by Doug DeMuro
So basically, whenever I took it out I would spend the entire drive scouring the roads for potholes, and construction, and dangerous drivers, like the Dallas police searching for Lee Harvey Oswald. And then, when I had enough “fun” with my Ferrari, I would bring it home, feeling approximately the same level of relief upon parking it in my garage as a bride does when her drunk uncle Hal RSVPs that he won’t be coming to the wedding.
And then there were the gas station encounters. Oh, the gas station encounters. Where some unkempt, overweight chain smoker would walk up to me, cigarette in hand, and call out, “WANNA TRADE?”, as he pointed to his beat-up work truck, laughing to himself like he had just delivered an especially hilarious version of The Aristocrats.
The first time, it was funny. By the seventy-eighth time, I was wondering if I could murder him and convince a jury to let me off.
But as I’ve had more time to reflect on things, I think I’ve come up with another major reason why I didn’t really enjoy owning my Ferrari: I never really trusted it. Now, this could’ve been because it was an aging Italian sports car with an engine that costs more than a bionic limb.
Or it could’ve been because of the very first day I took it home, when it spewed more smoke than London during the Blitz.
I’ve never told this story before. In fact, I’ve done everything I could to block this story out of my memory, largely because in the giant history of “traumatic things that have happened to me,” it ranks as number two. Number one is the time I decided to leave the nurturing comfort of my mother’s womb for the cold, harsh reality of the human existence.
But I have decided to share this story here for you, the reader, with one important condition: that you never, under any circumstances, in any situation, as long as you live, tell it to the guy who bought my Ferrari.
Here’s what happened.
As I recall, I purchased the Ferrari on some Saturday morning in January 2014. What happened was, my friend Andrew and I flew from Atlanta to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, at 6 a.m. on some low-budget airline, with a stupid name like SOUL, or JetEssence, or maybe something with an exclamation point in it. Here’s a tip: if your airline’s name has an exclamation point in it, you’re never going to see your bags again.
I knew it would be bad from the moment we took off, when the woman next to me pressed the flight attendant call button before the wheels even went up. Moments later, the flight attendants rushed over, battling the forces of gravity as the plane sharply climbed, expecting some life-or-death emergency. It turned out the woman had never been on a plane before, and she thought that was how you ordered a drink. Needless to say, we were the only people on that flight who were going to Florida to buy a Ferrari.
We bought the car around 11 a.m., and then we immediately started the five-hundred-mile drive back to Atlanta. Whenever someone hears about this drive, they always ask me the same question: “HOW FAST DID YOU GO, MAN?!??!” And I always respond with the same answer: about four miles per hour below the speed limit. This is because speeding through rural north Florida and rural south Georgia in a Ferrari would be like walking into the police station to report that someone has stolen your cocaine. You’ll be arrested, and you’ll probably have to spend the night in jail with a guy who got arrested for DUI on a riding lawnmower.
So we made it to Atlanta around 9 p.m., and I decided to park the car at my friend Mike’s house for the evening. This is because I didn’t have a garage—and while I was planning to normally keep the Ferrari in a warehouse about thirty minutes away from my house, I decided on this first occasion to leave it close to home. That way, we could wake up early Sunday morning and film the very first video, where I would express my SHEER JUBILATION about OWNING A FERRARI!!!!!
But that jubilation never came. As I recall, it was replaced by fear, terror, anxiety, dread, horror, and various other words that come up when you put “fear” into thesaurus.com. Such as consternation.
Here’s what happened: the very next morning after the five-hundred-mile drive, I went to Mike’s house to retrieve the car so I could shoot the video. So we opened his garage, and we oohed and we aahed over every inch of the car. And then I got inside the car so I could pull it into his driveway, where we would ooh and aah some more.
This is when the consternation began.
