The most fun I ever had in a car involved violating several laws, but damn, it was fantastic. I'd love to share, but half of you would scorn me and the other half wouldn't believe me. So, uh, I guess this post is pretty worthless. Sorry.

As part of a racing event, I got to tool around temporarily in a tricked out Camaro that Chevy uses to sell to police departments. It was painted black-and-white, had the bubble machine up top. It was an automatic (I know, I know), but would squeal the tires whilst changing gears when the pedal was fully depressed. People would instinctively pull off to the shoulder whenever I was driving around. It was pure joy.

Part 2:

My first car was a Fiat Spider 2000 ragtop (the only way they came, right?). There was no backseat - just a bench, really. So my high school girlfriend would have to engage in some contortionism for us to engage in our usual evening shenanigans up in the front seats.

Good times, good times. Sigh.

i ordered an '02 Dodge Dakota Quad Cab 5.9L from a local dealership a few years ago. took 2 months to arrive and when it did my name was on the window sticker. the day after i took delivery of it my buddy and i hopped in it to cruise around and jump neighborhood railroad tracks in it. man that truck made some evil sounds when you did it.

another day a couple years later i was in traffic with my girlfriend stopped at a light. we saw some friends pass us in the oncoming lane and we wanted to catch up to them. i waited til the car in front of me started to move, i clocked the wheel all the way the left and hit the loud pedal. did the sweetest 180 in the middle of the road you could ever do. i felt like michael knight for a minute.

come to think of it. out of the vette, hondas, cuda, 240 and every other car i've owned that truck was the most fun to drive. except when you had to fill up the gas tank which was every 5 days.

Besides the obligatory back-seat romps... The most fun I ever had in a car was being the passenger in the back seat of a early '90s Honda hatchback. This car was barely drivable, missing numerous parts (including mirrors and seatbelts). The highlight was the fact that it was driven on a doughnut for many miles past the safe spare tire limit. So when a friend of the car's owner decided to drive for a while & started slamming gears & hitting every pot hole known to man, we would all shout "doughnut!" as a reminder of the face of death we were all approaching. To this day whenever we all get together, someone will shout out "doughnut!" for our own amusement (including at the driver's wedding).

There are lots, as I am sure most of us can attest too. One of my faves was my dad taking me out in his beater Vdub, Type 1 of course, and doing donuts on a snow caked 2 lane dirt road. I was only about 7 or so at the time but I remember spinning nose first into the ditch at one point and asking "Are we going to have to walk home?" He simply smiled, threw it in reverse and backed onto the road for more rotations. The haze of youth has glossed the memory up I'm sure but it was still a blast.

Driving my Merkur Xr4ti sideways down main street in town.
Or the first ride in my 72 Mini after the rebuild.

Simple.

The day I bought my volvo wagon, I discovered that dropping the back seats gave me a sleeping platform long enough for my 6'4" frame.

I never made it back home that night.

Worked for a few days at a massive auto auction. One of my jobs was moving the cars. So I had the joy of hot-rodding (...er driving at a safe and reasonable speed) assorted high-end cars to satellite lots and buildings. I drove all sorts of cars I'll never be able to afford. Worked out there for about a week before our contract got cancelled that was soooo much fun. Made getting into my little Escort at the end of the day pretty depressing.

Well, there was a beautiful starlit night on Clingman's Dome in the Smokies, my lovely bride-to-be, and a Hyundai Excel whose seats laid down. Because there sure as hell weren't any driving thrills to be had in that car.

Also, a couple of years prior to that, four-wheeling with some good friends all over the jogging trails around the Occoquan Reservoir rowing venue in Lorton VA. If you row, and know Occoquan, you know four-low is a must. Tight, twisty, and riding with Rick on the front fender to get more than two wheels on the ground. Yeah.

@JayP71: I used to work at a Toyota dealership in N. VA. Man, rolling some of those rides on a dealer exchange was the limit. 5.0 HO Mustang to the DMV for a batch of plates? No sweat. Take this new Supra on an all-day ride to Salisbury MD. On my way!

Come to think of it, I had quite a bit of legal fun at one of Mazda's driving experience things. You get to race Mazdas around tracks with cones competing against the clock, but more so, everyone else around the country who is also competing against the clock. "Rev It Up", I think the even might have been called. That was a blast.

Without any racing experience whatsoever, I placed in the top 11% of the country. That felt really good. But, even had I not ranked as high as I did, the entire event was a ton of fun, and I highly recommend it.

Empty large parking lot with a foot and a half of fresh snow. 6 brand new X5 4.4s (for color variety). A couple of hours to kill. complete privacy and some orange cones...

If you can't have fun with that set up you are on the wrong website

I was driving my dad's crappy Pontiac Sunfire (I live in Costa Rica) 'round 2AM and a hill was coming, I was with my cousin an he told me "step on it!" so I did... we reached 80-85mph and massive height in one amazing jump! Dukes of hazzard style...

