Fetching the Racecar, Part 2

Outbound to Phoenix (Tempe, actually) was a piece of cake—350 miles, about 2/3 a tank (at $80 a fill, it had better last at least one leg), one BP check and seven million incredibly dead bugs. We chewed through 10 CDs, too. Doug left a live Sinatra disc in the six-changer, but we needed something sportier: I'd brought Amon Tobin, Clutch, The Melvins, Kyuss, Horton Heat, Novadriver, Led Zep, Failure; and Eli had Bowie and a batch of other stuff that kept making me sleepy. Driver's choice.

The Road Home
Weather? Spot-on, even tolerable in the desert as we sliced past Gray's Well, Gordon's, Glamis and all the other off-road playgrounds in eastern So Cal. Every time I motor through this area I regret the buggies I've passed on buying, but then recall all my friends who let me flog theirs instead, and I feel better. Folks are more likely to let you wail on their gear when you can fix what you break.


Phoenix isn't the most attractive city, but it's a new central-southern US hub that people can afford to live in, so the population is booming in parallel with business. We headed up the southwestern route to sneak into Tempe, off the 8 to the 84 and 347 North, and popped up at Kevin Lake's shop (gr8wheels.com) in about 4.5 hours, right on schedule. That hour we lost at the rental place meant that if we couldn't get the Prodrive car loaded in less than an hour, we'd have to battle out the definition of "24 hours" with the rental people the following morning.


Four guys, a huge slab of wood and one forklift later, the chassis had been placed upon and strapped to the rented sled. It had taken more than an hour, so our uranium-tipped schedule became moot and we started thinking about lunch. Little did we realize any additional delay would further compromise the mission. We figured the fuel left in the tank would get us back to Gila Bend and their little complex of people food and truck food, so we left the moment we finished and crossed our fingers we'd skate past Phoenix's rather crappy commuter traffic.

Strapped
Popular estimates had the carcass weighing about 1000 lbs., so there wouldn't be a big difference in weight hauling home. The PowerStroke Super Duty can haul something like 15,000 lbs. when it's in the mood, and we were at 3,000, but as we slipped onto the freeway the aerodynamic penalty showed up fast. Think about it. We'd placed the Subaru body on the trailer facing rearward, so all the OEM aero was flipped, as were all the special rally-spec body panels. The body tugged at its moorings, and the trunklid (with its monstrous wing) needed to be strapped down with a lead rope Doug had left in the bed. We watched the mileage gauge tick lower and lower.