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The Shadowfast super car projectContext of the times
1969 Ford Mustang Mach 1 supercar Sponser this pageThis page last updated on or about 3-21-06a - j m o o n e y h a m . c o m - o r i g i n a l |
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BACK to Me and my Shadow supercar
Though I did change the car's name in the story to Shadowfast from its actual name of Shadowfax, a recent examination of notes from the time shows I considered both names early on. So basically they can be used interchangeably for our purposes here.
The historical events detailed below are true-- at least to the extent my personal recollections are accurate.
I don't want to use my friend's real name here for reasons of privacy. So let's default to his alter ego's name from my story accounts: Steve.
My first race
My best friend Steve was even more into racing than I. I believe it wasn't long after I first met him in high school that he took possession of his first car. It was a green and black 1971 Boss 351 Mustang with 4-speed transmission. I believe Steve was making significantly more money than I then, being as how he was relatively skilled as a young electrician and working in his dad's construction-related business. Within days of buying the car my friend had found a senior at school who many believed had the fastest car around: a 1968 Plymouth Road Runner I believe (all this was a very long time ago). It was definitely black and a smart looking vehicle.
My friend and I went looking for the guy to challenge him one day, in the Boss. We found him, and he agreed to race us. Both cars proceeded to the same straightaway I describe in my story as being a local favorite for young racers (this may have been my first visit to the place).
I personally stood between the cars to start the race. They took off with screeching tires, rapidly growing small in the distance. It was actually hard for me to tell who won from my location I believe. But if memory serves it was my friend.
Steve's Boss 351 bites the dust
My friend was destined to total the Boss only around six weeks later. Fortunately he only chipped his elbow and his two passengers were thrown clear when the car rolled maybe a dozen times down a steep hill. The passengers (teenage boys like ourselves) were black and blue all over the next day, but apparently well enough to show up at school grinning and excitedly telling everyone about the crash. I guess my full-time job of that period saved me from being present too.
My friend had lost control when he hit loose gravel on a paved highway in a curve. I assume he was moving a bit too fast for the conditions.
Off to the races
My friend and I frequented races and the garages which built the cars back then. These had big influences on us. For example, after seeing the wide-angle rear view mirror used in a stock car I soon had installed one in Shadowfast-- and I did the same in virtually every other car I've owned since. My dad, too.
My friend was even more heavily influenced than I though. For a while we kept his totaled Boss in my family's small garage, where we stripped it in preparation for making it into a dragster for the local quarter-mile races. Official races, that is. For our little town actually had a true drag strip complete with Christmas tree (race control lights) and tower.
But my folks' garage was pretty cramped for my friend's ambitions. So after a while he rented an old delapidated but much, much larger garage maybe a dozen blocks away. The old garage was pretty nice for our purposes, actually sporting a mechanic's channel in the floor so you could work underneath cars with no lifts around. It was also a great place to hang out in general for teens. My friend used it once to host a massive get-together where he led the construction of the first two-story parade float our little town had ever seen. I'm not sure now what holiday it was for, but it seems like the day of the parade was cold. Anyway, the float construction required several days, and was sort of treated like a party by those in attendance.
My friend also used the garage as a home away from home, as his real home was maybe 30 miles out of town. So it was often easier for him to stay at the garage during the week than return home every day, while school was in session. My friend's dad ran his own small electrician business out of a place maybe several times bigger than my friend's old rented garage, plus much nicer in terms of amenities. As the place was usually deserted after-hours, my friend often stayed there as well during the week. His dad's place of business was about the same distance from his rented garage as my folks' place (just in opposite directions). And our high school was roughly equi-distant from the garage too. So anyone could literally walk between all the places if necessary.
Alas, my friend never did manage to get his Boss outfitted as a dragster. Maybe whoever ended up with the stripped chassis did, but not my friend. The project was simply too costly I believe for his means. But we did end up using the rented garage for other jobs. Including some of the modifications to Shadow. Such as installing his headers.
