Editors note: This piece was written a few years ago and remained unpublished until speedarticle Post 002. The car has since been re-engined and rebuilt. The story remains the same.
Somewhere in Nevada, surrounded by sky, sand, scrub, and stone, on a vanishing point road converging just as far forward as it did back, into the plane of consciousness crossed a thought. It struck like a one note of a riff of a song that couldn’t quite be placed, or a word pirouetting on the tip of your tongue. As the leather of the wheel creaked and wrinkled under stress of squeezing for the idea, the epiphany revealed itself. It felt like a song drop, as if the entire drive had been some sort of dreamy ethereal thing leading up to it. “This Goddamn thing saved my life.” Then the car died. I was out of gas.
It’s a piece of shit really. Just another example of a once loved and regaled car that was eventually abandoned, a victim of deferred maintenance creating a stack of bills that just outweighed its usefulness. From a quick investigation into the contents of the glovebox and door pockets, it was pretty easy to predict what happened. Someone forgot about the car. The keys were Dymo printed with “club” and “benz”. Whether the club was an actual club full of dentists and lawyers, or THE CLUB steering lock remains a mystery. In the glovebox was an embossed type Johnson and Johnson first aid kit filled with bandaids, gauze, and other items that were clearly made before everything got exported to China. Each item looked different than anything made today. It was all interesting, cute, or handsome in some way. Fonts looked great with excellent kerning and serifs. Injection molded edges were smooth and clean. The box even snik sniked open and closed in a satisfying way. There were also some 70’s sunglasses. I looked terrible in them but in the moment I wore them anyway. There wasn’t much else of note. Someone had died. No one hauls this stuff around for 30 years. They died in the 90’s, and then the car died. Both forgotten, left to rot into the earth. A car tale as old as time. That's just how it works.
Bjorn is an interesting man. Walking into his shop is a... diverse...experience. There’s a Pierce Arrow parked next to a Lamborghini Diablo. On the hoists are a Rolls Royce Silver Spur in need of CIS work, and an early 70’s Corvette with the names of each of its original owners hand painted above the Door handle. Dorreen and Dick. Together forever in fiberglass. Perfect. Classical music from the local NPR station floats down from the ceiling over them as Bjorn and I struck a deal on the 1972 Mercedes 250. It lived outside. A time lapse, if you had one, would show it shimmying back and forth behind the shop a few times. Snow piling up. Then melting. The sun spinning around a zillion times. Bjorn, and I, standing out there going “Man that would be a cool project” in quick blips a few different times. Eventually one of those times was the time. $1000 turned into a hair more once he remembered there were euro lights in the trunk. The thing didn't run. Both ridiculously complicated Zenith carburetors were in the back seat. They were rebuilt, and damn if the thing shouldn't just run if you could get them installed and get some fuel up there. Probably. Either way, it wasn’t Bjorn’s problem anymore.
January 3rd. Happy Birthday. Or, if its 2022, Go Fuckyourselfday. I found myself in Los Angeles with my wife. I’d left my 911 there after the Overcrest Rally. It was at a shop, getting an oil change, and a checking over, before we’d would drive it up the coast. Fun times. Instead, the engine on the 911 blew up after 10 miles, and I got sick. I spent the week in a hotel shitting, puking, and lying down. It was the beginning of the worst period of my life. To impart the gravity of the situation, I’ve got to talk Covid. I know. You’re sick of it. Trust me, me too. I’ll make it brief as I can to get the point across, and I’m going to be very candid. Something I’ve done for only a few people.
