EP4: Route 66, Roadtrips and the Third Wall

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In this episode Jon & Mark explore subjects like U.S. road trips, conferences, motorcycles, classic car restoration, and racing history. Jon shares his experience of an open garage event, bringing out his collection for neighbors, and raves about his Yoshimura-equipped GSXR 1100. Mark expresses his appreciation for both historical content and hands-on projects like Todd’s Workshop, as well as the excitement of road trips in rental Mustangs across the U.S. The duo reminisces about memorable driving experiences, including Route 66 and dangerous mishaps. They also discuss efforts to preserve the motorcycle course at San Francisco City College, emphasizing the importance of maintaining automotive history for future generations.

 

Notes

Jon Summers is the Motoring Historian. He was a company car thrashing technology sales rep that turned into a fairly inept sports bike rider. On his show he gets together with various co-hosts to talk about new and old cars, driving, motorbikes, motor racing, motoring travel.

The Drive Home, along Route 66: 

  • M and J’s Roadtrip Experience in the mid nineties in our ‘79 Lincoln Town Car
  • Route 66 exploration and found it in spades – hundreds of bypassed town, thousands of abandoned cars, derelict buildings; a sense of the continual evolution of the road; 1926, and the designation of Route 66, was just one iteration of the continually evolving road west; more like The Ridgeway than the M1
  • Cadillac Ranch vs. Stone Henge
  • Cannonballing vs. low speed
  • M’s vacation explorations of the American West, by Mustang V8 rental

Quick Fire:

Transcript

[00:00:00] John Summers is the motoring historian. He was a company car thrashing technology sales rep that turned into a fairly inept sports bike rider. Hailing from California, he collects cars and bikes built with plenty of cheap and fast, and not much reliable. On his show, he gets together with various co hosts to talk about new and old cars, driving, motorbikes, motor racing, and motoring travel.

Good day, good morning, good afternoon. It’s John Summers, the motoring historian, here again with School Friend. Mark Gammy, how are you Mark? I’m living the dream, baby. Ah, I’m pleased to hear it. Um, yeah, so, um, just thought we would talk about US road trips today, thought we would talk about the conference that I did at, uh, um, Midway 2 last week, and, [00:01:00] uh, and anything else that took our fancy for the next sort of 40 minutes or so, 45 or an hour.

It’s been an hour. Actually, they’ve all been different lengths because, of course, I can’t edit for, um, for anything worth a damn. We do talk a lot of shit. We do talk a lot of shit. And, in fact, the last one, I, I, I edited episode three just, just yesterday because I’m going to break down. The third wall, this is one of the things about the real housewives, right?

If you’re on the real housewives and you’re splitting up with your husband, you can’t be like, we’re splitting up because he’s butthurt because I’m more famous and make more money than him because you’re like referring to the show. You can’t like refer to the show. Do you see what I mean? You can’t break the third wall.

And what they’ve done in some reality TV shows is is you’ll hear the producer talking as a way to make it. seem more real. You’ll hear the producer like asking questions because we all know that the third wall’s there, so why not? Well, I’m not going to pretend like, you know, it’s just us [00:02:00] chickens talking.

This is not just us chickens talking. The fact that it’s being recorded changes what we’re Right. No, I’m totally natural. Well, well, okay. Right. Okay. But that is in fact, whilst that as we’re, let’s break down the third war completely. That is what I’m trying to achieve. It’s, it’s the Mike Brewer Aand Catnet.

When you meet the real person, they are similar to the persona that they. portray on the tv because it’s really hard to do that if you’ve that’s just why i’m doing the voice because i can be the real me in conversation with you over on with voice but i can’t be the real with me if i’m i’m sitting here looking at myself talking to you here i couldn’t be as scruffy as i am or Well, maybe I could.

I don’t know. I mean, this is the, the YouTube way. I mean, in YouTube nowadays, we got all these shots up people’s noses and all of shaky camera and all of this kind of Blair witch bollocks, isn’t it? So I don’t know, maybe I could do that, [00:03:00] but I don’t, I don’t feel comfortable with that because when you make it a visual medium, you make it mostly about the visual and I don’t want it to be mostly about the visual, I don’t know.

I mean, I was watching that Aidan Millwood. Formula one site before we, uh, we came online here and, and, uh, he’s interesting because he sets out to tell a great story that he researches really well, but the photographs are shitty and he himself is, is not the most visually appealing bloke and yet he’s happy to put, you know, he himself said, I always think he’s in office environment, but it’s a bit like yours, Gary.

Um, you know, he’s happy to have that kind of. of playing, you know, I’m just at my house. And I’ve done all this research about Formula One because I’m interested in it and I’m sharing it with you and I’m using Wikipedia images to, you know, break up the monotony a little bit. But the main thing is what I’m saying rather than the visual image.

Which [00:04:00] takes us back to Just Go Drive, doesn’t it? Which I’m going to plug a little bit because I actually watched those videos that we did a couple of years ago. And I think they’re interesting because Um, I actually don’t think they’re too bad. I just think when you watch a YouTube video, you’re expecting like a Top Gear style review of a car.

You’re not expecting b roll with insightful commentary. If there’s b roll, you’re expecting the commentary to be anodyne. And if there’s exciting film, the commentary still may be worthwhile or may not be. You can still be hit and miss with with. Anyway, so I, I, but I watch that stuff again and I’m actually quite happy with it.

I don’t, I don’t really mind it. We still need to, like, launch the, um, the 45 minute NASCAR, um, early history of NASCAR video that we did as well. Because we put quite a lot of effort into that. I’m just still kicking around on my hard drive. We need to get that up. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, I, I had considered, of course, I was thinking this is a misnomer.

Is somebody listening to this thinking I was [00:05:00] expecting motion history? Where is the history of the Suzuki GSXR? I want to know what happened in the 1969 Spanish Grand Prix from Barcelona in gory detail. I don’t know anything that maybe there isn’t a, there is an audience for that out there, isn’t it? But I didn’t want to do, I feel like that’s better done in the written form.

That’s what John Summers. net’s for. Whereas. This form is for, you know, us chickens. Just, uh, well, if they look it up, I think we get to that in episode 263. So they just need to hang out a little bit. Well, or go to order to go to john summers. net and ancient, ancient video. But you see that whole video, the reason that took you ages to do was because you were trying to layer in the right image.

And when I was saying junior Johnson, you needed to be shown junior Johnson, not David Pearson. And, and getting all that stuff right, and it’s a total pain in the arse, 99 percent done now, so we should definitely get it out. But you know what, it’s a lot less of arse than those monks in the [00:06:00] medieval period writing Latin with quills and ink, and, or, and do it in their eyes, because they were trying to work with candles late at night, so if you’re gonna, at least it’s, at least we can preserve what we have in a, in a sensible kind of Uh, of a way.

Yeah. So, let me begin, um, this, um, this conference by, um, having you Google up Watkins Glen original track, right? If you Google up an original track map of Watkins Glen, um, and if you’re listening in the car or something, you know, I know you can’t Google it up and we always talk about these visual images.

The point is that Watkins Glen was set up to feel like a European circuit. So the main start finish is the main high street through the town, and then you turn off the high street and rather like the Targa Florio, you climb up this crazy hill, a long straight, loads of sweeping [00:07:00] around, far more like the Nürburgring.

Or spa than like the Tar Florio. Um, you can drive the roads now. Um, and that final corner, big Bend, which is this long downhill right-hander, my word, if that’s not one of the best corners in Motorsport, and I include, you know, I include corners at Spa in, in that, that Big Bend, crappy name, great corner. Um, yeah, it’s a very American name to be fair.

Well, it is. Accurate, too. So, the other thing is, is if you look, if you look at the start finish and they turn right and they go up the hill, that long right hander there, the motel that I stay in is there. And it’s one of these motels where they don’t take, you have to like call up by phone, they’re not on hotels.

com or anything like that, you know, and they, they have like one of those old [00:08:00] credit card machines that, you know, you put it down and you run the thing backwards and forth, but the driver stayed there. That’s why I stay in that, um, in that motel because that’s where, where the driver stayed and there’s loads of driver.

memorabilia in in the bar and the bar is quite an impressive bar and if I tell you that when I Rocked up to to check in on this last visit. There was a gun auction Going on, going like more pickup trucks than you could shake a stick out parked up outside. And as I came in, as I came in, they were hammering a Remington for 550 bucks.

You know, that was the, the, uh, uh, yeah, the, the auctioneer was a girl in her mid twenties and she wasn’t. absolute rock star, right? It was worth, it was worth watching. It was worth watching the gun auction because this girl was, was, uh, was an absolute Belcher. And of course I didn’t get a name and can’t remember the auction company, but that was a pretty cool upstate New York travel experience.

But yeah, if you look further around the [00:09:00] course, as the course crosses the railway line, Which in period was like, you know, a total like, and this is they, they use it in the early fifties. So the cars are like Al Arnson, very early Ferraris. So old, uh, Miles Collier’s father was killed on that fast. Um, I, I think it’s a right hander.

Maybe it’s a, yeah, maybe it’s a left. Maybe it’s a right hander, but there’s a fast sweeper up at the top of the course there. But, um, it basically. Part of it’s A roads. A lot of it is B roads. A lot of that top part of the course feels like a like an English B road. So like a British sports car would be really good, really good along it.

But yeah, as I say, that big bend is a long sweeping downhill. Um, yeah, so it’s the kind of course that you can see a Nuvolari doing well where you were, uh, you know, so if you had big balls. It’s a good course. Um, so they built, of course, the road course, which the NASCAR guys and IndyCar in Formula One [00:10:00] used for a bit.

They built that to try and replicate it, but that’s about 10 miles out of town. Um, and in the town, there’s affiliated to the library. There’s an organization called the International Motor Racing Research Center, and it’s an archive. Of car stuff. So every car book that I’ve got on my shelf, they have as well.

