"The good old days"-column (closed for submissions, but new writeups coming again.)

[Knugcab]

REPRINT FROM TRAFIKJOURNALEN #5 1991

THE HAWK THAT LOST ITS WINGS

Maybe you have this issue in your stash, but keep in mind that it didn’t tell you the whole truth.

When testing cars, many things tend to happen. And some of them never get mentioned, for different reasons. I guess that I don’t have to explain why there was no mention of this when we tested the Armor Streethawk in 1971. After 20 years, however, I guess that I can mention what actually happened.

Being an automotive journalist is no child’s play, it is a serious business. Some people say that “you only play around with cars all day long” - boy, they should only know, is always my first thought. Not even when testing a serious muscle package like the Armor Streethawk is it all fun and games. It should be tested as seriously as any regular family sedan. And you could always ask me how I know…

In 1971 I was pretty new at this job. But of course, I took it as seriously back then as I do now. For many young people it would probably be tempting to lay down some rubber and drive like they stole the thing if they got the opportunity to drive a 312 hp monster. Not for me, I was a serious automotive journalist. But that didn’t change the fact that I also was 25…

Somehow a bunch of “raggare” in a beat up old Ardent, if I remember right a 410 from somewhere in the late 50s, showed up and tried to make fun of me.

“Why don’t you test real cars instead?”

“This is a real car. It has got four wheels and an engine like every other real car, right?”

“Hardly an engine, it’s some Armor sewing machine under the bonnet.”

“I am pretty sure it will beat your old Orion six anyway.”

“Armor has never known how to build cars. I am sure that it won’t even lay down some rubber.”

When this braindead discussion had been going on for a while I was pretty tired of it. To prove a point, I somehow forgot what a serious automotive journalist I was, instead the devil on my shoulder told me to do some nasty things. Like lay down some rubber. Lots of rubber. Rather like “covering the whole parking lot in smoke and leaving residues from the tyres on the rear quarters of our new, shiny, white test car”. I had some thoughts about how to remove them as easy as possible without anybody taking notice, but at the time it was way more important to prove a point to that annoying bunch of blockheads.

“Yeah, laying down rubber when standing still is one thing, but I bet it doesn’t have any performance in the end anyway”.

“More than most other cars on the road, I would say”.

At that time,our activities had caught the interest of another muscle car driver. A brand new, violet Ardent Chesapeake 444SS turned up. As in very new, a 1972 model, one of the very first while the car we tested actually was still a 1971 model.

“Now that’s a real car. An Ardent, they know how to build cars.”

I was quite tired of the drunkards that tried to convince me that Ardent was the absolute peak of automotive engineering that nobody was ever going to match. And they kept telling me that the 444SS would blow the doors of the Armor if they should race against each other. Which it would not. The cars were pretty even, the Armor actually a bit faster but not a difference that a more skilled driver could not even out. And before I knew it, I was going to do the most stupid thing I have done in my whole carreer as a journalist.

Accept a spontaneous street race with one of our test vehicles.

Soon, the three american automobiles were heading towards a nice, almost abandoned straight outside town. (I can’t say that I support racing in the streets at all, that should be done on a proper track or dragstrip, but at least we took the safety measures we could by doing it in such a place, which of course is no excuse.) And in a scene that was actually pretty close to the Eden street scene from the movie “The last night with the buddies” * that came out two years later, the white Armor and the violet Ardent lined up for a race while one of the drunkards used a flashlight as a signal for “GO!”.

In the movie, which I am sure that all of you have seen, the black Earl Glenwood went off the road and caught fire. And I am happy that my way of losing the race was way less dramatic. Because when I saw a purple thing disappearing in the horizon, I was still stuck at the start, going nowhere. I don’t know how previous testers had treated the clutch (probably not very nice), my burnout was maybe taking the last life out of it, and doing something of a banzai start here were far from a success. The clutch took its last breath there, to the laughter of a bunch of douchebags.

