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VEHICLE HARMED
The December edition of Wheels magazine tells the whole terrible story of how I drove a $400,000 Bentley GTC from California to Las Vegas via Death Valley and, well, broke it. At 140 mph. No link; print only. Some shots from the trip:
(Images courtesy of Lyndon Conrad Bell, editor-in-chief of OnWheelsInc and one superb driver)
One foot on the break and the other on the acelerater, or maybe Tim put a little oil underneath the tyres and had a few mates lift it up a bit and smoked it out.
What a nice car, hope it felt good
Posted by artful-dodger on 2006 11 26 at 12:03 PM • permalinkDriving on the “wrong” side of the road again, Tim?
Posted by Some0Seppo on 2006 11 26 at 12:28 PM • permalinkYou can’t stop there! That’s bat country!
Posted by Evil Pundit on 2006 11 26 at 02:48 PM • permalinkTo quote some old movie that starred Walter Matthau: ‘Carbon on the valves.’
Posted by SwinishCapitalist on 2006 11 26 at 05:24 PM • permalinkWhat a coincidence. I raced my daughter from California to Vegas on a video game simulator at a local buffalo wings restaurant. We each drove a $400k auto - the daughter drove a Maserati, I drove a Lamberghini. We both took out most of the casinos along the Vegas Strip and then we ate wings.
Posted by wronwright on 2006 11 26 at 06:48 PM • permalinkIt’s a British luxury car. The surprising thing is that it started.
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2006 11 26 at 09:29 PM • permalinkBah, you did us a favor. Ignoring the car’s impressive performance characteristics (during the odd time it’s actually running), the fact is that it looks like it was separated at birth from the Kia Amanti. Tim, you are perhaps the only person to ever drive one who was not a jerkwad real estate developer who was looking for some panache when leasing his next vehicle.
No sir, I don’t like it.
Posted by Matt in Denver on 2006 11 26 at 10:10 PM • permalinkGravelly - I was thinking the same thing. No insect splatter.
When I was in Nevada mid year I cam across Mormon beetles for the first time. Yikes! Talk about a Biblical plague.
Oh! I suppose
KimRoveMcManusMcKarl arranged for minions to lick the car clean every hour or so….Posted by Stop Continental Drift! on 2006 11 26 at 10:30 PM • permalinkMaybach: The cucumber down the trousers of the automotive world.
There are thousands of ways to say I’m a nouveau riche, ostentatious, gauche, wanker with money beyond the dreams of avarice. The Maybach is probably in the top 3.
Posted by Infidel Tiger on 2006 11 26 at 10:57 PM • permalinkThe new convertible Aston Martin has it covered for looks, hands down. Check out this bad boy:
http://www.autoblog.com/2006/11/15/officially-official-aston-martin-v8-vantage-roadster-revealed-a/
It pulls off the difficult task (for a rag top) of a) being masculine and b) still having a good roof line with the top up.
Stunning, in my opinion.
Posted by attilathepun on 2006 11 26 at 11:19 PM • permalinkBritish luxury cars used to be sold in pairs. One to drive, one for parts.
Posted by Infidel Tiger on 2006 11 26 at 11:30 PM • permalink22 Stop Continental Drift - They’re Mormon crickets, not beetles, and you should try riding a bicycle up a pass that they are all crossing at once. The crunch is sickening, made worse by the fact that they carry their dead bretheren back off the road, resulting in occasional “twofers.” For those who haven’t seen one, they are brown crickets the size and texture of the big puffy Cheetos.
Posted by Matt in Denver on 2006 11 26 at 11:42 PM • permalink#13 That moview was “A New Leaf” about a guy who drains his trust fund of money and needs to find an heiress.
Posted by James Hamilton on 2006 11 27 at 01:11 AM • permalink#17 Auntie, I doubt it’s a three-speed of any sort. See the fender extensions? What GM did (still does) with their truck chassis was to mount pickup cabs on them, extending the fenders for the extra width. I called it a deuce-and-a-half, but that’s nostalgia. It’s probably a five-ton chassis, and if so has five forward gears operated by a big lever sprouting from the floor, with almost a foot between gear settings. If it was a high-dollar version it also had a two-speed rear end, shifted by a knob attached to the main gearshift shaft, to be pushed and pulled by the first and second fingers.
Empty, you could leave the rear end in high, and just shift the mains. Loaded… well, it had either a 240 CID six-cylinder (the “stovebolt six” with a single-barrel carburetor) or a 317 CID V8 with a two-barrel; big blocks were still in the future. With a full load, if there were any slopes at all you’d be wishing for another set of gears interspersed with the available ones. Brrrrrr[RRchk]rrrrr[RRchk]rrr (repeat another eight times, gets you to 55 MPH.) Fun. Not.
#22, #31: Heehee. Go East from Pensacola in the springtime. There’s a species of beetle that has evolved a need for carbon monoxide in order to mate, and they come out of the pine woods and palmetto thickets in clouds reminiscent of ten-gram gnats to swarm over Interstate 10. At freeway speeds the result sounds a lot like a thunderstorm as they encounter metal and glass. Because they usually go *splat* on the windshield in pairs, they’re known locally as “fuck bugs”. Takes a lot of guts to do that… take a scraper along; you’ll be using it roughly every ten miles if you expect to see where you’re going. Other places make a fortune on recycled fan belts and oil treatments. In North Florida in the spring it’s windshield washer fluid.
Regards,
Ric#25: like the definition of a gentleman (one who can play the bagpipes, but doesn’t) you can only say that if you can buy one, but don’t. For a massive car with limo appointments, the performance is amazing. And you’re helping get rid of all that yucky oil from this planet.
As for other comments on the Bentley: c’mon! Since when did a British car (which it of course no longer technically is) have to start every time? That thing is at once a beast and a work of leathery, chromey art. You want a sensible car, get a Camry.
Well done mate….good shots too. Butt ugly car though.
Posted by Andrew Ian Dodge on 2006 11 27 at 05:11 AM • permalinkPerhaps Tim means he broke the Bentley the same way a rough-rider breaks a horse. He broke it in.
Or maybe he’s not talking about the car at all. What he broke was his own personal land speed record. Doing that in the US using an international driver’s license in somebody else’s car seems like a wily strategy. I don’t know how it is stateside, but 140mph is way too fast to attempt in Australia. All the highways suitable for that sort of pace are dotted with the traps. That’s how our police force over here rounds up the funds to pay its bills. Worse, a bust like that would have you stripped of your license on the spot and lucky to get it back before the pup’s an old dog.
My final guess is that the airflow at a ton-and-a-half on the old scale ripped the ragtop right off that box and left it dragging behind in a fluttering mess.
Damn! Now I’m gonna have to buy the magazine to find out what happened.
~~phone rings~~
Minion: Hello… splice here… ahem, yes Detective… how’s Sheila?
Caller: (faintly heard) bizza bizza crackle goddammit, buzza grumble grumble crackle!
Minion: Important, yes sir… Tim who?... was photographed by your contacts… last seen speeding through Nevada in an English car, way out on the road to Area 51… no, no, I don’t know anything about that sort of thing, sir.
Caller: buzzle crackle fuckle, slam!
*sigh* Not again! Doesn’t anybody else get tired of covering for Tim “The Hoon” Blair? Who the bloody hell gave him the keys to Karl’s car, anyway?
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You ‘broke’ a $400,000 dollar Bentley?
What happened, you try and drag Iowahawks COJ or something?
Seriously Tim, how exactly did you manage to break a 550hp POME hoon saloon?