I mention visiting a very unusual junkyard in the story. In truth, we visited lots and lots of junkyards along the way. Usually looking for good deals on parts. It wasn't just my friend and I doing so, but his two brothers, and a few other friends of ours. I found quite a few choice items for Shadow in these places, such as high performance suspension parts off wrecked Boss Mustangs. It may be I acquired the 1970 headlight cowlings from a junk yard as well.
Based on my notes from the time, I think Shadow ended up inheriting the black leather seats from my friend's crashed '71 Boss 351.
After totaling his Boss, my friend still had to pay off the car debt (possibly because he decided to hang onto the totaled car afterwards) plus pay for the garage rent and other things. So he ended up dependent on me and the as-yet- mostly-unmodified Shadowfast for much of his travel. His racing enthusiasm thus tended to wash over me and my car as well. He may even have bought one or more of the first items added to Shadow. After all, I was far from rich myself, and couldn't afford to buy much beyond the essentials.
His frequent need for a ride from me during that period may be one reason I attended many race events and observed race cars under construction as I did.
Coincidentally at the time, a 'hot rod' shop opened up only a few doors down from my friend's dad's electrical business. So we ended up spending time there too after school and on weekends, when we had the time to spare. The shop owner of course raced at the local drag strip with his own car, in partnership with a gas station owner of the area. We often debated the utility and effect of various hot rod components there. And I bought things like Shadow's traction bars from the place.
There may have been a whiff of male rivalry in the air too, regarding my initial purchase and/or subsequent modification of Shadow himself. The details are pretty fuzzy to me now, so many years later, but at some point I learned this girl I liked was going out with a football(?) player who owned a black 1969 Mustang Mach One I believe. I don't know if I found this out before I bought Shadow, or sometime after. But at some point I found myself wanting to compete with the guy. But I just never got the chance, for some reason. We never did race our cars, for example. I think maybe the girl moved on to someone else soon and so all reason for competing with the first guy fell by the wayside.
Keep in mind I'm speaking of my teenage self here. Few of us are at our best in those years. AGH!
A plethora of Mustangs
An older guy we rode with a few times owned a yellow and black 1970 Boss 302 Mustang-- or a car that looked like one, anyway. It seems like the car didn't have the original motor anymore. But looks-wise it was decked out with the shaker hood scoop, Boss stripes, front spoiler, rear window louvers, and rear wing spoiler.
Steve eventually got a 1970 Mustang. His brother did too. And maybe a couple more friends of ours as well. My friend's car was originally a plain bluish-green color Mustang. His brother's was a plain Mustang too. But both fellows customized their cars over time. Steve had an outrageous rear spoiler added to the car which went straight up in the air so far it blocked part of the view out his rear window. I think it was a Camaro spoiler added to the top edge of the shallow rear spoiler already built into 1970 fastback models. He added a front spoiler and Boss 429 hood scoop too. He topped it all off with a green and black paint job (thereafter refering to the car as "the green machine") and mag wheels all around-- but the front wheels being tiny, the size of Volkwagon Beetle wheels. The end result looked a lot like a funny car dragster of the era.
Steve's brother customized his Mustang to the extent seen in the photos below (the Mustang beside Shadow was his):
Neither Steve or his brother did much more than cosmetic changes to their cars-- at least compared to Shadow's more radical transformation. Basically this shows they had more of a life than I, in terms of relationships. :-)
Our other friends seemed to have had a red and a white Mustang, respectively. But I don't think they kept their cars as long as we did.