Luckily, the Chesapeake driver was far from a douchebag and could at least drive me to a telephone booth so I could call a tow truck. And it was far from nice to tell the boss what happened, or for that matter the Armor importer that lended us the test example.

But since I am still here, writing this, as a chief editor for this magazine, I had some luck I guess. And I have absolutely no hard feelings about Ardents. Immature fanboys, on the other hand, regardless of their favourite brand…

See you in next issue, and remember, everything was better in the good old days!

If you have ever wondered what a “real car” looks like, here is an image of one. According to some experts, at least.

@VicVictory @GassTiresandOil

• = (OOC) Yes, it’s an American Graffiti reference, the movie was called “Sista natten med gänget” in Swedish, a direct translation is “The last night with the gang”, so I thought why not?

[VicVictory]

Extra bonus points for the reference to the crotchety old Orion-powered 410…

[Knugcab]

I hope that reusing your picture was OK.

[GassTiresandOil]

That’s actually a pretty true description of the muscle car wars in the '60’s and '70’s. I read that the different car companies sponsored their own drivers in Detroit. They would test out their cars on the street once in a while, and there was a fair amount of gamesmanship involved. Dodge guys would set up a race with Pontiac guys, but the Pontiac guys knew the Dodge guys ran their engines rich for more power, so they would show up to the spot, only to change the location. They would all have to drive to the new spot, and that would be enough to foul out the spark plugs a little on the Dodges for the race. Sounds like those fanboys knew what they were doing lol.

[mart1n2005]

The 1957 knightwick K60

Introduced in 1954 the K60 was a modern monocoque small family car designed to be sold alongside the Viking which was introduced in 1948

Powered by the Knightwick “B” engine, a 1.5l fully cast iron 4 cylinder engine.

[patridam]

…from the movie “The last night with the buddies” * that came out two years later, the white Armor and the violet Ardent lined up for a race while one of the drunkards used a flashlight as a signal for “GO!”.
In the movie, which I am sure that all of you have seen, the black Earl Glenwood went off the road and caught fire. And I am happy…

A.) I love American Graffiti, great reference.
B.) I’m surprised you remember the Glenwood! The first round of Generations was like a year ago now.
C.) I actually made a 50s gasser off that body in direct reference to the movie. I had a hell of a time trying to find a pic.

D.) Technically, since it would be the low trim coupe rather than a high trim wagon, it would be a Greendale instead of a Glenwood but you’d have no way of knowing, not that it matters anyway. Had a whole line of them.

[Knugcab]

Actually, I have to admit that I have been browsing through other threads to find “reference” vehicles to the background, and Earl is the brand that feels closest to Chevy on this board IMO, so…

[patridam]

That’s about right, pretty much a mix of Chevy, Ford, and Plymouth/Dodge depending on the year.

[Knugcab]

REPRINT FROM TRAFIKJOURNALEN #6 1991

THE MIDSUMMER WITH MONICA

This Mons Albatros was featured on the centerfold of #16 1985, but it deserves to be shown again since it is a beauty. Not very practical though.

Last year, there was lots of talk about Hillstrom. Mainly it was about their failed fusion of their car division with IP, the discontinuation of their passenger cars with roots in the 60s and 70s that was kept alive just because they could not afford development of new platforms, and that now failed to meet the passive restraint regulations in the US, leaving only utility vehicles in the lineup. Maybe not the brightest news then.

But there are Hillstrom models from the past that many of us remember if we were around in the 50s, 60s or 70s. One of them is the Hillstrom Twinpower. If you don’t remember it, I can tell you that it was not a car. If you remember it, you probably don’t understand why I have started to write about tractors in an automobile magazine.

