Tag: Ford

A Race Car Dream

I was a young man. And I was at some kind of car race where I was to be a participant. Several emerging factors swirled and fell and rose. Nobody was expecting me. I wasn’t sure what was going on. I then confirmed, gosh, I am in this race.

Employing strange dream logic, the race was sometimes played as a card game with a board track. Other times, it seemed like a slot car setup, but then it was sometimes full-sized race cars. I’d seamlessly skip between those motifs but the dream itself was mostly centered on race control where I’d check the time sheets, find out where I was on the track, and learn my position. The people populating race control were all tall, older, and white. Most seemed British. I never saw any of the cars so I can’t comment on their colors or livery. But I would identify them. Like I told some once that another driver was piloting a Porsche 917 and another was driving a P3 Ferrari. Someone else was wheeling the Silk Cut Jaguar XJ9.

I swapped cars. I don’t know what I was driving but I suddenly announced, grinning, “I’m driving a Ford GT.” This is a car which won LeMans and the world championship in the mid 1960s and helped seduce me as a racing fan when I was nine. I didn’t specify which variant I was driving.

I learned that I’d qualified fourth but some bureaucratic snafu shuffled me to the pack’s tail end. That didn’t bother me; I shrugged it off with a grin. I was confident that I would win, as I’d qualified fourth with minimal effort. Now, recalling, I actually did have one segment where I was in the car, on the track, during the race, passing clusters of other cars. I then left the car, blink, and was back at race control to check my standing. They didn’t know who I was. I was certain I was leading but they dismissed it. I was told that I’d done something incorrectly and my laps hadn’t been counted. I didn’t know I was supposed to do that, I protested, but that wasn’t their issue.

None of that fazed me. Grinning, I told them, “But I have all these chits.” The chits were small red paper rectangles, like the old-time ticket stubs given at movies in decades past. I received them every time I completed a lap. As I told them about the chits, I held up a fistful of them. Expressing astonishment, they counted the chits and announced that I was in the lead.

I met the news with a happy grin and readied myself to keep racing. Dream end.

I enjoyed discovering this footage of the 1966 LeMans race featuring the Ford GTs. Nice to hear the voices of Bruce McLaren, Dan Gurney, Denis Hulme, etc., and see them. Of course, the staged Ford 1-2-3 finish was made famous in the movie Ford vs. Ferrari, where Ken Miles (played by Christian Bale) was first across the finish line but was deemed not to be the winner because another car started further back, so it covered more distance.

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Sunday Slivers

  1. The skunks came back.
  2. I’ve installed outside lights in the front to dissuade nocturnal visitors. These lights are solar-charged batteries with motion sensors because skunks aren’t supposed to like lights. What else can be done to stop them? The web suggested mothballs. I deployed them. After doing that, I heard a noise and checked it out. The lights were on. A skunk walked up to the opening, lifted the board, and entered foundation. Damn it. Lights and mothballs had no effect.
  3. I escalated from mothballs to ammonia. “Put some ammonia in a bowl with a cloth to deter skunks,” several sites recommended. I did. The first skunk to show up seemed deterred. Not the second. Skirting the bowl, they headed on in, then left twelve minutes later. So…grrr.
  4. I know they’re different skunks by their tails and stripes. One skunk has white in the tail while the other’s tail is all black. White tail also seems smaller. White tail is the one who ignored the ammonia.
  5. I doused the board with ammonia and set it up again. No visits last night were recorded. I’ll refresh the ammonia tonight. I want to ensure there are no skunks (or other animals) under the house before I permanently fix the space.
  6. Watching television, a Ford commercial often plays. It extols Americans’ belief in speed. Yes, we believe in speed (snark). I’m not certain what they even mean. Are they defining speed as a value for our society? Sure, if you’re into fast food. Highways are limited by speed limits. Ford isn’t encouraging us to haul ass down highways over the speed limit, are they?
  7. That same Ford commercial tells how Americans love the great outdoors. They show a car — well, an SUV, to be technical — rumbling across the land. That’s not being outside, Ford. That’s being in a car. It’s called driving.
  8. Yeah, I know, splitting hairs in modern America and overthinking these things, aren’t I? I’m still simmering about how ‘literally’ is now used, along with ‘decimated’ and ‘obliterated’. They’ve all become weapons of hyperbole.
  9. We didn’t receive a Visa bill this month. Freak-out city. What happened? Why not? Going online to our account, I navigated to statements. No September statement. WTF? Why not? Occam’s razor: we didn’t charge anything on it. Really? But wouldn’t they/shouldn’t they send a statement to tell us they received the last payment and that we don’t owe them anything?
  10. When we told friends about not receiving a Visa bill, their response was astonishment. Like, “Wow, I don’t think that’s ever happened to us.” Yeah, we’re all standard American consumers. Charge it. We always pay it off, though. Every month.
  11. Tucker, our black and white moo-floof, has established a new routine. After using the litter box in the morning, he then steps out. Releasing a little cry, he tears through the house like the devil is after him. After going from his litter box (yeah, weirdly, in the office), to the farthest spot in the house (the master bedroom), he’ll pause for a few seconds. Then the second leg is initiated in reverse direction. Don’t know what’s behind this. I’ve talked to him about it. He says there’s nothing wrong. His urine and feces seem okay, fur and eyes look great, excellent appetite. Seems happy and healthy, and the litter box is clean. Well, you know what I mean.
  12. Tucker’s post-litter box sprints scares the hell out of the other cats. Our home has hardwood floors with rugs in the kitchen, halls, dining room, and foyer, carpeted in the bedrooms, office, and living room, tiled in the utility room and baths. This mixed terrain means that as Tucker takes corners and encounters the hardwood or tile, he’s sliding, scrabbling for traction, and making a lot of damn noise. The other cat’s don’t hold to see what’s going on. They react, “WTF!” and hit the pet door running. At least twice, the other two boys reached the pet door at the same time, which caused another, “Ack!” freakout moment for them.
  13. Cats. They are characters.

