When I got my driving license, I couldn’t vote. Legal drinking was a distant speck on the horizon. But I didn’t care. I was captain of my own ship, master of my own destiny. Within a few months, the parental units provided regular access to the family hatch. I treated this gift as a matter of life and death, because, well, it was. By that time it was clear that my friends’ driving habits were the greatest threat to my continued existence.
I’m not saying I was the most capable or responsible driver extant. I admit I sought answers to important questions relating to the time / space continuum; like whether or not a Honda Accord with nearly six digits on the clock could do the ton. I planned my experiment carefully, selecting a deserted stretch of four-lane highway just outside of town for the daring deed. Give me a crash helmet and a stick of Beecham’s and I’d have been Chuck Yeager. I didn’t break the sound barrier, but I did peg it at 95.
In contrast, my classmates tested the upper limits of their ancient chariots between stoplights. Only the inherent limitations of their mounts (family sedans and old econo-hatches) slowed their progress. Other traffic didn’t figure. To accept a ride from one of my speed-crazed, hormonally-charged peers was like playing Russian roulette with half the chambers loaded. Fortunately, the brevity of the city confines limited the possibilities for automotive immolation. Unfortunately, our city was a small island in a sea of country roads, with endless opportunities to accel.
For those Boomers and Gen X’ers who came of age in a small mid-western town, the term “vamping” will bring back instant memories. For those of you who grew up in the burbs or amongst high-rises and belt highways, vamping was the fine art of launching a vehicle into flight over a bump. It was a relatively simply matter of blood, guts and a pair of lead feet. Find the right bump, back up a bit and go for it. As for the landing, well that WAS the tricky part. God help you if another car happened to be driving in the opposite direction.
There were more than 600 kids with licenses at my school, perhaps 2000 in the city. No one knew exactly who was riding this dark thrill-ride until they failed. And more than one did. Perhaps the knowledge that I was leaving for college after graduation kept me from vamping it up. Then again, that didn’t seem to stop my college-bound friends’ pursuit of “air time.” One particularly brazen pair of associates managed to mangle three cars between them. Two of the autos snuffed it in single car accidents. The other required a joint effort, in what became a famous “experiment.”
As in all towns, Springfield had a teen hangout: Quik & EZ (yes, we thought it was pretty funny too). This less than salubrious edifice sat on a corner, connected to a large strip-mall parking lot by a short, steep ramp. Despite the brief distance from the ramp to the street (perhaps 50 feet), our two heroes managed to drive their Nova onto the ramp at 50mph; enough to catch that elusive air. Emboldened by the accolades, the driver decided to perform their automotive stunt show in the opposite direction. Hitting the 45 degree parking lot connector at over 50 miles an hour, their car never actually touched the ramp. It flew from one lot to another, bottomed out, spun 180 degrees in a shower of sparks and plowed over an electric transformer.
Our heroes pulled themselves out, performed a quick inspection and discovered that the bottom of the car was fairly well fused. The car “looked like a canoe”. Since the police hadn’t showed (yet), and home was only two miles away, they decided leaving would be a good thing. They piled back in and headed home, shedding parts the whole way, driving into local legend.
For those who survived and got something faster; the next level was thrashing around the two-lane out by the lake. That road had lots of curves, little police presence and plenty of trees capable of cutting a Firebird in half (I saw the pictures). One particular stretch saw fatal accidents in three straight summers; proof of the road’s automotive allure and our local drivers’ courage/stupidity.
My luck ran out at the end of my senior year; I was rear-ended by a Sable in a driving rainstorm. For the next four years, my automobiling was restricted to summers and holidays; delivering Pizzas or heading out of town to boss hick kids and JD’s through cornfields. My first set of wheels would be a graduation “gift” of the sort that gave Trojans nightmares, but that, my friends, is another story.
I remember a classmate who used to drive a ’75 Honda Civic from the school gates to the boulevard– about a mile down a single city street– at maximum speed. Call it 85mph. Nuts.
The City eventually put FOUR sets of four-way stop signs on the route, and a good thing too.
I took my dad’s ’93 Tracer to Montana in the late summer of ’98. This was still in the “reasonable and prudent” days. I pegged that mug at about 110 on a deserted road near Plentywood. (OK, all roads near Plentywood are deserted.)
I then got to drive it back to him (1400 miles) with the automatic transmission stuck in second gear. I’d love to say it was because I was young and foolish, but I had just finished grad school.