Once we all had Mustangs a sort of informal competition came about for add-ons and the like. Plus we'd try to impress each other when we had one another as passengers in our respective cars. Steve's brother's 1970 sported a standard 302 motor with auto transmission, I believe. I use the pseudonym of 'Will' for him in my stories. I don't think Will ever performed significant mods to his engine. But he did try to outwardly disguise his car as a high performance model, by acquiring various Boss 302 body parts for the job. Like front and rear spoilers, rear window louvers, and shaker hood and scoop. The shaker scoop just sat atop a normal air cleaner, with only the hole in the hood holding it in place. Steve had a 351 Cleveland I think in his 1970 (along with an auto tranny). You can see more about Steve's 1970 drive train mods in The Daytona 1200, where we actually raced one another at the drag strip. Yeah, readers would likely prefer that Shadow had raced Steve's 1971 Boss 351 rather than his later 1970 Mustang. But I'm glad it was the 1970! For I can save you any suspense over a quarter mile race between Shadow and Steve's Boss 351 right here and now: Shadow without nitrous oxide would definitely have lost in such a short straight-line competition with Steve's Boss. I mean, barring some odd fluke like happened in Heartbreaker, or Steve's Boss being badly out of tune, or something like that.
More on my best friend Steve
Though Steve and I had enough in common to become close friends for the long term right from our high school days, we had plenty of differences too. For one thing, Steve was much more sociable than I, and did about a thousand times better with the women. You ever hear the phrase "silver-tongued devil"? Whoever coined it could have been describing Steve. As old Davy Crockett might have put it, Steve could have talked a tree into growing down rather than up. Indeed, it was downright dangerous for some people to be around Steve in his early adulthood, when he was purposely testing the limits of his persuasive powers. I witnessed him one day talk a perfectly healthy man into becoming badly ill within a matter of minutes-- simply to see if he could. For Steve it was much like a prank at the time. But he didn't know the full range of his powers. His victim didn't fully recover again for maybe years to come. YIKES!
Steve possessed sufficient persuasion power to easily start his own cult. Fortunately he didn't do that. Instead he used it to clinch millions of dollars in business deals and bed thousands of women over the years. No kidding. No exaggeration. The mythical James Bond would have found the real life Steve to be stiff competition in the womanizing department (Sorry about the horrible pun, but I just couldn't resist. How often can you truthfully say such a thing?).
But Steve's extraordinary abilities didn't end with persuasion. For Steve came from some great mental and physical stock, both his father and mother being outright fantastic in many ways. Both were very attractive folks, and highly intelligent. And both were almost perfect archetypes of their respective sex. Steve's father was an immensely strong, capable, and determined man-- practically an irresistable force of nature. Steve's mother was a beautiful and remarkably wise and strong woman in her own right. Of course nothing's perfect, especially during the turmoil of the teenage years. And Steve's dad was a Korean War veteran, one of only thirteen survivors I believe of a massive tank battle with the Chinese, which seemed to have deeply marked him thereafter. So he may have been pretty hard on his sons. And as they had to join the family business as soon as they were deemed able, they got no relief job-wise either in their early years.
I suspect Steve's father may have been a terrible taskmaster. I seem to recall Steve (or his brothers) talking about how their father would take them and leave them alone deep in the woods to find their way back by age six or so (their home was in the mountains straddling the border between Tennessee and North Carolina). Something like that. Basically their dad tried to train them to be self-sufficient in all ways. Such treatment, where it took, caused the boys' natural genetic potential to become fully realized, it seemed. For instance I personally witnessed amazing feats from Steve over the years. His natural sense of direction was uncanny-- but apparently based on a Sherlock Holmes-style power of observation honed by his dad during hunting-related and other training. Steve could closely follow multiple conversations at once from the folks surrounding us in a restaurant. Steve was a fast thinker on his feet, too. It could be amazingly difficult to outsmart him in any direct contest or debate.
The guy possessed an incredible stamina and power to endure, which I witnessed in many different ways over the years. I saw him absorb punishment on many occasions which I'm sure I couldn't or wouldn't have taken myself, no matter what the goal.
Among his other qualities, Steve had superior reflexes to my own, as well as was a better driver in general. Yes, he had a lot of crack ups in the early days, but that was when he was still learning. After a certain age he got to where he could quickly size up the limits of almost any vehicle he drove, and within minutes be pushing the envelope with it-- and without putting a scratch or dent into anything-- unless he wanted to.
