All this sound and fury over the Miata reminds me that I'd been
meaning to write something for quite some time. It's about the
difference between doing and being.
All of us on this list, whether or not we realize it, understand
the difference between what a car *does* and what it *is*. Most
of us have placed ourselves squarely in the "is" camp. That is,
we like our cars in spite of themselves, because of what they
are -- a link to a simpler time, a tactile reminder of something
we thought was lost, a working, physical, noisy and rambuctious
memory of a happier time, made into steel and rubber. They're our
own skill, patience, frustration, lust, joy, anger, yearning and
sweat turned into a more or less unified collection of parts that
we herd down the road like a swarm of buzzing metallic ducklings,
mostly doing what we tell them to do but never far from taking
the path that strikes their fancy at the moment.
They're machines, too -- oddly enough, so mechanical that they
develop personalities. The feel of a throttle linkage, the smooth
well-oiled slide of a shift lever, the tug of g-forces on the
tires as we pull the wheel and convince the car through a corner
at speed, all feel honest and mechanical and true, like the healthy
snap of a fine folding knife or the solid click of the action of
a well-used rifle. There's a high degree of congruity between
what a British sports car is -- a collection of mechanical bits
that require a high degree of normally pleasant user intervention
to keep them in harmony -- and what pleasure the driver obtains
from using it. British sports cars have identities. They *are*
what they appear to be, and are interesting because of what they *are*.
New cars have done much, most of it intentional, to distance the
owner from the vehicle's nature as a device. Paradoxically, by
making cars feel less mechanical, carmakers have made them feel
less personal instead. Newer cars feel much more abstract, much
less concrete; they do things, but the nature of *how* they do
them is so much more hidden from the driver than that same nature
is in a British sports car.
On the other side of the balance is the functional term of the
equation. New vehicles *do* so much more than older ones, and
they do so much more of it with so much less owner involvement.
That's part of their appeal for many people, myself included.
It's fun to have project cars, but when my wife and daughters
are facing a 1000-mile round trip, I don't like the thought of
them making it in a vehicle that's going to require extensive
tuning at a rest stop outside of King City. (Hmmmm, so they're
taking the oldest car, one that will celebrate its 31st birthday
this November...) There's a time and place for car adventures,
and a time and place for appliances.
Where this gets touchy is in our beloved personal paradigms. We
all grew up knowing that reliable cars were boring, and that
exciting cars weren't reliable, and that if you wanted to have
an exciting car, you -- in the words of someone here -- paid your
dues. We who have paid those dues think, naturally, that the
simple act of having paid them means that they're worth something.
The world has changed this perception, and not everyone is aware
of it.
The plain and simple fact is that many of the beloved quirks about
our old British sports cars came about because of brutally stupid,
short-sighted, mean-spirited and often outright hostile management
in the British motor industry over a period of about 30 years. The
front suspension of the MGB is one case in point, as is the rear
suspension. Enever and Thornley wanted to put IRS in the B, but
British Motor Corporation management wouldn't let them; it would
have driven up the cost. Nobody at the MG, Triumph, or Jaguar
factories *wanted* to build unreliable cars, but those who held
the purse-strings refused to let the designers and engineers build
the cars they wanted with the components they specified. When
Geoff Healey built a Super Sprite with an alloy body and a Coventry
Climax 100-bhp 1100cc sohc motor, BMC management issued an unequivocally
imperial proclamation that future projects would use BMC engines
exclusively. This was in 1959 or 1960. Imagine what an MGB would
have been like with a 1.5 liter or 1.6 liter Coventry Climax twin-cam
and IRS. Even if they'd used the available 115-bhp Twin Cam engine,
which needed engineering work to overcome some reliability problems,
the MGB would have been a very different beast from what it was.
It would have been a 1962 Miata.
Which brings me back to the is versus does dichotomy. We on this
list are attached to our cars for what they *are*, a romantic link
back to a past, either our own or one we can only imagine -- Roger
Daren, to name only two members, have cars significantly older than
they are. It used to be the case that these were the only cars that
*did* the things they do -- go, stop, and corner in ways that ordinary
cars could only dream of.
Today, ordinary sedans have twin cam engines, four-wheel disc brakes,
fully independent suspensions (even if 90% of them drive the wrong
end of the car), and perform in ways that only Jaguar and Aston-Martin
owners could experience in the Sixties. And they do this with engines
that go 100,000 miles between major services. People expect this of
a car in 1993; the vehicle paradigm is different. People who buy cars
today expect them to *do* certain things, and are less concerned
about what the car *is*, except for certain very expensive and
generally outdated instances such as the Porsche 911.
I'll close the is-versus-does discussion with a parable. There were
once two friends who loved British sports cars. They traded advice,
told tall tales, and caravanned to distant places so that there would
always be enough hands and skill to keep their cars running.
One of them bought a Miata. The second drove it, and was properly
disdainful -- the steering was so light, the gearshift (while
certainly possessing a short throw) didn't feel like anything,
the brakes were overboosted, and in short it felt like an
abstraction of a sports car. "Besides," said a mutual friend,
"all you can do is drive it."
The next time the second fellow drove the first's Miata, it was at
an autocross. He hit a bunch of cones and blamed it on the fact
that the Miata was so much wider than his MGB.
The third time he drove the Miata was at another autocross. He won.
As with most parables, the message is between the lines. The moral
of this story is that sometimes it's nice not only to have a car that
*is* interesting. Sometimes it's nice to have a car that *does*
interesting things.
--Scott "Do be do be do" Fisher
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