To tell you that I have to go to the roots with everything. To the midsummer holiday of 1972, when the celebrations took sort of an odd turn. Everything started quite well. My pea green PAZ 200 was stuffed full with whatever we could need in the trunk, and with people inside. Of course me and my wife (-to-be, back then), and also my brother, his girlfriend back then (that could be a bit…stubborn sometimes. Sorry Monica if you should read this, I hope that you can forgive it) and my friend Leif (if you remember the story with my stuck Trident from some issues back in time). The reason why we went away is because my parents-in-law in turn had gone away on a trip, and thought we could celebrate the holiday at their place. Not the worst place indeed, out in the beautiful countryside, if it weren’t for the facts that my brother was there, Monica was there and my father-in-law happened to own this Hillstrom Twinpower. The little sputtering 2-cylinder diesel tractor, nicknamed the “barb wire stretcher” back in the days. Which I also will come back to later.

Before any of our friends had arrived, before we had started any of the celebrations, before anything else happened, my brother and Monica were fighting about something as usual. I didn’t care very much about it to start with, and I heard that it got quiet after a while. Probably we were involved in something noisy because there was something else that it seems like nobody heard. The Hillstrom Twinpower leaving its shed. When I came out of the house, a moping Monica was more or less planted on the grass, without saying a word. After much trying to understand what had happened, it turned out that my brother had got so tired of their fighting, that he had stolen the Hillstrom tractor and left a while ago (yes, he had some quite interesting ideas sometimes in his younger days, not necessarily “interesting” as in “good”).

While my spouse had to stay there if there should arrive some more guests, I managed to get Leif (not so hard) and Monica (much more of a challenge) into my green Soviet hunchback to search for my brother and the lost tractor. Since he apparently had driven away a while ago, he could have been driving quite a long distance already, even if we were pretty sure which way he had been driving and where he was heading. It became more of a mystery when we actually found the tractor, idling at the side of the road. We were yelling his name to see if he had went out somewhere in the forest, but there was absolutely no sign of him anywhere. Our conclusion was that he must have stopped some car along the road to get a ride. Leif decided to drive the tractor back home, and since we now had to keep up with more than tractor speed, and since my brother must have been driving quite a bit already when we started, I think I revved the cast iron wonder under the hood of my kosmonaut chariot higher than it ever had experienced before, when I almost tried to push the pedal through the floorboards. But lucky for us, we soon saw a sight that I still can laugh at.

My brother. Angry enough to have a face with the same colour as a tomato. And that face was pressed hard against the back window of a Mons Albatros GT, of all cars. I could not stop laughing, which my brother probably saw, making him even angrier. Monica, however, was not as amused. Anyway, the driver and the passenger of the Albatros was probably surprised when a green PAZ was suddenly overtaking them (it was not an easy task because they were keeping a steady pace of more than the russian wonder wanted to do), just to try to stop them.

One of the first things I did was to try to open the rear hatch to get my brother out, but the lock was jammed. That meant that the suitcases and bags they had put between my brother and the front seats had to be removed before we could take him out through the door, which was not an easy task, especially not after he saw that Monica was with me. After talking to the driver and passenger in the Mons, I understood that when my brother saw that a car was coming closer, he had blocked the road with the tractor and demanded to ride with them. Since there was almost no space in the cramped Mons Albatros, they had to put him on the parcel shelf, and the luggage that now had no place anymore, well, it had to be stuffed somewhere, which was between my brother and the front seats. Or as they said, “first we were halted by a tractor, then by a PAZ, we had a hard time to understand what was going on”.

With my brother stuffed into the PAZ, we could go home again. With him and Monica having a wild verbal fight in the back seat. And needless to say, maybe, but I think that this midsummer holiday more or less was what killed their relationship, since the tractor incident was just the start of everything that went wrong that day. But since it is not car related stuff, it has no place in here.

See you in next issue, and remember, everything was better in the good old days!

[Knugcab]

REPRINT FROM TRAFIKJOURNALEN #7 1991

BLUEBERRY JAM BLUES

LUX tried to make the Bamse look like a giant, both with advertising pictures like this and with its name. But it really wasn’t.

