they didn’t really fit right on the plate. Plus, these were the unusual left-opening points used on 2002s with vacuum-retard distributors. I didn’t have a spare set of these with me, and the odds of any AutoZone having them was zero. It took quite a bit of fettling to get the point gap dialed in. When it was, Mike tried starting the car. The carb let out such a loud belch-and-backfire that it startled us all. I theorized that Mike had probably flooded it trying to get it to start with closed points. Eventually it started and idled, and a test drive verified that the car appeared happy. Mike joined our caravan, and we made it down to Asheville without further ignition-related issues.

It was a wonderful event. The organizers of The Vintage refer to it as “a gathering, not a car show.” It’s not a concours. There are no trophies. No one “wins” anything. While there certainly are some lovely restored high-dollar vintage BMWs there, it’s far more about shared passion and enthusiasm irrespective of budget. It’s the kind of event where, on the drive down or in the parking lot, if you need a part or expertise because your car is broken, there are hundreds of people who have your back, and that is a beautiful thing. My having helped Mike was part of the spirit that naturally flows out of the event.

There’s also a long history of my friend Paul Wegweiser pranking me at The Vintage. One year, he bombed my Bavaria with yellow chicken feathers that I’m still finding inside the car. Another year, he actually zip-tied burned-out wires under the dash of my 2002 and a burned-out fan motor under the front seat so I’d smell it on the drive home and wonder where the electrical fire is. He has threatened to put zip-ties on my driveshaft and half-axles so he can read about me going crazy trying to find the source of the noise. However, this year, he said that, since Hampton is such a lovely survivor example, he wasn’t going to screw with it. Like an idiot, I believed him.

The drive home hit a bump on our first stop in southern Virginia. Mike’s car had the good fortune of dying literally as we were heading into a gas station parking lot. Again, it was due to the points having closed up, but this time things were worse—the inside of the distributor cap was coated with soot, the points were noticeably more pitted than before, and I found that the thin braided wire grounding the distributor plate to its body had detached from its connector. And, to add insult to injury, we appeared to be parked near a leaking sewage line or septic tank.

My theory was that the detached ground strap was causing a much stronger spark across the points, which in turn caused both the pitting as well as the soot on the inside of the cap. I got everything buttoned back up, and we continued heading north. I rechecked the distributor on Mike’s car whenever we stopped, and it appeared to be soot-free with the point gap holding stable. One of my travel companions noted that another service area was also, uh, fragrant, but we were parked next to a drainage culvert at the time.

We arrived that night in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. While we were unloading our bags from our cars, someone noted that the smell of Virginia rest stops appeared to have followed us. While we were waiting in line to check into the hotel, the red light went on in my head: It was my “friend” Paul. After all, someone who zip-tied burned wiring into my car certainly wasn’t above putting something foul-smelling into my BMW. After I checked in, I went back outside and did the nose test under the hood, along the rocker panels, and at the tailpipe, but nothing jumped out at me. I thought that maybe, whatever he’d done, it was heat-activated. He’s a clever guy.

Before we headed off in the morning, I re-checked Mike’s car. I pulled off the distributor cap and was relieved to see both the absence of soot and that my repair of the little ground strap was holding.

Then I borrowed his key and went to start the car so I could check the dwell. It clicked but didn’t start. I pulled out my voltmeter and measured the battery voltage. It read 13.1 volts. Standard resting voltage of a fully-charged battery is 12.6 volts, so it had plenty of voltage.

To make testing easier and eliminate the car’s ignition switch as the source of the problem, I connected a jumper wire to the starter solenoid. I touched the other end of the jumper to battery positive. Again, click but no start.

The no-start decision tree is pretty easy to follow and usually quite definitive. This was beginning to look like a bad starter motor. Pulling the starter isn’t a 10-minute job like the alternator, and we didn’t have a spare one with us anyway, so I wanted to be sure. I was about to swing my car in front of Mike’s to jump it when one of my other companions said he had a new fully-charged lithium jump pack. We hooked it up, it buzzed, and still… click, but no start. Just in case there was a bad connection in Mike’s battery cables, I used my jumper cables to connect the battery directly to the starter. It made no difference. And Mike’s car is an automatic, so there was no way to push-start it.

I lit the Hack beacon and posted a the “2002 down, 2002 needs starter motor” message on the Facebook page for The Vintage, then began removing the starter. With it out, I did the on-the-asphalt test of connecting it directly to the battery. It did spin, but the spin-up time seemed unusually long. Two people quickly answered the post, one of whom had two used 2002 starters at his repair shop just 20 minutes north. He said that we’d actually met once in the parking lot of a Sheetz convenience store nearby. When I got home after the trip, I looked through my old trip photos to The Vintage and found pics of the meeting. Incredibly, it was 10 years almost to the day, and I was driving the same Bavaria.

I tested both used starters by jumping them with Mike’s car’s battery. They both seemed to spin up a bit slowly, but one was obviously faster than the other. Installation, however, was a bear. The solenoid on the replacement starter was fatter than on the original one, and it couldn’t get past the bracket for the kick-down cable for the automatic transmission. I had to loosen the bracket to move it out of the way. It was the kind of bent-over pulling-up-wrenches work that angers up my aging back, but I seem congenitally unable to say “Good luck with AAA” when there’s a problem I can diagnose and fix.

Finally, with one of the starter’s bolts holding it snug enough to the bell housing to verify the repair, I reconnected the battery cables and again touched the jumper wire to battery positive.

Click, but no crank.

No. NO. Not possible.

My first thought was that the engine was seized or otherwise prevented from turning. I chocked a rear wheel with one of the other starter motors, had Mike put it in neutral, and manually rotated the engine (it’s easy to do this on a BMW 2002 by just grabbing the cooling fan and leaning on the belt with the heel of your hand). It rotated easily.

Stumped, I jumped in my car and swung it nose-to-nose with Mike’s to jump it. Why? Don’t know. Just to try something, I guess.

It spun instantly.

Wait, what?

As I put the car back together, I began to accept the idea that I’d gotten the diagnosis wrong. It probably never needed a starter motor. If it started with a jump, the problem was likely the battery. Just because the battery had more than the necessary 12.6 volts, that doesn’t mean that it was able to deliver the cranking amperage to spin the engine. I hadn’t suspected the battery since it looked new (Mike said he’d installed it when he bought the car last year). But it was a mystery why it didn’t start with my friend’s jump pack.

With the starter fully secured and the ignition switch reconnected, the started instantly with a jump and a twist of the key. I re-checked the point gap using the dwell meter, and it was still fine. I verified with my voltmeter that, with the engine idling, there was about 13.5 volts at the battery, indicating that the alternator was charging it. Mike and I said our goodbyes as he was peeling off to drive home to Pittsburgh, about 250 miles. I advised that, as long as he didn’t shut it off the car, he’d likely be fine.

Does anyone get it? Anyone see what I missed? I’ll give you a hint: It’s as plain as the nose on your face.

A few hours later, this text appeared on my phone: “Update! The good news: I am safe at a rest stop off the turnpike. Bad news: I am kaput! Car puttered out and battery is fried. Smoking and a little stuff coming out. I am 96 miles from home, which puts me within the free 100-mile tow! P.S. I think that [expletive deleted] smell was ME!”

Oh. My. God.

The smell! I can’t believe I missed this.

An old-school voltage regulator is designed to to rapidly open and close (not unlike ignition points), bringing the alternator in and out of the charging circuit so that the average voltage to the battery with the engine running is about 13.5 to 14.2 volts. When a regulator fails, it can fail in two ways. They usual “fail open,” which means they never bring the alternator into the charging circuit, so the battery runs down and eventually the car dies (or won’t start). But if they “fail closed,” they cause the alternator to always feed the so-called full-field voltage (about 17 volts) to the battery. This over-charging boils the sulfuric acid in the battery and produces gaseous sulphur which smells like rotten eggs. THAT’s what we all were smelling. It wasn’t sewage. It was the battery being fried.

If someone had said “I smell sulphur,” or “I smell rotten eggs,” my voltage-regulator-stuck-closed neuron would’ve fired, but I missed it. This is why the car’s resting battery voltage read 13.1 volts instead of 12.6 (I can’t believe I missed this one too). And, most important, this is why the battery wouldn’t crank the starter in the car—it was ruined. It’s also why, when removed, the starter was slow to spin up. Had I dropped my own battery in Mike’s car, or used my battery to bench-test his starter, it would’ve spun fine. It was also likely a contributor to why the points were pitting and the distributor cap was coated with soot.

I think that part of the reason I got it wrong was that it was just a few months ago that I wrote about buying a new battery for Hampton when the problem turned out to be a bad starter motor, but I felt like an absolute idiot. The entire episode could’ve been avoided had I simply jump-started the car like anyone who doesn’t pretend to be a know-it-all would’ve done, and if, once it was running, I checked the battery with a voltmeter both while the engine was idling and while it was revved up. I would’ve seen the over-voltage. I had a spare regulator in my trunk. That and a trip to an auto parts store for a battery… it would’ve been so easy.

I still, though, didn’t understand why the car didn’t start off my friend’s lithium jump pack.

A day after we got home, my friend messaged me:

“So I figured out why the starter didn’t crank with the jump pack. It’s a ‘smart’ jump pack that sensed that the battery was at 13.1 volts. That’s the buzzing we heard when you hooked it up. Per the instructions: ‘HOMPOW [brand] car jump starter with intelligent clamps provides protection against over-charging, over-discharging, surge voltage, overload, over-voltage, short-circuit, reverse polarity, and high-temperature protection, making your devices jump faster in a safe way.’”

Oh, my two cars, with their decades-old points? Flawless. Absolutely flawless.

When you blow a diagnosis, all you can do is learn the lesson, and hope that the consequence of being wrong isn’t too painful in time, effort, money, and the degree to which you’ve caused yourself or someone else a pain in the butt. At least this one made for a good story, and two good arrows in the diagnostic quiver.

***

Rob’s latest book, The Best Of The Hack Mechanic: 35 years of hacks, kluges, and assorted automotive mayhem is available on Amazon here. His other seven books are available here on Amazon, or you can order personally-inscribed copies from Rob’s website, www.robsiegel.com.

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post Blowing a Diagnosis on a Road Trip appeared first on Hagerty Media.

We love driving our vintage cars, but sometimes local law says we can’t, shouldn’t, or are not welcome to do so. It’s frustrating, and the complexity of traffic law makes the situation confusing, even if those layers of legalese were accumulated over a century of incremental change targeted at keeping our roads orderly and our drivers safe.

The laws that govern driving are something that we agree to follow when we apply for and are granted our driving license. So what do we do when we want those laws changed?

The process is not simple or quick, but it is possible. Just a few weeks ago, a committed group of car enthusiasts won a long-awaited victory: The state of Michigan announced that it would alter the driving code as it pertained to the usage of vehicles with authentic or historic registrations (to qualify, a vehicle has to be 26 years or older).

The vehicle code of Michigan was written to restrict the driving of vehicles with these types of registrations to “club activities, exhibitions, tours, parades, and similar uses, including mechanical testing.” The law barred their use for regular transportation but granted a lower annual registration fee. A handful of drivers were issued tickets while at Detroit’s beloved Woodward Dream Cruise because the event did not fall under any of the approved scenarios yet drivers took their vintage rides out regardless of registration. John Russell, along with other members of the Twin Bay British Car Club, thought the situation was absurd, so they began the process of removing the restrictions.

Most states help people like you or I by giving us a roadmap to enact the change we wish to see. For example, Michigan.gov has a four-page explainer of the exact steps needed—in order, no less.

If only it were that simple. I reached out to a few of the people who were behind the recent change in Michigan, and they provided some valuable perspective. “I guess the word I would look for is perseverance,” said Dr. Fred Stoye, who worked closely with John Russell and other members of the Twin Bay British Car Club to march the path laid by the state. “We saw the need for positive change, followed all the legal steps, forged alliances in the legislature, and presented a plan that worked and was voted into law.”

The process was not quick. There were multiple dead ends along the way that put pauses on any progress and sometimes kicked them back to square one. In the end, the group persevered for ten years before they achieved the big victory. One of the tougher steps in the process was getting a lawmaker to pick up their cause. They struggled to find a sponsor who was willing to introduce the bill and to continue advocating for it as the bill stepped through committee review, which can take months to years, depending on a multitude of factors.

Even with a sponsor, and after the bill passed the Michigan House of Representatives, Russell and his compatriots had no time to relax. All the work up to that point could be done from afar, but when the bill entered the Michigan Senate, they were asked to testify at a hearing to explain why the relaxation of driving restrictions was worthwhile. Stoye, Russell, and other team members went to Lansing with a measured approach: “We expressed the need to drive our classic cars to keep them healthy and how there would be no adverse damage to our roads.” Their argument boiled down to the fact the current law was not particularly helping anything—so why did it exist?

Their argument might not apply to every change you or I would like to see regarding restrictions to the use of vintage cars, but the members of the Twin Bay British Car Club set a great example for automotive enthusiasts. What it really takes to change a law is the right group of people, motivated in the right way, who are willing to stick out the process.

If there is a restriction or driving law you think is outdated, superfluous, or otherwise unhelpful to the vintage car hobby: The power is in your hands. People just like you have succeeded in making change. Now it’s your turn.

***

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The post Yes, It’s Possible to Change Laws That Keep You from Driving Your Classic appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Why aren’t engineers considered artists? That’s one question I have after watching Hagerty Media’s exclusive video review of the new Gordon Murray Automotive T.50 supercar, which we paired with the McLaren F1 that Murray designed more than three decades ago. Another question: How can I get my hands on $3 million to buy that T.50?

In stereo sound and vivid colors, the film illustrates why the T.50—designed and engineered by a team led by Gordon Murray—might just be worth a healthy retirement account. Murray has proven time and time again that he’s an automotive engineer of unrivaled creativity, passion, and brilliance. We’ve summarized some of his high points in this article. He deserves, however, his own multi-part documentary.

Gordon Murray started racing in his native South Africa before landing a job with the Brabham F1 team. Before he turned 30 years old, he was appointed chief designer and cars he designed won two F1 world championships. By the mid-Eighties, Murray moved to McLaren and led the team that engineered the MP4/4, the car that won 15 of 16 races in 1988. Soon after, Murray and McLaren debuted the F1 street car, which we had the privilege of driving for Hagerty Drivers Club magazine a few years ago with the assistance of none other than Jay Leno.

The F1’s headline figures include a 0-to-60-mph time of 3.3 seconds and a 240-mph top speed, but they’re not the real story. The F1 has been coveted since it debuted and is heralded as one of the best driver’s cars ever produced. That does, however, lead to the question, what exactly is a driver’s car?

The answer is personal and subjective because a driver’s car is all about the feeling it gives the person behind the wheel. I’m told by those I trust who’ve driven the F1—I never have—that there’s a purity to the F1 experience. The driver’s seat is in the middle of the car and there’s a directness to the controls coupled with a howling BMW V-12 engine. The “system” delivers an experience that borders on religious for those of a certain type (count me as true to type).

According to the Hagerty Price Guide, a 1992 F1 is worth about $20 million, which makes it one of the most valuable cars produced in the last 50 years. Amazing. So, in 2018 when Gordon Murray announced that he would design and produce an F1 successor, the T.50, the car world went nuts. How could he improve on greatness?

In a Hagerty Media scoop, contributor Henry Catchpole assembled both cars, drove them on lovely roads in Spain, and explained the experience of these incredible machines. I won’t give away the ending here except to say that the lucky few who got on the T.50 list—they’re sold out—will not be disappointed. We’ve made this film and provided it free to spread the love and passion for driving. If you’d like to support our efforts, please join the Hagerty Drivers Club.

Back to my opening sentence: Is Gordon Murray not an artist? He builds cars not as tools, but machines that inspire emotional responses. His canvas is the road, and his supplies include metal and composites. I’d argue that the creativity to conjure a vision for a car, and to solve design challenges to realize the dream, are no different than the creativity a painter relies on when putting brush to canvas. I’m also fascinated that despite over 100 years of automotive engineering and ever more powerful computer tools, the talent of the human running the process, in this case Murray, remains the most critical element. Bravo! And thank you, Gordon!

Okay, after you watch the film, here’s a bunch of new material from Hagerty Media and beyond to keep you entertained and informed when you’re not out driving this holiday weekend (you’re driving, right?).

• The latest speedfest from Cammisa
• Barn Find Hunter Tom Cotter unearths a Datsun raced by Paul Newman
• A beginner’s guide to building your own Hemi Charger
• Rabbit GTI buyer’s guide
• The Andretti spurning by F1 saga gets weird: Senators demand investigation

Thanks for reading!

Larry

P.S.: Your feedback is very welcome. Comment below!

Please share this newsletter with your car-obsessed friends and encourage them to sign up for the free weekly email. The easy-to-complete form is here. And if you’d like to support the efforts of Hagerty Media, please consider joining the Hagerty Drivers Club.

The post Never Stop Driving #100: The Best Driver’s Car? appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Given the choice to drive a great car on any road in the world, I’d head to Ojai, California, and stunning Route 33. Just typing those words makes me jittery with anticipation. California State Route 33—as it’s officially known—and its dozens of miles of uninhabited curves, dips, rises, and vistas is Hagerty’s first Road of the Year. (Check out this reel.)

As the epicenter of American car culture, Southern California was an obvious place for us to start with this award, but we will be looking further afield for next year’s winner. Kindly comment on this article or nominate your own favorite road via editor@hagerty.com. [For the full Road of the Year experience, you need Hagerty Drivers Club magazine, which is part of membership. Join here.]

I started keeping a personal diary of my favorite roads some 20 years ago. When I need to be anywhere on the East Coast, I’ll usually drive from my home base in Michigan, adding a few days to the excursion for exploring. The right car on the right road is a beautiful thing, so when I find one, I snap a few photos to record the location.

Route 58, which runs parallel to Virginia’s southern border and gets curvy and rural in the western part of the state, is a longtime favorite. I first drove it back in 2012 and need to return. I bet you have similar favorites, and we’d love to hear about them.

In other news, the Financial Times held a conference called “Future of the Car” last week. There are so many similar events, but what made this one special was the number of car company CEOs and senior executives in attendance. I have all kinds of sympathy for these automotive leaders—even though they are highly paid—because few consumer products are as heavily regulated as cars.

They’re in a tough spot. Governments are demanding EVs that can’t be produced at prices consumers are willing to pay. Someone must eat those losses. Should it be car companies? Or the public via subsidies? The bet, of course, is that EV costs will fall over time, yet there are so many contributing complications: charging networks, the nation’s power grid, and how we generate electricity. Big, complicated problems that these leaders are tasked with solving. You can read the FT’s terrific summary here.

Jay Leno recently reminded me that the last days of an existing technology are always the best. After 100 years of constant development by smart engineers, today’s internal combustion gasoline engines are staggeringly good. They start in every weather condition, are cheap, powerful, and almost never fail. When folks ask me if they should change the engine oil at 3000 miles, the old standard, I ask, “When was the last time you saw an engine fail?” Yeah, likely never. So just use the interval in your owner’s manual.

Conversely, we’re at the dawn of EV tech and, not surprisingly, things are rocky. Someone recently told me that without gas engines, all cars will become boring, electrically driven blobs. Hogwash! There are so many variables that determine how a car feels, from suspension geometry and the vehicle’s center of gravity to tires, steering, and so much more. I know scores of bright people working in the car industry who love driving as much as we do and who will have these variables in mind as they develop the cars we’ll be driving in the future.

Here’s some of my favorite new material from Hagerty Media to get you through the weekend.

• Tell us your favorite road-trip song.
• Four high-school girls win car-build and race competition.
• Henry Catchpole drives the gorgeous new Aston Martin Vantage
• A car that sits is a car that’s dying

Thanks for reading!

Larry

P.S.: Your feedback is very welcome. Comment below!

Please share this newsletter with your car-obsessed friends and encourage them to sign up for the free weekly email. The easy-to-complete form is here. And if you’d like to support the efforts of Hagerty Media, please consider joining the Hagerty Drivers Club.

The post Never Stop Driving #99: The Road of the Year appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Life requires equilibrium. In a perfect world, we all would have an even trade-off of time spent working for someone else and time spent indulging our own personal interests and passions. The scale is rarely so neatly balanced though. So maybe shoot for quality over quantity and indulge yourself with five minutes of peaceful forest noise punctuated by the howl of a Ferrari V-8.

While the Modena Yellow Berlinetta stands out in a big way against the lush green backdrop, it’s the exhaust note that cuts through the serenity more than the bright exterior. The mid-mounted V-8 displaces just 3.5 liters, hence the 35 leading the model name. The final 5 is a reference to the number of valves per cylinder (cinquevalvole), which is uncommon for Ferrari but a perfect way to delineate the key difference between the previous 348 model and the evolved 355 that replaced it.

Looking at the car and hearing it are one thing, but the pièce de résistance is the gated six-speed manual transmission. The rise and and fall of the engine rpm, punctuated with the soft tink-tink of the shifter as the driver goes between second and third gear on a winding forest road, is the dream for many of us. Although we might be stuck at the desk for another couple of hours yet today, this is a perfect five-minute escape to the place we would rather be—even if we might likely never be there.

***

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The post Silence Is Golden, but This Ferrari 355 Is a Musical Masterpiece appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Nearly 20 years ago, I was in high school and riding to Thunderhill Raceway Park with Bruce Trenery, a vintage car dealer. During our trip, he articulated his predictions for the future of enthusiasm for cars. In addition to his concerns about the regulatory environment, he was most disquieted by his perception that young people just weren’t interested in cars any more. As a young person who was (and remains) immensely passionate about cars, I was initially put off that the latter idea could even be possible, but after reflecting on the interests of my contemporaries, it alarmed me because I could see a lot of truth to it.

While car enthusiasm today isn’t ubiquitous the way it might have been in the era of Grease or when the Beach Boys released “409,” Trenery’s foreboding apprehension remains mercifully unfulfilled. In fact, I have been delighted to observe what almost feels like a resurgence in passion for cars among young people in the past two decades. Attending events today, especially more approachable ones like Radwood, I’m always struck by the number of obviously enthusiastic teenagers and twenty-somethings, especially given that the cars concerned are often older than they are.

The emergence of social media has doubtless played a big role in spreading enthusiasm: The dynamic and sensory nature of cars (i.e. they move, they’re shiny, and they make loud noises) means that they lend themselves perfectly to the mediums of photo and video. Teenaged “spotters” wandering events, camera in hand, become the purveyors of beautiful media that portrays our cars in fresh, original ways. While it is gratifying for us to look at pretty images, the rise of spotters does something essential for young people, too—it gives them a meaningful way to interact with cars (and often their owners, too) that they couldn’t otherwise do, regardless of whether that’s in person or on their phones.

That’s particularly fortunate since the barriers to entering this space as a participant—that is, as a car owner rather than an observer—are higher than they have been since at least the end of World War II. This is tragic but incontrovertible based on three interrelated factors, all of which converge to make things tough for young enthusiasts. These are, in order from broadest to most granular: 1) macroeconomic shifts 2) their consequences on the new car market 3) the resulting impact on secondhand enthusiast cars ranging from lightly used late model cars to full-fledged classics.

The core of the macroeconomics discussion as relates to young people is disposable income. Simply put, young folks have a lot less of it than youths did in previous decades. This is the result of too many things to discuss in detail here, but the rising costs of real estate, education, and healthcare at rates that exceed the growth of wages are major drivers. These affect people of all ages of course, but for young people who do not yet own any real estate to help their net worth grow, and for whom the ever-increasing cost of education (and the near necessity of student debt) is greater and a larger share of their liabilities, these economic realities are far more restrictive. This means that even if car prices were stable (they’re not), young folks would be less able to participate in the market because they simply don’t have the disposable income to enter it.

Real wages have been stagnating for decades and the consequences of this long-standing trend have been manifesting themselves in the new car market since at least the 1990s. In short, as people have less disposable income, they buy fewer fun cars and manufacturers respond by killing them off because they sell poorly.

Let’s take a journey back 30 years to 1994, when there was a whole host of enthusiast cars available at both entry and higher price points. Effectively the entire sport compact genre, including: Honda Prelude and Del Sol, Nissan Sentra SE-R and 240 SX, Toyota MR2 and Celica, the Mitsubishi Eclipse (and Eagle Talon and Plymouth Laser) and 3000 GT (and Dodge Stealth), the Ford Probe, the Mazda MX-3 and MX-6. Go back another 20 or 30 years and the story is similar: Fiat 124, Alfa Spider, Datsun Roadster, Triumph TR, MGB, and big Healeys. This to say nothing of pony cars and muscle cars from the ‘60s and early ‘70s.

Today, these cars and their ilk are nearly gone from manufacturer lineups. There are precious few reasonably priced sporting survivors: the Mini (which recently lost its manual for the US market, as has Volkswagen’s GTI), the Subaru WRX, the Mazda MX-5, and the Toyota GT-86 (and BRZ), which is most realistically the spiritual descendent of the 240SX. This is not part of some draconian plot on the part of manufacturers to deprive us of driving enjoyment and modernity in the same package, but rather their response to market forces. One needs only look at MX-5 sales in 1991 (63,000 units) vs 2018 (27,000 units) to see that consumers aren’t buying sporting cars the way they once could, despite today’s Miata costing less than it did in 1991 when adjusted for inflation and there being fewer other enthusiast choices at comparable prices now.

This lack of appealing new affordable options for the driving enthusiast has predictably disheartening consequences for secondhand cars of the same ethos, whether they’re four years old or 40 years old. The decreasing sales of these cars when new in recent years means that supply for used options is tight and thus depreciation is low. This, coupled with the fact that 30-year-old cars are pretty usable in modern traffic, means that more and more enthusiasts are turning to Radwood era (1980-99) cars.

In 1994, driving a 30-year-old enthusiast car meant giving up a lot of usability and performance. You’d have to deal with carburetors, marginal brakes, tires, suspension, and acceleration, catastrophic rust, poor weather sealing and ventilation, and a host of other unpleasantries that we don’t generally have to contend with in a 30-year-old car today. Similarly, cars of the Radwood era are easier to live with than more modern ones, albeit for completely different reasons. They’re much simpler than newer cars, lacking most of the sensors and computers that handle everything from HVAC to the powertrain to radar cruise control. Even something as simple as replacing headlights has been completely transformed: compare the 5.25” and 7” sealed beams in a BMW E30 or NA Miata to a $1500 Xenon assembly in a car from 10 years ago.

The result is that cars of this era are sought not only by Generation X and millennials who lusted after them in their youths, but by Generation Z too, who are pushed toward them by the dearth of affordable and appealing newer options and pulled toward them by the intrinsically appealing characteristics such as the experience of interacting with them and the variety of options, along with their simplicity and accordingly sensible running costs. The tragic result of this growing demand is that cars of this era have appreciated in value, making it even more difficult for young folks to buy into the market.

The silver lining (for us car nuts anyway) is that car enthusiasm is still very much alive and well, even if it takes a bit more diligence. For young enthusiasts, there are many interesting options at reasonable prices if they’re willing to go off the beaten path a bit. Mainstream enthusiast cars like M3s and air-cooled 911s are prohibitively expensive, but plenty of other options do still exist like non-M BMW E36s, early Boxsters, or several generations of the Mustang. For those less concerned about sporting intent, a host of other Radwood attendees remain attainable, from a Toyota Century to the world’s cleanest 1989 Oldsmobile Toronado Trofeo. 

This may be feeble consolation in the face of larger economic forces, and young enthusiasts approach the hobby through different literal and figurative vehicles than in years past, but there’s no question that they remain highly engaged. I for one am delighted to see their passion and look forward to seeing how the resilience of the human spirit inspires them to express that passion in ways that generations before them never considered.

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Hopping into the driver’s seat of a car is a freeing feeling at any age. A loose grip on the wheel and light touch on the pedals give us the capability to go just about anywhere when properly equipped—well, assuming your classic vehicle doesn’t have restrictions on usage based on your registration. Luckily, vintage car owners in Michigan are primed to enjoy this driving season and many more with a little more freedom thanks to the passing of House Bill 4183. Governor Gretchen Whitmer signed the bill, which vastly expands the ability to use classic cars, into law on April 2nd with immediate effect.

According to the way the law was previously written, a vehicle with historic or authentic license plates could only be used for “participation in club activities, exhibitions, tours, parades, and similar uses, including mechanical testing, but is not used for general transportation.” The new legislation expands the definition of “exhibition” considerably. The full language reads:

Sec. 20a. “Historic vehicle” means a vehicle that is over 25 years old and that is owned solely as a collector’s item and for participation in club activities, exhibitions, tours, parades, and similar uses, including mechanical testing, but is not used for general transportation. For purposes of this section, use of the vehicle during the period from Memorial Day weekend through Labor Day each year is considered an exhibition.

Plenty of drivers ignored the prior law, but there was always the chance that law enforcement would issue a citation for usage outside of the guidelines. That’s a worry no more, all thanks to an enthusiast just like you and me.

This law stands as a testament to what can be done by grassroots classic car owners, as it was not a lobbying group or organization that made this happen, but rather one person who thought the way the law was written was too much and decided to do something about it. That person was John Russell of Traverse City, Michigan.

“It’s been a long road, but totally worth it,” said Russell. It all started with a group being ticketed for participating in the Woodward Dream Cruise, as the informal driving event did not technically fulfill the letter of the law. The group protested and gained enough traction to amend the ruling in June of 2012 to allow unlimited use for the month of August.

Russell saw this as an opportunity. “That 2012 ruling made me call up my senator and ask why we had restrictions at all.” From there it turned into a letter writing campaign and spooled up into a full-scale lobbying effort before long. Despite some lulls and gaps in progress for the bill, John didn’t give up and before he knew it he was testifying in front of the Michigan state legislature, to which he said, “We aren’t asking for special favors, we are just asking to drive our cars. This is the automotive capital of the world. Why are we restricting people from driving to get ice cream in cool cars?”

Russell’s patience paid off. He got word on April 1st that the bill had passed, and had to reach out to his government contacts to confirm they weren’t pulling his leg. They weren’t, and that meant it was cause for celebration. It took years to get the ear of the right representative who would put together and introduce a bill, and then a full decade after that to complete the process to see said bill signed into law. Despite the wait, the timing is perfect, as owners are just starting to bring out their seasonally-stored vehicles and prepare to enjoy the driving season—now with a little extra driving.

With this win under his belt, Russell’s first question to State Representative John Roth and the bill’s other sponsors was “we can come back in a few years and ask for no restrictions, right?” Russell thinks he has the the right combination of evidence to make that happen, but in the meantime, those of us in Michigan are preparing for a celebratory drive this Memorial Day weekend.

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As I mingled with the crowd at a Wednesday night bike gathering in Venice, California, my helmet hung uncomfortably in my right hand. At any moment, one of the interesting people I was talking to would ask what I rode in on, at which point I would have to explain the vehicle I had parked a block away, which was probably earning a ticket for an expired meter. Inevitably, someone asked, and I answered: Polaris Slingshot.

“Wait, what is that? The vintage-looking things?”

Someone else: “No, that’s the Morgan 3 Wheeler or the Vanderhall.”

A bystander, from a few feet away: “It’s those three-wheeled things all the tourists rent and drive annoyingly in traffic.”

The original question-asker: “Oh yeah! Those things are weird.”

I couldn’t argue. I was a tourist, renting a Slingshot, and it was kind of weird.

Nature tends to favor even numbers. We humans are no exception, from the television volume to the wheels on our vehicles. Four wheels? That’s a car or truck—we love those. Two wheels? Motorcycle, cool. Eighteen wheels? Roll on, Snowman.

But three wheels? That’s literally an odd one. Since five- and seven-wheeled vehicles just haven’t taken off, trikes take up the flag for automotive oddities. Is the peculiar wheel count a detriment to those vehicles? Rather than sit and philosophize, Aaron Robinson and I took to the streets in and around Los Angeles to spend three days with two of the most polarizing vehicles on the road today: The Morgan Super 3 and the Polaris Slingshot.

The Morgan Super 3 has a longer history and more charm. This 2023 model traces its lineage back over a century to 1909 when Henry Fredrick Stanley Morgan first put a vehicle of his own design into production. The design was born from thrift. After learning that cyclecars were not taxed the same as motorcycles, his plan to construct a bike utilizing the 7-hp Peugeot twin-cylinder morphed into a plan to build a trike, with two wheels up front and a backbone frame to support the single rear wheel.

It was weird. The V-twin was mounted up front with a slim, lightweight body behind it. Decorated English fighter pilot Albert Ball once remarked that driving his Morgan was the closest he could get to flying without leaving the ground. Morgan’s 3 Wheeler has gone through a handful of iterations, including one built from 2012 to 2020 that featured an S&S air-cooled V-twin out front to fit the tradition.

The latest version of the Morgan is the Super 3, and it changes the form a bit by tucking a Ford-sourced, 1.5-liter three-cylinder engine behind a small, semi-circle grille and under the low and sleek hood that establishes the very aeronautical shape of the body. A Mazda-sourced five-speed manual transmits the engine power to the rear wheel using a bevel gear and belt drive. The whole shape would be even more fuselage-like if it weren’t for the sideboards attached to each side behind the front wheels that are designed to hold luggage. Even your spare socks get the open-air experience.

That aircraft theme is carried to the interior where two simple gauges sit front and center with a few weatherproof switches for the accessories underneath. A small digital gauge pod sits atop the steering column. It can be used for GPS navigation with the help of Beeline, an aftermarket motorcycle-oriented navigation system. The diamond-stitch interior panels are thinly padded, which makes getting into the driver’s seat a little easier by offering steadier footing climbing in. Sliding down into the driving position requires limber joints, especially because the steering wheel will bend if used as a grabbing point. Once you are in place, it becomes clear there is not much to do besides drive. You don’t get to a 1400-pound curb weight by filling a car with trinkets and farkles. Instead, flip the switch cover between the gauge pods and press the start button twice to wake the 118-horsepower three-cylinder. Shift to first, and away you go.

It shakes a little at idle. The steering wheel is small and inputs all feel quick no matter how many times I tell myself “slow hands” while diving through corners in the Malibu canyons. Within the narrow body shape, the pedal box is cramped. There is no room for a dead pedal, leaving me to try and brace myself against the floor and the sideboard, which drives my left knee into the metal eyelets that create a kitschy bungee-cord storage system. Maybe I just need a pair of driving gloves to wedge in there. It would fit the aesthetic, but a seemingly better solution is for the car to gain an inch at nearly every measurable point. Interior, exterior, and suspension travel all would benefit from a little more space or travel.

Since the Morgan is registered as a motorcycle, helmet laws do apply depending on your jurisdiction, and while behind the wheel we often prefer the additional insulation a helmet provides. The small windshield bumps the current of air up (but not completely overtop) the occupants, and the wind buffeting we experience is just like what we feel in a motorcycle. The H-pattern five-speed hails from the NC-generation (2005–2015) Mazda Miata and makes freeway entry or just motoring about engaging and fun. Expect attention everywhere you go, but understand that attention meets you from a thinly padded, narrow, and non-adjustable seat that gives a perfect angle to inspect the inner fenders of a stock full-sized truck.

The Morgan has a certain simplistic charm that is hard to find in a modern car. There is nothing going on inside the Super 3 that keeps a driver or passenger from paying more attention to what is going on outside the sheetmetal bathtub; this is a vehicle that allows you to focus more on the experience of the drive rather than the destination. That said, handling is best described as quirky: I spent many of my weekends last year racing motorcycles and have enough track time in a car to know the Morgan was encouraging me to back off, rather than to push quicker and drive it more aggressively. Most drivers will be wise to slow down and take in the scenery.

If both the Morgan and the Polaris are attempting to prove that 4 < 3 > 2, Morgan is a gray-haired math professor who still scrawls his proof on chalkboards and, after a century of trying, uses roughly the same method. The Polaris Slingshot is the newcomer, the rough guy from Southie who wrote on the chalkboard one night when he was supposed to be cleaning.

While Morgan is a small British company with aeronautical roots dedicated to keeping old-world craft alive, Polaris is a relatively young U.S. company that got its start with snowmobiles in the 1950s. It later expanded into the side-by-side market, and also the boat and motorcycle market, by acquiring and reviving brands on the brink of collapse. The Slingshot has been sold since 2015 and has experienced plenty of changes over those years. The largest is the switch from a Chevrolet-sourced Ecotec inline-four to an in-house, Polaris-sourced Prostar 2.0-liter inline-four. This engine is part of what makes the Slingshot charming. It pulls strong from low rpm and continues to sweep smoothly up the tachometer to a 10,000-rpm redline. Said engine is mated to the same Miata transmission as you’d find in the Morgan.

The Slingshot looks at things differently and adds new variables. The angular front end is busy, but that is the nature of the beast when hanging double-wishbone front suspension out in the air. The 205-series 17-inch front tires look massive when parked next to the Morgan’s 195/65R-15 all-seasons. In all but one of the five color schemes available from Polaris, the tubular chassis becomes a visual highlight along with the door bars and roll hoops, which are painted in contrasting colors: red, orange, purple, and lime green. The accent color extends to the single-sided swingarm that hangs proudly off the back and houses the belt that transfers power to the meaty, 18-inch rear wheel.

Though the Polaris has far more grip than the Morgan, that larger rear tire still struggles to plant the 203 horsepower. Leaving one tire track after a burnout was the subject of many a joke during our test, but the Slingshot is no laughing matter. Compared with the Morgan, it is relatively luxurious: There is power steering hidden under the clamshell, which was welcome when swapping from one to the other. The “interior” has simple vinyl bucket seats with good bolstering that feature both heating and cooling for the back and bottom. It’s clear that Polaris has powersports experience because the fit and finish is nice despite everything needing to be some form of plastic to handle the exposure that comes when you ditch a roof. Close your eyes while sitting in the driver’s seat of the Slingshot, and it all feels like a car. Open your eyes, though, and the sounds and smells of the world come through stronger than ever. Even with a helmet on the eau de perfum of the 405 cannot be ignored. The lack of insulation is a trade-off: Once out of traffic, the sounds and smells of the wild canyons permeate your senses and create an escape. The front wheels are out in the wind and so are you.

While similar in concept, the Slingshot and the Super 3 produce very different responses for me. I drove the borderline-gaudy Polaris for hundreds of miles during the week I was out West, but always with a slight tinge of happiness that I was wearing a helmet. I didn’t really want to be seen in it, despite enjoying the driving experience. The Morgan was the polar opposite. An extra trip around the parking lot to look for a “better” spot? No big deal—the Morgan turns heads without the stigma. The Super 3 is a novelty designed to be interesting and succeeds at doing so. The Slingshot is a novelty that also functions well and suffers for its relative practicality: It’s seen on the road far more often, and passersby have opinions hardened by factors that have less to do with the Slingshot and more to do with the people who typically drive it.

The history of three-wheel vehicles has pretty much always been centered around either functionality or experience. The first self-propelled vehicle had three wheels, in fact, not four: Around 1770, Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot grafted a steam boiler powering a single wheel onto a simple cart that would be defined in modern terms as a powered trailer. Even with those low expectations, it failed to perform tasks better than un-powered four-wheel or two-wheel carts.

Over 250 years later, trikes are not solutions to transportation problems; they are lifestyle choices. As extensions of their owner’s personalities, they are no different from antique iron. Could you live every day with the Morgan or the Polaris as your sole vehicle? Sure, if you’re okay with carrying a helmet with you everywhere, but let’s not pretend daily use was ever part of the design brief for these machines. They are novelties, and the only problem they solve is forcing a driver to be more aware of what’s on the road.

Only after driving these trikes can I say that not everything strange is bad. As a person who buys vehicles for the experience they can provide, I would consider either of these if a spot in my garage opened up. You might have experienced everything on two or four wheels, but the Morgan and the Polaris are different. They are like motorcycles, but somehow not consolation prizes compared with riding two wheels. They provide the openness of a motorcycle but are so much less busy to drive. Each is unique; it flies in the face of convention and is coveted or shunned for doing so.

Proving whether two, three, or four is the correct number of wheels for a vehicle will only drive you mad. Why be mad when you could drive either of these three-wheelers with a grin on your face? The only axiom that matters is driving = fun.

Specs: 2023 Polaris Slingshot R

Price: $33,999 ($34,299 in California)/$33,999 (Base/as tested)
Powertrain: 2-liter inline four-cylinder, five-speed manual transmission
Horsepower:203 hp @ 8250 rpm
Torque: 144 lb-ft @ 6500 rpm
Layout: rear-wheel-drive, no-door, two-passenger roadster
0–60 mph: 5.3 seconds

Specs: Morgan Super 3

Price: $53,937.98/$79,028 (Base/as tested)
Powertrain: 1.5-liter three-cylinder, five-speed manual transmission
Horsepower: 118 hp @ 6500 rpm
Torque: 110 lb-ft @ 4500 rpm
Layout: rear-wheel-drive, no-door, two-passenger roadster
0–60 mph: 7 seconds

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In an effort to curtail road deaths in his state, California Senator Scott Wiener (D–San Francisco) introduced a pair of bills, SB 960 and 961, last week. The bills are part of the Speeding and Fatality Emergency Reduction on California Streets (SAFER California Streets) package. SB 960 would require the state’s transportation department, Caltrans, to upgrade infrastructure to better accommodate pedestrians, cyclists, disabled citizens, and transit users. Those changes include new crosswalks and curb extensions, but SB 961 would mandate a manufacturer-installed speed limiter on all new cars beginning with the 2027 model year.

The bill also mandates underride guards on trucks to prevent the risk of cars and bikes getting caught beneath them in a crash.

The speed governor would arrive in the form of smart devices that could automatically cap a vehicle’s speed to just 10 miles above the posted legal limit. The bill would exempt emergency vehicles and would also allow the Commissioner of the California Highway Patrol to authorize the system to be disabled on other vehicles based on specified, as yet undisclosed criteria.

The impetus for the pair of bills, says Senator Wiener, is the rise in traffic fatalities in the state. “The alarming surge in road deaths is unbearable and demands an urgent response. There is no reason for anyone to be going over 100 miles per hour on a public road, yet in 2020, California Highway Patrol issued over 3000 tickets for just that offense. Preventing reckless speeding is a commonsense approach to prevent these utterly needless and heartbreaking crashes.”

According to a recent report from TRIP, a national transportation research nonprofit, between 2019 and 2022, California traffic deaths increased by 22 percent. Nationwide, the figure was 19 percent. The report adds that 4400 people died in car accidents in California in 2022.

Speed governors are nothing new. Many semi-trucks and fleet vehicles come equipped with them. Many new private vehicles, too, including new Volvos (112 mph), already have speed limiters on them. More often than not, these kick in at triple-digit velocities that most motorists rarely, if ever, approach.

The technology proposed uses GPS to verify local speed limits and prevent cars from going 10 miles per hour over that threshold. Among a number of unanswered questions, it’s unclear from the language of the bill how this would impact cars used, for example, as daily drivers during the week and then for track days on the weekend. Such questions and use cases will require consideration as the SAFER California Streets package moves through the legislative system.

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A Bugatti Type 57 SC is an Art Deco masterpiece that needs no introduction. When that Type 57 is wearing the automotive equivalent of a buttoned-up blue shirt? Well, it only makes sense that Jay Leno would own one.

Of course, wearing the same shirt as someone is no reason to get married, so there must be other reasons that convinced Leno to bring this 1937 Bugatti into his collection. Luckily, he decides to share the story on this week’s episode of Jay Leno’s Garage.

The Type 57 is widely regarded as a beautiful shape, which makes the story of how it got that silhouette all the more interesting. The car appears to be riveted together down the center, and it is. The original goal for the Type 57 was to be as light of a car as possible; Bugatti even built an “Aérolithe” version with a body built out of Elektron, a 90/10 mixture of magnesium and aluminum. This alloy is difficult to weld, so the hand-formed panels were riveted together and the seam became an iconic part of the design. So much so that even steel-bodied cars like Jay’s still wear the rivets.

The engine beneath the elegant shape is just as pretty when you consider the engineering involved. Bugatti was big on the blend of aesthetic and function, so the dual overhead-head cam, supercharged, 3.3-liter straight-eight wears turned-aluminum cam covers and smoothly puts out over 170 horsepower—some estimate up to 197. While that power figure is not earth-shattering, that engine is only pushing just 2400 pounds, and it is reined in by mechanical drum brakes.

These attributes make the Type 57 a delight to drive. Jay describes the Bugatti as “light on its feet” and says it is perfect for the tight, twisty canyon roads of southern California. A crisp early morning, when the heat coming up through the firewall would be welcome and traffic would be low, sounds perfect to us.

Too bad there are only four of these cars out there; I doubt many of us will be so lucky as to experience that drive. Luckily, one owner felt the need to share the experience. Thanks for the ride, Jay.

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Now entering its fourth year, the Drive Toward a Cure “75 Days of Summer” national fundraising endeavor began on Father’s Day and lasts through Labor Day weekend. It encourages automotive enthusiasts to do what they enjoy most—get out and drive.

Fueled once again by Hagerty Drivers Club, the 75 Days of Summer program began as a means for individuals to escape from isolation during the pandemic summer of 2020 but has become an annual competition that to date has raised nearly $100,000 for Parkinson’s disease. It also means participants have a chance to win prizes via random weekly drawings.

According to Deb Pollack, automotive executive and founder of Drive Toward a Cure, each year the enthusiasm toward and participation in the event has grown; individual entrants have been joined by clubs and groups. For 2023, an additional, separate competition was created to include university Formula SAE team members.

“Our original success stemmed from reaching out to car clubs nationwide and through social media channels,” said Pollack. “This year, we additionally have aligned with 20 university Formula SAE teams that originally signed on to provide awareness through their race vehicles—and now the students are coming forth to create larger fundraising efforts.”

Sponsors such as Michelin and Shell/Pennzoil have participated since the program’s inception, bolstering Grand Prize offerings, as well as making long-standing contributions to the foundation since Drive Toward a Cure’s initial driving events began in 2017.

This year, additional Grand Prize sponsors for the driving program include Radford Racing School, NCM Motorsports Park, Xtreme Xperience, GrandPrix Originals USA, and Katzkin Leather—with JBL, Triple Zero, Audrain Motorsport, and the Ingram Collection contributing to weekly random prize draws every Friday.