It’s like, and plus like a ton more, you know, when the, their version, the American version of Murray Walker, Chris Okonomaki, um, when, when he popped on to where pastors knew a few years ago, his wife donated his archive. To the IMRRC. Um, yeah. So a library where if you call them, they’ll do work in a bit like the national motor museum that do work and research for you.

Um, cool. But yeah, [00:11:00] yeah. I, unfortunately a little bit of a backwater and because they’re not commercially viable. You know they rely on donations That makes me always feel awkward about what a potential future might might look like. I mean i’m I’ve I’m not a businessman and I didn’t enjoy the world of business, but I just I’m just uncomfortable with anything that doesn’t have a sort of sustaining income that’s relying on a on a sort of handout and doesn’t um, you know, yeah, so I, I, I, I felt Also, I guess I feel also that there are a few centers like this that have a lot of knowledge and they should be like nodes on a greater network.

So when you are researching information about Indianapolis, it should dig into the Rev’s archive. It should dig into, you know, George Simeone’s archive in Philadelphia. It should dig into, um, the National Motor Museum. It should be in all these places at once, [00:12:00] rather than these information being sort of siloed away.

So. You know, you need to like, it’s like old fashioned history. You need to go to these places and like, look through the books and talk to the historians to, which is fun for like a beardy old historian like me, but I just, I just don’t feel it’s like the future of, of, If, you know, if we’re to preserve motorsport, if, you know, people in 120 years time are to understand what was so cool about the Porsche 956, then we need to do better than grey haired blokes and books on shelves is, is my, uh, Um, this is you said I was, I was, I told you I was edited in number three.

You said in number three, um, you know, like I, I don’t want to walk around a museum where the cars are sitting there and they haven’t even bothered to put up a TV screen where you can see the car driving. The one year, every [00:13:00] millennium, they fire it up and you’re going to hear and hear it. That was the main point you were making the sound.

Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, and, and this is not dissimilar from, um, old Michael shanks. Uh, uh, Sanford there in this, this notion that, that he had after going around this art gallery in the Hague, where, um, they had these still lives, I’ve probably told you this before, they had these still lives, so the still life would be like a bottle of wine and a brass bowl with some fruit in it, and then they would have the brass bowl on a plinth at the side, so you’ve sort of got the art, and then you’ve got like a 3D Representation of it, which is it, which is saying, which suddenly, right, the both things are more, there’s a symbiosis there.

The art is, you know, so yeah, so you can, if you’ve got film of the car running in theory, you can preserve the car in perpetuity and not wear out by running it, driving it all the [00:14:00] time. But you can still have the pleasure of making it come alive. And as virtual reality gets better and better, I feel we’re duty bound to do that.

I mean, already a driving game of racing a blower Bentley at Lamont is more realistic than you and me buying a Bentley. Go in there and driving down the Mozart driving down the road from Paris to tour 130 miles an hour. I mean, it’s it’s so there’s there’s room for both, right? But is having the real Bentley and being able to drive it around and then having like a VR representation.

Of it, which is grounded in, it’s not Mario car. It’s grounded in the reality that Benji field gave us when he wrote his impressions of what it was like to race down the Mozart straight. You know, we can, the computer can make the road narrow again. The computer can make the road rough again. Can’t it, you know, which

Oh dude. Like, I mean, you know that, that somewhat exists [00:15:00] if you, like, if you set up a VR connection to something like GP Legends or something, you, you know, you can do pretty good sim racing stuff based on, you know, the 1957, you know, GP seasons. So you do all the old tr So there’s a lot of stuff coming along and with the, um, you know, my boss, I was just at a conference the last couple of days.

My boss’s lad, um, I say lad, I think he’s like 23 or something, but you know, he races sim racing, he plays iRacing, and he, and uh, My boss had endless issues with a three letter acronym company, um, delivery firm with a brown shield, um, Having issues delivering, finding the hotel in central London that’s very near to Heathrow.

Um, but anyway, we got this, we got the box delivered and it was some 350 or 400 bucks set of pedals by Fanatec, um, that are the pedals. And there’s full sort of varying resistance in the pedals and you can get full geared ratio sort of resistance stuff on the steering wheels now that actually feels like you can sell, you can [00:16:00] have a really sexy setup at home that used to be.

So the preserve of the McLaren center, you know, when they started doing VR, you can very much get more advanced probably than they had, maybe not in terms of full access and the G on the, on the chairs and so forth, but you know, you can approach that in a way that you never used to be able to these days.

But the secondary point I’ll make is. Back to your point about the museums. It’s so myopic. These places are often short of cash. They’re often having trouble making ends meet and sustaining what should be, as you say, an archive in the physical. Um, but look at how successful Goodwood is. Look at how successful a lot of these retro classics are.

Why don’t these places rent out a track for a day? Tracks need, like, often, especially in the winter, need Money as well because they’re not being utilized in the same way. Why don’t these people race rent these places out take the cars there and once and sell tickets people would come yeah you’re gonna sell a shitload of tickets over a long weekend make a load of money it’s probably gonna see the museum through for the rest of the year and they get turned [00:17:00] over once a year it’s only a few other you know they’re probably gonna do 30 or 50 miles, but the more you do, the more you put into it, the more they actually give it a few beans and like, you know, get the back end out, the more people will come.

So it’s, I think there’s, there’s more that can be done in that area as well. This is exactly what my presentation at the conference was about. It was about how the. The hobby is, is changing, right? It was, it was kind of about YouTube, but I touched on the fact that there is this contradiction between museums closing and contradict and collections being liquidized and pebble being bigger than ever, um, you know, car show cars and coffee events being out of control.

The value of collectible cars of all a, you know, of all shapes and sizes, but particularly, you know, nineties stuff. There is, you know, they, yeah, so, um, yeah, but what, what my, um, you know, so with, [00:18:00] there is definitely scope to have people, um,

you know, I don’t know, I don’t know, nobody ever goes to the museum in your hometown, you never visit the museums and you know, when did you last go to the British Museum? When did you last go to the Natural History Museum? Like decades and decades ago, you don’t go to the things that are close to you and, and, um, Yeah.

So maybe the notion that Goodwood is this like one off thing that you have to go to where you have to buy the tickets and all of that, you know, it becomes like a Prada handbag, that the fact that it’s 30, 000, not 3, 000 or 300, that alone makes it You know, covetably it’s rareness makes it, you know, the, the, and there is a, isn’t there an economic phenomenon where as the price goes up, it becomes more desirable, not less desirable because it has this, because that confers exclusivity or it [00:19:00] conveys the greatest status for the owner, right?

Cause you know, everyone knows how much money you spend on it kind of thing. Um, you know, yeah. So what we say, there’s definitely room for a shake up in the way that we think about marketing classic cars, um, or marketing automobility altogether. Um, the conference, one of the things that came up repeatedly was this notion that, um, we, we need to take a model from the horsey people and, and that once upon a time horses were, you know, 100 years ago, horses were, you know, being used.

as trucks, um, you know, basically, and now they’re exclusively as sports cars, you know, it’s dressage, it’s, it’s, and what’s a dressage, if not a demonstration of an everyday skill, if you had to ride a horse every day, you basically, if you were going to ride the horse properly and not have the horse, Be a paid in the house and you need it to be about as good, not [00:20:00] as good as like top dressage now, you know what I mean?

Just as driving on a track, driving a Morris minor round a track in a hundred years time is going to be similar to, you know, racing, you see what I mean? There’s, there’s this notion of pulling together the skills. I’m not really, you know. Um, where exactly where I’m, I’m going with that, but, but yeah. I hear what you’re saying.

Yeah. Yeah. Um, especially as it becomes rarer. Um, yeah. Again, I was chatting to a chap at the conference and he said that, uh, he’s, he lives in the States and his neighbor’s car had been broken into and they’d broken into it, got in and sat in and then just got out and walked off because it was a stick shift.

Yeah. Yeah. It is a fairly, uh, uh, well known thing that the best way to stop your car getting stolen in California is drive something with manual transmission. Um, Yeah, and of course, this is why so many hypercars went to automatics, [00:21:00] because, you know, the reality is managing a V12 stick shift in everyday traffic is, you know.

It’s a thing. You need to be good. You need to be committed and there is always that chance that, you know, I, I don’t know. I mean, there are hills. Um, I remember I, you know, if I use the Mustang for the school run, I will drive a particular route to avoid having to do a stoppy starty through a four way intersection uphill where there’s a hundred yards of cars because the, the, the clutch pedal needs to be on the floor all the time.

And, and, you know, I don’t know if there’s something wrong with the clutch or the clutch is just heavy on that, on that Mustang, but you know, my, my leg for one hour, I’m like an old man. I’ll get back pain if I do, you know, so yeah. Yeah. Okay. So what it’s, so I presented a lot on YouTube, right? It was about what I talked about was how it was most [00:22:00] racing.

This is which, which conference. So this is the conference at the places in what I think of as Glen and who else is there? It’s, uh, so it’s at this IMRRC, like international motor racing research center. And the small conference, you know, there’s maybe 50 people in attendance, if that. Um, but this bridge that I’ve always tried to stand on between the academics and the car racing people, because remember the car racing people often have a lot of money.

They’re often really enthusiastic about cars, but they’re, they’re what the academics call folk historians. The, they, they’re not trained historians. They, they like telling anecdotes, um, you know, bench racing in, in, in our parlance, but they’re not historians in, in the sense of, you know, when you talk to academic historians about [00:23:00] cars, what they say is that cars don’t have.

