Cars are sold on progress. New models! New features! New cupholders! Sometimes, though, there are cars that remain timelessly desirable.
Much as I respect the 691 horses bottled up in the Aventador's V12, there's no new Lambo that I would want more than a Miura. This one's an SV, the most lust-worthy of all.
Though cars get better and better at serving humans as transportation appliances, sometimes there is old tech (like the Miura) that still has place in the car world. Many of us moaned that Laurie Ulvestad wouldn't have found herself helpless in an out-of-control Kia if she'd had a manual. A technology that's old and ‘obsolete' would have been better than the newest auto that Kia could serve up.
Then John Street reminded us that, much as we love vintage automobilia, old car technology is kind of crap.
It happened to me in my first car, a '71 Ford F100 longbed with 302. There was a linkage on the carburetor that would bind once in awhile, and it usually happened when I was at a cruise... a simple stomping of the accelerator pedal would dislodge it and the power would disappear... plenty of time to slow down, so no panic situations had yet arisen, and my lazy butt was slow to fix it.
Well, not until the '73 model year did Ford equip their half-tons with front disc brakes, so I had drums all around. This was also the first model year that Ford equipped their trucks with an automatic. (C4)
I was taking a short cut through a parking lot one night to avoid a clusterflub of cars at a light, and due to heavy rains earlier that night, there was an area of the backway out of this Hardees that had almost 2 feet of standing water at its deepest point. I would've been fine had I gone through it slowly, but the smartass that I am, I plowed through it, and shorted out my distributor with all the splashing water. The truck died in the deepest part. I was there for a few minutes before a kind, and bemused guy in a Toyota truck offered to pull me back out into the parking lot to dry out my distributor. Well once I got it to start again, I learned what happens to waterlogged drum brakes... THEY DON'T WORK! So I went with some friends to kill an hour or so at the DQ up the road, and came back. brakes still were unresponsive, so I decided to slowly drive laps in first gear around the parking lot while riding my brakes to heat/squeegee/dry them out so I could get home.
At one point when I straightened out and gave it some gas, the throttle stuck on me, and I stomped it to release, but then it stuck wide open and launched hellbound towards the entrance into heavy traffic, too fast to make the turn around the building again. I only had a few seconds to respond before I would've shot right out into the middle of heavy traffic, and with no brakes, I just slammed the tranny into park while killing the ignition as I listened to the sickening grind of the parking dogs grinding themselves, seemingly to death, to stop the truck.
It stopped short of the highway and surprisingly enough, it still held fine in Park thereafter... no damage (that I could tell from daily driving) to the transmission at all. I was amazed. And I fixed that damned throttle linkage THE NEXT DAY.
Photo Credit: Mike Mertz