By Scott Longman
I’m not afraid to confess when I’ve been an idiot. Worse yet, when my idiocy nearly killed me and the man seated next to me. I offer this only that no-one else repeat it.
I’ve got a friend we call The Car Whisperer. He’s a buddy of ours whose mechanical genius is sometimes described as “boggling” or, less charitably, “sociopathic.” To give you just the proper picture, the movie Rain Man is not inappropriate.
He conjures up and builds vehicles where your first visceral reaction is: Oh, NO. He announced: “I’m putting a highly-built Chevy LS1 V8 and drivetrain into a little RX7.” These years later, there have been many such swaps, but at the time, it was unheard of. He explained: “Under acceleration, it will allow you to hear colors and taste time.”
It was an ’88 Mazda RX7 convertible. Seemingly defying Newtonian physics, he KY-jellied a built 5.7 Chevy LS1 into that car. The powerplant was good for someplace between 375 and 400 horsepower. And it was now bolted between the framerails of a ride with the curb weight of a half-loaded shopping cart. The result would either be magnificent or cataclysmic and quite possibly both.
I had lots of reservations, concerning weight distribution, suspension issues and braking capacity, all of which he answered deftly.
So, he then threw me the keys, along with another of our disreputable ilk, who we call The Canadian. I’d long had a carefully plotted out high performance test route that involved Chicago’s Kennedy Expressway, with on ramps and off ramps, some as much as 270 degrees lateral misbehavior. That route allowed testing of acceleration, lateral hold and braking, in a significantly safer environment than surface streets.
We launched. The car was a Category 5 hurricane from moment one.
First, most of that was the sheer kinetics, with a power-to-weight ratio of perhaps 8 pounds per horsepower. For those who have better things to do than know such numbers, that’s in the realm of cars that cost more than most mortgages and regularly appear on glossy calendars with even more expensive 24-year-old clothing-impoverished females draped across their quarterpanels. Second, he was big into dissipating backpressure, so the enormous dual exhaust left you with the aural perception you were more or less opening the gates of Hell with the accelerator. And then, add that the car was a droptop, so the full you-are-here experience very literally smacked you in the head: wind, sun, road noise, induction, exhaust. It was wonderful, and will ultimately make the VA question my claim for hearing loss and cardiac-related benefits.
My compadre and I roared out, and pushed the car, hard. It was astonishingly good, in every respect. Tilt-a-Whirl lateral forces, and acceleration like we were leaving the deck of the U.S.S. Forrestal.
What that left was braking.
The final segment of my standard test run on the Kennedy Expressway was inbound, approaching Harlem Avenue. The exit took a precipitous dip downward, to accommodate a massive roadway overhead, before taking an equally precipitous upward rise to the end of the exit, optimistically marked by a lonely and underfunded “Stop” sign.
I loved this for the end of a test run, because, as anyone reading this already knows, you can stop far, far harder going uphill than you can on the flat. So this uphill route subjected us to forces normally reserved for naval aviators hitting the third cable.
So. There was just one . . . little . . . problem.
I had been doing that route for years, exclusively with cars that had anti-lock braking systems, and good ones at that. And to make that effect even worse, in the last year or so, I’d been doing that run in a WRX STi, which not only had breath-taking platter-sized Brembo brakes and world-class ABS, but also a yaw sensor. That sensor basically meant that I, as a driver, could be off on my approach, but it would fix it, and not bother to take it off my deductible, all with a brutal, bruises-follow-the-seatbelts certain stop.
Well, it turns out the RX7 chassis on which this build was based never had ABS. It had a conventional, what we might call historic, braking system.
I didn’t know that, nor did I ever have it enter my epoxy-filled skull.
So coming in hot on the approach, we blasted down the chute, at least 80, probably better, and at the bottom dip, I did what I had done so, so many times before, and flatass tagged the brakes.
As the meme goes: “It was at that moment that he knew he had fucked up.”
I was not arrow-straight and I had just, however inadvertently, locked up the brakes, which instantly yawed us at least 20 degrees. I would have claimed 40 degrees. The car was a convertible. Had we rolled, it would have been a closed-casket-mason-jar-and-spatula event.
But by the grace of The Almighty and having grown up in the snowbelt, long-forgotten programming deep inside my gray matter instantly snatched it. It had been put there by my father, the Army ordnance officer and amateur racer, who had long before taken me out on snowy Chicago streets and taught me to deal with oversteer. His thinking, still funny to this day: “One, it might save you. Two, you are going to go do it with or without me, so, better with me.” God bless you, Captain.
It was all still in there. We got straight and then I threshold-braked—which I also hadn’t done in years—working the brakes at the edge without ABS. This turned out to be, shall we say, really quite memorable. Slightly off azimuth, we slid up to that forlorn stop sign.
Adrenaline, cortisol, cytokines, and lots of other things cascaded through me, although thankfully, not out of me.
The Canadian looked over at me, cool as a capybara driving a Zamboni, despite the fact that he was wholly aware of how close we’d come.
“Oh. Hey. You might want to know that the car doesn’t have ABS.”