Where I adapted Shadowfast to me, Steve would adapt himself to the car he was driving at the time.
In years to come I would witness Steve do things with cars that I never saw anyone else but professional stunt drivers do. He's a superb driver.
But he wasn't that great in the mechanic department. Or maybe he just didn't care. And that's where I got him in our own auto-related contests. In any real world course pursuit, if I was ahead of him I could definitely lose him, and if behind, he couldn't shake me. For no matter how good his driving, Shadowfast just did the hard work for me. Steve once tried to lose me in the very sort of tricky highway I'd designed and built Shadowfast for: an amazing series of hard switch-back or hair-pin curves that seemed to go on forever, and that I was completely unfamiliar with myself. And it was well after dark. Steve was wanting to prove his skill could leave the embodiment of my mechanical talents (Shadowfast) in the dust-- or else see who'd chicken out first in a daring run.
Steve was supposed to be leading us to somewhere we all wanted to go (I forget now what the destination was, as the trip itself turned out to be far more memorable). I was wholly dependent on Steve to lead the way. Steve was driving his brother's plain jane (suspension-wise) 1970 Mustang that day, and knew the route well. This was a rare opportunity for Steve, as his brother's car wasn't impaired by the tiny front dragster wheels of his own, which sometimes lost their tires entirely on hard curves (ha, ha). So Steve went for it.
Steve drove that poor car so hard on those dangerous curves that I became genuinely concerned he might crash and hurt himself. Under other circumstances I would have simply let him go, for his own sake. But here we were deep into boondocks with which I was unfamiliar and worried about getting lost in. So I was strongly motivated to stay on his tail.
From one perspective the situation was somewhat comedic. For by this point Steve was entering his most skilled years as a driver, and so I was pretty sure (if not completely so) that he could make these manuevers without crashing. He also had others with him in the car (I can't recall now if those included his girlfriend and/or another brother of his) so I hoped he'd avoid endangering them too much with his antics.
The comedic aspect is that Steve's brother who owned the 1970 Mustang Steve was driving like a maniac at that moment was actually sitting in the passenger seat of my car, watching his own car barely staying on the road ahead of us in curve after curve after curve. The guy seemed terrified: I'm not sure he spoke a word the whole time. He really liked his car.
Me of course, I think I grumbled aloud during most of the chase about Steve's ridiculous and dangerous attempt to prove he could outdrive the combination of my auto design and driving skills. Of course he didn't manage it. But I'm sure if I'd been driving virtually any other car, and Steve even in a VW bug, he could probably have left me behind by virtue of driving skill differences alone. He was that good.
Before Steve turned his second Mustang into the Green Machine, his transmission went out one day. Only reverse still worked. Steve needed to get the car from town to his home for repairs. The only timely manner was via interstate. So Steve drove his car backwards for something like 30 miles at interstate speeds (I don't remember anyone passing us). I was riding in the car with him. He never even came close to losing control a single time. Keep in mind that near the exit for his home is a famous curve where many a car and truck has met its end on that road-- driving forwards, at similar speeds. Steve drove through it backwards as easily as any other stretch of road.
Many years later I owned a black 1985 Pontiac Firebird. For a while during such ownership I lived in Boston with Steve, splitting an apartment, as we were both employed at the same place. We frequently shared one or the other's car on the 50 mile one-way commute to or from work. Steve's ride of the time was a somewhat stodgy Chrysler New Yorker (he was trying to be a grown up, after all). So he seemed to enjoy driving my Firebird every chance he got. I didn't mind at all, as I disliked driving much by that time anyway. Plus, I knew Steve was the better driver too. Heck, he frequently borrowed my car to impress his girlfriends at the time (or maybe just because it was more fun than his?), as living in Boston I could walk wherever I wanted. Once he took his girl of the time to a ski resort with it.
