I have no idea what in the hell I’m doing…
In the world of “Import VS Domestic” my track record with vehicles is very solidly (and single sidedly) with the “imports”. The only two V8’s I’ve ever owned were in a truck and a van and both of those were “three-fifties”. In fact, when it comes to personal preferences, I very solidly prefer the torqueless, high revving rotary engines on a racetrack to just about anything piston powered.
Even for domestic purposes, when it came to “Ford VS Chevy” I nearly always side with the General and only dabble “here and there” in Fords lineup. Chrysler products don’t even appear as a blip on my RADAR. Even today, “Dodge” wouldn’t appear on my internet search history, and I usually assume them to be odd, expensive, and owned by people who use teeth marks to sign their vehicle registration.
I’ve already got a Wankle powered trackday/daily to maintain, a 4-Runner project that’s getting ready to go to Africa, and a house under construction that eats up 100% of my free time and money (because any deviation from the time/money rule, is more time/money spent in a rental we can not wait to be out of).
So how the hell did I end up getting this overweight rust filled barge of a land yacht scheduled to be delivered to my driveway tomorrow???
Two words: Eric Rood.
Now to say that Roadkill (and this forum) have completely changed my automotive project filled life would be the understatement of the century. I was born and raised on Super Chevy magazines and PowerBlock television. In that world, projects simply took cubic dollars and were completely sorted out in 30-minute segments. As a reward, your shiny unused car was featured in a magazine or on TV and everyone lived happily ever after.
My reality with automotive projects was much different (and worse!), so I must have been doing something wrong and generally considered myself a complete automotive failure. Nearly 20-years later, GRM would motivate me to buy and work on my first Alfa, and they were patient enough to teach me everything I learned along the way. Roadkill showed me what it was like to have perfect fun with an absolutely imperfect project and made me wish I could go back and do some of my failures over... But even that’s not how this got here.
To get “here”, we’ve got to go back a bit and talk a bit more about my favorite subject: Me.
I was born in the Pacific Northwest before the infamous Californian invasion of the 90’s. Before Starbucks. Before, even, Microsoft. Before any of those culture altering entities really took hold, the PNW was a podunk place filled with dirtbikes, chainsaws, 4-wheel drive trucks, and a relatively new football team in Seattle that absolutely sucked. My grandfather would take us in the mountains in his beer-bottle brown Ford and we’d cut logs in the summer for our winter heating. I wouldn’t live in a house that didn’t 100% depend on wood heat to stay warm in the winter until I moved to the other side of the mountains in Junior High. Back then, we had two beers, Rainier or Olympia (The latter pronounced “Oh-lee”) and I lived so close to the Oly brewery that it’s morning whistle would let us know we were late for school. Other than that it was just pine trees and a smell in Tacoma that was simply known as “the aroma” (Get of my lawn!).
Enter Mr. Rood:
In my followings of Roadkill, and subsequently the website for the show (RoadKill.com), an article titled “426 on 4/26” popped into my feed back in 2017. In this article, Mr. Rood told the story of how a Logging Mill owned NASCAR team entered The 24hrs of LeMans in a 1972 Dodge Charger (powered by engines that were built in Seattle). He goes in to great lengths to describe how the presence of this team of “shirtless Americans” was received by race aficionados (who were more accustomed to MUCH more professional efforts). He talks about the issues the team had with the (poor quality) race gas and how they almost immediately started popping engines despite their best efforts to do otherwise, and then he had to go and hit me right in the feels: When the team realized they were never going to be competitive, they filled their race car to the brim with local women and drove it into town on beer runs (And the girls that went on said runs are still talking about it)…
To me, nothing better describes the place in the universe that I was born into more than the actions described in that last sentence. Nothing's taken serious. If we're in it and have no chance to win it, then it's time to party.
So here goes. We're going to build the biggest, loudest, stupidest car anyone has ever seen on this side of the Danube, and we’re going on beer runs because (and I quote) “the chicks dig it”.