Probably this is nothing new for you readers, but life really gives you surprises sometimes. One of my surprises was in the mid 70s when Leif was knocking on my door and said that I had to pull him out of the ditch. The most surprising thing was the colour of Leif, though. He had turned into a shade of purple that, to say it nice, wasn’t really his colour.

Anyway, Leif was kind of exhausted after having a long walk after the country roads, but when we were seated in my Nevis, he had a very interesting story to tell me, in fact one that made me laugh so hard that I almost put the Hampton down in the ditch too.

Leif had been in his garage, working on his Anhultz Superkroon that saturday morning and thought that he was going to have a nice, relaxing day off. That was however not the case, because Leif had an uncle that was, to say it nice, kind of eccentric. He had no drivers license, but (maybe unfortunately) he still had a mode of transportation in his moped car, a LUX Bamse. And this morning, he heard the sputtering of the Bamse when it arrived on his driveway, and understood that this day was not going to end well. And as you already have understood from my story, it didn’t.

His uncle’s idea of how Leif should spend his evening was not by being in the garage, he should rather come with them to the woods to help them pick blueberries. And if you knew his uncle, you also knew that there was no point in trying to do anything else than he had decided that you should help him with. Leif even suggested that they could take his car (yes, his daily at the time might have been just a beat up Hampton Ferret, but still!), but according to his uncle there was no way that they should do so. Instead, all three of them, Leif, his uncle and aunt, managed to squeeze themselves into the tiny cab of the LUX Bamse. With a couple of 10 litre buckets to carry the blueberries home in. It was a good thing that Leif was thin as a stick figure in the 70s, because his aunt and uncle, well, to put it nicely, they weren’t.

After a day in the forest underneath a burning sun and lots and lots of mosquitoes, they managed to pick blueberries to fill all the buckets. The problem now was how to get the buckets filled with blueberries securely into the…ehm…”car”. As you may have understood already, that soon became Leif’s responsibility. He had to sit there in the middle between his aunt and uncle, trying to hold the buckets securely, without spilling any blueberries on the floor. Believe it or not, though, it all went well.

That’s, of course, until a wasp entered the cockpit.

Leif’s uncle was apparently struck with panic when he saw that wasp flying around in there. Waving around with his arms, he frequently struck the buckets filled with blueberries, giving Leif an even harder task trying to keep the berries inside the buckets. Since the wasp didn’t want to go away, though, the anxiety level was rising all the time. Finally, he took both of his hands off the steering wheel while trying to wave away that wasp. In turn, that was leading to the LUX Bamse going toward the ditch at an alarming speed (or, well, as alarming as it was possible in that little lunchbox of a “car”). Leif figured out quickly that he had to do something about it, so as fast as he could, he raised his hands above the buckets and yanked the steering wheel, but it was a bit too late and the Bamse flipped over and tumbled around a couple of times before landing on all 4 wheels in the ditch again. And inside, Leif, his aunt and uncle was tumbling around as much, but what also was tumbling around was the buckets filled with blueberries, that he no longer had the slightest chance to hold on to.

He had figured out that it was closer to take a walk to my home than it was to find the nearest phone booth, so that’s why he turned up at my place, splattered with mashed blueberries. And when we arrived at the scene of the accident, I can tell that his aunt and uncle were looking kind of funny too, not to talk about the Bamse. Not only was its sheetmetal looking like a raisin, but the whole interior had gotten the same purple shade, as well as the inside of the windows. Leif’s uncle was a bit short-tempered and was cursing about how everything was the fault of Leif. If he had not yanked that steering wheel, if he could have held on to the buckets a little bit more.

Oddly enough, after we pulled it from the ditch, it started and it drove in a straight line, and everything seemed to be working like it should, so they continued home after wiping the inside of the windows clean from blueberry jam residues. Leif, on the other hand, had enough of the LUX Bamse at that moment and told me to drive him home. Probably a wise choice, after all.