Affecting nearly one million Americans and 10 million worldwide, Parkinson’s disease is the second-most common neurodegenerative disease after Alzheimer’s and is the 14th-leading cause of death in the United States. It is associated with a progressive loss of motor control. There is no cure for Parkinson’s and 90,000 new cases are diagnosed each year in the U.S. alone.

Drive Toward a Cure is a 501(c)(3) non-profit supporting beneficiaries including The Michael J. Fox Foundation, the Parkinson’s Foundation, and numerous Centers of Excellence for Parkinson’s. For donations, sponsorship, and information, visit www.drivetowardacure.org.

Join the Drive Toward a Cure and make every mile count in awareness of Parkinson’s Disease—sign up here.

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On June 22, the Oregon Senate took the final action to pass House Bill 2426. If you own a classic car in the greater Oregon area, you should be celebrating.

In case you haven’t been keeping track of the 82nd Oregon Legislative Assembly, H.B. 2426 amends a 1951 law (ORS 480.315) that forbids drivers to pump their own fuel by requiring an attendant to pump fuel into the customer’s vehicle.

The prohibition on self-serve fuel has long confused out-of-town drivers, and some locals don’t always abide by it: When expensive-looking vehicles appear at the pump, attendants sometimes ignore the law and let the driver take care of things. If H.B. 2426 becomes law, at least half of the pumps at any given station in Oregon must be self-service.

The push for this change came from a lot of different fronts, including fuel station owners and managers. Some objected, such as Northwest Grocery Association, which stated concerns that allowing self-service would cut jobs for gas-station attendants; but there have long been staffing troubles that left pumps idle and customers waiting. Add in the fact that, according to a 2021 survey, roughly 60 percent of Oregonians were in favor of self-serve pump options, and it is easy to see why H.B. 2426 is headed for the Oregon governor’s desk.

Once passed by the Oregon House, the bill moved relatively quickly through the Senate thanks to bipartisan support: Introduced on January 9 of this year, it was passed on June 22. It’s not the first time legislators have considered such a move: in recent history, Oregon has been making incremental steps towards this near-complete lift of the self-service prohibition. In 2015, 2017, and 2020 bills were passed that enabled limited self-service during night hours, in rural areas, and under emergency situations like heat waves and wildfires.

If signed into law by Oregon governor Tina Kotek, H.B. 2426 will go into effect immediately, leaving New Jersey as the only remaining state to ban self-service gas pumps.

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There are an endless number of ways by which to compare two drivers. The most popular are feats of flat-out speed, competitions that demand the driver be finely attuned to the car’s performance and handling characteristics while pushing their own physical and mental limits. Some people have the risk tolerance for that, but another group of driving enthusiasts figured out how to get all the challenge of racing but at a milder pace—and with way better scenery.

These people founded the Great Race—and yes, I know I just told you that it wasn’t racing. It is a wild driving experience, though, and one that doesn’t require participation to enjoy. As I write, the race is about to leave St. Augustine, Florida, on its way to Colorado Springs, Colorado. It’s essentially a traveling car show of over 100 vehicles and teams. Every lunch and dinner stop is a chance for locals to get up close and learn about these cars and the event. If you are even remotely nearby—and here’s the route, complete with addresses and times—the Great Race is well worth your time.

Cars are driven like they were meant to be

The Great Race has rules, like any competition does. The most visible is the age of the vehicles competing: They must be built pre-1972. The less visible rule is that the rally portions of the drive are scored in a way that gives preference to older cars. The relative luxury of a 1960s car might make the drive more enjoyable, but if you want to compete for the potential $50,000 prize, you’ll be wise to lean towards early cars, which come with unique challenges when considering the route and timing of this rally.

The cars that take part in the Great Race range from the relatively mild to the positively wild. Sure, there are ’60s muscle cars with air conditioning and stone-reliable V-8s, but there are also absurd early cars like the 1918 American LeFrance Speedster that sports a massive four-cylinder engine and chain-drive to power the rear wheels.

The challenge is fascinating

Each car is driven by a two-person team: a driver and a navigator. They follow a set of instructions handed to them by the rally master just 30 minutes before they start each day’s drive. The instructions are best described as cryptic, and navigators work quickly to decipher the pages and prepare their drivers for the day’s challenges. The goal is precise and consistent driving. I can tell you from experience that making a 1916 Hudson accelerate and brake at exactly the same rates over thousands of miles is demanding, but following the instructions isn’t that much easier in a 1968 Ford Mustang, as the team of Christian Lauber and Brandon Gregg has found over the last seven years of rallying.

“On the surface, when people first hear about the race, it sounds pretty simple,” says navigator Brandon.”Turn where they tell you to turn, and go the speed that they tell you to go. It’s really not that simple—the rally master assumes that every single motion you do, it’s done instantly. So when you need to slow down to take a turn, you need to be able to account for how much time you lost [getting] there. It turns a Sunday cruise to church into a real competition.”

It’s all about the love of driving

Yes, following the rally instructions and managing a vintage car over 2000 miles of driving is a challenge. At its core, however, the Great Race is a unique way to see parts of the country that a lot of drivers would never touch. The rally master designs the route to avoid highways or interstates and to keep the teams on winding back roads where they can’t see far enough ahead (or behind) to take cues from other rival cars.

The route is one that would never be suggested to a person trying to efficiently get from point A to point B. For Christian, that is the point. “It’s a lot of fun to go around with car people and see a lot of the back roads of this beautiful country that’s been lost because of the rise of GPS!”

A rolling group of people driving roads they have never seen with 200 of their friends makes for interesting conversation every evening, especially when locals ask, “What route did you take to get into town?” Rarely do participants have any idea; they just know the route was fun and pretty. And that’s okay.

They want you to join in

2023’s Great Race starts in St. Augustine, Florida on June 24 and will traverse most of the U.S. over the next nine days. Each lunch and dinner stop is effectively a pop-up car show of over 100 well-traveled vehicles—and you can meet the teams taking on this wild challenge. Take a look at the map above; you won’t regret taking the time to engage with these driving enthusiasts. They just might convince you to get on the waitlist for the 2024 Great Race. You’ve been warned . . .

***

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We dedicated the May/June 2023 issue of Hagerty Drivers Club magazine to the deep connections between music and cars, including several fun lists featuring your favorite car songs. Click the Music & Cars tag to catch up on all the stories, or jam with our custom Music & Cars playlist on Spotify, available here.

For our final installment of car songs, we’re looking to the open road for inspiration. Here are 11 tunes focused on that long black ribbon of freedom.

Nat King Cole
“ROUTE 66”

Now you go through St. Louis
Joplin, Missouri
And Oklahoma City looks mighty pretty
You’ll see Amarillo
Gallup, New Mexico
Flagstaff, Arizona
Don’t forget Winona
Kingman, Barstow, San Bernardino

Fun fact: Outside of this song, no one has ever accused Oklahoma City of being mighty pretty.

Deep Purple
“HIGHWAY STAR”

Nobody gonna take my head
I got speed inside my brain
Nobody gonna steal my head
Now that I’m on the road again

Meth—not even once.

Willie Nelson
“ON THE ROAD AGAIN”

On the road again
Goin’ places that I’ve never been
Seein’ things that I may never see again
And I can’t wait to get on the road again

It’s literally impossible to come up with something snarky to say about this song. Try it.

The Doobie Brothers
“ROCKIN’ DOWN THE HIGHWAY”

Ford’s about to drop, she won’t do no more

And I smell my motor burnin’
Underneath the hood is smoke

Somewhere, a billion Chevy owners are nodding their heads and laughing.

Golden Earring
“RADAR LOVE”

When she is lonely and the longing gets too much
She sends a cable coming in from above
Don’t need no phone at all

Even in 1973, these guys knew that driving and cell phones didn’t pair well.

AC/DC
“HIGHWAY TO HELL”

I’m on the highway to hell
Highway to hell
I’m on the highway to hell
Highway to hell

No one has ever captured a weekend trip to Ikea better than AC/DC did.

Lindsey Buckingham
“HOLIDAY ROAD”

I found out long ago
It’s a long way down the holiday road
Holiday road
Holiday road

A catchy jingle to be sure, but this song really comes alive when you’ve got your dead aunt Edna strapped to the roof.

Talking Heads
“ROAD TO NOWHERE’”

They can tell you what to do
But they’ll make a fool of you

Nice, subtle nod to parents everywhere.

Kraftwerk
“AUTOBAHN” (This was actually a Beach Boys homage)

Wir fahr’n, fahr’n, fahr’n, auf der Autobahn
Wir fahr’n, fahr’n, fahr’n, auf der Autobahn
Wir fahr’n, fahr’n, fahr’n, auf der Autobahn
Wir fahr’n, fahr’n, fahr’n, auf der Autobahn
Wir fahr’n, fahr’n, fahr’n, auf der Autobahn
Wir fahr’n, fahr’n, fahr’n, auf der Autobahn
Wir fahr’n, fahr’n, fahr’n, auf der Autobahn
Wir fahr’n, fahr’n, fahr’n, auf der Autobahn
Wir fahr’n, fahr’n, fahr’n, auf der Autobahn

They’re driving on the Autobahn, in case that’s not clear.

Canned Heat
“ON THE ROAD AGAIN”

You know the first time I traveled out in the rain and snow
In the rain and snow
You know the first time I traveled out in the rain and snow
In the rain and snow
I didn’t have no payroll, not even no place to go

Poor planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine.

Tom Cochrane
“LIFE IS A HIGHWAY”

This is the road and these are the hills
From Mozambique to those Memphis nights
The Khyber Pass to Vancouver’s lights

We’re not going to say this drive is impossible, but you really need to keep an eye on the tides.

***

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Last year, vinyl records had their best year since 1987. Mechanical watches, tube amplifiers, and even film photography also continue to enjoy a resurgence. Analog tech is clearly having a moment. So why should low-tech cars be any different from records, amps, cameras, and watches?

In point of fact, they’re not—post-1990s analog cars are hitting their stride among a certain subset of collectors and enthusiasts. But what makes for an analog car, and why are people coming to appreciate them? Let’s just say that while the cars themselves may be simple, the answers to those questions are anything but.

There seems to be little consensus on what exactly fulfills the analog definition. The most hardcore enthusiasts will not abide any electronic drivers’ aids, like traction control or even ABS, while the more tolerant will accept those but draw the line at electric power steering, which they consider to be the work of the devil. Where enthusiasts do come together, however, is on the tactile delights of a good, old-fashioned, hydraulically assisted steering rack and, of course, the non-negotiable manual transmission.

Similarly, it’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment when analog cars gained the throwback quality that made them cherished outliers rather than the norm. Just as there was nothing novel about the vacuum tubes in a Carver or a McIntosh amplifier from the early 1960s, there was nothing remarkable about a C2 Corvette of the same vintage lacking ABS or traction control. There was, however, most assuredly something damned unusual about the 2005 Lotus Elise not having power steering, or the 2000 Dodge Viper lacking ABS. Those traits contributed to the Elise’s reputation for driving purity and the Viper’s rawness—even when new—and as a result few can quibble with those models being charter members of the late-analog car hall of fame.

Analog car fans can be incredibly geeky, to the point of near-snobbishness. For example, many single out the 1999 Porsche 911 as the last true analog 911—but it can’t be just any 1999 911. Nope, it has to be the Carrera 2, and not the all-wheel drive Carrera 4. Why, might you ask? Although both cars could be ordered without Porsche Stability Management (PSM), only the Carrera 2 came with an old-school cable-actuated throttle, whereas the Carrera 4 had an electronically controlled one. These folks have been known to split a few hairs.

Regardless, they are onto something. The more that digital-age assists make spirited driving easier—and further disconnect us from the task that got us excited about cars in the first place—the more people seem to revel in cars that lack that technology.

Case in point: two track events that I did a few years apart. The more recent of the two was at Road America in a then-new 991-generation Porsche 911 GT2 RS. The suite of driver’s aids on the car made blistering lap times available to mere mortals and superbly managed the car’s 690 hp. Did you get on the gas a little too soon exiting a corner? No problem, the car knew better: It overrode your hamfisted, premature throttle input until the front wheels were pointed straight. The car’s sophisticated electronics always made you feel like a hero, but deep down, you knew where the magic was coming from.

In contrast, years earlier, the Z06 Corvette I drove had far less sophisticated driver’s aids. It was an unrepentant oversteerer, unwilling to mask the mistakes of an unskilled driver. But, when you nailed all the inputs just so and rocketed out of a corner, your ear-to-ear grin came from knowing that little bit of perfection came from you working with the car. And that’s precisely the appeal. Lovers of analog cars want the visceral thrills—they want to take the risks and bask in the rewards.

Alongside renewed appreciation for driving these cars, the market seems to have jumped on the late-analog car bandwagon. Supercars that fit the analog moniker, like the Ferrari F40 and Porsche Carrera GT, are breaking records, but the trends aren’t just limited to the top of the market.

First-year 996-chassis Carrera 2s are now highly sought-after cars that have increased in value by 74 percent over the last five years. Early Dodge Vipers, after years of fairly static pricing, are firmly on the upswing. Values of my personal favorite late-analog car, the pretty and diminutive Lotus Elise, have followed a similar trajectory. Cars that were in the low $30,000 range a few years ago are now in the mid-forties, and likely to climb further. That’s no surprise—as it becomes more obvious that we’ll never see a new sports car with a curb weight under a ton again, people are flocking to the little British sports car. Simplicity doesn’t come cheap, unless it’s the perfect Elise substitute, the very analog Toyota MR2 Spyder. Don’t tell anyone.

At least as it applies to cars, “analog” is always going to be defined differently based on who you ask. But one thing’s for sure: as our automotive world becomes increasingly digital, the last generation of cars that offered a pure mechanical connection to the road will only grow in popularity.

***

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We dedicated the May/June 2023 issue of Hagerty Drivers Club magazine to the deep connections between music and cars, including several fun lists featuring your favorite car songs. Come back often or click the Music & Cars tag to stay up to date on these stories as they roll out online. You can also jam with our custom Music & Cars playlist on Spotify, available here.

Countless songs address the freedom of driving. Among thousands of candidates, we’ll start by nominating two seemingly disparate numbers, both of which illustrate a great through line of American song—the liberating spirit of adventure and exploration that hitting the highway represented. “See the U.S.A. In Your Chevrolet” was made famous by Dinah Shore in 1950, though the jingle—written by Leo Corday and Leon Carr—was originally sung for the TV show Inside U.S.A. with Chevrolet by Peter Lind Hayes and Mary Healy. Later covered by Pat Boone and even the cast of Glee, after decades of service as a recurring Chevrolet jingle, its luster has by now largely worn off. Conversely, the status of the once-obscure garage rock classic “Roadrunner”—by Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers—continues its ascent to musical standard-dom, its popularity growing like the sprawling suburbia that its narrator simultaneously celebrates and seeks to escape.

And, of course, no discussion of the freedom that cars offer would be complete without “Born to Be Wild,” made famous by Steppenwolf and its appearance in the 1969 film Easy Rider, which is about two meaning-seeking, drug-dealing Californian rebels on an impromptu trip across the American Southwest and South on old Harley choppers. Amusingly, this all-American standard was written by a Canadian sessions musician, Mars Bonfire (real name Dennis Eugene McCrohan). He was broke and out of work and planted in Los Angeles when he penned the timeless anthem, a ditty that turned out—in the way these things do—to be just as useful for breathless corporate marketers as for nonconformists quitting their jobs and hitting the road.

Here are 14 more songs that celebrate the freedom of driving…

Bruce Springsteen
“THUNDER ROAD”

There were ghosts in the eyes of all the boys you sent away
They haunt this dusty beach road
In the skeleton frames of burned out Chevrolets

Somewhere in Maine, Stephen King is listening.

M.I.A.
“BAD GIRLS”

Cover me, cause I’m changing lanes

That’s not the purpose of driver aids and you know it, M.I.A! They’re meant to complement proper use of mirrors, not replace them completely.

Sonic Youth
“SHOOT”

Can I have the car keys? I wanna go for a ride
Can I have the car please? I’m going out for a while
Can I have the car now? I wanna drive all around
Can I have the car, dear? I’m gonna leave this town

This feels like the lyrical equivalent of Mom? Mom? Mom? Mom? Mom? Mom? Mom? Mom? Mom? Mom? Mom? Mom?

Iggy Pop
“THE PASSENGER”

He sees the sight of hollow sky
He sees the stars come out tonight
He sees the city’s ripped backsides
He sees the winding ocean drive
And everything was made for you and me
All of it was made for you and me
‘Cause it just belongs to you and me
So let’s take a ride and see what’s mine

Someone sure is selfish.

The Allman Brothers Band
“RAMBLIN’ MAN”

Leaving out of Nashville, Tennessee
They’re always having a good time down on the bayou, Lord
And Delta women think the world of me

Yes, but the JetBlue women can’t stand you.

Wilco
“PASSENGER SIDE”

Hey, wake up, your eyes weren’t open wide
For the last couple of miles you’ve been swerving from side to side
You’re gonna make me spill my beer
If you don’t learn how to steer

Team Wilco lasted exactly one stage before the FIA banned them from ever competing in the WRC again.

Foghat
“SLOW RIDE”

Slow ride
Take it easy
Slow ride
Take it easy
Slow ride
Take it easy
Slow ride
Take it easy
Slow ride
Take it easy

I hear you, man. Now tell it to all the bozos over on r/idiotsincars.

Pearl Harbor and the Explosions
“DRIVIN’”

(Drivin’)
Back on the streets when it feels so right
(Drivin’) Drivin’
(Drivin’)
It’s just tonight, I feel the only cure is drivin’
(Drivin’) Drivin’
(Drivin’)
I’ve got no time to think of how you feel
(Drivin’) Drivin’
(Drivin’)
Behind the wheel, so now I gotta drive it, drive it
(Drivin’) Drivin’

Contrary to popular belief, this is not a song about golf.

The Modern Lovers
“ROADRUNNER”

With the radio on
I’m in love with Massachusetts

With the radio off, however, I prefer South Dakota.

The Cars
“DRIVE”

Who’s gonna hold you down when you shake?
Who’s gonna come around when you break?

Such a subtle nod to the Plymouth K-car.

Chuck Berry
“NO PARTICULAR PLACE TO GO”

Ridin’ along in my calaboose
Still tryin’ to get her belt aloose
All the way home I held a grudge
But the safety belt it wouldn’t budge
Cruisin’ and playin’ the radio
With no particular place to go

And that, friends, is why we heed recall notices.

War
“LOW RIDER”

All my friends know the low rider

Yeah, but so does Karen from the neighborhood watch, and you just know she’s got 911 on speed dial.

Gary Numan
“CARS”

Here in my car
I feel safest of all
I can lock all my doors
It’s the only way to live
In cars

Is it, though?

The Breeders
“DRIVIN’ ON 9” (Ed’s Redeeming Qualities cover)

Drivin’ on 9
Drivin’ on 9
Drivin’ on 9

Also not a song about golf!

***

This article first appeared in Hagerty Drivers Club magazine. Click here to subscribe and join the club.

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We dedicated the May/June 2023 issue of Hagerty Drivers Club magazine to the deep connections between music and cars, including several fun lists featuring your favorite car songs. Come back often or click the Music & Cars tag to stay up to date on these stories as they roll out online. You can also jam with our custom Music & Cars playlist on Spotify, available here.

Hard-partying musicians are certainly well represented among the millions who’ve died in car crashes, but perhaps none of the songs written about such accidents has been as eerily prescient as Jan & Dean’s “Dead Man’s Curve.” A 1963 hit about a street drag race gone wrong, it echoed loudly in memory when, in 1966, band member Jan Berry drove his Corvette into the back of a parked truck not far from the dangerous corner whose legend he and partner Dean Torrence had helped to cement. Berry and the band’s career were never the same.

The pride of El Sobrante, California, Primus scored its first hit in 1991 with “Jerry Was a Race Car Driver.” Penned by the punk-funk band’s virtuoso bass-playing leader, Les Claypool, it concerns an “I’ll show them” type of guy who’s in over his head and meets his end driving an Oldsmobile 4-4-2 too fast after many too many beers.

Here are seven more hits about fender-benders—and worse.

Jan & Dean
“DEAD MAN’S CURVE”

Well, the last thing I remember, Doc, I started to swerve
And then I saw the Jag slide into the curve
I know I’ll never forget that horrible sight
I guess I found out for myself that everyone was right
Won’t come back from Dead Man’s Curve

Sounds a lot like the automotive equivalent of “you’ll shoot your eye out!”

Ray Peterson
“TELL LAURA I LOVE HER”

He drove his car to the racing grounds
He was the youngest driver there
And the crowed roared as they started the race
‘Round the track they drove at a deadly pace
No one knows what happened that day
How his car overturned in flames
But as they pulled him from the twisted wreck
With his dying breath, they heard him say . . .

” . . . I probably should have eased into this whole racing thing. Maybe some SCCA Solo, or just a high-performance driving experience to see if racing was right for me.”

Dave Edmunds
“CRAWLING FROM THE WRECKAGE”(Graham Parker cover)

Crawling from the wreckage, crawling from the wreckage
Bits of me are scattered in the trees and on the hedges
Crawling from the wreckage, crawling from the wreckage
Into a brand new car

How’s about you crawl into that ambulance first? Then we can talk about a new car.

David Bowie
“ALWAYS CRASHING IN THE SAME CAR”

Every chance,
Every chance that I take
I take it on the road
Those kilometers and the red lights
I was always looking left and right
Oh, but I’m always crashing
In the same car

Maybe less looking left and right, and more eyes forward? Try that for a while.

Mark Dinning
“TEEN ANGEL”

Teen angel, teen angel, teen angel, ooh
That fateful night the car was stalled upon the railroad track
I pulled you out and we were safe, but you went running back

PSA: Don’t tug on Superman’s cape. Don’t spit into the wind. Don’t mess with the Lone Ranger’s mask. And never, ever, crawl back into a car when a train is barreling down on it.

The Beach Boys
“A YOUNG MAN IS GONE” (about James Dean)

For this daring young star
Met his death while in his car
No one knows the reason why

Obviously, The Beach Boys don’t read Wikipedia, because it says exactly why right there.

They Might Be Giants
“MINK CAR”

I got hit by a mink car
Hit by a mink car
Driven by a guitar
And the silver chauffeur says
That it’s all in your head

Or . . . it might be in that toad you just licked.

***

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We dedicated the May/June 2023 issue of Hagerty Drivers Club magazine to the deep connections between music and cars, including several fun lists featuring your favorite car songs. Come back often or click the Music & Cars tag to stay up to date on these stories as they roll out online. You can also jam with our custom Music & Cars playlist on Spotify, available here.

If there’s a recorded music subject that tops cars, it’s the related topics of sex and romance. Going back to the beginning, almost 120 years ago, “In My Merry Oldsmobile”—which urban historian Kenneth T. Jackson once called the “best-known song written about the automobile”—is riddled with double-entendre couplets about the young motorist and his passenger, so many that when Oldsmobile later used it in advertisements, the company changed the lyrics. With lines like They like to ‘spark’ in the dark old park, and You can go as far as you like with me, in my merry Oldsmobile, such “aftermarket” modifications by Olds’ ad men surely made sense.

Jumping ahead a century, those squeamish Oldsmobile agency types would be glad they’re not still alive, as Rihanna’s considerably more licentious “Shut Up and Drive” from 2007 illustrates:

’Cause your Maybach ain’t got what I got
Get it, get it, don’t stop, it’s a sure shot
Ain’t a Ferrari, huh, boy, I’m sorry
I ain’t even worried, so step inside
And ride, ride, ride
So if you feel me, let me know, know, know
Come on now, what you waiting for, for, for
My engine’s ready to explode, explode, explode
So start me up and watch me go, go, go, go

The following six songs also fit the theme of cars and romance …

Cyndi Lauper, Céline Dion, Roy Orbison
“I DROVE ALL NIGHT” (covered by)

I had to escape
The city was sticky and cruel

These are the very first words of the song, and no matter whose version you prefer, has there ever been a better lyric about the need to jump in the car and get out of town for a while? That there’s some nooky at the end of the road just sweetens the deal.

Simon & Garfunkel
“BABY DRIVER”

They call me Baby Driver
And once upon a pair of wheels
I hit the road and I’m gone
What’s my number?
I wonder how your engines feel
Scoot down the road, what’s my number?
I wonder how your engines feel

If those engines are big-blocks in traffic, they probably feel pretty damn hot, Paul Simon. If they’re 911 flat-sixes with IMS bearing failure, I’d wager they’re cold and dead.

Scissor Sisters
“LOVERS IN THE BACKSEAT”

There’s lovers in the backseat
Jealous glances now I’m looking for another song
On the radio
I’ll take you to a side street
In the shadows you can touch one another now
And I’ll just watch the show

Whatever, creepshow Uber driver.

Hot Chocolate
“HEAVEN IS IN THE BACK SEAT OF MY CADILLAC”

Can’t stand it
Can’t stand it, baby
When I’m close to you I wanna touch you
There are people everywhere
People who like to stare

Yeah, people like that creepshow Uber driver. Eyes on the road, pal!

Meat Loaf
“PARADISE BY THE DASHBOARD LIGHT”

Two down, nobody on, no score, bottom of the ninth,
There’s the windup, and there it is, a line shot up the middle,
Look at him go. This boy can really fly! He’s rounding first and really
Turning it on now, he’s not letting up at all, he’s gonna try for second

They just don’t write sexy baseball songs like they used to.

Lana Del Rey
“BURNING DESIRE”

I drive fast, wind in my hair, push it to the limits ’cause I just don’t care
I’ve got a burning desire for you, baby

Well, just wait ’til you’ve got points on your license, girl. It’ll affect your insurance rates, and that’ll make for some tough choices in the monthly budget. Then you’ll care. Then you’ll care.

***

This article first appeared in Hagerty Drivers Club magazine. Click here to subscribe and join the club.

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post 6 songs about cars and romance appeared first on Hagerty Media.

We dedicated the May/June 2023 issue of Hagerty Drivers Club magazine to the deep connections between music and cars, including several fun lists featuring your favorite car songs. Come back often or click the Music & Cars tag to stay up to date on these stories as they roll out online. You can also jam with our custom Music & Cars playlist on Spotify, available here.

Band names, like names of race horses and boats, often make no sense. Toad the Wet Sprocket, anyone? The Goo Goo Dolls? Limp Bizkit? Band names start to make more sense, however, when they’re named for stuff we love and relate to, like cars. Oooh, Galaxie 500—now that is a fine name for a band.

Here are 14 groups who rejected obscure references to stuff no one cares about and instead looked to the automobile for inspiration.

The Avantis

Like the car from which they took their name, the surf-rockin’ Avantis really only stuck around for 1963–64, before changing their name. Not to the Avanti IIs, sadly, but to Pat & Lolly Vegas, and later to Redbone.

Car Seat Headrest

This American indie rock band is still going strong, so a more apt name might be Active Headrest. Car Seat Headrest’s name comes from lead singer Will Toledo writing lyrics in the back seat of his car. Sadly, he missed a golden opportunity to call the band Won’t Toledo.

The Cars

The Boston rockers got together in 1976, and when it came time to name the band, they wanted something simple and timeless. In a 2018 Wall Street Journal interview, drummer David Robinson said the name was “meaningless and it conjured up nothing.” Just like seat time in a Mitsubishi Mirage.

Chevelle

Brothers Pete and Sam Loeffler formed their band in their parents’ Illinois garage in 1995. They loved cars, their dad loved Chevelles, so the name was a no-brainer. It’s still unclear whether or not they workshopped Chevette before making the final decision.

Crash Test Dummies

Once, there was this band who
Named themselves after one of those diagnostic dolls …

The Fabulous Thunderbirds

Since their founding in 1974, the bluesy Fabulous Thunderbirds have seen 28 different members come and go, the one constant being Kim Wilson, the lead vocalist. Surely they weren’t all fabulous, were they? Surely some were … square birds.

Galaxie 500

Not to be confused with the Canadian band of the same name, this Galaxie 500 was an American alt rock group of the late 1980s who named itself after a friend’s car. Good thing that person didn’t drive a Mazda Bongo Friendee.

The GTOs

This Los Angeles girl band only released a single album, 1969’s Permanent Damage. Originally called the Cherry Sisters, then Laurel Canyon Ballet Company, producer Frank Zappa finally dubbed them GTO, for Girls Together Outrageously. Girls Together Once seems more apt.

The Mustangs

The British blues rockers often refer to themselves as The Mustangs (UK), which is just like a Capri, but different.

Pantera

The Texas metal band was originally called Gemini. Then they tried out Eternity. Then they discovered the Spanish word for “panther,” and that was that. We also would have accepted Mangusta or Vallelunga.

REO Speedwagon

We heard it from a friend who heard it from a friend who heard it from another that the members of REO Speedwagon met in 1966 on the campus of the University of Illinois. On the first day of his History of Transportation class, keyboardist Neal Doughty saw the name written on the blackboard, and it stuck. Just imagine—if he’d had Linguistics 101 that day, we’d be rocking out to Glottal Stop.

Relient K

These Ohio Christian rockers got together in high school in 1998 and named themselves for the guitarist’s car. To avoid copyright infringement, they spelled the model name wrong. The band is still going strong, which can’t be said for most of the 3.5 million Plymouth Reliants built from 1981 to 1989.

The Rivieras

These guys were big Buick fans, apparently. How else to explain the name they rode to 1960s success, along with the name they rode to much less success when they reunited back in 2000: Wildcat. C’mon, guys, how about a comeback tour as GNX for old time’s sake?

Trans Am

The pride of Bethesda, Trans Am has been producing primarily instrumental “post rock” since 1990. Scottish arts and culture site The Skinny says the band flits from “dischord-inspired guitar experiments to krautrock hypnotics; from hardcore-infused electro soundclashes to arch pop freakouts.” No tire-shredding V-8, then?

***

This article first appeared in Hagerty Drivers Club magazine. Click here to subscribe and join the club.

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It started with mowing the lawn. When I was 10, I decided to use the family Snapper to make some pocket money. But there was a problem: The Snapper had a clutch and a two-speed transmission. Anybody who has ever confronted the mysteries of a manual for the first time remembers how daunting they can be. But, eventually, through trial and error, I figured out the necessary brain/foot/hand coordination, and the rest is lawn care history.

I started with the neighbors’ lawns. Before long, I was also mowing the neighborhood common areas. And it wasn’t long afterward that I decided I needed a bigger machine to scale up the business. I was soon paying $183 a month for the brand-new three-speed Sears mower you see in the old family photo above. An empire was in the making. And what did this empire get me in the end? A $500 rusted-out 1967 Porsche 911 S that Dad and I found in pieces behind an old barn. It took years, but we put it back together. It’s the first car out of my garage each spring and the last put away in fall.

So, you could say that manual transmissions and I go way back, something I’ve been contemplating after recently reading a Wall Street Journal article headlined: “The 20-Somethings Fueling a Stick-Shift Renaissance.” The article noted that “Following a decades-long decline, three-pedaled vehicles are experiencing a modest but real resurgence. Manuals accounted for 1.7% of total new vehicle sales in 2023 … up from 1.2% last year and a low of 0.9% in 2021.”

That sounds like progress to me. As a lifelong car guy, I love the sense that I am more in control of a car with a manual gearbox. There is immediacy, agency, and presence involved that you just don’t get with automatics, no matter how slickly efficient they now are. And the moments I spend behind the wheel of my 911 S on a winding country road are among my happiest.

I have never subscribed to the belief, long held by some, that manual transmissions will ultimately go the way of the dinosaur. To the contrary—and I’ll take The Wall Street Journal article as evidence—I think the manual will be with us always. People crave authenticity in life. They long to be distracted from the din within their minds. Some people eschew manuals because they take more effort, but that effort is precisely the point. It’s the effort that sets us free.

Whether they realize it or not, people who drive a manual often do so because they love the act of driving more than the result, which is the opposite of how most Americans view life these days. Our goal now, in the great age of commuting and over-busy lives, is to get from Point A to Point B as quickly as possible.

That’s not driving. That’s getting somewhere. I drive a manual for the same reason I have a collection of vinyl records. And for the same reason that others garden when there are perfectly good vegetables at the grocery. It takes a bit of work. And that work puts you in the moment. I live for moments when I’m in the moment. It’s a long way from mowing lawns, but it makes for a good life!

Perhaps that describes you, as well. If so, I have a favor to ask: Carry on the tradition. Teach your kids. I did so with my oldest daughters, Olivia and Sophia. They took to it right away, and their skill impresses the heck out of their stickless friends. My youngest daughter, Ava, is too young to drive, but she’s learning, too. She sits in the passenger seat and puts her hand over the shifter and I put my hand atop hers. And together we drive.

In our household, at least, the tradition will not become a lost art. How about yours?

I hope to see you out on a great road somewhere. Happy spring.

***

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We dedicated the May/June 2023 issue of Hagerty Drivers Club magazine to the deep connections between music and cars, including several fun lists featuring your favorite car songs. Come back often or click the Music & Cars tag to stay up to date on these stories as they roll out online. You can also jam out with our custom Music & Cars playlist on Spotify, available here. Read on for Jamie Kitman’s prelude, a historical tour of harmony and horsepower. 

To the best of our knowledge, no one has ever named a car after a song. Yet countless songs have been written about (and named after) cars. And driving. And, as the young folks say, we’re here for that. Throughout history, the most popular songs have been written about romance, yet cars—not only as instruments of romance, but also as romantic ideals and objects of desire themselves—have filled many a verse, chorus, and bridge. That’s not to mention the countless ditties that have been penned to convey the experience and psychological significance of driving. The feels, if you will.

Start with 1905’s “In My Merry Oldsmobile” and see what I mean. Move on to “The Little Ford Rambled Right Along” (1914). Then pass some time with “Henry’s Made a Lady Out of Lizzie” (1927), Robert Johnson’s “Terraplane Blues” (1936), and the Andrews Sisters’ recording of “Six Jerks in a Jeep” (1942). Jackie Brenston and Ike Turner share credit for “Rocket 88” (1951). Cue up the Beach Boys’ cut “409” (1962), and Bob Dylan’s “From a Buick 6,” (1965). Keep forging ahead in time to Deep Purple’s “Highway Star” (1972), War’s “Low Rider” (1975), Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run” (1975), and maybe Motörhead’s “Motorhead” (1977). Then, take in Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again” (1980), and, in a different musical vein, Talking Heads’ “Road to Nowhere” (1985), before moving on to hip-hop, with A Tribe Called Quest’s “I Left My Wallet in El Segundo” (1990), Vanilla Ice’s “Rollin’ in My 5.0” (1991), 2Pac’s “Picture Me Rollin’” (1996), 50 Cent’s “Get in My Car” (2005), and Rick Ross’ “Aston Martin Music” (2010). Come up for air and it’s 2020 and Lil Yachty drops “Ferrari Music,” while in 2021, Young Thug and Gunna release “Ski.”

The point is, there have been few deeper wellsprings of subject matter for lyrical consideration than the automobile. Indeed, with all the car-centric songs out there to choose from, selecting examples for the preceding paragraph presented us with a seemingly infinite number of possible formulations, no mainframe computer required. There hasn’t been a month, much less a decade, without a carload of car songs. And then there are the bands named after cars, starting with The Cars.

It’s no wonder. The advent of recorded music is roughly contemporaneous with that of the automobile, a rather successful device that recorded sound has grown up right alongside, starting with wax cylinders, acetate and later vinyl records, radio, eight-tracks, cassettes, compact discs, digital audio, and more recently, wireless digitized sound and satellite transmission. There are no new Oldsmobiles anymore, alas, and many of the ones left often aren’t very merry. But people are still blasting music in their cars and enjoying it as much as ever.

There’s something singular about listening to music in a car. And something unique, too, with the car as setting and symbol, both conscious and subconscious. It sets one to thinking, thinking, as we’ll see, about all sorts of things. When you put tunes in a moving vehicle, it can lead not just to soul-cleansing introspection but also toe tapping. And thrumming on the steering wheel or banging on the dashtop. Often while singing along at the top of your lungs. I’m going to go out on a limb and say cars and music go together fundamentally better than music went with horses, chariots, or landaulet carriages.

According to an American Automobile Association report from 2019, Americans spend a collective 70 billion hours annually behind the wheel. That’s a lot of time for listening to music on the go, made ever more possible with each passing year thanks to an explosion in in-car audio technology and the advent of the cloud. Together, they’ve worked alongside decades of miniaturization as drivers of enhanced listening possibility. For those of a more terrestrial bent, there remain tens of thousands of radio transmitters broadcasting thousands of land-based radio stations to drivers, a cornucopia augmented in recent decades by an ever-expanding profusion of satellite stations beaming la musique down to enabled automobiles from above.

Recently, we asked the regarded music critic Michael Azerrad, author of several books, including the authorized Nirvana biography Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana, for his thoughts on the supernatural connection between cars and music. Traveling around the country as a journalist and a onetime touring musician himself, he has had occasion to consider this topic.

“A car is a great place to listen to music—it’s not like you can get up and do something else, and what you see through the windshield provides a constantly evolving visual soundtrack. And it doesn’t matter if you don’t have the greatest stereo, since the human ear adjusts to any aural conditions—how many hundreds of millions of people,” he asks, “have had peak listening experiences while listening through a crappy little mono speaker in the dashboard?”

Azerrad continues: “Listening to music in a car is very intimate and intensely private—nobody knows what you’re listening to, and you can pound on the steering wheel and sing as loudly and out of tune as you want, and no one will hear. So, you’re engaging with the music more than you can pretty much anywhere else.  If you’re alone, music will keep you company, and if you’re with other people, it can unite all of you; either way, that forges emotional bonds that you’re just not going to get with, say, talk radio.

“There’s just something about the kinetic energy of music—particularly rock music—that pairs well with driving. And bear in mind, musicians do a lot of traveling on highways, so movement is often built right into the music from the start. To take a literal example, perhaps the ultimate driving album, Kraftwerk’s Autobahn, was directly inspired by the sounds of cars whooshing down pristine modern freeways.” Quite so, though if I may get personal for a moment, Kraftwerk never did as much for me as it did for many of my friends. But the Kinks’ “Drivin’” from their 1969 masterpiece Arthur, which celebrated the freedom—or at least the illusion of it—the automobile offered, somehow clicked for me and my auto-fevered brain, despite my tender years.

“And all the troubled world around us

Seems an eternity away

And all the debt collectors

Rent collectors

All will be behind us

But they’ll never find us

’Cos we’ll be drivin’, drivin’, drivin’, drivin’”

— The Kinks, “Driven”

The track, like many a Kinks classic, was written from a working-class perspective. Other numbers—for instance, “House in the Country”—allude to the automobile as symbol for persons of wealth (“He’s got a house in the country and a big sports car”). Later still, when the Kinks were more fully established in the rock firmament, they wrote songs like “Motorway,” about the rigors of touring, or the poignant “Sitting in My Hotel.”

“If my friends could see me now,

driving round just like a film star,

In a chauffeur driven jam jar, they would laugh.

They would all be saying that it’s not really me,

They would all be asking who I’m trying to be”

— The Kinks, “Sitting in My Hotel”

By way of further biographical footnote, I first became aware of the Kinks as a young child, with 1964’s theretofore impossibly rocking “You Really Got Me,” which I heard on the dashtop speaker serving the lame-o AM radio in my parents’ 1960 Plymouth Valiant wagon. I thought it sounded great. Legend has it that band member Dave Davies stuck a pencil through the speaker of his amplifier to achieve its signature distorted guitar tone, a sound that cut through the fog even on the tinniest of car radio speakers.

Eleven years later, one of the greatest experiences of my early driving career was being able to cue up Kinks’ leader Ray Davies’ moving indictment of consumer culture, “Shangri-La,” in the cassette player of the parental units’ almost-new 1974 Saab 99LE (which also had—gasp, such luxury—an FM radio.) If fuel-injected Saabs with cassette decks were the fruits of consumer culture, well, count me in. Not that we only got carried away by the British Invasion around my house. My sister, Suzy, and I had demanded extended rides in the family’s new 1967 Volvo 122S wagon (which replaced the Valiant) against the chance we could catch on its Bendix AM receiver the Monkees’ single, “Last Train to Clarksville.” Over and over again. Nowadays, of course, it’s a different world. Your kid can listen to any song they want on demand and as often as they want. I pity the modern parent.

Kids are people, too, and anyone with a pulse has some connection to music. Car guys and car gals are no different. Remembers Bob Boniface, head of design for Buick (and formerly Cadillac): “I used to listen to the [underground alt rock giants] Pixies on WFNX in my car when I lived in Boston. When I moved to Detroit in 1989 to study transportation design at the College for Creative Studies, I discovered that there were no alt rock radio stations in the area. I bought Doolittle on cassette the first day. To me, the Pixies’ music borrowed from nothing—it was pure creativity, and it had a profound impact on my own creative process. I would always start an important sketch assignment by playing ‘Debaser.’” A happy coincidence, of sorts, as Pixies’ frontman Charles Thompson, aka Black Francis, told me he still owns the 1985 Cadillac Fleetwood he bought in 1988 with his first royalty check.

It would be easy to fill volumes free-associating one’s way through this subject, but to give some shape to an inevitably rambling exercise, what follows is a brief outline of the many branches of the car song family, prepared with the kind assistance of the aforementioned critic Azerrad and John Flansburgh, guitarist and founding member (along with John Linnell) of multiple Grammy Award winners They Might Be Giants, a band whose vast catalog includes many songs about cars, including “Electric Car,” “Thunderbird,” “Boat of Car,” “Mink Car,” “The Bloodmobile,” “AKA Driver” (about “Nyquil drivers”), and several others I can’t recall, even though I spent 32 years managing the band. Space limitations and regard for your patience and my own sanity will limit the number of songs referenced, though I’d invite you, the reader, to insert your own favorites in each category and to make up your own.

***

This article first appeared in Hagerty Drivers Club magazine. Click here to subscribe and join the club.

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The post Music & Cars: The songs, bands, and albums influenced by the automobile appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Ross Bentley is a professional driving coach, sports car racer, and author of the bestselling Speed Secrets book series. He will join us each Monday to explain and dissect aspects of high-performance driving. Sharpen those pencils, take a seat, and speak up in the comments below. Class is in session.

To the casual observer of racing, the fastest driver is the one who wins the game of chicken: Who can brake the latest for the corners? Whoever brakes first should go back to the barnyard.

The casual observer is wrong.

It’s not how late a driver brakes that makes them fast. It’s the other end of the braking zone that makes the difference.

Many years ago, three-time World Driving Champion Jackie Stewart claimed that he won more Grand Prix in his day than anyone else because of how he let off the brakes. At the time, I didn’t fully comprehend what he was saying, and yet it was—and still is—the most significant thing ever said about driving fast.

But what, exactly, does letting off the brakes better than everyone else really mean? At first, I took it as a need to be smooth with how one comes off the brakes. I later learned there was much more to it.

I was fortunate to begin coaching Colin Braun—a sports car champion and four-time Rolex 24 winner—when he was racing karts at the age of twelve. I remained his coach through his transition into cars at fourteen, and even to this day, to some extent. It’s a fact that I’ve learned more from him than he ever did from me, because I was able to experiment with various coaching approaches and techniques with him. He’s been like my crash test dummy (without the crashing part, and he’s no dummy!).

During a debrief session after the Rolex 24, a year in which he had set fast time in his Daytona Prototype, a phrase came to me:

The timing and rate of release.

We had been talking about why, on that fast lap, he had gotten a better exit out of Turn One than any other lap. After some fun back-and-forth about what could have occurred, we settled on the fact that how he had released the brakes entering the corner had resulted in the car changing direction “just right.” The precise release allowed him to get to full throttle sooner than ever before, and without over-slowing for the corner.

It was the timing and rate of release of the brakes that made his record lap possible.

That’s exactly what Sir Jackie had been talking about so many years before! Letting off the brakes “better” than everyone else really meant that he had gotten the timing and rate of release of the brakes just right.

Let’s dig deeper: The timing of the release of the brakes is in relation to where you turn into the corner. You can let off the pedal before beginning to turn into a corner, simultaneously as you turn in, or after you turn in. The rate of release of the brakes is the speed at which you ease your foot off the pedal. Quickly, slowly, or something in between.

Combining the timing and rate of release of the brakes in just the right way is how magic happens; the car turns in with more speed than ever before, and changes direction so you’re able to squeeze back to full throttle sooner than ever before.

Okay, you’re observing a race (casually or not-so-casually). It could be a Formula 1, IndyCar, IMSA, or NASCAR (road course) race. The fastest driver laps the track in a minute-and-a-half-point-something. That’s ninety seconds, plus the fractions. Consider for a moment all of the things this driver has done in that time: where their eyes were focusing and scanning; upshifting and downshifting; identifying, driving and adjusting the line through the corners; correcting for tire slip and the movements of the car caused by the track surface; on and off the throttle, to accelerate and decelerate, but also to manage the balance of the car; applying and releasing the brakes at the exact right moments and amount. And so much more.

Hundreds, if not thousands of discrete movements and techniques, all performed in ninety seconds.

Review data of multiple drivers, and you will see tiny differences among them. Most of the squiggly lines representing speed, steering movement, throttle application, brake pressure, gear changes, RPMs, GPS positioning on the track, and longitudinal and lateral g-loads will line up on top of each other. The differences are hard to notice, that is, until you zoom in on the area at the end of the braking zone, where the timing and rate of release exists.

Over the course of a ninety-second lap, the deltas in braking zones may add up to just one or two seconds in total, spread over eight or more braking zones; each one just fractions of a second in duration. But it’s where the biggest difference typically is between the fastest driver and everyone else.

This has nothing to do with who is braver and begins braking earlier. It does have to do with who goes into and comes out of the corners faster—that, again, has nothing to do with bravery. It has all to do with technique: the timing and rate of release of the brakes, which enables the driver to carry speed into the corner and get back to full throttle sooner than everyone else.