The landing didn't sound well at all but it's been a couple months since then and the car's running fine!

Ahh I have too much fun in my car..a 96 teg. Handbrake turns every rain, FF donuts in the snow. And then there was the time I was pulled over on the FDR around noon on a Tuesday by a dumbfounded officer. "Do you know how fast you were going?" "Honestly I don't sir." "You must have been doin 100, you were passing cars like they were standing still." "Sir, I'm sorry, I really didn't think I was going that fast." "The speed limit is 40! I'm gonna let you off with a warning. SLOW IT DOWN!" "yes sir!" I think I just got the warning because he didn't have a speed gun or any way of proving my speed. And I have slowed it down, really, it was a beautiful day, no traffic, and in all fairness that car doesn't ever feel like it's going very fast... There was also the time I too did a 180 with a rented mustang convertible in Cali, late at night at a stop light. Boy did my gf scream! Louder than the tires...

Probably drifting around an icy parking lot in my dad's old Subaru.

So many, so many.....

Playing in the snow with my best friend's Corvair (the only other guy at our rural high school that knew what an Abarth was...). Courting my first wife on twisty roads in my SAAB 900.....Autocrossing my ECHO....The day I brought home my first son in the Oldsmobile...Riding next to my dad as a young 'un and learning all about 4 wheel drifts in his '60 Corvette.....Having my Uncle (who in my mind was right up there with Moss and Fangio) tell me that I'm a very smooth driver....

All this and so much more.

Easy. Last winter we set up cones in "back 40" (which is actually about 11 acres). Ground frozen and a couple of inches of fresh snow made for Super Winter Rally Hoonage Potential! I've got an '89 Corolla All-Trac wagon with 190k miles on it who's only purpose in life anymore is being driven as sideways as possible. I felt like I needed to add a few more consonants to my name in true Finnish style.

One Christmas, when I was about 10, my dad gave me season tickets to the Baltimore Thunder (Major Indoor Lacrosse League). The night Baltimore played the dreaded Detroit Turbos (starring the feared Gary and Paul Gait), my dad was out of town, so the dad of a friend of mine took me, his son, and another kid to the game at the Baltimore Arena.

1st, there was a fight at the game, on the field and in the stands. Both goalies went at each other, and if you've never seen a box lacrosse game, those guys wear more pads than hockey goalies. So it was like 2 people in those inflated sumo-wrestler suits, but they weren't messing around at a birthday party. Then, while ~10 guys were going at it on the field, a fight broke out in the stands, between a Thunder and a Turbo fan. This ended with the Thunder fan slamming the other guys face into an armrest, resulting in blood streaming from the losers face as the cops pulled both of them out of the arena.

My buddies dad was a paramedic, so he seemed to have some experience with driving quickly. On the way home, he introduced our impressionable minds to what he called "Roller Coaster Road." Flying down some rolling back-lane road at 11:00, catching a bit of air in more that one occasion, I was introduced to the art of hooning. I don't remember where Roller Coaster Road is, but everytime I think about having fun in a car (while its moving), I remember him laughing like those maniacal Baubus engineers as we went down that road and turned around to do it a few more times, before being dropped off at home.

Probably off-roading in my '92 Taurus wagon. Amazing car. We would drive it to one of the desolate corn fields that are so common where I am from in Pennsylvania, and follow the tractor paths to wherever they may lead. Once found a 50s Caddy rusting in some weeds.

wet, grassy field, about 100 yards square, convertible 5.0 mustang with the top down and a full tank of gas.

oh, how the turf did fly that special late summer evening.

i continued to pick grass/dirt out of the back seat for weeks.

Probably pretty lame, but the first time I got to drive around in my mom's 2000 Turbo Beetle was pretty awesome.

The rear spoiler pops up at 92mph, according to the dealer. I drove it home from the dealership, and about halfway through, my mom asked me if I would please drive faster so that she could watch the spoiler lift. At that point I advised her that it had already been up for probably five minutes, and that our twenty-minute drive back to the dealership had just been chopped in half due to excessive speed.

I also used to drag-race that car on my way home from work. 1.8L goes a long way when your vehicle only weighs about 15lbs.

most fun while actually driving with a purpose:

The Tail of the Dragon on a Monday evening.
[www.tailofthedragon.co]

I had just spent a truly frustrating week working on my Bronco: '84 full size, 351 Windsor, 4-speed, I was hopping up the engine.. It was running again, and faster than any top-heavy short-wheelbase 4x4 should be. It was winter, and a friend of mine came over to drink some good beer. Poor judgment led to much hoonage:

Picture a large parking lot, post many snows. It's been plowed a few times, but also has a fresh coating of snow and ice. Now picture driving across the aisles at high speed in a lifted hopped up 35"-tire-havin' hillbillymobile. That was a ton of fun, if a bit hard on the tie rods. Parking blocks are still not soft even with snow on top of them.