Recently like… two months ago I lacked the ability or sense to resist in a personal indulgence of seeing just how well a Cayman could handle that windy long road that leads into Lime Rock Park in CT. So when he stepped on it I gave chase in my grocery getter A4 Avant. After a few mins the driver of the cayman lowered his window and tossed out his coffee and proceded to go even faster. Be damned if I didnt fail to observe the cayman brake for a bump/peak and sudden drop in the road resulting in me launching and then bottoming my A4 Avant out. I scraggled up my belly pan, nearly pierced a $300 trans sump filled with 8 liters of $20/L fluid. But hey The Cayman didn’t get away from ye olde quattro with yours truly the sociopath at the wheel. It was worth it… my passenger agreed that it was quite comical.
I’m crazy I know… even with some HPDE experience and autocross experience there is no excuse for doing what I did… next time I’ll brake and load the front suspension so it doesn’t get all airborne. YEEE HAW!
When I was stationed at a U.S. Navy air base in El Centro, California (from September 1972 through January 1976), we “squids” as we used to call ourselves (maybe to pretend that we were part of the regular Navy) used to play “chicken” on the main road, that ran 8 miles to-and-from the base and the town of El Centro.
That meant as we were about 500 feet from passing each other, one or the other would drive into the other sailor’s lane. Fortunately, our febrile (so they seemed) young brains were hard-wired enough to each other; as a result, we knew when to go in the direction needed to avoid impact. No one ever misjudged the other’s intent and did a head-on. None of us were brave, or stupid, enough to ever try this trick when we’d been drinking. It was done stone-cold sober and was just another way of trying to cope with living in an area that, at that time, was pretty barren, and in the summer held temperatures of 100 plus degrees with 80 to 90 percent humidity (due to farmers irrigating their crops). One of the sailors I knew then called El Centro, “the armpit of the universe.”
Who knows why no one was ever killed. It must have been some sort of “freak of nature” deal, akin to why salmon always know where to swim back upstream to spawn.
It was a cruel thrill to have a civilian friend with you, who didn’t know that this was planned out; and watch him or her almost pee their pants, in fear.
Senior year spring of ’92, I escaped for an afternoon to drop off donations at various chrities. On the way back, a classmate and I coincidentally meet at a stopsign less than a mile (but out of sight) from school. Without a word we both floor it and the drag race is on…my hand-me-down 84-T-bird hitting at least 70 on the straightaway 2 lane road, then screeching to a stop in the parking lot. We laugh our heads off and chat in the lot for a few minutes before walking back into the building, only to freeze dead in our tracks…standing there outside the office is one of the city’s finest (back in the day when cops were never at school). We both nervously smile at him and head back to class, convinced someone saw us and called to complain and we would be spending the next few saturdays like the ‘breakfast club’. A few agonizing hours later we find out the officer was only there to talk to the athletic director about security at that night’s big game against a downright hostile rival school. PHEW!
Exactly why, when our daughter turned 16 (and was already the only person in her high-school class of 200 who knew how to drive a manual transmission, having already logged back-road seat time in a variety of press cars from Vipers to a Diablo) we bought her a new twin-cam Neon Sport, which was thought by many to be the height of indulgence.
Which wasn’t the point at all. I didn’t care whether or not she screwed the guy with the Camaro, I just wanted him riding _right_ seat.
Her graduation present, two years later, was the full Barber road and competition courses. No, not an indulgence either.
*muffled scream*
Do you guys have ANY IDEA how much these stories burn up us poor Limeys growing up in the 40’s and 50’s with NO chance of wheels of our own?
Drive to school? I was bussing and cycling (including a 15% hill) every day until graduation.
A diet of hot rod movies and Custom Car magazine just made it worse…
*gnaws left foot off*
Don’t feel bad. It was exactly that way in the suburban and rural U. S. in the ’40s and ’50s…except my hill was 18% and I didn’t get to ride a three-speed Raleigh. Newsboy Schwinn.
*muffled scream*
Do you guys have ANY IDEA how much these stories burn up us poor Limeys growing up in the 40?€™s and 50?€™s with NO chance of wheels of our own?
Drive to school? I was bussing and cycling (including a 15% hill) every day until graduation.
A diet of hot rod movies and Custom Car magazine just made it worse?€?
*gnaws left foot off*
do you know how much these stories burn up us limeys with cars(mine is right outside right now) who are priced off the road by bastard insurance companies
Lost you there. Are we crazed Murricans raising your rates?