The most common piece advice given to performance and race drivers is, “In slow, out fast.” It’s better to enter a corner slow and accelerate fast out of it than it is the other way around. With ideal timing and rate of release of the brakes, the best drivers go into corners fast, and come out even faster.

And here’s what makes this even more challenging: the timing and rate of brake release is different for every corner; it’s different for every car, and even how the same car is set up to handle; it changes as the track and tire conditions change.

The best drivers are masters of the timing and rate of release of the brakes, and adapt how they use this technique from corner to corner, lap-to-lap, car-to-car.

Save your chickens for the farm.

***

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A great way to reduce your classic car’s impact on the planet is to make sure it’s in tiptop running condition. Obvious, right? Not always.

This summer, many folks will hop in their family hand-me-down and fire it up for a drive without thinking about routine checks (or easy upgrades) that can help reduce its thirst for fuel.

We’ve gathered a handful of tips here. The best news? The same changes that optimize your classic’s fuel economy can improve its ride and increase its engine’s performance. More responsible habits … and more fun behind the wheel.

Tell us which measures you recommend in the comments section below.

Check tire pressure

Set your tires to the correct pressure whenever you can. You can improve your gas mileage by up to 3 percent in some cases by keeping your tires inflated to the proper pressure. Under-inflated tires can lower gas mileage by about 0.2 percent for every 1 psi drop in the average pressure of all tires. Properly inflated tires are also safer and last longer. Tire-pressure information should be visible either on the driver’s-side door jamb, the inside of the glovebox door, or in the owner’s manual. DO NOT use the maximum pressure on the tire’s sidewall.

Stay in tune

Take your car to your mechanic for a tune-up, or do it yourself! On many classic cars it’s straightforward, fun, and educational. (Read a whole host of DIY content here.) Check the spark plugs and plug wires, tune the carburetor if your car has one, and check the ignition timing.

Consider fuel injection

If your car has a carburetor, companies such as Edelbrock, Holley, and others offer electronic throttle-body fuel-injection setups that offer superior overall performance, even at full throttle. Our own Davin Reckow saw the results for himself. And when properly installed, no one will know it’s there except you.

Breathe easier

A new air filter can improve both fuel economy and acceleration by a few percentage points under normal replacement conditions. Replacing a clogged air filter on vehicles with fuel-injected, computer-controlled gasoline engines—such as those manufactured from the early 1980s to the present—or diesel engines may not improve fuel economy (as the computer can compensate for the restricted airflow), but a fresh air filter will restore power that was lost from the clogged one.

Kick it into overdrive

If you own an older collector car—especially if it’s a muscle car—and want better fuel economy, consider installing a new manual transmission with overdrive. There are complete manual five- and six-speed transmission packages from Modern Driveline. Gear Vendors has bolt-on overdrive packages for a wide range of vintage cars with manual or automatic transmissions. These are overdrive systems you can install in a collector car and only you will know it’s there. When overdrive is in engaged, your engine will turn significantly slower at higher speeds, ensuring your car sips fuel rather than gulps it. And five- and six-speed manual transmissions often have less rpm drop between gear changes than most original gearboxes, so your car will accelerate better, too.

Breaker, breaker

If you drive a collector car that is still using breaker points in its ignition system, you’re very likely burning excessive amounts of fuel, while also dealing with the maintenance issues associated with these older systems. The electronic-ignition conversions from companies such as PerTronix, Mallory, and Accel are easy to install and improve both drivability and fuel economy. Every time a spark plug misfires, precious fuel is lost via the tailpipe. Electronic-ignition conversions virtually eliminate misfires when properly installed.

Drum technique

If your classic has drum brakes (which it most likely will if it’s more than 40 years old), they can be adjusted too tightly, which causes drag, and will result in your car consuming more fuel.

Keep it smooth

Try to drive with gentle and deliberate inputs. Spend less time accelerating and more time at cruising speed, without resorting to jackrabbit starts, unsafe driving, or any other questionable tactics. Maintain a steady speed without heavy application of throttle or brakes. Anticipate traffic and brake accordingly. Avoid excessively high speeds. Coast to decelerate rather than relying on heavy application of the brakes.

Drive with purpose

Avoid unnecessary idling or carrying extra weight.

***

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Proper fluids and lubricants keep our cars and trucks operating in top condition. But when it’s time for them to be replaced, it’s just as important that they be disposed of responsibly and safely. That care also extends to the tires, batteries, and the worn-out parts that can accumulate after a maintenance session. Let’s take a look:

Motor Oil

Motor oil is hazardous to the environment and can contaminate groundwater, so it should never be allowed to drain into the ground or onto the street. Luckily, while used oil does get dirty from combustion and additives that break down with use, the base oil is recyclable and can be processed into useful lubricants. Drain your vehicle’s used oil into a clean plastic container that can be secured with a lid for safe transport, and don’t mix in any other fluids with it. Most auto parts stores will collect your used motor oil and filter for free, and many scrap metal shops accept used oil filters, too.

Other fluids

It may be more difficult to find a place that will accept your old gear lube, coolant, transmission fluid, or brake fluid, but you can check with either your local government’s waste management department. Alternatively, the Earth 911 website has an easy-to-use locator that can point you to the nearest recycling facility. As with your oil, drain the fluid into a clean plastic container with a secure lid and don’t mix fluids; doing so will contaminate them and make them more difficult to recycle.

Batteries

Old batteries can leak acid, posing a safety risk to those that may end up handling them. However, both the plastic case and lead internals are recyclable. You should be able to return a battery to an auto parts store if you just purchased a replacement, sometimes for a modest store credit. Otherwise, check your local waste management department for locations that accept household hazardous materials and other automotive maintenance products, including aerosol cans containing solvents.

Tires

Used tires can typically be turned in for recycling or disposal at your local tire store for a nominal fee. This disposal fee is often included in the purchase of new tires, but it might be easier to contact your state or local waste management department to find a more affordable way to dispose of tires.

Metal

If you have worn brake drums or rotors, extra sheetmetal from a donor car, a bent or cracked wheel, even a bad cylinder head or other cast-metal engine part, your local metal scrap yard will likely pay you for it. Parts with copper (such as the starter or alternator) and aluminum are even more valuable! There’s always a market for recycling metal (as catalytic converter thieves unfortunately understand) so if you don’t have the means to deliver it, you’re usually only one Craigslist or Yellow Pages visit away from a scrap-metal recycler that will come and pick it up for free.

***

Maintenance to minimize your environmental footprint

Restoration and maintenance help keep our beloved vintage vehicles running and on the road; it also keeps them out of the junkyard and, as a result, reduces their environmental impact. So consider these points:

Tire selection

Tires are the vital connection between vehicle and road, yet many enthusiasts give them nothing more than a passing thought. Removing stylish oversized tires for factory-correct-sized tires will likely last longer and also increase fuel economy, both of which decrease the consumption of fossil fuels and release of CO2. If maximum performance isn’t needed, consider getting passenger car tires rated as “low rolling resistance” to maximize your fuel economy.

Oil lifespan

For a vehicle that is rarely driven, you don’t need to stick to the traditional “change it every three months” rule. If the thought of running your oil a little longer keeps you up at night, take a scientific approach for peace of mind; send the oil out for testing by a lab (such as Blackstone Labs) and you will learn how far you can safely run your oil without ever going too far.

Quality above all

High-quality parts typically last longer than cheaper parts yet require similar amounts of energy to produce. Spending the extra money up front to keep poorly made parts out of landfills will pay off in the long term.

Extended paint life

Paint work—even using modern, water-based systems—is quite harsh on the atmosphere. Work on preserving paint if for no other reason than that it keeps corrosion at bay, which extends the life of your beloved car.

Tight and dry

The joke that “If it ain’t leaking oil, it doesn’t have oil” should remain that—a joke. Strive to maintain a vehicle that holds all its fluids, all the time. Pennies make dollars, and small oil leaks eventually add up to quarts on the ground.

***

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Dear Greyson,

May I call you Greyson? You gave no last name. There was only a phone number and a short written hello, this polite little missive in thick pencil. The scrap of paper was tucked under a windshield wiper, torn from a larger piece and folded neatly in half. 

The car sat a few hours from home, on the upper floor of a parking garage in a small southern city, looking no more grotty than usual.

Which is, as you know, still pretty grotty.

I thought it was a parking ticket at first. Cars like this don’t get many notes, you know? This one mostly sees dirty looks, or middle fingers, or headlights flashed in annoyance. Once, on a North Carolina interstate, some troglodyte in a Mercedes gave all three at once. Being the sort of person who believes in rigid adherence to rules regardless of circumstance or sense, I was at that moment of course trundling along at the 55-mph posted limit.

There was a fast downhill sweeper. There was a chance to safely pass that Mercedes in the left lane, on the outside.

As that tired old tach needle swung past four grand, I did what any reasonable person does while swimming in good, clean fun that doesn’t hurt anybody: I kept going. Who knows how fast? Forty miles per hour? A million? Mach numbers are for Yeagers. In the mirror, I saw the finger come out, the headlights on that Mercedes flash.

What a nincowpoop, as my hero once said. Much ado, crapcan nothing.

You offered to buy it! How kind! I have so many questions. Are you into old cars in general or BMWs in particular? Have you seen a 2002tii before? This one is a ’72, fuel-injected and early in that model run, 70th off the line for America. (Cue anal-retentive Concours Man Voice: Oh my, produced in the third week of Junetember, that was before they switched to cad-plated hardware on the flooglehousing, SO RARE AND SPECIAL.)

(It is not rare.)

(At least, not in that sense.)

I wish I could sell you my car. Such is the nature of the project that no explanation as to why I cannot, why I love it too much to do that, will make any sense. 

When your garage holds a smelly old pile of German steel . . . when that pile itself holds much questionable body repair and three distinct shades of filthy white paint . . . when you and your goon friends have over years laid hands or welder or torch on every inch . . . when oxide and time and maybe a saltwater flood have given that sheet metal more holes than a dozen donut shops . . .

Most of all, when you have spent a galactically stupid amount of money to bludgeon and Band-Aid back to life a zombiefied pile that, even today, is barely worth its value in parts . . . 

Well, some notions that do not make sense start to make sense, seem utterly vital and necessary, even if only to you. So you keep spending that money, mile after mile and month after month, keep buying and repairing bits. 

Maybe you convince your significant other that this whole pointless effort is important, that you Need it For Mental Health, but that sentiment is usually unspoken, because that person knows you so well, they don’t need to be told.

“You are building,” a friend once said, as I bolted some shiny new component into place, “a very nice parts car for someone else.” And then we laughed, because we each knew he was right, and that my children will likely inherit this pile and curse my name—it’s Sam, for the record—when I am gone. But that will be then and this is now, as they say, and it all sounds a lot like Dead Sam’s problem.

This didn’t seem like a big deal, once. That was before I had written thousands of words on it for my employer. Before I drove from Tennessee to California and back solely to enter a fancy car show as a joke. And before I hopped behind the wheel last Friday afternoon and drove from Knoxville, where I live, to Asheville, North Carolina, a few hours away, to meet a group of friends for the weekend.

At which point all that hard work and rust sat in a downtown parking garage for a few days. And you found it.

Before I left for North Carolina, I stopped for fuel. As I hung up the pump, an older man left the C-store and strolled over. He nodded at the hood badge. “This a 2002?”

“It is,” I said. “You know them?”

He used to run a body shop, he said, did a lot of crash repair. “Worked on a lot of these.” The words were friendly but unsentimental. A minute later, he asked the question I knew was coming. Because it always comes, when people walk up at gas stations, because the car looks like a project waiting to happen, not an end in itself.

“What are your plans for it?”

Love you are keeping it alive, you wrote. 

The Cliffs Notes are short. I am a car journalist by trade. I have owned several dozen old BMWs and more than a few 2002s. This one cost $1800 and had been sitting for ten years. It left the factory a pretty shade of blue, then weathered 48 years and two repaints in the Northeast.

Rust had eaten everything. The roof, trunk, hood, floors, and doors were burned through with holes. The rockers were gone. The inner fenders were Chernobyl. The steel box sections for the rear-subframe mounts were simply dust. The few bits of interior not missing were cracked open, shredded, or spattered with mold.

It was not the nastiest old car in the world.

Friends in the restoration business suggested a cutting-up for parts. Instead, there was welding, sloppy and quick, from those same friends and others, a gifted-labor group project that seemed to grow and rope in new people every day, equal parts pandemic time-burner and half-serious joke. The work began as experiment, to see how quickly a group of experienced folks could slam a DOA car back to life minus their standard workmanship and care. It ended as a reminder of how freeing it can be to meet something you love on your own terms.

Lotta jerks in this world, Greyson. Too many get their bloomers in a bunch at the thought of a person enjoying themselves in a manner they don’t endorse. 

Love you are keeping it alive. 

My friend, I suspect you are young. Your handwriting reminds me of my daughter’s. Moreover, your note sat under the windshield wiper with another piece of paper, a note in pen with tidy letters.

A parent? An older sibling? It wasn’t signed. Made me smile, though.

The 2002 was “finished” in Spring of 2021; the California trip was a few months later. We have gone many places since. What else do you do with a reliable, sorted little thing that tracks hands-free at highway speed and pulls strong at high rpm? Few machines I’ve owned have seen as many miles in as short a time, or made my clothing stink so much of oil. (Tired valve guides, smoking on overrun.) None have been more fun.

Just as perfect can be the enemy of good, so can good be the enemy of good enough. For a long time, I thought I knew what those words meant. Now I know a little more.

I almost texted you pictures of the resurrection, all that welding. Then I thought better of it. Shortly after this story is published, however, I will send you two things. A link to this page, for one. Then a line or two of thanks.

Like I said, we don’t get a lot of notes. Yours was the first. It made my day.

Your friend in rust,

Sam

***

Sam Smith is an editor-at-large for Hagerty. His ’72 BMW 2002tii “Weissrat” has appeared previously on this site, including a seven-part feature series documenting the build.

If you’d like to read more, start here. The car can also be found on Instagram at @thatsamsmith and the hashtag #weissrat.

The post Smithology: I wish I could sell you my car appeared first on Hagerty Media.

With warmer weather finally arriving in many parts of the country, spring driving season is once again upon us. This article originally published in 2020, but these checks were as relevant then as they are today. Here’s to many more miles this year! –Ed.

If you’re reading this, you almost certainly have a non-daily-driven enthusiast car somewhere in a locked garage. It’s time to unlock the door, let that puppy out, fire it up, and drive it.

But you need to check a few things first.

I assume that the car has been sitting over the winter—say, three to six months. If the car’s been sitting for years instead of months, you get into a whole other level of issues like bad gas, clogged fuel lines, corroded cooling-system components, and failed brake and clutch hydraulic seals. But for a season’s sit, the list below should be pretty good.

Enabling the rollout

The cars that I store offsite are in rented, traditional, one-car-per-roll-up-garage-bay spaces and thus can be brought out at a moment’s notice, but at my house I have a shoebox-proportioned garage with a single door into which four cars are stuffed in two rows, nose-to-tail.

The car immediately behind the door can be pulled out easily, and the one behind that (on the mid-rise lift) is next in line, but the other two are typically blocked in by a winter’s worth of tools and parts.

Once that Maginot Line is cleared, I need to slide a car to the right on wheel dollies. This turns my space from a four-car, winter garage to a three-car, three-season garage, which it remains until first snow. It also means that one formerly garaged car must go somewhere, creating a chain reaction that sets off a shuffle in the other places where I store cars.

Tires

If, when you roll open the garage door for the first time in months, one of your car’s tires is wheel-on-the-cement flat, you kind of have to start with the tires, so let’s. Obviously, if that’s the case, you need to air that tire up before you can move the car. If you don’t have an air compressor in the garage, buy a portable one that runs off the cigarette-lighter socket, or better yet, runs off 12V DC or a 120VAC adapter.

I’ll air up the tire and then see what it’s going to do. If you immediately hear it hissing from a puncture or a bad valve stem, then you need to stop everything, jack up the car, pull the wheel off, and either swap on another wheel and tire or get this one fixed. But if you don’t, you can see whether the leak deflates the tire over hours or days. Just remember that it deflated over the winter, so it’s going to do it again.

Then, check the air pressure of all four tires. While you’re doing that, it’s a good idea to inspect the tire sidewalls for cracking. Odds are that if the car is stored indoors, the tires aren’t going to get much worse over a single winter, but it’s easy for 10 years to go by one winter at a time and the tires to cross from old-but-OK to sheeh-I-don’t-want-to-drive-farther-than-to-the-gas-station-on-those.

Battery

We’ll come back to the battery in cranking (below), but here’s where I talk about what you should’ve done when you put the car away last fall. If the battery has been on a tender or trickle-charger for the winter, it’s probably fine. Since I store several of my cars in a remote garage without electricity, I can’t trickle-charge them, so instead I simply unhook the negative battery terminal over the winter. Most of the time, when I reconnect it three or four or six months later, the engine turns right over.

But if you didn’t do either of these things, you’ll probably have a problem.

You can take a multimeter, set it to measure voltage, and put the two probes on the battery terminals. If it reads 12.6 volts, or near it, the battery is fully charged, and if it’s in good health and the cable connections are good, it should turn the engine over. But with every 0.2-volt drop, the battery loses about 25 percent of its cranking power, so if it’s reading closer to 12 volts than 12.6, it’s is unlikely to crank the engine over without being connected to a good three-stage charger for several hours. So measure the battery’s voltage, and if you need to charge it, charge it.

Fluids inside

Check the oil, coolant, and brake fluid levels. I’m pretty bad at keeping track of which car had an oil change when, so I do it more by the seat of my pants. If the oil looks black, I make a note to change it soon. I give a quick look inside the radiator or expansion tank to both check the level and see if there’s any oil in there indicating a weakening head gasket.

Fluids outside

Next, look under the engine compartment for evidence of leaks. Hopefully all you find is a few dots of oil from where the car’s been leaking out the front timing cover for the last 40 years and nothing more.

Anything green is antifreeze, and its source should be identified before you drive the car, as a minor leak can quickly mushroom into a gusher. Blue liquid can be either antifreeze or washer fluid. Clear liquids are usually power steering or brake fluid. I’m not above doing the pinky-in-the-fluid-and-tongue-touch-to-the-pinky test (antifreeze is sickly sweet), but I’m old and cannot be easily killed.

Move to the back of the car where the fuel tank is, schooch under, look, and sniff. Vintage cars have metal fuel tanks, and they can leak from age, particularly with ethanol’s propensity for attracting water. Since it’s good practice to store a car with a full tank of gas (this eliminates the chance for humid air to get into the tank and contaminate the gas with water), if you find the tank leaking, it ruins your day, since you now need to drain it. Gas can also leak from rotted or cracked rubber fuel lines.

Gasoline isn’t like oil or antifreeze; there should be a zero-tolerance policy for any amount of fuel leakage. You should also sniff in the engine compartment to be certain gas isn’t leaking there.

The critter check

If your garage has an affinity for rodents and they’ve made your car home, they can deposit a lot of material in the air cleaner in a short amount of time. It’s good insurance to pop the top off the air cleaner and have a quick look.

Hoses and belts

Give the hoses and belts a quick inspection. Squeeze the hoses. If any of them are pillowy soft, order replacements. Inspect the belts for cracks and cuts and put a thumb on each of them to check the tension. If they’re obviously loose, take a moment and tighten them.

The crank-over

If the car has passed the above checks, the engine is ready to be cranked. As I said above, if the battery is fully charged and registering about 12.6 volts, it should crank when you turn the key. If it doesn’t crank, clean the battery and cable terminals and try again.

If the voltage is a little low, you can jump-start the car, but if the battery is deeply drained (turn the key and you get a click of the starter but that’s all), or worse, flatlined (less than 10.5 volts, or the car’s dash lights barely even turn on), it’s best to replace it before you drive the car. Alternators aren’t designed to charge deeply discharged batteries. Although old analog cars often don’t seem to mind, post-OBDII cars with a proliferation of electronic control modules can do very odd things, including bucking and dying, if a deeply discharged battery is jump-started and the car is driven.

If the car is fuel-injected, it will likely start in just a few seconds when the starter is cranked. If it doesn’t, the fuel pump may not be running, either due to a popped fuse, stuck relay, or the pump itself.

Carbureted cars often take much longer to start due to the lower fuel pump pressure, the need to refill the float bowls, the far less precise air/fuel metering, and the lack of direct spray into the cylinders. A short blast of starting fluid into the carburetor throat can coax the engine to life. If a carbureted car still won’t start after sitting, the problem is often that an old fuel line has become dry-rotted and is sucking air rather than fuel.

The eyeballs-on idle

Once the engine is running, let it idle for about a minute. Then shut it off and look under the engine for any fluid dripping or streaming out.

Twice around the block

It’s common for brake pads to stick to rotors from sitting. If the car has been stored indoors, the rotors probably won’t have rusted much, but still you want to scope it out. Take the car for an easy lap around the block. Brake gently to verify that the brake pedal is firm and functional, then more firmly. Pick up speed and do it again. Note any brake-pedal shudder (pulsation), pulling to one side, or steering-wheel shimmy. Pull back into the driveway and check again for any fluid leakage.

A real test drive

Take the car up onto the highway or other road where you can build speed. Verify that it comes up to operating temperature in about the middle of the gauge and stays there. Continue to test the brakes for shuddering or pulling. If the brake pedal is still pulsating, there are still unwiped deposits on it. A series of hard braking exercises (first verifying that no one is behind you) may wipe the rotors clean, or you may find that it doesn’t go away and you need to buy new rotors.

If there’s steering-wheel shimmy that wasn’t there in the fall, it’s likely the tires are flat-spotted from sitting. It may go away. It may not. Come home, recheck for fluid leakage, and check again the next morning.

If the car passes these tests, I feel pretty good about thinking that it’s in about the same condition it was in when put away in the fall and I’m ready to begin to enjoy it in the spring. But keep in mind that successfully emerging from storage doesn’t mean that the car has been healed of any known problems. Cars are not biological systems; they don’t mend themselves with a good long sleep.

***

Rob Siegel has been writing the column The Hack Mechanic for BMW CCA Roundel magazine for 34 years and is the author of five automotive books. His new book, Resurrecting Bertha: Buying back our wedding car after 26 years in storage, is available on Amazon, as are his other books, like Ran When Parked. You can order personally inscribed copies here.

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The post 11 checks to make before your classic’s first spring drive appeared first on Hagerty Media.

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If logic had entered the equation, I wouldn’t have bought a sports car at all. For a 23-year-old barely six months into his first real job out of college, a used Civic would have been sensible. A Forester, maybe, because winters in Michigan are rough. But I wasn’t interested in sensible. Sensible came with a roof.

It was March 2014, five months into my car magazine career. Whether I would ultimately hack it remained an open question. Seven of my coworkers, including current Hagerty Insider managing editor David Zenlea, owned Miatas. Three or four grand was the going rate for a decent NA-generation driver.

That, too, would have been the sensible choice.

Instead, I blew $8300 on a 2001 BMW Z3 2.5 roadster with 71,500 miles. That sum represented more than half of my total savings, mostly earned from years of waiting tables. Several people told me I was making a dumb choice, and that the money I’d have to put into a 13-year-old BMW made in South Carolina would eventually fill me with regret.

They were wrong about the last part. I love this car to pieces, even when it’s in pieces. The time, energy, and investment I’ve put into my BMW over the last decade has been entirely worth it to me.

Car valuation is Hagerty’s bread and butter. Our insights from comprehensive data, we hope, help people make decisions that will allow them to get—or even just keep—a vehicle that makes them happy. But for all our talk about savvy car purchases, we don’t often acknowledge the upshot investing in the health of one’s car: you get to keep driving it.

I’m not talking about a full rotisserie restoration, though that nuclear option is certainly worth it for some. My mantra has been four-fold:

(1) Be religious about basic maintenance.

(2) Address common failure points before they have a chance to wreak havoc.

(3) Fix things promptly when they break.

(4) Drive it as much as possible.

Long did I pine for a Z3, so the last thing that crossed my mind when I finally got it was what it would one day be worth. I’d picked a great example of a fun car and expected German-car ownership costs. The point was to enjoy it. If I lost my shirt, it was because I wanted a really good tan.

Everything I’ve done to the car myself—from oil changes to brakes, weather-seal repair, headlight bulbs, and new engine gaskets—has been to ensure my spring, summer, and fall are punctuated with weekend spurts of top-down fun. That straight-six song! Those classic proportions! That oh-so-BMW rubber-band-ball shift feel! It doesn’t get old, even as my recently graying beard reminds me I do. And when things go wrong beyond my expertise or bandwidth to handle, I have no problem paying a shop to get the car back on the road ASAP. My rough annual maintenance budget of $1000 sometimes takes a big hit, but usually there’s some left over to roll into next year. So when the choice is between drenching myself in transmission fluid to badly replace a transmission shift-shaft seal and swiping my credit card, I take the latter route.

As a matter of interest, I decided to check—for the first time since buying it—what a five-speed Z3 2.5 in #3 (Good) condition is worth. At the time of purchase, in 2014, $8300 was the exact average value for my car. Not bad for a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed hopeful like me, right? Unlike full-bore M Roadsters and M Coupes, however, ordinary Z3 roadsters like mine were not finished depreciating. Values hit their bottom of $7500 in 2021, eventually rebounding and growing to today’s average of $11,800. Adjusted for inflation, more like $9400.

Lord knows I’m upside down. Just how much so I don’t particularly care to calculate. Maybe it’s the blood rushing to my head, but it’s been a lot more fun than puttering around in a Forester.

Last summer, I realized my Z3 was 21 years old. At that point in its life, Rule #2 applied to a number of components. The entire engine cooling system, for one thing, is suspect on Z3s and related E36 3 Series BMWs at this age or about 80,000 miles. Rubber and plastic pieces like hoses, expansion tanks, and fan blades get brittle and risk cracking, which means overheating that BMW’s aluminum-block inline-sixes do not tolerate well. Brake lines. Motor and transmission mounts. Suspension and differential bushings. This stuff gets tired, but at a rate slower than one can easily notice.

The last thing I wanted was to cook my engine, lose my brakes, or risk damage to my subframe (unfortunately common on Z3s with worn diff bushings, due to spot weld failure). Thanks to a fellow named Bryan Salgado, who runs a popular Z3 and Z4 maintenance group on Facebook, I executed a plan. I ordered a giant, $2900 pile of parts and had them dropped off at Salgado’s home garage in North Carolina, courtesy of a nearby BMW supplier called BimmerBum. He spent three or four days performing all of the necessary work, at a very reasonable rate of $75/hr. Given that my car was something like the eighth or ninth “kitchen sink” project Salgado had done for friends and Z3 club members, I knew I was in good hands.

All told, the work involved a complete cooling system overhaul, replacement of engine and transmission mounts, seat rail bushing repair, stainless steel brake lines, new front control arms, springs, shocks, suspension bushings, differential bushing, and a weighted ZHP shift knob for good measure. My boss, Larry Webster, was skeptical that I’d spent $5500 on an unremarkable Z3.

“Really? It’s worth that much to you?”

“Absolutely,” I said.

And wow, what a difference. I have a story in the works that will get deeper into just how much better the car drove after the kitchen sink refresh, but suffice to say it might drive better now than when I bought it.

Naturally, a wayward traffic barrel rolled into the left lane outside of Louisville, Kentucky, on my way back to Michigan. Nobody was hurt, which is what really matters, but I can’t say I was thrilled to see a cracked bumper cover and dented driver’s door, among other damage. It’s insured (thanks, Hagerty!) and it will be fixed. The car was never meant for the concours lawn, anyway.

I have no plans to part with my Z3, so all I care about is that I can drive it when spring comes around. Those precious moments behind the wheel are the only return on investment I care to track.

***

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Via Hagerty Insider

The post Invest in the car that’s in your garage appeared first on Hagerty Media.

About 25 years ago, during Monterey Car Week, a mutual friend introduced me to concours guru, restoration expert, and all-around car nut Dick McClure. I liked him because he was all about having fun and not taking the cars or himself too seriously. It was refreshing to find someone so invested in the hobby who was just out to have a great time, without caring whether he impressed anyone.

Early on in our acquaintance, I discovered McClure had a 1935 MG PA Airline coupe, one of the cars I’d always wanted. Every year in Monterey, I’d ask him to sell it to me. I bugged him for years—until one August, when I asked him when he was going to sell it and he answered: “Right now, but you have to take my MG ND, too.” He set a price and I agreed. After years of waiting, the entire deal took 30 seconds.

In addition to Monterey Car Week, I’d see McClure at the California Mille, an event he co-founded. His perpetual challenge was to find an eligible car that cost less than the entry fee. He’d go through old Mille Miglia programs and find less-exclusive cars from 1957 or earlier of a type that had run in the famous Italian road race. One year, a shop-owner friend gave him a 1955 MG Magnette sedan—for free. Knowing that one had completed the Mille Miglia in 1956, McClure was happy to accept.

While at the California Mille, McClure’s co-driver, Mathias Doutreleau, took a call from his boss, collector and Quail Lodge owner Sir Michael Kadoorie. Kadoorie was intrigued to learn the pair were running a Magnette in the event, because that was the model in which he learned to drive. Before he knew it, McClure had an invitation to show his free car at The Quail, A Motorsports Gathering, the following August.

Another year, I co-drove with McClure at the California Mille in a Renault Dauphine. He paid $300 for the car, then invested another $600 preparing it. For less than a grand, we were out there running with 2.9 Alfas, Bugattis, Ferraris, and Maseratis. I’m sure that some of the other entrants were looking down their long hoods at us, but McClure and I agreed it was the most fun we’d ever had in a car.

Before long, we noticed that the Renault was losing oil from the breather hose, so McClure stopped at a convenience store to pick up a jar of peanuts. After emptying the jar, he punched a hole in the lid and, with some creative engineering, crafted a catch tank. Whenever the oil light would indicate a low level, McClure would stop and I would hop out, open the hood, pour the oil from the peanut jar back in, and we’d get going again in less than a minute.

As part of the rally, we did some laps at Sonoma Raceway. Behind the wheel, McClure provided running commentary, like on TV. “It’s a new world record for a Renault Dauphine!” he said in his best announcer voice. “And the crowd goes wild!” he shouted. All while passing the empty stands in a car with a 75-mph top speed. We had a riot.

Last year at The Quail, McClure entered an Alfa Romeo Giulietta Sprint, which several members of the Alfa Romeo Owners Club had passed on because it was the “worst, rustiest example I’ve ever seen,” and “too far gone to restore.” After the car spent months on the market, McClure haggled on the price and took it to his shop, where he repaired the body and painted it Rust-Oleum Royal Blue. He was thrilled to receive the Spirit of The Quail award from Kadoorie himself.

Some of McClure’s other entries for The Quail and/or the California Mille have included a care-worn 1952 Jaguar XK 120, the MG TD he drove in high school, a VW Beetle with a chopped roof and suicide doors, and a Morris Minor, while he hopes to drive a 1964 Dodge Dart slant-six coupe in the 2023 Quail Rally. In any event McClure enters, his passenger seat is highly coveted. I’ve co-driven with him several times, but the “record holder” as his co-driver is vintage racer and Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason, who keeps coming back for one simple reason: It’s so much fun.

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Each January, somewhere in the president’s address to Congress, you will hear the words, “The State of the Union is strong.” If I assessed the collector car market, I would be even bolder and say, “My friends, our beloved pastime is not just strong—it is, in fact, flourishing.”

Mine is certainly not an unbiased assessment, so I would enter into evidence the website you are currently reading. Last month, Hagerty Media announced the sixth annual Hagerty Bull Market List, highlighting vehicles from six different decades, including everything from bolts of lightning (2003 Corvette Z06) and beasts (2002 Hummer H1 and 1969 AMC AMX) to a curiously named motorcycle (the 1938 Harley-Davidson Knucklehead).

This year’s Bull Market List truly is a microcosm of today’s collectible market, which is seeing buyers who are younger and more diverse than ever before. The SUV and pickup on the list, for instance, are favored by millennials and Gen Xers, as are the Japanese makes. Those generations, incidentally, have sought more quotes from Hagerty than boomers four years running. The guard is both changing and growing.

From time to time, I hear the old saw about how people aren’t as interested in cars as they were in the past. Nonsense. According to a Hagerty poll last year, about 69 million Americans self-describe as car enthusiasts, which I take to mean people who get that tickle of excitement just thinking about their next car, their next drive, or their next afternoon under the hood. On average, each of those enthusiasts spends more than $10,000 annually on the hobby. A chunk of that, I would wager, is spent at online auctions, including Hagerty’s brand-new Marketplace. (Our goal: Be the most trusted platform for browsing, buying, selling, and financing cool older vehicles.)

Why did we get into digital auctions? Because modern humans are shopping animals, and online auctions are becoming the preferred way to buy. How big is the potential market? Of the 2.5 million vehicles that Hagerty protects, about 300,000—worth an estimated $12 billion—traded hands within the past year. And those are merely the ones on our books. Globally, the value of insured collector vehicles measures into the trillions.

That doesn’t sound like disinterest to me. In fact, it sounds like flourishing.

But raw numbers and car values aren’t why I’m so optimistic about the state of our beloved pastime. What has me jazzed is that owners today, especially younger ones, aren’t so much interested in amassing large collections of investment cars that sit unused in garages or storage facilities. They’re using them—whether that means doing laps at the local racetrack, or organizing a road rally with friends, or attending GridLife or one of the other weekend car-centric festivals that millennials are flocking to. Individualized experiences are where it’s at for today’s collector. And I love it. Cars are meant to be driven and enjoyed for what they are—vehicles to the best things in life. It doesn’t matter what car or era you favor. Hagerty Media ran a story recently about a guy who collects Ford Escorts. I’ve personally witnessed a gaggle of Pontiac Azteks tooling the picturesque peninsula near my home, their drivers happy as larks.

There’s no right, wrong, or better in today’s automotive pastime. Buy what you like. Drive what you want. Go have fun. That’s all there is to it.

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Last month, we asked members of Hagerty Media about their wish list for Santa. While it woulda been fun to see who was naughty and who was nice, perhaps discretion is the better part of valor. So instead, we’ll ring in the new year with some of our favorite moments from last year.

Who knows, maybe these picks will inspire us (or you) to seek new inspiration in 2023, or perhaps to dip back into the well that’s been so good to us in the past.

Cars and Coffee with the Family

Matthew Fink, our Branded Content Writer, said his favorite moment was when he took his Dad and son to their first Cars and Coffee with other classic car owners. He said it was an easy choice, and that moment “made all the cost and struggles to get a car and keep it running worth it.” More to the point, Matt wished he did this years ago!

Cars and Buildings

Mine was pretty easy, as I had watched the movie Columbus and always wondered what car could turn that little Indiana town into a story for automobile enthusiasts. More specifically, enthusiasts who also have an appreciation for great architecture. It took years to find the right car for that city, but luckily I found the right rolling sculpture in the Minecraft-like Hyundai Ioniq 5.

What resulted was an installment in Hagerty’s Great Reads. I am beyond proud of the hard work that went into making this happen. So if you like buildings with your cars, check this out.

Staying in the Moment

Sam Smith, our Editor-at-Large, remembered how a snapshot of an Audi race car “set off a cascade of memories that reminded me everything is forever on its way to somewhere else” and subsequently gave us a fantastic chapter in his In The Moment series.

Radical old with radical new

Eric Weiner, our Executive Editor, chose his contribution to 2022’s installment of our Great Reads where he drove a Tesla Model 3 and a Citroën DS together for a story idea that’s been simmering “for about eight years.” You can experience Eric’s Great Read here.

Barracudas and Boats

Aaron Robinson, another of our Editors-at-Large, was thrilled to work on the brakes of Mr. Bean’s Plymouth Barracuda but his time with the USS Nimitz might have been even cooler. You know, even if the Nimitz‘s connection to automobiles is, as Aaron put it, rather “tangential.”

Racing and Spectating

Senior Editor Eddy Eckart chose two moments in motorsports. What a modest guy, as his C8 Corvette Z06 review was a banger!

Anyway, Eddy loved his time as a driver, when he went karting at Nelson Ledges in 2022. While he didn’t win, he noted that “I sharpened my skills and got deeper into one of the purest forms of motorsport out there.” But Eddy went further, referencing Colton Herta’s amazing save at Indy, as seen in the video above. Wow, that was a moment to savor.

Six Ways and a Wedding

Editor Kyle Smith was actually conflicted on our question, because two of his articles “represented big shifts in my life.” The wrap-up of the Six Ways to Sunday project and the tale of Driving the Model A to his wedding were moments in time that he will hold “close to my heart for many years for a variety of reasons.”

Demolition Man

Editor and Photographer Cameron Neveu raced in his first demolition derby this summer. Cam drove a “Dodge Caravan painted like a Minion from Despicable Me. I finished second. The crowd loved me!”

Therapy behind the wheel

Grace Houghton, Associate Managing Editor, had the privilege of escaping “the glamorous hustle of Monterey Car Week’s auctions and press events” to get some quality time with a special BMW. Grace says this was a “refreshing reminder of how therapeutic driving can be, and how a moment can find you.”

Becoming Dad of the year

Ben Woodworth, Senior Video Lead, never fails to impress me in his replies for Our Two Cents. This time he gave us a true gem:

“Mine is pretty simple: Doing donuts in the snow in an empty parking lot in my crappy car with my kids giggling in the back seat.”

California Dreamin’

Joe DeMatio, Senior Manager of Content, remembered a wonderful trip in a wonderful car:

“This photo was taken near Willow Springs, but the previous Saturday morning I crossed the Oregon-California border, southbound. The section on Interstate 5 that took me up to Mt. Shasta and through the Shasta-Trinity National Forest was spectacular, traffic was light, I was behind the wheel of my newly-purchased 2019 VW Golf Alltrack, and I was headed to San Francisco, one of my favorite places.”

R/C cars and minivans

Associate Editor Nathan Petroelje said his moment was a “toss-up between overlanding in a minivan” and exploring the world of R/C vehicles in Florida. He put this community’s enthusiasm in proper perspective when he said:

“The passion that I discovered there draws from the same pool that full-size automotive enthusiasm does, but the attention to detail and the creativity that these folks put on display is truly incredible. They’re crazy fun to wheel through the forest, too!”

The post Our Two Cents: Personal moments from last year, for a happy new year appeared first on Hagerty Media.

One of the interesting commonalities among driving enthusiasts is that we all think we are the second coming of Senna and thus believe we have both legendary reaction times and fine motor skills. After all, how many folks have you heard over the years talk of pulling ABS fuses or disabling the system because they claim they can stop a car faster if ABS is not “interfering,” and they can truly threshold brake? Those people are wrong, and Jason Fenske of Engineering Explained just did the math to prove it.

There’s one thing to get out of the way right off the hop here: This is a discussion of modern ABS systems. First- and even second-generation systems likely were quite cumbersome and slow reacting. However, computer technology has come a very long ways in the last 40 years, and any judgements previously made against ABS should be re-evaluated against a current system.

I say that because Fenske does a good job of putting that into hard numbers. The first to know is slip, which is pretty self-explanatory when you think on it. Slip is the speed differential between tire and the vehicle. This is what determines if you have traction or not: 0 percent slip is traction, 100 percent slip is sliding.

The next important data point is processing speed and inputs. A modern ABS system is picking up wheel speed and slip from each individual tire and can modulate at each tire. You only get the joined feedback at the brake pedal, along with your internal accelerometer. The ABS system can cycle and analyze data between 15 and 100 times per second. Your human brain has a whole lot of processing power, but the average human has a reaction time of 120ms, meaning that by the time you even understand you’re sliding, the ABS system has cycled at least twice.

That’s in ideal conditions, too. Add in changes in surface that affect coefficient of friction. A small patch of dirt or sand, or maybe a little oil or water, and suddenly you need to react to that and you won’t be able to predict that change in braking capacity—neither can the ABS, to be fair—but your reaction will likely require some amount of give and take fluctuation before you zero back in on perfect threshold, and by that time the surface could change again. A human simply cannot act fast enough to keep brake pressure in the sweet spot. We can do really well in some situations, but considering the depth and breadth of variables when driving on public roads, there’s no way even the best can beat ABS consistently. It’s statistically impossible.

The post Here’s why you can’t out-brake ABS appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Los Angeles is an incredible place to be an automotive enthusiast.

Car culture courses thick and pure through L.A.’s veins like grease dripping from a street taco. There’s as much automotive variety in this city as there is cultural diversity; if there’s an automotive niche—or a niche of a niche—you can find it on full boost in southern California.

Certain streets and parking lots shimmer with a perpetual parade of interesting cars, a patchwork quilt of gleaming hypercars, buzzing imports, hopping lowriders, and sunburned survivors. You’ll meet some of the most welcoming and wonderful people out on the streets, with communities and clubs for every type of enthusiast. And the roads! Oh god, the roads. When I die, bury me somewhere alongside Angeles Crest.

Los Angeles is an awful place to be an automotive enthusiast.

Tainting this kaleidoscope of vehicular wonder is a toxic stew of hassle and sunk cost. Traffic, exorbitant gas prices, lobotomized drivers, and the omnipresent threat of the overzealous LAPD are the obvious bummers that tamp the physical act of driving, but it’s hidden frustrations that can make ownership a nightmare.

As of this writing, the average price of a home in L.A. is right at $1 million. So, if you’re an enthusiast of regular means, you live in an apartment, which means you automatically must fight for parking if you live in one of the many buildings who do not offer assigned spots. This is annoying if you own a car. It is all-consuming if you own several cars.

Regular street parking almost invariably leads to regular dents, dings, and scrapes. If you’re near the ocean, the marine layer will render anything old into a pile of brown dust. Something breaks? You’re working on it where it lays unless you bring it to a shop. If you have assigned parking at your apartment, you’re usually forced to bring it to a mechanic anyways, since the majority of complexes do not allow you to work on your own car for anything beyond a battery replacement or bulb swap. Ask me how I know. And you’re going to want to keep your car in tip-top mechanical shape, considering I can think of fewer scenarios scarier than a blown radiator on the side of the 405 at rush hour.

This is to say nothing of the physical hazards of L.A.’s rotten infrastructure. Hollywood’s silver-screen representation of L.A. has done nothing to prepare visitors for the deteriorated roadways that await their hapless rental Camry. Busted stretches of highway expansion joints on the main arteries interrupt conversation and will convince you of a newfound flat tire. A significant portion of parking lot entrances are perplexingly steep and apex at a sharp point, while the interiors of some L.A. garage structures can prove treacherous for even a Mini Cooper.

Don’t stray too close to the dips and missing chunks bordering the edges of surface streets, lest you seek catastrophic sidewall damage. If you take any of the strange V-shaped drainage ditches scattered around the city at speed, you can expect to leave the concrete some gratuity in the form of oil pan fragments and the fidelity of your control arms.

In short—this is not a place friendly to the average classic car enthusiast.

I love classic cars. I’ve dedicated my career and most of my rapidly dwindling brainpower to the worship of the older stuff. It’s a shame, then, that I am mentally unfit for relying on a classic car for regular transportation in Los Angeles at this time. As a professed neurotic, driving anything through the City of Angels that could be considered unreliable or problematic is an exercise in hyper-fixation and weaving anxiety from the threads of tranquility.

Hold up—did I just hear ticking? Is that my lifters? I just had the oil changed—maybe the mechanic put in the wrong oil. He’s a specialist with three decades of experience with this particular car, but people mess up, you know? I bet there’s catastrophic engine failure brewing, I just know it. I know it! Then, I’ll be stranded. Then—then!—I’ll have to call Hagerty roadside services, and wait while they thread through the same traffic jam that did in said engine. Man, isn’t the shop rate at my place like $200? This is going to cost five-figures. How much is this whole car worth? God, there goes my weekend—no, my month.

Oh. It was just the A/C compressor cycling on and off. Haha! We’re good!

I know, I know—I need to relax, I need to chill. It’s not like this mania is fueled by a history of disastrous automotive incidents, either. My family’s 1981 Porsche 911 SC never once died on me, nor did my cranky and very sketchy 1974 VW Baja Bug I daily drove in college. So far, my 2002 Carrera has been rock solid, as was my 2005 Pontiac GTO. In fact, it’s the traditionally reliable stuff that’s left me stranded. My unmodified 1999 Miata caught fire en route through the Mojave desert—thank you, cheap coil pack!—a few months after I grenaded the valvetrain of an automatic 2016 Corvette Stingray convertible press car.

Point is, even if it’s possible to drive a classic every day in Los Angeles, it simply isn’t enjoyable. My daily driver for the past six months has been a 1998 Volvo S70 T5. This five-speed, front-wheel drive turbobrick is a grand Swedish thing with oodles of character and barrels of torque—or is that tjörk? In theory, it’s the sort of modern classic that a young collector can use as an actual car. In reality, the air conditioning doesn’t work, the engine is absurdly thirsty for a 2.3-liter, some parts are hard or impossible to come by, and I don’t always want to drive stick in gridlock when I just want to get the hell home. Yeah, I don’t think it’s fun driving manual in traffic. Sue me!

I needed a new car before summer hit and I sweated through the seats of my Volvo. No, not a different car, a new car. Something I don’t have to pay out the nose for and won’t burn my ass in severe depreciation when this wild market starts to settle. Something with a known history, something that I can sustain simply with oil changes and tire rotations for 100,000 miles while I spend the big bucks on keeping my 996 on the road. Naturally, I made a list of all the hot hatches, compact sports cars, and generally interesting rides that would scratch the fun rash during errands and not turn to stapled Jell-O when snaked through Malibu canyons.

I bought a 2022 Subaru Crosstrek Sport.

Please, stay your jeers and hatemail—this has already triggered every sort of identity and existential crisis that you can imagine. A crossover. No, a CVT crossover. Are you ok, man? Have you considered medication? Therapy?

Yeah—this is my therapy. Air conditioning, CarPlay, and the zone-out CVT is what keeps me sane during my daily trudge through L.A. Plus, the Crosstrek is, dare I say it … good. Plenty powerful, big enough to carry my stuff, small enough to park anywhere.

