I saw a picture of a great–looking car on (wait for it…) a social media site. A young girl was standing in front of the car, beaming and holding a plaque that memorialized the car’s first-place win. The car belongs to a man I know from my pool-playing league. Since Indy is close to the day it hosts a big auto race, men and women spend no little time talking about cars. But I know very little about the subject, so I ask manly questions — small ones — designed to get other men to talk about their cars. I asked my friend about his beauty, which is a 1967 Chevy Camaro SS. (He told me the year; I saw the “SS” on the front grill.)
He has had the car for many years — since high school — and it only has 36,000 miles on it. When he entered the car into the competition, his daughter, (who is also a pool player) told him that she wanted to “go get the award.” The man laughed and told her, “It has to win, first.” Her faith was borne out, which is why she was shown proudly holding the plaque.
I asked the man another question: how fast can it go? “I’ve had it up to 165,” he said, “but it scared me.” I told him of my long-ago adventure as a passenger in a friends’ Lotus Ford and 165 miles-per-hour of screaming fear. He instantly knew what kind of car I was talking about because he told me, “(that car) is built to handle those speeds.” His car got a little shaky at Mach RealFast.
My first car was a 4-speed 1963 VW Bug, purchased in 1969. Once my wife taught me how to drive it (try holding a stick-shift car on a hill in Pittsburgh without using the handbrake) we drove it from Pittsburgh to Los Angeles, California. It stopped once, in Kansas, for reasons I still don’t know, only coming to life when a passing motorist taught me how to start it while he gave us a push. This is known to most of the rest of the world as “popping the clutch,” and to me as “scary stuff that happens when a big car pushes a Bug!”
My youngest daughter (another pool player) is my mechanic. She recently summoned me to her house, where she “checked my fluids,” and “topped off” my … something. She congratulated me on the level of my oil, patched my broken side mirror and shop-vacced the accumulation of leaves from beneath the trunk and hood. When the compressor failed in my car, Lauren researched how to install a bypass thingy as a way to avoid replacing the compressor. She did allow another mechanic to do the actual work, but I’m sure, given parts, tools and time, she would have tackled the problem herself.
My pool-playing friend’s delightful daughter may share Lauren’s passion for cars: I cannot say, for I have only seen her smile in one prize-winning photo. But she does seem to be “Daddy’s Girl,” a designation often placed on Lauren’s affection for me. If she chooses to climb under the hood of her own ’67, she will probably do so with a lot more information from her father than Lauren got from hers.
On the eve of 100 years of “fast-go-round-oval,” I want to raise a glass of milk to the females — young and younger — who are the ones who care about the “zoom zoom” under the hoods of the cars we men drive around the roundabouts. I couldn’t start my engine without them.