My good friend and industry colleague David Tracy recently spent a few weeks hanging out with me. Instead of flying home at the end like a normal person, he made me drive him deep into the woods of Upstate New York so he could drag a 1965 Plymouth Valiant out of some dude’s field to take home. Amazingly not only did Tracy get the thing running, he had it dialed in well enough to cross a third of the United States in just a few days.
- Car: David Tracy’s 1965 Plymouth Valiant, my Montero in the background.
- Location: Hudson Valley, New York
- Photog: moi
- Camera: iPhone XR
Tracy’s tireless enthusiasm for wrenching still blows me away. This dude simply refuses to quit working until his cars run right… at any rate, that’s how he ended up manually removing studs from winter tires in my garage in the middle of the night.
OK, sometimes he might not make the most efficient use of his time, but you can’t argue with the man’s results. He’s driven all kinds of junkers all over the world and he’ll never run out of automotive adventure stories.
Life’s too short to drive boring stuff, folks. Start that project, take that trip!
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• This retrospective on Ford’s surprisingly effective youth marketing from the 2000s is a nice dose of near-past nostalgia.
• Upgrading a BMW ZHP with Toyota Camry parts… it’s a thing, and the results can be better than you might expect.
• Keeping an old Land Rover alive is a never-ending education on good repair procedures.
• Our guy in Ohio bought a car that the internet loves to love, but the fun didn’t last.