So why do I feel so bad? Modern car culture has warped me to feel ashamed that I would trade character for comfort, and acceleration for A/C. For many enthusiasts, there is no Goldilocks option. If I moved back to rural Michigan or my hometown of Dallas, you can bet your lugnuts I’d have found something with a stick and a stoke—but not in L.A. I can’t do it, I just can’t do it.

Maybe I’m a cautionary tale. Southern California, the place were America’s love affair with the automobile really took flight, has become utterly inhospitable to car lovers of ordinary means.  That likely will become even more the case if Californa succeeds in upholding its 2035 gas ban, leaving regular-joe enthusiasts to fight over a dwindling supply of fun ICE cars.

Or, maybe, I’m just maturing. Our own McKeel Hagerty has gone on record that we’re here to save driving—not necessarily commuting. I still have my (manual) 996 for weekends and short trips, and I’d add an MGB GT to the fleet if the coastal air wouldn’t melt the poor thing down to its tires. Save the special cars for the special drives. For the rest of it, there’s my Crosstrek.

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark us.

The post L.A. forced me to stop daily-driving my classics—maybe, for the best appeared first on Hagerty Media.

The Pebble Beach Tour d’Elegance, founded in 1998 by Craig Davis, addresses the perception that all concours cars are merely “trailer queens” or museum pieces. The Tour serves as an opportunity for spectators to see these automotive treasures in motion.

And does it ever. It’s a rolling car show arguably unequalled by any other such event in the U.S.

The Tour is now is presented by Rolex and is an essential part of Pebble Beach Concours, and open to all entrants.

The Tour is included in Monterey Car Week, held on August 12-21, which is a whirlwind of auto shows, concours, auto memorabilia shows, VIP parties, collector car auctions, vintage racing and new car reveals from luxury manufacturers that started in 1950, having grown into an international gathering of automotive fanatics orbiting the Lodge at Pebble Beach on the Monterey Peninsula.

The Concours, the crown jewel of Car Week, takes place on the 18^th hole at the Pebble Beach Golf Links, lined with over 200 of the finest and provocative classic and vintage cars on the planet, rarely seen by the general public, all vying for first in class and the prestigious Best in Show award.

Craig Davis had lived in Europe and was more used to taking part in driving events than looking at them, and he brought that love of driving to The Tour, which is an 80-mile cruise starting at the Pebble Beach Equestrian Center, traveling the gorgeous 17-Mile Drive and Highway 1 to Big Sur, where they turn around and head back to the Center.

To put it all into context, Concours chairman Sandra Button noted, on its tenth anniversary, “The Tour is an integral part of the Concours. It underscores the fact the Concours is a competition between cars—and cars were created to be driven.”

One of my favorite locations along the route is when the automotive treasures motor across the engineering wonder, the Bixby Bridge. The moving car parade was viewed by hundreds of spectators that lined the highway devouring the string of cars cruising along the coast with the mighty ocean as a backdrop.

The highlight for me was in 2015 when the Concours honored racing driver Sir Stirling Moss, who led the Tour in a 300SL Gullwing, fitting since Moss piloted a 300SLR to the famous win in the 1955 Mille Miglia 60 years earlier.

This year’s Concours paid tribute to the Centennial Lincoln, the Talbot Lago Grand Sport, the Alfa Romeo 8C 2300, the Otto Vu Fiats, coach-built cars by Graber, the iconic 1932 Ford hot rod, and the 100th anniversary of 24 Hours of Le Mans. Blue chip Ferraris, fabulous Siatas, 8V Fiats, Lamborghini Countaches and Maseratis trailed by pre-war racing machines and classics motored along the California coast with crashing waves complementing the purr of classic cars. This year the lunch stop in Carmel-By-The-Sea and the lap around WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca were cancelled, which was disappointing, but there was plenty left to enjoy.

In all, a glorious event, a true bucket list item for every automotive enthusiast. We hope you enjoy the following photos.

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark us.

The post Gallery: The Pebble Beach Tour is a cavalcade of automotive royalty appeared first on Hagerty Media.

A Corvette summer has its merits for some, but all classic car enthusiasts eventually long for an endless one to enjoy their vintage vehicle without the stresses of freezing wind, frustrating snow, and deadly salt. But sometimes the driving season drags into a long, hot summer, so we asked you for tips on how to keep yourself as cool as possible when driving your classic in the sunny months. And here’s what you came up with.

Timing is everything

Community user 69BirdofPrey suggests that we cruise in our classics in the morning, before the sun has the time to bake everything underneath it. Good advice, but there’s more to it, because one should “keep an eye on the weather if it’s triple digits out, and you have to be in stop-and-go traffic.” There truly is nothing worse than getting stuck in traffic in a vehicle without air conditioning (or with inadequate A/C), and 69BirdofPrey believes that seeking alternative routes can help keep the wind in your sails. Literally.

4-40 air conditioning

Similar to 69BirdofPrey’s advice, be it in a sedan or a vintage coupe with roll-down rear windows, Community user mkvi30 suggests an alternative air-conditioning system: Roll four windows down and drive at least 40 mph. That strategy has worked for decades, so why not give it a shot in 2022?

Long-lost window technology

Speaking of windows, Ken_L reminds us that removing t-tops definitely helps. After all, can heat stay in a cabin if most of the roof is gone? His C3 Corvette came with a disabled HVAC system, so he’s currently installing a Vintage Air conversion kit. It’s not done yet, but it can wait until winter: Work stopped, and the t-tops subsequently got popped off. An honorable mention goes to longtime commentator DUB6 when he added three brilliant words to the thread: “Wing windows, baby!”

Buy stuff to keep your cool

Believe it or not, but yours truly tries to avoid interjecting his thoughts into According to You articles, but I am somewhat proud of the things I’ve done to avoid the summer heat in my classic machines. Aside from parking under a shady tree while keeping the side windows cracked open (if weather permits), here’s a quick list of things you can buy and install for a cooler motoring summer:

• Use windshield visors when parked outside, preferably the well-insulated and reflective ones.
  • Use another visor on the rear if you have a truck with very little space between the headrests and the rear window.
• Add clear ceramic window tinting on your windshield, and tint the rest of the windows with clear or dark tint.
• Install heat resistant-insulation on the inside of the roof’s sheetmetal, be it the sound-muting stuff with a metal layer, the insulating foam, or both.

Just do it

Sometimes you need to dive in head-first to learn what’s really at stake. Community user ScaryLarryPants believes that summer is absolutely the best time to drive your classic, “because when it breaks down, you’ll have the maximum amount of daylight hours available to ponder your predicament.” I absolutely agree … provided you packed enough fluids to sustain you before the tow truck driver arrives and takes you home.

Now that you are armed with the information to make your summer jaunt in a classic vehicle far more palatable, go out there and do it!

The post According to You: 5 ways to beat the summer heat in your classic appeared first on Hagerty Media.

He slammed the shifter into second and rolled on the throttle, feeling the engine pull hard. The back end went a little light as the tires lost traction, and he responded by tipping into the throttle a little more, as if daring the car to break loose. He wanted to forget all about the argument, but the words were still bouncing around in his head.

Hard shift to third. The white lines on the road picked up speed, as they do, 10 feet long and 30 feet apart. It was somewhere around 65 mph that the dotted lines filled and then left his peripheral vision, faster than he could tap his index finger.

This was escape velocity for him. Beyond the 15 mph that had run as a teenager, faster than the thirty-or-so miles per hour of a horse, speed enough to flee. The engine pulled strong. He could feel his tension fading slowly. The process served to calm him in a way he didn’t need to understand in order to rely on.

Here, he was in control. Back there, the words piled up on top of each other, so many, until they just became noise. With fight or flight, he always chose the latter. Attacking constituted a crime, and he wouldn’t take it that far again. But they always seemed to want to drive him to aggression.

Age had tempered his responses, and these days, he chose to escape, not engage. Break speed limits, not a jaw. Better to fight inertia and headwind than flesh and bone. When he got to the point where he wanted to hit someone, he hit the gas instead.

The control there was intoxicating. Nothing happened without his input, and unlike people, the reactions were always predictable. The fingertip inputs at the wheel, the placement of tires at each apex, the smooth acceleration from each corner, all at his bidding. He had bought the Facel II from Ava Gardner’s estate, then restored it—nursed it back to health and tuned it to his liking. The honor of its creation belonged to a group of workers far away and long ago in France, at a long-dead company that had earned his allegiance by the shear audacity of its creations.

But he had taken their dream and made it his own. Somehow uniquely his. Something he controlled.

He shifted into fourth and rolled into the throttle again. The V-8 hissed as the secondaries opened, drinking in fuel as the revs climbed. His thoughts wandered, as they often did in these moments. With the top down, the stars and a half moon were visible just above the wrap-around windshield. He remembered the first time he had ever noticed that moon shape, as a child, then coming to realize that the moon was always full, an optical illusion, the earth’s shadow changing its shape in an orbit each night. The bright side is familiar and easy to recognize, the shady side harder to discern.

His mind went back to the argument. How he wished everything was clear and visible but seldom was. The hidden parts are what cause the trouble, the confusion. The shadowing temporary, but then a dark side that you never see.

The tach reached mid-range power in fourth gear and he settled down. The angry words felt more distant. He brought them back up, but they had fallen to mere mumbles, only the moment of boil remaining. He remembered the switch flipping in his head, the moment he said “Screw it,” and walked out, straight to his car. At that moment, nothing had felt more right, more fully justified.

His mind ran through a brief systems check. Gas tank: full. Oil pressure: gauge holding steady, three bar. Tires: full of tread. He could make it to the coast before he ran out of gas. The credit card in his pocket could fund a few dive motels along the way, enough for maybe a week’s worth of driving … it was tempting.

The argument had started at two in the morning. At 2:45, he had bolted out to the garage. The engine’s rumble and the pull of acceleration was a salve on his psyche, calming him down. The night air was full of dew, the air spilling over the windshield misting the inside of the glass and those chrome-rimmed gauges.

He didn’t have a rag, so he pried off his right shoe and pulled off his sock to wipe down the glass—a trick he once saw an Army medic do, when they needed a tourniquet. He turned his dash lights off and rolled into the throttle again, bare foot on the pedal. He could feel the engine’s vibration through the pedal, feel its heat through the steel pad, feel the pedal squeak as he pressed it deeper. The wood wheel was warm to the touch, the lacquered hood alternating reflections between moonshine and clouds. They flew into the dark curves as one. No radio, no dash lights, no pain.

A familiar section came into view. The road dropped downward for half a mile, into a vale. The temperature changed as he descended, the air heavy and humid, with a peaty smell. The air brushed against the back of his neck and billowed his shirt sleeves. The narrow bridge at the bottom of the hill became illuminated by his high beams, the concrete sharp contrast against the black two-lane. It looked like an aircraft carrier floating in the dark.

He centered up on the bridge and hit the entry at full song, two tons of steel and aluminum compressing the suspension to the bump stops. The chassis shuddered under the load. He anticipated the recovery, and as the car rebounded on of its springs, the steering went light, as if the front wheels were aquaplaning. He loosened his fingers on the wheel.

“Okay, girl…” he said, in a tone both calming and pleading at the same time. As the Facel’s dampers clamped the oscillation, she settled down and shot into the darkness on the other side of the bridge.

He decided to play the navigation game his Dad called, “Deak Reckoning.” You drive west for 40 minutes, then take the first right turn north that you see. Then you go north for 20 minutes until you are “gutenlost,” as his Dad used to say, in his guttural and mocking German accent, borrowed from a black-and-white war film. From that point, the challenge was to use dead reckoning to get back home: no maps, no GPS, no asking for help. A fun game, which they played when he was a boy.  He pulled a stopwatch from his glovebox and clicked it alive. He thought about how much he missed his dad.

Forty minutes later, he was deep into the country, no streetlights and few crossroads. As the stopwatch reached the mark, he began looking for a right-hand turn. It took about a mile, but a narrow two-lane appeared, fading into the distance on the right.

He stopped the car at the intersection and shut the engine down, climbing out. He lit a cigarette and leaned against a front fender, pulling a long drag. The car ticked and clinked as it cooled, a deep rumble as the cooling system tried to equilibrate.

He walked around the car. Who were those men who created this, he thought, what drove them? Not a bad angle from any view. Was this a lost art these days, with roads full of shapes like athletic shoes?

He ground out the remains of the cigarette and climbed back in, firing up the engine. He reset the timer for 20 minutes. Corn fields were to the right, ripe in the late summer, the tassles standing proud against the night. To his left was a deep wood, and between shifts, he could hear the cicadas and tree frogs trilling their songs. The peace of his baseline had returned, and he was once again dancing on a dark back road, in his happy place.

As the timer clicked past the second target, he looked up for the North Star, the glow of the city on the horizon, took his bearings—now, to find a way back.  The angry words had dissipated, replaced with commitment and devotion.

Maybe that was the point of the navigation game: To make you feel so lost that you yearn for home, regardless of what you left there.

The post What If? Facel Vega Facel II Convertible appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Welcome, Drivers.

This newsletter is for people who love to drive and who share Hagerty’s purpose to preserve driving and car culture for future generations. Think of it as your all-in-one, weekly source of everything you need to know about the world of cars—from inspirational stories to collector-car sales to industry gossip—as curated by a lifetime car geek. I’ll comb the automotive landscape for the most interesting and relevant news and opinions and provide links and my own commentary. I’ll also keep an eye on autonomous vehicle development and its potential future impact on us car enthusiasts.

While I would not mind an autonomous pilot myself from time to time, I am first and foremost a driver. As Editor-in-Chief of Hagerty Media, I work with dozens of passionate car folks who love producing engaging material across all mediums: web, print, social, video, podcasts, etc. It sure is a different world from when I started at Car and Driver in 1995, isn’t it? After CD, I was the Automotive Editor for Popular Mechanics magazine before a stint as Editor-in-Chief of Road & Track, and then I joined Hagerty in 2016. The one thing I’ve had in common at all my gigs is that I have no off-hours from cars. I spend nearly every waking minute either working on cars; driving cars, whether around town or, my favorite, long road trips; racing; or passing on my enthusiasm to my three kids. Your humble narrator is fathoms deep in the car thing.

Today, two things are on my mind: A recent sale of a used Volkswagen and a podcast in which Elon Musk said Tesla cars will have Level IV autonomous capability in 2023. I think the two are related. Let me explain.

That VW was a far-from-pristine 1984 GTI that sold for nearly $20 grand on Bring a Trailer. I love GTIs and have owned three. I bought the first in 1990, a 1983 model for $2300, while I was an engineering student at Lehigh University. The time I spent bombing around Bucks County, Pennsylvania, back roads rather than studying shaped my life. My memories of those years are so rose colored, I bought and restored a second GTI just to drive to my 20th college reunion.

For all its charms, that original GTI was basically an upgraded economy car. Worse, those early GTIs were built at a western Pennsylvania factory that was shuttered for a variety of reasons, one of them being poor quality. That second GTI, although freshly restored, was a buzzy, slow little thing. I quickly sold it, never imagining that it would soon be worth tens of thousands of dollars or about the same as the underappreciated Subaru BRZ.

The classic-car market is indeed hot right now, as detailed in this Hagerty article. There are various reasons behind the rise in classic-car values—Gen Xers now have money to spend on nostalgia, the pandemic prompted a general awareness that we’re all not going to live forever, and more—but in my mind the biggest driver is what Musk, and others, are up to: Driverless cars.

While today few agree with automotive executive Bob Lutz’s prediction that driving will be outlawed altogether, the number of engaging new cars is shrinking even while autonomous technology is progressing. Level IV means a car can operate with no human input within defined areas. The technology required, as Musk explained, is fascinating.

That said, more people realize that this technological change might mean the loss of something valuable. Therefore, there’s a renewed rush toward what we call “analog” cars, or machines with few or no electronic driver aids. This is good. It means people aren’t so in love with their smartphones that they’ve forgotten all the richness cars can offer. Here at Hagerty, we know this intrinsically. Heck, we even wrote a book about it. Here’s hoping the $20 grand GTI means many others agree.

Thanks for reading. See you next week.

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The post Never Stop Driving #1: Used VWs and autonomous cars appeared first on Hagerty Media.

It’s the sort of road trip that any group of car nuts would conjure over late-night beers: The longest contiguous route in America. Key West, Florida, to Deadhorse, Alaska. Tom Cotter is no stranger to long road trips, but this 7000-mile odyssey has the Barn Find Hunter more excited than ever.

Beginning today, Cotter and photographer Michael Alan Ross are hitting the road to find what Cotter calls “the heart of America.”

Cotter’s road-trip rolodex reads like a greatest hits album. He’s piloted a 1926 Ford Model T across the entire Lincoln Highway: Times Square in Manhattan all the way to the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. He regularly takes his 1939 Ford Woodie Wagon across swathes of the states in search of dusty treasures in Hagerty’s beloved video series, Barn Find Hunter. He’s written several road-trip books on the grand adventures along the way—perhaps you’ve read some of them.

For his latest endeavor, he won’t be driving a classic car. Instead, Cotter and Ross will rely on two modern reinventions of legendary nameplates: A four-door version of Ford’s new Bronco (in Outer Banks trim) and a shiny new Airstream Basecamp 16X, each graciously provided by the manufacturer.

“This [route] has been on my mind for five years at least,” says Cotter. “The question was always … what kind of car? I thought maybe I’d buy an ’80s Corvette, or maybe I buy a car on Craigslist in Florida and then sell it in Alaska.

“But then I decided, let me take the car out of the question—the potential breakdowns and stuff—and let’s concentrate more on the country instead of the automobile.”

They may not be vintage, but a Bronco and an AirStream still turn heads and start conversations. “I have a Cobra, I have Shelbys, I have Cunninghams—all sorts of amazing cars,” Cotter says. “I have never gotten as much attention as I get with this Bronco and with this Airstream. Nobody is afraid to come up and talk about it.”

His quest to find the heart of America centers on avoiding the interstate system. Cotter believes that along the two-lane roads and quieter parts of the country, there are still stories to be heard and celebrated.

“I’m hoping to meet Americans who are seldom met,” he says. “Americans who live off the grid—and I don’t mean that digitally, I just mean Americans who don’t live near big cities and interstate highways. With all the conflict going on in the United States, I’m hoping that by the time I get to Alaska, I’ll have found that there’s more that binds us together as a country than separates us.”

And that’s not the only noble part of his quest. Cotter and Ross have partnered with Vintage Racers for Rescues, a 501 (c)(3) non-profit foundation that helps raise money for an animal rescue shelter. They’ll be taking per-mile donations from those interested in getting involved, with all proceeds going to the non-profit. If you’re inclined, even a penny per mile will have a large impact in helping this foundation offset the costs of sheltering and caring for animals in search of a forever home.

Cotter has plenty of experience in America’s last frontier. He once drove 2000-plus miles in an original 289 Cobra on Alaska’s paved roads, temporarily becoming famous when a nosy bear clawed its way into the precious roadster overnight to score some Fig Newtons left in the cabin by his co-pilot. Cotter was quick to note that no such snacks would be left unattended this time around.

Interested in following along as Cotter and Ross make this great trip? Be sure to follow @thebarnfindhunter on Instagram, where the duo will be posting daily updates.

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If the media agrees on one thing, it’s that it will beg to differ. So it was at the launch of the BMW Z8, in 2000. After driving it for the first time, Autocar concluded, “Hard to think of a surer recipe for success”. Shortly after, evo was scathing to the point that it asked, “Why did BMW build this car?”.

Who was right?

Before slipping behind the wheel and attempting to answer that question, from the comfortable perspective of 23 years of told-you-so hindsight, let’s rewind the VHS tape to 1993, and a glitzy weekend of fine wines, tasting menus and executive backslapping, as the BMW board gathered to pay its collective best wishes to Eberhard von Kuenheim, the departing chief executive of BMW.

Kuenheim was an engineer by training, and took the reins of BMW in 1970, transforming it from a company numbering 23,000 staff, to one with more than 70,000 employees by the time of his departure, and molding it into the giant “premium player” we know today.

The venue for the farewell was the Chateau de la Messardiere in Saint-Tropez, a 19^th century chateau with five-star elegance and rooms that go for several thousand pounds an evening, today. Nestled in the hills, about a 15 minute stroll from the waters of the Mediterranean, the “thank you” weekend included a range of historic BMWs on display, including a 507 from the late ’50s.

Over a glass of the very finest Dom Pérignon champagne, Bernd Pischetsrieder – who was to succeed Kuenheim in the top job – and Wolfgang Reitzle, who led product development and had assumed he would be recommended for the top job by Kuenheim, walked around the 507, ran a hand over its curves and slid down into the driver’s seat, before concluding that BMW should build a modern interpretation of the rare roadster (just 252 were made).

Even before the first meeting had been held or a memo circulated, the Z8 was a passion project, with all the positives and negatives that brings. After all, it takes a brave soul in product planning or sales and marketing to stand up and announce to the two most important people at BMW: you’re stupid and you don’t know what you’re doing.

When Chris Bangle, BMW’s design director got the nod to start work on the 507-inspired project, it was Henrik Fisker who volunteered. As Fisker would later recall, “So I remember the design chief came back and said, ‘Would anybody like to take a stab at this? You know, do a model on what the 507 could look like today’. Similar to how a Porsche 911 evolved over time, how would the 507 look if we produced it today? So I start working on this project, and instead of making the car kinda look like a 507, I decided to make something entirely new that still had heritage. It was summertime, and everyone was on vacation and I volunteered to stay behind and model it as a ‘no promises’ design exercise.

“I only had five engineers working with me. It wasn’t even officially a project, so we had absolutely no restraints. That’s why the design could be so pure, because it didn’t go through the traditional channels,” adds Fisker. “When we showed it to the board they immediately green lit it without really knowing how we were going to make it. We had to create a whole new platform, which was very exciting as that gave me an opportunity to keep the proportions of the car. It was just decided that this was going to be the ultimate BMW at the time.”

Reitzle was right that an upmarket brand like BMW needed a flagship car like the Z8. At the time of the weekend in Saint-Tropez, those members of the board concerned with such things would have been only too aware that drivers seeking luxury trinkets were turning to Aston Martin, Ferrari and even Mercedes, with its SL.

The absence of a platform that Fisker alluded to was solved in much the same way that Lotus and Renault went about creating platforms for their Elise and Spider. A bespoke aluminum chassis, made using large, extrusion-pressed beams between which sat high-strength aluminum panels, was married to aluminum bodywork, while much of the suspension (multi-link at the rear) was also made from the same material.

To this, BMW fitted the 5-liter V8 from the E39-generation M5, plus its six-speed manual Getrag gearbox (but not the limited-slip differential) and added big brakes from the 750i V12. The roof was electrically powered (but had to be manually pulled closed for the final seal) and, because it only had a plastic rear window, it folded away oh-so-neatly behind the roll-over bars. Throw in one of the most striking interiors this side of the then-new Audi TT, plus no small amount of chrome-covered bling, and it’s little wonder BMW felt confident enough to charge £80,000 ($98,615) when it was sold as a left-hand drive-only-model in the UK.

With a curb weight of 1585kg (3494 pounds), it was said to weigh 150kg (330 pounds) less than the M5 saloon. All well and good, but that’s only slightly less than a V12-powered DB7 Vantage Volante (1622kg, 3576 pounds) and some way behind the (2+2 but six-cylinder) 911 Carrera Cabriolet (1395kg, 3075 pounds).

Needless to say, the retro flavor of the Z8’s design proved divisive. Some loved BMW for celebrating one of the greatest-looking sports cars of all time; others criticized the company for failing to showcase the innovative aluminum construction with an equally modern look. As ever, it’s subjective, but while out and about with the Z8 you see here, from BMW UK’s heritage fleet, the attention, camera phones and comments suggest that this is a rarely-seen car that people can’t get enough of.

The first time I approach the Z8, it’s 6:30 am on a Sunday and I’m off to the most recent Bicester Scramble event. You can draw your own conclusions, but for what it’s worth, I think the design has aged better than its contemporaries. Its rivals – even a Ferrari 360 Spider – have a mass-market vibe about them. The Z8 in contrast feels like the boutique product it was, and with little more than 100 in the UK, seeing one in the wild is an occasion.

In the same way that its rarity somehow skews your view of it, it seems to skew values. A concours example of a Z8 is worth an average of almost £200,000 ($246,520), according to the Hagerty Price Guide. The very best DB7 Vantage Volante is about £50,000 ($61,630), a 911 Carrera Cabriolet of the same vintage half again. Even the best Ferrari 360 Spider is around £70,000 ($86,275) to £80,000 ($98,600), based on a scan of the classifieds. Whether you bought a Z8 back in the day as a thing to enjoy driving or a speculative purchase, it has dramatically outperformed its peers when it comes to any cold, calculated definition of return on investment.

But what of the return that comes from enjoying a Z8? The key slides into an ignition barrel that’s placed where you’d expect a rev counter to sit, a starter button is just below this, while the rev counter, speedo, fuel and water temp dials are in the center of the dashboard. Pretty much everything you can see and touch in the cabin is bespoke to the Z8, and as you fiddle around with the switchgear it’s difficult to imagine how the project ever broke into the black for BMW. Set against the piano-black finish throughout the cabin you could be forgiven for thinking that you could pluck a chord on the steering wheel’s harp-string-like, thin alloy spokes.

Thankfully, the seating position of the left-hand drive Z8, and pedal arrangement, is good, so there are no problems getting comfortable, even if that expansive bonnet feels daunting at first, especially as you edge the £200,000 ($246,520) machine out of a driveway or t-junction.

The V8 initially feels like a pussycat, pulling smoothly and eagerly from less than 1000rpm, even in sixth gear, but as the revs build so the Z8’s character changes. It is far more vocal than the M5 ever was, sitting somewhere in the middle ground between a TVR Griffith and Chevrolet Corvette – especially with the roof down as you wind it past 3000 rpm and venture toward the 7000 rpm red line – and the floor-hinged throttle response is a delight when in Sport (frankly, Sport should be the default setting).

And boy oh boy is it fast. When evo ran the numbers on a Z8, in late 2000, it hit 60 mph in 4.8 seconds and 100 mph in 11.1, while its in-gear acceleration was equally impressive. Once past 4000 rpm the engine is really singing, but even when pottering through a village the rumble from the standard exhaust will put a smile on your face.

Where the Z8 falters is its low to medium-speed ride. It doesn’t feel settled until you’re really motoring, or on a smooth surface. Yet this is despite the structure being terrifically rigid and flex-free, and is no doubt in part due to run-flat tires.

Find an elusive stretch of smooth road, as we did, switch off the DSC – which you don’t have to rely on as there’s enough feel to complement the copious traction – and you have to carry a lot of speed to push the wide, 245 and 275 tires past the limit of adhesion. Then it becomes a game of trust as you feel your way through body roll, grip and slip, play around with the throttle to try and balance the chassis, and then pin it to the floor to unsettle the back in a way that should come naturally to a V8-powered, rear-wheel drive roadster.

It doesn’t quite come naturally, though. Sometimes the tires grip, sometimes the inside wheel spins up, sometimes both will let go and – for a fleeting moment – the big Z8 comes alive. But finding that sweet spot is frustratingly difficult in a car with such an exotic specification. It hints that, because of the nature of the project, the Z8 didn’t get the level of fine-tuning that had been lavished upon the M5 and imminent E46 M3.

On fast, open and smooth roads, such as I encountered across Oxfordshire at 7 am on a Sunday, it is a truly glorious thing that brightens your day despite its flaws. It’s also – as mundane as this may sound – surprisingly practical, with a comfortable cabin, plenty of stowage space and a properly-useful size boot. And to be able to arrive at an event such as the Bicester Scramble and see the reaction it receives from car enthusiasts suggests there are about 100 drivers in the UK who, hopefully, realize just how lucky they are to be custodians of such a car.

It might have its flaws, but by swerving the usual due diligence and research and development processes, Bernd Pischetsrieder and Wolfgang Reitzle brought the world something that it otherwise may never have seen. For that, surely, we should be grateful.

Via Hagerty UK

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Justin Bieber likes hockey. Who knew? Well, apparently a lot of people in Toronto, as the Canadian-born singer is a regular at Maple Leafs games. But fellow Canadian slap-shotter Trevor Johnson didn’t know until a few years ago, when he was playing in the Italian national league. A friend approached him about setting up a private hockey game for Bieber, who was passing through on tour. This led to a side gig for Johnson organizing Bieber’s private games, which involves renting a rink, finding players, and booking rooms and catering wherever the entertainer is traveling. That led Johnson to another job they don’t tell you about in high-school career counseling: organizing car rallies.

Which sounds like a pretty fun way to prove your parents wrong about never amounting to anything because you like cars (or hockey) more than studying geometry and French. At least, it is if you enjoy spending hours negotiating with hotels that don’t appreciate their parking lots getting oiled, being on 24-hour call for wealthy folk who are used to getting their way, having contingencies at the ready for a gaggle of cars that might be a century old, and generally ensuring that a weeklong traveling roadshow with a million possible disaster triggers runs on time and without incident. “So far, no cops, no lawsuits,” says Johnson.

He had no idea that hockey would lead to Bieber, which would lead to old-car rallies until 2018, when another friend asked Johnson if he wanted to help with a 100-years-of-Bentley tour being run by a friend of mine, Craig Ekberg, who has put together several Bentley rallies on the West Coast. Ekberg and his co-organizers wanted to step up the rally’s game, with fancier hotels, finer food, gift bags for the co-drivers, and other accoutrements of the good life. “They’re paying you to drive their cars on public roads, which they could do for free, so you need to make it pretty damn cool,” Johnson says. The Bentley run was a hit, and it led to Johnson founding his own travel and events company, the Luxury Rally Club, in 2019.

Since then, and despite the pandemic, he has organized rallies along the old Route 66 and staged a run of 50 Lamborghini Countaches during the 2021 Monterey Car Week. He’s currently working on one-make rallies for the Mercedes-Benz 300SL and Porsche Carrera GT. The challenges can be daunting. Just finding cars with owners willing to pay $5000 to $15,000 to come along is his biggest task. “A lot of these guys don’t have Instagram; they can be hard to reach,” says Johnson. Another is picking the right regions and routes.

Do the job long enough and you’re going to see some stuff. Like the guy on the Countach rally who didn’t know how to put gas in his own car just minutes before the start. Or the Bentley owner who overslept and then loudly demanded that the organizers of the illustrious Quail Motorsports Gathering rip down a fence to let him in late (they did). And the mid-’60s Corvette Sting Ray that plowed into a feral hog at speed near the Grand Canyon, hosing the driver’s wife with pig innards. “She was actually pretty cool about it,” insists Johnson, though we might need a second source on that.

The point of telling you this: There are ways to be involved in and make a living from the car world that may not be obvious to young people of modest backgrounds who wonder if they’ll ever get to see a Ferrari in person. At Pebble Beach, at Scottsdale, and at every car auction and gathering that is more than a cars and coffee, paid staff make the wheels turn. It’s a business that runs on relationships, not on résumés or college degrees, meaning it rewards initiative more than much of the working world. And those relationships often forge best in buzzing auction tents or in hot hotel parking lots or out on lonely roads where an owner needs a flashlight held while he futzes with a Ferrari.

For most of us, this is a hobby; for people like Trevor Johnson, it’s a job—and by the looks of it, a pretty fun one that I wish someone had told me about in high school.

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Compared to the sweetness of summer, winter driving and its icy, slow-going is not everyone’s idea of fun. Slippery and fast-changing conditions make the cold season the most dangerous for motorists. Luckily, with a measured degree of care and attention, you can beat the odds and arrive for spring ready to cruise. Here are six quick and easy pieces of advice to keep top of mind as you hit the roads in the next few months.

Check your battery

Car batteries store and distribute power based on a chemical reaction inside the battery case. This chemical reaction slows as the temperature drops, especially if the battery was not the healthiest before the frost. That means a car that started strong in the heat will give you just a rapid set of clicks when you turn the key in the cold.

Most chain auto repair stores will give your battery a load test for free, or you can connect a multimeter to your battery and watch it while a friend cranks the engine. If the voltage drops below 10 you should have the battery professionally tested, as it is likely near its last legs.

Clear off your roof

This seems like something that should go without saying, but clean off all of your car. That means the roof, too. The snow on top of your car does not inhibit your vision as you drive, but as it blows off the people behind you can be left in a wispy blizzard. Even worse and more dangerous: as your interior heats up it will melt the underside of ice and snow on the roof, introducing the risk of hazardous projectiles. When the right crosswind hits, it could unleash a giant frozen slab that can easily shatter a windshield. Not cool.

If you have a tall vehicle like a truck or SUV, keep a small ladder and an extendable broom or scraper handy to make removal easier. Yes, it’s annoying when you’re late for work, but being lazy about it could easily cost somebody their life. Chalk it up to the cost of doing business with winter driving.

Winter tires (or at least an air pressure check)

Here in Michigan, winter tires are all but necessary for safe and confident driving. Between the optimized tread and unique rubber compound that helps cars steer and stop better in cold temperatures (as well as ice and snow), dedicated winter tires put all-seasons to shame. Of course, much of the U.S. doesn’t see temperatures that require such measures. If you find that true winter tires don’t make sense for your situation (sustained low temperatures above about 40 degrees F), you should at least take the time to check your air pressure as the mercury drops. Every ten degrees in temp fall can amount to about 1 psi drop in tire pressure. That means a slow swing from 100-degree summer days to a frosty night five months later can put you at least 7-8 psi off. That’s enough to hurt handling. Grab a reliable pressure gauge and stay on top of tire inflation during every season, but especially when it gets cold.

Extra stopping distance

Modern cars have amazing brakes, but without traction those brakes are worthless. Ice can be hard to spot during even during clear-visibility days, and the last time you want to find that out is when the 18-wheeler in front of you slams on its brakes. Give yourself a little extra space when it comes to following distance, particular behind larger, heavier vehicles. Don’t forget to give a little extra space pulling out into traffic, too; traction works both ways, and a little wheelspin could put that cross-traffic right on your bumper since you aren’t accelerating as expected.

Fresh wipers and fluid

Winter means falling precipitation, and that means grime getting kicked up from the road onto your windshield. Nothing is more important than vision and thus having you washer fluid topped up and fresh wiper blades is a wise investment. No one want to be looking through a streaky mess while trying to drive. Bonus tip: Rain-X or any similar water repellent coatings not only make your wipers more efficient but also makes the windshield easier to scrape when ice freezes to it overnight. Which leads us to …

Clean off your windows—all of them

When it’s cold and you have places to be, scraping the windshield and driver-side window seems like enough to get you there, right? Maybe, but it’s not worth the risk. Modern rollover standards have created larger and larger pillars that end up creating sizable blindspots even in the best conditions. Leaving your driveway with less vision than normal is only a recipe for disaster. Take the extra 45 seconds to brush off everything.

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“Italian tuna sounds good,” I said to my husband, Jeff, as I shifted up—quite smoothly, I have to say—into fourth.

I love driving my 1974 Tundra Green MG on the back roads between our house and Guido’s Fresh Marketplace in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Canaan Southfield Road is winding. Traffic’s usually light—not too many intimidating SUVs bearing down on me. It’s a perfect 30-minutes-each-way trip. And Jeff, who typically has been allergic to food shopping throughout our decades of marriage, is happy to join me—as long as we take the MG.

“I’ll get breadsticks, olives, white beans, some of that nice goat cheddar, and the Italian tuna,” I said. “You can wait in the car.”

“It’s not Italian tuna,” Jeff said, nodding in approval as I downshifted and made the turn onto Cross Road in third—not second—gear, which he’s been encouraging me to do more of. “It’s Italian tuneup!”

You might know what an Italian tuneup is, but I—children’s book publisher, new classic car owner, and avoider of anything that sounds even vaguely like an ethnic slur—did not. But I know now: It’s a slang term for attempting to restore engine performance by driving a car to its redline, which theoretically flushes out carbon deposits.

I also know that when Jeff starts talking about Italian tuneups, it’s his way of telling me I’m shifting too soon. Revving it high just feels too aggressive to me, like I’m pushing too hard. But I’m listening to Jeff—and hearing him—and I’m going to keep working on my shifting to get it right. Because I love this car and everything about it—including the fact that Jeff (a 1971 Jaguar XKE owner) and I have started an interesting new chapter in our marriage.

Last Mother’s Day, Jeff bought the MG for me from a friend who bought it from its original owners, two women in Tennessee. The bill of sale included a note: “Goodbye Fun Car.”

And it is fun. I get so many compliments out on the road, and for the first time in my life, I’m enjoying the journey as much as the destination. The best part? Jeff and I have so many new things to discuss and rehash and obsess over. Long married life is great, for sure, but after a few decades of it, there’s often not a lot of new ground to cover. But he’s always interested and inspired when we’re talking about my latest trip in the MG.

It’s undeniable, Jeff and I have a ménage à trois going with this MG. She is the best kind of new partner. She’s beautiful and ageless, and she is not ashamed of going topless; she’s always up for a new adventure and is fun to be around. We three share a love of the open road; of driving for the fun of it; of going to the supermarket for an Italian tuneup, and maybe even picking up some Italian tuna for dinner.

The post In my MGB, Italian tuna always hits the spot appeared first on Hagerty Media.

The 1949 Buick Special and the 1969 Porsche 911 weren’t marketplace competitors. They weren’t really designed to appeal to the same people, and you don’t often find them in the same collections. In fact, they seem to come from entirely different planets, so much so that it’s hard to believe that the Buick was just a 20-year-old used car when the Porsche was new, as common on the roads then as a 2001 Buick Regal might be today.

No doubt you’re dying to know why we threw them in a story together. It started (as it often does) with a debate among coworkers. One side: Our boss, Larry Webster, he of the 911 owners club, took the position that it’s more fun to drive swiftly on a road trip, to pleasure in the delights of a well-cut apex and an expertly executed downshift while speeding along excellent, undulating roads at the helm of a precision-engineered machine.

The other side (your author, he of the somewhat-grayer Buick owners club) stated that a road journey is about more than driving, that it’s about experiencing what the route has to offer along the way, about reading the signs and smelling the air and listening to the sounds of the country. All of which is impossible if the landscape is whisking past you as you laser-focus on the next hairpin. The two sides were intractable. Larry insisted that the whole point of automotive evolution was to achieve speed with comfort and safety; that speed equals time, the most precious and irreplaceable commodity of them all, and thus speed is a pure good. Especially when wrapped in the right package, such as a vintage Porsche.

I, on the other hand, argued that all you can see at speed is blur and smashed bugs. “The world has gotten to be in too much of a hurry,” I told Larry during a Zoom call last fall. So we put our cars where our mouths were and convened in Southern California in February for a tour of the middle coastal counties, where the surf laps onto lonely beaches and where pinot and grenache and syrah grapes grow in neatly combed rows on the slopes of the green and brown hills.

GM’s famous styling chief, Harley Earl, is said to have told his design team in 1938 as they were tasked with developing a dream car of the future, “I just want a little semi-sports car, a kind of convertible.” They called it the Y Project, a play on the “X” designation that aircraft makers used for their experimental machines, but Earle kept referring to it as “that Y job,” and the name stuck. Long and wide, the Y-Job did indeed look futuristic compared with the contemporary cars of the era with their coffin noses, cycle fenders, and running boards. It melded the broad, triangular hood and fenders together into one sculpted form, ditched the vertical grilles then fashionable for a broad, low mouth slatted with chrome bars, shed the running boards, adorned the elongated fenders with art-deco streamer lines, and closed its hole through the air with an alluringly tapered fastback tail.

Those styling concepts went into production as the dramatically redesigned 1942 Buicks featuring “Airfoil” fenders, the “Weather Warden Venti Heater” cabin airflow system, and the “Fireball” valve-in-head straight-eight. Buick unveiled its new wares exactly 35 days before the attack on Pearl Harbor. The machine tools and stamping dies for the ’42 Buicks went into storage to await the peace.

When it came, Buick’s shrewd manager, Harlow Curtice, figured that pent-up postwar demand for new cars was close to 9 million units and that Buick would need to churn out a half-million cars per year in the immediate postwar period to maintain its prewar market share. However, persistent shortages of raw materials, as well as labor unrest, prevented Buick from achieving that lofty number, so it leaned its production toward its more profitable Super and Roadmaster lines. The lowly Special, so important to Buick’s sales in the Depression, was barely mentioned in company literature.

By late 1948, when a Mrs. Odessa Hensley walked into Woods & Vandivier Motor Sales in Franklin, Indiana, to pick up her new black 1949 Buick Model 46S Special sedanet, the postwar rush had tapered off. Hensley’s ’49 Special, the car pictured here, was a remnant, one of roughly 4000 body shells Buick had remaining of the older ’48 Specials that didn’t fit with the ’49 Supers and Roadmasters, with their freshened horizontal lines and new fender portals. Buick slammed these few remaining Specials through the plant between September and December 1948, called them ’49s, then shut down Special production for the rest of the year to make way for a grand relaunch of its entry-level model in 1950.

Thus, notwithstanding the new grille and small trim changes worked in by Buick’s postwar styling chief, Ned Nickles, the 1949 Buick I’m driving is effectively one of the last 1942 Buicks the company ever produced and the last direct descendant of the Y-Job. It was outdated even as it sat new in the showroom as Buick’s cheapest and smallest car for 1949; it also bore the dubious reputation of being the choice of widows and preachers (indeed, Hensley was a widow, her husband having died in 1931). Still, it’s hard to gaze upon the lines of this fastback Buick today and think of it as being dowdy in any way.

In fact, when the Buick is sitting next to a 1969 Porsche 911, there seems to be almost a family resemblance in the way its roof curves in one clean line down to the tail, and the side glass echoes the shape. As it happened, we had three examples of Porsche’s beloved project 901 along on our trip, including two four-cylinder 912s owned by our photographer, James Lipman, and our Hagerty cohort Logan Calkins. The Buick leading those three Porsches up State Route 154 into the hills behind Santa Barbara looked like a mama turtle at the head of a junior turtle parade.

It’s hard to imagine that the comparatively Lilliputian 911, from its earliest fetal moments as mere line drawings and sketches, was known inside the company as “the big Porsche.” But company founder Ferdinand Porsche was acutely aware that chief among the complaints of customers abandoning their 356s for other vehicles was the car’s lack of interior space. “You can’t even get a set of golf clubs in the 356,” he’s said to have grumped, and the car was not easy to get in and out of because of the rearward position of the A-pillar and door hinges.

Page through Karl Ludvigsen’s seminal four-volume Porsche history, Excellence was Expected, and you’ll see old black-and-white studio photos of the design concepts that grew out of those complaints. They show how tantalizingly close Porsche came, as early as 1959, to the final perfection that would be the 911. But originally, the proposal mandated four full seats, which would have meant a 911 with a longer, flatter roof and what might be uncharitably called a full diaper. A parallel design project to create a cheaper, 356-based two-seater to sell alongside this “large” Porsche actually got right the rear-end shape, and forces within Porsche began to push for that design to be the one product Porsche would deploy to replace the 356.

However, according to Ludvigsen, it wasn’t design factors that determined Ferdinand’s final decision to drop the larger four-seat concept in favor of the shapelier 911 that we all know and love. It was the war (again) and the Allies’ rationalizing of Germany’s postwar car industry—in which Volkswagen would build the cheap cars, Mercedes-Benz the expensive cars, Ford and Opel the middle-class vehicles, and Porsche the sports cars (with BMW, NSU, etc., only factoring in as niche oddballs). Ferdinand was as yet unwilling to upset the scheme by encroaching on a market belonging to others, a factor that obviously plays no part in today’s world of Porsche sedans and SUVs. So he stuck with his sports car project and the 911 debuted in 1964 to immediate raves.

A few years ago, our man Larry Webster hauled his ’69 911E out of a rural Michigan barn, where it had been slumbering for 30 years. The E stands for Einspritzung, denoting the Bosch mechanical fuel-injection system that Porsche put on this deluxe version of the 911 from 1969 to 1973. Larry overhauled the 2.0-liter flat-six, replaced a suspension that was tired after 95,000 miles on Midwest roads, and added Recaro seats. The rest, including its original Ossi Blue paint job and 14-inch Fuchs wheels, he left as found.

Porsche thought its 911 improved on the 356 by being bigger. Today, getting in one feels like pulling on a perfectly tailored wetsuit. Prices of these early 911s have gone kablooey precisely because they are just so right; so immediate in their responses, so comfortable over a journey, so easy to see out of, so clearly built to last, and so lovely to look at. It is a masterwork of industrial art.

Though it’s roughly the same shape, the Buick is enormous, rather leisurely to answer its helm or throttle, comfortable over a long journey only if you are traveling not in the hot season and don’t have preexisting lower back problems, and difficult to see out of. There’s a reason why drives over a hundred miles used to take two days; why Grandpa needed a Lucky Strike and a lie-down after wrestling all day with bias-ply tires, a column shifter, and drum brakes, all while dressed in gabardine and braces. But the Buick, too, is a work of industrial art that never fails to draw waves and a thumbs-up as it glides by.

After a night at a ranch up in the hollows of the Santa Ynez hills, we were awakened by the incessant gobbling of wild turkeys. We spent the morning making breakfast, listening to the turkeys (who, we were soon to discover, were crapping on our cars), and watching the chilly winter sun slowly chase the shadows from the hills. Heading out on the road, our convoy passed first through Solvang, a re-created Danish village that is the region’s reigning tourist magnet, past an ostrich farm, and into the old Coast Highway service town of Buellton, home of Pea Soup Andersen’s, an immense Tudor-style eatery with half-timbered walls and steeply sloped roofs.

Anton Andersen departed Denmark for central California in 1924 with his French wife Juliette and their son Robert, intent on following his brother, who was already settled in Solvang. The Coast Highway had recently been paved through nearby Buellton, so the family opened a roadside luncheonette called Andersen’s Electrical Café, named for its kitchen full of newfangled electrical appliances (Buellton had just received electricity in 1917). One day, Juliette decided to serve split-pea soup made from her mother’s recipe as a special, and a dynasty was born. Today, every Californian who travels the 101 through these parts knows the famous Pea Soup Andersen’s signs featuring the cartoon figures of Hap-Pea and Pea-Wee splitting peas by hand.

