UTMC

I had a flashback to my childhood today. It was a smell. That smell used to be all over the place, but no more.

I was coming from one of the city's premier Turkish takeouts (where they bake their Dürüm fresh and it comes out of the oven looking like a misshapen balloon) and, sitting in a parking space (well, half sitting in the eurobox-sized parking space, half sitting in the road) was a fourth gen Cadillac Sedan DeVille, showroom condition, a lovely dark bottle-green, the apartment sized V8 happily blubbering away. And the smell, ah that lovely smell of unburnt hydro-carbons and volatile organic compounds wafting over the sidewalk. Modern cars don't make that smell. Some older bikes do, but comparatively faintly (what with the engine being about seven, ten, twenty times smaller than that 7 liter monster).

I know it's bad for me and bad for the environment, but even though it is slightly revolting, I miss that smell. When I was little, more cars on the road still had carbs, and that smell was all over busy roads, parking garages, etc.

Anyone else who thinks that modern vehicles smell boring?

A few years ago I went to a pre-'63 drag race event at the local strip. All the unburned hydrocarbons and VOC's you could handle for five bucks!

I had a '67 Deville convertible, which I drove coast to coast in 1998. It was great. There are few better cars to bring 3 friends, drop the top, aim at the other coast 3,000 miles away and pull the trigger on a warm summer night.

I went to a vintage tractor show today. There were several old Rumely Oil-Pull tractors there, running on kerosene. Two ten inch pistons, with a twelve inch stroke. 1885 cubic inches. (30.9 litres for DG.) Redline: 375rpm. The exhaust note was an irregular series of explosions, with a back-beat. Way cool.