[Nobbc] Fw: MercedesHeritage.com Newsletter: BAPE Gullwing, Barn Finds and more!

[Greg Tatarian]

Wendell,

There actually is a video, just above the still pictures.
Here's the Youtube link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xG8nQIBl7ig&feature=player_embedded

This was amusing to watch, as Jay describes Mulholland Drive as a hidden 
racetrack. I grew up a mile away from Laurel Canyon on the other side of 
the hill from Hollywood. This is one of the roads Jay drives in the 
gullwing, and I got into much trouble over 3 formative years racing on 
Mulholland. It is usually well populated by police, so I'd say Jay was 
somewhat fortunate not to have been ticketed on this drive, although it 
was 0700, probably on a weekend (and the reason why traffic was light).

All of our drives on Mulholland were quite a bit faster than Jay's 
little jaunt, and always in the dark. In my youth, everyone wanted to 
race Mulholland, so to avoid the "amateurs" we used to do so starting 
around midnight, taking as many runs as we could stay away from home for 
(I snuck out of the house many times to race this road). We'd set up 1-3 
mile runs in one direction, then switch off our headlights so we could 
see oncoming "civilian" traffic reflected in the guardrails, since there 
are many blind turns. The video shows one turn we used to call Dead 
Man's Turn, for obvious reasons). Sunset Blvd. isn't really considered 
part of the course, but it will allow one to make a loop that gets them 
back onto Mulholland after a tour of Hollywood.

My car was a 1969 MGB roadster, with as many mods as I could afford to 
make the car faster on this road, but as fast as my car was and as fast 
a driver as I thought I was, there were always faster cars and drivers. 
Generally they were either high-school or college drop-out age, male, 
and offspring of wealthy parents, who would replace cars as they were 
wrecked. One fellow high-school age racer had 3 different cars in one 
year, each faster than the last. My friends and I built many very fast 
road racer cars back then. That was also when I learned my first lesson 
about the limits of controlled slip angle and drift on wet pavement; 
300-foot drop on the right, and steep bank hill on the left, me 
carooming around like a pinball barely missing the hill and the rails.

The fastest ride I had was in a 60's Corvette that looked like a pile of 
shahooty, but the driver was an absolute madman, and the car was always 
driven to its limits. I tumbled out onto the ground shaking after that 
drive, the driver chuckling gently then burning rubber away from my 
quivering form. As Jay said in the video, the stuff that movies are made 
of...

Cheers,
Greg





On 1/4/2010 2:04 PM, wendell bain wrote:
> Kinda cool. It would be better if it had been a video and not stop
> action
> photos, but still pretty good. Interesting car. We would all probably
> like
> to get our hands on one.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Wendell
> 59 Morgan