How much has changed. The highway department expanded the coast road to four fast-flowing lanes in 1949, but the wrecks from cars trying to cross on or turn into the intersecting State Route 246 were so frequent and horrendous that the highway was dug out and 246 made into an overpass. The last time we stopped at Andersen’s, a few years ago, the place was deserted and its famous pea soup was a watery green gruel. No wonder the business and its 3.4 acres of property are for sale.

We also saw the former Windmill Inn, a kitschy motel with a replica Danish windmill for a lobby. It was renamed the Sideways Inn a few years ago to capitalize on its role in the 2004 cinematic wine romp, Sideways, which tracks a pair of aging knuckleheads as they booze their way through an ill-fated week of debauchery and self-discovery among the area’s vineyards. The rambling roads we took out of town pass some of the wineries depicted in a film that brought fame to the region while simultaneously crashing merlot sales for a decade.

After we left Buellton behind, the Porsche disappeared with a blat of exhaust. I came round turns only to find a dissipating dust cloud hanging like a brown seraph in the streaming sunlight. Oh well, the Buick is its own kind of pleasure, just at a more relaxed tempo. It wafts along easily on a wave of straight-eight torque, the three gears of its simple transmission offering the choice of “slow,” “less slow,” and “good enough.” I may not have even exceeded the speed limit, as the doughy BFGoodrich Silvertowns are quick to squeal at the slightest hint of g-forces.

But did it matter? I saw people on small tractors working the grapes, horses frolicking behind white fences, idyllic ranch houses set beneath lovely groves of old oaks, flycatchers darting in the bushes, and red-tailed hawks perched on fence posts. Larry was driving, I was touring.

At each major turn, I found the Porsche idling impatiently, waiting for the loping Buick to catch up, then snarling off. By the time I reached Jalama Beach, where the azure Pacific meets a 150-mile stretch of the California coastline left entirely to nature because of Vandenberg Air Force Base to the north and state parkland to the south, Larry had obviously been out of his car for a while. He joked to someone that if he had been forced to drive that fabulous section in my Buick, he would be fending off serious thoughts of self-harm.

“I didn’t grow up hearing angry 911s roaring around racetracks,” Larry reflected later. “For me, this car is about the clear steering feel, the growling engine, the cantankerous shifter. It’s not fast by modern standards, so you’re constantly working the thing to stay around the speed limit. It’s involving. I’m in the pilot’s chair to take myself out of my own head. This car does that.”

All true, but the sights mentioned above, plus Pea Soup Andersen’s and the Sideways Inn, were recorded to memory precisely because there was time to do so. Thus far, Larry had no impression of our journey as anything other than a spooling ribbon of black laid through a green smudge. The title of that film, Sideways, seemed a perfect appellation for our own trip; one must take time to look sideways or much of life gets missed.

It’s hilarious that the fastback Buick was shaped to some 1940s visual conception of speed. Unlike the similarly contoured Porsche, it was a lie disguised in florid marketing tags, like Vibra-Shielded Ride, Quadraflex Coil Springs, Flex-Fit Oil Rings, Road-Rite Balance (whatever that was), and Duomatic Spark Advance. Even in its day, the Buick wasn’t considered that fast. Buick was selling the glamour of streamlining without the substance.

The Porsche 911, in contrast, was born into the Jet Age, the world of speed. The Germans invented the interstate and the conquering Yanks copied the idea with gusto, constructing more than 40,000 miles of it by 1964. Suddenly everyone needed an overdrive. And who can argue that driving fast in a vintage 911 isn’t a joy? It’s like arguing against a moonrise over the desert, or a dollop of ice cream with raspberry pie. We switched cars—briefly—and Larry’s Porsche proved it can hustle a twisting road with a nimble self-confidence, its little flat-six issuing a raspy, steel-cut wail that crescendos beautifully in each gear. It is so light and fleet and visceral that it’s hard to stand against those who claim it to be the perfect automobile.

All cars should be built with such economy and purpose to their design. Unlike the Buick, with Nickles’s signature “bombsight” hood ornament that seems to capture a rocket going supersonic, there’s no BS about the Porsche. There is exactly as much 911 as there needs to be on a road, and its Teutonic directness is its own charm. The Teutons have always had places to go, and the Porsche exists to get them there as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Larry emerged from the Buick saying, “I feel like I’m 4 feet off the road. It has a calming presence, though, forcing me to relax.” He added that he felt like Bogart in The Big Sleep or Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity. Old Buicks do that, take you right back to black-and-white and make you wonder how we got to polyester athleisure wear as a universal fashion choice.

We circled back through the northern periphery of the Santa Ynez. Except for the modern cars, the roads seemed pretty much the same as they were in the 1950s, as we passed places like the Full Moon Farm, the Seein’ Spots Farm, and the Fess Parker Winery, which played the Frass Canyon Winery in Sideways. A hulking waste-management truck was up ahead, and even that guy was in a hurry, the brakes making a banshee squeal as the driver set up for a corner like some public-service Fangio.

Everyone wants to go fast. Just look at the values of 911s against common prewar and 1940s cars today. Porsches seem to have no ceiling, while American cars are stuck in neutral or dropping, making them one of the cheaper ways to get into the old-car hobby. Nobody wants to go back to slow, and besides, a Buick never won Le Mans or was driven by Steve McQueen. But angle-park the Buick in old Los Olivos, where the shops specialize in pinots and cabernet francs and artistically blown glass, and where Mattei’s Tavern has been serving valley travelers since 1886, and you’re a veritable one-car Norman Rockwell painting. People coo over the Porsche; they take pictures of their kids in front of the Buick. Take that, Zuffenhausen!

If you’ve made it this far into this story, you’ve already realized that there is no winning this argument. It isn’t even an argument, really—it’s a meditation about the various ways to enjoy an old car out on the road. The reason we bothered is that so many people who say they like to travel are often lying. What they mean is that they like to be in other places, not travel to other places. Were it otherwise, they wouldn’t go to such extraordinary lengths to minimize the actual traveling part of travel, climbing aboard airliners with the shades drawn or merging onto endless gray straight-edges of superslab.

If there’s one thing Larry and I can agree on, it’s the most unoriginal thought you can have in a 1949 Buick or a 1969 Porsche: What America has traded for expediency is the chance to experience our country via the small roads that trace the landscape rather than the big ones that slash through it. And whether you go fast or slow, the best cars to travel in engage you with the machinery and make you work a bit for your miles. And that the best use of any such car lies well beyond the freeway exit.

1949 Buick Special Model 46S

Engine: 248-cid I-8
Power: 110 hp @ 3600 rpm
Torque: 206 lb-ft @ 2000 rpm
Weight: 3800 lb
Power-to-weight: 34.5 lb/hp
0–60 mph: 18.4 sec
Price when new: $1790
Hagerty #2-condition value: $20,300–$28,750

1969 Porsche 911E

Engine: 122- cid -6
Power: 140 hp @ 6500 rpm
Torque: 129 lb-ft @ 4500 rpm
Weight: 2250 lb
Power-to-weight: 16.1 lb/hp
0–60 mph: 7.0 sec
Price when new: $6995
Hagerty #2-condition value: $81,500–$104,500

The post Two Speed Cruise: ’49 Buick and ’69 Porsche in the battle of fast vs. slow appeared first on Hagerty Media.

April 17 was National Mustang Day, and the weather was primed for celebration in Southeast Michigan. Under a remarkably well-behaved, blue sky, Mustang Owners Club members turned out in droves to cruise in a there-and-back rally that started at Michigan Central Station in Detroit. Between 150 and 200 total Mustangs from every generation—and restricted to club participants—represented nearly every performance tier in the model’s history.

We were honored to host a coffee stop on the rally at our editorial office in Ann Arbor. When our paved parking lot could not accommodate a single Mustang more, the incoming stream of pony cars began to divert into the pockmarked, gravel-strewn lot of the body shop across the street. The influx didn’t stop, however, and soon there was a colorful, burbling traffic jam at the office turn-in. Volunteers from SE Michigan’s Mustang Owners Club dispatched to wave drivers on to the third and final stage of the rally: Ford’s Garage in Dearborn.

Maximum-attack S550 GT500s shared the parking lot with inline-six, automatic-equipped first-gen cars. Mach 1s rolled in by the handful, including the original, the SN-95 version, and the all-new machine. (Ford generously loaned us a Grabber Yellow ’21 Mach 1 for the event, and we didn’t even manage to be the only such example in attendance.) Daily drivers mixed with track-dedicated restomods. Only one pony, however, was named Bucephalus.

“This is technically the only car I’ve owned with my name on the title,” says Laura Pasicznyk, a one-time professional cyclist who grew up outside of Philly and now works as an X-ray tech for the University of Michigan Hospital. She acquired the ’69 coupe in 1987 when her brother needed a parts car for his ’69 Mustang (and also needed his sister’s help to fund the purchase). The Mustang, which she dubbed Bucephalus, became her college car and, even after that, her only car. “I’ve never known life without a Mustang in the garage,” she says. “I feel very lucky.”

The coupe had the base 302 V-8, a three-speed auto, and no air conditioning. “It’s the workhorse,” Pasicznyk says. “The car has been to and from Canada, it’s been like five colors of green. We put studded tires on it. I drove in 10 inches of snow with that car, I’ve been in snow storms with that car.”

When she made her living on two wheels, the Mustang held more than her bike: “My whole life was in that car.”

Her time with Bucephalus was hardly drama-free. To save money, Pasicznyk learned how to work on the drum brakes, adjust the points on the engine, and replace a countless number of power-steering hoses. “I don’t know how many times I broke down on the side of the highway, and the kindness of strangers … I don’t know how many people have helped me.”

After a string of unfulfilling office jobs simply to pay the bills, Pasicznyk landed in the healthcare industry on the suggestion of a neighbor. “I jumped with both feet without looking, which is usual for me, went to school, and became an X-ray tech.” Married, and with an independent income, Pasicznyk could finally restore Bucephalus the way she had determined to: with her own cash, and on her own time.

Her goals were to make the car both safe and fun to drive. Bucephalus now boasts front disc brakes, a four-barrel carb instead of the stock two-barrel, a Magnaflow dual exhaust, PerTronix electronic injection, and an Edelbrock manifold.

Among the younger demographics, at least at this particular event, there were several contemporary GT350s on the high end of the performance spectrum, with several more unassuming 5.0 GTs as well. The sunglasses-clad owner of a white Shelby GT350 confessed that this is his first outing with the Voodoo-powered machine. He struck up an animated conversation with Karl Woods, the driver of a 2017 Grabber Blue Mustang GT, who is about to graduate college and amid the throes of job-searching anxieties. Woods loves his five-oh (a recent upgrade from a ’17 EcoBoost in the same color) but his automotive interests aren’t limited to pony cars; for the past four years, he’s been restoring a 1980 Porsche 924 Turbo.

Woods and his friend Danny Perez, a vehicle development engineer for ZF and the owner of a 2013 California Special, at one point leaned over the gleaming engine bay of a 1969 Mustang fastback, enthralled.

“It’s a 434, but it’s not a stroker, it’s a revver,” said Steve Heinrich, a lanky plant manager who, in the ’90s, worked for Ford’s Europe-based F1 team designing the race cars’ electronic systems. He bought his Mustang in 1983 for $700 dollars and gleefully tells the story of how he needed an oxyacetylene torch and a hammer to take it on a test drive.

“It had been in a crash, and the front was so messed up that the front tires were squealing [when the seller was] pulling it out of the garage. ‘Do you have an oxyacetylene torch and a big hammer,’ I asked the guy. ‘Can I use them?’

“I wasn’t scared to do work in a driveway, I got under the car and pounded it back and aligned the front end enough to drive it. That’s how it started.”

In a pattern familiar to many, Heinrich soon found his time consumed by school, a wife, and kids. The car sat garaged for nearly 30 years, until 2015, when he decided to leverage his speed-shop connections and turn the fastback into a track car.

Today, little about the Mustang remains stock. That overhead-valve 434-cu-in mill—built out with forged internals including the crank, the rods, and the pistons—uses a Holley EFI system and is topped with a high-rise intake plenum from the same company. Output sits a little north of 600 hp, says Heinrich, and torque comes in at around 500 lb-ft. The engine exhales through long-tube headers and, since Heinrich wanted high-end horsepower rather than low-end torque, the dual-exhaust system uses an X-pipe rather than the stock H-pipe setup.

Power goes to the rear wheels via a Tremec six-speed dual-clutch unit rated for 1000 hp—just in case Heinrich decides to get creative later. To help the Mustang’s unibody construction handle that power, Heinrich also had Taylor-based Motor City Solutions, the shop largely responsible for the build, add frame extensions. Brakes are courtesy of AP racing and sit behind a set of Forgeline racing rims. Inside, Heinrich included a host of creature comforts—air-conditioning, Bluetooth, even a back-up camera—while maintaining a retro aesthetic.

This rally was Heinrich’s first real shakedown drive in the restomodded Mustang. When we followed up with him afterwards, he said the car “drove like a dream.”

Our winding journey back to Detroit took us along Edward N Hines Drive, which traces the Rouge River. Back at Ford’s Garage, the generous parking area accommodated the entire herd of Mustangs—including a brace of Mach-Es. Despite somewhat-awkward inclusion of the upstart EV in this rally, it’s clear that the enthusiast spirit among the Mustang community is thriving: The sheer range of cars, and the contingent of younger owners, testifies to that. From faithful daily drivers like Bucephalus to all-out restomods like Heinrich’s, Mustangs continue to bring all sorts of people together.

The post Michigan’s Global Mustang Day rally captured the colorful scope of Mustang culture appeared first on Hagerty Media.

While manual transmissions are slowly fading from new-car option lists, the enthusiast community continues to grow, and drivers who are new to row-your-own gearboxes discover the more engaged driving experience offered by three-pedal cars. Inevitably, they’ll also learn about the esoteric art of heel-and-toe.

Ever since I started my YouTube channel many moons ago, I’ve wanted to share my knowledge about the heel-and-toe technique. To this day, I still haven’t seen a comprehensive guide on the subject and what I have seen has been misleading or narrow in its scope.

A year ago, I took the opportunity to crystallize the idea in order to give drivers who may be new to the technique a methodology by which to learn this skill. In the process, I hoped to demystify the concept. Breaking down the technique also provided a great excuse to revisit the Hyundai Veloster N, which is purely selfish on my part because it’s one of my favourite modern hot hatches—I’ll take any excuse I can for more wheel time.

One year later, I’ve had many conversations with my racing and performance driving colleagues on the subject, so we’re diving deeper into the technique to help you perfect the heel-and-toe downshift.

Before we get into this lesson, a word, please. It’s your responsibility to understand the techniques and to practice them safely. If there is anything unclear to you, please reach out with any questions. If you decide to use this guide and have a grasp of the technique, as well as a little mechanical sympathy, your car will experience only minimal wear.

Furthermore, the methods described here assume you’re seated behind the wheel effectively. If not, you can use my seating position in the video at the end of this article as a guide. Note that I’m seated close enough to the steering wheel that my shoulders don’t leave the seatback when I’m turning the wheel; my elbow and wrists are bent, as are my knees and ankles. The lesson here also assumes that you can already operate a manual transmission with reasonable proficiency.

Many modern road cars have widened pedal boxes so that drivers won’t mistake one pedal for another. What that means to us, however, is that those fashionable, narrow driving shoes you’ve been envying may not be suitable for heel and toe. In those rare circumstances in which a car’s brake and throttle pedals are fixed close to one another, go with the fancy racing booties—but with the majority of cars, you’ll benefit from a shoe with a wider sole that still offers good pedal feel. I tend to wear skate shoes for driving because I’m still dumb enough to ride BMX bikes like Jack Baruth.

Heel-and-toe, as described in this column, works well with modern, synchromesh manual gearboxes and is otherwise independent of the type of driveline. Whether you’ve got front-, rear-, or even all-wheel drive, the approach remains the same.

Colloquially, we refer to heel-and-toe as a down-shifting technique, but that’s a misnomer. It’s actually a braking technique and, when executed properly, you’ve braked perfectly while approaching a corner, shifted to a lower gear for optimal acceleration upon exiting the turn, all while maintaining your car’s balance.

Even “heel-and-toe” is a misnomer. When the technique was first conceived, drivers had to use both the heel and the toe of their shoe in order to manipulate the brake and throttle pedals. However, nearly all cars manufactured in the last five decades have brake and throttle pedals placed close enough together that the technique is properly called BALL OF YOUR FOOT AND SIDE OF YOUR FOOT, as you’ll see.

Even though this a racing technique, I use heel-and-toe in my daily driving as a matter of habit and, when you’ve mastered it, the process enhances your driving experience. To be fair, I was initially taught the heel-and-toe at racing school decades ago, but it didn’t become second nature until I started racing. I immediately discovered that the rapid shifting pattern was necessary to improve my pace, which forced me to learn the method quickly.

In brief, it’s a six-step process:

1. Begin braking.
2. Push the clutch in.
3. Downshift.
4. Blip the throttle.
5. Release the clutch.
6. Release the brake.

As the driver, it’s your objective to perform these six steps in rapid-fire fashion. After reading the list, heel-and-toe may sound simple, but execution is another matter altogether, so we’ll explore each step in more detail. Your goal is to perform the downshift in the middle of your braking zone—start braking, perform the heel-and-toe downshift, and complete braking.

With braking, the most important consideration is that you’ve placed the ball of your right foot on the right side of the brake pedal, so that, with a quick twist of your ankle, you can rotate the right side of your foot to reach the throttle pedal. You must also be applying enough input on the brake pedal to actively decelerate the car—weight transfer to the front tires is natural here. Clutching in is simple, and it’s the same action to which you’re accustomed for both up- and downshifts. Similarly, shifting to a lower gear is performed in your usual manner.

The magic happens when you blip the throttle and release the clutch at the precise moment to avoid upsetting the balance of the car while you’re braking. Blipping the throttle and releasing the clutch are performed almost simultaneously; mastering the timing will take some time.

The biggest challenge a driver faces is rolling their ankle towards the gas pedal, while braking, in order to quickly stab the throttle. Since everyone likes a good hack these days, I’ve got one for you: Practice that quick stab of the throttle while your car is standing still. With the shifter in neutral and the parking brake on, apply some brake pressure and quickly roll the right side of your foot to the throttle pedal.

Watch the tachometer and practice that motion until you can consistently hold your right foot on the brake, roll your foot quickly to the throttle, and provoke a 2000 rpm increase in engine speed. If your engine idles at 1000 rpm, shoot for a stab of the throttle that pushes engine speed up to 3000 rpm. Practice does make perfect and the movement you’re creating will be the same motion you’ll use on the road or on the racetrack.

Timing the release of the clutch is key: You want the clutch to engage while engine revs are dropping, ensuring smooth engagement of the driveline to avoid that herky-jerky motion we all experience while learning to drive a manual. Once you’ve released the clutch, smoothly release the brake pedal, and you’re ready to accelerate in that lower gear.

It’s at this point at any given performance driving school that I’d leave students to their own devices to begin sorting out the process on their own. Since you won’t have an instructor with you, I’ve got another hack that will accelerate your learning process.

My old racing and instructing pal, Jamie Ford, suggested a simplified practice technique before putting all six steps together. After you’ve learned how to stab the throttle to achieve that 2000-rpm jump in engine speed while parked, take it to the open road.

You’re not going to worry about shift action at this point. Simply continue to work on the action of brake application and the jab of the gas pedal on the open road. For example, find a road with a moderately high speed limit, shift to neutral, put your left foot out of play on the dead pedal, and, while braking to a stop sign or a red light, practice blipping the throttle all the way to a stop.

As this becomes easier, gradually delay your braking so that you’re forced to increase brake-pedal pressure, select neutral, and brake while stabbing your gas pedal. This will simulate the feeling of braking combined with the appropriate blipping of the throttle.

Once you’re comfortable with moderate braking and stabbing the throttle, begin to assemble the steps into one rapid movement:

1. Begin braking.
2. Push the clutch in.
3. Downshift.
4. Blip the throttle.
5. Release the clutch.
6. Release the brake.

As you can see in the accompanying video, all six steps happen in the blink of an eye when executed correctly.

The two most common mistakes are mistiming the clutch release and placing your right foot on the wrong spot on the brake pedal. Don’t be discouraged. Remember that this is an unusual and perhaps unnatural technique to learn, but once you’ve learned this skill, it’s very rewarding.

I sincerely hope this brief guide helps you in your driving journey and this new skill gives you the same satisfaction as it’s given me.

The post Recovering the lost art of heel-and-toe appeared first on Hagerty Media.

John Johnson writes:  I’m hoping to take my ’72 Datsun 240Z for its first road trip in the spring. Is there a pre-trip routine you go through to help make a car dependable?

Although anything can go wrong in a vintage car, the problems that strand you are actually pretty predictable. In fact, the main issues that cause you to go from living the dream to being on the cellphone in the breakdown lane stem from failures with ignition, fuel delivery, cooling, charging, belts, clutch hydraulics, and ball joints. Address these things and you give yourself a pretty good inoculation against trouble.

The ignition systems in most pre-1980 cars have points and a condenser. Over time, the point gap closes due to pitting of the point faces and wear of the nylon block that rides on the distributor’s cam lobes. Do a dwell measurement and, if necessary, adjust the point gap to set it to spec. Make sure the distributor cap isn’t cracked and that the plug and coil wires can’t easily be pulled out of their connectors.

Fuel delivery issues are commonly caused by a bad fuel pump (I always carry a spare), but a thorough fuel system inspection should include replacing any rock-hard or very soft fuel lines and checking for rust in the gas tank, which can cause the fuel filter to clog up.

Cooling system problems come in two forms: leaking and hot running. Leaks typically come from split hoses, failed water pump seals, or cracked reservoirs. Squeeze all the cooling hoses. If they’re too soft or too hard, replace them. Rock the fan fore and aft to check the water pump bearing. If there’s anything other than the smallest amount of play, replace the pump. If the plastic fan is 40-plus years old, replace it, too. Hot running occurs when a leak-free system runs in or near the red part of the gauge. If you’re going to be driving in hot weather, test it in hot weather. If the water pump is turning and the thermostat is open, overheating is usually due to an inadequate radiator and fan.

The charging system—the alternator and voltage regulator—should charge the battery at about 13.5–14.2 volts with the engine running. An $8 cigarette lighter plug-in voltmeter is handy for verifying correct operation. Inspect all the wires to the alternator for corrosion and breakage. If you have concerns, throw a spare battery in the trunk, as a vintage car can run for hours off a fully charged battery.

Because there’s often a single belt running the water pump and alternator, a malfunction can cause those two crucial systems to fail. Inspect the belt, replace it if cracked, and check that it’s tight, deflecting about half an inch under thumb pressure. Also verify the pulleys it runs are parallel, as alternator bushings can degrade, causing the alternator to cock and the belt to slip.

Clutch hydraulics—the master and slave cylinder—can be surprising failure points. You can inspect the cylinders for signs of leakage, but the best approach is prophylactic replacement—or traveling with spares. Any steering or front suspension component can fail, but it is the ball joints that take the pounding from potholes and allow the front wheels to turn. And if one fails, you lose control of the car. Check for play by squeezing them with a large pair of channel-lock pliers.

Are all pre-trip boxes ticked? Excellent—now go drive!

The post Pre-trip checkup: Inspect these systems before that first spring trip appeared first on Hagerty Media.

If German immigrant Heinrich Engelhard Steinweg had only gone whole hog (oder, ganzes Schwein) when he Anglicized his first and last names upon arriving in America in 1850, today, the world’s most famous piano would be known as the “Stoneway.”

Or, the “Stonepath.”

Or (my favorite), the “Stonestreet.”

For better or worse, the Anglicization was not total. The pianos Steinway and his sons made in America have been and will be Steinways, not Stonepaths.

Along with Einstein and Heifetz, “Steinway” is a family name that is also a common noun, as in, “A Heifetz, he is not.” Or, “It plays like a Steinway!”

Heinrich Engelhard Steinweg was an amazing character. He was born in the late 1700s. While still a teenager, he served in the army of the Holy Roman Empire in the pushback against Napoleon’s occupation of parts of Germany.

Upon leaving the army, Steinweg apprenticed to an organ builder, discovering in himself a love of music as well as an aptitude for fine craftsmanship. Because of strict Guild rules (his status was apprentice, not master), Steinweg began building instruments in secret—in his kitchen.

(Building instruments in secret—in a kitchen—really makes me think of Hermann Hesse’s Medieval novel Narcissus and Goldmund. Miles Davis hated that book, but I love it. Perhaps you will like it, too!)

The first instruments Steinweg built in his kitchen were zithers and guitars. He then moved up to pianos, starting with small pianos, later increasing their sizes, learning and thinking all the time. Still working in his kitchen, he built his first grand piano in 1836. That piano is now in New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In 1839, Steinweg pocketed his first Gold Medal, awarded by a state trade exhibition in Braunschweig. At some point, given the restrictions of the Guild system (as well as the state of politics in Germany after the uprisings of 1848), Steinweg concluded that there would be greater opportunities for him in the United States.

In 1850, he emigrated, with several of his sons. Steinweg modified his first and last names, and went to work for other New York City piano builders until he had amassed enough experience (and money) to start his own company, in 1853.

During the early years of Steinway & Sons, Steinway’s innovations gave the modern grand piano its mechanical and tonal identity. About half of Steinway & Sons’ 139 patents were granted to the first and second generations of the family. For instance, Steinway & Sons invented the middle (“sostenuto”) piano pedal.

Steinway continues to innovate. Steinway’s hot product these days is a computerized-playback grand piano, the Steinway Spirio; it is controlled by an Apple iPad app. The Spirio system works by true motion capture, not just on-or-off “key punch-ing.” The software is so sophisticated (and the datasets that are being managed are so granular) that you can even use the iPad app to change the volume at which the Spirio plays back a digital file. (For those intimate cocktail parties, I guess.)

The library of playback performances available from artists such as Lang Lang, Yuja Wang, Aaron Diehl, Billy Joel, Jenny Lin, Pablo Ziegler, and Bill Charlap now includes more than 2,000 musical selections. New tracks are available every month.

The photo at the top is of a limited-edition reissue of a piano, the case of which was designed by famed Mid-Century-Modern architect Walter Teague for Steinway’s 100th anniversary, in 1953.

Today’s “Teague Sketch 1111 Limited Edition” is priced circa $132,000; and, of course, it is a Spirio reproducing piano as well. It might make a memorable “just-because” present!

Here are 12 piano recordings of great merit. Eight of them are on the Steinway & Sons’ label. The other four similarly are Desert-Island-Disc-quality offerings both old and new, from other labels.

1. Cole Porter on a Steinway (vol. 1): Jed Distler, Simon Mulligan, Adam Birnbaum

Three wonderful pianists take turns here, offering solo-piano treatments of 12 Cole Porter songs, from 12 different Cole Porter musicals. Think about that for a moment—most musicals that come to mind are collaborations between a composer and a lyricist; but the composer Cole Porter was his own lyricist.

At Yale, Porter minored in music, and was one of the first members of Yale’s legendary a-cappella singing group the Whiffenpoofs. Most remembered for his witty, urbane lyrics (which frequently contained in-jokes and double entendres), Porter was nonetheless a composer of accomplishment. In fact, he briefly studied composition at the Schola Cantorum in Paris, under Vincent d’Indy. Of course, by that time, Porter had already written 300 songs—while still a student at Yale.

2. The Goldberg Variations (J.S. Bach): Beatrice Rana

The piano is a percussion instrument. A pianist presses down on a key, and a complicated mechanism flips a felt-wrapped hammer upward until it hits (usually) two or three strings that are tuned to the same note. The piano is a percussion instrument; just get used to it.

And therein lies the challenge in making music on a piano—creating the illusion that one note just flows into another, as is the case with the human voice, or the violin.

Furthermore, the piano’s dynamics are a one-way street. Once you hit a note, it only can die out—there is no way to “swell” the volume of a sound, once a note has started sounding on the piano. Whereas, swelling a note is part of a singer’s stock in trade, and a violinist’s too.

J.S. Bach’s “Goldberg” variations are a cornerstone of the piano repertory, and an important part of everyone’s shared cultural heritage. I think that, in the 1950s, if people owned one jazz LP, it would have been Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue; and if they owned one classical LP, it would have been Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations. Or, at least the sales figures suggest so.

Beatrice Rana’s recent (2017) studio recording has become my favorite piano version of the Goldbergs. Her “singing lines” in the Aria (and elsewhere) are joys to behold. This is a thoughtful (but not overcautious) interpretation, from a young pianist who seems to have no limitations whatsoever when it comes to technique. And, she has fascinating musical insights.

3. Watercolor: Shen Lu

All the nice pianistic things I just said about Beatrice Rana apply in full force to Shen Lu. Mr. Shen plays like a mature artist who understands the music, and whose technique is effortless. Watercolor is a recital that bookends familiar masterpieces of 20th-century Western piano music (Ravel’s Miroirs, and Rachmaninoff’s Op. 33 Etudes-Tableaux) with piano music by Chinese composers Chen Peixun and Tan Dun.

It is in Rachmaninoff’s Etudes-Tableaux that Shen shines most brightly, I think—in particular, No. 3 in C minor. There is a plangent quality to the slow upper-octave melody in the middle section. I think that’s the kind of thing many of today’s hot-rodding young pianists don’t seem to be able to put across. By the way, this is one of the most gorgeous-sounding piano recordings I know of.

4. Basically Bull: Alan Feinberg

This survey of very early English keyboard music (some of the scores date back to 1611) originally composed for the instrument called “the virginals” should not “sound right” on a modern Steinway concert grand piano, but it does! (The most-represented composer is John Bull, hence the sophomoric wordplay of the title.) Comparisons to Glenn Gould and André Watts are not out of line.

When Basically Bull was a new release, I praised it to the skies in Stereophile magazine, concluding, “Even if the last solo-piano recording you really enjoyed was George Winston’s December, I think you’ll love Basically Bull. Highly recommended.”

5. The French Suites (J.S. Bach): Sergey Schepkin

Bach’s French Suites might not be as household-name familiar as the “Goldbergs,” but they are immensely treasureable as well. Sergey Schepkin graduated summa cum laude from the St. Petersburg Conservatory, but he now lives in Boston. His Bach keyboard recordings of 20 years ago are still sought-after by audiophiles. More recently, he has begun re-recording that repertory. Thoughtfulness, loveliness, and a sense of discovery abound in this generous collection, which, in addition to the French Suites, features performances of two Fantasias.

6. Mélancholie: Zhenni Li

Zhenni Li was born in China, but educated at Juilliard, Yale, and McGill. Britain’s authoritative music magazine Gramophone hailed this, her début recording on Steinway’s house label, as “A bolt from the blue.”

However, her program does not start out that way; it starts with Arthur Lourié’s Op. 1 Préludes fragiles, which live up to the album’s title of “melancholy.” The major work is Schumann’s far-ranging first piano sonata. Zhenni’s interpretation is self-confident yet sensitive; her technique is prodigious; and her sound is simply grand.

7. Siegfried Idyll: David Deveau

Richard Wagner was not a nice man. He was both a wife-borrower, and a wife-stealer. He stole Franz Liszt’s daughter Cosima away from her husband. Cosima then gave birth to Wagner’s only son, Siegfried. Wagner wrote his Siegfried Idyll (for 13 instruments) as a birthday present for Cosima. It is heard here in a piano transcription.

This engrossing program begins and ends with works by Franz Liszt. The first track is Liszt’s “Funérailles,” for the revolutionaries killed in 1848. The program ends with Liszt’s “At the Grave of Richard Wagner” (1883), which, while quoting Wagner’s last completed opera Parsifal, veers off in the direction of atonality, toward the vista of cosmic emptiness that appears in Mahler’s last symphonies. Bookended by the Wagner and Liszt pieces, there is a lovely selection of Brahms caprices and intermezzi. David Deveau’s pianism is stellar, and the recorded sound is second-to-none.

8. Get Happy: Jenny Lin

Jenny Lin’s ambitious, technically demanding program consists of virtuoso arrangements of 17 Broadway show tunes, plus one movie theme. Lin’s playing positively sparkles. If this recording doesn’t put you in a positive mood, try pouring a glass of champagne! (Cole Porter, I am sure, agrees with that.)

Cole Porter’s scores are—of course—represented (by “Begin the Beguine” and “So in Love”). Also heard from, are Richard Rodgers, Irving Berlin, Harold Arlen, and George Gershwin.

But for me, the standout piece (and the most impressive performance) is Marc-André Hamelin’s Meditation on “Laura,” i.e., David Raksin’s theme music from Otto Preminger’s 1944 mystery-thriller film. Fascinating chromatic twists and turns mirror the film’s plot (or, at least I think they do).

9. Solo: Pablo Ziegler

Pablo Ziegler is an Argentine composer and pianist, best known in the US for the decade-plus he spent as one of the sonic and musical anchors of Astor Piazzolla’s revolutionary “Quinteto Tango Nuevo.” This solo recording displays Ziegler’s full-bodied tone, fearless virtuosity, and completely committed musicianship.

For me, the standout track is “Oblivion,” Piazzolla’s elegiac interlude from the soundtrack to the film version of Pirandello’s “Theater of the Absurd” play Henry IV (meaning the Holy Roman Emperor).

10. Good Night: Bertrand Chamayou

“The lullaby’s place is halfway between dream and reality,” writes French pianist Bertrand Chamayou. “There is that special moment as you are falling asleep, and you experience all kinds of emotions.”

This wonderful collection brings along modern and contemporary composers as companions to Dr. Brahms. A great gift for the parents of young children; or, for anyone who might appreciate some 100%-organic music. A fantastic recording job, by the way.

11. Emanuel Ax plays Chopin

Recorded in 1975, this remains one of the most beautiful records of anything ever made.

(I think that just about covers it.)

12. Live in Brussels: Ivan Moravec

Ivan Moravec (1930-2015) was the ultimate “pianists’ pianist.” Moravec’s playing was not flashy. His repertory was not huge: he largely stuck to the “undeniable greats” (such as Chopin, Debussy, Beethoven, Mozart, and Brahms), and a few Czech composers. Moravec rarely visited the US. He never recorded for any of the “top” record labels.

However, the astonishing extent to which Moravec could control the smallest movements of his fingers (coupled with his extraordinarily deep musical understanding) translated directly into revelatory performances of those works he chose to play. This live recording from 1983 is the best introduction I know of to his art.

Here’s a Qobuz playlist of all 12 albums. Enjoy!

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Tired of songs about Pink Cadillacs? Here are some new ones for your repertoire.

If you have fuel in your veins, chances are you’ve read articles about car songs. Heck, you’ve probably read one or two on this website! But generally they tend to be the same, old same-old that are overplayed at local car cruises.

Yet the online soundscape is vast, giving enthusiasts opportunities to be exposed to automotive music obscured until now—here’s a few to get your toes tapping on the accelerator:

“My Automobile” by Parliament

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2ug_-_5TBQ

P-Funk history is long and convoluted thanks to a combination of George Clinton’s poor business sense and a corrupt music industry. After winning a hit as The Parliaments, George Clinton & Co. went on some trips, so to speak, shed their vocal group origins, and became psychedelicized. The legacy of funky craziness began with the Osmium LP from 1970. Though more in the spirit of what would become the Funkadelic group, the album included the ditty “My Automobile,” a tongue-in-cheek (if not politically incorrect) take on a guy’s set of wheels and the love interest he tries to pick up. A few years later, Parliament ditched the flivver for a UFO.

“455 SD” by the Radio Birdman

Named after misheard lyrics from a Stooges song, the Radio Birdman was an Australian proto-punk band of some repute, complete with an American singer who grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The group took its Michigan connection seriously with homages to Woodward Avenue (“Murder City Nights”) and life in Detroit (“I-94”). But when it came to automobiles, “455 SD” truly waxes poetic on the wax. Recorded in 1978 and appearing on the LP Living Eyes, the song imparts the smell of burnt rubber from a band hell-bent on celebrating Detroit horsepower: “Got a Hurst T-stick in my hand, Borg Warner four speed says I can … Do the standing quarter in 12.5, Run through it, bring tears to your eyes, Edelbrock high rise manifold, Zero to 60 in 7.0.” Purists may wince at times, but the intention was pure adrenaline.

“Super Bee” by the Demonics

Imagine being a college student and taking a three-day trip 3000 miles away with Dad to the City by the Bay. The free weekly city tabloid mentions a quasi-punk group with a singer who has a penchant for Iggy Pop acrobatics and, oh, guess what? They just released a 45 called “Super Bee!” After navigating the bus system and dodging plenty of San Fran crazies, that student (moi!) ended up in the Upper Haight, where I found the store that was selling the record complete with nifty picture sleeve. Self-released in 1996—way before the cost of self-promotion was lowered thanks to MP3s—“Super Bee” was a typical revisionist punk rocker that included the actual rumble from the singer’s 1969 ‘Bee.

“’48 DeSoto” by Tony Kosinec

A British-born Canadian who spent much of his musical career in New York, Tony Kosinec was among the large group of singer-songwriter musicians that was peddled by the industry in the 1970s in search for “the next big thing.” Kosinec enjoyed minor success in the early 1970s but was drowned out by the James Taylors of the world, though he parlayed his talents into writing jingles and scoring TV and film. Bad Girl Songs, his sophomore effort (produced by Peter Asher for Columbia Records), contained the song “’48 DeSoto.” It was more about two carefree lovers bombing down the backroads than a paean to a big ol’ Mopar, but if Bob Seger can sing about night moves in a ’60 Chevy, then why not a fat-fendered DeSoto?

“The Hot Rod Song” by the Nightshadows

Among the earliest garage bands in the U.S., Atlanta’s Nightshadows formed in the 1950s, primarily playing R&B and Blues …  and then the British Invasion hit. Band member exits and entrances led to an evolution of what could be characterized as more frat band than Beatles-esque, resulting in the recording of a few humorous and risqué crowd-pleasers before “The Hot Rod Song” in 1965. What starts off sounding like a “Taxman” knock-off eventually reveals itself to be a typical (if not slightly twisted) rocker of the period, with no inkling of what kind of car is being sung about, but apparently it’s the fastest/biggest/finest/wildest one around. Every town has a car like that, right?

“She Took My Oldsmobile” by the Romancers

Here’s a nugget of authentic garage from a Chicano band out of East Los Angeles with this 45 on the Linda label. Like many 1966 releases, this song was about a girl doing a guy wrong, in this case by taking his Oldsmobile. It’s even an Olds 88 (albeit without the “Rocket” hot rod references)! “Looked out the window, what do I see? Big black clouds looking back at me. No matter how all I try, all I seem to do is cry—she took my Oldsmobile (my 88, my 88, yeah)!” as one lament follows the other. We don’t learn if he gets his Olds back, but four years later she may have been riding in a ’48 DeSoto for all we know.

Know of any car songs to recommend that few know about? Post them here!

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To relieve the COVID cabin fever, the pilots down at my local airport have been organizing leisure drives almost every weekend since March. Once—sometimes twice—a weekend, the security gates slide open and out files a procession of the kinds of classic and exotic rides that hide in the hangars of every small airport in America. The tour is of the surrounding suburbia, and, as the airport is about 3 miles from the Pacific Ocean, it manages to work in a few scenic views as well as occasional bits of curvy road. But there is traffic. Stoplights and stop signs and crosswalks abound, plus running kids and bolting dogs and lurking cops, so the speeds rarely rise above 45 mph. Which is one reason I’ve become a passionate advocate for cars from a slower age.

My favorite car for this run is my 1933 Austin Seven, which weighs about 800 pounds, has something like 17 horsepower, and proves that old axiom that it’s more fun to drive a slow car fast than drive a new Ferrari behind a Prius. The Austin cackles and clanks and makes 30 mph feel like you’re doing a hot lambada with death. Often on these drives I’ll be white-knuckling around some corner, leaning in like Louis Chiron to keep all four of the black hula hoops that are its tires on the pavement, while the guy in front of me is wondering if he’ll ever get to shift his GT3 out of second. I know who spent more money; I will take odds on who is more amused.

I have tried to spread the religion, sidling up to folks at the stops to wax on about how any car with Babbitt bearings, a thermosiphon radiator, or a preselector gearbox would make these cruises so much more fun, but so far, I have no converts. However, the pilots did try substituting their cars with their airport Vespas as a way to spice things up. Scootering at 45 mph is generally more exciting than dawdling at that speed in a kit Cobra—perhaps one reason the Motorcycle Industry Council reports that its members had a roaring year, with sales up 10 percent across all segments in 2020. Smaller-displacement bikes and scooters helped lead the charge, and many bike makers are now offering some flavor of sub-500cc entertainment.

Not wanting to be left out, I bought a used TU250X, a 250cc retro standard made by Suzuki to resemble an old Triumph or BSA but without the oil puddles and short-circuiting. It was cheap and seemed cooler than a scooter. But Suzuki Motor Corp. is both singularly marvelous at making awesome products and singularly terrible at distributing them, so I had to go all the way to Portland, Oregon, to find one. On the 1200-mile ride back, plowing through coastal fog and nearly through a herd of roaming elk, I had lots of time to contemplate why I am increasingly smitten with going slow.

Well, of course, I’m getting older. I’m not sure if that means I have reduced confidence in my abilities, actual reduced abilities, or just greater experience. As you age, you catalog more and more cautionary tales of the harsh penalties life can dole out to those who persist in their youthful cockiness—especially those who ride mountain bikes even though the exact same thrill can be had by jumping from a moving train. Besides making it easier to avoid the elk that are roaming in the fog, going slow has demonstrable charms, too, as I proved to myself while slaloming down the Pacific coast on the wee Suzuki. It felt about as heavy underneath me as a Schwinn, and I could crack it wide-open out of a corner with no fear of splatting against the car in front of me or, indeed, breaking the speed limit. Yet I was having a blast.

Sure, I have ridden big bikes on the California coast. You spend a lot of time on the brakes, always holding the machine back, like constantly pulling on the reins of an overly spirited horse. The little 250 pranced from corner to corner and barely ever needed its brakes. A world with more throttle and less brake is surely one we all can agree would be better. And that world is possible, even on an increasingly crowded planet, if the throttle is connected to something older or smaller.

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As we move towards a reality in which autonomous vehicles share the roads with human-driven ones, automakers are looking at every potential sort of learning material to train and program their artificially intelligent systems. They’re even taking some lessons from those sideways hooligans in drifting.

“Since 2008, our lab has taken inspiration from human race car drivers in designing algorithms that enable automated vehicles to handle the most challenging emergencies,” says Professor Chris Gerdes of Stanford University’s Dynamic Design Laboratory. The department is best known for Marty, the self-drifting DeLorean DMC-12.

“Through this research, we have the opportunity to move these ideas much closer to saving lives on the road,” he continues. To realize Toyota’s lofty goal of zero traffic fatalities, vehicle controls must become increasingly active in the decision-making process that determines throttle, braking, and steering inputs during an emergency maneuver.

Traditional traction control has carried a buzz-kill reputation because it does little more than bring you back in line. Such systems focus on cutting power to stop wheel spin, braking individual tires in order to jerk the car back on course, and, with the rise of electronic power steering, even steering the wheel to nudge the car into the center of a lane. More often than not, however, these system are simply reactive measures with a one-track mind: Stop the slide.

Stanford’s Dynamic Design Laboratory and TRI change the script by introducing more advanced car control techniques to their stability and autonomous driving systems, teaching the car that a bit of slip-angle may be the better move in certain situations. The average driver easily outreaches their skill sets—or simply human perception—when desperately attempting to evade a crash, and AI might be able to lend a professionally “trained” hand.

“Every day, there are deadly vehicle crashes that result from extreme situations where most drivers would need superhuman skills to avoid a collision,” says Gill Pratt, CEO of Toyota Research Institute (TRI) and chief scientist at Toyota Motor Corporation. “The reality is that every driver has vulnerabilities, and to avoid a crash, drivers often need to make maneuvers that are beyond their abilities. Through this project, TRI will learn from some of the most skilled drivers in the world to develop sophisticated control algorithms that amplify human driving abilities and keep people safe. This is the essence of the Toyota Guardian approach.”

Extreme car control has been absent from most autonomous driving routines because the necessary decision-making process is a computationally expensive one. In a fraction of a second, the vehicle must perceive a list of variables, spit out the right commands to initiate a drift (if that were determined to be the best move), and potentially maintain the slide while the vehicle’s chassis regains its equilibrium.

We humans, through experience and training, develop a muscle memory that helps determine the ideal trajectory before we recover a slide. Could a traction-control system could replicate that learning process? Well, that’s where Stanford’s research comes into play.

The Dynamic Design Laboratory focuses on developing a computer algorithm that creates a feedback loop to measure vehicle stability and the driver’s intentions, working between them to make input changes while prioritizing the slip-angle of the tires. This feedback loop behaves not unlike OBDII, which has open- and closed-loop routines that vary based on vehicle conditions.

“Open loop” means that the vehicle’s computer is reading sensors and deciding its next move based on the sensor array; “closed-loop” refers to a system that has essentially entered a prescheduled routine with stricter operating parameters. The first is similar to the mental process that occurs when you encounter a wet patch of road, detect that grip has diminished, and then adjust your inputs. The second is similar to prior knowledge: You know ahead of time that the road is and preemptively drive carefully.

Stanford’s algorithm aims to expand this computational process. First, the algorithm takes a snapshot of the vehicle’s situation, simulates a multitude of reactions, and chooses the best result. Then, the algorithm figures out how to manipulate the vehicle to perform the chosen behavior.

For Stanford and Toyota, the drifting demonstrations are for more than just great PR videos. Controlling a prolonged slide remains one of the most challenging tasks for a driver of any kind, whether artificially or organically intelligent, and a successfully balancing the car on the limit of grip is a triumph of (digital) mind over matter.

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My “Drive of the Year” for 2020 was in my 1937 Packard convertible sedan. In its day, Packard was known for some of the most elegant and stately machines on the road. The automaker’s clientele came from the cream of society, bankers and financiers in particular. With big, L-head V-12 engines and long wheelbases—144.1 inches, in the case of my ’37—Packards were a perfect reflection of their owners: imposing and powerful. I like to imagine what it was like at the time to be a Packard owner. How did they live? How did they spend their time? What did driving cars like this mean to them?

