When we see some crazy bastard trying to use some oddball orphan British car- say, a Triumph Stag or Humber Sceptre- as a daily driver in the heart of a major American city, we generally feel a mix of admiration and pity. But how do you judge the owner of a '57 Olds who parks his car on the street in the Finsbury Park neighborhood of goddamn London? Hell, this thing probably can't even fit in a third of the streets in The City Where You're Always Lost. Not only that, but the car has vintage Oklahoma plates and no sign of any form of British registration anywhere on the car; maybe the coppers are afraid a grotesquely obese American with really white teeth will emerge from the car and start blasting away with a pair of .44 Magnums if they even think about causing problems over paperwork.
My editor and pornographer friend Paul sends me these photos straight from The Smoke, courtesy of his low-end camera phone. His statement: "I don't know what this thing is, but I thought you might like it."
This is pretty cool, because my dad had a very similar car when I was a kid; his was a '56, and all I recall about it was the extra-mean sound that 324 Olds V8 made when the hammer went down.
One can only speculate as to the cost of feeding a 277-horsepower 371-cube late-50s V8 in the UK. It's fortunate that the public transit in London works pretty well, because daily commuting in this beast could get incredibly expensive (not to mention the nightmare of dropping anchor in a typical London parking spot in this behemoth).
Damn, how could GM have axed Oldsmobile? It must have been the Achieva.
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