{Over the years, I have become what others call a power-user in
{Macintosh-land. Alas, I have yet to get my first MG....reluctant to put
that
{amount of time and elbow grease ;) into it.
Well, lately I've been telling DOS snobs that when I want to use
something quirky, antiquated, unreliable, frustrating, and just
plain badly engineered, I drive my British sports cars, which have
the added benefit of being fun. British sports cars are very much
like fiddling with incompatibilities between sound card drivers,
conflicting AUTOEXEC.BAT and WIN.INI files, getting all the right
DLLs to load so that you can make the program run, and just plain
outdated design. Except that when they all work together, they're
a delight beyond the lives of most people. (The cars, that is. :-)
{Tell me why I should! (Can I really be satisfied just smiling when I see
them
{drive by?)
It's tempting to say that if you don't know by now why you should --
if it isn't already an overwhelming need to have one of these things,
in the face of everything you've heard about them (all of which is
of course true) -- if you still need to be convinced, then you're not
right for British cars.
British cars aren't ordinary cars. True, you can use them for daily
transportation. You can, with just a little advance preparation and
not much more care than it takes to defragment a hard drive and
make regular backups, commute to and from your job, take the kid
to school, do shopping and otherwise turn petroleum into smog in
a little British sports car, just as you could with a Datsun or a
Volvo. You can do ordinary things in British cars, and you can do
them without fear of massive, sudden, unexpected failure -- assuming,
of course, that you pay attention and live right.
What you get in return... There is a very special feeling that comes
from motoring down a tree-lined highway in a car that you've built
with your own hands. When you press the throttle and the engine
responds; when the exhaust growls as you accelerate; when the car
takes a set *instantly* in a corner and lets you make the most
mind-boggling course corrections in mid-drift without complaint --
when all this happens because of your own work, and thought, and
sweat, and even a little blood -- no amount of money or status or
horsepower can compare with that feeling.
Perhaps most important, when you can make these cars work, and
other people can't, there's a phenomenal surge of ego involved. When
people talk about unreliable, quirky, failure-prone English cars to me,
it fills me with pride that *my* car doesn't leak oil because *I* built
the motor. And more to the point, it fills me with pride because *I*
can put up with it, can endure it, can go past it and with pure reason
and skill and stubbornness make the silly thing work -- and they *can't*.
{How long did folks think seriously about geeting such a car before their
{first?
As I said, there was never any doubt. I became addicted on a summer
afternoon when I was four or five years old, and I went for a ride in a
white Jaguar XK-120 roadster, driven by my dad's friend since high
school, Dick Wells. He didn't probe the limits, pin me to the seat with
power, or demonstrate a four-wheel drift to me. He just took me for
a ride through gentle California hills, golden beneath the black-green
live oaks, undulating like the breath of the dragon whose backbone
we were riding that day, the dragon-road that pops up now and then
along the Pacific coast. That car had a sound, a feel, and a smell that
I can still remember, viscerally and clearly, a smell of leather, hot
aluminum, wool-jute carpets -- and fear. Underneath the musty smell
of the carpet was a tinge of something eternal, something terrifying,
something dark that required constant mastery and constant watchfulness.
The fear of disaster... the fear of failure... the fear of collapse. I
didn't
and don't know Dick's private fears, but the olfactory lobe of my brain,
deep down in the lizard part of my brainstem, recognized it and responded.
Here are some additional ways to determine whether you're the right
kind of person to own a British sports car. If you're offended by the
fact that I phrase it this way, you won't be happy with one. It has nothing
to do with money, race, creed, social standing, gender, sexual orientation,
or even for that matter intelligence. (In fact, you could make a fairly
reasonable case that intelligence and British-car ownership were
mutually exclusive...)
If you're more concerned about the way the car looks, or the way you look
driving the car, you're probably not going to be happy for long. Likewise,
if you really care about what most people think constitutes automotive
engineering -- that is, electronic engine management system controls
and speed-sensing steering and the rest of the execrations that have been
added to cars in the name of the bottom line and been sold to people under
the mistaken apprehension that it makes them Sporty -- you'll be very
unimpressed with British cars. If your idea of being a car enthusiast is
memorizing tables of g-forces from the Petersen publications, learning
which wax works best against bird droppings, and hoping one day to
learn what the letters on the tires mean, British cars are likely to be
pretty frustrating for you. Being an expert on modern sports cars isn't
likely to cost you much more than a few tickets and maybe a new set of
tires now and then, till trade-in time comes. Being an expert on British
sports cars hurts.
What do you get for it? Why do we put up with them?
Because life slips unnoticed beneath your wheels, past your windshield,
out the little slit portholes of the side window and disappears into the
mirror. Most cars do what they can to insulate you from that reality,
from the sounds, smells, sensations and thousand natural shocks of
each instant, past before you process your experience of it. In an M.G.,
or a Triumph, or any of these silly old things we all enjoy so much and
so irrationally, we become, for just a moment, participants in life, in
nature, in the unending stream of little evanescent scintillas of
consciousness that, taken together, make up eternity. We are each russet
leaf, we are pebbles in the asphalt, we are gravel at the edge of a narrow
country lane, we are dappled oak-shadows on a hillside, we are warm
yellow grass and cool grey mist. We ride the dragon, his great bleached
bones
jutting up and out, catching our tires in loops of sinew and swirling through
the hills and valleys of the gold-green earth, and for a moment, if
we have lived right and given back enough to the car and to our lives and
to our sacred honor, the dragon smiles, and we catch a glimpse of God.
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