Later that night (morning?), we visited my local 4-wheeling site. (Now has condos on it, sigh!) Unfortunately, the snow, ice, and tired driver conspired to make me get stuck going up a hill. The truck slid back, and to the side, into a tree. Gently - no damage was caused, but we were truly and mightily stuck. We walked about five miles, got my friend's car, ate some breakfast, slept a few hours, and went back with a comealong and determination. I got it out, but it was handling terribly, sliding it's ass all over the icy trails. It wasn't until I was on the road that I realized the parking brake was on. I might have been stuck ass-end into a tree on a steep hill, after an entire night of abusing a Bronco but I apparently still had safety in mind!! (p'shaw)

Ahh! Another fun time (or times, actually) was (were) in my first car: a 1984 Plymouth Reliant. I was 16, and I drove that thing to hell and back. All over the place, mostly with my friend Amy. I would roll the windows down and drive down one-way streets with parked cars all down the sides. I'd see how fast I could go while almost touching mirrors with the parked cars. Closer-closer-closer, faster-faster-faster.. Amy loved it, and the whoosh-whoosh-whoosh of the cars going by the open windows was a blast. I never, even once, hit a car's mirror or came close to an accident doing that. I have no idea how.

Oh, the memories come flooding back. I was young and apparently very stupid. (As opposed to now: not-quite-so-young and still stupid.)

Easy. Ice racing:

[www.putfile.com]

The course was huge. 4th gear was required. The racing was fun, but the fun-runs at the end were a total hoot.

@KVHnik: Hey Keith, I concur, good times. Thanks for having me over!

Who knew you were on here?

The field in question:
[www.pbase.com]

Doing a track day (SCCA PDX) at Pocono in a Carrera 4S. I was in awe of the car by the time I was done.

Cruising the backroads around Deepcreek Maryland in my Uncles 82 Cadillac Cimarron (aka: Cavalier w/ pleather interior). It had the powerhouse Brazilian 1.8 liter, linked to a 4 speed manual. 4 cylinders of goodness, with about 1/4 of the clutch left. All of 14 yrs old, my buddy and I blazing down the dirtroads, Straightenin' the curves, flattenin' the hills... Someday the mountain might get 'us but the law never will...

One of my summer jobs, many years ago, was driving a combine for Green Giant. We'd frequently get shut down due to some type of malfunction at the plant, and be required to "sit patiently" waiting for the green light to pick more peas. During one of these moments of "sitting" a co-worker challenged me to a race around the field (probably 50 acres). I had a '91 Bronco 4x4, he had 81 Honda Accord... needless to say I won, but that little car was a heck of a lot faster than I thought it would be.

Spending all summer welding a new floor into a 914 set up for autocrossing, driving it for a week, and finding out the longitudinal members were trashed and the car was unsafe. I got one week or driving bliss before parking it forever, and it ruined me for any other car.

Back before the beloved Cherokee started blowing its rear universal joint on a regular basis (3x in two months), I was in the habit of taking it for high-speed gravel road runs through Southern Missouri.

I found a 3 or 4 mile stretch of county gravel road running through a nature reserve. No traffic on the gravel road, which had been made superfluous by a newly paved route. That said, I'm not an idiot - I always did a dry run of the course at safe speed to check for hikers, etc who might've been on the road.

God, just thinking about taking that run gives me the chills. It was down by where my mom lives - I'd drive down there about once a month to visit or house sit. The road was about 20 miles off from where she lived, so I'd either make a detour on the way into our out of town (often both), or wake up early in the morning if I stayed the night so I could take a fresh crack at it.

The road ran through hilly woods, with some nice sweepers and elevation changes. I got to where I could average about 55mph through the 'course', holding four wheel drifts through the sweepers full on from one corner and into the other. After two or three runs, I got to where I almost lost sensation of the car, because I was so in tune with the course and amped on adrenaline.

God I miss that road.

Offroading in a '79 Plymouth Volare coupe, doing donuts hard enough to get flung into the doors. whee!

Chasing a Porsche 944 through the streets of Soegel Germany in my VW GTI back in the mid 80s and realizing I was keeping up.

I used to spend my summers in maine working at a boyscout camp. The summer i had my first GTX (god rest her soul) every day was spend trying to find dirt roads on the topographical maps so that on the weekends or during nights out i could get my little rally beast into her element.

This is easy for me. My dad and I took his corvette on the NCRS road tour to San Antonio last summer. That alone was a lot of fun, but when we got into to Texas, the Texas chapter folks hooked us up with track time at Texas Motor Speedway. Having never driven on banked turns like that, it was a total blast. The guy in front of us on one of the laps scared me pretty bad though. He had is 2006 Z06 about a foot away from the wall for the whole lap. I think he was a big NASCAR fan.

