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My 87 S4 is currently in the clutches of my mechanic. Kevin Jones's shark is there also. I have a nice working relationship with Igor, my wrench. We share custody, but I have visitation rights even when he has it. We've worked it out over the years so that he takes the car, keeps it away from me for varying periods of time, and eventually he calls and tells me to get it the hell out of his garage because he needs the space. At that point I give him lots of money to ransom it out, and we're both happy.
Because he has it now, I was driving home around 1:30 a.m. this morning in the BMW 750, it was raining heavily and there were no other cars in the vicinity. Boonies; between Stuart and Jupiter, on I-95. Speed limit 70 mph. visibility 100-125 yards ahead, I was cruising at about 75 in almost sepulchral quiet except for Toni Braxton softly moaning and groaning her way to yet another cybergasm, (I just invented that word and already have it copyrighted, feel free to use it, but there will be a royalty charge), couldn't hear the torrential rain, as BMW puts probably half a ton of soundproofing in the 7 series.
The car was cruising along like a supertanker. Out of the gloom behind me, along comes Willy Lumplump driving one of those twelve foot wide, six wheel pickup trucks, propelled by an Allison engine. The kind that never has anything in the back because that would scratch the paint, but does have a Winchester Model 94 in an "Easy Rider Rifle Rack" in the back window. There are lots of them in Florida. They are especially handy if you happen to run across a herd of elephants that made a wrong turn in the Serengeti, lots of room in back for one, or a hippo, or rhino, or Cape buffalo. He was overdriving his visibility by at least 40 mph, throwing up a bow wave and leaving a 100 yard rooster tail behind him. I was in the center lane of three lanes. So was he.
No problem! If I was in the Porsche, even in a downpour, a simple flick of the wheel and I'd be over in the right lane. So that's what I did. A simple flick of the wheel and six thousand pounds of BMW went berserk! All the computers in the automatic traction control wanted to do different things, and they did. The main thing they almost succeeded in was to convert the car into two three-thousand-pound motorcycles. As the car made all these strange spastic sideways motions, it started hydroplaning, which in turn caused all the computers to have a mass simultaneous nervous breakdown. For a few moments I thought that I was about to wind up tobogganing down the highway on the roof.
(Continued on page 37)
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