A very long time ago, on a highway ever so far away, I got lost. Hey, it can happen to anyone, especially here in New York.
Back in the late sixties, directions were either shared by someone who had been where you wanted to go or there were maps often picked up at a gas station. Remember those neat packets of travel information that, once unfolded, became an experience from hell? Think about the true beginning of distracted driving with the map perched in front of you, leaning against the steering wheel, while you tried to navigate unfamiliar territory.
It all started with a quest to buy a carburetor rebuild kit for my ’66 GTO when a change was made from a four-barrel to tri-power setup. Running “3 2’s or 3 Deuces” was a big deal back then and had been since 1957.
The Tri-Power option was available on the GTO from 1964 through 1966 with a total of 20,547 GTO’s ordered with Tri-Power as original equipment in 1965. There was nothing better, WHEN, the damn carbs played nicely together and that was a matter of bringing a lot of fine tuning to the process, and four letter words.
There I was, on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, in my GTO, map in my lap, finally coming up to the exit which would take me to the speed shop. Let me tell you, up to this point, it had been an almost two hour trip which encompassed traffic, missed turns and even more traffic but, at last, I had arrived. As I started to make a turn and head to my destination, a man started to cross in front of me, waving his hands in the air and shouting. I didn’t think twice and pulled over, thinking he needed help. He came over to my car, with a huge smile on his face. I asked if he was okay and his response was “hey, I saw you drag race at National Speedway, isn’t this Light My Fire?” And right he was, sans the usual lettering on my hot rod when at the drag strip, it was me! Within a few minutes, the stress of that day disappeared with his smile and a lot of laughter as we stopped and talked for a while.
He wished me good luck with the rebuild kit, told me that the speed shop was just down the next street and said he’d be looking out for my next visits to the drag strip, which he did, always stopping by in the pits to say hello. Thinking back to those years ago and how different times and people were then, getting lost managed to end well.
By the way, for any motorhead reading this, running tri power was, at least for me, an exercise in futility. Nothing beat my 1050 Holley and the lifelong good memory that went along with that process.
Except for the BQE, which is still a nightmare some fifty-six years later.
