An old car on a new road

We all tour and certainly know the challenges of sharing the road with cars that are faster, steer better and seemingly stop on a dime. Our tours are usually designed around the roads that were created in the early forties instead of the prevalent four lane, fast track expressways. Joanne and I typically tour in our Chevelle, which allows her to over pack a bunch of gear we’ll never use on the trip. It’s 15 years newer than my 55 and traverses the roads like the modern blender-cars of today.

In the eighties I regularly drove an early 60s Austin Healey to work on the expressways so I thought nothing of firing up the Studebaker to travel to Lancaster Pennsylvania. Rolling down the road in my 55 I came to realize the absolute strangeness of traversing high-speed highways in an old car, things have changed.

There have always been the good-natured people who come abreast of you and honk the horn giving you a thumbs up. This is a heart stopper for me as the sudden, unexpected noise is startling. Then there is the road noise that with the open windows prevents you from hearing your wife’s stellar instructions. My Studebaker rolled along at between 60 and 65 because the OD was temporarily under the weather. Unfortunately it appears that the new norm is 75 plus on the four lane roads heading south. Everything but rickshaws passed my gesturing and honking like I was wearing a giant, pink rabbit suit.

There’s lots of construction on route 15 and eventually I found myself hurtling down a mountain pumping my breaks through a decreasing radius bend as the highway turned unexpectedly into a construction zone. I discovered the element of shear terror here.

My Studebaker was a great handling car in 1955 but in 08 not so much. I would find myself surrounded on three sides by manic truckers riding the hills. In many places a temporary concrete divide separated our two lanes from oncoming traffic and served as the fourth side of the downhill 70-mph box I found myself in.

One might experience this kind of nerve-racking scenario behind the wheel of a modern vehicle but it’s more intimidating in an old car. You can hear from far away the furious sounds made by semis weighing forty times more than your car. As they pass your mind wanders to what a disaster the shredding of a retread tire would be.

It’s all due to the fact that old cars are driven, not pointed. You’re not hermetically sealed inside an air-conditioned bubble in a Studebaker. The windows are down so there’s not even glass to shelter you from the facts on the ground. The old car driver stands in awe of mass and acknowledges big trucks potential as a force for evil, like every motorist should but few do. In a modern car the presence of others is filtered out of the driving experience, in cars decades old even a Honda Fit commands attention.

Creature comforts are few, passive safety nil except for owner-installed seat belts. There are no air bags or stability controls to save you from yourself. You must instead depend on wit, coordination and advance planning and above all, your machinery, which in my case was 53 years old.

Its funny but the passage of time has relegated driving a five plus decade antique car on superhighways to the netherworld where devout eccentricity rubs shoulders with clinical insanity. Its exciting like a roller coaster is exciting which is why I continue to recommend the practice of this deviant behavior. When I arrived in my Studebaker I felt like I had accomplished something beyond mere survival.