'So, this one time...'

I fully accept that this is not likely to be your first idea of beautiful, but stay with me.

The best thing about the internet, I feel, are the things you discover by accident - the unintentional treasures, the unexpected stories; at it's best it's the one jazz club everyone claims to have located by near mystical origins and seen someone nameless do something fantastic just one time never to be replicated again, 'So, this one time...' was how my old friend Zac started every tale - the well rehearsed hook to a non-duplicatable, you-really-had-to-be-there adventure starring, well, Zac.

But hasn't everyone got that story? Maybe not quite so many as Zac, but, one fondly remembered yarn grown to fishing dimensions by the washy lapping of time at the shores of your memory - I think so.

Now, let's scale back a bit - interesting wikipedia pages are not, generally, as empowering and colorful as random New Years kissess, near death experiences, meeting Lebron James' mom in a clothing store or the white petals falling over the Buffalo Trace distillery in Frankfurt, Kentucky at the end of long road trips - chance...things....that happened and no one really can or cares to try and understand the raggedy moment-edge importance of. But this one....

This is really cool.

I think anyone who likes cars in the 'I have changed my own brake pads' kind of way has heard the name Carroll Shelby. The pearling blue, white-striped Cobras with their enormous hub-flares and wide, honest faces hiding terrifying engines and monstrous rubber; these, in any trim, have seeped into motoring Americana even more than the man himself.

I was blitzing through the internet searching for the name and history of the Shelby Daytona Coupes - some hazy recollection of the world beating Cobra hard-tops and the curious bus that drove them around... only to realize that I was confusing that bus with two other completely different busses loaded with expensive race cars - one the Ecurie Ecosse racing team transporter

which is, itself, almost the right color but hopelessly stuffed with Scottish Jaguars and then, rather more innocently, the rather more correctly blue transporter of the F1 Scarabs -
Which is when things start getting really tricky, see, this one, the great blue monster loaded with America's first and only homegrown F1 team was left behind after the Scarab's European tour - like some poor unowned beetle of labor it was converted to carry around Team Lotus for awhile (apparently coach-built car transporters were the thing in that era...and there was quite a bit of bus-reappropriating going on) then prepared but not actually used by the Camoradi Maser team and then, in one of those really gratifying turns, eventually used to tote Carroll Shelby's Daytona Coupes and GT40s around.

This isn't even the neat part. I had to go deeper.

Carroll Shelby eventually built six Daytona Coupes - each a slightly different hardtop derived from the A.C./Shelby Cobra roadster for the purpose of being shipped over to Europe to compete in the GT class...and hunt Ferraris, something his previous Cobras had been unable to do. The Daytonas used the same powertrain, but made tremendous strides in aerodynamics - the resulting car was champion bred and accomplished most of the goals Shelby had set for them - including the first American wins at Sebring and taking the crown at Le Mans. Five of them made the trip - or rather, the parts for five, which were constructed in Italy, leaving just the prototype, apparently designated CSX2287 and the only Coupe built in the US, stateside.

It's clear to me and my digging that it was raced a bit itself - it owns several at-the-time landspeed records at the Bonneville salt flats - and is supposed to have spent some time in Europe, though how it got back here..that part seems questionable. And it did get back here - in 1965, unable to turn the Daytona's rather lengthy list of racing successes into premium sales, Shelby sold the CSX2287 to Jim Russel, who made toy cars for something like 4,500 dollars. Russel then sold it to Ross Spector, a hollywood record exec who used it as a sort daily driver - though apparently with a great number of issues that accompany the use of legitimate, thoroughbred race cars for running to the store for milk and bread.

The romance with the Daytona was short, Spector apparently took it to someone to see about getting the race car fixed out of it, but was told it would cost a mighty sum - the shop offered to scrap the thing for 800 bucks, at which time Spector's bodyguard, George Brand, asked to buy it for a grand - an offer Spector apparently accepted. Details are sketchy for many reasons that don't include Brand's Alzheimer's, so one can imagine how complicated it gets after that, but at some point he passed the car off to his daughter, Donna O'Hara.

In the early 70s, O'Hara, who it seems didn't drive the car a great deal and might have been a bit mad, took the car and put it in storage - and promptly began denying at least her ownership of the car and occasionally it's existence - once to Shelby himself, who tried a few times to buy the prototype back.

The car was, for all intents and purposes, gone - this wasn't 'just some car', it was the progenitor of some of America's greatest racing stories and, accordingly, it gained a near mythical status amongst Cobra/Shelby enthusiasts; the 'Lost Cobra', gone, destroyed or, as was actually the case, sitting in a storage bay somewhere in California. 30 years went bye and it might have stayed there, in the deep obscure of legend rather a lot longer if Donna O'Hara had not gone out into the woods near her house with a can of gasoline and burned herself to death under a bridge along a horsetrail in 2001.

A bit mad.

There's a bit more story, too, though it's rather more mundane - arguments regarding ownership, shadowy deals, legal battles...in the end the car changed hands for 4 million dollars and at some point found it's way to the Simeone Foundation Automotive Museum. At the time it was the most expensive car ever sold.

And here's the thing....go up and look at it again. It's just a mule - a very fast mule, mind you, but it's an ancient, rotting fast mule. Think, for a moment, about all the kinds of cars you could buy for 4 million dollars, that's four (FOUR!) Bugatti Veyrons...and those look like this -

and these? These go rather a lot faster than that Daytona ever could and have things like heat and air conditioning and leather from baby animals you've never even seen. Children will squeel in delight, women will swoon, men will buy you beers and everyone will rev their engines at you stoplights, just for the laugh of it. But as good as that is and, let's be clear, a thousand horses is a pretty good...it's sort of like going to dinner at a crazyily exclusive restaurant. Or flying on a Lear jet - perhaps just a brilliantly expensive watch...a thing, a nice thing, one of the nicest, but just a thing.

