Things were going great . . . until a tire blew, an oil pump failed, a tree fell on the car, and I was hit by a runaway Ferrari.
If you haven’t driven an antique car to the Monterey weekend, you’ve missed half the fun of going. Parking rules seem to relax as valets stand aside for vintage cars. The cops generally just give you a wave. You can park on lawns and sidewalks and drip oil onto Venetian tile and nobody will yell at you. Thousands of people you’ve never met will see your car and think its owner is cool, even if at that very moment you are somewhere else dribbling shrimp cocktail down a silk shirt.
The last time I drove my 1970 Lamborghini Espada to Monterey, I had to replace all six Weber carburetors on the lawn at the Concorso Italiano. After I got home, I had to pull out the engine and rebuild it. I also rebuilt the suspension and brakes and replaced the radiator and rewired the cooling fans and replaced the exhaust system. I rebuilt some other stuff, too, that I can’t even remember the details of now.
Three years later, the green Espada was ready to return. A group of three Espadas and one 1967 400GT were to join me in a big, merry, 60-cylinder convoy. Four cars met on Wednesday morning, which was lost to a last-minute job replacing the two power brake boosters on my car, which were leaking hydraulic fluid profusely. Luckily, my pal Bob Huber, a fellow Espada owner who rebuilt his blue Series III Espada from a complete wreck, had a spare pair. The only problem, he said, was that they didn’t work very well. And once the brakes were applied, sometimes they didn’t release. But otherwise, they were great. And they didn’t leak, so in they went.
We departed Los Angeles in typical L.A. traffic around 2:00 pm on Wednesday, headed north. Things were going swimmingly and we made a fabulous sight, buzzing the left lane as four spaceships from Planet Awesome. Then, just north of the seaside city of Oxnard, it all started to fall apart. First, the white Espada S1 of Mike Trivich blew a tire. The group got broken up in traffic trying to circle back in answer to his distress call. As we assisted Mike (he lucked out and was able to get a replacement tube and tire in an hour), Jack Riddell in his 260,000-mile-plus 400GT called. It was both overheating and spewing oil.
(Last year, you should know, Jack rebuilt the engine after it dropped a valve seat and blew a fist-sized hole in the cylinder head and piston. He has owned the car since 1972 and driven it to the Pebble Beach weekend 34 times.)
We mustered our three Espadas and drove up the road to meet Jack, who had landed in a gas station parking lot near Santa Barbara. It looked as if the Exxon Valdez had run aground in his parking space. After an hour of diagnosis, it was determined that the oil-pump pulley seal had failed catastrophically, and there was no way to continue on. Four hours later, the tow truck dropped the car nearby at a friend’s house, Jack and his gear piled into one of the spacious, wagonlike Espadas (which is THE Italian exotic to have in such situations), and we continued on in the encroaching darkness. At our Pismo Beach layover, we realized it had taken nine hours to cover about 200 miles.
The next morning we arose and the (now-four) Espadas continued on without trouble. I was proud of the green gal. The rebuilt V-12 ran strong and flawlessly and—except for a noisy, bad bearing in the transmission—was every bit the smooth, comfortable touring car that in 1970 cost the equivalent of four Corvettes.
Then we got to Monterey. If you can imagine Beijing traffic, but with Benzes, Bentleys, and Bugattis, you have Monterey during Pebble Beach weekend. While we waited in a line of cars on a narrow side street in Carmel, where I’m pretty sure 18-wheelers are banned from narrow side streets by about 17 laws, such a big rig suddenly appeared, going about 50 mph. It sheared off the lower third of the canopy of the tree directly overhanging my car, and suddenly my poor Espada was in a monsoon of pine cones, moss, twigs, and several large branches, which crashed onto the roof and hood and poured through my open windows.
In my rage and misery, I yelled out of the window, “Thanks, you (delete) (delete) (delete) hole (delete) (delete) (oh, boy, delete) you mother (delete)!” It took ten minutes to clean off the car and survey the damage, which, fortunately, was limited to a few new scratches in the original Verde Pallido paint.
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Later, after I parked my Espada at the hotel, a silver Ferrari 575M parked directly across from me. How nice, I thought. I’ve always liked the 575, drove one when they were new. Fast and comfortable, it was kind of a two-seat Espada. When I came out later, the 575 had rolled down the incline into my car, at which point I realized that the 575M is a miserable steaming pile owned exclusively by douchebags who don’t use their parking brakes. The damage was a mark on my irreplaceable stainless-steel bumper, which is now also slightly bent. I took a picture of the scene and the license plate, stuck a big rock under the Fazz’s tire, rolled the Espada back so its transmission and rather weak parking brake wasn’t also holding back two tons of Maranello scrap steel, and left a tersely worded note asking the owner to please be a stand-up guy and contact me.
I’m still waiting . . .
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