Team Bamford
Our heros made great time after Phils cheese pitstop with the inline 3 running on song and the world just going right in general.
Phil was steadfastly rocking the wheel between his hands to keep the car on the road, with sunglasses on and a cigarette held between his fingers in his right hand, he was looking seriously “cool” except he couldn’t see because it wasn’t that clear of a day and he wasn’t allowed to light the smoke because the team wouldn’t let him, but he knew that he was cool.
“Pass me one of those house bricks” he called out to no-one in particular
Jason reached into the boot, using the Advance’s handy folding rear seat system and returned with a lone brick.
“They told me back in '92 that it was a stupid idea to fold the rear seats down, but it just paid off” smirked Ken
Phil blindly reached backwards and seized the brick, awkwardly swinging it into the drivers footwell and with a mere moment of adjustment, dropped the brick on the throttle.
“Cruise control doesn’t work” he said.
“But what if you need to stop in a hurry?” asked Simon
“Relax” smiled Phil “There’s nothing that’s gonna slow us down!”
An Hour Later
In his 70-odd years of life, Ken had never seen anyone eat a cigarette before, he’d seen his mates smoke a lot of them, but never purposefully eat one out of frustration, or go back for seconds for that matter, to stop Phil from giving himself a stomach ache the team relented, rolled the windows right down, cranked the AC and let Phil smoke, one cigarette at first and then two in the vain hope that he’d calm down.
No such luck.
The object of the English/Indian team’s scorn was a line of cars, about 3/4 mile of cars, headed by a 4x4 that had never been dirty, a few saloons and a smokey, black Dodge Monaco.
“Never trust a driver with a hat on, nine times outta ten they’re too old to drive” muttered Phil
“Dude, both of them are wearing hats” called out Jason
“And?”
“We’re tailing the Blues Brothers!”
Ken laughed along with his grandson, but that was about it, Simon had decided to be even more silent than usual and Phil was stubbing his cigarettes out in the ashtray, he saw a gap coming up and planted his foot even harder into the carpet.
Nothing.
The Inline 3 could move the car, sure and with a bit of coaxing could keep them at 55mph, but that was about it, any highway pulls while the car was in top gear were futile and the soggy automatic was designed solely to move the car with no thought given to performance.
Phil dragged the shifter back to “2” and was met with the same grinding that he found when they’d unloaded the car yesterday, so he went back to “D” and began fuming again.
“45mph” said Simon, checking his phone’s GPS “Can you go any faster?”
Phil swore and went back to glaring straight ahead and within the next hour the rest of the team joined him too.
Eventually they came to a sign pointing towards a golf course and a majority of the cars turned off, leaving the Bamford with the Dodge Monaco and a sedan further up the road.
Phil smiled and put his foot down again when the Dodge, with a loud roar, suddenly squatted down, hoisting it’s front wheels towards the air and it disappeared in a cloud of tyre smoke…
“Well” said Ken “they seemed to be in more of a hurry than us”
“Must be on a mission from God” replied Jason.
