I’ve left New York. What started as a ten-day trip to hammer out some business with Alex turned into five weeks of sleeping on his blue velour sectional, plenty of brainstorming, a ton of new friends and adventures the wooly world of startups that I couldn’t conceive of when I boarded that eastbound redeye in Sacramento over 4th of July weekend. But come to an end it has. We’re off to Monterey in 144B. We’ve enlisted the talents of Autoblog’s resident Northern California boy, Damon Lavrinc, to handle additional driving duties. We’re also attempting to warp the poor man’s brain. We’ve never attempted a driveplan that involved meeting an airline flight before, but that’s exactly what we’ll be attempting this time when we pick up Liz Moses.
She claims that she’ll bring some much-needed sense to the proceedings, but we’re a bit curious as to how much sense anyone who hitches a ride in a fake German police car crewed by a bald man, a bearded man and a blogging man could possibly have. Nevertheless, we intend to make our trek a memorable one. We’ll be broadcasting live video from Seero, as well as putting together one of our signature maps. We’ll be ruminating on the nature of driving in today’s America, passing through hamlets large and small as we travel the entire length of Interstate 80 — from the George Washington Bridge in New York to the Bay Bridge in San Francisco, then tooling down 101 through Silicon Valley and south to Steinbeck Country — where we’ll take in the goings on during what’s internationally recognized as the most fantastic collection of automotive events in one weekend. If you call yourself a car guy and haven’t made it to Monterey, mark your calendars. And once you experience it, you’ll want to come back every year.
Want to know what it took to join the U.S. Express back in 1980? Organizers of similar underground illegal races today sure could learn a thing or two from Express organizer Rick Doherty and the boys. Check out 32 Hours 7 Minutes Assistant Editor Adam Bedient’s production blog, then take a look at the acceptance letters…
Oh yeah…I almost forgot. Cory Welles has suggested - maybe - and I’m praying this is true - that the U.S. Express logo depicted above will make its way to the official 3207 movie T-shirts sometime. Soon.
January 17, 2005 - I was driving on Rte. 206 N between Bedminster and Chester, NJ. It was freezing. The temperature range for this particular Martin Luther King holiday saw a low of 17 and a high of 24 degrees. Conventional wisdom would have prevented me from driving my very heavily modified 1979 Porsche type 930 (911 Turbo) out of its normally garaged location, but I had taken the car out the previous day and gotten caught nearby at a friends house just as snow flurries started to fall. I decided to take my chances, stay overnight night and drive back home the following day when the sun was out.
Before I get into how much I love this thing, let’s be clear. I’m not an SUV guy. Most SUV’s handle terribly, and accident statistics show how often they are driven by people who don’t know it. Personal observation also suggests most of them don’t need them, but hey, it’s a free country. If I had to buy one, some are obviously better than others. The Cayenne. The Toureg. The Range Rover. The X5.
If you haven’t read "The Driver", I’ll let you in on a secret. We at Team Polizei like to think outside the box…the Polizei uniform box, that is, which is why - on our final cross-country run in October 2006 - we didn’t merely strip the Polizei M5 of our traditional livery. We re-liveried as Storm Chasers, and although we were lucky enough never to have to resort to what little Storm Chaser knowledge we studied prior to departure, let me tell you, the mere thought of encountering a real tornado made me realize how hilariously bizarre a Storm Chasing M5 must have looked.
I’m probably the least physically fit man ever profiled in Men’s Journal, so a big thank you to their auto editor Eddie Alterman for getting me yet another unexpectedly big peice. Again, you’ll have to buy a print copy of the January issue to read it, or wait until it goes online next month.
. The pic is the story, really. It’s just cool.