Anyway, one day we were returning to Boston from somewhere in my Firebird. I believe I was sitting in the back in order to allow Steve's girlfriend to sit up front. Steve was moving pretty fast through the city, as we were both wont to do where possible, after we'd become experienced with the place. But Boston streets could be chaotic at times. Suddenly we had to stop in a distance shorter than the Firebird was capable of, even with mighty Steve at the wheel. Steve of course simply spun the car about 90 degrees as he stopped in order to gain the extra four feet or so of clearance he required. No damage done. And I wasn't surprised a bit.
Did Steve ever drive Shadow in its ultimate form? I can't recall him ever doing so. So maybe not. Perhaps back then our automotive rivalry was still a little too strong. Or it may be that Shadow wasn't finished before Steve and I went our separate ways for a matter of years. And when we met up again later, Shadow was already gone.
Prior to Steve getting his blue Mustang turned into the Green Machine, someone with a dislike for him shot a hole in his car with a shotgun while it was parked overnight in front of Steve's dad's shop. I think Steve was asleep in the back (of the shop, not the car). The next night I and a few others rode around in Steve's car as he looked for the culprits. Our car was crammed full of so many guns we were forced to sit on some of them as we roamed. Fortunately we did not find who we were looking for that night. YIKES!
During the short six weeks Steve owned the 1971 Boss 351, we did manage to have a few experiences with the car. Once sometime prior to 8:30 AM on a school day, I was riding with Steve in the Boss when he decided to shadow the bus carrying a girl he liked to school. We pulled off the main road to wait for the bus in a steep graveled driveway which led down to a small house several car lengths below. It was a somewhat precarious perch, with the Boss being a straight-shift, and Steve not being overly experienced with the car anyway.
I believe around the time the bus was passing by and everyone on it saw us sitting there, Steve started to pull up and out to follow-- I guess so maybe the kids would be talking about the cool looking car behind, and the girl he wanted to impress would hear it all.
But instead of doing what we expected, the Boss began going backwards down the steep driveway. Steve did what he could to get things back in control, but still we thumped pretty hard into a wall of the house below with the rear end of the car. It may well have looked hilarious to the bus riders. DOH! As Homer Simpson might say.
It turned out that the steel wire cable connecting Steve's gas pedal to everything else had broken loose from something like a lead weight which kept it secured in some notch on the pedal lever (if I recall correctly). So the pedal no longer worked. And naturally we had precious little in the way of tools onhand. We'd soon be late for school too-- if the owner of the house didn't come out and shoot us, that is.
It may be no one was home. Or else they were scared to emerge.
Once Steve determined what the problem was we tried to make it up out of the depression and to school with me laying on the floor console trying to pull the frayed wire cable to gas the engine while Steve steered. My body interfered with the gear shifter so we had little choice what gear we used, thereby most likely somewhat abusing the engine.
It seemed to take enormous finger strength to pull the cable-- remember the design was meant to leveraged with a pedal, and even then pushed with a foot. Plus the frayed end was sharp, tending to cut your fingers. The more blood there was, the more slippery the cable became, and the more strength was required. And on and on. AGH!
I couldn't pull the cable for long. Either my finger strength gave out, or blood made it too slippery. Maybe both. I'm unsure now. So we had to switch places pretty soon in the five miles or so trek to school, including some half dozen redlight stops through the middle of our small town. I remember Steve's fingers being a bloody mess by the time we made the school.
Over the years there was much to envy about Steve and his abilities and conquests. But nothing comes without cost. In Steve's case it may be a much shorter than average lifespan. If I recollect correctly, all Steve's male ancestors died relatively young of heart problems or the like. So Steve may be like the head replicant in Bladerunner: extraordinarily gifted in many ways, but cursed with a short span in which to use those gifts. It could be that Steve could possibly lengthen his life by quitting smoking, and more closely following certain of his doctor's other recommendations. He'd already quit drinking when I saw him in 2001 (he once drank ungodly amounts-- but there too he seemed able to drink just about anyone else under the table and still seem pretty sober for it).
