Up Front

UP FRONT

The car question

David Edwards

My FRIEND’S QUERY CAUGHT ME OFF guard. After a spirited drive in her Mazda RX-7 with me at the steering wheel, she asked if I had ever considered writing for a car magazine.

I'd never thought about it before. It's not that I don't like cars. Along with the 17 motorcycles I’ve owned over the years have come some memorable automobiles. There was the Fiat 850 Spyder, more go-kart than sports car, really, that served faithfully as backup for my CB350 during my first semester at the University of Maryland. But freshmen were prohibited from keeping motor vehicles on campus, so the car quickly gathered a wad of parking tickets thicker than my Calculus 101 textbook; and come Christmas break, the little green beauty was driven home and turned over to my brother.

Years later in California, for reasons that escape me today, I purchased a 1962 Chrysler Newport station wagon, previously used by a visiting German couple to tour the Southwest. As American as Kate Smith and almost as large, the Chrysler was a sight to behold on the freeways, where its honking V-Eight and acres of gleaming sheet metal combined for an intimidation factor that had even 18-wheelers scattering like so much driftwood. Sadly, the Newport had to be junked after it was attacked by vandals, who apparently mistook it for a New York subway car and laid into it with rocks and spray paint.

And I’m still regretting the day two years ago that I sold my Jaguar Etype, to my eyes the most beautiful automobile ever built, even if it was costing more than rent each month to keep it running. It was replaced by a new Chevy pickup with a big motor, a handling package and the ability to accomplish two tasks that the Jag never could: start on a daily basis and carry two XR60Gs.

Even though I've enjoyed all my cars, I subscribe to the thinking of Stanley Woods when comparing twowheelers to four-wheelers. Woods, for those unfamiliar with the name, is an Irishman who achieved great fame as a motorcycle roadracer in the 1920s and 1930s, back when “men were men and bikes were crocks,” as he put it in a recent Automobile magazine interview. If you were to pick the 10 top roadracers of all time, Stanley Woods, with 35 GP wins and 10 Isle of Man TT victories to his credit, would make the roster with ease. Woods, nearing 90, was asked in that interview why he had never made the jump to automobile racing.

“Driving a car is like driving a pony and trap,” he replied. “Riding a motorcycle is like riding a horse.”

I had occasion to remember Woods’ words recently when I test drove a Nissan 300ZX Turbo, the $33,000, 300-hp Corvette rival that has made such an impression on the motoring press—and on SouthernCalifornia’s upwardly mobile professionals, who use the 150-mph ZX to trundle along in rush-hour traffic, averaging all of 17 miles per hour while placing calls on their cellular telephones. A beautiful car, regardless of that misuse, yet when I rapped on the accelerator and called all that intercooled, twin-turbocharged horsepower into play, I came away, well, not overly impressed. The Nissan was no lemon; it’s just that after romping through the gears on motorcycling’s own ZX, Kawasaki’s ultra-potent ZX-1 1, the Turbo Z was about as exciting as watching women’s golf on television.

As Stanley Woods said, you drive a car, but a motorcycle . . . you ride.

The latest exotic to make the rounds at the car magazines is Honda’s new blockbuster, the Acura NSX. a mid-engined, Ferrari lookalike that will sell for $60,000, although just how much will be tacked onto the list price by greedy dealers remains to be seen. Overlooking the fact that the NSX costs 10 times more than my parents paid for their first house, I pored over the car's specifications, and came away interested. An aluminum chassis and aluminum body panels—even the jack is aluminum-help keep the curb weight down to a claimed 3010 pounds. Power comes by way of a 2977cc, 24valve V-Six that revs to 8000 rpm and rips out 270 horsepower.

Our sister publication, Road & Track, bagged the first test of the NSX and enthusiastically reported that “Honda’s exotic has shown that it deserves a place in that stratospheric performance league of sports/ GT cars.” Then, I looked at the performance numbers that led to such high praise. With a 0-to-60 time of 5.7 seconds and a quarter-mile clocking of 14 seconds flat, the NSX may indeed be cosmically quick for a car, but something as down to earth as a $3100 Suzuki GS500, powered by an ordinary, air-cooled, two-valve-percylinder Twin, would blow its alloy doors well and truly into the weeds.

Leaf deeper into this issue and you'll come across our 15th annual Ten Best Motorcycles awards. There, you’ll find 1990’s choice picks, a veritable smorgasbord of two-wheeled excellence. Had you money and garage space enough, you could own all 10 bikes and never have to buy another one for the rest of your life, happy in the knowledge that you had some of the all-time great motorcycles. The tab for this happiness would run to about $67,500, roughly what taking possession of that Acura NSX would cost you.

Now, let’s say that your fairy godmother fluttered into your living room packing a stack of bills $60,000-some-odd high and told you to pick between the 10 bikes and the one car. Given the choice, I don’t think many of us would have a problem deciding where to spend the money. I know of one 87-year-old Irishman who wouldn’t.

I’m with Mr. Woods on this one. B2