Any agency. In other words, we can talk about Henry Ford. We can talk about Alfred Sloane and talk about Ferruccio Lamborghini, but we can’t talk about Lamborghini as as a like a Lamborghini car. This is just not in the same realm as and and a lot of this right is the composition of people who are historians, which is, you know, it’s it’s a liberal leaning.

Female leaning profession. And that’s very obvious when you go to the, to, to the conferences. So, um, you know, I, this event’s different from that, right? The academics who come are car enthusiasts and the non academics who come are folk historians. Who are really clever people who work like historians. So, for example, Don Kapp, [00:24:00] who you will see, you know, knocking around, who’s a leading light at the conference, um, former Army Ranger, um, multiple, you know, helicopter shot out of the sky in Nam, numerous times, um, has focused his energies in more recent years on being not just a historian, but on encouraging people like me to write and talk about motor racing history, did a big thing about the origin of the Silver Arrows.

Um, He sponsored a paper this time from this guy in New Zealand who thinks he can unpick a number of very mysterious histories of Italian 50s racing cars. And this, this is a rat hole that’s, that’s worth disappearing down, right? Because this is what the, the, the conference is, is, is really about. [00:25:00] Um, uh, it seems the Italians registered all of their cars and identified their cars, like motorcycles, by the engine.

Whereas in Europe, we always did it by the body. This would seem to be a trivial detail, wouldn’t it? Right? So, in other words, when Luigi and Mario were building the car, they put engine one in chassis one. Now, somebody then goes out and bends up chassis one, which never happened, would it? No. You take engine one out and you put it in chassis two, and that car becomes Car number one, that’s now chassis, that’s now car one VIN number one, when that car gets shipped abroad, when it gets put into racing manifests, it’s car number one [00:26:00] in like, yeah, in actuality, right?

It’s car number two, according to how we Europeans feel about it. So fast forward 50 years when Maserati 250Fs are collectible. Well, it really matters whether this was the car that Sterling Moss raced and won, that Fangio was photographed in in that famous picture with the damaged nose and the car in a full blooded four wheel drift.

Right. If you can identify that car or even just that engine, that engine and gearbox, you know, the identifying that specific car is a much more important thing. Well, and the trail is completely, completely blurred. Well, um, I saw the paper presented before a couple of years ago before the pandemic, and there was a car broker, [00:27:00] classic car broker, racing car broker, well known guy in the audience and I happened to be stood.

By him, um, sort of with him for lunch, you know, in line for lunch immediately after the presentation. So I said to him, what did you make of that Maserati thing? And he said he thought it was a load of old bollocks. And of course, because He has sold many of those cars and he sold the car saying this chassis was the chassis that Sterling Moss used to win in Monaco in 1954.

You know what I mean? I, you know, this was the car that did the deed. Yet. Now, the paperwork seems completely blurred and crossed out, right? Because the way that it was annotated from the factory and the way that it was So, so if you think of it, so car number two leaves the factory as car number two. But when it comes back to the factory and [00:28:00] gets engine number five It becomes car number five, but according to our reckoning, it’s not car number five.

It’s actually still car number two, right? It’s got the dinks and the louvers and the brakes and everything of car. So you see how it should be a fairly simple thing, but actually. It becomes hideously complicated. So that’s the stuff that Don Capps is, is ready to, to do is pick at those wounds. And he’ll say, you know, I can’t get Doug Nye.

I can’t get my friend Doug Nye to say this. And I’m like, I said to him in the conference, Don, like, that’s because Doug is retained by the auction companies and the auction companies have a business, which is predicated on the widget. being a widget, not a widget that had a wadget changed into it. And, and so this, so this bloke that you’ve wheeled in this Trevor Lister [00:29:00] guy from New Zealand who looks like he played far too much rugby and has put together these crazy spreadsheets where he thinks it’s not just Maserati 250Fs.

He thinks it’s Seatas, it’s Oscars. Of course, it’s Ferraris. But there’s an additional like level of double layer of complexity with Ferrari. One being that they cheated with the numbers. Basically, it looks like they deliberately bend the rules. Who would imagine for deliberately bend the rules? Plus, you’ve got the obfuscation of the fact that the cars have been worth a lot of money for ages.

So you add the whole like Lord Brocket thing. Do you remember Lord Brocket? This is in the 80s, English Lord, um, when Ferrari prices went up, he started doing things like cutting up some cars to make better ones and faking up the identity of the better one. And that was cool. But by that time, like half a dozen cars, like nice ish cars, cars that would be worth millions now, had been cut up to make fakey do.[00:30:00]

GTOs basically that was that was it was it was oh, it’s absolutely fingernails down the down the blackboard when you think about it But so when you look back at that, right, that’s how the cars were treated in period So the ferraris particularly, uh, and they’re of course worth telephone dial amounts money now.

So so So for somebody like the car broker who I won’t name, um, but really well known, you’ve seen him advertised, handles the very, very best cars, one of the top two or three car brokers, um, you know, if we were to go back with a voice naming car brokers, he would be one of the first three or four names that we would, uh, we will come up with, um, yeah, he’s to, to dig into that would just be destroyed.

Um, You know, any sense of value or provenance and, and it’s a bit like digging into allegations of cheating in NASCAR. It’s like who gains from it? So when Smokey Unix said that [00:31:00] Fireball Roberts won the 1962, you know, Daytona 500 with a supercharger. He wrote that. Yet, you know, nobody found any evidence of it.

The car’s long since destroyed. All he did was kind of pee on Fireball’s achievement somewhat, didn’t he? He didn’t really like we can’t prove it and I’m not saying you shouldn’t have written it if he thought it was true. I’m just saying in terms of, of the clarity of history. It never leaves them. It never leaves them.

Nigel was the same at Goodwood in his little speech. They’re still snarky and annoyed and grudge holding. I think a lot. Yeah, yeah, I just wonder. What gives them the vim and vigour, you know? Yeah, yeah, well, well, Smokey Eunuch was certainly a vim and vigour kind of person. And of course there’s, if you’ve looked online, I’ve dug into it.

There’s stories about, well, where could the Supercharger have been? How could NASCAR have missed it? And could Smokey have had it on there and removed it? And I, I just think it was an old man. You know, talking some shit at [00:32:00] the end of his life, Smokey was like that, and I don’t think there was ever a Supercharger on the car, and I feel like there’s like an asterisk next to Fireball’s achievement, where he was super dominant, like dominant in a way that you never see in NASCAR now, and I feel it was partly Smokey’s car, and I feel that Smokey’s car probably was a bit cheaty, but I feel like Fireball was really fucking amazing, That weekend, it was his day of days, if you like.

And Smokey, you know, denigrated that for, for, you know, just, but that, but you know, that’s just, cause I can’t imagine how a supercharger would fit. But the point is digging into allegations of NASCAR cheating just makes everybody look bad. You know, when David Pearson won all those super speedway victories with the Wood brothers, you know, was that cheating?

You know, if you, I listened to a Pearson interview recently, um, where he was saying, oh, you know, cause oh, petty, he’d often have the big motor. And I’m thinking, yeah, but what did the Wood Brothers do to your car? You know, no, I, you know, [00:33:00] nobody was within the rules. So, you know, but, but to dig into that takes away from the, the greatness of, uh, of the individual, of the individual driver.

The point I was making in my presentation was looking at YouTube and saying, YouTube has changed the way that we talk about cars. Um, if you want to see, if you want to know who, how good Fangio was, You have to read, you know, you have to like read history and do standard history. You have to like read books and compare and contrast and secondary sources and what did contemporaries think and, you know, yeah, it’s, it’s this pure hardcore history.

Whereas if you want to know how good Senna was, you just watch the races. They’re all on YouTube. You can see. You can see for yourself whether or not he’s better. Well, that’s awesome as a, as a history thing. And now you’ve got people on YouTube doing that. That Aiden Millwood guy I was talking about earlier.

You’ve got NASCAR guys doing that. [00:34:00] You, you’ve got people taking things like, um, Alan Grice, I’m not sure if you’ve heard of him. He was a total maverick racing in South Africa, racing in Australia. He was like a Bathurst guy. Well, in the mid eighties, Holden, the Holden factory team were like, we’re going to race in Europe.

Gricey, the privateer, he was like, I’m coming too. I’m gonna take my Holden as well. So you’ve got Peter Brock with the deal with the Holden dealer team, like racing against six through fives and capris and things like that. And then you’ve got this white Holden, Grey’s, Holden, not sponsored by anybody.

Chick D was the name, that’s some haulage company from the town that he was on. Chick E was, was was the sponsor. Grey was faster. than the DTV, the dealer team, and even won some races in the course of the season, right? Amazing [00:35:00] story. This super 100 mile an hour guy tells that story, right? Which I never would have got.

I’m not going to sit there and watch every You know, every round of the European touring car championship from 1986. But when supermoto 100 miles an hour packages up for me, there’s a new narrative and a new way of telling the story. So I talked about that. I talked about old Hoovey and the supercar guys and how, remember I told that story about the.

You know, three dozen McLarens that nearly ran me over when, uh, when I was at Pebble. And I couldn’t believe how many Lamborghinis and McLarens and new supercars that there were at Pebble. Yeah, I, I, that’s, Hoovy is part of this and these other YouTube guys who, Hoovy has three Lamborghinis paid for by the channel.

Paid for by this stupid persona that he’s got where he talks about cars and doesn’t really do anything with them. He just fixes them. And then sells them. He doesn’t really like, he doesn’t, [00:36:00] it’s not like he goes to the track. It’s not like he’s like setting quarter mile times. It’s not like he’s, you know what I mean?

He doesn’t, um, yeah. So, uh, yet what he, yet the literally does is enough for him to generate an income from that. So I thought that was worth, that was worth talking about, but to be honest, I’ve had enough of the whole, like motor racing as a mediated experience. I want to go back and do proper, like.