As I recall, I started the car and smoke immediately began billowing out of the exhaust. And I don’t mean there was some steam coming out of the exhaust, or a few vapors like you get when you start your car on a cold morning. I mean there was smoke, serious smoke, as if the car had just chosen a new Pope, and its name was 0W-40.
Immediately, I shut off the car and I began to freak out. Why is my new car SMOKING? What the hell is WRONG with it? What’s the PROBLEM? What is GOING ON? If I had to put my feelings into words, I would say that I was, at this point, seriously consternated.
With far more experience working on cars than I have, Mike quickly floated the idea that the white smoke might mean the car had a blown head gasket. It was a good theory, since white smoke is a common sign of a blown head gasket: when the head gasket fails, coolant leaks into the combustion chamber, and smoke is produced as the coolant burns off.
This changed my level of panic. I was no longer “seriously consternated.” I had now advanced to “the kind of consternation the captain of the Titanic felt when he realized he had hit an iceberg the size of a rural congressional district.”
Here’s why: In a normal car, a head gasket repair is incredibly expensive. It usually costs thousands of dollars, and that’s assuming the engine is still in acceptable condition to be repaired. If not, it costs even more thousands of dollars to find and install a new engine. A head gasket repair is so expensive that it often costs more to fix than the actual value of many older cars, or many newer Mitsubishis.
But in a Ferrari? In a Ferrari, I had no idea what it could cost. Thousands, for sure. Maybe tens of thousands. A new engine would be $40,000, plus much more for installation. Could it be that expensive? Possibly. I didn’t know. The only thing I knew was that the mechanic would have a great time telling this story as he sailed around the world on his ninety-foot yacht, the S.S. Engine Out Service.
This began my frantic searching of the Internet on my phone for help. As I recall, these were a few of my search strings:
ferrari 360 head gasket
ferrari 360 smoke
ferrari 360 head gasket smoke
ferrari 360 white smoke
ferrari 360 smoke at startup
ferrari 360 head gasket repair
can i cancel a cashier’s check?
jail time for insurance fraud
jail time for murdering car seller
is time travel possible?
Unfortunately, this wasn’t yielding any major help. It seemed there were very few Ferrari owners who had experienced a head gasket failure in the 360—and the few who reported it had something like eighty thousand miles on their cars, or they had ignored obvious warning signs like major overheating. With so few other reported failures, was I in the clear? Was the smoke just a strange coincidence?
To put my mind at ease, Mike suggested that we take a look in the coolant tank. His theory was that if the coolant tank was empty, the car might be leaking coolant—potentially a sign of a blown head gasket. But if it was full—the more likely scenario—then there was no head gasket leak, the smoke was from something else, something smaller, and I could relax. Then we could re-start the car, finish the video, and everything would be fine. The consternation would be gone, the sheer jubilation returned.
I agreed that this was the best course of action, so we opened the coolant tank.
It was empty.
CONSTERNATION LEVEL: MAXIMUM.
It’s hard to explain how anxious I really was at this point. No coolant and lots of smoke generally means that you’re looking at a head gasket replacement, and this cost would’ve been truly, ridiculously, absurdly, insanely, start-a-GoFundMe astronomical.
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I was Googling everything I possibly could find that was even remotely related to my problem. I was reading about coolant, and smoke, and head gaskets, and Ferraris. I even Googled the previous owner, to find out if he had been featured in any of those CNBC shows about financial fraud where some guy in Florida with a Hawaiian shirt and a Hummer H2 convinces a bunch of old people that the secret to major wealth lies in the Guatemalan cucumber trade. I clicked on every single Yahoo Answers link about head gaskets, and smoke, and engines, including one from a guy with an ’89 Buick LeSabre asking if he needed a new engine because a family of warblers had been living in his number four cylinder for the past year and a half.