I love chauffeuring people around in the Packard. This particular day in July involved my 85-year-old mother, Louise, and my 24-year-old daughter, Olivia. COVID had limited our time together, so we decided to take a spin up the long, narrow peninsula where we live. With its top down and oceanic back seat, the Packard was perfect. And so was the weather.

Until, suddenly, it wasn’t. A massive storm blew in from Lake Michigan and we were caught with the top down, miles from home. If you’re wondering, “Why didn’t you just put the top up?” my response is only half-joking: “Because it takes three people about 45 minutes to get the top up on a ’37 Packard.” And it was already raining heavily. So, we made a run for it, away from the storm but also further away from home. Fortunately, nearby was a friend’s vineyard with lots of outbuildings with attached overhangs. Sure enough, one was unoccupied. We pulled in and rode out the storm there, laughing, telling stories, and listening to jazz on Olivia’s phone. The rain really came down, but we (and the Packard’s wool upholstery) were fine. And bad weather always passes.

It’s amazing how many memories include our cars. Who doesn’t remember their first car? Who doesn’t have a road-trip story, a going-too-fast story, or, yes, even a caught-in-a-storm story that, in retrospect, wasn’t so bad after all?

Cars are part of us and our lives. It’s hard to imagine that ever changing, yet autonomous vehicle technology is supposed to kill the car as we know it. Just like the horse was replaced by the car, the car will be replaced by other forms of transportation. That’s what “they” say. But they don’t know everything. Horses, for instance, haven’t gone away. They’re a $120 billion industry in the U.S. Why? Because people like horses. Horses and people build memories together. It’s the same for cars.

So, no, cars and drives away from rainstorms aren’t going away, not on our watch. At Hagerty, saving driving for future generations is our purpose and mission. It’s why we print Hagerty Drivers Club magazine, teach teens to drive a manual, and have given grants to struggling auto shops during COVID. It’s why we sponsor motorsports, create cool driving tours, support organizations like the Historic Vehicle Association, and much, much more. We have even bigger plans for 2021 and beyond (including getting 25,000 newbies to try competing in amateur motorsports). But none of it would matter without you. You are our partner in spreading car love, and we thank you for that. Together, we are saving our beloved pastime and preserving it for future generations. Sounds good, right? My mom thinks so.

Here’s to making more memories in the new—and hopefully better—year.

McKeel Hagerty is the CEO of Hagerty. He still drives his first car, a once-dilapidated ’67 Porsche 911 S that he restored with his father, on the same northern Michigan roads that he did as a teenager.

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Big celebrations require plenty of planning—sometimes years of it. The U.S. House of Representatives has passed SEMA-supported legislation to create a commission “that would recommend ways to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Route 66” in 2026. The historic 2448-mile stretch of road was commissioned in 1926 as the first all-paved U.S. highway.

According to SEMA (Specialty Equipment Market Association), the “Route 66 Centennial Commission Act,” S. 1014, creates a 15-person commission with representatives appointed by the President of the United States. The appointments are based on recommendations from the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Transportation, U.S. House and Senate Republican and Democratic leaders, and the Governors of Route 66 states Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California.

The commission has two years to make recommendations to Congress about how to celebrate the iconic highway known as The Mother Road. SEMA says, “It may recommend the production of various written materials, films and documentaries, education programs, artistic works, commemorative memorabilia, and celebrations to commemorate Route 66’s storied history.”

The legislation, which unanimously passed the U.S. Senate in August, now heads to the White House for the President’s signature.

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Please welcome “Josh Arakes,” a senior U.S. military fighter-jet pilot who has obtained permission to share some of his life and experiences with us here at Hagerty. If you want to hear more about the Top Gun lifestyle, both as it relates to jets and cars, please let us know. Josh is willing to tell us anything that doesn’t compromise operational security. Enjoy! —JB

I’ve sledded into missiles a surprising number of times. It feels a little cathartic, if not slightly embarrassing, to admit that. When an enemy radar locks onto your fighter jet, a Radar Warning Receiver (RWR; think radar detector) makes some noise to alert you to the fact that you’re being targeted. Much like when you’re speeding and the highway police light you up with a radar gun, it’s not a good feeling—or, um, so I’m told. In a fighter though, ignoring those warning tones means that in lieu of attempting to talk your way out of a speeding ticket, you get called dead in training (frustrating), or actually killed in real life (inconvenient). Sledding into a missile means ignoring all the indications—cockpit warning tones and lights, radio calls from airborne control and/or other fighters, the hairs on the back of your neck—and continuing on your present course. Inbound missiles love non-maneuvering targets; predictable equals easy to kill. There are occasions when this happens in ignorance (broken RWR, for instance), but sometimes it just happens.

It’s always interesting (depressing?) in the debrief to watch the cockpit video recordings and review the engagement already knowing what’s coming, all the while wondering how you missed hearing/seeing/processing/reacting to such obvious warning cues. (Much of the learning comes after a flight, wherein the aerial engagements and target attacks are analyzed in excruciating detail; it’s not uncommon for the debrief to last hours longer than the time spent airborne.) Fortunately, such lapses diminish in frequency with experience, which allows the pilot to more accurately process the information presented in the cockpit and visualize the battlespace in their brain. This visualization enables understanding the threat(s) and therefore when it’s appropriate to either press the attack or egress the fight. This accurate understanding and perception of the fight is known as Situational Awareness (SA; no relation to Maslow) and is a popular term among fighter pilots. The highest level of SA is global, rotating, prismatic SA. The lowest level? Tumbleweed. As in, you are a tumbleweed: annoying, worthless, directionless, and in the way.

Side note: If you’re talking to a fighter pilot and you learn that their callsign (nickname) is NoSA (No SA), or LoSA (Low SA), or nearly any prefix followed by “-SA”, there’s probably a good story about them cluelessly doing something dumb. A decent sounding callsign is LEMO, but looks can be deceiving. All airports have a four digit alphanumeric identifiers (look at your luggage’s bag tag, Denver airport is DEN—technically KDEN—with the K prefix denoting a U.S. airport). The “L” prefix denotes southern Europe. It is left to the reader to figure out the European city in which LEMO is located and why the name LEMO might indicate the esteem in which said pilot’s peers hold him or her.

Given all the time we fighter pilots spend working to increase our SA, it baffles me when I see my fellow pilots do something utterly clueless on the road. We train to have near-perfect understanding of the 3D space dozens of miles around our jets in order to make correct decisions decisively. And yet, on the road, we pilots sometimes sled happily and blissfully into missiles, so to speak, all the while ignoring a surfeit of cues telling us we’re being stupid. Common sense dictates our flight training would make us better drivers—but, to paraphrase Voltaire, common sense isn’t.

Earlier this week I was driving to work on a two-lane highway, speed limit of 65. The preponderance of traffic around me was also heading to base. I noticed a Tesla Model X ahead in the left lane going, perhaps, 64. The right lane had a Civic going 65 that was slowly passing the Tesla. There were four or five cars stacked up in the right lane to go around the slow-moving Tesla. Cars Zero and One subsequently moved from the right to the left lane, somewhat aggressively, making their frustrations evident to the Tesla driver, as soon as the Civic was far enough ahead of the Tesla to allow for a lane change. Sighing, I waited my turn to pass the Tesla on its right, cars backing up behind me in a somewhat impatient queue.

To be clear, my frustration was not directed at the Civic‘s driver in any way. If you’re going the speed limit in the right lane, you’re exactly where you’re supposed to be. Maybe I’d like you to speed up for a moment to help me get around any dawdling left lane traffic, but I’m not angry with you. The lone exception to this personal rule on anger management is on I-15 between Vegas and L.A., specifically the California section, which is a mere two lanes for 150 miles and is wholly insufficient to handle the crush of traffic, and a single car going the speed limit can cause a backup 10 miles long. I’d guess there’s not a single SoCal driver who hasn’t wasted hours of their life slowly creeping from Vegas to Jean to Primm through the agricultural inspection station (that never inspects anyone) and on to Baker, Barstow, and Victorville before finally reaching the promised land of three-lane freeways. Granted, California has needed to expand said stretch for 30+ years and that’s why traffic there is so bad, but drivers that fail to go with the speed of traffic only exacerbate the issue.

I don’t generally stare people down as I pass them on the right as it isn’t worth the energy, and, to quote a freshly-battered-by-Lennox-Lewis Mike Tyson, they are generally “Bolivian” as to why a driver passing them on the right might be frustrated. On this day, knowing most people on this road were headed to base, I decided to see who it was. And maybe give them an angry look. Imagine my surprise when I saw it was a fighter pilot I know well, though we don’t regularly work together. Embarrassed by my angry look and fearing he would recognize me and see me glaring, I quickly turned my attention back to my lane, but not before I saw that he was blissfully smiling, seemingly unaware—or at least uncaring—of the slowdown he was causing by hanging out in the left lane. Cars were passing him on the right and then aggressively changing lanes in front of him, how could he not see what he was doing?

Tangent: If I’m going 10 over in the right lane, don’t tailgate me if I’m passing slow moving traffic lollygagging in the left lane. #1, I’m already going 10 over. #2, the driver towards whom your anger should be directed is the ham-fist in the other lane, not me. This happened to me last week as I was driving my wife’s Miata home from work. The car tailgating me was so close I couldn’t see its headlights, and I was in a Miata. Just back off a bit, re-center your chi, wait three more seconds, and you’ll be able to pass the car in the left lane while I stay in the right. It’s like getting gas from an airborne tanker when another formation of planes shows up, channels their inner Veruca Salt, and acts all impatient on the radio because they need gas right now and it doesn’t matter that you were already there and taking on fuel as fast as the tanker can pump it.

Some audio tones in the jet are beeps, chirps, and growls. Others are voice warnings that verbalize words or short phrases. Fighter pilots across the world have names for the (almost always female) warning voice, but in the U.S. armed forces she’s known as Betty, generally with an alliterative pejorative placed before Betty. Some aural warnings are relatively benign, such as reaching a programmed fuel state (“Bingo fuel”). Others are more serious, like a low-altitude warning (“Pull up! Pull up!”) or the “Engine. Engine.” caution I had two weeks ago (after sucking up a seat cushion, I realized the issue was just a failed fuel flow transmitter, so NBD). Noting the inversely proportional relationship between SA and the likelihood of sledding into a missile, we like to joke it would be helpful if Betty would proclaim, “Warning, SA low. Warning, SA low.”, thereby alerting the crew that their SA is dangerously lacking. Maybe such a warning will be developed before Cyberdyne takes over the flying and fighting then plugs us all into the matrix, but I’m not holding my breath.

Back to my buddy. When my children were little, I was amazed at how they would meander through pedestrian traffic at malls or on sidewalks with no regard (awareness, really, thanks to those pesky unknown unknowns) for how they were cutting people off or getting in the way. They didn’t realize that their small size made them little more than speed bumps for the full-size people through whom they were wandering. After a considerable amount of teaching they learned to take the flow of people into consideration before they veered off to smell a flower or examine a bug.

In a flight debrief, a competent instructor pilot can watch their wingman’s tapes and, with a few good questions, understand what the wingman perceived the situation to be and why they acted the way they did. The root cause of errors such as sledding into a missile is generally found in one of three things: the mission was poorly briefed (error lies with the flight lead who briefed the sortie), the wingman misperceived or misunderstood the situation (fault lies with the pilot), or lack of knowledge (pilot didn’t know or misapplied the appropriate tactic). Instruction is then given to the flight lead to correct future briefs, and/or the wingman to teach the correct cues, tactics, and decisions to take the next time. I’ve implied that wingmen are always at fault, which isn’t the case, and even the most experienced instructor pilots talk to their own errors in the debrief so that everyone can learn. A fighter pilot is never done learning and honing their craft, and much of that learning an honing comes via the debrief. There is no recurring driver’s training or debriefing after a challenging drive. Unless you actively seek out feedback or driving instruction, once you have your license you’re left to your own devices; the onus is on you to improve, or not.

My question is: If people fight the way they train, what kind of training got handed out to the people who attempt to merge onto the freeway at 35 mph, then gradually amble their way to 10 mph below the speed limit while merging into the left lane, at which point they sit there for miles? I can’t imagine any driving school teaches such things, yet I see it all the time. I think it’s just laziness. In the left lane they don’t have to worry about traffic getting on and off the freeway; there’s no need to be proactive, defensive, or aware of anything more than 50 feet down the road. Why care what’s going on in your mirrors? Everyone can just drive around you as you mindlessly sled down the road, Bolivian to the commotion you leave in your wake. SA level = tumbleweed.

Okay, now really back to my buddy. As I crested a rise a couple miles down the road, I could see his Model X still cruising in the left lane, causing a traffic jam as he blissfully sledded down the road. I’m too nice to have done it, but I’d love to tell you that I talked to him later that day, or even that week, about his poor choices that day, giving him the feedback he so clearly needs. I would have explained to him that he was like the arterial plaque that leads to atherosclerosis, artificially narrowing the road and slowing down flow. Or, to use an analogy more likely to resonate with him, he’s akin to a newly minted wingman, flying into the teeth of the threat, blithely ignoring Betty’s pleadings and his RWR, about to get a face full of missile.

The post The Tesla-driving fighter pilot who “sledded into a missile” appeared first on Hagerty Media.

We’ve all heard stories about cities alleged to have the worst traffic in the world. It’s pure chaos in Paris and Rome. Tokyo is sensory overload. Atlanta and Chicago drivers are the worst. Among driving enthusiasts like us, it’s sport to choose any major city around the globe and complain about its drivers.

Los Angeles, however, is the ultimate symbol for bad traffic—and its reputation is well-deserved. The sheer volume of traffic that runs wild on Southern California freeways is unimaginable. Users of the freeway system in Los Angeles County alone total in the millions every single day.

No matter where you live, you’ve probably seen news images of California’s I-405 in full gridlock. Imagine a freeway with six lanes in both directions, each lane filled with single-occupant cars, moving no more than a few kilometres an hour. The horror!

I’m here to share with you my unique perspective on driving culture in the two parts of the world where I consume thousands of miles of road. On average, I drive nearly 50,000 kilometres a year, with half of that in the Toronto area and a third in Southern California. It may come as a surprise to you, but I’m willing to argue that drivers in Southern California are not the worst. Most Toronto drivers are, on the other hand, decidedly in the Needs Improvement camp.

TomTom’s 2019 Traffic Index report states that Mexico City experiences the worst congestion in North America, followed by Los Angeles. Toronto takes the puck deep up the list to the no. six spot. There’s more to the city driving experience than sheer traffic volume, however.

Freeway systems began to develop in Toronto and Los Angeles in the 1930s. You might assume that driving behaviour in those cities matured alongside the physical infrastructure in the following 80 years, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Nobody walks in L.A., as the song says, and that’s everyday reality for the majority of Southern Californians. Of course people walk, but, among vehicle owners, they walk for exercise and not for transportation. Public transportation policy lags behind societal need in most regions. Most people drive rather than walk, cycle, or take public transit, and that preference has led to the development of a unique car culture which is defined by its breadth and depth.

Only in Southern California could a small company like Singer Vehicle Design emerge to produce museum-worthy, six- and seven-figure rebuilds of humble Porsche 911s, with a waiting list as long as PCH. Singer’s legendary reimaginations of 911s require highly talented fabricators, engineers, painters, upholsterers, and parts suppliers, and many of those people are concentrated within a stone’s throw of the company’s L.A. headquarters.

Singer’s proximity to some of the region’s finest driving roads is no accident, either. Canyon and mountain roads crisscross all of Los Angeles and Orange counties. The routes are reasonably well-maintained and the best part is that speed limits are suitable for adults.

These great roads, a highly predictable climate, and scenery that ranges from beaches to forests to desert—combined with the cars and trucks I’m privileged to test there—make Southern California one of my favourite destinations. Enjoy any of my YouTube episodes from California and you’ll see what I mean.

To the uninitiated, driving in Los Angeles may seem overwhelming. The pace at which traffic moves is rapid, the volume of vehicles is mind-boggling, and you’ll frequently encounter lane-splitting motorcycles. L.A. can be a soul-crushing experience for the uninitiated driver.

On the other hand, the level of awareness required to endure this traffic on a daily basis raises the skill levels of the local drivers. You have no choice but to pay attention to survive your commute. It’s sink or swim in L.A.

The freeways are one thing, but the great driving roads are another. The region is surrounded by mountain ranges and a good portion of Southern California drivers are accustomed to twisty roads with reasonable speed limits. The net result is that most drivers are accustomed to carrying speed through those turns with cornering loads approaching 0.5 g.

Southern Californians may love to complain about the conditions of their roads, but Ontario residents have it worse. The northern winters wreak havoc on Canadian road surfaces, which are tortured by a pattern of freezing and melting, a cycle exacerbated by religious use of road salt. Dodging potholes is a winter sport in Canada, much like hockey is our national pastime. However, one of the fundamental differences between Ontario and California today is that speed limits are juvenile in the Great White North. It appears that the province has no faith in drivers’ abilities to motor though corners at any reasonable pace.

Sure, the Greater Toronto Area possesses a reasonable public transit system that supports millions of daily riders, but to get anywhere outside of that locale, one must drive.

When I started driving, I honed my road skills on the curvy roads of the Niagara Escarpment. Much like the California canyon roads I drive today, the scenery there is beautiful—but in modern Ontario fashion, the speed limits have dropped from 80 km/h to 60 in the last three decades. Most likely, bureaucrats argued for the reduction in the name of saving lives, but a cynic might suggest that lower limits increase speeding ticket revenue.

Look at any map of Southern Ontario and you’ll notice its defining feature: straight roads. That’s due to the nature of the topography—twisty roads are few and far between.

Ontario’s roads and the rules that accompany them foster a population of drivers who are only comfortable driving in straight lines. When that tissue box starts sliding across the dashboard, you gotta slow down, buckaroo. The notion of carrying even modest speed through any Ontario corner has been erased from most people’s driving experiences, and many Ontario drivers’ skill levels are lower as a result.

The predominance of straight roads, the sophomoric speed limits, the resulting reduction in driving proficiency, and a less mature response to digital distractions have created a driving culture in the Toronto area that is often opposite that of Los Angeles. For instance, L.A. drivers are reasonably aware of motorcycles on their roads all year long; Ontario drivers are surprised to see them every spring.

I’m not suggesting L.A. drivers are perfect. They’re far from it. I’ve witnessed exceptionally egregious, if not illegal, driving behaviour ranging from sustained speeds of 200 km/h on the freeway to oops-I forgot-I’m-driving-on-bald-tires crashes during the occasional rainstorm. In general, though, drivers in Southern California are more engaged than those in Ontario. Drivers in the 6ix are, in my experience, more often distracted by their phones, more likely to stop their disabled cars on the left shoulder, and more likely to hog the road compared to L.A. motorists.

What are you saying, Brian? Toronto drivers are more selfish than L.A. drivers? Yes, my friends, this is the truth of the matter.

This idea crystallized for me following my return home from Los Angeles last year. The morning after my return, I jumped in a car for a quick trip east of Toronto on Highway 401.

Within seconds of merging into the collector lanes, I witnessed drivers in a panel van and a Honda Civic vying for the same space in the far left lane. With the next interchange to the express lanes of the 401 four kilometres away, there was no urgency to change lanes. Yet, these gentlemen managed to sideswipe one another in a fit of rage in their fight over a few metres of asphalt.

Toronto’s rush hour is defined by this lack of courtesy and the outright selfishness of incessant lane-changing for the sole purpose of advancing one’s position in traffic by a few metres.

This style of driving is infuriating to me, and modern driver-assist systems only make the situation worse. I’m often testing cars with well-resolved, low-speed-follow, advanced driver-assist systems, which, for safety’s sake, leave a couple of car lengths between me and the next vehicle. Inevitably, it only takes mere minutes, if not seconds, for the next boor to jump into the space ahead of me, forcing my car to brake itself.

It may be hard to believe, but drivers in Southern California show markedly more courtesy than those in Toronto. During rush hour, they seem to realize that they will arrive at their destination in the same amount of time as everyone else.

As a result, L.A.’s heavy freeway traffic is defined by infrequent lane-changing. Even when gaps do appear in adjacent lanes, drivers don’t pounce upon them like they do in Toronto. It’s almost a pleasant experience.

After a few days spent driving around Southern California with motorists who seem to know what they’re doing and act with some measure of courtesy, I’m loath to return to the mean streets of Toronto. Can we make driving in Ontario enjoyable again? Of course we can. As a driver, I know how we got here, but I don’t know how to fix it single-handedly. Whether we develop a more sane, considerate driving approach—or simply yield to selfish recklessness—is up to us.

The post Think driving in Los Angeles is bad? Try Toronto appeared first on Hagerty Media.

As far as last hurrahs go, Ben Coombs certainly thought larger than most. An engineer by trade, Coombs decided that prior to selling his Alpine White Porsche 944, he’d—along with his friend, Laura Reddin—enjoy one final adventure with it. This was no weekend trip with a few six packs and some firewood; for Coombs, his vision would take him much farther afield. When it got to driving time, he pointed the 944’s nose south from his home in England—to Cape Town, South Africa.

The journey kicked off in 2007, by which point Coombs had been using the 944 as his daily driver and added 100,000 kilometers (roughly 62,000 miles) to the odometer. With the car showing a total of 320,000 km  (nearly 200,000 miles), it was hardly in mint condition. But what’s another 13,000 hard miles for the trip of a lifetime? Despite being a novice mechanic, Ben felt that the 50-millimeter suspension lift and home-spun, plywood-bodied rooftop tent would be sufficient to see them through to the end.

Naturally, plans shifted somewhat sideways, even after driving through Europe, Syria, and Egypt. The crew lost their exhaust in the Nubian Desert, battled muddy roads in Kenya, and finally ground to a halt in the Namib Desert thanks to a blown ball joint. With ratchet straps and cable ties, they feebly lashed everything back together, soldiered on for a while longer, then broke down again. Eight attempts later, their amateur repair work finally held long enough to putter out of the desert at 20 mph, back onto pavement. They were able to complete the journey from there, arriving in Cape Town after 62 days of travel.

It was far from a smooth journey, but would it be an adventure everything went to plan? Even still, that a Porsche 944 with nearly 200,000 miles even stood a chance over two months, 26 countries, and five deserts is damn impressive. Be sure to click through the slideshow below to see some of the incredible sights and varied landscapes that Coombs and his co-pilot experienced.

The post This wicked Porsche 944 drove from England to South Africa appeared first on Hagerty Media.

(Please welcome former Stereophile author, classical-music producer, and audio-equipment designer John Marks in his debut column for us. John will be sharing his music and knowledge with us on a frequent basis. Most of this music can be heard via any streaming service; the most esoteric selections may require that you be a subscriber to the Qobuz HQ streaming service. Enjoy! — jb)

There’s respect. And sometimes, there’s also love. Here are some of the jazz recordings I have loved. (So, obviously, this list is both personal, and subjective.)

But first: let me make an attempt at a workable definition that may illuminate the differences between “jazz” on one hand, and popular “instrumental music” on the other.

Jazz is an American musical art form that developed out of ragtime (“ragged time”) piano, as exemplified by the music of Scott Joplin (1868-1917). During his lifetime, the “Maple Leaf Rag” (published 1899) was Joplin’s most successful composition. However, the Ragtime Revival of the 1970s achieved critical mass when Joplin’s theretofore less well-known rag “The Entertainer” was included as part of the soundtrack of the film The Sting.

Ragtime music is characterized by an uneven beat. That is, the strong rhythmic beats or accents have been relocated to where they usually would not be. Therefore, our first definitional criterion is that jazz usually has a complex, non-metronomic beat: the rhythm in jazz is “syncopated.”

Secondly, jazz usually involves some degree of improvisation. That is, departing from the melody (which is often a song) as it is known to have been written; or, creating a new melody, tune, or pattern to embellish. However, in practice, there is a rather broad continuum.

Some of the most iconic jazz music was almost entirely written out, such as the big-band charts by Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn. Nevertheless, that music itself was in the spirit of improvisation, and most big-band charts left room for soloists to improvise over an allotted span of measures.

Obviously, some of the most famous jazz music was, indeed, made up on the spot. Many of the tunes on Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue started out as little more than one-line notations of a “white-key” (modal) piano scale as the basis for improvisation.

Thirdly, and although this criterion is historical, in today’s world, it might be debated: jazz music usually has some link to or resonance with African-American or Afro-Cuban culture. I think that that is valid, but only as long as “culture” is taken in a broad sense, and not a narrowly stereotypical or pejorative “Catfish Row” sense. (Catfish Row is the fictional neighborhood in which the Gershwins’ opera Porgy and Bess is set.)

To give one example of the breadth of the diversity of African-American culture, in 1944, Miles Davis entered the Juilliard School, where he familiarized himself with musical scores by then-contemporary classical composers such as Stravinsky, Alban Berg, and Prokofiev.

Of course, definitions are a product of a time and a place.

Perhaps it was over-reliance upon a rather limited, categorical definition that led to the painfully awkward result when New Yorker magazine critic Winthrop Sargeant flatly declared that, as interesting as Birth of the Cool might be, “it is not really jazz.” Whew.

From a vantage point more than 50 years removed, I think we can all agree that Winthrop Sargeant had no business telling Miles Davis and his colleagues what was, and what was not jazz. That’s because, with Birth of the Cool, they redefined the possibilities of jazz.

I have created a playlist of these 12 albums on the Qobuz streaming service—more than 12 hours of music! All the albums are available in at least CD Quality; titles with high-resolution versions are noted. To the music!

1. Miles Davis: the Birth of the Cool sessions (1949/50)

Birth of the Cool grew out of what I conceive to have been a charmingly nerdy enterprise: a basement-apartment music-theory “study group” where forward-looking young musicians would gather, earnestly to plot out the future of jazz.

It might have remained merely academic and theoretical, except that Miles Davis decided to shape them up into a performing group distinguished by its compactness (about half the size of the smaller range of “big bands”), the richness of its harmonies, and the generally slower tempos. That, indeed, was the birth of “Cool Jazz.” (Eleven sides from the original 78-rpm records were reissued together on a vinyl LP, in 1957, under the title Birth of the Cool.) (Qobuz has a hi-res version.)

2. Clifford Brown with Strings (1955)

Of all the trumpet players who came after Louis Armstrong, the one who phrased most like a singer was Clifford Brown. Following in the footsteps of alto-sax genius Charlie Parker, Brown recorded a “with strings” album in January 1955. The set list reads like a “Best of the Great American Songbook” cheat-sheet, the first four tracks being “Yesterdays,” “Laura,” “What’s New,” and “Blue Moon.” A precious moment in time, frozen in amber. If you love Kind of Blue, Sketches of Spain, or Porgy & Bess, then you already love Clifford Brown with Strings.

3. Ella Fitzgerald: The Cole Porter Songbook (1956)

Cole Porter was one of the most significant contributors to what is known as “The Great American Songbook.” Ella Fitzgerald’s survey, made at the peak of her powers, is one of the most important recordings (of anything) of the 20th century. BTW, there’s more at work than frosty Martinis and sly winks. “Miss Otis Regrets” is about a lynching.

Over the course of my decades as a reviewer of high-end audio equipment, after confirming that I had properly connected the right and left loudspeakers, I always made a practice of playing Ella’s “Easy to Love” from this collection. That told me in a heartbeat whether the all-important midrange was at least OK. (Qobuz has a hi-res version.)

4. Michel Legrand: Legrand Jazz (1958)

This has to be the ultimate “1950s ‘Sleeper’ Phenomenal Jazz Recording.”

The total outlier in Michel Legrand’s discography is this oft-overlooked product of three 1958 New York City 30th-Street studio sessions for Columbia. Legrand didn’t play piano and isn’t credited as a composer. Instead, the 26-year old Legrand shaped up the sessions, wrote out the charts for the 11 standards (from “A Night in Tunisia,” to “ ‘Round Midnight”), and conducted.

The earliest session is the attention magnet, in that it features Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Phil Woods, Bill Evans, and Paul Chambers. (Tracks from the three sessions are interleaved in the recording’s playing order.) But, there’s not much variability in the quality of the sessions, because Legrand’s inventive arrangements are so engaging.

5. Oliver Nelson Sextet: The Blues and the Abstract Truth (1961)

Oliver Nelson was an alto saxophonist/composer/arranger who figuratively, and perhaps to some degree literally, struck gold on his first recording for the Impulse! label.

Nelson was extremely fortunate in his colleagues: Freddie Hubbard, trumpet; Eric Dolphy, reeds and flute; Bill Evans, piano; Paul Chambers, bass; and Roy Haynes, drums. (Evans and Chambers had previously played together on Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, in 1959.)

Baritone saxophonist George Barrow made important contributions throughout, in terms of the harmonic textures; but because he did not play any solos, he did not get billing on the LP cover.

The opening track, “Stolen Moments,” features a poignant trumpet solo by Hubbard and a flute solo by Dolphy that is all the more powerful for its being unexpected. “Stolen Moments” remains one of the most iconic Cool Jazz tracks. (Qobuz has a hi-res version.)

6. Bill Evans: The Complete Village Vanguard Recordings, 1961

I can’t imagine Bill Evans sitting down to play “When the Saints Go Marching In.” But, if he had, I’m confident that the result would have been postmodern, and tragic.

Evans reinvented the jazz piano trio, elevating the string bass from a rhythm instrument to a melody instrument, while relying on the drummer more to modulate the music’s intensity than to keep track of the beat. “My Foolish Heart” is one of the most beautiful recordings of anything ever made. These live recordings are of the “a precious moment in time, frozen in amber” variety.

7. Paul Desmond: Desmond Blue (1962)

In Concierto, Jim Hall’s celebrated 1975 excursion on the CTI label (see below), the master of understated guitar lyricism traded heartfelt solos with saxophonist Paul Desmond and trumpet player Chet Baker. Here’s a forerunner to Concierto, from the previous decade: Paul Desmond fronting a string section, with Jim Hall featured in a supporting role. Fortunately, Desmond and Hall managed to rise above the cash-in concept. (Gee, was there another jazz record from around that time, also with “Blue” in its title?)

I think Desmond and Hall’s music succeeds despite, rather than because of, Bob Prince’s culturally-striving string arrangements, which include such non-essentials as a mock-Elizabethan introduction to “My Funny Valentine.”

8. Stan Getz & Charlie Byrd: Jazz Samba (1962)

Creed Taylor earned a psychology degree from Duke University in 1951. I find that rather amusing, because, over the years, I have several times stated that being a record producer is nothing other than the unlicensed practice of psychotherapy. (It also helps to be lucky.) Taylor must have been good at both disciplines. He signed John Coltrane to Impulse! records, but soon thereafter, left to join the new label Verve.

American guitarist Charlie Byrd made a U.S. State-Department-sponsored tour of Latin America, and came back with a satchelful of Bossa-Nova music from his visit to Brazil. Byrd phoned Creed Taylor. Taylor thought the music would be a good fit for Stan Getz, and set up a recording session that really should take the Grand Prize for “Return on Investment.”

Recorded in a church auditorium in Washington DC, with most of the songs completed in one take, Jazz Samba remains the only jazz record to have topped the Billboard “Pop” chart. Jazz Samba sold half a million copies within 18 months, putting Bossa Nova music on the map in North America just before the lads from Liverpool knocked all the pieces off the chessboard. (Qobuz has a hi-res version.)

9. Hubert Laws: The Rite of Spring (1971)

Creed Taylor, buoyed by success, left Verve to found Creed Taylor, Inc. (CTI), the record label that “moldy fig” jazz fans love to hate. Yeah, Taylor did pay Eumir Deodato to record a “jazz” version of “Theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey.” (Well, it won a Grammy, did it not?)

But Taylor also made quite a few albums of lasting artistic value, and this brief sojourn by flautist Hubert Laws is one of them. (Ignore the naysayers.) This album is famous for its title track, but you must hear Laws’ take on Fauré’s “Pavane,” with Gene Bertoncini’s classical guitar so wonderfully recorded. The Bach Brandenburg Concerto excerpts, with some of NYC’s finest session players, strike me as quite true to Bach’s intentions. Merely updated in execution.

10. Jim Hall: Concierto (1975)
Without doubt, the greatest achievement of Taylor’s CTI label was Jim Hall’s mesmerizing reconsideration of the slow movement of Joaquín Rodrigo’s famous classical-guitar concerto. As far as I know, this is the only studio session where Paul Desmond and Chet Baker played together. The other supporting players—Steve Gadd, Ron Carter, and Roland Hanna—create such an elegant (but totally engaged and engaging) soundworld.

11. Tommy Flanagan: Lady Be Good… for Ella (1994)
Tommy Flanagan was Ella Fitzgerald’s music director for more than 10 years. Before that, he participated in such iconic recordings as John Coltrane’s Giant Steps (1960) and Wes Montgomery’s The Incredible Jazz Guitar of Wes Montgomery (1960). One of the peak experiences of my life was to serve glasses of champagne to Tommy Flanagan and Max Roach at a little party I threw at the Waldorf-Astoria, back in the 1990s.

This trio outing has to rank among Flanagan’s best work (and this was a man with 200 album credits, and 30 albums in his own name). The opening track has a very cute intro: “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” transitioning to, “Lady Be Good.” You can hear (and feel) the love.

12: Aaron Diehl: The Bespoke Man’s Narrative (2013)
Aaron Diehl (b. 1985) is an astonishing talent. When soon-to-be-departing New York Philharmonic Music Director Alan Gilbert was putting together his final season, his choice of a soloist for the orchestra’s opening-night gala was Aaron Diehl, to play Gershwin.

This is Diehl’s first studio recording (his previous releases were live recordings). The quartet consists of piano, vibes, bass, and drums. Diehl’s playing in his own arrangement of the “Forlane” from Ravel’s Le tombeau de Couperin is nothing short of amazing. Also, the quartet’s “Bess, You Is My Woman Now” is for the ages. Not to be missed.

Qobuz streaming has a 30-day free-trial offer. The URL for this playlist is here.

The post Music For Your Road, no. 1: Some jazz records I have loved appeared first on Hagerty Media.

There is always one person or fictional character that kids identify with. Mine was James Bond. I liked him because he could, quite literally, do everything. Ski off a cliff, then pop open a Union Jack parachute and glide to safety? Check. Tilt a car up on two wheels to escape down a narrow alleyway? Check. Leap crocodiles? Jump a speedboat? Get the girl? Check, check, and check.

I didn’t know the term at the time, but Bond was a Renaissance Man, and that’s what I wanted to be when I grew up—someone who could do just about anything. I haven’t reached that point yet, but I’ve tried, and along the way, I’ve come to believe that life is about adding tools (read: skills) to your toolbox, both mental and physical.

Which brings me to the subject of daughters, driving, and what we car lovers pass on to the next generation.

I’m blessed with three daughters, all of whom share (or possibly just tolerate) their dad’s life-is-learning philosophy and are thus good-natured about me teaching them things. This summer’s project was driving a manual. My middle daughter, Sophia, learned to drive an automatic last year, but as a member of a car family, she understands that driving a modern automatic car isn’t a full driving experience. Real driving is about feeling like you and the car are one. It’s about mastery of a mechanical object. And freedom. And being in control. And tight corners. And long straightaways. And a whole bunch of other things, as well.

Or so I see it.

So, we decided her classrooms would be a 1930 Deluxe Model A roadster and a 1932 Ford hi-boy roadster hot rod. (Access to cool, old cars is a perk around here.)

We began with the Model A, because it’s a challenge from a braking, handling, shifting, grinding-gears, and “OMG I broke Dad’s car” standpoint. If she could handle the A, she could handle anything. And she did. She quickly got comfortable clutching the three-speed while puttering along the orchard-lined country roads where we live.

Before long, Sophia wanted to go faster, so it was on to the Deuce, a.k.a. the Tommy Fitzgerald Roadster. Like many hot rods built in the style of the late 1950s and early 1960s, Fitzgerald stayed true to the Ford flathead V-8, although he added Eddie Meyer aluminum heads, twin Stromberg 97 carbs, and an original S.C.o.T supercharger.

Sophia didn’t know or care about all that, of course, but she did think the Deuce looked cool and could probably go fast. “Can we finally try that high-speed-axle thing?” she pleaded after mastering the clutch, referring to the two-speed Columbia rear axle I’d been teasing her about.

“It’s too much for the first drive, sweetie,” I said. Of course, I relented after we found a safe, empty stretch of road, because that’s what dads do. We didn’t really go that fast, but we did go faster, and she was thrilled. Her ear-to-ear grin was of the “Hey, I just learned something new and pretty cool” variety.

It was a priceless daddy/daughter moment. I hope you seek out chances to help the next generation put new skills in their toolboxes. That’s how confidence and self-assurance grow. It’s also how our beloved hobby lives on.

The post McKeel Hagerty on driving, daughters, and becoming one with the Deuce appeared first on Hagerty Media.

If you got all your vintage car information from TV shows, you’d likely think all classics had paint shinier than the sun and, if they didn’t, had to be restored in 30 days or someone would be forced to sell their shop. The truth is stranger than fiction, though. When contemplating a vintage car purchase, or justifying the one (or two, or three …) you currently own, you’ll waffle between the joys and the inconveniences. The conclusion we reach from weighing these pros and cons will be different for everyone, but don’t shy away; join the conversation and add your own reasons, either for or against, in the comments.

I wrote out some of the points of vintage car ownership I have personally debated and discussed with friends and family over the years. These have shaped both my collection and my life, and hopefully they can help shape yours.

Image

Humans are pretty vain beings. Much of what we own projects an image of ourselves—what we want to be and how we desire to be perceived. We strive to separate ourselves from the rest of the herd corralled on the 405. Driving something other than a beige crossover with 13.1 sticker on the rear window is an easy solution.

A prime example is my 1965 Corvair. Regardless of where I take it, the car usually stands out. It provokes fun conversations, and I like to think the white coupe is a rolling depiction of my lifestyle. The path to where I currently sit (literally and figuratively) started with a ’65 Corvair. Now I keep one around to remind me of where I started and how far I have come.

Maintenance

Some know-it-alls will convince you that vintage cars have the personality of a needy toddler who just learned the word “gimme.” While this stereotype isn’t universally true, the vast majority of items produced for consumers are not meant to last forever. The cars of the 1960s were never expected to last 60 years under regular use, though some vehicles have managed to pull it off. Keeping something vintage on the road will require a liberal amount of care to prevent failures.

You can either anticipate the warning signs or let components go beyond their expected service life. However, ignore that scraping noise while turning, or the clunk as the transmission shifts into second, and you could soon be watching the green fly out of your wallet instead of watching the green stream past your window.

Fun

In the grand scheme of things, vintage cars are often just big toys for their owners. We buy them because we like how they make us feel when we sit behind the wheel or stoop under the hood. The experience of turning the key, dropping the transmission into gear, and heading out of the driveway for the most mundane errand is enough to bring a smile to our face. Vintage cars are just fun to drive, and in the right situations can be the closest thing to time travel a human can experience.

Safety

Modern cars are veritable bank vaults when it comes to protecting their occupants. Vintage cars are … less so. Life is all about risk, and how much you are willing to take on is a very personal choice. Lap belts are better than nothing but have been proven to be less effective in a crash than a three-point belt. Air bags are nice, too, especially when compared to a plastic three-spoke steering wheel and solid steering shaft.

Accident avoidance is another major factor in safety. Drum brakes often get a bad rap but, if properly adjusted, can provide enough stopping power to overcome the coefficient of friction provided by most narrow, classic-sized tires. The soft suspension of a ’70s land yacht makes a quick lane change in modern traffic a hair-raising experience. Many vintage cars will not have ABS to step in and help keep you from skidding. Remember, more metal and no crumple zones does not mean you “win” in a crash; it only means you have more momentum and that more force will be transferred to the occupants of your car.

Community

Want to make new friends? Just drive a vintage car into a public place and smile. You will be chatting with someone in no time at all. Dive deeper and attend a gathering of vintage cars (if it’s feasible in your area). Unlike underwater basketweaving enthusiasts, car enthusiasts can simply hop behind the wheel and take to the streets to find fellow hobbyists, like-minded or otherwise. A vintage car attracts more attention than the Bat-Signal, and all those conversations—whether on a research quest or at your local Dairy Queen—will inevitably lead to a few new friendships.

Usability

Having taken a 103-year-old race car up some serious grades in the high desert of California, I can attest to how unnerving it is to be the slowest thing on the road. Staying in your lane and hoping other drivers sense the speed differential between themselves and you is not a relaxing experience.

Cars have molded much of the world around them—and vice versa. Road quality, traffic patterns, and the general demands placed on a car being used on the road have changed drastically. Most cars built 40–50 years ago were simply not built to cruise on the highway at 70 mph. Some certainly can, but most are not at their happiest when traveling at that pace and doing so will only serve to increase their wear and tear (read: their chance of mechanical failure). Having realistic expectations of what your vintage ride is capable of could mean re-routing your trip to the “blue highways” or swapping the keys for something that is better suited to the journey and experience you want.

This list isn’t meant to deter anyone from pursuing their interest in cars, nor is it meant to convince someone to immediately rent a trailer and tow home a Craigslist find. Instead, this is simply a realistic look at the landscape of the automotive hobby. We take the bad with the good, knowing that the struggle of keeping our vintage cars on the road makes the enjoyment of driving them that much sweeter.

The post 6 pros and cons of vintage car ownership appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Lilly Pray has a passion for cars, and now she’s channeling that energy into an organized drive that will give back to the community. Lilly, a nurse in Boulder, Colorado, serves an ambassador for Rally Across America, a grassroots organization whose goal is to raise more than $1 million for nonprofit groups across the U.S.

As a frontline medical worker and car lover, the fundraising tour is right in Pray’s wheelhouse, and it all started with her dad. Malcom Pray Jr. was a successful car dealer and well-known collector who gave generously to the Boy Scouts, Boys and Girls Club, Red Cross, USO, and other local charities in Greenwich, Connecticut.

“My father taught me how to drive classic cars,” she says of Malcom, who passed away in 2013. “If I wanted to spend time with my dad, it was in the garage with him, as well as attending a lot of auctions and concours events.

“I’ve been a concours judge for many years, and it is probably how I made my dad the proudest when I started judging at Hilton Head Concours 19 years ago. He instilled in me a great sense of giving and giving back to my community,” she says.

Lilly Pray began working in the medical field in 1987, first as volunteer, which led to a career as a firefighter/paramedic. She became an RN in 2010 and volunteers as a victim advocate for the Boulder Police Department.

“My brother died in a car crash in 1986,” she says of Malcolm Pray III. “It was a life changing event. My life motto has been always to ‘help the weaker hikers on their journey.’ So as an EMS provider, and now a RN, I guess I’m still helping the weaker hikers and holding their hands in whatever way I can.”

She jumped at the opportunity to help Rally Across America, which hosted its inaugural drive on June 7, with proceeds going to the Connecticut Foodbank. A total of 41 cars took part, with each driver donating the suggested $100.

Lilly says the idea began with her friends Frank Taylor and Wendy and Jim Petty, who organized the drive as a way to recognize and give to 501(c)3 nonprofits in their area that have greatly suffered during the COVID-19 lockdown. Pray happened to be in Connecticut at the time, so she immediately registered her 1987 Porsche 911. Since Rally Across America hopes to have ambassadors in every state (and average eight drives per state), she took the lead for Colorado.

The first drive that Pray is organizing is set for June 28, beginning and ending in Boulder. Her chosen beneficiary is the Denver-based Morgan Adams Foundation, which raises funds for pediatric cancer research. “The MAF holds the best four-hour concours in the world,” she says, “and they had to cancel their annual major fundraiser on August 24 due to the ongoing events with COVID.”

She has planned two other drives for July 26 and August 16. They will follow a route “into the foothills of the mountains—an easy 60-mile drive lasting 3–4 hours.” As a registered nurse, Lilly is well aware of the possible negative ramifications of any gathering, so social distancing guidelines will be observed. “We just want to get out in our cars and help the nonprofit community,” she says.

She’ll be driving the 1959 Porsche Convertible D that she has owned for 25 years. If you’re sensing a Porsche pattern here, you’re onto something. Lilly’s daughter is named Portia.

Pray says Rally Across America events are planned in six states so far, including one later this year, organized by Barn Find Hunter Tom Cotter, that will travel country roads from Charlotte, North Carolina, to Virginia International Speedway and include a parade lap on the track. Details are forthcoming.

“Driving cars makes me happy,” Lilly says. “My car friends really are my family, and there is nothing as fun as gathering for a family reunion—whether it’s at a concours event, a 1000-mile drive, or a short day-run with friends.”

Rally Across America ambassadors are being sought in every state. If you’re interested in becoming an ambassador or joining a ride near you, contact Lilly Pray at LillyPrayRAA@gmail.com.

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It’s that time of year—we all just want to go for a long, scenic drive in our vintage cars. If you need more motivation than warm weather and an automotive soundtrack, consider joining us out on the road to support a worthy cause—and potentially win some sweet prizes along the way.Hagerty has partnered with Drive Toward a Cure for the fourth year in a row to give drivers across the U.S. a little extra push to get behind the wheel. Those who choose to enter will log miles and work to collect donations for Parkinson’s Disease research over the 75 days between June 21 and Labor Day (September 7). A selection of prizes will be awarded based on miles logged and experiences shared on social media.

“No one would deny the memories we all retain from great drives—whether youthful recollections for nostalgic cars or the roads we envision on a crisp and clear summer day or night,” said Doug Clark, Vice President of Publishing and Business Development for Hagerty. “The ‘Summer Drive Toward a Cure’ program is an opportunity to get out safely and just feel good, while doing some good for others, too.”

If you are not sure where to drive, we will being sharing route suggestions throughout the summer that will hopefully give you some inspiration. Those who are out on the road are encouraged to share their stories and photos both on social media and in the Hagerty Community, where posts will be selected weekly for smaller prizes.

The grand prizes will be awarded after Labor Day to the drivers who log the most miles and raise the most money. Over the last four years, Drive Toward a Cure has raised over $400,000 for Parkinson’s Disease research and patient care. To get involved, visit drivetowardacure.org/summer to register.