From January to April, I had to crawl to the couch, and to the bathroom. I had no energy. I felt like I was moving a piano from room to room, but that piano was my body. Not only was it heavy, but it was out of tune. My heart would race for no reason, pounded with unreasoned adrenaline spikes. I couldn’t focus, and I started to get anxiety and depression. It was uncontrollable. I’d never experienced any mental health issues before. Panic attacks happened for no reason, and then the hypochondria took over, and the anxiety about anxiety started creeping in. I was falling apart. I had a piece of paper on my desk that said “tomorrow”. I underlined it. I knew things would get better. They had to. After a few months I’d underlined tomorrow almost to the bottom of the page. I was not getting better, and I’d lost hope The only recommendation from doctors was to focus on “later”. Science would figure it out. Eventually. I became acutely aware of time. The length of the days, and the shortness of the years came into focus like a months long Hitchcock shot where I was the portrait, standing there. Stiff, afraid, and worn down. I’d lost 30 of my 150lbs, and looked gaunt. I was at the end of my flint. I was ready to die, and felt like I might. I was obsessed with the fear of where the road I was on led. I had to do something...
It came in the form of a car that had two rebuilt carburetors... damn if the thing shouldn't just run if you could get them installed and get some fuel up there. Probably. It was everything I had to get out to the garage, even if I was still in my pajamas. I forced it on myself. I did little things first because its all I could do. Getting on the ground and back up again was impossible so most efforts didn’t even involve the car. I did things that felt like I wasn’t letting myself down. I cleaned and tidied the toolbox, moving sockets around and using a hand brush to make things nice up top. It was good for morale. Over the course of weeks, 10 minutes became 30.
The car also needed calipers. At the time I was filming a bit of a youtube series on the car. It was a colossal waste of time, but it did help me catch a mistake when I was reviewing footage. The car, being from Minnesota, did have some rust. One of the m14 big boy bolts that held the knuckle on was seized. I tried everything. A small wrench led through a series of leverage tricks. I sent it into the depths of hell with a torch. In the end, I put a jack handle on the end of a breaker bar. It snapped off flush in the hub. I was so determined not to be defeated by the car that I tried everything to extract it. Air hammer. Welding. Drills. Nothing worked. The hub was destroyed, and I had been a real man and absolutely destroyed it. When I was editing the episode, I noticed something. Before I tell you what I did, I want to emphasize again how difficult being out there was. It was difficult to focus, and think. There was a lot of standing in front of the toolbox with the drawer open wondering why I was there, and what I’d come there to get. I scrubbed back and forth in Adobe Premiere, looking at what I’d done in disbelief. The entire time I’d been trying to loosen the bolt, I’d actually been tightening it. Righty loosy lefty tighty. I torqued that son of a bitch until I snapped it right off. A class 10.9 M14 bolt has an ideal torque of 250 lb/ft. I did a little bit of math, and I think I probably tightened that bolt to over 1000 lb/ft of torque before it snapped off. It was a reminder that I needed to slow down. I thought about mirroring the clip, in case someone noticed, but I didn’t, and no one did, except me.
The tank ended up being corroded, so weeks in I made a trip to the junkyard to get that, and a new hub to replace the one I’d mangled. I brought my daughter along. She made castles in the dirt while I wandered around the graveyard. I thought to myself that this was the place that car should be, but wasn't. The parallels were not beyond me. I was lucky for once, and a new gas tank was in the backseat of a decrepit w114. It was dry as a bone and had a new hub in the trunk. Things were looking up.. It ran well enough that a friend and I replaced every suspension component on the car, lowered it and tossed on a set of real AMG Pentas. It ran perfectly, and drove the same. I started to get excited about bringing it to the Overcrest Rally. My business partner in the venture, Jeff Bull, asked if he could hand paint a livery on the car. Thinking that the thing was once forgotten, there was no reason to say no.
A few weeks later he called me.
“So Kris, on a scale from 1-10 how far can I take this livery?”
“I don’t know, 10? Just don’t make me look stupid.”
Jeff is an incredibly talented dude. A driven branding guy by trade, with creativity baked all the way in. I had complete trust in whatever it was he was doing. It took weeks before he called me again. No he wasn’t done, but I better do something about this engine, it was too slow to match the livery. This made my head spin. What could be done to an old Benz? AMG was still in diapers in 1972, and Mercedes didn’t do much outside of official motorsport channels in terms of performance. Along came Ed.