At this point I was so terrified that I called up a friend of mine who has a lot of experience with exotic cars, and I explained the situation. Actually, “explained” isn’t really the right term. A better way to describe it would be: I shouted into the phone in sheer panic. I think if you look back into the long global history of panicked telephone calls, you would have, ranked by overall level of panic, a) Madeleine McCann’s mom calling the Portugese police, b) this phone call to my friend about my Ferrari, and c) Steve Bartman telling his wife to start packing the car, because they were leaving Chicago for a little while.
Although my friend gave me some reassuring words (“they all smoke,” and “don’t worry about it”), he wasn’t able to calm me down. So then Mike called one of his friends—a person with a lot of Ferrari experience, in the sense that his father owned a 360 Challenge Stradale and an F40—and he told me the same thing: they all smoke. Don’t worry about it. It’s no big deal.
WELL THEN WHY THE HELL IS THERE NO COOLANT? WHY DIDN’T IT SMOKE YESTERDAY ON A FIVE-HUNDRED-MILE DRIVE, BUT TODAY IT’S SMOKING LIKE SNOOP DOGG? WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON HERE????
At this point, it had been about an hour of sheer terror and panic since I first started the car earlier in the morning. With few other ideas (aside from “wait until Monday and flatbed it to a dealer”), Mike and I decided to drive our consternated selves to the auto parts store in a different vehicle in order to pick up coolant, which we would then pour into the coolant tank. If the car started up with no smoke, everything was probably fine. If the coolant leaked out of the car, we would know there was a serious issue.
So we arrived at Napa Auto Parts, and we walked up to the coolant aisle, and the following realization dawned on us: what the hell type of Napa Auto Parts coolant do you put in a Ferrari 360 Modena? In fact, what the hell type of Napa Auto Parts coolant do you put in anything nicer than a 1984 Dodge Aries? Just as we were having the conversation, a helpful Napa Auto Parts employee walked up to us and asked for our year, make, and model so she could look up the coolant type. “It’s a 2004 Ferrari,” Mark replied. The woman just chuckled and walked away.
Eventually, we chose some coolant—using the age-old method of “Which one has the better logo?,” —and we drove back to the Ferrari, which still hadn’t been started or moved since The Great Smoke Incident of Earlier That Morning. We opened the garage door, I dropped some coolant in the tank, I started the car, and …
Smoke.
But not that much smoke. Not like the smoke that had been spewing out two hours ago. So I let the car continue to idle. After a few seconds, the smoke lessened, and then it lessened some more, and about a minute later it was completely gone. We backed the car into the driveway and let it sit, idling, for a few minutes, as we discussed what to do.
In the end, we decided to go ahead as planned with that day’s video. It was a risky prospect: if there was a blown head gasket, the car would probably overheat and require a tow. It could also further damage the engine. But the car seemed to be fine: it wasn’t making any unusual noises, it wasn’t displaying any fault lights, and the smoke now seemed like it was completely gone. In other words, the Ferrari was a Ferrari: it could be totally fine, or it could require more money in repairs than a luxury home kitchen remodel. And I could only know for sure if I brought it to a dealer that charges roughly the same hourly rate as Johnnie Cochran.
So we filmed the video that afternoon, and I uploaded it later that week. And as of this writing, the video (“Driving Home From Florida in a Ferrari 360 Modena”) has now been seen by around 250,000 people—none of whom have any idea that the guy on camera, casually driving around in the Ferrari and talking about his five-hundred-mile trip home, is silently thinking to himself that he may be facing a repair that costs as much as an entire college education.
The next day was a Monday, and I drove the car to straight to the dealer with two goals. One was simple: I needed tires. But I also wanted an explanation for that smoke. Was it the head gasket? Was it the engine? Is this what Ferrari ownership is like??? ARE YOU SURE TIME TRAVEL ISN’T REAL?!?!?!?
So I dropped it off, and the dealer said they’d call, and I said “OK, great, I look forward to hearing from you!” But what I really meant was: I will literally be sitting by the phone and staring at the screen until you call me. And then I went about my day, silently cursing every time a call came in from someone other than the dealer. (“Oh! Hi Mom! It’s you!” Sonofagoddamnmotherf—)
And then, in the afternoon, the call came: it was the dealer.