One thing for sure, I haven’t slowed down with age at all, but at least I’m smarter about it ;-)
Driving 90+ on a 2 lane road in a 1972 Chevrolet Nova (for which “handling” was an undefined term) was about as dumb as I got, fortunately!
Lost you there. Are we crazed Murricans raising your rates?
nope you’ve just reminded me of bombing around in my tiny econo-hatch while all my mates/college peers walked.
Ahh yes, the insanity of youth.
I remember being just so freaking proud of myself for getting my Dad’s 1974 Mercury Montego to do 100+ (indicated) on a local freeway outside of my little Ohio hometown…
That was just one of many, many random acts of stupidity. I’m amazed today that I ever survived… (Hand of God maybe?)
And no, I will never tell my kids about this stuff… Until they’re at least 30…
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one of my favorite stupid videos: http://www.alldumb.com/item/12901/
some crazy danish kids go dukes of hazzard.
beautiful…I give the landing a 9/10.
I spent my teenage years in Germany and the US. Legal driving age was, gulp, starting with your 18th birthday overthere. Eventhough I had my US license a couple of years earlier it didn’t do this Army brat any good overthere! (Talk about dangleing the carrot in front of your nose.)
My european mom insisted (in hindsight a smart thing) that I take the german driving test.
Unlike here where you buy the book and stroll out of the multiple choice exam, practically the same day with a learners permit, this involved classroom training for some 6 months, endless hours of daytime and night time driving with an instructor at a premium, a written(!!) exam and passing a gruelling 4 hour driving test under Fraulein Rottenmeier’s snipped disaprovals!! A medical complete with eye exam and two weeks later, when all the stars were aligned just right you got a pink letter in the mail, more anticipated then your admission to Princeton, allowing you to head to the local DMV to swiftly in 3-4 bureaucratic instances holding your drivers licence marred by a big red letter “L”(for learning) all across. Man, you really had to FIGHT for this thing!! All in all it took almost a year to get!!
I felt like a king!! I was now SOMEBODY!! Lol. Eventough you are limited to speeds up to 50mph on rural and 90mph on the Autobahn.
As Andrew stated, that didn’t make me a better driver, but a more cautious one. I did not want to loose my “pappe” (german for cardboard, referring to the stiffness of the document) carelessly , all to easy accomplished with the stiff penalties in the land that invented penalties!!.
Being w/o your “cardboard” was the worst social stygma, especially because without your permit you were literally “grounded” in an infrastructure similar to L.A.!! Say goodbye to that girl two towns over!!! Trinken verboten!!!
Where my buddies on average went through 5 cars in the first 2 years of owning a licence, I managed to get through the learners permit’s two years with the same car with the added bonus of showing my responsability and my dad buying me a BRAND NEW BMW 323i.
Which I consequently wrecked within the first month of ownership…..Oh, well!!! Back to the old Fiat Spyder I went….
I did launch my Crown Vic at a construction site, although it was quite unintentional. If it had been paved, I might have actually done some damage. As it was, I left a huge dust cloud and a startled passenger.
And test pilots chew Beeman’s, if I’m not mistaken.
Here is an excerpt from an article I wrote that contained details about all of the vehicles I’ve owned to date. The one described here was number four of 21, and I was around 18 at the time…
???69 Jeep Dispatcher 100 (former mail delivery truck): Back then, the postal service auctioned off its used vehicles to the general public. While I still had the VW, I just had to have one of these! It was right-hand drive, and had only one seat in it as purchased. This made for some very interesting happenings at toll booths.
My friends and I had so much fun in this thing, I could fill another entire column with just those stories. I???ll share my favorite one here. It was when we played Rat Patrol.
If you remember the TV show Rat Patrol, you???ll remember its frequency of scenes with a Jeep getting air over sand dunes. We didn???t have any sand dunes in Bridgeport, Pennsylvania, but we did have a trail that ran along the Schuylkill River.
To enter the trail, you had to drive down a very short and steep incline, almost like a ramp. We would drive down to the other end of the trail, turn around, floor it, and keep it floored. When we would hit the ramp, the mail truck would leap into the air. How fast we hit the ramp determined how high. And heaven forbid you chicken out and back off the throttle prematurely; this would bring you down nose instead of tail first. Not very pleasant.
I was never outside the vehicle to witness it, but people who had told me a few times, the bottom of the tires were about level with their heads. It was all quite fun, but looking back, also amazingly stupid. But nothing bad ever happened, and nothing ever broke.