Ed loved the Chicago Bears, and he loved Mercedes Benz. Unfortunately, daily driving an old Benz in Minnesota will doom just about any car, no matter how much you love it. So the story goes with his 1973 Mercedes 280 twin cam. Ed’s Benz. Solely named by Ed, and emblazoned on his license plate, was indeed, a really terrible car. It would never ever be anything but. It was extremely rusty. The first time I hit the gas, the pedal broke off the floor. I reached down and yanked the pedal off the assembly, leaving just a rod to push with your foot while the road whizzed by underneath. I managed to score a manual transmission on ebay. It showed up in a plastic tub covered in duct tape, alongside a driveshaft with a shipping label on it. I bought a flywheel brand new from Mercedes. I had no idea if any of it would go together. Surely an enormous twin cam with a manual transmission would be cool enough for the livery.
“It’s done.”
Jeff’s garage door opened. The light spilled onto the hood, leaving the car vignetted by the darkness of the garage. I felt overwhelmed immediately. I ran my fingers over the hand painted parts of the car. Every focused brush stroke was there. I’d talked to Jeff a little about how I’d been feeling. Tired, gray. But I hadn’t really told him. I hadn’t (haven’t) really told anyone things were in such a bad way. He explained how the car had been left for dead, and that it had been resurrected by me. Saved. Not forever, just extended. I think until that moment I’d let the car be my distraction. It was a robe to cover myself with. It allowed me to breathe. Now, the car was in front of me, reborn in the stark images, full of reminders of death and all the inevitability of it all. On the hood was written “Driven to Death” and on the side “Gonna Die Happy.” The thing was now the monster under the bed, and the demon in the closet, except they were not in their original hiding spots. They were right there. But it wasn’t the car that was the problem. It was me.
“Jeff, It’s going to be really ironic if I die on the Rally in this thing.”
In the end he was right. It was too slow with the new livery. The next few months would be spent swapping the engine, and installing one off 3d printed intake manifolds to accept a triple set of Weber carburetors. It had to be at the Overcrest Rally. It was a true test. As the car came together, so did I. Despite many hurdles, and with a lot of heavy lifting from friends, It left for the rally the day after it was finished. All the way from Minnesota to Idaho, to somewhere in Nevada on the side of the road.
I’d pulled over for gas miles back with a friend. He was in his e28 M5, I’d picked him up a few hours into a 12 hours drive at another station. The Benz was not running well. It had a miss at partial throttle. Lean something or another. The scene was laid out in perfect 70’s movie style. Dilapidated old gas station. Nowhere. Car drives into the frame and stops at the pump and turns off introducing silence. Dust floats away into the distance. A stunningly handsome driver hops out in a cowboy hat, pulls the hood release and leans under it, peering into the abyss of whatever is wrong with the car. Unlike the movies where the guy just stares at the carburetor with hat in hand, handkerchief in pocket, I knew exactly what the problem was. One of the 3D printed silica aluminum magnesium manifold runners had cracked. It lasted 3,000 miles. Not bad for a prototype, and big props to Alex Nelson for creating the masterpiece. It had banged itself to death on part of the crossmember brace. With a hacksaw and little JB quick smeared on the crack I was back on the road again.
Back on the road. Without gas. The light started flickering about 15 miles down the road. I needed to go back but with the rev limiter banging drift I did out of the parking lot, I couldn’t. It was another great scene. The carbs were dorping triumphantly as I left that joint sideways. The owner had burst open the screen door. I couldn’t hear him but I knew what he was saying, and you do too. The only part missing was me waving my hat out the window. The bad part is, karma’s a bitch and now I couldn't go back. Steeped in shame, I sat on the trunk and waited.
In the heat ripples of the highway behind me revealed a savior. An M5 and an Ur-Quattro with...*squints* a roof rack and… an Overcrest meatball on the door. A roof rack with a gas can on it. Brilliant. I spent an entire day's worth of driving from Idaho after the weekend's rally, and here I was with two fellow rally drivers on the side of the nowhere road in nowhere Nevada. It was exactly where I wanted to be. On the side of the road with friends and no gas, in the midst of an adventure in the car that saved my life.
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