“We got the tires on for you, Mr. DeMuro,” they said. “But we didn’t see any smoke or anything that could’ve caused it.” Then they added: “The car looks great!”
I let out a sigh of relief that was heard in some remote Asian villages.
I later discovered a few things that would’ve set my mind a little more at ease if I had known them at the time. The biggest is that the “empty” coolant reservoir was actually an expansion tank—a coolant tank designed only to be full when the car had been warmed up and excess coolant was bubbling up from the regular coolant reservoir. In normal operation, it was designed to be empty—like, for example, when you were going to check on your car after it had been sitting overnight in a garage on a cold day in January.
That cold day in January also undoubtedly played a role in the Great Smoke Incident of 2014. As it turned out, that was the coldest night of the year in Atlanta—and the coldest night in a decade for the car, which had spent the last ten years in south Florida. Combine the temperature drop with a) a five-hundred-mile drive, and b) a temperamental Italian car, and apparently you get exhaust smoke. Who knew?
I picked up the car the following day at the dealership, and I didn’t see any smoke when I started it up. Over the course of the next year, I put around five thousand miles on the Ferrari, driving it in five different states under an enormously wide variety of circumstances, from loaning it to a movie studio to a spirited mountain drive to a day trip to Manhattan. Never again did it spit out even the slightest bit of unwelcome smoke.
But that didn’t stop me from checking my rearview mirror for smoke every single time I started the car from that moment on. When it comes to Ferrari ownership, you can never have too much consternation.
The Real Story of the Chrysler PT Cruiser I Crushed
When I die, I think this is what my tombstone will say:
Here lies Doug DeMuro
Crushed a PT Cruiser with a Hummer
I say this because I’ve been doing this car journalism thing full time for about three years now, and I’m starting to think that my readers believe no achievement will ever top the time I used my Hummer to crush a Chrysler PT Cruiser. I get the feeling that I could announce tomorrow that I’ve become the first person to visit Neptune in a Range Rover, and my readers would carefully peruse my column about it, and they’d chuckle a bit, and they’d think about it for a while, and they’d smile, and then they’d call over their wife, and they’d say: “Honey! Some guy on the Internet traveled 2.8 billion miles through outer space in an SUV! You’ve got to see the video where he crushes a PT Cruiser with a Hummer!”
So my crowning contribution to the world of journalism is the time I crushed a pathetically used, broken-down, poorly maintained, wood-paneled Chrysler PT Cruiser with a mi
litary vehicle designed to pursue serious enemy combatants through a wide array of rugged terrain, provided this terrain is no narrower than a standard elevator. And you know what? I’m OK with that. Although if I ever take a Range Rover to Neptune, dammit, you’d better at least give me a re-tweet.
But there’s a little more to the PT Cruiser destruction story than you originally thought.
Here’s what I announced online: I purchased a PT Cruiser from a shady guy in Camden, New Jersey (motto: “GET DOWN!”), and then I crushed it with the help of an even shadier guy in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania (motto: “Daily Extradition Service To Camden, New Jersey!”).
Here’s what actually happened: Yes, I purchased a PT Cruiser from a shady guy in Camden. And yes, I crushed it with the help of a shady guy in Upper Darby. But what I didn’t tell everyone is that I tracked down the PT Cruiser’s original owner on Facebook. And let’s just say I’m still looking over my shoulder, just in case he ever finds that video of me crushing his beloved car.
This part of the story begins a few nights after I bought the PT Cruiser. My friend Peri flew in from Atlanta, Georgia, in order to check out the Hummer and experience the PT Cruiser destruction in person. He’s the one you can hear in the video yelling, “KEEP GOING! KEEP GOING!” like a marine biologist cheering on a group of newly hatched sea turtles.