Found these photos of my cars. That’s Oneula and me in the Healy.
I miss driving fast on open roads. One day I’m going to go to Germany and rent a BMW or Porsche and drive as fast as I can. Maybe if life is good, I can buy one there and drive it around before shipping it home.
agreed. she is "easy on the eyes" as they say....(mcding's sister that is.) digging the car photos for sure.keep it rollin'!
Howzit sharkcountry, Don't waste your money going to Germany for a speedy ride. They now have speed limits on the Autobahn and I watched a program the other night all about it and it looked like the fastest you could drive was 100 of what ever way they judge speed and they reduce the speed limit at times. I couldn't believe it but it is true and they even have traffic jams but they will raise the limit to prevent them if it will do the trick. Seems they even have cameras and all kinds of gadgets to keep things under control. They talk about a highway in Italy that is something like the Autobahn but they are cracking down on speeding there now also. Aloha,Kokua
Motown was full of fast rides when I was growing up but believe it or not my friend Mark’s yellow lecar was a blast. We would pull the top back and emerge from the roof, our torso’s exposed and arms crossed. His knees fit into the two slots on the steering wheel and that was one of the most bizarre feelings I’ve ever experienced in a car.
Check the broken glass on the ground. Bad neighborhood or locked in keys?
Ha ha, they say there is nothing new under the sun but times have really changed in Detroit. That pic was pulled somewhere off the web so can’t clarify bout the glass fragments. My graduating year of high school was infamous for Detroit as it was known as the murder capital of the world. Thankfully they have since lost the title.
In a straight line another friends mercury won a few titles
thanks to a 427, hurst, muncie, to mickey’s.
This could be found a few streets over at the local dealers house, he had plenty of cash to beef it up with. 
Cars and parts were everywhere growing up. Pintos with v-8’s dropped in, stupidly quick and so light they would melt rear rims. A more suitable match was a buick v-6 in the chevy vega to avoid the blown head gaskets that came with the different heating and cooling properties of the aluminum and iron stock setup. That was an engineering blunder that should have never made it to production.
Mine was red. 
WOW Charlie, I love the 3.0 CS. That’s a real beauty, especially in the racing form. I remember Bob’s shop at the bottom of St Louis drive. I live up there, so I used to go past it all the time. Now it’s home to Larry’s Air Conditioning. Did Greg surf? I knew a couple of guys named Burgess that used to surf at Courts and Big Left a lot, but one is dead and the other moved to Kauai. Once in a while he’ll sneak over here and if I’m lucky I run into him at Big Lefts.
Bob was a trip. He had a temper, but he was always cool with me. A couple of the other guys at KHON told me he used to keep his stash in his tool box. I had a 66 mustang back then and wanted it. He had a corvair that I wanted to trade for, but we never did it.
Were you still in that location when the tower fell or was that a parking lot by then. I was off the day they tried to bring the tower down and it fell over. There was a guy named Charlie Bouleg ? that worked out of a small shop around there. I think he may have been involved in that or in tearing apart the remains of the tower. He used to drive around in an orange golf cart. His grandson or great grandson is my daughter’s classmate at Kamehameha.
Hi Kokua, I was in Europe a couple of years ago with the family on a school trip. We stayed in Munich for 3 days and I went past the BMW factory at least 3 times. I saw all the speed limit signs on the autobahn. There was a lot of traffic on the autobahn, but it seemed like cars were moving along pretty fast.
DLock, in the late 70’s when I worked at KHON TV, there was a local racer renting the warehouse next door to the TV station. His name was Bob Sato and they called him Madman Sato. He had a beautiful yellow Vega station wagon with a huge blown V8 in it and would do burn outs in his garage. Just totally nuts seeing this guy launch his car out of the garage and have to stop about 40 feet away, or end up in the fence. I always thought the V8 Vega wagons looked cool.
Hey Mike, I wish I had one of those. I still love the early 2002 shape. I used to drive the last mile standing with my head out the sunroof because during the first 25 miles all the wind blowing through the car pushed my hair over from the left. I’d do about 50 mph down the street with my head out the top and all my hair would be blown straight back. Sometimes, I’d pass other news crews going out and they’d comeback and comment on seeing me flying by with my head out the top.
After I moved into town, I lived right around the corner from work, about 100 yards away, so I rode my skateboard to work. Did that for about 6 years.
Nowadays, driving fast is just a fading memory. There’s too many cars on the road today, and you can’t open up without causing problems. When it was empty, you had enough space to deal with the people who don’t use their mirrors. A lot of people don’t think about what’s behind, and when your going 100 it’s a problem when someone decides to change lanes without looking first. I remember a day when I was cruising home in a news car at my usual speed and a guy in tricked out Mopar something decided to show me how fast his car was. About a mile down the rode an idiot in a Triumph Spitfire changes lanes and the guy in the Mopar had no where to go but into the back of this little car. It was a mess and I thought a lot of people were going to caught in that wreck. Luckily, I was back enough to be able to get around and continue on home. Those 2 cars were pretty much totaled. Several days later someone threw a big rock through one of our news car windshields. I think it was the guy in the Mopar.
It certainly is a relief driving fast is a fading memory. We were the lucky ones to get through those years somewhat unscathed. The heavy and fast ones often were the first to get totaled. We would aim for 300 horses at 2,000 lbs then go pick off all those stock z-28’s and trans ams.
