1996 Buick Roadmaster. V8 and 17/26 MPG. Plus they’re dirt cheap, as long as you don’t mind high mileage.

It was late August, 2011. My girlfriend and I had left the NY State Fair in Syracuse to return to our apartment north of NYC. The standard route: 90 to 87. Easy trip, takes about 2.5-3 hours on any day. But not this day.

Very much so.

Good Lord that was complicated. Enjoyable from an engineering standpoint, but complicated.

Hitting that 200 mark is essentially the law of diminishing returns, or the top of an s-curve. It gets harder and harder to get those incremental improvements as you throw more and more support/funding/engineering into it.

Vintage British/Jap motorcycle parts. What doesn’t go to my young kid, goes there.

Stowing the vacuum hose looks like Cthulu squeezing into a mailbox.

At least the cargo door blowing open won’t drop any passengers, just some fire suppressant.

How’s the legroom in the second row? 

Guess they don’t want to go crying home to (Eda)mame.

Love this song! Squeeze was so underrated.

My car always runs better right after a wash. Every. Time.

In a similar vein, project motorcycles are not as cheap as some would think. While not as rare as a 1 of 2000, my Norton project has been continuously chipping away at my bank account. There’s a decent aftermarket network despite the company folding in the 70's, but nothing on this thing comes cheap.

You’re being forced to take place in a no-holds-barred race across the Sahara and may pick any vehicle as your ride. You may not have any outside assistance. What vehicle do you choose?

For all that tech Q invented and put on the car, you’d think some type of international LoJack would’ve been standard.

Paintballs?

So I bought a car from Carmax, and overall I was pleased with the process. There were two reasons I bought it there:

This is the slippery slope of buying a decent old vehicle. Now you want to keep making it better and better. Happened to me with a couple motorcycle restorations I’ve done. You can’t just replace a single piece of chrome. Then the rest will look bad.

This kind of racing was brought to my attention when I saw the Revival cycles offroad sidecar rig

I’m originally from NY, and this guy was a riot to watch. Truly an artist with a roll of duct tape.