The uncle kept driving that LUX for years after that, apparently without caring about the cosmetic damage. But as far as I know, it was the last time he took Leif with him on a blueberry picking trip.

See you in next issue, and remember, everything was better in the good old days!

@bilobilo

[bilobilo]

best read ive had in a while, thanks!

[Knugcab]

REPRINT FROM TRAFIKJOURNALEN #8 1991

THE FAILED INSURANCE FRAUD

A MAD Corsair that we can hope still has its cylinder heads intact.

A sign of the times is that old muscle cars get restored nowadays. 10 years ago, however, things were very different. The values of the late 60s and early 70s muscle cars were at an all time low, while the word “street machine” was in the opposite end, probably at an all time high. Perfect factory paint was sanded down and shot with metalflake instead. Air shocks in the rear were pumped so full that everything in the trunk did slide against the backseat. Flawless original interiors were saturated with rubber cement and then upholstered with lampshade quality crushed velvet. Of course, some builds actually were of some quality and still holds up today, some others, well….not so much maybe.

One of our local “heroes” got his hands on a mint MAD Corsair GTE. Even if muscle cars aren’t really my thing, it was one of my favourites of the era. They were great handlers for what they were, had a decent build quality and performance was stunning, not only in a straight line. Not that he did care, though. He only wanted a cool “street machine”, like he had read about in the magazines.

Honestly speaking, he had limited success there. Painting the engine bay chicken yellow over wires, cables and relays doesn’t make a street machine, and the question is if the rusty Cragar SS rims was an improvement either. I must say that I also have my doubts behind the craftsmanship when it came to the interior. Someone that was cross eyed is my guess, if not blind. Cutting up the parcel shelf for giant speakers and the dashboard for a huge stereo with equalizer completed the whole picture. It was kind of a sad sight already in 1980, not to mention what a collector would say if he saw it today.

But did he care? Of course not. He was king of the streets, at least that was what he thought. Unfortunately, he was not really king of servicing and car care. For every day, it looked more and more like if the car was starting to fall apart by itself (which it also was). And the day he found water in his oil, he finally had to do some repair work. He ordered new head gaskets, lifted the heads, and of course found out that they were cracked.

The problem was that getting heads for a MAD V8 wasn’t the easiest even back then, at least not for a sane price. And at the moment he was actually getting tired of the car, probably realizing that it was a lost cause, that he had pumped lots of money into. And when the car later was “stolen”, he didn’t seem to mind. It was insured after all.

But I am pretty sure that all of you already know where this story is heading…

The police actually found the car dumped in the woods. Not as a wreck with any expensive spare parts removed, but complete and in good condition (as “good” as this car now was when the custom craze had hit it). Except for one little thing…

They wanted him to explain why it was dumped with the cylinder heads in the trunk. His explanation was that the heads probably had cracked for the thieves and that they dumped it to get rid of the broken car. That, however, wasn’t really an explanation that was good enough to tell the reason behind why they had found invoices in the car from when he had ordered new headgaskets in his own name…

Needless to say, this insurance fraud did not end very well. On the other hand, this was the same person that had broken into an electronics store that was in the same house as his apartment and stole a lot of VCRs. He could not explain why no footsteps were showing in the fresh snow outside or why only the lock on the door on the inside was broken, but not on the door on the outside, and he didn’t do a very great job of hiding the VCRs then either. And that was the last thing I ever heard about him, I don’t have a clue about where he is now.

See you in next issue, and remember, everything was better in the good old days!

@abg7

[abg7]

Nice story, eh? At any rate, all of your stories in this thread are just as entertaining to read as I expected!

[Knugcab]

(I am a bit out of inspiration at the moment, I haven’t given up but writing requires inspiration to be good, so before you ask if I have forgotten the car you sent in, the answer is no.)