If you want to participate but find yourself without a vintage car, use the discount code DTAC2020 on DriveShare.com and rent your dream ride for a day or two. That discount code will also prompt DriveShare to donate its proceeds from the rental fee to Drive Toward a Cure.

The post Add a few miles to your odometer and Drive Toward a Cure with us appeared first on Hagerty Media.

If you’re anything like us, you had the date for your teen’s driving test circled on the calendar. Hopefully, both you and your child were growing increasingly excited: you’re probably an anticipating some relief of daily shuttle duties, and they’re eager to prove their worth behind the wheel of a car—that expression of freedom we cherish so deeply.

If only it were that simple. COVID-19 brought nearly everything to a halt—including driving tests.

As the country prepares to pull back the shutters and slowly return to normal life, there’s no telling when driving tests will resume. How can soon-to-be drivers ensure that their skills don’t grow rusty, especially as memory of that driver’s ed class fades into the past?

Bill Wade is the National Program Director at the Tire Rack’s Street Survival driving school. In the absence of official driving instructors, Bill has kindly passed along 11 skills and exercises that parents can practice with their future drivers to help them stay sharp.

Seat position

Most young folks are so nervous prior to a driving test that they will ignore something as simple as a comfortable seat position. Teach your teen how to adjust the seat and steering wheel (if possible) so that they can use all the controls without having to lean or stretch.

Have them stretch out their arm without pulling their shoulder off the seat back; the steering wheel should hit their outstretched arm at the break of their wrist. Your teen should be able to press the brake pedal as far as they can without locking their knee; they should be able to get a large range of travel, and should slide the seat forward until that is possible.

Proper hand placement

Placing your hands at nine and three o’clock shouldn’t feel stilted—there’s an anatomical advantage to doing so, according to Wade. If you’re turning left, use your left hand to pull down on the steering wheel, rather than using your right hand to push up. You have smaller muscle groups in your forearm, and they are easier to control than the larger groups in your upper arm. Relying on your forearms rather than your beefy biceps means that steering adjustments (or inputs) will be more precise. This technique is especially helpful when you’re driving in less-than-ideal conditions, such as a snowstorm.

Seatbelt safety

This should go without saying, but tell your teen driver anyways: Always buckle up when in a car, whether behind the wheel or not. Position the horizontal portion of the belt low on your hips, not up on your stomach—in the event of a crash, a lower-slung belt is less likely to damage your internal organs. Similarly, the shoulder belt should be reasonably snug on your body.

If you’re wearing particularly bulky clothes, the seatbelt will require additional fractions of seconds to tighten against your body if you get into an accident. It might not sound important, but those tiny slices of time can be the difference between safety and serious injury. If you’re driving in colder regions, take the time to let the car heat up, then shed that down jacket before you leave the driveway.

Effective mirror positioning

Despite the plethora of modern automated safety technologies, none of them replace an aware driver. Your seemingly humble side and rearview mirrors are among your teen’s best tools in protecting their blind spots. There should only be a tiny sliver of your own car visible in each side mirror.

Contrary to what some of us were taught, Wade says that your teen should never look over their shoulder while driving to check their blindspot. His reasoning is simple: Your hands follow your eyes, so when you look over that shoulder, you subconsciously begin to change lanes. Instead, the proper mirror adjustment mentioned above—and simply leaning forward in the seat to momentarily gain a wider mirror angle—should be enough to determine whether or not it is safe to change lanes.

“Always in park” procedure

The mirror and the seat adjustments mentioned above should only be done when the vehicle is in park. The same goes any adjustments of the radio. These mundane adjustments might not be top of mind when your teen grabs the keys. Work to form their habit of adjusting driving-adjacent inputs before they hit the open road.

Sometimes numbers help: At 60 mph, your teen travels the length of a high school basketball court every second, and the length of a comparable football field in five seconds while doing 55 mph. It’s not worth the risk to change the station on the go.

As important as these first five reminders are, the whole point of driver’s education is to familiarize young folks with the sensation of being on the move while behind the wheel. Wade also shared some behind-the-wheel exercises to work with your young driver.

“10-second rule” exercise

Often new drivers can be relatively short-sighted; they’re fearful of swerving from their lane and may not trust themselves or the car. Ironically, this same attitude may produce jerkier steering and prevent them from anticipating circumstances farther down the road.

To help your teen break this short-distance focus, have them pick an object somewhere down the road that they think is ten seconds away. Then, have them count to ten seconds out loud. Often, they’ll reach the object they’ve picked well before ten seconds have elapsed. Repeat this technique to help them improve their instincts. It’s almost impossible to be looking too far down the road—especially on interstates or highways.

Appropriate following distance

Many teens’ first accidents involve them rear-ending someone (or something) because they’re not familiar with the distance a vehicle requires to stop. According to Wade, the distance between two vehicles should be at least 3 seconds at any speed over 35 mph.

We’re going to ad lib here and say that with every 10-mph increase, you should allow for an additional second’s worth of room. You should discuss this idea of following distance in conjunction with the 10-second exercise mentioned above.

Nighttime driving

It’s important for you to get some seat time with your teen as they start driving in the evening. Discuss how low-light situations can mess with a driver’s perception and distance; encouraging them to lower their speeds as the sun sets. Many modern cars have headlights that automatically switch on at dusk, but show your teen in great detail how to adjust the headlight dial, stalk, or switch; make sure  they exactly what each setting does and when each is appropriate. There’s nothing worse than encountering another car at night with only a dim glow from its fog lights. Do everything you can to make sure your teen driver isn’t that car!

Additionally, explain to them why the “but I can see just fine” excuse never cuts it. Even if the light has only begun to fade, and active headlights don’t make a discernable distance to your teen, headlights don’t exist simply to serve a car’s driver. More often, the headlights serve other drivers on the roads, allowing them to trace the movement of your teen—and the car they’re driving.

Varied speed experiences

This should go without saying, but please don’t throw your new driver into the merging lane on the freeway within their first 20 minutes. Take it slowly, starting with around town speeds no more than 50 mph, and building up from there. Allow them to get comfortable with the car’s braking, turning, and accelerating behavior at different speeds. Braking a car from 70 mph is a very different exercise than slowing it from 40 mph. Trying to accelerate from 50–70 mph may be surprisingly undramatic, unless your teen is driving a McLaren, and newer drivers can easily blow pass a speed limit without noticing.

Scanning for wildlife and other factors

Around Hagerty’s Traverse City office, wooded roads are only a 15 minute drive in any direction you choose—and so are deer, raccoons, possums, and other wildlife. Your teen should be on high alert for unexpected intrusions apart from fellow drivers, including children, bikers, road debris, potholes, wildlife, and more.

Teach them to love the drive!

As you work through the instructional materials above, never miss a chance to compliment your teen on their driving, and celebrate their opportunity to enjoy the open road. After all, that’s what this is all about—making sure that the next generation never stops driving!

When driving tests are finally able to take place again, be sure to check out Hagerty’s License to the Future program and learn how you could help your teen get their driving license for free.

The post 11 tips to sharpen your teen driver’s skills appeared first on Hagerty Media.

How’d you enjoy your time on the treadmill today? I don’t mean the one at your local gym, which you probably haven’t seen in a while, or the one in your basement, which in my case is currently being used to hold up a stack of recently acquired Earth, Wind, and Fire vinyl records—I mean the treadmill that you had a 100 percent chance of using today, and that’s the hedonic treadmill. The phrase comes from a psychology paper published in the ’70s, and it refers to our ability as human beings to quickly adapt to any given level of happiness.

Remember when you were a kid and you were just certain that having a driver’s license would fix all of your problems? Later on in life, maybe you scrimped and saved for a dream car, only to find that pretty soon you didn’t even notice you were driving the thing. Or that McMansion you’d always wanted, which now exists in your mind primarily as a place with three different A/C units to fail at random intervals. That’s the hedonic treadmill, and it punishes us just like that old boulder punished Sisphyus.

For your humble author, the ultimate hedonic treadmill moment came after I’d just got done driving some $400,000 car around a racetrack somewhere, on someone else’s dime, while wearing a Brioni coat and a carbon-fiber helmet. I’d had a great meal with friends the night before and I knew I was going to have another one that night. My son was healthy, I was ahead on all my bills. I was dating a wonderful woman and her best friend. Life was great—and then I got an email from an airline telling me I was going to have a middle seat for the five-hour flight home. I looked dramatically to the Alcantara-clad roof of my hypercar du jour and screamed, to an audience of no one: “Why do I have to live like this?” Then I laughed, because I sounded ridiculous even to myself.

You get the idea. Nothing satisfies, not forever. Today’s questioner would like to step off the hedonic treadmill and find a car to enjoy every day for a long time—but he has a few nontrivial restrictions, of which you’ll hear in a moment. This sounds like a tough ask. Maybe there’s a way around the problem. It’s foolish to think that we can escape what is known to be a fundamental part of the human psyche—but can we trick it?

Erik asks:

I’m approaching my 40th birthday and am planning my mid-life crisis / “reward for making it this far in life” new car. I’ve considered buying a classic, but realistically with family commitments I don’t have the time to spend wrenching—my free time will need to be spent driving it, not fixing it. Car will spend the majority of its life on the street (slight possibility of one or two days at the drag strip per year).

My current fun car, purchased when I turned 30, is a Mazdaspeed3. I’ll keep this car as my winter fun car (saving the new one from -30 C and road salt). I’m an engineer by profession and have enjoyed installing all the bolt-on upgrades (engine and suspension) and tuning it myself. I appreciate well-built machines—it’s been super reliable and satisfying to own. When I was in university my daily driver was a ’92 Ducati 900SS (I no longer ride—lower risk tolerance since fatherhood). I loved the intake and exhaust noises—riding it was a very sensory experience.

My primary constraints for the new ride are:

1. I’m tall (6 feet, 5 inches), so sadly no tiny vehicles (Miata or Supra).
2. Must feel special every time I drive it. It doesn’t need to be ultra fast or flashy (I skew more towards slow-car-fast, but I need to feel connected to it (good handling, nice intake/exhaust noises).
3. Good reliability with reasonable servicing costs.
4. ~$80K (Canadian) price limit.

Here’s my shortlist (not in any particular order):
1. Charger Widebody Hellcat. Pros: great noises, ability to seat four (bring along the family), a bit of a sleeper (compared to the Challenger). Cons: terrible interior, looks like a fleet car, wife associates with redneck brodozers, questionable build quality and reliability.
2. GT350. Pros: Great handling, cool engine, manual transmission. Cons: questionable engine reliability & build quality.
3. LC500. New would be a stretch, but maybe 1 or 2 years old used. Pros: absolutely gorgeous exterior & interior, NA V8, pretty rare, stellar build quality, should last forever. Cons: higher initial cost, higher servicing costs, weird infotainment input device.
4. New Corvette (base trim, maybe with Z51). Pros: mid-engine, naturally aspirated V-8, great price. Cons: maybe too wild/flashy looking, still working out the kinks in the new design.

So what do you think? Any other cars I should consider or ones I should avoid?

I bolded one sentence above: “Must feel special every time I drive it,” because that’s the big ask. The two big conditions are: No tiny cars, nothing over $80K Canadian. Without the first restriction, I could recommend an ND2—which is to say, 2019 or 2020—Miata roadster. I have one, courtesy of my spouse, and it’s one of those rare cars that never seems to get old. Any time you’re tired of the way it behaves, you can just drop the top for a few minutes and become revitalized—or you can rip around a local roundabout until the police show up. It’s not a “tiny vehicle” in the MG Midget sense of the word. I can sit my 48 Long suit size (58 in Zegna, and 60 in Brioni, sadly!) torso and six-foot-two body in there without trouble. If Erik is a legit six-five, however, as opposed to a dating-site profile six-five (which means my height) then he’s going to be just on the outside of what works on a daily basis there.

Without the second restriction, I could recommend a Lotus Evora 400, Ferrari 458 Speciale, Nissan GT-R Nismo, AMG GT R … the list goes on. There are a lot of great cars out there for big-and-rich guys.

Oh well. Let’s start with Erik’s list. The LC500 has to go right away because it’s just not going to excite him on a daily basis. It’s a brilliant car, and I wish to heck I had one, but it’s not the kind of thing that will astound you on the move. The same goes for the C8 Corvette in its current form. Both of these cars are just too, ah, “globally competent.”

You see, what Erik’s really trying to do here isn’t just to step off the hedonic treadmill—he is also trying to “make love stay,” a topic which has animated more than a few great novels and at least one Dan Fogelberg song. As strange as it sounds, perfection, or even substantial competence, is the enemy of making love stay. You need a person (or a car) to give you both the highs and the lows. That’s how we trick the treadmill. If we never stay at a particular level of happiness, we never get a chance to become complacent with it. I think that’s why some endurance athletes are such sunny people. They get a daily dose of misery in their lives.

Both the Hellcat and the GT350 will provide some lows to go with the highs, to put it mildly. Of these two, I would pick the GT350 because it’s a more engaging vehicle to drive. The Hellcat is a bit of a one-trick pony. After a while, you don’t really notice the acceleration. I spent a year riding my ZX-14R to work every day; at the end of that year I could literally yawn while blasting from 80–150 to cover gaps on the freeway. Then I let it sit in the garage for a while because I had a 180-mile commute, which ended in March. I got on it for the first time in a while last week and I thought I was going to fall off the back of the bike. If you drove a Hellcat once or twice a week, it would still blow your mind. Every day? Take the GT350. For the noise, the clop-clop way it punishes you on bad roads, the coiled eagerness to rev all the way past the 8000 mark. There’s a chance it will blow up, but the same was true of the Puerto Rican hairdresser vaguely alluded to at the beginning of this article. The course of true love never did run smooth.

We could close today’s piece right there: Take a GT350, and a GT350R if you can afford it because you’ll get all your money back, and then some, when it’s time to sell. As the Sisyphus of advice columnists, however, I can’t resist offering some advice which won’t be taken—or even taken seriously: Instead of one car, Erik, I say you should get two. Get a Hyundai Veloster N, and get a five-year-old five-liter Mustang. That’s $80K Canadian right there. Switch back and forth. Tune them to your satisfaction as you have time and money to do so, knowing that the other car will still be able to get you to work. With winter tires, you could probably shuffle off the MS3 and use the Veloster in the winter, even.

As the owner of two such radically different cars, you’ll always be aware of their individual virtues and excitements as you switch back and forth. Just as importantly, you’ll also be annoyed by both of their foibles. Just enough to make you want to drive the other one for a bit, and so on. This will keep both cars feeling fresh, and it will prevent you from ever taking either of them for granted. I think that’s the key to beating the hedonic treadmill, one I learned personally when I spent quite some time in the hospital about a year after my spoiled-brat incident described above: If you don’t want to take your happiness for granted, sometimes you have to throw it away for a while.

The post Ask Jack: It’s got to be special every time! appeared first on Hagerty Media.

It’s payback time. Time to make up for all the stupid neckties, questionable cologne, and handmade IOUs you’ve given dear ol’ Dad on past Father’s Days. You know the ones—good for mowing the lawn or taking out the garbage … chores that were already on your jobs list anyway.

No, it’s time to step up and give your car-loving father something that he’ll truly appreciate: the gift of your time, your attention, and maybe even a little of your sweat. Are you listening, kids?

Clean the garage

No, it’s not glamorous, but that’s what makes this task worthwhile. We all want to spend time on the fun projects, but a messy garage sabotages efficient progress. Help your dad focus on what he loves by taking the task off his plate. Make that eternally-delayed trip to the storage unit. Purge the herd of family bikes cluttering the wall beside his project car, or mount them on the wall out of panel-dinging danger. Clear a space for a new shelf or tool chest—just don’t mess up his carefully considered organizational system!

Photograph his car

Even though we love to text or email a picture of our ride to our friends, or post a quick phone shot on social media, there’s no substitute for a frame-worthy photo shoot. Use these tips and do the shoot yourself, or hire a professional. Either way, print out some hard copies. You’ll capture your dad’s memories and allow him to share his automotive story that much better with friends and family.

Go on a road trip

A long drive is a much-needed tonic these days. A day spent away from the urgency of everyday life can be a gift all its own. If your dad loves off-roading, scope out a trail you can tackle together. If he prefers a laid-back cruise around a scenic downtown, do some searching on Google Maps. Or maybe the dad in your life is craving a solitary escape: take over kid duty or volunteer for weekend yard chores to let him hit the road obligation-free. Don’t overthink this one, either; the destination isn’t nearly as important as the execution.

Wrench with him

Maybe there’s a grueling, all-weekend project he’s been putting off for lack of help. Help a fellow gearhead by tackling that intimidating project once and for all. Maybe your dad’s put off a junkyard trip for weekends to look for that one part—use the special occasion of Father’s Day to block off the time and help him cross something off the project car list. It doesn’t have to be a heroic effort, though; quality garage time could be as simple as grabbing a few beers and talking shop while changing the oil.

Detail his car

Maybe your dad’s car is running just fine, but it’s not looking its absolute best. Some classic car owners know a professional detailer and are comfortable trusting their ride to them; others prefer to do the task themselves, either out of caution or because they genuinely enjoy the hands-on task. If your dad’s in the latter group, hop on your computer and splurge on a box of automotive detailing goodies.

Buy him something

Sometimes you just want to celebrate a holiday with a gift-wrappable object. In that case, and especially if you’re in need of a contact-free option, we’ve rounded up not one, but two lists of our staff’s favorite books. If your dad would prefer to tinker with a model than flip pages, however, check out these old-school cool wooden kits. For wearables and gearhead-friendly accessories, check out The Shop by Hagerty, where you’ll find a casual Barn Find Hunter hat, our classic Shift Happens tee, and this retro-themed garage poster.

Research his car

Aaron Robinson recently used his abundant time at home to research the history of his 1949 Buick Special—and he struck gold. The key to his success? A subscription to Newspapers.com, which allowed him to discover the original owner of his 71-year-old ride. If your dad owns an older classic, or relishes the research, $75 will unlock six-month access to nearly 17,000 newspapers from 1700s–2000s. It’s an all-you-can-eat buffet of automotive history, and even someone who wants to peruse the olden days of automotive culture, rather than comb through digital classifieds, will enjoy it.

Watch a movie together

Maybe you’ve already tuned some carburetors together, gone on a glorious road trip, and turned a few wrenches in the garage. Top off your Father’s Day with a movie, enjoyed from the comfort of your car. Whether you’re looking for the all-time greats or some obscure titles, digging through vintage flicks or browsing more recent Netflix hits, we’ve got you covered. (Want something truly awful? Got that too.)

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Seamus Hnat is a humble, hardworking guy. His firm handshake will often impart a dab of grease, usually originating from his century-old car. Not only does Seamus drive a Model T, he logs miles with a dedication that few pre-war vehicle owners can equal. His no-nonsense, straight-to-the-point personality is a fitting reflection of his 1914 Ford touring car.

I was reminded of Seamus’ T adventures via social media, when he started posting photos of the car packed up and ready for a trip. We both graduated from McPherson College with automotive restoration degrees, and when he began working at a large car collection in Michigan, a few hours from me, he and I resolved to stay in touch.

I’d followed his trips over the last two years, including two trips to the annual Hershey fall swap meet, so my interest piqued as to where he might be headed this time. He told me he was headed north from his home in the greater Detroit area for some sightseeing, including a few days in my neck of the woods, Traverse City. This gave me a chance to talk shop with the 25-year-old who has put more than 10,000 miles on his Model T in the last six years.

“I’m trying to catch up with the old timers, so I’m just driving as much as I can,” Seamus said when asked why he is driving his T so much. “I don’t have a formal logbook or anything, but just keeping track of the larger trips it is around that 10,000 mark.”

His car might look like a crusty Model T plucked from a barn somewhere, but Seamus’ Ford hides its upgrades well. All the mechanical bits have been thoroughly investigated and either restored or upgraded for better reliability. Seamus overlooked nothing, but the T’s appearance is what he concerns himself with least.

“I use Seagrave firetruck grease in the water pump. I’ve only got a little of it left, and it was super hard to find, but that water pump hasn’t leaked a drop in the two years since I rebuilt it.”

The aftermarket two-speed Ruckstell rear axle is serious business, a period-correct piece that has been also fitted with high-speed 3:1 gearing. This axle setup effectively gives the car four gears instead the standard two. Ford advertised a cruising speed of about 30 mph for the Model T, but with all the work Seamus has done he can now cover ground much more effectively, topping out in the mid-50-mph range. It’ll cruise happily at 42 mph all day, at least according to the GPS that he powers with a 12 volt jump pack kept in the passenger footwell. He’s programmed the GPS to avoid highways, but occasionally there is only one path to get where he is going. In those situations he has to keep an especially level head.

“I’ve only been flipped off once this trip. It is always a bit weird because I wonder what they expect. I can’t pull over for every car that comes up behind me, I wouldn’t get anywhere if I did that!”

On-the-road maintenance it pretty simple, Seamus says, even when covering over 200 miles per day. He greases the chassis lube points each morning, the steering box weekly, and changes the oil every few days due to the lack of filter in the system. Going for a ride showed me a comfortable—if tall—car that just floated down the road. It went faster than I was comfortable with, admittedly, but Seamus assured me the car’s stopping power, after his upgrades, was sufficient.

He upgraded the engine internals for more power and cruising speed, but his initial plan to balance that by simply increasing his stopping distance quickly came apart. Model T Fords have rear-wheel brakes only, and even after he rebuilt the factory drum brakes there was just not enough braking power to safely rein in the T.

“I added the disc brake kit, and it wasn’t cheap but now I tell everyone I can that they’ve got to get it. I can actually stop now.”

If Seamus does stop though, it isn’t for long. Road tripping his 106-year-old car is just fun for him, something he takes up at every opportunity. When asked what the hardest part about logging all these miles in a vintage car, he responds with “finding the time. I only have so much vacation time.”

That pure love of driving is infections, and it reminded me to take the time to enjoy being behind the wheel a bit more. Maybe we all should. Thanks for the reminder, Seamus, and safe travels.

The post When you put 10,000 miles on a Ford Model T, it’s for the love of the drive appeared first on Hagerty Media.

“Nearly every American hungers to move.”—John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley

It’s amazing how quickly life can change. A few months ago, few had heard of coronavirus. Since then, COVID-19 has consumed our attention. I hope you and your loved ones have weathered the storm. In the end, that is all that really matters.

But now, from coast to beautiful coast, we are well into driving season, and it is time to move. Maybe not in groups yet. As I write this, many places are still restricting gatherings. But we can still get out and drive. Or at least plan our next great road adventure. That’s half the fun anyway. The coronavirus is commanding our attention at present, but it cannot keep us from enjoying life. Nor should we allow it to.

I could use a road trip right about now to clear my head, do some deep thinking, and reestablish a sense of normality and control over life. Maybe you feel the same. This is not the first time I have felt that tug, of course. Road trips have always been part of my adult life. I did a lot of solo trips when I was a philosophy grad student. Like many others with a soul full of wanderlust and a head full of questions, I was under the spell of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert Pirsig.

Billed as a “fictionalized autobiography,” Zen is actually one of the great American road-trip books. Pirsig was trying to come to grips with what electroshock therapy had done to his mind and spirit. As the narrator, he used daily motorcycle rides to unpack a set of ideas and thoughts, which he called a “Chautauqua,” referring to the traveling circuses that once roamed the U.S. spreading music, information, and strange new ideas to remote towns.

Sounds a bit wild, yes, but basically Pirsig was in search of himself. Aren’t we all from time to time? That’s why I would jump into my 1989 Mustang convertible and explore the American Southwest.

I loved those journeys, my personal Chautauquas. They were my joy, my disconnect, and my way to work through things that were on my mind, which in those days often meant term papers. Top down, stereo off—after 120 miles or so, I’d wrestled many a problem to the ground.

Even better, I always felt refreshed and lighter somehow, which is why I continue to roam. These days, my trips are more infrequent and typically closer to home because, frankly, my family needs me around. But the payoff is the same as it ever was: My spirit is renewed. And isn’t that what personal adventure and exploration are supposed to do? I think so.

I’ve heard it said that road trips are not unlike hero quests, which form the basis of most of the stories we love, from The Odyssey to Star Wars. You will indeed bring back treasure from almost any road trip, and the treasure is what you’ve seen, done, and learned.

I hope you are able to claim your share of that treasure sooner rather than later. Until then, remember, this too shall pass.

Onward and upward.

McKeel Hagerty is the CEO of Hagerty. This story originally appeared in the May/June issue of Hagerty Drivers Club Magazine.

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I was once a man of loosely defined, youthful ambitions: I wanted to pursue a career in automotive design and meet folks that would forever alter my path. The Glassell School of Art introduced me to a woman in her late 50s who, at first glance, seemed like another free spirit seeking inspiration via afternoon workshops. That changed when she busted out a copy of Blood Sugar Sex Magik in an open studio. The past 23 years fogged my memory, but one comment remains clear:

“I crave the music that young people enjoy. I need their inspiration, their energy to create … the Red Hot Chili Peppers motivates me.”

After that exchange, I thoroughly enjoyed seeing that crazy diamond gettin’ her shine on. Perhaps that’s why I’m following in her footsteps with the electronic music of Gen Z and millennials, which I discovered because of their bottomless love of modern classics on YouTube. I stumbled upon a trove of videos starring everything from a Nissan 240SX or BMW E36 to a Corvette C4, Lexus LS400, or Mazda RX-7, all overlaid with synthesized tunes. This isn’t some obscure corner of the internet; it’s a full-blown automotive subculture.

The C4 Corvette’s brutally minimalist style, long clamshell hood, digital gauges, and pop-up headlights pair well with modern electronic music and YouTube production values. However, I’ll admit my first reaction to the above video came from the title’s poor grammar—on second thought, I realized the author is from Kuwait and likely speaks his mother tongue better than most of us. Which proves this new subculture is a global phenomenon, as millennials and Gen Z take a reincarnated sound, implement the latest video production technology, and spread their “message” via social media.

So what’s the sound?

Synthwave. It’s a low-fidelity electronic sound influenced by 1980’s New Wave and it happily lives on less-mainstream streaming platforms like SoundCloud, far below the surface of pop chart popularity. Well, until The Weeknd’s synth-heavy single “Blinding Lights” dropped last November and spent most of April at the number one spot on the Billboard 200. The song came with a suitable chariot for that synthwave sound: The accompanying music video’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas theme had a Mercedes-Benz AMG GT droptop playing the role of Hunter S. Thompson’s 1973 Chevy Caprice.

More to the point, synthwave isn’t necessarily bright and cheery. While you might imagine contemporary synth-pop to riff on Cyndi Lauper’s bubblegum sound, the lo-fi sound speaks to directly to low-key film noir fans who gravitate to the seedy subject matter beneath the neon and pastel veneer of Miami Vice. That famous scene with Crockett and Tubbs (and Phil Collins, natch’) could very well be the godfather of all car-focused synthwave music videos.

Synthwave car culture videos are usually low-budget affairs that often repackage other video clips into a modern interpretation of film noir. Once again, the C4 Corvette works well with deconstructed music and dark themes, just as that (fake) Ferrari Daytona did cruising the streets of 1980’s Miami.

It’s also cool to spell words W I T H  S P A C E S in a title. Which I get, because it stands out on the respective newsfeeds of YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. It’s brilliant marketing, if nothing else.

This C4 video from Poland transitions to another aesthetic element of this subculture: stanced (i.e. lowered) vehicles and their inferred connection to the global automotive drift scene. Note how the C4 driver’s head bounces up and down on a slammed, cambered, and somewhat-suspended suspension, pointing to a prioritization of style over performance.

Speaking of style, it’s time to get phonky.

Phonk: Synthwave for Gen Z?

If synthwave is red chili powder, phonk is a basket of Carolina Reapers. It still possesses lo-fi sound engineering but reveals a harder tone sampled from the 1990s Southern hip hop scene (mostly from the Memphis “horrorcore” subgenre). Based on phonk’s popularity on SoundCloud, and judging by the taste-making videos on YouTube, it’s the best soundtrack for car enthusiasts that love to drift (professionally or otherwise)—but not necessarily. Younger enthusiasts might plug in the aux cord and crank some synthwave to cruise around in a pavement-grazing ride whose stance approaches Oni Camber levels of extreme—or simply grab the keys to whatever ride happens to sit in their driveway.

If there’s a house style for car videos with phonk music, the person(s) behind FLRSH nailed the formula. I’ve spent many a quarantined evening relaxing in this dark, lo-fi automotive trance, much to the delight of my 12-inch Klipsch subwoofer and terrazo floors.

Yes, the videos glorify automotive excess, but you can find the same slice of car culture at your local cars and coffee. It’s the same aesthetic that pulls the Yeezy-wearing highschoolers and their iPhones away from your ’65 Mustang and to the matte-black Maserati GranTurismo instead. The Nissan 240 SX/Silvia might be the poster child of the synthwave subculture, but all manner of late-model, modern classic, performance and luxury vehicles get the treatment.

Judging by all the donut residue and burnout trails I see in Houston intersections (extensively chronicled in Vice episodes), this automotive movement reflects a universal automotive truth dating back to the days of hot-rodded Model As and Tri-Five Chevys: Burnouts and street racing are illegal, but let him who is without sin cast the first stone. You didn’t deck out your Z/28 with LED mood lighting, we know, but you’re more likely to find kindred spirits behind the wheels of these stanced imports than you might expect.

Why should you care?

Hagerty’s mission is to save driving and that means ensuring that younger generations remain engaged with car culture. You may occasionally hear frantic predictions that ride-sharing technology will subvert traditional automobile ownership, or that social media and video conferencing apps will bypass the need to spend hours roadtripping to see friends face-to-face. However, years of boring actual research suggest otherwise. The truth sets us all free, and there’s ample reason to believe Gen Z will shoulder the mantle of automotive enthusiasm. The phonk don’t lie. 

While a $40,000 crossover or $70,000 half-ton truck isn’t on many a Gen Z or millennial short list, their tighter budgets won’t stop them from buying and tricking out a cool ride. We’re witnessing a global phenomena of fully depreciated dream machines purchased from Europe, Japan and the U.S.A. backed by New Wave and Southern hip-hop beats, with stylish videos collectively racking up tens of millions of clicks.

The automotive community is beyond lucky to have this new generation of creatives and driving-obsessed fanatics amongst our ranks. I can’t get enough of the vibe, and I’m sure my former art school classmate approves.

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No one should ever drive while too young for a license, but I confess: as a car-nut kid of 15 in suburban Cleveland, I joy-drove my mom’s “Thunderbird Special” 1957 Ford convertible nearly every Friday night of my junior year in high school. Driving was a drug to me, and her sexy Ford was the vessel that delivered it. And despite some very close calls, I somehow got away with it.

Why is that car behind me flashing its brights? Flash, flash, flash! I’m cruising in the third lane (of four) on my side of an eight-lane suburban highway. Should I move over? There’s plenty of room to pass. Flash, flash, flash! What does he want?

Is he a cop? Is he pulling me over? This could mean jail! And no driving ‘till I’m 21… my dad’s dire warning if he ever caught me driving before I was legal. I had my own keys to Mom’s super-cool ’57 Ford Fairlane 500 convertible, and he knew that I knew how to drive it.

A year short of car-pilot legality, I actually had a license… for the Vespa scooter parked in the middle of our garage. It was my daily transportation since turning 14, Ohio’s legal scooter age at the time. And if both Mom’s Ford and Dad’s Buick were in the two-door garage, one of them had to be moved out to extricate the scooter, which is why I had a key to the Ford.

Oh, no! It is a cop, and he is pulling me over! I’m doomed! Twenty miles from home on a major road, in traffic, at night, with a friend on the passenger side and my little brother in back. This was not going to end well.

He said I was speeding, slightly over the 35-mph limit. He asked for my license. I handed him my scooter license, lamely explaining that I had passed a test for that so knew the rules of the road and how to operate in traffic. I also knew how to safely drive a car. After all, I had sat on my dad’s lap and steered his big Buick when I was still small enough to do that.

He stared at my scooter license, then at my friend and brother, then back at me. He didn’t know what to do. He had seen me driving safely, if a fraction too fast. He knew we were far from home. He knew I was legally licensed to drive a small two-wheeler. Could he really ticket a non-licensed driver for driving without a license? What would he do with my friend and brother if he hauled me in? And, to be sure, there were more and better tickets to be written that shift.

He stood there a while, turning this all over in his mind. “Where are your parents?” he demanded. “Bowling,” I replied, “in a Friday night league.”

He handed back my scooter license. “Drive straight home! And when your folks get home, you’d better tell them about this! If you don’t, I will. GOT IT?”

“YESSIR!” I stammered, exhaling for the first time in minutes. I couldn’t believe it! I put the Ford in gear, flipped on the signal and pulled carefully away. I don’t think I had ever been that scared… or that relieved… in my 15 years. But my interesting evening was not yet over.

At the next red light, breathing hard, sweating bullets, thanking Heaven that he had let me go on the promise to tell my parents (yeah, right!), I casually glanced at the car next to us. There in the back seat sat… a good friend’s parents! The two most conservative parents I knew; he a preacher, she a righteous nag. Oh, no!

They looked right at me before I could turn away. They had surely recognized me! They knew I was too young to drive. I knew that lady would be on the phone first thing in the morning.

I waited for that life-altering call. But somehow, some way, unbelievably, it never came. I had miraculously escaped the awful consequences of my too-young driving foolishness. Not for the first time. Or the last.

Because I was a year ahead in school, all my friends got their licenses a year before I could, which seemed patently unfair. But my parents’ Friday night bowling league provided weekly opportunities.

I truly loved that Ford. My dad, a farmer’s son and closet car enthusiast who had circle-track raced as a youth in his native Nebraska, had purchased it used for my mom to replace her old, boring ’51 Chevy. I think the Fairlane was his secret second-childhood car. White on the outside, green on the inside, it sported that signature gold side trim that expanded from the front fender through the door to the crisp chrome strip sweeping up over the graceful fin. About as cool as an affordable car could get, and a strong “chick magnet” at a time when I really needed one.

It didn’t pack Ford’s rare 300-hp supercharged “Thunderbird Special” engine, but I nick-named it that anyway. Its 212-horse 292-cubic-inch V-8 felt strong enough and (by my watch) was good for 10-second 0–60 bursts, decent for its day. A year later, when I was legally driving it, I challenged a Corvette at a light and… got badly blown away. But it was quick enough to be fun and once won me a trophy at the local drags. My parents were not pleased about that. Or that I had painted its steel wheels green to match its interior, a cool thing to do at the time.

Like most domestics of its day, it was a softly sprung barge on skinny tires with barely-there drum brakes and steering remotely connected to the front wheels. It was noticeably lighter and tighter than Dad’s Buick, but who really cared? All I wanted was to cruise it invisibly and bring it home intact every time. I could explore its agility once I was legally licensed.

High-school basketball also happened on Friday nights, so I sometimes took dates to those games. Then had to get them home and Mom’s car back in the garage before my folks got home. When it snowed while I was out, I swept the driveway to hide my tracks. When a friend got sick and puked in the car, I cleaned it up before they returned.

One fun Friday, I parked the Ford in front of a date’s house, slid across the front bench to get out of the passenger door (in case her parents, who knew I was too young to drive, were watching) and walked up to her door. Her dad asked whether my dad—who he assumed was waiting in the car—would like to come in. I said he was not feeling well. When she was finally ready, I walked her out, held the door for her to get in, slid in after her, then climbed over her to the driver’s side. She seemed OK with that.

Another narrow escape came the night I picked up my friend Mark down the street from his house (so his parents wouldn’t see me driving) and traveled 25 miles northeast to Painesville, Ohio, in hopes of seeing a couple of girls we knew who lived there. We visited with one of them briefly outside her house as the Ford’s muffler developed a growing, growling hole that sounded great to teenage ears. We ran low on gas driving back and couldn’t find an open station. We were down to fumes when I dropped Mark at his house and hurried home to mine, just in time to beat my parents. The engine was still crackly cooling when Dad’s Buick pulled into the garage.

Mark called the next morning: “Get over here, now!” I asked my mom to drive me there, and when she cranked up the Ford, it sounded like a dirt-track racer. Then she saw the gas gauge below empty and looked hard at me through accusing eyes: “Have you been letting your friends drive this car?” “No, Mom, I would never do that.” Thankfully, she didn’t ask if I’d been driving it.

Mark’s father was furious. A friend of his down the street had seen Mark get into my car, and his folks had worried about his riding with me all evening long. His dad chewed me hard up one side and down the other, then made me promise I would never do that again… or he would tell my folks. “YESSIR! YESSIR! I will NEVER, EVER do it again.” At least not with Mark.

That glorious day when I finally turned 16, passed the test, and earned my license to drive a car was among the finest of my life. But somehow driving legally took a bit of the fun out of it. No more excitement and drama of stealing Mom’s car every Friday night, cruising it wherever I chose, then rushing back to beat them home and covering my tracks as needed.

I drove the Ford to my girlfriend’s house that first legal night. On my way home, I tossed it sideways just for fun on a snowy neighborhood street… and bounced it up over the curb when I couldn’t straighten it quickly enough. This wannabe future-famous-racer still had much to learn.

Fearing losing their trust, I never, ever confessed to my parents about my too-young driving adventures. And doing it legally has been great fun (most days) ever since.

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Last year, some friends gave me a helmet.

At least, it felt like they gave me a helmet. What they really gave me was new paint on a helmet I already owned. My six-month-old Impact full-face, made new with shape and gloss, the gift not just pigment but labor and thought. I’d call out these folks by name—three friends in a restoration shop in Wisconsin—but they don’t care much for attention. If you’re curious, just picture a group of cheery Midwesterners who love New Glarus beer and believe the sun never sets on Road America. (For the record, those words could also be used to describe much of the great state of Wisconsin. Which is partially why I adore much of the great state of Wisconsin.)

The whole thing started over email, but time has fuzzed the how. I could ask my email server for details, but the specifics aren’t critical, and the story sits happier in memory as a feeling anyway. We were talking about one thing or another, and then it was helmets.

Do you do paint the things, I said? Turns out they did. We chatted about design; simple shapes and a few personally important colors seemed right. Plus my generic last name writ large, as if unique, because the idea made me laugh. I remember discussions of font, but also how responses grew less frequent when I asked about price. Weeks passed. An impasse was reached. One of the guys offered the work as a gift. It seemed right, he said, not explaining further; the shop just wanted to do it. I got the sense that the gesture meant something to them, and that I should accept it, and we should leave it at that.

Sheepishness in the face of generosity may be common, but it never feels normal. I struggled with the notion for a bit, then relented, mostly because my father told me I was being a doofus. And so my prime road-racing helmet went into a box. A UPS truck picked up that box at a local office and sent it to this country’s upper middle. A few months later, that same truck returned it to my porch.

Even taped up, the box reeked. That curious funk unique to paint booths and body shops, a combination of evaporating volatiles and 19th-century pharmacy. A whiff of curing paint hit the moment I opened the door. My throat went a little tight.

I’ve been club racing and driving on race tracks for almost 20 years, but a professionally painted helmet was long out of reach. My lids were always white and boring, stock models bought under thin budget. Fancy helmets are a paddock luxury, a custom-painted signifier of pro drivers and those fortunate amateurs who don’t wince at the cost of new tires.

Still, I wanted one. I put the occasional dollar aside for a bit. Years, really, because I have kids and a mortgage. So the money would build to a half-substantial figure, then get sucked into house repairs or an insurance copay or whatever. In retrospect, the idea of spending on something as frivolous as helmet paint never really felt right, even as the fund grew. Even when I finally convinced myself to divert the funds, pull the trigger, and begin making calls.

Then some nice people in Wisconsin, without knowing, just traded that whole chunk of weirdness for joy. Gifted at the right time, as if they knew.

Maybe I was light-headed from those fumes, but when I lifted that sucker from the box, I was reminded of families. The kind we are born with and the kind we find, and how each of those groups can start to feel like the other, if you’re lucky. I wonder sometimes if we’re gradually losing the instinct to be kind, the mental state that makes a certain sort of considerate behavior a form of default. If we have traded that for whatever currently passes for national discourse—knee-jerk yelling, the crossing of arms.

Similarly, I’ve been thinking about that helmet lately. What it meant to see it back on my front step.

It’s funny, how much the mail can bring. Some people send things to others as a matter of course. My wife mails out cards and notes almost weekly. My friend John Krewson ships used books to friends virtually as often. Before all this, before we were all cloistered at home for months, I wanted to do things like that but rarely made the time. Those gestures seem oddly more important now, a signal from outposts made suddenly more distant.

The majority of my helmets have been consigned to random storage, various bags or boxes, but the Wisconsin one lives in a cabinet on the far side of my office. Visible from my desk but rarely dwelled upon unless being packed for travel. Two nights ago, I caught sight of it while doing something else. Then I said to hell with it and cracked a bottle of wine and pulled my typewriter out from under my desk and wrote boozy, rambling letters to friends I haven’t seen in months or years. Boxes for porches, better late than never.

Helmets have a finite life. Their components age and oxidize in ways that reduce their effectiveness, until one day, you’re left with a lump of composite and fittings that won’t pass tech at any track in the country. At that point, most people toss the things. I tend to hang onto mine, for reasons I can’t quite explain, and this one probably won’t break that chain. Old plastic on a shelf means very little, in the grand scheme of things, but it can also mean entirely too much.

The post Smithology: VOCs, and voices, from distant outposts appeared first on Hagerty Media.

During the first week of March, before the U.S. began shutting everything down to curb the spread of the coronavirus, I had the pleasure of driving my 1966 Sunbeam Tiger almost 1400 miles with about 70 Hagerty members on our annual “Amelia Island or Bust” road trip to the Concours. It may be a while before any of us is able to safely enjoy a long trip like that again, but nevertheless, now’s a great time to plan ahead.

We started in balmy Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and worked our way down through Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, and then Florida. Being an end-of-winter East Coast adventure, we know that this time of year it can be cold, snowy, or even icy in the mountains before hitting the flatlands. And this year we had another twist—we got hit HARD by an absolutely monstrous rainstorm that lingered over our route for more than two days.

While inconvenient, everyone made it through, and it was one of those “Wow, can you believe that?!” sort of moments that tend to bring people together. It prompted me to think about what worked for us in these conditions, and how it can help others prepare for the worst.

Make sure your wiper and defroster system is working

OK. You don’t drive your classic in the rain, ever. You’ve told people that a million times. But just in case, check the operation of your windshield wiper system every now and then. It could save your life if a sudden storm comes out of nowhere, or if a vehicle ahead of you throws up a bunch of water you need to see through. This includes wiper blades, which degrade over time even if they never see a swipe. It’s easy enough to test here and there, and if you’re worried about dry wiping your NOS windshield, just lift the arms off and let them wave in the air like they just don’t care.

A working defroster system can also work miracles, but in the Tiger’s case it was merely a whisper of warm air. Throw a few microfiber towels in the cabin of the car that you can reach in an emergency, too—I was busy wiping the water and humidity off the windshield to keep visibility as good as it could be, and you may need ’em too. I’ll throw a plug in for Rain-X or one of the other glass treatments, and keep reapplying it when you can.

Tires, tires, tires

When I was prepping my car for the trip, I realized the tires on the car had been purchased in 2013 and had quite a lot of uh… “enthusiastic” miles on them, including a couple of Tiger Club autocross events. A quick call to Tire Rack put a fresh set of 13-inch tires on my doorstep, and I had them mounted and balanced locally. This probably saved my bacon more than anything, and the fact that I knew my tires were as good as they could be gave me a lot of confidence that I could trust them to get me through. You really need to check your tires regularly—fronts tend to wear differently than rears on a lot of cars, and you may not be able to rotate away your issues.  Keep a good mind on the tread pattern, too. Those awesome drag radials might be fun at the strip, but if you’re going to take your car out into the wild you may want to get something with more all-season capability.

Adjust your driving—big time

Even with perfectly good tires, water on the road can be a big problem. We hit big ponds of standing water, mud washed over the apex of corners, drastically shortened visibility, and all the rest. Tigers have a lot of torque, thanks to that small-block Ford between the front wheels, so I drive it like there’s an egg under the throttle when the weather is dicey. If you hit standing water, don’t hit your brakes or make big steering adjustments—just let the car go on through and be easy. Going around corners should be slow in and accelerating gently out, watching for mud, rocks, or anything potentially slippery that could cause a problem. Frankly, my little rear-wheel-drive car felt much better than I thought it would, given the Noah’s Ark situation we were all in.

Yes, your car is probably going to leak

My Tiger was a worst-case scenario for water retention, and yours may be, too. Non-existent door seals, a convertible top that left about a half-inch of clear space between the side window glass and the roof all the way around, a windshield seal that let a river run down under the dash onto my legs… you name it. By the time we got to Florida, the floor of my car was completely full, with standing water that would visibly slosh back and forth across the sodden mats. Fantastic. As quickly as I was able to when we arrived in Florida, I pulled the mats out and dried out the standing water with the last of my paper towels. My car has the original underlayment, which also soaks up a lot of water, so down the top went for two days to get some sun and breeze in there!

My apologies to the other hotel guests, who had the pleasure of seeing me air my flooded belongings in the parking lot all weekend. Hey, you do what you gotta do. The main point here is to get the wet stuff out of the car as quickly as you can. You can do more than what I was able to do, like buy desiccant bags to soak up moisture afterwards, rent a carpet cleaner to suck the water out, plug a dehumidifier in there to help keep mildew at bay, etc.

If you get stuck in big rain, don’t panic. If you’ve done all of the above, chances are you’ll get through it and to a safe place so you can continue on with the adventure. There’s a sense of satisfaction you may feel by surviving something like this instead of just succumbing to the elements. When you can, get out there and keep driving!

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For some time now, enthusiasts and automotive industry observers alike have bemoaned the notion that young people, particularly Millennials (1981–1996), were not embracing driving the way previous generations of Americans had. The Millennial generation came to maturity at a time when mobility alternatives to privately owned and operated automobiles, like ride sharing and e-scooters, were heavily promoted, and alongside their concerns with environmental awareness, it’s easy to get the impression young adults don’t like cars or driving as much as previous generations have.