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Ford Wins LeMans

Ford won LeMans in 1966, and they won again today, June 19, 2016, fifty years later to the date.

When I was ten, this was important. The Ford GTs were the pinnacle of sports racing endurance cars, and one of the winning drivers, Bruce McLaren, was a racing driver I admired, so wow, Bruce McLaren, in a Ford GT, won LeMans. Groovy!

I don’t know where Dad was that year. Mom and Dad had divorced. I lived with Mom and my sisters in the Pittsburgh, Pa, area. Dad was in the Air Force, and I think he was outside of the United States. I think he may have been in Vietnam. My belief is fixed on Dad’s Ford Thunderbird. A turquoise hardtop convertible, that car was gorgeous. It was also sitting in my Uncle Pete’s garage in Penn Hills, Pa, alongside Uncle Pete’s white ’65 Mustang coupe.

Yeah, I was into cars.

Cars are what connect Dad and I to this day. When we speak, we chat about what we’re driving and what new car designs have, or are about to, come out. After the ’65 Thunderbird (or maybe ’66), he had a ’68 Thunderbird coupe, red, with a black landau top. He traded it in for a maroon ’74 Monte Carlo, but went back to the Ford Thunderbird, buying a white one in 1976.

Then he took on Corvettes, buying and driving three or four of them, having them as a second car while his primary vehicle was a pick up truck or SUV. There was one break in all of this when he bought a Cadillac. (Dad in a Cadillac is as strange as me in a Cadillac.) Memory isn’t as fixed about those cars. I was an adult by then, separated from him by life. But like him, I was in the US Air Force and enjoyed performance and sports cars. My first car I bought was a 1968 Camaro. Returning from the Philippines, I bought an orange Porsche 914 and drove it from West Virginia to Texas and back. It was left for a Pontiac Firebird, which I sold when we left for Okinawa. Returning from there, I bought a 1985 Mazda RX-7. The RX-7 was my Corvette, as I ended up owning three of them, trading in my black 1993 Mazda RX-7 R1 less than two years ago, after owning it for nineteen years.

When I call Dad later today, he’ll ask me if if I still have the RX-7 and then remember that I traded it in for a Mazda CX-5. He’ll mention his step-daughter’s Corvette, which he helped her buy. We’ll talk about the newly redesigned Miata, and I’ll ask him if he’s seen the new Fiat 124, based on the Miata. Besides the way I look, walk and talk, and the color of my eyes, hair and skin, and my build, there is no doubt I’m my father’s son.

We are car guys.

 

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