[Knugcab]

REPRINT FROM TRAFIKJOURNALEN #9 1991

HOW TO NOT BUY A CHEAP CAR

This classic photo of our red Husar in the first part of the series said that “everything looks good in the dark”. But probably there was not enough darkness in the whole world to make the floor in the yellow Husar look good.

People like to bash cars that are built behind the iron curtain. Truth is that some of them deserve it too, but there are some of them that I would like to call underrated. One of them is the Husar 75C, the improved version of the not as good 50C that we didn’t see much of here. The improvements simply made it a very good car for its era, especially considering the price.

That did not help the second hand values though, they were free falling from day 1, like always when it comes to eastern european cars. And if you have been reading this magazine for a while, you probably remember a series of articles that we ran in 1979-80 about cheap car ownership. What we did was to buy a (very) used 1967 75C for a low amount of money, tried to drive it carefully to save on gas, insure it as cheap as possible, do repairs and servicing for as little money as possible without sacrificing the quality, and sold it for as much as we could get when our experiment had ended. And indeed, the miles were cheap, but there was one little thing that we never told you, that would have raised the costs by a fair amount. The fact that we actually bought two cars, and the first one was nothing but a great blooper from my side.

The mustard yellow 75C looked great to start with, as great as a mustard yellow 75C now can look, but still. Sure, it had some touchup painting done with a brush, knitted seat covers were hiding the worn out upholstery and padding, you know, the classical cheap car problems. But the engine ran like a dream, everything worked, it was taxed and had recently passed the annual safety inspection. And since this was a honest experiment (well, considering this story more like semi-honest) that was done to show the readers the actual cost of owning a cheap car, I saw no reason to check it out more under those circumstances, repairs were probably going to be needed sooner or later anyway. And it was bought incognito by me, not by the magazine. The reason was of course to be as representative as possible for how it would look for a private buyer. The seller would neither give us any advantage or take advantage of it himself, that the car was going to be featured in a magazine.

On my way from the seller, I picked up two hitchhikers, if nothing else it could maybe make for a great story was my thoughts. And it sure did but it took some years before it could be published (1979 to now). While the one seated in the front seat was chatting with me most of the time, the guy in the back seat was very quiet. He said some words every now and then but kept his mouth shut most of the time. I saw him in the mirror every now and then, sitting quiet, staring through the windshield. After a while I saw him with his knees up at the chin and the feet on the rear seat cushion, and I slowly started to wonder what was wrong with him. I saw his face getting more and more white. “Probably scared”, I thought, but I was driving as careful as I could, and some people are just afraid of riding no matter what.

When I let them off he didn’t say a word. He was just slowly sliding out of the back seat and then slammed the door. I was curious why he seemed so upset, but well… Maybe he just had a bad day or something? I kept driving until I arrived at the garage and there I saw something that was not very nice. Looking into the backseat, the worn old floor mat was hanging out of the big hole that was placed where the floor had been once upon a time. I saw the repair on the other side, it was just a bit of thin sheet metal that had been cut out and “glued” to the rusted out old floor with some undercoating, and how it could have passed the safety inspection without anybody noticing that is something I still can’t understand.

I drove the mustard yellow Husar straight to the wrecker and was searching through the ads until I found a similar car, but in red this time. That was the car you saw through the whole article series. The yellow car has never been mentioned until now. And yes, I checked the red Husar through much better before buying it. And while it was not completely free from rust, it was at least structurally sound.

See you in next issue, and remember, everything was better in the good old days!

@ImKaeR

[ImKaeR]

@Knugcab

the worn old floor mat was hanging out of the big hole that was placed where the floor had been once upon a time

It was for flinstones style emergancy braking if the brakes would fail

[Knugcab]

I am closing this for submissions for a while for 3 reasons.

1. My knee injury has finally healed, mening that I am back at work = less time for this.
2. I have enough submissions for a while.
3. I have something other fun in the making that may be posted soon.

May open again in the future, dont take it as a promise but it is not out of the question.