It seemed as though getting a driver’s license was no longer a desired rite of passage for many younger people; now, however, a study from Benchmark Co. suggests a more hopeful perspective. According to Bloomberg, Mike Ward, an analyst at Benchmark Co., wrote in the report that Millennials in the United States are currently getting drivers’ licenses at a higher rate than in the last 40 years. He even speculates that Millennials’ impact on the automotive market may eventually rival that of the postwar Baby Boomers.

Traditionally, U.S. drivers’ license rates peak as people reach their mid-30s, start having babies, and need someone (and something) to haul around those children. The first Millennials turned 35 in 2016, the second of a record five consecutive years in which light vehicle sales annually exceeded 17 million units. The proportion of the U.S. population that drives has, in fact, increased each of the past five years, and in 2018 accounted for 227.5M drivers. Apparently, as young adults start growing their families, they also start appreciating the convenience of a personal automobile.

“The impact on the auto sector from the Millennial generation could be as great as the impression the Baby Boomers had on the industry in the 1980s,” Ward says in the report. “Over the last five years, there were 15.4M new drivers in the U.S., the biggest comparable increase since the 1974–78 period.”

That’s a good sign for the industry and hobby, as there are now about 84M Millennials in America, a cohort bigger than that of their Baby Boomer predecessors.

“We believe underlying demographics support normal demand of 16.5M–17M units annually over the next 5–10 years,” Ward wrote, predicting that the number of licensed drivers will increase by 12.5M people over the next decade. That means that by 2025 there will be almost a quarter of a billion drivers in the U.S. Using conventional metrics, that could mean an additional 3M car and light truck sales a year.

“The key demographic group of people aged 35–44 years continues to grow until 2034 and could provide growth for the industry for the next decade,” the report says.

Whether it’s due to decreased interest in driving, increased environmental concerns, or a flat economy as Millennials came to adulthood, it is true that young Americans take more time to obtain a driver’s license than before. A study released by Sivak Applied Research showed that in 2018 barely a quarter of 16 year olds had drivers’ licenses, which was down from almost half in 1983. Still, by the time they hit middle age they seem to embrace driving. More than 90 percent of U.S. residents aged 35–39 have a valid driver’s license.

As with Mark Twain’s reported demise, the death of driving has been greatly exaggerated.

The post The death of driving has been greatly exaggerated, suggests new study appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Whether you’re visiting the Scottsdale area during Arizona Auction Week, planning a vacation, or flying in for a business trip, everyone deserves a moment to escape the hustle and bustle of Scottsdale and take in the breathtaking landscapes surrounding the city. While you’re there, you may as well, right? Hop in the driver’s seat and enjoy these 4 scenic Scottsdale drives.

Cave Creek to Bartlett Lake Marina

Two of the area’s most scenic roads begin just 25 miles north of Scottsdale in Carefree, a quaint western-style town that makes for a great shopping or restaurant stop before or after your drive into the mountains. The first option is the most vehicle-friendly: Take North Cave Creek Road to Bartlett Dam Road and navigate around the twisty roads heading toward the Bartlett Lake Marina. Pause for the lakeside view nestled in the mountains before looping back around. The drive was exceptionally fun in this turbocharged 1986 Porsche 944.

Carefree to Seven Springs Campground

The second available route heads north from North Cave Creek Road instead of turning on Bartlett Dam Road. You’ll pass the Desert Mountain Golf Course and Tonto Hills before making a left-hand hairpin turn toward the Sears Kay Ruins, where the road soon merges into North Seven Springs Road. Be forewarned—this road turns into gravel, but the views are absolutely breathtaking. You can always rent a rugged vehicle to get you there in style. The last time we took the route, the road was decently smooth, and even stock daily-driver sedans drove up with ease. If you don’t mind a little dust, keep heading north to the Seven Springs Campground to admire the untouched, rolling desert landscapes, wildlife, and intriguing cacti growth.

Fountain Hills Loop

This loop will take you through the northern outskirts of Scottsdale and bring you back by way of Fountain Hills, a town in Maricopa County known for its impressive fountain.

Let’s say we begin this drive at the cross-section of North Scottsdale Road and Dynamite Boulevard. Heading east on Dynamite Boulevard will take you through hilly neighborhoods with scenic acreage and dump you at a stop sign; there, the road will continue on Rio Verde Drive. Continue until you reach Forest Road and then turn right. In a couple of miles, you’ll turn right again onto McDowell Mountain Road, which turns into Fountain Hills Boulevard. Stop and admire the huge fountain, perhaps grab a bite to eat, and then take Shea Boulevard west back to central Scottsdale.

Apache Junction 88 to Tortilla Flat

This route gives visitors a great opportunity to visit the ghost town of Goldfield and perhaps even take a mine tour. Beyond Goldfield, the very scenic Apache Trail (AZ 88) is paved to Tortilla Flat. Beyond Tortilla Flat, the Apache Trail is unpaved for approximately 20 miles. Depending on Mother Nature, the road could be washboarded, but the trek is worth the view if you don’t mind some dust and jostling. You’ll end this drive at Lake Roosevelt, which has a nice visitor center. You can head back to Scottsdale via 188 and 87.

Alternatively, if you don’t want to make the full loop or prefer to stay on pavement, you can drive back from Tortilla Flat to Apache Junction. Even the paved part is gorgeous.

Now that you have an idea of which drives you want to experience and which vehicles to drive, you can make the most of your Arizona Auction Week adventure.

The post Don’t skip these 4 scenic drives at Arizona Auction Week 2020 appeared first on Hagerty Media.

UPDATE: We originally published this story in 2019. A lot changed with departments of motor vehicles during the pandemic, so we thought we’d take another look and update the various and sundry rules and regulations for registering a classic car in all 50 states.

There were a good handful of states – in New England particularly – that kind of flew under the radar as particularly classic car friendly, but some significant changes occurred in the last few years that changed that a bit. Specifically, Vermont closed a loophole that had previously allowed out-of-state residents to register vehicles there. Being a state that doesn’t require a title for vehicles 15 years old or older, it was a boon for people from other states that have a title requirement for all vehicles. We’ll get into greater detail in the Vermont section but suffice it to say that states are making it harder to register our older vehicles without titles.

What we wanted to figure out was whether your state was actually classic vehicle friendly and rank all 50 states by its overall consideration for older car owners. Some of our criteria are objective: Is there an emissions process? Is there a sales tax? Several of the criteria were more subjective: How car-friendly is the weather? How pleasant are the roads?

Our methodology took these items into account:

Registration: For classic car registration restrictions, we looked to every DMV website, and in some cases the state laws that govern them. If there were no restrictions, the state got 100 points. If there were restrictions for “parades and special events,” the state gets a 75. If there were day of the week and holiday restrictions, the score went to 50.

Inspections:  States typically either require a safety and/or emissions inspection or they don’t. For this yes or no question, a state either gets 100 points for No or zero points for Yes.

Sales tax: If the state has zero sales tax, it got 100 points. We took off 10 points for every percent of sales tax. Since it’s difficult – nigh on impossible — to build city and county taxes in, we indicated it in the text, but they’re not part of the score.

Title requirement: Some states (Vermont, for instance) don’t require a title for vehicles over a certain age. They got 100. Some states allow a surety bond. They got 50%. Some states like Massachusetts will not register a car without a title at all. They got zero.

Road quality and traffic: For road quality and traffic, we looked at the US News & World Report’s Transportation Ranking.

Weather: For weather, we checked the state’s annual snow and rainfall at Current Results.

Finally, we searched every state’s DMV website for information and talked to classic vehicle owners where we could for their opinions. Then we assigned a number grade for every criterion and averaged each out to come up with an overall score.

With nine categories and a possible 100-point score for each, a home run would be 900 points. No state achieved that lofty score, but several crossed the 800-point threshold. Two states didn’t manage 50 percent of the available points and Massachusetts – where this story is currently being revised? It’s only getting worse.

Which state is the most classic car friendly? Some of the answers may surprise you and the entire top ten is a little perplexing (We’re looking at you, Alaska).

From lowest score to highest, here’s how the states shook out:

Data is subject to change. Content is intended for informational purposes only. Check with your local motor vehicle department for current information.

50. Massachusetts

We can tell you from first-hand experience over the last 40 years of operating a motor vehicle that Massachusetts isn’t a great place to own a classic vehicle. The weather is the biggest disadvantage, as is MassDOT and the local highway departments, which blast the road surfaces with salt more or less constantly from November to April.

If that’s not bad enough, the Registry of Motor Vehicles is notoriously awful, assessing a 5.5% sales tax not on what you paid for your car, but what some arbitrary price guide says it’s worth. Williamstown resident David LaChance registered a 1966 Volvo P1800 project car that he hauled home on a trailer and wouldn’t be roadworthy for years. “They taxed it like it was a Pebble Beach candidate. Oh, yeah — they said don’t bother trying to appeal it.”

The one nice thing about Massachusetts is its rolling emissions requirement. If the car is older than 15 years old, you’re mostly in the clear. The emissions equipment that came on the car is supposed to still be there, but the inspection stations – all privately owned gas stations – aren’t likely to check. Massachusetts does have a mandated safety inspection. Your experience getting a sticker can be wildly different from shop to shop, so if you find one that’s willing to adhere a sticker to your windscreen with minimal fuss, stick with them.

49. California

Weather and the lack of a safety inspection is the only reason that classic car ownership in California is as good as it is. Everything else is a major impediment to driving a vintage vehicle.

Cars from 1975 or newer must have all of the original emissions equipment present on the vehicle when it was new when the car goes through a mandatory smog check. Frankly, we didn’t even check whether California requires a title from other states when registering a classic car, because the hassle of registering a post-1975 car from another state makes it not worth it. California is generally a classic car exporter rather than importer solely because of the smog regulations.

That’s not a bad thing for clean air, but it’s a really bad thing if you’re just trying to register a car for occasional use.

48. New Jersey

New Jersey is not particularly unfriendly to vintage cars. It offers historic plates and a lot of classic car owners seem to have them, likely because the registration fee is only $44, versus up to $84 depending on the year and weight of the vehicle. There’s also a Street Rod plate available for just $15, but it’s for vehicles built prior to 1949 that are registered in a NJ street rod club, or an affiliate of the National Street Rod Association.

The state follows the OBD-II era, 1996 or newer only requirement for emissions testing, which is great for most classic vehicle owners. Sales tax is steep at 6.625%, but there’s no annual excise tax.

Greg Giacchi owns a Datsun 280Z, a second generation Supra and a second-generation Trans Am, and comments, “No complaints here in NJ. Cars older than 25 years have antique status, which means no safety inspections and registration renewals are spaced out to either 3 or 5 year intervals. Overall I find this state to be lenient on vintage car ownership.” (Ed. Note: Since we originally ran this, it appears that the state’s classic vehicle registration runs for three years, but there’s no fee for renewal, another distinct Garden State benefit.)

We searched high and low on the DMV’s website and couldn’t find any exemption for titles, regardless of year, though. That can pose a real issue if you’re buying a vehicle from a state that doesn’t issue a title for an older car. Greg agrees: “I’ve only tried to register a vintage snowmobile without a title and that was a mess. They wanted me to place an ad in the newspaper public notices for 4 weeks before allowing me to proceed.” Oof.

New Jersey is congested, it’s a pretty small state and most of it is squeezed between major cities like New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore. However, despite its reputation, New Jersey is a beautiful state away from the cities and does offer some nice driving.

47. Texas

Texas likes to brand itself as this free-wheeling Libertarian paradise, but registering a vintage car is just as complicated and costly as any other state, and sometimes more confusing.

We talked to Peter McCoullogh, who provided a ton of information about the law and how it’s practically enforced in Texas.

Sales tax for vintage cars is calculated on your bill of sale, which is a lot more legitimate that using some bogus price guide. “Texas has a SPV (Standard Presumptive Value) system to calculate sales tax values on most vehicles, but they do not use this system for anything 25+ years old. They will instead just charge you 6.25% of your indicated sale price, like most states normally practice,” Peter says.

The Lone Star State also has four different ways you can register a classic car. You can register it normally and pay a normal registration fee. You can register it as a Classic, which is for cars 25 years old or older for $40 per year with no driving restrictions. Or you can register it as an Antique for $10 per year – actually a $50 registration fee that’s good for five years before it has to be renewed — with the “exhibitions and special events” restrictions most states have. If your vehicle was manufactured before 1921, the fee drops to $40 for five years.

“Texas State Troopers have an absolute field day enforcing this,” according to Peter. “Counties like Harris and Ft. Bend are cracking down through their own law enforcement policy. Most people who abuse Antique Plates use the ‘I’m driving home from my mechanic’ excuse when they’re, but they’ve heard every excuse in the book. Unfortunately, enforcement is noticeably selective. The guy who drives his ’70 Nova to work and back every day will likely go a decade unscathed, but the dude in the FB RX7 wouldn’t last a week. If and when you do get busted, the officer has the right to impound your vehicle, and write you a citation for no registration.”

Texas ranks 37^th and 38^th in the US for commute time and road quality, so when you do get your classic registered, it doesn’t sound like you’ll have a great time driving it.

46. Vermont

Vermont has undergone one of the biggest, most painful changes for vintage car owners. The issue is not for residents, but non-residents who used to be able to register just about anything by taking a road trip to the state’s southernmost Department of Motor Vehicles. That loophole that allowed out-of-state registrations has closed, so if you had considered registering your classic vehicle without a title in that state, in order to get a valid registration that you could use to get your vehicle registered at home, you’re out of luck.

Vermont is deceiving because its numerical score is so low. What makes it great is how easy it is to deal with the DMV. The staff is generally terrific and the lines are amazingly short. There’s also no title required for anything 25 years old or older, although there’s an “Exempt Vehicle Title” form to fill out.

The problem is that the weather is not conducive to vintage vehicle operation from late October straight into May some years. Not only does it snow like crazy, most of the back roads are dirt and they turn to axle-snapping mud for about a month and a half after the snow melts. Many main roads can be completely buckled with frost heaves in the winter and spring.

On the plus side, traffic is generally light outside of the “cities” like Brattleboro and Burlington, and Vermont offers some of the greatest driving roads in New England when the weather is decent. (ED NOTE: Watch out, though. In the seven years your author was a resident of Vermont, he got more speeding tickets in that state than in any of the nearly 40 years of driving he’d done in Massachusetts and Maine.)

“Vermont pretty much leaves me alone,” says Michael Eldred, who has a handful of British cars registered in Southern Vermont. “Neither of my two pre-1960 vehicles needs to have seat belts retrofitted or pass any kind of emissions test to pass its annual safety inspection,” he says. “You can register your vehicle as an antique and pay a reduced fee, but that only entitles you to drive your vehicle in parades and to shows. As a result, few people register their antique cars as antiques.”

45. Tennessee

“Tennessee is pretty good,” says our vintage motorcycle collecting pal Somer Hooker. “Antique is over 25 years of age. You fill out an affidavit that it will only be driven on weekends or special events.” From there, the tag fee is a one-time event, with no renewal required. However, that’s only good for weekends and special events, and according to Somer, “If you are caught using on a regular basis it can be revoked.” The state notes that if that happens, you’re responsible for all the fees to register the vehicle as a general use vehicle.

“Vehicles over 25 years old can be titled on a Bill of Sale,” Somer notes. Tennessee abandoned emissions testing since the last time we posted this, so there’s no longer a requirement, regardless of your classic vehicle’s age.

Depending on where you are, you may see a couple of inches of snow a year in most of Tennessee, and the roads can be pretty spectacular. However, the tradeoff is Nashville. Traffic in and around the city can be outrageous.

44. Missouri

Missouri has some pretty stringent restrictions that come along with getting Historic plates, with no real obvious benefits for doing so, other than avoiding an annual registration renewal. The DVM’s website doesn’t say you can’t drive the car on a weekday, but if you’re driving it to a shop, it has to be within 100 miles of home, and you’re limited to just 1,000 miles of driving per year. The mileage restriction alone might steer you away from getting such a plate. A thousand miles a year isn’t much.

Taxation is also pretty brutal in Missouri, depending on your county. The state assesses a 4.25% sales tax, but then there are 24 pages worth of county taxes to research to find out how much more you owe. A cursory search reveals that your additional sales tax can be up to 5.5130%. There’s a handy tax calculator to figure out how much you’re going to owe.

One bit of good news is that Missouri allows an owner to bond a title if the original title isn’t present, making it much more friendly to register a car than some of the states in the Northeast, which just tell you to hit the bricks if you don’t have a title.

Historic registration doesn’t appear to get you out of the state’s biennial safety inspection, but you do avoid the emissions inspection in St. Louis, St. Louis County, St. Charles County or Jefferson County if your car is from 1996 or older. Throw in the average foot of snow lots of places in Missouri get every year and it’s not particularly old car friendly.

43. Hawaii

Hawaii is a weird state in terms of registering a car. There’s no state DMV, for example. Each island – essentially individual counties – runs its own licensing division. Trying to track down exactly what requirements they have is tricky.

Honolulu says “The vehicle must be a bona fide antique as defined in Section 249-1, HRS. ‘Antique motor vehicle’ means any motor vehicle of the age of thirty-five years or more from the date of manufacture, that is of the original factory specification or restored to the original specifications in an unaltered or unreconstructed condition, operated or moved on the highway primarily for the purpose of historical exhibition or other similar purposes.”

There are some beautiful roads in Hawaii, but US News & World Report ranks both the traffic and road quality near the bottom.

39. South Dakota

South Dakota’s historic vehicle plates apply to cars 30 years old or older. The sales tax is reasonable at 4.5%, but there’s also a steep excise tax of 4% that makes this one of the most tax-heavy states in the Union when registering a car.

The restrictions on classic vehicle plates seem relatively familiar, though there’s some room for interpretation. There’s no mileage restriction, for example, and the requirement says that you can’t use this registration for “daily transportation” to work. But if you took it to work a few Fridays a month through the summer, does that count as “daily transportation?”

South Dakota does require a title and doesn’t seem to be particularly helpful in providing information if you happen to have a car that either came from a state that doesn’t issue one for older cars or is missing its original title. That may or may not be a problem when the time comes to register it, but it’s tough to tell without some kind of documentation.

South Dakota ranked #1 in America for length of commute time, so traffic isn’t an issue, according to US News & World Report. It ranks about mid-pack in terms of road quality. The 45 inches of snow the state accumulates every year probably doesn’t help.

39. Maryland

Maryland has the same “weekends, holidays, and special events” clauses that most other states have, which means that you might not want to bother getting the antique or street rod plates if you plan on driving it to work occasionally.

It appears that Maryland requires a title for everything, regardless of age since there’s no exemption listed on the state’s page for registering a classic vehicle.

What’s nice about Maryland, though, is that it assesses its 6% sales tax on the value stated on the bill of sale if the vehicle is over seven years old. That’s a nice advantage when the NADA book value on a classic vehicle assumes that it’s in concours-ready condition, while you went and bought a $1,500 beater that you’re hoping to drive as you restore it.

The weather’s decent in coastal Maryland most of the year and snow isn’t that much of a concern, but Oakland County in the western part of the state gets an average of 80 to 100 inches of snow a year, leaving classic vehicles in the barn for a good chunk of the year.

39. Pennsylvania

Perhaps it’s because of things like the Hershey swap meet, the AACA headquarters, and the Carlisle events, but there seem to be more classic cars in Pennsylvania than just about anywhere. Does that have anything to do with how easy it is to register a classic vehicle there? Probably not.

Pennsylvania has two different vintage vehicle designations (Antique and Classic) with different restrictions. Classic car tags are available for anything older than 15 years old. Antique plates are for 25 years old or older.

The restrictions say that the “occasional use” of a classic or antique vehicle is “no more than one day a week” in bold letters, which seems pretty restrictive. “Classic cars have a permanent registration but require yearly inspection,” Brian Padnes learned after registering his 1984 Land Rover. “Inspections can be done by any licensed shop so most are kind to older vehicles. Antique are emissions exempt and I believe classic are too as they fall into the ‘drive less than 5k miles’ category for PA.”

Tax is pretty significant, too. There’s no excise tax, but the state sales tax is 6%. Registering a car in Allegheny County means you’ll pay an additional percent on top of that. If you register in Philadelphia, it’s 2% on top. “For cars older than 1976 (the last year the plates were dated) you can restore an old license plate for the vehicle with a year that matches,” Brian tells us. “I got my father an old dealer plate for his 1972 Volvo P1800ES.”

39. Indiana

Indiana has a historic vehicle registration program that requires you don’t use the car for daily transport, but other than that it doesn’t place any restrictions on days of the week or holidays. But there’s not much of a reason to get one, since you’re still going to pay the standard registration fee, excise tax, county tax, and another municipal excise tax.

The state does have an emissions program in two counties (Lake and Porter) and inspects cars for emissions every other year from 1975 forward, meaning you’ve got to have all of your original emissions equipment in place. Don’t toss those AIR pumps.

Tax is pretty hefty at 7% in Indiana, and on top of that, you owe an excise tax every year, but for vehicles older than 1980, it’s a $12 per year flat tax.

Indiana does require a title when you go to register your classic car. There doesn’t appear to be any exemption for age, so get that paperwork in order. With 22 inches of snow and 39 inches of rain every year, Indiana’s weather isn’t the greatest, but outside of the cities, the roads are well maintained and traffic isn’t absurd.

36. Rhode Island

Rhode Island gets a high numerical grade, mostly because of its relaxed Antique Vehicle requirements. If the vehicle is 25 years old or older, you can register it as an antique and skate on the state’s safety inspection requirements. However, if you do get it inspected, you can use it as a regular vehicle. If you don’t, the language from the DMV site notes: “The vehicle may be maintained solely for use in exhibitions, club activities, parades and other functions of public interest,” which isn’t great.

But the very next sentence says: “The vehicle may also be used for limited enjoyment and purposes other than the previously mentioned activities, but may not be used primarily for the transportation of passengers or goods over any public highway.”

This means as long as you’re not using it as a limousine or a cargo vehicle, you should be fine, although David Dennis does have a warning. “If you have a car that is 25 years old, but isn’t considered a ‘classic’ (think Honda CRX, or any average car from 1994), the police generally don’t know the actual rules and it can be a pain. I haven’t been targeted specifically, but have friends who regularly have arguments with officers trying to ticket him unlawfully despite the folder of information he carries with him at all times to show them.”

Where it falls apart is taxation. The state places a 7% sales tax on every vehicle, and you pay the higher of either the purchase price or the CPI Black Book. The CPI Black Book does have three grades of vehicle (Fair, Good, and Excellent), but basically overvalues anything that might be considered a restoration project. There is a Valuation Appeal process, but if it’s like every other state we have experience with, it’s not worth the time to fill out the paperwork.

The Ocean State also assesses a labyrinthine excise tax every year. Good luck figuring out how to determine how much you owe. If you can read this and make any sense of it, we’d suggest getting an advanced math degree because you’ve earned it.

36. North Carolina

North Carolina is really light on the information on its DMV site. We heard from Eric Seeger that the state is “rather friendly to antique cars. I learned this with a 1989 Grand Wagoneer and a 1992 BMW 525i wagon. If your vehicle is pre-OBDII, they require an annual “safety” inspection which can be done at any number of state-licensed privately-owned shops for probably less than $25.” Further research reveals that the cost for a safety inspection is a totally convenient and not at all arbitrary $13.60 in North Carolina, so make sure to have some change in the ashtray.

Sales tax is also remarkably low at 3% of the purchase price.  You’re also responsible for a “property tax” that can vary significantly based on where the county you reside in and the calculated value of the vehicle.

The state has a Property Tax Estimator online. We plugged in a $10,000 value in Charlotte and came out with an estimated tax of $167.87. Over a period of years, that’s a pretty hefty tax liability, especially if your car is worth some money.

The state’s inspection consists of a technician making sure that basic things are in order: tires are not bald, blinkers and wipers work.” Period-correct emissions equipment is supposed to be in place, as well, but that’s largely left up to the shop doing the inspection.

36. New Hampshire

Go one state north of Massachusetts and the weather gets even worse, locking a good percentage of the state in snow and ice for almost half the year, from just north of the state capitol in Concord all the way to the Canadian border.

We were a little unfair in our “poor” road quality assessment the last time. It mostly has to do with roads being damaged by the weather, which isn’t the fault of the state. We boosted the score by 25 points because whoever paves the roads in New Hampshire is a master of the craft. Fresh asphalt in New Hampshire is like a billiard table and you’ll know it instantly when you cross the border from Vermont, Massachusetts, or Maine.

Kristen Pratt said that registering her 1978 Jeep CJ-5 was a piece of cake. “Super easy to register here. Just need title (or bill of sale if applicable) for registration tags. Inspection is just like my 2018 Jeep, lights, tires, brakes etc. no emissions requirement,” she says. The title requirement is only for vehicles 20 years old or newer. New Hampshire doesn’t issue a title for vehicles older than that, either, so you save the title fee when you register. “NH has no sales or excise tax, they just have one registration fee, which is scaled according to age and value,” she says.

The one caveat, though is that while NH doesn’t have a sales tax, its registration fees can be pricey and weirdly kept a secret until you show up at city hall to register.

35. New York

New York is rather notorious for its sales tax, but the state only assesses a sales tax of 4%. The issue is the additional use tax tacked on by the county, which can be up to 4.5%. However, that means you don’t have an annual excise tax bill to pay, so when you compare it to a state like Massachusetts, it ends up being mostly a wash.

The title situation isn’t great, though. Where most states in the Northeast have a 20 or 25-year-old or newer title requirement, New York rolls that all the way back to 1972, making a valid title required paperwork if you’re looking to buy a vehicle out of state. Even for vehicles built before 1972, you need to fill out a Certification (Affidavit) of Sale or Transfer and a Title Application.

We gave New York a “Good” rating for Road Quality and Traffic, despite having one of the most traffic congested regions in America. That said, it’s a huge state, and it offers some amazing driving once you get outside of New York City and Albany. The run west along the Erie Canal basically parallels I-90, but get off the highway and explore some of New York’s state highways like NY Rte. 31 in western New York; NY Rte. 5 and 5S in the Mohawk Valley; NY Rte. 48, 481, and County Rte 57 along the Oswego Canal; NY Rte. 4 along the Champlain Canal. Truly beautiful. The southernmost part of NY west of Watkins Glen offers a low population and beautiful scenery.

34. Illinois

When we first wrote this we offered kudos to Illinois Secretary of State Jesse White for providing a thorough brochure on vintage car registration in the state of Illinois. Sadly, though, it looks like it hasn’t been updated since then, meaning all of the dates on the page are at least four years old. The long and short of it is that for $30, you can get a vintage car tag for five years, which is a pretty significant savings over a regular registration.

Sales tax is pricey, though. Illinois has a 7.25% sales tax to start with, and the county can ring you up for another quarter to three-quarters of a percent. If you live within the city of Chicago, there’s another 1.25% added on.

Despite Ferris Bueller’s adventure in the Ferrari, the weather and traffic in Chicago is brutal on a vintage car. Once you’re outside the city the roads open up, but it’s still a pretty short season, with 38 inches of snow in the middle of the state.

33. Virginia

Virginia is pretty clear about its antique plate usage and it’s not great news for people who like to drive. First of all, the statue says you can’t “exceed 250 miles from your residence.” Secondly, you can’t use your classic vehicle for general, daily transportation which “includes, but is not limited to, driving to and from work.” You can also use a pre-1976 Virginia license plate if you’d rather not use the state’s antique plates. If you’re planning on using your vehicle for more than just parades, that’s the route to take because it allows you to go through the regular inspection process.

Nevertheless, there’s a significant advantage to obtaining antique plates: you avoid the state’s annual safety inspection. Older vehicles are also exempt from the state’s emissions testing program, although, unlike many states that only make cars from the OBD-II era comply (beginning in 1996), Virginia pushes that back to 25 years.

Sales tax is relatively low at 4.15%. If the vehicle is more than five years old, the tax is calculated based on a state-provided Vehicle Price Certification form, so you’re not left to the inconsistent values in a NADA price guide, especially if your car is less than perfect. Like Maryland, a lot of places in Virginia get snow in the winter, so you’ll have your classic car stored at least a few months during the year.

32. South Carolina

South Carolina is a pretty great place to have a vintage vehicle. It does have the familiar weekends, holidays and special events restrictions for antique vehicle registration, but the fees are just $10 for registration and $15 for a title. You can get a Year of Manufacture plate for anything over 30 years old. That allows you to avoid the weekends and holidays restrictions, but you pay a fee just the way you would for a normal registration.

Beyond that, the Palmetto State did away with its safety inspection back in the mid-1990s. You can argue that’s not a great thing for road safety in general, but not having to worry about it or pay for it every year is a boon to classic car owners here. There’s also no emissions requirement, meaning South Carolina vintage car owners skate on all the annual annoyances, regardless of how old their car is.

Sales tax is moderate at just 5%, and outside of Charlotte, the roads are in comparably decent shape and uncrowded. The higher elevations get snow, but for the most part, South Carolina’s coastal communities will go years without seeing the white stuff.

30. Florida

Florida’s weather alone makes it friendly to vintage cars. The state has several designations for older cars including Antique, Street Rod, and Horseless Carriage for cars manufactured before 1945.

On the one hand, it’s hard to see why bother getting an antique plate, because the state has neither a safety nor an emissions inspection program at all, never mind for vintage cars. But you’ll want the plate to save on what Florida calls the “Initial Registration,” a hefty $225 fee it collects the first time you register your car in the state. That fee is waived for cars bearing antique plates, and the fees for Antique, Street Rod, and Horseless Carriage tags are permanent, meaning you pay them once and you’re good for the entire time you own it.

The bad news is that – according to the application – everything needs an existing title, a hurdle that’s a challenge for a lot of people who buy a restoration project with plans to register it at some point in the future.

Florida gets essentially no snow every year, and outside the cities the roads are in great shape.

30. Maine

Several things have changed in Maine that owners of classic vehicles need to pay attention to. The big one is that the state is arbitrarily refusing to register Japanese kei-class trucks like the Subaru Sambar and Mitsubishi Minicab, which have been incredibly popular there thanks to four-wheel drive and efficient operation.

It’s a huge issue that’s eventually going to either bite the state or owners of ALL vehicles that meet the DOT’s 25-year cutoff for legal importation. Maine has not only refused to register these vehicles but has gone so far as to cancel the plates on vehicles it previously registered.

Like the pandemic, this contagion has spread to other states, making it harder to register these vehicles. Under the guise of “safety” the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators (AAMVA – you know, the people who like the tax and licensing revenues from new vehicles that cost an average of $45,000 in 2023) has been advising its members to not register these vehicles at all.

Outside of having a requirement that you have a daily driver to get antique plates, Maine is pretty light on the antique plate restriction, but it does require a safety inspection of all vehicles. Emissions tests are only required in Cumberland County (where Portland is, basically), and only for cars newer than 1996. There’s a sales tax and an excise tax, but you don’t need a title for anything older than 1996, so if you buy an older car from Maine, you’ll only need a current registration and a bill of sale, and honestly, we registered a vehicle there without a current reg.

One fact interesting to owners of trailered cars is that anybody can register a trailer in the State of Maine, regardless of your state of residence. The fees are super cheap, so if your state dings you for registering your wacky single-wheel trailer you tow behind your Beetle, give Maine a shot.

We dropped the road quality number into the “Fair” territory because Maine roads especially in the southern portion of the state – where the people live — are getting pretty rough.

Andrew Baca has a bunch of vintage scooters, a Corvair Greenbrier van, and now a Corvair-powered UltraVan registered in Maine. “One weird thing in Maine is that you can use a vintage plate on your antique vehicle as long as you keep the official plate in the vehicle,” he says. “I find this odd. They would not let me register the vehicle with the vintage plate.”

29. Washington

Washington would get a much higher score if traffic and road conditions weren’t rated 42nd and 40th by the U.S. News & World Report. The restrictions on classic car registration include “club activities, exhibitions, tours, parades, and occasional pleasure driving,” but there isn’t a day-of-the-week or non-holiday clause like some other states.

Jason Bagge has owned and registered hundreds of classic cars in Washington and suggests the way to register one is to find a set of correct year plates for your car’s model year and register it that way. “A collector plate limits you to non-daily use,” he says, “but what if you buy a set of old school plates that were made when the car was new, you can register them as ‘restored’ plates. These are daily driver plates that can still wear original 1970s tabs.”

For 38 years, Washington had an emissions testing program, but it was eliminated on January 1, 2020, for all vehicles, in all counties.

We’re giving the state a full “No” for a title requirement to register a classic car. Technically you do need a title, but if you don’t have one you can register the car for three years without one at all, or get a bonded title, as spelled out in Washington Administrative Code Title 308  Chapter 56A Section 210.

28. Connecticut

We were ready to hammer Connecticut because its Department of Motor Vehicles is notoriously awful. (Ed. Note: Still is. At the time of this writing, the Classic Vehicle Registration section of the CT DMV’s website offered nothing but a helpful runtime error.)

But a handful of Constitution State residents chimed in to defend its honor on a couple of counts. First off, Connecticut has a long history of offering a major tax break on vintage cars. For tax purposes, a vehicle that is older than 20 years old and historically significant only has a tax value of $500. That can save a lot of bucks versus registering a vehicle just a few miles north in Massachusetts, where a $500 Falcon can easily cost a multiple of that in sales tax based on the book value of a fully restored vehicle.

Dillon Troxell weighed in that you get that tax break whether you decide to get “Early American Vehicle” or “Classic Vehicle” plates, which don’t carry any significant restrictions to use. David Pollock notes that while a current registration is required if a vehicle is old enough to not need a title, Connecticut will “give you an affidavit that the seller fills out and gets notarized,” which is a whole lot better than a lot of states.

Dillon Troxell notes, “Car registration is the only thing CT doesn’t kill you on (yet).”

27. Delaware

Delaware’s numerical score is slightly downgraded mostly because of the restrictions on classic vehicle registrations. Antique vehicle registration is open to anything older than 25 years, but the restrictions are fairly well defined: Cars with an antique plate “shall be used only for participation in club activities, exhibits, tours, parades, and similar uses, but in no event shall it be used for general transportation,” according to the Delaware DMV. Delaware also offers “Street Rod” registration for 1970 or older vehicles that have been extensively modified.

The title requirement is not good, though. From what we can see, everything requires a title, regardless of its age. That’s a challenge if you’ve bought a restoration project.

Delaware gets good marks for sales tax. However, it does charge a “Documentation Fee,” which is 4.5% of the vehicle sale price, or the NADA value, whichever is higher. Call it what you like, but that’s still a tax. Antique registration means that you pay $25 once for an inspection, and never have to pay for it again.

Delaware’s weather is better in the winter months than most of the Northeast states, extending the driving season by a month or so.

26. Wisconsin

Wisconsin hates round numbers, apparently, because it charges a 5 percent sales tax, plus a .5% county tax. As of April 2020, the state no longer charges a .1% “Stadium Tax” to register a car. The Stadium Tax afforded Wisconsin residents the privilege of paying for the $290 million Miller Park for the last 25 years, all to watch the Brewers lose in the playoffs every time they get there (This year it was to the Arizona Diamondbacks.)

But we digress. Wisconsin also has antique vehicle registration, but only for cars built before 1945. There’s no safety or emissions to avoid (unless your car is from 1996 or later, and you live near Milwaukee).

There’s a title requirement, but in recent years, it’s gotten a lot easier to buy a heap without a title and register it legally. The process requires a surety bond worth 1.5 times the value of the vehicle (which comes from a price guide with the vehicle in “number 5 or 6” condition). A vehicle valued at $5,000 to $6,000 could get a surety bond for around $100. With that in place, you can get yourself a title. That’s a major convenience versus many other states that won’t give you the time of day without a title.

Wisconsin weather is completely offensive to old car ownership, though. You’ll probably forget what the car looks like it’s in storage so long.

25. Louisiana

According to what we could find on the Louisiana DMV website getting a vintage vehicle plate is slightly more involved than other states. The state requires that you fill out an affidavit that says you haven’t modified the vehicle from its original form.

If the vehicle is 25 years old or older, you don’t need a title to register, but again, that requires some paperwork. You need an affidavit signifying a physical inspection by the police, a notarized bill of sale, and a statement saying you’re part of a classic car club, which appears to be unique to Louisiana. And those vintage vehicle tags come with a significant set of restrictions now: “… such vehicle shall be used primarily for special occasions such as exhibitions, club activities, parades, or other functions of the public interest, or for necessary testing, maintenance, and storage purposes.”

There’s no emissions testing requirement, but vehicles built after 1980 have to have their original emissions equipment present during the annual safety inspection in Ascension, East Baton Rouge, Iberville, Livingston, and West Baton Rouge counties.

Tax can get rather expensive, too. The state assesses a 4% sales tax, but counties can hold you up for up to an additional 6% in sales tax depending on where you live.

24. Oklahoma

We gave Oklahoma a hard time the last time we ran this story because it seemed to want to keep any information about registering a classic car under heavy wraps until you’ve stood in line for three hours at the DMV. There’s more information in a PDF provided by the state now, but it’s still pretty slim. Most states cut you a break by making classic registrations a one-time fee, but not Oklahoma. It’s a $19 annual fee. If you want it for ten years, it’s $86, which saves you over a hundred bucks in registration fees, but you’re better off in other states that have a one-time fee.

Despite what appears in our scorecard, Oklahoma DOES require a title for classic cars, but it also accepts a nominally priced surety bond in place of a title if the car you’re interested in is missing one (something to keep in mind when negotiating a price with a seller.)

The traffic in Oklahoma is generally pretty light, which scored the state an 11^th ranking in US News & World Report. Its road quality is pretty dismal, though, placing it 37^th in the US.

23. Michigan

Considering it’s locked in snow for four months a year, the roads are in deplorable condition and – well, Detroit – Michigan fares well in the vintage vehicle friendliness rankings, mostly because of the registration requirements.

“I had a super easy time getting a title for a Honda S90 I bought with a bill of sale several years back,” Evan McCausland tells us. The state does require you to fill out the Uniform Surety Bond in lieu of a title. The requirements for a Historic vehicle plate are kind of remarkable. Yes, you’re only supposed to be using the car for events and pleasure driving, but there’s no distinction on what days of the week you can drive it.

What’s really interesting in Michigan is the month of August: With a Historic plate, you can drive your car every day, including for general transportation to and from work. That’s a pretty sweet deal, especially if you’re headed to the Woodward Dream Cruise in the middle of the month.

22. Georgia

In almost every instance, Georgia rocks as far as classic vehicle ownership goes. Georgia doesn’t appear to have an annual safety inspection, nor does it have emissions requirements (A) for vehicles older than 1996 or (B) for any vehicles registered outside the Atlanta Metro area.

We placed an asterisk next to the classic vehicle restrictions section because they weren’t evident on the DMV website. Your mileage here may vary. The plates are comparatively expensive versus other states – $80 up front and $55 to renew every year – and don’t really provide any benefits since you’re not avoiding inspections.

Joe Severns noted that years ago, he only needed a bill of sale on a 1964 Mercedes-Benz Heckflossë some years ago, but the state’s website notes that titles are required for 1962 and newer cars now. “As the car had been a barn car (that ran and moved under its own power – but lacked safe brakes, tires and working safety belts,” he says. “Maybe Ralph Nader should have lobbied Georgia for a safer registration process that would include a safety inspection. Ad valorem taxes may also be required depending on the year of the vehicle. ’The government do take a bite.’”

That seven percent sales tax is applied at registration and is calculated by the state, not your bill of sale, which isn’t great, depending on which wildly inaccurate source the state bases its value on.

On the plus side, Georgia gets about 2.9 inches of snow every year, so you’re safe never really storing the car for the winter, and outside of Atlanta Metro, the roads in the region are spectacular.

21. West Virginia

West Virginia does have $66.50 per year antique vehicle restrictions that conform with the “weekends, holidays, and special events” restrictions of other states in the region, but the requirements don’t seem as strict as those laid out in Virginia.

You can either select the antique plates provided by the state or if you have a 1973 or earlier vehicle, you can opt for plates with a year marking that matches the year of your vehicle.

West Virginia doesn’t have an emissions inspection, so you don’t have to worry about that at all if your vintage car interests include cars from the 1990s. Unfortunately, it appears that West Virginia still requires titles for anything, so that may put a wrinkle in your plans. If you opt for the antique plates, you don’t have to worry about safety inspections, either. The sales tax is relatively spendy at 6%, but it appears to be calculated on the bill of sale, which is a huge advantage versus calculation by a NADA price guide.

West Virginia has some of the most amazing roads in the East, and traffic is relatively light compared to other states in the mid-Atlantic region. The weather cooperates most of the year, but you’ll definitely see snow a few months out of the year.

20. Kansas

Kansas is another state that actually seems motivated to provide information to its constituents about registering classic cars. Not only does it have a clearly written statute laying out the lenient requirements and restrictions for historic plates (KSA 8-172, if you’re interested), but the Kansas Highway Patrol has provided an excellent pamphlet on title requirements. Whether you have an out-of-state title or a Bill of Sale, you’re required to have the VIN inspected by the Highway Patrol. Antique plates are available for a $40 one-time fee, avoiding annual renewals.

That’s the plus side. On the negative side is Rick Lyda’s experience: “I brought my ‘61 Willys CJ5 to Kansas from Colorado,” he says. “I had to get it inspected by the Highway Patrol before I could tag it. They only do inspections on Tuesday and Thursday between nine and noon. That made me have to pay two days extra trailer rental and miss a day of work just to get the pleasure of paying $25 and spending a half hour arguing with the guy about the six-digit VIN.”

The roads rank pretty high according to US News and World Report at #15, and the commute time is the 8^th best in America.

19. Iowa

Iowa has Antique vehicle registration, but we’re not sure there’s any point to obtaining it other than vanity.

After 2009, if you get Antique plates, you’re subject to the restrictions (only driven to and from state and county fairs or educational exhibits, must never use it as daily transport), but the fee is the same as any regular car. It doesn’t look like there’s any break on the 5% sales tax, either. Iowa House Bill 2251 introduced the idea of a cheaper state-provided year of manufacture plate, but that bill appears to have gone nowhere since 2022.

According to the state’s general laws, Iowa requires a title for all vehicles at the time of registration and there’s no language obvious that allows any kind of surety bond in its place.

Add that Iowa gets 39 inches of rain and 29 inches of snow every year, and you’re looking at a pretty low score.

18. Colorado

Colorado is like most other states in that it offers a Historic vehicle tag with a few minor restrictions. There are some confusing instructions to keep in mind, though:

The state has a graduated emissions testing program for cars in nine counties in populated areas. Vehicles older than 1975 registered as collector cars are exempt from emissions testing.

Cars from 1976 to 1984 that were registered as collector cars prior to 2009 and have not let that registration lapse are exempt from emissions testing.

Cars 32 years old that were not registered prior to 2009 must have an initial emissions inspection, then be reinspected every five years, and must not drive more than 4,500 miles per year. Is that clear enough?

Emissions inspections are at government-run facilities. “Wait times are posted online and there’s one about 5 minutes from my house,” Andrew Ganz tells us. “I’ve never waited more than 10 minutes, though it’s ironic that you sit idling outside the facility.”

The second thing to take note of in Colorado – like Arkansas, New Mexico, and a handful of other states – is its titling requirements. If your older car doesn’t have a title, you can still register it with a surety bond, as in many other states. However, if your vehicle is NOT roadworthy, older than 25 years of age, and physically located in Colorado, you can get what’s called a “Rebuilder’s Title” to keep with the car as it’s being restored. Once it’s again in roadworthy shape, you can use that Rebuilder’s Title as the basis to get a clean Colorado title. That’s a unique win for restorers in Colorado.

Unfortunately, Colorado ranks 30^th in commute time and 29^th in road quality, according to US News & World Report.

17. New Mexico

New Mexico Statute 66-3-27 NMSA 1978 lays out the requirements for its “Horseless Carriage” registration. The restrictions are the basic “special events and car shows” type, but there’s no restriction on days of the week or miles per year. It’s kind of odd that a car from 1984 can be registered as a “Horseless Carriage,” but that’s the statute.

The fee is $14.50 for the first five-year registration period, then $9.50 every subsequent five years afterward.

There’s a version of Colorado’s “rebuilder’s title” in New Mexico that allows a car to be restored over time and then inspected at the time of registration for a clean New Mexico title.

New Mexico ranks as #14 in America in terms of short commutes, but unfortunately ranks at #41 for road quality, according to US News & World Report.

15. Arizona

Arizona has up to four special plates for older cars. Classic Car plates are reserved for those recognized by the Classic Car Club of America. Historic Vehicle is for those 25 years old or older. Street Rod is for 1948 or earlier with modifications. Horseless Carriage is for 1915 or earlier. None seem to carry much in the way of major restrictions, which is great in a state where the sun shines most of the year.

Jeff Koch tells us that “Arizona’s emissions standards vary by county. In Maricopa County, where Phoenix is, any car 1975 or later needs emissions testing UNLESS you get collector insurance,  then the emissions requirement is waived. Collector-car or antique plates are not necessary for collector-car insurance,” a nice benefit for Arizona’s Hagerty customers.

He also notes that “Used car buyers who buy from a private seller are not required to pay sales tax on the transaction.”

Road quality puts Arizona in the top 25 percent of US states, while its road quality ranks at #33, according to US News & World Report.

15. Nevada

Nevada’s classic car plates (of which there are SEVEN, by the way) come with an age and mileage restriction. The vehicle has to be 25 years old (or older for Old Timer or Horseless Carriage tags), and can only be driven 5,000 miles a year.

Changes to Nevada’s classic registration program went into effect in 2021. Nevada now requires that anything with a classic vehicle plate also have collector car insurance: “You must show the Declarations page from your insurance policy as proof that the vehicle is covered by Nevada insurance that is specifically designated for classic or antique vehicles and meets the minimum liability coverage. You must submit this at your next renewal or at the time you first obtain plates.”

The weather is generally conducive to old car ownership, the roads are fantastic outside of Las Vegas and you can register a car with a bond if the title is missing. Only relatively high taxation keeps the state out of the running for the best state in the Union for classic ownership.

14. Wyoming