Hardcore history. So I think what I’m going to do next. Um, there was, uh, I’m a member of the society of automotive historians and, uh, a woman locally contacted the society saying like my dad was into motor racing. He’s got all these magazines from the 1950s. Would you be interested in them? So the society contacted me as the local member.

I met her and there were all these oval track racing stuff from the 40s and the 50s. It seems that within my, within like 10 [00:37:00] miles of my home, there were half a dozen racetracks. And in that brief window after the war, but before everyone had a TV, watching overracing was an enormous thing in, in the US.

So I’m going to do a bit of research into that. I’m going to try and do it on. This is, I’m. Making this up as I go on. I’ve never said this out loud before. I just was going around inside my head. When I was a tour guide in Rome, I used to be able to stand in the forum and tell the whole story of Rome from one spot in the forum.

Literally from, you know, over there in 750 BC, right the way round to, and there in 430 AD. You know, you could just turn around and, and, and it was, it wasn’t a, it was a great device as a tour guide because it was so clever fundamentally as I’ll blow my toot my own horn with that. But it was actually a shitty tool because the people have to stand still and then your feet hurt and you get bored and you get fidgety and you stop listening.

[00:38:00] You need to walk and talk. You need to talk for like two minutes and then walk. It doesn’t matter how significant what you’re looking at is you have to walk and talk, walk and talk to keep the, uh, the, the, the punters, uh, the punters happy, but I wanted to do the same thing with, um, I feel like I could do.

I want, um, what was I talking about? I was talking about the same as. You know, standing in the middle of Rome. What was I going to do that with? I was going to do that with what was I talking about the circuit racing stuff that you were going to do the research into. Yeah, I could do the same thing standing in, so you could, so you could say it from my home in 1930.

From my home, from where I’m sitting at the moment in 1900, what could I go and see in 1910? What could I go and see in 1920, in 1930? Because it would change because something else I was gonna talk about. And one of my favorite presenter, um, is, is this guy Joe. Um, at the conference is this guy Joe Leonard.

Who [00:39:00] again has a really interesting background, successful businessman, um, obsessive car guy throughout his life, classicist, and then, um, I had a long conversation with him about Thucydides on a bus ride one time, um. He studied. So, um, Duesenberg, class judge at Pebble Beach for Duesenberg, um, did a really interesting piece about Duesenberg racing cars a few years ago, did a really interesting piece this time about people who’d finished second at Indianapolis a lot of times.

So kind of like Lloyd Ruby, but even the kind of beardy historians who, uh, represented at the IMRRC. They weren’t, you know, these are drivers who we’ve not heard of. And a lot of these guys raced on board tracks, which is with all the splinters, sprint cars on board tracks. Yeah, yes, your face says it all.

It was Yeah, man, Jesus. It was dangerous [00:40:00] as a motherfucker. Imagine when the track starts to break up, and then you fall out of your car and accidentally impale yourself on a piece of 2×4 that’s come up off the track. I mean, it just, it is eye It’s not entirely Eye popping, dangerous, and there’s no fucking history of it whatsoever.

And there are books and I need to dig into like, ’cause the books are expensive ’cause they’re rare. So I, I need to dig into that. So I think I might go back and do that kind of hardcore history rather than doing this kind of, let’s talk about how the story got told kind of thing. So, um, other people, so, so there’s a, there’s, so there’s the older guys, like, like Don and, and, and Joe.

And then there’s. younger guys who, um, are racing enthusiasts, but who are academics. So there’s one girl, Kate Sullivan, who’s at the University of Edinburgh, who does lots of land racing stuff. Like she’s the fastest woman in the world in a pickup truck or something like that, because she’s been out to Bonneville numerous times.

Um. Uh, [00:41:00] there’s a, this Belgian guy, Tim Robeers, who did a really interesting project a few years ago about Formula E and made a lot of us old car guys. Sitting in the room, really look at Formula E in a different way. And, and you know why it was, it, I realized that Formula E is on its way to being when you be me, you, and Dan’s used to sit around in, in wilds lane.

And I used to watch you. Be all comers on on wipe out on the PlayStation, and we used to say Formula one needs to be this. It needs to be this floating needs to be really fast. It needs to be neon lights. It needs to be upside down. It needs to be. You could shoot the other guy. It needs to be. You can drive over power ups.

Why isn’t it that, um, the managing ethos around Formula E at the time that Tim did this presentation, um, seemed to be like that. And, and that was, was interesting and cool to me. It’s pretty [00:42:00] exciting. Yeah. So, so the conference brings together, you know, one guy, Francis Clacks, African American dude who used to race motorcycles.

Um, really interesting guy. He was, didn’t make it this time. I’m not even fingers crossed. He’s still, he’s still with us. Cause he was a bit frail the last time I, I spoke to him, but, um, Yeah, um, one guy, um, an academic at the University of Michigan, Mark Howell, um, who worked for Todd Bedean’s NASCAR team. So, you know, he did a piece about, his presentation was about rock stars and, uh, was was about music and racing cars and how there’s a lot of crossover to it.

And he talked about Vince Neal racing in the Indie Lights series and how, how about, apparently he was quite good. I mean, who knew, right? So, uh, yeah, so it’s like, and I’d see fabulous [00:43:00] pictures of like Vince with the Indy cars, but with the long hair and the pout still. It was truly where heavy metal meets, uh, yeah, yeah.

But, but of course he was a bit light on, he was like, you know, I’m trying to make a list of all the references between racing and Car between racing and you know, every song has a reference to racing or cars in it. And I’m like, and, and, uh, I sat there thinking I was able to make a list of half a dozen heavy metal songs straight away.

You know, if, especially if you expand it to, cause to me, right, I think the main similarity between racing and rock and roll is that most of the time everyone thinks being a rock star is about being on stage like good evening Long Beach, you know, and everything’s motor racing is about being at the track, you [00:44:00] know, gentlemen, start your engines and you’re racing and no, it’s not mostly it’s about in the truck on the road.

Both things are mostly about in the truck on the road. It’s mostly, you know, we are the road crew. It’s hotel rooms and motorways, you know, that’s, that’s really, um, that’s really what it is. I, I think so. Uh, so I think that a lot of that has in common, they have a lot of that in common. Yeah, yeah. So, um, so let me, uh, uh, there is a talk track.

There’s not an agenda today, but there is a little talk track that I, uh, yeah, so, uh, so there is this sense, right? That there’s two camps at the IMRRC. We try and bridge that camp a little bit. And, and there’s, uh, Um, but, but I guess the main thing this time was that they streamed it. So if you go to the IMRRC website, um, there should be a recording of it.

Uh, the conference was free. Um, they’ll keep [00:45:00] the recording up, you know, this is all about publicizing motorsport. And, and, you know, as Don’s been very ill this, this, this last year, um. You know, there is a sense amongst, um, us, us younger guys that, um, this is the only event where you can talk about, um, this is the only event where an analysis of why Jackie Stewart won the 1968 German Grand Prix and just how effective is, so it’s a well known story that he cut his own tire chunks out, right?

What this conference is all about is digging into that. Well, what shapes did he cut? What did it make that big a difference? Well, he got this legendary victory. Well. Let’s read the motorsport review. Let’s look at the lap charts. Let’s find as much contemporary film as we can to see how, you know, let’s see if we can talk to him about what he [00:46:00] remembers about it.

It’s it’s taking the surface story, which is enough for the folk historians, and it’s digging into that in a way which is like a Actual hardcore historian, but where the actual hardcore historians in academics In academic institutions are mostly just eye rolling because they don’t give a shit about car racing.

Um, so yeah, so so that’s what uh So, uh, public does though, or at least a large chunk of it. Well, exactly, right? So, that’s why publicizing this and trying to bring some of the sheen and support of Goodwood to this environment. And, you know, you’ve got a bit, guys like Joe Leonard, they see that. He goes to Pebble Beach every year, he shows cars across the East Coast.

You know, this is something, you know, it’s not like he doesn’t see. the juxtaposition [00:47:00] between, um, yeah, between the, the, between the two events, between the kinds of, of, of events. It’s just, uh, um, yeah, I, I, uh, um, yeah. So it’s, that’s what the event’s all about. So it’s in the New York, uh, Watkins Glen’s in the Finger Lakes region of New York, which candidly is a total asshole to get to.

Because if you fly there, you have to do a puddle jumper afterwards, and then to get out, you have to do the puddle jumper, usually at an inconvenient time of day. So you’re always worried you’re going to miss the connecting flight back to California. Um, so the other option is, is, you know, you, you, maybe you just do one flight and you drive from there, but you, then you’re talking like a six hour drive.

For six hour drive from like JFK or Philadelphia or somewhere like that. You still got a pretty long drive to, to get there. Um, and then you have to have the car throughout the conference. When the time you’re at the conference, you don’t really need a car. So, [00:48:00] um. That and similar, you know, so anyway, so I did the only sensible thing you could possibly do plus I hate fucking flying Let’s be candid about it.

I hate airports hate security I’m fine when I’m on the plane but all of that bullshit Between the time that you walk away from the rental car and I sat down on the plane and the planes actually taking off all of that can just Go straight to hell and never come back to such an extent the plus turbulence plus throw in the fact that I fucking hate turbulence as well scares the You know every time you come over the Sierra Nevadas it would seem And and I had bad weather into Philadelphia, which is why I was like, you know Anyway, um, I drove back 3, 000 miles across the country.

Um, I approve Yeah, so you have done a bunch of driving [00:49:00] holidays here and as I was driving I was thinking like You’ve done way more dry and we should preface this shouldn’t we and this is I’ve even got this year we should preface this by saying that the young impressionable age you and I drove a Lincoln Town car 79 Lincoln Town car which American car guys will tell you is the last last year of the really big cars 400 cubic inch Windsor V8.