Another downside to Steve's brilliance and capabilities was that his mind was almost always racing. It was often difficult for him to turn it off. This-- along with other things-- may have made Steve sometimes prone to a form of manic-depression and/or attention-deficit syndrome, and so certain addictions as well (like his smoking of later years). One day we were in my 1958 VW bug (described in the story). Steve was driving. We ended up roving about a local abandoned quarry. Suddenly Steve seemed to be driving at worrisome speed towards the edge of a great drop off in the place: a deep, huge crater with vertical sides and a miniature lake at the bottom.
Maybe Steve was just trying to scare me. Or maybe he truly didn't realize how close we were to the edge. But I had to wrest control of the car away from him even while I was sitting in the front passenger seat. He got pretty angry and struggled with me, but I took control and got us away from there. I was adamant.
Sometime later there was an account of two other fellows who'd driven off into the crater in a VW bug and died. The quarry had no security fence around it. Local kids often went up there to hang out or party. Really brave ones would dive into the lake at the bottom from the top edge. Apparently it was only fatal if you took the dive in a car. Though one of our other friends who plunged in feet first at a party said impact drove his shorts painfully up in-between his legs, and you had to hold your nose or you could be strangled by water being forced up there too. Every year or two there's a new report of folks dying up there. Usually teenagers I believe. I firmly believe Steve and I almost joined them. But to this day I don't know if that was Steve's intent. We may both have been lovesick at the time over various girls. But it's too far back for me to be certain.
I'll try to add more here about my car-related experiences with Steve, as I recall them.
My first crash
One incident which greatly affected my driving tendencies afterwards occured when I'd only had Shadow maybe a month or two, and was still new to driving altogether. I guess I was sixteen or so, as I'd begun working to buy a car at age 15.
I and a friend were in Shadow when we hit a progression of lengthy straightaways, maybe two or three in a row, separated by curves which weren't too bad in themselves. But the end of the series involved a fairly serious curve.
This was a paved two lane state highway.
The visibility on the straightaways was pretty good, so I could see nothing was coming for quite a ways as we entered the first section. I guess I decided to show off for my friend. I sped up, changed lanes, and began passing everybody on the road for the next half mile or so, curves and all.
Note here that not only was I a woefully inexperienced driver, but I was unfamiliar with the road as well as my own car's capabilities, in just about every way. Plus I was an immature teenage male with way too much power at my beck and call.
As it's been maybe 30 years since that event, and I was pretty shaken up by it too, my recall is fairly hazy. But what I think happened is this:
On the last leg of the straightaway I saw the approaching curve looked much worse than the last few, disappearing abruptly behind a hill. So I needed to get back into the proper lane pronto. Which might have meant speeding up even more to get ahead of the cars there. Then there may have been cars suddenly visible around the bad bend coming at me in the present lane. YIKES! I think I panicked, gave Shadow too much gas to help get into the right-hand lane again, then hit the brakes way too hard even as I was still in transition.
So I lost control.
The whole car spun around like a top as we approached the curve, with the view in the windshield basically a blur. How all the other cars both ahead and behind us kept from hitting us I'll never know.
The spin burned off lots of our speed and we ended up plowing into the hill to the left side of the road, rather than running off into the lower and flatter ground on the right.
If I remember correctly Shadow wasn't very badly damaged at all. It seems the hill was pretty soft. Shadow took the main impact on his whole left side, including the front and rear corner posts.
It might be neither my friend or I were wearing seat belts at the time. So things could have been much much worse. I ended up calling a wrecker for the car, mostly out of inexperience and being shaken up I believe. I probably could have simply driven the car back with little problem, had I possessed the presence of mind. But this was my very first auto accident after all.
That incident helped me resolve to exert better control over my urges in the future, as well as better learn to drive in general, and get to know my car better. And improve its handling too.
But truth be told, it was likely entirely my own fault we wrecked, not Shadow's. Much much later I'd discover that curve and speed were well within the ultimate Shadowfast's capabilities-- and likely inside the unmodified car's capacity as well. It was just that the driver was flawed, and making one bad decision after another.
