Does your car have character?

[karlcchen@juno.com (KARL C CHEN)]

On March 1998 issue of Road & Track, Peter Egan has done it again.

Here are some of my favorite:

- If you feel compelled, at time of purchase, to buy a 300-page
  Official Factor Shop Manual to go with your car, give yourself
  25 points.

- If your car can be loaned out to another person with less than 
  15 minutes of careful instruction on its peculiarities, 
  deduct 20 points.

- If you die suddenly and no one else on earth would be able to
  start the car or keep it running, give yourself 75 points.

- Award yourself 200 points if the car is French. You deserve it.

- If you would rather commit suicide than do another clutch job, 
  give yourself an added 50 points and call E-Type Owners' Hotline.

- Fifty points for any car with a Laycock de Normanwille overdrive
  unit. Ten more if you just love to say Laycock de Normanville 
  aloud, apropos of nothing, in the checkout line at supermarket.

- Seventy-five points for any car whose engine heat causes 
  passengers to request you let them off early, near "a friend's
  house" or a phone booth.

- Give yourself 30 points if you have to spell the name of your
  car more than three times to your insurance agent over the phone,
  and then it still shows up spelled wrong on your insurance 
  contract.

- If, on the roadside, you are brought to your knees, exhausted, 
  by a convertible top that will not stretch far enough to reach
  the "Lift-the-Dot" snaps, give yourself 40 points, Forty more
  if it's raining. Ten-point bonus if you are on the Dan Ryan
  Expressway at night.

- If your car's engine designer grew up within 300 miles of the
  birthplace of Giuseppe Verdi, give yourself 100 points.

- If a fighter pilot of any nationality might have driven your
  car, or one like it, to an airfield during the Battle of 
  Britain, give yourself 100 points. If he wasn't able to 
  get to the airfield because of "gudgeon-pin" failure or the
  malfunction of any Lucas electrical component. add another 
  100.

- If you come out of a movie at night and accidentally try your 
  keys in another car that looks just like yours, subtract 500 
  points.  This has never happened to a car with character.

Karl Chen 

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