No horsepower, plenty of torque. The seafoam, half length velour roof that looked like it had been attached by wild animals with all the foam coming out of it. Big eagles or something, yeah. Seafoam velour interior. Do you remember that? Eight way directional seat control, baby. That fucking worked. And it worked, didn’t it?

So, you know, what? You could sleep. In on the bench seat front and back with your neither your head or feet touching the doors. Yeah. Yeah. It was legit. So we would just drive and [00:50:00] then pull off the highway, park up somewhere. And you know, wake up in the morning and sometimes it’d be an office car park, sometimes it’d be a hotel.

Yeah. Sometimes it’d be the famous guitar shaped pool of Nashville hotels. Yeah. And we’d just have a little swim in. Yeah. Yeah. Me and my boxers, because I couldn’t find any boxers, any shorts. Oh my God, can I? Yeah, only realizing as I came out that that was going to delineate my scrotal area quite anyway.

Yeah. Yeah. Did we go, we never went to Grand Ole Opry, did we? We went to Nashville. No, but we didn’t go to Grand Ole Opry. We went to a bar in Nashville where they were playing in the evening, and it was pretty cool. We had a few beers and like tipped the Giza that was playing, sitting on a stool inside the door with the, with the, uh, the cowboy hat and the, uh, and the guitar.

The guitar, sorry. Yeah. Um. And, uh, yeah, that was a, that was a good evening. Do you remember that one of the bars we were in, there were loads of photographs of country singers and you were like, I see it’s important to be hot if you’re a female country singer. And I was like, yeah, that had never occurred to me [00:51:00] before.

In my naivety, I thought it was all about the quality of the singing voice. It is that as well. It’s just that there’s a large enough pool of people that want to be country stars. And as you are absolutely exceptional, I’m going to pick the hot one. Yeah, yeah, well I didn’t drive through Nashville this time.

Although I did drive through Indianapolis, which we drove through before, but I didn’t stop. So I did, um, from Watkins Glen in upstate New York to beyond St. Louis, St. Louis, Missouri. In, on day one, then I did basically, well, from like from nearly near, you know, a hundred miles west of St. Louis on Route 66, like the route of Route 66 then, because Route 66 comes from Chicago to Indianapolis.

There’s really interesting things about Route 66, right? It’s, it’s called the main street of America [00:52:00] because it connected the towns together like an old fashioned English A road. And just like now, if you drive the A roads, when there’s a motorway parallel, like you drive the A4 when the motorway, you know, Marlborough.

Is still much as it was a hundred or two hundred years ago. Um, so when you drive through these communities, well, so Route 66 is that too. And if you were thinking you might find some decay, like it’s there straight away. It’s there all like along the side of the old road. There is a scene of where once there was.

You know, roadside businesses and take the trade away. It does. I picked up a can of Coke. I stopped in this town, San John, New Mexico, because John obviously. Right. And, uh, it’s one of these where you remember that scene in the [00:53:00] big Lebowski where, um, Uh, that the PIs after Loki’s crashed the car. And, uh, the, the, the pi, um, the, that the pi is follow is, uh, is, is, I’ll get the words outta my mouth in a minute.

The PI’s following him in the blue Volkswagen and says to him, you know, yeah, fella Seamus, you know, looking for Bunny. Um, you know, the family have sent this picture of her farm in Kansas. They think they, if they think it might make her homesick, and it’s a picture of this fucking barren fucking dust bowl with this shitty little shack on it, and you’re thinking like, yeah, there is no way in hell she is ever, ever going back to, to, to that.

Um. It’s that kind of, it was that kind of, so there’s no way for me to take a piss, but there’s this building, I’m like, whatever, in California, there’d be like homeless squatters living in the building, but so you wouldn’t want to like go in there for fear you were like peeing in their bed, [00:54:00] but like, I was like, there’s probably nobody, so anyway, I went in there, took a pee, and next to where I’m taking a pee, there’s like a stove, and I’m like, oh wow, there’s still like the stove that was in here when somebody lived in this place, and then I noticed next to it, Two old coke cans.

And when I say old coke cans, I mean that they are from the era where when you were, when you did the ring pull, you removed the ring pull. Now, correct me if I’m wrong, they changed those when we were at Davenport High School for Boys. In the late 1980s because I remember David Bickle being upset that you couldn’t separate the things and you remember he would always Bickle ever afterwards would always fiddle with the lid until it broke off out of petulance that they weren’t going to leave the lid attached that he wanted a separate ring pull.

You remember that? So that must have been what? Remember he used to put the ring pull bit. Into the, so the, you [00:55:00] put the, uh, the, the sort of, uh, tab that came out. If you had the, the ring pull with the two little slits in it, you could stick it in and then bend it back and use it as a spring and fire the ring pull across the classroom.

Yeah. Yeah, I do remember Bickle doing that. You know, they’re destroying a hobby. Yeah. They’re destroying a way of life. Well, so that was, a way of life has been destroyed. Well, fucking, this is what I saw on Route 66, right? A way of life destroyed. A can of soda, a Coke can, that had been drunk, discarded, had left there for, what, 30 years, 35 years?

You know, like, so that was, was interesting. So a lot of, you know, so finding the cool abandoned garages with cars. Cool cars. That was not to the extent that I conditioned myself to, I was like, I’m not going to stop if I stop at any of these, I’m just not going to, because I set myself to do it in four days.

So it meant that I had to do at least 750. miles a day. And then when I started out, [00:56:00] I was like, I didn’t want to get caught speeding. Um, so I just set the speed up. Well, well, then I realized I could drive further without getting tired, you know, like a lot further because the speeds were lower because everything was just moving more slowly.

Um, so yeah, so yeah, so St. Louis the first day, the second day, um, Amarillo, Texas. Just by Cadillac Ranch, you know where the so I stopped basically because I was good because this is the thing, right? You’re my guy is that when the sun goes down, you’re like, right back in cannonball now, because whereas, and you know, in the old days, when I used to go up and down to LA a lot, that’d be the time to get the radar detector on.

And that was the time where you could really make some speed because the radar detector would, would work, you know, fast up the hill and then roll off over the top of the hill. And then on the way. [00:57:00] If the radar doesn’t detect right over the top of the hill, you can just come back into throttle and be doing whatever speed you, you, you want to be, you know, you want to be, you want to be doing that.

But, uh, um, I didn’t bring a radar detector. I didn’t want to drive like that this time. And I realized on the first day when I’ve done the whole of the Midwest, like all the way across like New York, Philadelphia, Ohio, you know, and then right away into Missouri, which is right away across the Midwest, right?

Missouri was the Western bit of America, you know, the edge of the wild West, wasn’t it? And I did that in a single. In a single day. So with that thought, I was like, I want to see how the country, how the country evolves in terms of landscapes. I don’t want to plus when you’ve been driving since eight o’clock, since seven, eight o’clock in the morning, by the time it gets dark, you’re fucking knackered anyway.

Yeah, so Amarillo, so I did Cadillac Ranch and the weather was like [00:58:00] we grew up in Plymouth and Plymouth has a special brand of rain, doesn’t it? Where it’s not quite raining. It’s just damp. So you can put an umbrella and it’s not going to help you at all. You’re still going to be wet. And the cold gets into your bones far more than the temperature would suggest.

Like you Americans would say, what, what’s the temperature? And you would say, Oh, mid fifties. And they’d say, well, it’s fine. And then you leave them out in it for a little bit. Like we had, we get a bit of this wet weather like that here. Dana watched a soccer match of Ollies. Cold got into our bones so uncomfortable and miserable.

Like with, it was like that when I was at Cadillac Ranch, it was like that kind of cotton wool. Fog and just a word on Cadillac Ranch as you’re driving west. It’s south of the highway. It’s actually quite a long way away It’s not like Stonehenge Stonehenge is way closer way closer to the road then or actually that roads closed Did you know that have you been past Stonehenge recently?

They’ve closed that closed. They’ve moved the road. It’s moved Yeah, excellent about time [00:59:00] yeah, um, well they moved the road they moved is the one that goes right past it Right. The one that, that, that road. So not the 303. The little one is the one that they’ve closed and they’ve made the whole thing part.

So down at the, if you go past it, you remember you used to be driving. If you were driving West, you used to come off the 303 and on that little road, on that little road. And then the car park would just be up on the right. They’ve now moved all of that stuff further away and you go to a visitor center and then you ride a bus down.

Um, actually I think it’s a better experience. But I wasn’t, well, you know, a major, yeah, but they’re going to move that. That’s, that’s the, the, they’re going to, that’s, that’s going to be moved. I think so. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, so Amarillo, Texas to, um, uh, was it Seligman? Yeah, it was Seligman, Arizona, which is the town, which is closest to radiator Springs in the cars [01:00:00] movie.

Um, and it is, I mean, it is, and by that time, right, at almost every intersection, there’s historic Route 66, and if you get off, you can actually drive on what was Route 66, and it’ll run parallel to the main freeway, and sometimes the surface won’t be quite good, and the speed limit will be 55 miles an hour, but you really get a sense of what it was really what it was really like.

So, um, I actually felt like the best bits of Route 66 were, were out west. I actually felt like the best vistas, like New Mexico, the high desert, awesome. But I actually felt like the best vistas were, um, old, uh, California there coming into Southern California. Then I came off at 58, um, and came past Bakersfield and then up I 5 and home to, uh, Home here to, to [01:01:00] the, uh, to the San Francisco, to the Bay area.

Um, I kind of want an 18 wheeler again, you know, kind of, um, they are really, really cool. Cause I didn’t really talk to anybody and I didn’t listen to the radio or anything like that. I just had my YouTube playlist on mix. So a lot of like EDM and a lot of heavy metal and absolutely nothing else. I was just totally like checked out from there and driving slower.