[Knugcab]

REPRINT FROM TRAFIKJOURNALEN #10 1991

BATTLE OF THE SMOKING GIANTS

Believe it or not, digging deep into our archive, we found a picture from a 1978 article about buying an used diesel car, featuring the two stars of this story. Sometimes you are lucky.

Diesel. Yes, I know that it is a word that makes most people that actually has a passion for cars cringe. The truth is that some of the turbocharged diesels today are starting to get almost a little bit peppy and refined. And most brands can offer one. That was not as true in the 70s where you had a few diesels to choose from on the market. One of them was the more or less forgotten Haniyasushin Monaaku. No, I did not sneeze, that was its name. But they were not completely horrible by 70s standards, 0-100 took under 20 seconds and it could reach 160.

That did not matter, the market more or less ignored the Monaaku and it disappeared after just a couple of years. So did the few cars that were sold, too. But my brother surely remembers the Monaaku forever. And he also remembers how one of them disappeared.

As usual, ending up in some stupid place far away from home when he had been, ehm, looking too deep in the bottle. How to get home? Hitching a ride of course, at least it is cheap and most often you will end up at home sooner or later. Anyway, this was in 1974, and the Monaaku that stopped must have been more or less brand new. Wagon. Brown. Diesel. Exciting, right?

The driver looked a bit like a lunatic and to start with he had glasses that were thick as a sheet of MDF. If he was even allowed to drive? Who knows. This was a year before the seat belt law went through in Sweden. My brother did fasten his seatbelt anyway. “Ahahaha, are you afraid?”, the driver laughed. “Yes, as long as I am riding with you, I am”, my brother thought but didn’t say anything. And, he did put the japanese diesel to the test, to say the least. If the car had not been so new that there weren’t even traces of rust on the floorboards, the accelerator would probably have gone through the floor. Maybe it wasn’t the quickest thing on the road but he sure did know how to make use of all the few horsepowers that it had, and it certainly was too fast on the roads they were driving. My brother was grabbing the dashboard in fear when the speedometer said 150.

“AHAHAHAHA, are you afraid?”,the driver laughed once again, while staring on my brother through his waterbottle glasses.

“LOOK AT THE ROAD INSTEAD, LOOK AT THE ROAD INSTEAD!”

If that had not been enough, he took up the chase with what probably was a friend of him in another of the giants of the road. Late 60s IP Icarus diesel. Wagon! Complete with woodgrain and roof rack, probably one of the worst asian yank travesties ever, and even slower than the Monaaku. Which didn’t really get in the way for a little racing between them.

The two dead slow asian station wagons were chasing each other at a pace that was as steady as it could be. And everything actually went quite well as long as they were still at the country roads. But entering city traffic at that pace had its drawbacks. Traffic was building up and the IP ahead barely managed to stop, probably with red glowing drums. How was the Monaaku going to stop then? In the thoughts of my brother, there was absolutely no possibility. A crash was simply going to happen. Unless……

Some quick janking of the steering wheel sent the Monaaku into the divider, doing a jump that would have made a certain orange Ardent Chesapeake from “The counts of the county” green of envy. He noticed the bang when it emptied the tyres of the Monaaku that now was facing oncoming traffic in the other lane. The lunatic with the bottle thick glasses didn’t seem to be worried at all, though. With a trace of oil running out behind the car, a suspension alignment that was worse than something Ray Charles would have put out, empty tyres and some very sad looking sheetmetal, he managed to dodge traffic and somehow drive up to a gas station where he was looking at his mess.

“Do you think the warranty will cover this?”, he asked my brother.

“GET A TRICYCLE, YOU GODDAMNED MORON!”, my brother had answered him before he went to a telephone booth to call me for a somewhat more calm ride to his place.

See you in next issue, and remember, everything was better in the good old days!

@TheAlmightyTwingo

[voiddoesnotknow]

when will submissions be open again?

[Knugcab]

At least not before the update. And I don’t promise anything about what will happen after that.