Sacto Mitch posted:Stan (and Ray), that is exactly it.
This car started working out for me when I began accepting it for what it is, rather than trying to make it into something it wasn't ever going to be.
Small, light, simple, mechanical, it's a 'momentum' car. And I'd never quite understood just what that means.
It means if you don't pay attention to where the torque curve ends, if you don't get the revs up before you get to the hill, if you don't shift down before you get to the corner, if you pick the wrong line through that corner, you ain't gonna have any momentum to speak of.
The car's a handful to keep tracking straight down a rough road at speed.
The motor heats up and cools down as it gets more or less work to do. It's one of your jobs, as driver-in-chief, to watch the temp gauge and not give the engine more work than it can handle.
You could spend a whole lot trying to fix all of that. You could make the power and suspension and creature comforts more like a modern car. But this ain't your father's Oldsmobile. Or your wife's Camry.
If you let go of your ideas of what a sports car is and try to learn what a sports car WAS, this car has a lot to teach. There was a knack to being quick in those old machines. It was a lot harder than it is now. It took some skills that have almost been forgotten.
But on the right road, on the right day, for reasons that are sometimes impossible to explain, this can be the best car there is - if you give it half a chance.
That's really sage advise, Mitch... but unfortunately I just can't take it quite that far. It would be better if I could. The car (as it sat pre-campfire) was ticking all the boxes, including having the ability to travel long distances. We drove it to NC in the fall of '17.
It was very fast, comfortable (for both Jeanie and me), and interesting mechanically.
The problem for me is that I came to understand that it couldn't do everything consistently enough, and reliability (and sadly and boringly, comfort) have become more important than other most of the other attributes at this point (at least within the parameters that I've dictated for myself). There will have to be other cars that can tick other boxes-- cars meant to ride on a flatbed or in an enclosed trailer from the shop to the foothills. Cars strung more highly.
I know there's real wisdom in just letting the car be everything that it wants to be, but I really can't do that, and neither can very many people. I would respectfully submit that neither can you. There is a continuum everyone falls along, with the drum-braked single-port 1500 on one end and a car like Bob Carley's on the other.
There's a sweet-spot somewhere in-between, a piece of real-estate that may differ from man to man. Most everybody can find it with a 2110 and disc brakes. You needed the 5-speed to find it. I ended up taking something too far (again), mostly to prove to myself that it could be done. This (latest) setup is an attempt to step it back to what I hope will be the edge, but not over a line I'd rather not cross.