You run at the same speed as, as the trucks a lot of the time. Although what you’ll remember from, um, you know, years ago of, uh. Of what driving in the Lincoln was on the downhills, then it mess around. They’ll do whatever the speed the truck will run up to. They won’t fight the break, fight it on the brakes.

If it wants to run down that hill at 80 or 85, they will, will let it do that. Um, and that’s, uh, yeah, I’m not, I’ve been [01:02:00] passed by an 18 wheeler like that for, uh, for some considerable time. Um, you did a couple of vacations here. Um, didn’t you? Where did you, where did you drive five years? Yeah. Um, yeah. So just picked up rental Mustangs from various places.

Um, so the V8s obviously, at least sometimes do the straight away if it was an option or just upgraded the airport. Um, but yeah, now we flew into, uh, Seattle or a couple of times into once into Vegas, couple of times into San Francisco. And then picked up, um, the cars and then did various rou routes or routes if we’re It feels right to say that again, we’re talking about America.

Um, and then yeah, I mean, we drove from San Francisco to Las Vegas to Death Valley. Uh, I’ve been through, um, Yosemite, I’ve been through, um, Yellowstone. Um, we did Craters of the Moon National Park. Northern Idaho up to and through Montana [01:03:00] up to the, up to the, uh, the border, um, but going to the sun road and so forth up in that national park up there.

I mean, it’s an absolutely fabulous places up there. Um, regularly get the side eye from the, uh, gentlemen, as I dropped the, uh, the rental car back. And he goes, you’ve had this for three weeks and you’ve done five and a half thousand miles. I don’t know. I went out, there’s a lot to see, you know, but, uh, Yeah, I mean, look, it’s, it’s epic, and you know, if you spend a bit of time out there, you can find some really nice roads, you really can, I mean, you know, I’m just thinking off the top of my butt, but Boise, Boise, which is a wonderful name, uh, Idaho, if you, if you head northeast out of there up to Idaho City, once you get past there on the 21, ah, damn, that is a, a beautiful piece of road, and it’s twisty as all hell.

Um, well surfaced goes all the way up into the mountains and, and I should, I should point out there that you, uh, it wasn’t like we prepared for this call or anything like that. You just remembered that off the cuff because you enjoy driving [01:04:00] that rope so much. Oh, I’ve been out there twice. Didn’t really, cause it was just so great.

We took a little detour on the way back from, um, uh, the Grand Teton’s National Park. Which I love the fact that it is basically the big Tits National Park as the name . That’s what that means. Um, because there’s two mountains that look like a pair of Bo Zoomas , which wizzywig what you see is what you get.

It’s fair enough, isn’t it? Yeah. Yeah. There, there’s that, um, joke isn’t there that I always, uh, forget how to tell properly, but the, the punchline is, it’s like Native Americans talking to each other and, uh, the punchline is anyway, why do you ask two dogs fucking. Okay. That’s an odd name, dad. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Um, but yeah, I mean, there’s some, there’s some special stuff up there. Um, and if you get up early or if you’re bored of the point with a lot of those national parks, you know, don’t get up early, you know, have a lie in you on holiday with the missus, you know, Chile and have a big breakfast, go [01:05:00] and do a bit of driving to get you where you get to then have a nice late lunch and linger over it.

Um, go and chill out somewhere, look at a bit of scenery and then head on up to say, you know, um, The national park about an hour before sunset. Perfect. Everyone’s coming the other way. So a you’ve got the road up there when everyone’s around pretty much to yourself going one way so you can enjoy the road up there.

Then you get up to the car park is almost empty. You get lovely sunset light on everything. So your photos look golden. And then when you leave, you’re leaving sort of. Just after the sun goes down, time to get back to the hotel and have a nice bottle of wine and some food with the, uh, with your good lady.

And you can thrash the rental car on the way back down the mountain as well. So, yeah, lots to be said for that.

And, if there’s roadworks, that’s the other trick I would advise. Uh, if there’s roadworks, uh, on your chosen route, then, uh, you know, get through the roadworks. If you’re at the back of [01:06:00] the EQ, get through the roadworks on the Contraflow. Stop, you know, sit down, do, do something constructive. Uh, 10 15 minutes, and then you know that whole road ahead of you has got no one on it, so you can have, you know, stretch the vehicle’s legs somewhat, um, and if you’re first through on the contraflow, because you probably will be at the next one, because everyone else would have gone through ahead of you, then you definitely know you’ve got the entire time of the contraflow was coming the other way, and no one in front of you as well.

Yeah, I was And if you have to wait, and if it’s long enough, sometimes you’ll catch up, and I’m not saying this has happened to me or anything, but you’ll catch up a Northwind branded caravan at least three or four times, so when you’re editing your own private GoPro footage of it, you you come hooning up to the back of said caravan on multiple occasions, and then just find a little lay by somewhere picturesque with a nice view of the river and chill out for a bit.

Have a little, uh, you know, um, relaxed time and then head on again, cracking entertainment. [01:07:00] Um,

I guess the other thought that I had is about, um, Route 66 is, um, that what they badge as historic Route 66 is the road as it was in 1926 when it was like designated as Route 66. That sort of hides the fact that it was in continual evolution. So, it wasn’t like it suddenly bypassed the towns and, you know, people were thrown out of work.

It continually evolved and changed and developed, basically as cities grew up. It then needed to bypass those cities because it was slow driving through the middle of them. Um, so it, it, it was a continual shifting, changing, um, kind of a thing. And I actually, [01:08:00] you know, you and I have, have hiked that road, that prehistoric road, um, west of London, the Ridgeway.

It actually reminded me more of that, that it was this sense of sort of, of continual, um, evolution. Rather than being one kind of, um, you know, fixed thing that this was Route 66 kind of thing. It wasn’t like that. It was a, it was a continually evolving, uh, evolving thing. Um, who’s your favorite YouTuber at the moment?

I

quite like, uh, well, obviously I like a bit of Todd’s, Triple Todd, um, who was introducing himself as Hi, it’s Todd from Todd’s Workshop and Todd Cutlater, as if he didn’t get that it was Todd the first time. Um, I understand why he does it, but it still makes me smile every time. Doing these. Roman Catapulta revisited, and he’s got himself a ballista that he experiments with, and he’s good buddies with Dr.

Toby Kaplan from the Wallace [01:09:00] Collection in London, so he makes replicas of, you know, uh, daggers and then tests them out against various types of leather and chain mail to see how brutally dead you would be if someone knifed you with them, and whether or not it does any damage to the weapons, um, And he usually gets the gentleman from, uh, Scholar Gladiatoria, which is another quite good YouTube channel, if you like your arms and armor, to help him demo them.

And he’s into that sort of historical reenactment with sort of, um, foam latex weapons stuff. Which is pretty brutal, to be honest. Um, but, uh, where they do a bit of arms and armor reenactment fighting. So I’ve got like that. And then I also like, I was watching a bit of, uh, Dafydd Phillips, who’s a Welsh photographer and videographer.

Who spends a lot of time going to air shows like Axalp in Switzerland, uh, and hanging around on the Mac Loop in North Wales and Snowdonia, where all the sort of fighter jets from various allied nations, uh, NATO nations go to train at flying sort of sub mountain level and sort of 500 feet and so forth.

And he gets, he climbs up [01:10:00] the mountain daily, has his little CB radio to listen in to the, to the pilots. Uh, chatter. So, because you don’t, they don’t announce the flight schedule, obviously, um, and then, you know, gets amazing, like, 4K footage of F 35s coming past at just about subsonic speeds below him. He’s standing above them on the mountain looking down, uh, and the bits where, the bits I love every time is where they start to pull out a vertical turn, so they’ll flip over like they do in Top Gun and, like, pull vertical and you get that sort of, sort of mist and halo of vapor over the top as it sort of rips the moisture out of the air as they pull the, uh, pull upwards.

And some of the shots of that with the sunlight on it and it’s all sort of rainbow trails through that is just beautiful. So that’s the, yeah, we’re looking at that maybe. I was aware of that alley in Wales and had seen some of the photos. So, uh, yeah. Um, I, I, uh, I’ve been enjoying, um, Salvage Rebuilds UK.

Which [01:11:00] is these, these two guys in Kent who, who rebuilt cars. Um, and now one of them is kind of shy. The one that’s skillful guy is kind of shy and doesn’t like to talk very much. And, and the guy that talks to the camera all the time, it’s like a dose of England without being in England. So, so a. Something that made me fall about laughing the other day was, was, uh, Rob talks about, he’s talking about damage to the part of the car that’s below the door between the wheels, which I don’t know how you would pronounce it, but he pronounces it seal.

The seal, damage to the seal, well, and, and he has these really flat, like Kent, like, like, so, um, it, it, so the, the accent makes me laugh, the skill of, of workmanship that they’ll take like an Audi A3 the front and they’ll have it rebuilt in a couple [01:12:00] of days and you can, and, and it’s not just the sourcing and fitting of the parts, it’s not just the repair in the engine, it’s hardcore body Repair as, as well.

So there’s the element that I always liked from those, that kind of YouTube, where you were, where, where you learn it, but now that the seal as, as, uh, makes me laugh, the accent makes me laugh. And, and what really made me laugh is this one video where after he says seal, the other one goes, Oh. Like, I like, like, like I said, and, and when I pointed that out, bug is on Pier 39 or whatever.

Yeah, yeah. It’s like, like the seals on, on Pier 39 and the our of the, uh, and yeah, so that made me laugh ’cause of, of our, um, silly joke about, about the seals. But, but yeah, the, the, so I’m enjoying, I’ve enjoyed salvage Rebels uk, um, ’cause of that, uh, favorite car or bike at the moment. I

dunno. Um. [01:13:00] What’s yours? Give me another 30 seconds to think about that. Oh, um, I hadn’t, I told you to think about this before you came on the call. Yeah, I did. Um, but I, I, of course I told you to do it and then hadn’t done it myself, but that’s what this should be, right? This, this favorite car at the moment should be a totally spontaneous thing.

