The Detroit News published a good article today about Tom Nagle, who’s going to drive his 2004 Corvette (rebuilt to look like a 1961 model) on Route 66 from California eastward. About a dozen other Corvettes will join him.
Nagle my type of guy because of this:
Cruisers like Nagle look askance at those who take their cars from place to place without driving them. Those are the “trailer queens.” Nagle’s kind also loves the gears and polish, but it’s a reverence of the road that revs their imagination, as does the wayfarer’s credo: The journey is as much the adventure as the destination.
“Part of my love of cars is driving them,” Nagle said. “That’s what I built it for.” […]
… [H]e will log about 7,000 miles on his trip — to Detroit and back — to the clucking disapproval of some car nuts who frown upon it if it isn’t all original equipment. Last year’s trip weathered the made-over car a little bit: “Some stone chips in it, one or two, but not many,” he said. “That’s life.”
Even old cars are meant to be driven, not sit around as museum pieces.
Good for him. That’s why you will never, ever see Gretchen on a trailer … or getting some froufrou paint job with airbrushed flames.