We used to laugh our butts off at these fishbowls. A bad hair car maybe.
so back to bad ass cars
I got another funny story. When I was in high school my dad had a toyota station wagon. The road down at the beach was unpaved and full of huge pot holes, so you’d have to do a lot of turning if you wanted to go faster than a crawl.
We’d take the car down the road and do power slides and have a blast. One day I was up at school driving on one of the back roads and doing these full on power slides around the hairpin turns just having a blast. I never thought that on the unpaved roads we could slide around all day, but on the paved road the tires were getting chewed away. When we were done, I pulled up at the parking area and found that I had wore the back tires down to the white treads. One gave out and I had to put the spare on, but I only had one spare, so I had to drive all the way home in full pucker mode. My dad was so angry that I wore down the tires so much.
Today they call it drifting, back then we called it power slides. It’s a hell of a lot fun when the back pulls out and you have to pull the front tires back around to keep going in the direction you want. Learning how to power slide saved my butt a couple of times when I put a bit too much horse power on a slick road.
I learned to drive on sand roads (well before I was 16) so I had the tail out back then too, steering with the throttle, etc. Knowing how to control a slide is an important skill, seriously :)
More cool old race cars....
HEY! I was there... worked in that warehouse with Madman Sato back in '78. There was a little outfit on the Ewa side half called Marine Consultants (Greg Burgess, his uncle Buck Lum and myself). I remember Bob's yellow V8 Vega - he built it himself. He eventually chipped all the paint off with a gasket scraper. Bob was certainly a character, and he could display a bit of temper at times.
He took the then-new yellow pearl Vega to the safety check station to get his "Reconstruction" sticker and the inspector had to know if the car was safe at highway speed. So they went out for a ride... Bob hammered it and got up to about 80 in the first block under the freeway. The inspector quickly decided the appropriate thing to do under the circumstances was to assume the car was pretty solid and give Bob his sticker.
Later I helped Bob move to Kaimuki, but he's gone from that location, I though to Waipahu but find no listing for Bob Sato's Auto Repair in the phone book now.
Later I moved on and got the first of about 14 BMW 2002's I've been through. Nowadays I gently drive a 3.0CS, one of the best styles BMW ever had. I've been up close and personal with their old pre-war 328 and 1950's 507 models, I'll keep my coupe. Attached, if I can, is Herve Poulain's Le Mans effort, painted by Alexander Calder. It was BMW's first Art Car (and at the time didn't belong to the factory).
LOL. I guess we should continue this discussion over at the BMWCCA website, they have good forums too!
A long time ago, in another life, I had a 3.0CS also. I thought I'd keep forever. It was Fjord Blue, pigskin, 4-speed, sunroof, small bumpers (73). Unfortunately I didn't do due diligence when I bought it (young and foolish), it had rust all through the unit body so it wasn't a ''keeper''. I thrashed the hell out of that car and made so many good memories doing so.... The 335i coupe that sits in our driveway would absolutely paste it at any racetrack, but that old car had a feel, a character, even a smell that the new cars just can't replicate.
The art cars are uniquely BMW. The Stella ''graph paper'' batmobile CSL is my favorite. Did you guys see the one they did for Le Mans this year?
When I walked up on this car at Sebring last March, I got chicken skin all over my body. This is THE CAR that I watched win the 24 hrs of Daytona in 1976. It also won at Sebring that year. BMWNA brought it down for display and I told the guys there that THAT CAR had gotten them a lifetime of brand loyalty from at least one person...
Ding, That was really disturbing. That made less sense than Huie!
Surfding,
Where in the world did you find that little gem? That was hilarious and reminded me of a few things I would rather forget. Did you google bad hair? Mike
I know this isn’t a car but…a few years ago I got into bikes. Man, it was 1/5 the cost of taking a car to the track. The sense of speed was double. Just no AC. In the pic I’m tipping it into turn 9 which kind of continues into turn 10. You treat them like one big double apex left. I got alittle to greedy with the throttle at full lean angle and you guessed it. Not one second after this pic was taken I was sliding on my ass. Not a big deal till I hit the curb. The dam thing sent me cartwheeling into the run off. My shoulder made a huge “POP!!” and after 30 minutes I couldn’t lift my arm at all. Long story short. With surgery and physical therapy I still not that great of a paddler. Motorcycles=longboarding
Howzit sharkcountry.When they first opened up the 405 freeway nobody hardly used it in certain areas at night and I wouldtake my Dad's 64 Porche SC on it and redline that tach and be doing 125 MPH, if yo ueven jerked your handsthe thing would change lanes at that speed. In the late 80's I was over here taking care of my Dad when he was dying of cancer and would drive to Ca a lot and the Hywy between Needles and Barstow was open speed ground and would drive hie 72 240Z at about 120 MPH almost the whole way andwhen I told him ne would smile and say " How ;ong did it take you to get here". He loved driving a car made for high speed driving and would brag about doing the trip from LA to Havasu in around 3 hrs and it is about 300 miles for the trip. Also in the old days here in Havasu they had big dips in the road and I would go so fast I could fly the dips which was so much fun but scared the heck out of my girl friend. Aloha,Kokua
