Antique & Classic Cars Blog

There’s a trade-off in the car-writing world. You live in a hole in the ground covered by a tarp, eat Raman noodles for all meals—with frosting on your wedding day, brush with a pine bough, floss with upholstery thread, and get new clothes at a top-shelf store only when a riot removes the windows and distracts the clerks (and the items don’t fit well because it’s hard to try on pants while sprinting through a melee).

The upside is that you get invited to drive some amazing cars. The only caveats are not to stall–because you look like a nitwit, and not to break anything your life’s income couldn’t pay for.

Last Friday, a friend and I were photographing a ’57 Ferrari 250 GT for an upcoming book. After an excellent shoot where we got everything we wanted and then some, the car’s owner asked if I wanted to take a spin.

“Oh, no, the trench and the tarp are all the joys I need….” Not.

We were working on a “blur”—a panning shot with slow shutter speed that put the passing car in focus but made the background and wheels blurry from motion. We got this shot with the owner at the wheel, but since the owner offered a spin in an Italian V-12, the photographer decided to shoot yours truly the same way.

All it took was to go down the road, turn around and come by at maybe 30 miles per hour. And not stall. And not break anything.

Out of the blocks, I worked the pedal well enough to take off, went to a wide stretch down the road and pulled over to hang a U-bee. No side mirror, so you have to check the rearview, then crane your head to confirm. There was a huge tri-axle dump truck up the road.

How fast could that wheeled-mountain move? We were on the clock, so I pulled out. And stalled directly across the road.

Murphy—or his ghostly handmaidens—was on the scene spontaneously to take away the instant tick-over that marked all previous key turnings. The car and I were sitting perfectly square to the oncoming juggernaut. Obeying a physical law solidified by Hollywood action films, the car-across-the-road would not start. Unlike the movies, it was not a glaring Nicholson in the truck cab but a man capable of smiling at, and avoiding, another’s misfortunes. He swung wide, went around, and the Ferrari, on cue, fired right up.

Two quick passes went fine. Isn’t three lucky? Perhaps, if you’re in the Ferrari transmission repair business. Ignoring the voice that says, “well done, now pull over before something stupid happens,” I made one more pass, pulled into a side street and stopped to double back—and the car would not go into first gear. Little throttle blip, tried the other gears, back to first…nothing. Or rather, two for two–stalling (in front of dump truck) and breaking (gearbox).

I told the owner it wouldn’t find first, so he took the wheel with the same result. When we got back to his driveway, he said it had done this once before and that it returned to normal when the car cooled down.

A couple days later he called and said it was working again, so I reassumed my identity and returned from the remote Alaskan wilderness where I was pretty sure a mailman with a repair bill could not find me.

Next time, when a person with a phenomenal car asks if I’d like to take it for a spin, I think I’ll say….. heck yeah!!

This entry was posted on Friday, August 15th, 2008 at 10:25 am and is filed under Car stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.