And then there's the Daytona, that is not a thing - it's a myth.

I remember, very clearly, the first time I met Tommy Heinsohn. By way of one of my jobs, he loomed towards the counter and I, devout Celtics faithful, nearly squeeled like that wide-eyed child watching a Veyron, or other halcyon supercar sloop past the bit of concrete I was occupying - in fact, to be honest, I did squeel and was not able to go help Mr. Heinsohn. None of my co-workers really understood, he was just a customer, a very, very nice customer and a rather tall one, but a customer.

Over time I managed to collect myself and eventually I did help him - and did him the respect of never mentioning what we both knew, that he is a legitimate Celtic's legend; save one time when we commiserated about a recent roadtrip gone bad and I nearly passed out from excitment. Some of my friends do their best smile and nod at this story, wincing around 'guess-you-had-to-be-theres...' and not getting it.

But when someone does get it - when they remember sitting in their dad's living room with the C's on, when they recall being told the stories, when just the phrase Green 17 tosses them a bit - they really get it, and they grin and they want to have been there and they just knew he was a good guy and they beam, as I beamed, watching something that really matters, and matter to a lot of people, walking through my now.

Just as when someone who gets it walks past that particular blue thoroughbred, whether it is lounging in it's old age in a museum or burling through some possible boulevard, they'll know - as the light lathers down it, that rosy swelling that comes with intense recollection - the history repeating, the way time collapses all around you; the intense magic of a proper story barrelling first into you and then back out - what it's like when just a piece of it, that myth, is yours to know for good.

On coupes, mustangs and the light in the eye

I am working on a something - a book. A book buried deep in my recently recovered passion for automobiles, a book that seeks to explore my seemingly random interest in the matters of the wheel and also that of my country. Scribblings, now, and questionaires - fleshing out concepts, directions, a lot of planning. Am enjoying myself tremendously and find myself again charging wildly both through my own history as well as to the top of my plucky, little car's tachometer.

What I am on about most recently is Dream Cars.

Lust is a good emotion, I approve of it. Though it beguiles and confuses, though it will bend you to it, some over-eager tango partner grabbing at your thigh, it is terribly honest at the point of creation - a vibrant, reasonless want; the body's chemical bloom as it responds to something that is particularly beautiful to you.

In all the world only two things evoke it for me and I consider myself likely ununique in this regard - all the slinking lines of girls and cars. Am most enamored, come the end of day, of the frames of women - how they are set, the stance that allows for all that soft and silking shape; hips, shoulders, the neck swoop - and all these things draw me to cars, as well. How either of them move at pace, how they sit askance regard or under it, the way the light smashes along the length...delirious. These things make me delirious.

I allow that there are hues to consider, the skin and ways in which the body swells - I rather like the swells...and what it is that makes one move, be it lady or Lambourghini, will matter eventually...but those are high mind things. I am talking of the animal ripple - the senseless thing that masquerades as need and makes me, us, so wonderfully fool in it's shadow.

Here's a visual aid - it's called an Aston Martin Vanquish V12 and I desire it.


Just look at it - the almost lurid stance, the simple athlete in the lines; if one knew nothing about the torrid monster under the hood, this car would still promise speed, would still incite the light to run along it's length and the eye to chase right after- it makes me stupid, this car, it makes my mouth water; it's like some impossible dancer twisting just outside the span of arms.

My dream cars are not sensible, it is not love I feel while wrenching my head around in traffic, daring a smash for a momentary glance at some slice of sheet metal - it is lust, smashing distracted young men and women into doorframes as the eyes sprint raggedy after a hip or a chin or a faint of skin.

What I wonder is where the dream car has gone off to. As entwined as we are as a nation with the automobile - the birthright of the license, the somewhat diminished ritual of the 'first car', it seems the automobile occupies very little of our collective heart - for all the people I have asked this question after, simple, what car it is that excites them, that takes them, that they would have if only...justt a handful of people have an answer.

When I began this mental dialogue, I was most concerned with whether or not our dream cars were fair to ourselves - if it was good to create an idyllic paradigm in youth, to set a goal like that without knowing the stakes or what was involved; if the car one chooses to drive says something about someone, and I believe it does, then it follows that the penultimate car of desire would say rather a lot more. Did the car we longed for change, did it say more about who we were than who we hoped to become - was it about assigning a form to who we wanted ourselves to be or whom we hoped other people saw us as....so many questions.

Yet what became more pressing was the absence of the idea. I have a clear picture in my head of the evolution of my dream cars - how they changed as my vision of the world expanded, how my priorities changing were reflected in sheet metal and hub flares - what follow is a smattering of those shifting ideals, the vehicles whose ownership never seemed likely, but who nevertheless stirred my heart and wrenched my head dangerously around.


1996 Chevrolet Impala SS
1987 BMW M6


1987 Karen Gillan....*cough* - you get my point.




There is a part of the brain that doesn't care - that ignores reason, that refuses to know what it ought - about expensive cars, about famous girls you'll never meet - and opts instead to treat all the beautiful things as mothfire - to grab us and throw us brutally towards the fire knowing full well we wont ever get there. Eye lightning and the streaks it leaves across the mind - that, that is where the dream cars throttle and barrel through the dark.

I worry only that, like wild mustangs out bundling across the plains, no one would argue they were wonderful - simply that they could never imagine what it would be like to ride.