And I’ve said car and bike to combine it together. I’ve got to be honest with you. I did this open garage thing. For some of my neighbors where we, you know, there’s a number of us on the street that are into cars and bikes in different kinds of ways. So we do a little get together where we just drink beer and talk about cars or bikes or whatever takes our fancy.

And I hadn’t hosted, and I thought, instead of just hosting, I’ll get a couple of cars out of the garage, I’ll move the bikes around, I’ll make it so that you can actually see the bikes, and, uh, yeah, and I didn’t plan to, like, call it an open garage, but that’s what it sort of turned out to be, and it felt like an open garage to [01:14:00] me, because I was, like, espousing about my, uh, my, my stuff, um, One of my bikes, uh, the 90 GSS XR 1100, which is black and gray, and has a bunch of race bits on it.

Four Yoshimura race pipe, four, um, McCoy’s. Um, it really, uh, I, I’d not looked at it. In, you know, I, I don’t know if it’d been in a corner. Um, I’d not looked at it in comparison to, I have the same bike in the same colors with a standard exhaust on it. And it’s totally standard setup. And I guess I hadn’t, I, because I’ve been fiddling around with and trying to get the standard bike to work.

I hadn’t looked at the racier one for a long time. And the racier one is sexy as a bag of cats. And I. Fucking love sports bikes and I guess I learned just recently that [01:15:00] that bike, um, the values have always hurt them because in the TT in 1989, two riders were killed riding them. Steve Henshaw. And, uh, Phil McCallum, both in one fucking race.

So no wonder they’re, they’re not that, uh, they’re not that loved. And there’s this feeling of more engine than there is chassis or, or, or, uh, or brake. But you know, I quite like the MV Brutale. Oh, you do? A new one. That’s new, is it? Yeah, well, I don’t know whether it’s new or not, but like the new sexy exhaust system on it.

I mean, Oh, it’s always like that. It’s always like, um, yeah, yeah, it’s just, yeah, yeah, it’s very nice. Um, although from an event point of view, I was watching an episode of Harry’s Garage the other day, uh, bless him. And, uh, he was talking about having some custom bike build for this Sand Raiders thing, which I’d never heard of, which I think I sent you the link to.

a chance to have a look [01:16:00] at it, but it’s essentially gentlemen’s Dakar lights. So you go to Mexico and they ship you, you need to provide a bike or you can rent a bike off them and it’s a week’s worth of, I think you do about like two and a half thousand kilometers or something in a week or something like that.

So it’s not a, you know, you do the miles through Morocco and they’ve set it up to do all these different stages. You say every night in nice hotels. Come on, we’re not savages. Um, They’ll ship the bike down for you to, from wherever it’s coming from. And you have to have the right insurance and so forth, but you can live your Dakar fantasy and it’s like two and a half thousand euros.

Yeah. I’ve got a new model. I’m not sure how much of a Dakar fantasy I, I have, um, I also ride you around in the desert, that sort of thing. I also feel like. Uh, yeah, I mean, but, but, oh, but it’s like, they’ve chosen picturesque routes because it’s not the Dakar, you know, so they, it’s like through the mountains and through [01:17:00] all this sort of stuff.

So they’ve chosen what looks to be a really gorgeous route, at least from looking at the, from the, from the information. Harry did it last year and said he really, he thought it was awesome. I didn’t see any videos about it. Maybe I just missed them. Um, but yeah, Mark, if you ever want to have, uh, uh, Uh, desert riding fantasy, like we should, you should fly here and we should go down and see Mark Newton in Todos Santos and take his Yeah, but I don’t want to get shot, I want to go and have the, uh, the instagram Todos Santos is, is not, that’s not, that’s, well, I mean, that’s, that, it’s a touristy place, look it up, look it up, it’s touristy spot, Todos Santos.

It’d be, the, the shooty bit is up by the border. Well, either way, I quite like the idea of it. But look, I mean, reality is, I’m gonna have to, I’m, I’ve been eyeing up Honda, um, CRX250 rallies, um, things like that. I’m thinking that’ll do me. Well, the other thing, the other thing you, you should do [01:18:00] is, um, since, um, certainly since I, when I picked up riding again, um, I was amazed at how the kit has changed.

So basically now you can get like Kevlar jeans and a Kevlar check shirt that does better protection. Then, um, the, your leathers. So the whole business of, Oh, I’m too fat to fit into my leathers. Now I need to slim down. Yeah. I’m going to need to buy in stuff anyway. Yeah. But, um, especially if I’m going off road, it’s also, it’s also like a whole adventure finding the equipment because it’s actually quite hard to step away from.

So what I bought, I bought this, um. Armored vest thing, and it’s got foam in the elbow. And it’s quite hard to step away from what I used to have with that Elpa and Stiles thing, like on a hard armored elbow. It’s hard to, it’s weird to step away from hard plastic and know that this soft foam is going to [01:19:00] provide more protection because this soft foam is this like clever fucking material that goes ultra hard.

when you hit it. So it’s like soft and flexible until it’s hit and then when it’s hit it’s super it’s it’s super hard. Like those non newtonian fluids and so forth. Yeah yeah so so it’s so between that and so if you wear that armor and then you wear like a Kevlar shirt like a Czech Kevlar shirt that like could pass as a normal Like not set, not classy, but you know, we’re like a, a, you know, you could wear it in the pub and not look like you were in a motorcycle kind of thing.

Those things have more slide than leather. It’s, it’s absolutely brain out. It’s you, you need to adjust your light. Perception of, of what’s possible with it. Um, cause I was thinking about it cause I kind of rushed the learning and what were you, the important thing for me was, was getting jeans that were, see, if I [01:20:00] sit on a sport, if I sit on a jigsaw in the trousers that I’m wearing at the moment, wearing the tennis shoes I’m wearing at the moment, I fit fine.

If I do the same thing wearing boots and my leathers, I can’t get my foot onto the peg easily. Well, that’s bloody dangerous. So one of my main goal was to get. Things that were proper get proper armor, but where I could actually get my leg up. So I ended up getting a size of climb. K. L. I. M. It’s the best gene maker based upon the research that I did 18 months ago.

I, I’ve got a pair of them, but if I don’t put the belt on, they fall down. They’re like that, that, I mean, they, they, they look, they look like they’re for a bloke, you know, three inch, they are for a bloke, three inches taller than me and, you know, and a lot fatter, but this way, this way I get enough play in the knee that I can, you know, and they’re wide enough, so they go over the top of my boot.

So where my old boot and the jean goes over there anyway, it’s [01:21:00] the whole, like getting the right kit. He’s uh, is, is a total, uh, is a total fucking sport. Um, what’s the most scared? I thought of this the other day, what’s the most scared you’ve ever been in a car or on a bike? I’ll go first if you’re thinking.

Okay. Um, I thought of this question and then I didn’t have an answer and I was thinking, well, you’ve got to have an answer. It’s such a good question. You’ve got to have an answer about it. I was thinking, well, what is the most frightening times? And the most frightening times is the moment where, you know, you’re going to crash.

Where you’re out of control and you know you’re going to crash. So if I think about the time that took that, that moment lasted the longest, um, the occasion, because on a sports bike, the window, but usually don’t have time to be scared, right? Usually just you’re on it and then you’re hurt, right? There’s not the, there’s not the, so I was pretty scared.[01:22:00]

Um, when I rode that Aprilia around Italy and I was on a bridge or I was riding on a freeway and it was a downhill and we were going on to a bridge and the joint of the bridge had like this metal section about a foot wide and it was slipped with water and I just knew the front wheel was going to slide and there’s nothing to do but watch the front wheel slide and hope that I didn’t fall off and eat the Pavement at highway speeds and I just was over it and that was it.

So that was scary, but you know, but I actually think the most scared was probably in that white Ford Sierra two liter gear that you and I own jointly. Um, on the way home from the office or the gym one day where the back snapped on me and I caught it. But didn’t correct fast enough, and the act of catching it meant that I just speared off the road and into a ditch at about 80 or 85 miles an hour.

And I remember it [01:23:00] going, and me catching it, and feeling like a hero for catching it, and then immediately it wanting to spear off the road, and me seeing the tree in the ditch coming and just thinking, fucking hell. Like, this could be the very end. And you lost your nice green Jaguar bag out of the back because some little bastard came along and pilfered it overnight before we could go back and empty out the car in the morning.

Yeah, yeah, well you were a trooper that day. Thank you, uh, again for that. Because, uh, when the car stopped moving, I was like, oh, let’s fucking get out of here. And the right hand side of it was against the ditch. And, because it went in, it went across the ditch, Fucking tree bounced back, went along the ditch backwards.

Um, so the driver, so I tried to get out of the driver door and it wouldn’t open. And the passenger doors were against the ditch. So I opened the sunroof to get out and walk to a pub to call you. And I remember in the pub, they looked at me as if I was like, you know, if, if I was fucking ET, [01:24:00] they looked at me the same way.

It’s like the pool ball stopped moving when I, when I walked in the pub. Yeah. But I covered, yeah, the loss of the nice green. Jaguar bag still more to this, uh, to respond, I guess, I don’t know. I mean, obviously I’ve had a few accidents. Everyone does. If you’ve been done as many hundreds of thousands of miles as we have.

Um, I guess, I was thinking about it earlier on, when you mentioned this, but um, the um, Uh, I came, when I used to, I used to drive to and from my work, Redstone, in Bramley, the village near, I was living in Risley, near Reading. And there was a back roads route, that you could, no, route, we’re back in England now.