Hard lesson learned: Wide-angle rear view mirrors are some of the very best safety devices you can add to a car. Especially if your auto has blind spots. A quick head-turn before a manuever might save your butt too.
Once, long before I had the big wide angle mirror in Shadow, my best friend and I were headed home in Shadow on a well lit five lane highway. Maybe we'd been at a high school basketball game or something. We were cold stone sober, but maybe traveling abnormally slow for the given road (like 15 or 20 mph). I checked my standard small mirrors (interior and twin door mirrors) and then began gradually changing lanes when SMACK! I got hit by a VW bug apparently traveling much faster than we were. Shadow was hit pretty much dead center on the driver's side rear wheel if I recall. Shadow, like all 1969 Mustangs, had a pretty big blind spot regarding both quarter panel sides. Trusting the standard small mirrors to protect you simply didn't work. As I learned the hard way.
I never ever had anything like that happen again after I got the wide-angle. But I also physically turn my head to look too, ever since that incident.
To see a sampling of crashes installing a wide-angle mirror helped me avoid later, CLICK HERE.
Hard lesson learned: Out of seat belts can also mean out of control
I learned the value of seat belts the hard way, when Shadow and I had to make a life-and-death decision for someone else on the road. The fact I wasn't wearing my seat belt that day caused me pretty severe financial repercussions for maybe a full year after the event. Not to mention the damage suffered by Shadow. And it could have been worse still. For I was very, very lucky that day.
But if I'd been wearing my seat belt the incident would barely have been a blip on the radar.
I was doing maybe forty or fifty mph. A perfectly reasonable speed for the highway I was traveling. But there was something of a rise or hill in the road, and just past that a side street from which people could emerge onto the highway. I wasn't cruising around aimlessly. I'd just gotten off work and was headed home, only a mile or two away.
The traffic stats will tell you most accidents occur close to home.
Someone in a very low slung small car abruptly pulled out of the side road and into the highway directly in front of me, at the perfect moment I was about to crest the hill. The little car was a four banger and slow as the hills, plus so short in height it was simply invisible until things were too late for less than drastic action. The little car's speed and its driver's road view weren't helped any by the fact the car was crammed full of people.
I also recognized the car model as one recently in the news for bursting into flame from rear end collisions.
To avoid a bad collision with the car I had to run off the road and around them. There was considerable gravel and pretty severe humps in that off-road course. But nothing I and Shadow couldn't handle.
If only I'd been wearing my seat belt.
I swerved to avoid the other car, and went into the gravel and moguls, as you might call the humps on a ski course.
I struck the humps and was violently thrown out of my driver's seat and into my passenger seat, somehow clearing the center console with no problem at all. I can't remember if my head struck the car roof but it seems it would have. So maybe that contributed to my shock. One moment I was in control, the next I was just a hapless passenger in a nightmare, watching everything happen around me.
Now the moguls were steering the car. The rear end came around a bit, even as we continued to be violently thrown up and down. Suddenly I was thrown back into the driver's seat again. I didn't get the chance to regain control though, for it was at that moment we struck the corner of a brick building, ruining Shadow's passenger side.
If I hadn't been thrown back into the driver's seat again I might have been killed or severely injured.
Even after hitting the building Shadow's motor was still running. I was too stunned to do anything. I numbly watched without comprehension as Shadow slowly drove across the highway and into a parking lot on the other side, all on its own. Across the same three-lane highway I had been doing 40-50 mph on maybe one or two heartbeats before. And that other cars were doing the same.
I was very very lucky not to get hit.
I don't think I even had the presence of mind to take hold of the steering wheel again until we were already in the parking lot. But I finally came to my senses and stopped the car there.
From that moment on I always wore seat belts when driving. For I'm convinced that particular crash was a waste: I'm certain if I'd been belted I'd never have lost control of the car, and never struck the building, but simply swerved around the other car and gotten ahead of them on the highway.
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