@SwatLax: They fixed it a bit, but there is a road called Pear Blossom Highway through San Bernadino County that eventually gets to Vegas that had what my old man called, "Whooptie Doos."

Basically an earthquake accordioned the road, so even though it was paved, it rolled and rolled and rolled.

Nothing made my mother shriek with terror quite like when the old man would get the Buick air born.

So far, Skyline Drive in Shenandoah with a few other Se7eners. But ask me again on July 7th.

Wow, I'm shocked... 30+ comments and not a single obscure reference to Black Flag's "Police Story" or "Police Truck" by the Dead Kennedys.

We used to be cool... what happened?

Driving a sustained 112 mph (it's got some kind of speed limiter) in a full size Ford Econoline van on an ass-hauling road trip. Since the speedometer on those shitboxes only goes to 80, I had to measure speed using the lap speed function on a Robic stopwatch using the milemarkers. For a couple hundred miles.

Putting sexual escapades aside, I'd say it would have to be the following:

My stepdad knows a guy who owns several USAC sprint cars. He decided that a good use of the older ones would be to put on events where people could hoon around dirt tracks on them (kind of like a redneck Skip Barber). Anyway, I got to take one out for some laps around a 1/2 mile clay oval. The cars have no transmissions, very little in the way of brakes and are set up with such enormous stagger that you basically just pitch the car sideways and then dial in massive opposite lock to get around the corners. The throttle response is effing amazing, though. It's basically like riding bareback on an alcohol burning 410 cubic inch V8.

It's still not my brand of racing, but I do have respect for someone who can shepherd one of those ill handling overpowered pigs around a dirt track surrounded by other cars.

Tied for first place:
My previous boss's daughter rolled her Cherokee. We Sawzall'd the top off and added a roll cage. Then we added two cases of Michelob Light. By the end of the night, I was yelling "She's overheating! The light is on! Go Faster!" while sparks were flying off a bare wheel as we hurdled down the (closed) dirt road . I was getting mildly electrocuted by the car-battery-powered hand-torch which had replaced the function of the busted headlights.

Shortly thereafter I attended a party at another coworker's place of residence, complete with "mud bog." Total Hoon of the Day material. Except instead of jumping a metro or something, we just totaled an Escort, two Golfs, and a Jetta. Every time the Escort got stuck, this magic Toyota would come out of the woods and a dude would ask "can we drive over you?" to which I would reply "no, it's not dead yet, but you could push us out!"

Second place goes to the time I've spent at my current job, doing some rally photography stuff and general "car shuffling" as we call it.

Road course ride along in a track-duty Panoz Esperante.

Let's see. I don't know if this counts but I remember I got to ride in a DKW. It is kind of like an amphibious tour bus. There was another time I got to ride in a taxi cab that used to be a cop car. It was a Ford Crown Victora. It used to be a cop car for Kansas City. I asked the driver if it had any of the police stuff still attached, and he said it still had the standard ford police engine, the guy even did a burnout in my driveway. Also to make things more unbeleivable, I rode the cab for free. Paratransit paid for it. Another time I got to ride in a semi truck when they visited a local summer camp for people with special needs. The most interesting thing about the semi I was in is that it had 2 horn settings. A city setting, which sounds like a regular car horn, and the highway setting, which is the familiar air horn. I must have scared a lot of people with that thing. Another time I got to sit in an actual SCCA trans-am racecar driven by scott sharp. I had a model of the exact car sitting in my bedroom. It's blue with a hotwheels logo printed on each side.

The winter I spent delivering pizza in a decrepit Chevette. I got it sideways every time the little four (barely) managed to summon the power to spin the almost bald tires. Only spun it once, not counting deliberate 180s.

I had almost as much fun the next winter, driving an old F150, but the back tires had significantly more grip than the fronts, so most attempts at hoonage ended up as my truck making a beeline for the curbs.

Oh, and finding out that my Escort was a little tailhappy at times was pretty cool

Learning to do Hollywood style U-turns in my MX-5 miata. I soon found out the trick to making it smooth was don't lift. If I lifted on the gas the rear would snap back in, but if I staying hard on the gas and steared through it, the MX would straighten up nice and smooth, in a perfect power drift. First time I did it with a friend in the car he said "how the hell did you learn to do that?!" I said "practice".

Also when I was a kid we had many exiting times living in Northern Australia. One time we came around a corner on a 4x4 track and a wild water buffalo was staring us down. Trees meant we couldn't go around it. My Dad yells "Get off the road you big boofhead!" and blasts the horn and the buffalo charged us.I then witnessed my Dad reversing as fast as the old diesel Land Rover would go down the twisty narrow track with the buffalo in pursuit. It was truty awesome driving, the buffalo soon lost interest and we continued to our camping spot.