some here may recall a long time ago--with a wife then now far far away--my scribblings about the Lady of the Lake, my very first, still most loved and dearest missed Vette;
you all knew what chance i stood against the insurance company maggots--less than non--so at the advice of my lawyer i've not sen since, i finally took the pennies on the dollar and tried my luck with a C4 (yes, i had lost my mind);
don't you know, it got hit, too, this time in a parking slot right outside my building, by some rather foreign-looking people who, after bumper-car shoe-horning themselves into a space in front of me, tried to sneak off and then when caught by an eyewitness, suddenly forgot how to speaka de anglisch...
another battle with an insurance company lost--my electric headlamps were knocked out, but all i got was a checque to cover repainting the bumper--i went and bought another C4 near remade into an autocross demon i did my best to complete;
but after lounging in the garage for two summers, now, awaiting my last kid to finish college, i am still ambivalent to it;
let's face it, the european-ised Vettes, however supercharged/turbocharged/computerised impressive, just don't move me like the all-American ones, and the new wife took one look at the old pictures of me with The Lady of the Lake and promptly sniffed either i buy another C3 or she'll do it for me!
did i marry the Corvette babe of my dreams, or what?
so now there's one very light very loud very quick C4 up for sale, especially after passing by a blood-red 69 raggie with custom pipes wearing late 60s-early 70s-style Koni-ish five-spoke wheels;
i'm close enough to reitrement, maybe i'll let my clearly shy and retiring ego have its head and buy two of them (still less than a quarter of the cost of today's europeanised-Vette)...just so long as one of them is red and a raggie and the other, silver or blue;
the only other brush that even comes close to painting the canvas of an open road like it is an E-type, and i had to go into the navy to escape the law probably still looking for me in several states when i had one of those;
besides, you needed a whole set of Imperial tools to carry around in back of it, don't dare park it anywhere but the top of a hill to roll-start it in case a cloud passed over the sun, and forget about trying to stop it in first gear...
receiving all my spare parts from the back of a running van in any one of several alleys no longer brings the thrill it did in my youth, nor does racing the State Patrol slugs up and back down a turnpike at 3 and 4 am, just to see how the plugs glowed i'd pull once i got home;
ask anybody who owned one, E-types go Jaws on clutches no matter how many times you double clutch to match the revs to the syncros, and if you didn't fire by the second crank, your battery was flatter than an IHOP serving;
no, this time i'm gonna listen to Bobby Bare and take Muncie over Liverpool or even Getrag;
much as i love any Z06 or ZR-1, that hat just doesn't fit my head;
that's just now how Bobby Bare said you make an all-American boy...
aceinthehole
kstyer
