What Are a Few Dented Fenders Between Friends?
Southern California is the world’s lushest, wealthiest car market, with more motoring writers per capita than BMWs per se.
Most are quite serious commentators, women and men with Turtle Wax for bone marrow. They have equal passion for domestic and imported industries, understand this partnership in the global economy and thrill to the endless evolution of the automobile.
A sprinkling of writers just like driving vehicles they can’t afford. Or obtaining a lifetime’s supply of free T-shirts, Swiss army knives, dinners with two wines, leather totes and a haberdashery of baseball hats that accompanies new car launches at Santa Barbara and Miami resorts far beyond all our budgets.
(For the record, my freebies go to best buddy Ajai Sharma--the only 12 3/4-year-old in Northridge with more automobilia than the Ford museum.)
In frequent moments of pomposity--which have been known to grow and saturate entire careers--we invariably see ourselves as nestors of America’s auto-buying habits.
We take credit for hammering the Rover-Acura-Honda mongrel that was Sterling and the Chrysler TC--with body by Maserati and cowl shakes by St. Vitus--until both cars were deported to Europe.
We gave our Paper Blessing to the Ford Taurus SHO, Dodge Viper and Mazda Miata. Thanks to that slobbering, buyers found themselves on months-long waiting lists for the privilege of paying several thousand dollars above sticker.
Each month we gather as a club--the Motoring Press Guild--with lunches at the Proud Bird Restaurant, close to the jet droppings of LAX. The group’s 250 members include auto executives speaking the news, publicists orchestrating the news, and us poor sods groping for some truth in it all.
Each November, we stage an annual fender fair--MPG Track Days at Willow Springs International Raceway near Lancaster. The track is a 2.5-mile, nine-turn, paved and pernicious wriggle in high desert, where there are precious few willows and absolutely no springs.
There also have been no antelope sightings in Antelope Valley recently. Or royals in Lancaster. But we digress. . . .
For two nervous days, major manufacturers donate their latest and proudest cars to fate and invite the motoring media to murder them.
Not all auto makers are so accommodating. Rolls-Royce--in the stuffy belief that nobody buys a $250,000 Corniche because they saw its lap times in Popular Mechanics--does not donate cars. Ferrari, Lamborghini, Porsche and Aston-Martin also respectfully decline to make mechanical sacrifices to the Ink-Stained Gods.
But Mercedes-Benz was at Willow Springs this month with a collection of coupes and convertibles worth $300,000 and few visible cares about who thrashed or trashed their panzerwagen . Lexus and Infiniti joined in the hazardous fun. So did BMW, Alfa-Romeo, Cadillac, Range Rover, Jaguar and other builders of big-buck buggies.
The crash-helmeted press--with some senior automobilisti talking laps much faster than we drove--did their very best to accommodate manufacturers’ silent anxieties.
One of our lot had serious brain fade in Turn Three--a slow, uphill left-hander--overshot the apex and continued east instead of turning north. The Nissan 300ZX cabriolet buried its nose in a dirt berm. The driver buried his nose in the air bag and popped a $900 hearing aid.
Another lad with more ambition than luck dropped a wheel off the inside edge of Turn Seven, a particularly quick portion of a tricky track. He achieved perfect separation of power and asphalt before the red Dodge Viper pirouetted dramatically into the dirt. His penalty was ribald directions to the adjacent off-road course and a suggested career change: Humvee Editor.
There was a lout in a Ford Crown Victoria with police suspension and engine--the car was upholstered in turquoise, wino-resistant vinyl and actually was on loan from Fullerton PD--who spent two persistent laps trying to crawl up the tailpipes of a Mitsubishi 3000GT.
I was black-flagged for “aggressive” driving. The charge was plea-bargained to “assertive” driving with no hard feelings.
Within all this fine madness, however, is serious purpose. Which is why SAAB, Range Rover, Chrysler, BMW and others chose to fly representatives from East Coast headquarters: not just to schmooze the MPG meet, but to gain another level of biofeedback.
Getting a car sideways, short on adhesion and close to the edge is a relatively easy test of steering, brakes and suspension. But learning each system’s inherent talent for safe recovery when revolving beyond adhesion with parameters off the page is critical information.
Inquiring auto writers--mostly recovering race drivers or performance driving school dropouts--need to know. How far does a Buick Roadmaster lean when its two tons of metal and mechanicals lash from side-to-side during emergency lane changes at 80 m.p.h? Does a Mitsubishi MR-2 at 120 m.p.h. stop straight or snake with the brake pedal floored? Is Mazda’s RX-7 truly a 150 m.p.h. car?
Answers are not found on the San Diego Freeway.
And even the process of snub-nosing a Nissan or derailing a Viper carry important messages about handling, safety and corrective measures to their driver-commentators.
Thrash Days developed some fun snapshots.
* Automotive journalists are unabashed patricians. Each day, the sports cars and grand tourers of Mazda, Mercedes, Acura and Jaguar were rode hard and put away wet. Anything with four doors and worth less than $10,000 barely turned a wheel.
* Track officials installed a chicane--a narrow avenue of pylons--to slow enthusiastic passages down the track’s long backstraight. Journalists, being just a mite smarter than orange traffic cones, soon nailed a flat-out route through the pylons. A second chicane appeared the next day.
* To heck with J.D. Power ratings. The most popular domestic cars on the circuit were Dodge Viper, Chrysler’s new triad of LH sedans and the Cadillac Seville STS, closely followed by the Ford Probe. The hardest-working imports were the Acura NSX and the Mazda RX7. Anything by Mercedes won the bronze.
* A full range of alternative-fuel vehicles--from an electric-powered Porsche Speedster to sedans running on propane, methanol and denatured Wyborowa--were lined up for media evaluation.
They remained lined up as most writers stuck with the stink, noise and rollick of The Real Thing.
Sniffed AutoWeek columnist and former European racing princess Denise McCluggage: “The only thing that should be plugged into a wall is a stereo.”
But she did plug herself into the narrow tub of a 10-battery, open-wheeled Indy race car by the Solar & Electric Racing Assn. of Phoenix.
She turned some silent and eerie laps around the parking lot and was asked her opinion.
“I think it’s an electric car,” McCluggage said. “But, hey, it’s a beginning. And they probably laughed at Henry (Ford) once.”
