Personality Goes A Long Way – But Not All The Way

I was scheduled to spend my first shift of the rally driving the red Camaro alongside Steve Elstins, the man who had bravely assembled (and then kept alive like some kind of high-octane Dr. Frankenstein) both of the coupes. We pulled out of Oresbro castle amongst a throng of Gumball fans, proving once and for all that the Swedish link to American pop culture extends far beyond Abba. I might as well have been a rock star rattling down the cobblestone streets on my way to the highway, what with the attention being heaped on the Camaro by the four-deep pack of well-wishers that lined the road.

I certainly sounded like one; each of the Camaros had been outfitted with cutouts that dumped just behind the doors, activated by a simple switch under the dash. The sound was uproarious, intoxicating, and punctuated at random intervals by the rising and falling of the Chevrolet’s lumpy cam. I asked Steve if he minded running them wide open for the duration of the drive, and he was more than happy to don the radio headsets we had been provided with so that we could, you know, actually have a conversation inside the vehicle.

After the first 10 clicks spent acclimating myself to the long-travel clutch and the limited adjustability of the seats, I realized that the red Camaro was actually a pussycat to drive. The one foible that I could detect was an enormous turning radius (the result of aftermarket control arms up front) that made negotiating narrow European streets somewhat of a sideshow. Other than that, I had no complaints: throttle response was excellent, allowing me to zip ahead in a blast of dynamite cap-level noise and glorious expended hydrocarbons, the brakes were reasonable, and the ride no more choppy than a lowered car of more recent vintage.

Despite its modernized bones and easygoing personality, the one thing the red car didn’t have going for it was reliability. The trouble started with a fuel stop gone wrong, where 14 litres rather than 14 gallons of high-test were loaded into its tank by support staff, stalling me in my tracks halfway to Oslo. Next up was the spectacular explosion of the engine’s distributor cap, which I witnessed from one of the chase vehicles following immediately behind the Camaro as we entered the city limits of the Norwegian capital. Jets of flame and three sonic booms signalled the end of that leg for the bright red ride.

A network of Scandinavian drag racers had the MSD ignition parts replaced by 4 AM, allowing the Chevrolet to line up on the starting grid the next morning, but two days later its flair for the dramatic revealed itself once again as it puked its guts all over the side of the Autobahn, staining the meticulously maintained high-speed motorway with coolant, oil, and what was left of its pride. Game over for the red Camaro, which was loaded on the plane from Amsterdam to Reno by a wrecker, never to move again under its own power.

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