There was a back roads route, um, that you could go from my house to the office, and you got an hour for lunch. But, it was about a 15 minute drive. But I would still go home for lunch because I knew that road really well, and you could get, I could do that route in about seven or eight minutes, so therefore [01:25:00] you could have about 45 minutes at home, having a nice bit of lunch, watch a bit of telly or whatever, and then blast back to the office.

And I was doing my, I think it was in, in various cars, but I think at the time I was in that, um, angular shape sort of, uh, focus two liter gear. Um. And I came smoothly carving my nice apex lines around the corner and there was a guy in a box van reversing round the corner line corner Reversing round the corner towards me and I was like, uh oh And it was one of those runs where I okay either I’m just gonna have a nap and the mother and father of all rear ending into this van and I’m gonna lose that So I just overtook him It’s like, well, you know, and I, you know, it’s like, roll the dice here, buddy, make a saving throw.

Cause if there’s something coming the other way, it’s going to be worse than hitting the van. If it isn’t. Yeah. And there wasn’t. Um, I just overtook him at like [01:26:00] galactic speed, off down the other end of the road and around the next bend before I could even react to put the horn on. Yeah. I mean, yeah.

That’s a pretty good one. And I’d never heard that one before. It was kind of intimidating. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and my other question is gonna be about books and, and of course you are not reading at the moment, so I’ll talk about my books and, and, and then, uh, I’ve done all your books at a moment, but Yeah.

Yeah. Um, I, so I, I, uh, the book I was gonna talk about was Old Miles Collier’s, um, the archeological automobile and, and how this is really just. It’s a handbook for looking after, um, collector cars and how to think about collector cars, how to think about, um, the automobile as a historical thing. If you care about cars, if you have any interesting cars, the book is worth picking up.

Um, it’s 150. I mean, It’s [01:27:00] one review the Society of Automotive Historians Review, Reuben Verde’s Skilled Reviewer. Um, his comment was that really this, it would be great if this was in paperback form. And I think this is interesting because this book was something that I was originally gonna write with Michael Shanks.

And then because Michael was busy, um, and it wasn’t going to be the 15, $20. In the high street bookshop kind of publication, Michael, it wasn’t the right thing for him to be involved in doing with his time and energy. It didn’t suit his what he needed to do it at the time. So one way or another, it never got written.

Miles wrote it himself. But of course, what comes out is very different from what would have been, you know, um, you know, what it would have been like if he and I had written, if two Englishmen, [01:28:00] uh, you know, if two, uh, lower middle class Englishmen had written it, it would be very different from if, you know, one of the wealthiest and leading car collectors in the world has written it.

Now for all that, the The book has Miles’s just incredibly dexterous feel for, for storytelling and, and for cars in, in general, it’s really exquisite and, and to reduce it to paperback at 15 bucks in the airport almost doesn’t do it justice because he approaches the cars like high art and, and his book looks like high art.

And the stuff that he’s written, um, comes across as the, the musings of, of somebody who, who regards the stuff as high art rather than as, you know, paperback and, and, and disposable. That’s not to say, so there’s a long and short is there’s still room. [01:29:00] for somebody like myself to take those ideas and that aesthetic and discuss it in a way which is accessible for people who have XR3s and Camaros.

Um, so that’s my, yeah. So the, so the, the recent audio book I’m listening to, um, uh, is, I’m on book two of Sherlock Holmes, uh, and the Cthulhu Casebooks. So this is an, this is a book, books, series of books written by James Lovegrove. Because, of course, Holmes is old enough now that it’s public property, um, that, so you can write with those characters because, you know, Mr.

Conan Doyle, uh, Sir, Sir A himself is long dead and it’s passed into public domain, copyright has expired. Um, so he’s written Cthulhu ized versions of the books where, yes, Holmes is still the same sort of deductive genius, but actually he was waging a long campaign against the Elder Gods, who were, Behind a lot of the evil that [01:30:00] was going on and there’s like Cthulhu style monsters and summonings and evil stuff going on in the deeps beneath London, and it’s pretty good.

Yeah, well, and actually, Mark, that’s given us a really nice segue for me to talk about what I was going to say is that, you know, in I asked you for favorite books, um, one of these. episodes a while ago, and you were like, well, I’ve been writing and I was going to say, we should say, you know, you, you’re, you’ve been writing these satirical Dungeons and Dragons novels that sort of bring our Dungeons and Dragons campaign alive.

Um, Halvar and Clarence, Chronicles of Halvar and Clarence, there’s a website, um Well, the website’s not quite up again yet. Well, of course not, but, you know, who’s listening to this? And, you know, by the time you build it, it’s probably going to be up. How many people who are listening to it are actually going to go to the website anyway?

But of course, all of this also, all, every one of them. Uh, no, the [01:31:00] other, but this also ties to, to the, the YouTube channel that we talk about all the time in 44 teeth, the motorcycling YouTube channel and Mike booth, because however, I’m Clarence. com sponsored Mike booth, um, on his fateful. Visit to, to the TT recently.

So this is why we’ve been invested in, uh, in Mike Booth. And, and Mark, you’ve been invested in, uh, in, in writing these, uh, these, these novels. So I’m gonna Yeah. Best wishes. So I’m gonna, of course, I’m sorry. I said of course, best wishes to boo these still. He, I saw a video of his update from any other way.

The guys approaching it in exactly the way you would hope. He would like an absolute hero, and I’m sure he’ll show us that all up as to. What can be done? Yeah, I watched the beginning of one video and he was looking very pale and he was saying, you know, some days are just shit. And I think he, I think that’s inevitable cheese dude, you know, and there was, there was one where he [01:32:00] described the wound.

Did you see that one? And the description that he’d used to do, I’m not going to spoil 44 teeth storytelling because it is, um, my word is compelling. Yeah. So look on the theme of, of motorcycle, um, I and this is where I’m going to wrap. I’m going to wrap up with a little bit of trumpet blowing and a good news story, which is that through some politicking, the motorcycle course at San Francisco City College was due to be taken off the roster.

So at the moment there’s no You know, if you wanted to study motorcycles at San Francisco City College for the first time in 20 years, you couldn’t do it this semester. But next semester, it has been reinstated, um, in small part due to the flamey letter. That I wrote to the trustees of the college, which then got forwarded to the chancellor [01:33:00] and it seemed that what happened was the course appears in the books and as far as the chancellor and the trustees were concerned, the course was going ahead, but where the rubber met the road.

For a couple of sort of political reasons that are too complicated to drill into here, it wasn’t going ahead. And by stirring up the hornet’s nest and being like, you know, what the fuck? The motorcycle course is really good. Like, where is it? The students want it. There’s faculty to teach it. What the fuck?

Just by being that, it’s meant that the course is now being reinstated in a meaningful way, um, in the, in the spring. So, uh, go me. And, uh, as I said to Dana, it seems that maybe that time I spent at City College wasn’t, um, you know, doing the admin stuff and the meetings at City College wasn’t actually wasted time.

It has tangible benefits and improvements. Um, yeah, [01:34:00] I, I guess that the, you know, there’s a bigger story with City College, which is that, you know, the motorcycle course is small beans in comparison to teaching English as a second language to Syrian refugees, um, or to, you know, Yeah, you’ve got to skill them up.

Yeah, got to skill people up. There’s no having the American dream if you can’t get a foothold on it. Dude, like, how are you going to make America great again? If you can’t even speak the language, come on, get behind it, get a hat, everyone needs a hat, not that hat, it’s too late. But no, truly, it’s carry your own culture with you, but you’ve got to skill up and integrate into society, haven’t you?

That’s alright. Yeah, yeah. So apparently there are 300 languages spoken in California at the moment, the same as it was. In the 1840s, before the gold rush. Shit bro, I didn’t even know there were 300 languages still being spoken. Yeah, in California, there were 300 languages, but the native [01:35:00] Americans in California had had 300 languages.

Apparently when I did that, when I did that American history course, that was one of the eye popping things about when you think of the, you, when you think of native Americans, you need to think of it as a hodgepodge of all sorts of different cultures. That’s it’s a patchwork of cultures because it was small tribes, you know, each of which had their own cultures and it’s absolutely fascinated.

Fascinating history. I’d like to study the more warlike ones. There were some warlike ones near here. I, of course, I’m interested in these. Ollie’s been studying the Ohlone people that were in this part of, uh, but they seem, you know, they seem to be pretty Ewok y I’m not so interested in the evil archetypes.

Garlands of flowers and pacifism. Yeah, yeah, but is that just what we You can bring a few stormtroopers, like, rather than Ewoks, and they’ve got a bit of fire going. But is that just what we take from them, right? That when we [01:36:00] look back on How their lives were, you know, we like the idea of it being, you know, a simple pastoral paradise.

It probably wasn’t like that, was it? It’s probably more like, more, it’s probably more like the homeless people are now. More like Ewok on Ewok knife action. Yeah. Yeah. Could be. Every Ewok for themselves. Yeah. Yeah. Well look on that super incongruous note. Let me bring this be beach. Wow. On that rambling.

And is that copyright? Are we gonna be done for copyright now on that? It was on the Ewok cartoon. As I recall from when we were kids, and I used to be like, be chihuahua when anything unusual or extreme happened. Yeah. Like, you know, an AT ST kicks through the back of that little mud hut. Yeah. They’d be like, ah, run away, be chihuahua.

Yeah. But then get them back with big, like, logs on swings and stuff later on. Because, you know, much like Avatar, the [01:37:00] locals have got to win. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, well, look, on that, um, incongruous and unusual note, let me thank you for your time. It’s all good. And, uh, bid, uh, our listeners adieu. Our listener.

Yeah, me whilst I’m editing it. Adieu. Class.

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