| Love is a Many Cylindered Thing In these hallowed pages, I rarely mention Brand Xs unless there's sufficient cause. Keeping in mind that Cadillac had big V-12 and 16s, something happened over the holidays I must put to paper. Occasionally, without warning, we encounter a bit of serendipity that makes us think, perhaps after all we are blessed. Kinda like walking into Spec's Liquors and being offered a generous sample of 30-year-old single malt Scotch or walking down Main Street and instead of being assaulted by Gangsta Rap, we see Itzak Perlman playing his fiddle. Rare freebies. Such it was in the early, pre-frenzy hours of Christmas Eve when, with family in tow, I crept into the Rice Village for some last-minute shopping. Then, coming out of The British Isles, I heard the unmistakable sounds of an expensive exotic ---- the high-pitched whine of the tranny -- the muffled roar of constrained power ---- a Ferrari. It sailed through the Greenbriar and Rice light and just beyond the trees the car opened up, the sound of unleashed fury resounded off trees and Rice Stadium. The car had to be going decades over the speed limit and if a policeman had been around the driver might still be in jail. But, oh, what music. It brought back the memory of a long ago afternoon when despite the distractions of beer, bratwurst and friendly women from Chicago -- I listened to the Can-Am Ferrari's blast down the straights at the '69 Road America in Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin. That unmistakable, rarely heard sound embodies all that is noble in Italian culture going back to Caesar. I almost fell to the pavement in a state of nirvanic arrest. |
For some time, I've been
meaning to have chat with my son. He thinks Goosebumps is
literature and McDonalds fine cuisine but since his
indignant reaction to the Ferrari was "Why does that
car make that noise?" I realized it's definitely
time for a heart-to-heart. Now for
Cadillac Unlike powerhouse high performance cars, the Cadillac philosophy, while including power on its list of requisites, also demanded smoothness and ease of operation. In December of '81 Road & Track did a great article on '31 Dual Cowl V-16. It's an interesting read. Many of the 12s and 16s got mated to large Fleetwood sedans and served time hauling dowagers to the opera and such. This, however, does not mean the engines were wimpy. My favorite V-16 story comes from Maurice D. Hendry's Cadillac, Standard of the World: The Complete Seventy-Year History, published in 1973. In the early morning hours of May 2, 1931, three men left San Francisco in a V-16 sedan to prove, amongst other things, that the world was flat; to get away from all telephones and to see Havana by moonlight. They drove cross-country covering 10,000 miles in 24 days. On the |