Wes Phillips

Alan In Victoria commented on a URL I posted about the Primedia Enthusiast sale: "I know Primedia through their two excellent car mags, Automobile and Motor Trend. Both have been recently spiffed up, especially the dramatically revitalised Motor Trend. I hope they are now in good hands..."

What the fudge?, as Stephen Mejias says. Not Stereophile? I'm shocked, shocked.

But when I went to Automobile and compulsively read the entries in "Great Drives," I discovered Erik B. Johnson's description of the six-barrel 1969.5 Plymouth Road Runner 440, a car I drove a lot between '69 and '76. "It makes no sense that a 3450-pound automobile with a leaf-spring rear suspension and torsion-bar front setup should be enjoyable to drive. After all, that's a perfectly good recipe for a pickup truck. In 1947. But, inexplicably, this car is fun, and I'm guffawing like a drunk donkey with every flex of my right ankle."

. . . "My brain can't fully come to grips with the enigma that is the Road Runner. So much about it feels wrong. The front bench seat's springs are so soft that when I sit down, it feels like my rear end is being lowered into four-hundred dollars' worth of pudding. I can't see anything over the massive hood tumor that feeds air to the 390-gross-hp, big-block V-8. The unboosted brakes have about a quarter-inch of travel and two settings: off and full lock. And even with the tighter steering, I don't drive, pilot, or steer so much as I suggest, coerce, and beg the car to turn before the seventeen-foot-long behemoth-this is what passed for mid-size in 1969-careens into oncoming traffic."

Not just hilarious, but oh so true.

Thanks AIV!