by Doug DeMuro
After several more questions, they let us go with a stern warning. The guards insisted gruffly that the border is not a tourist attraction. They continued their serious admonishment. It is not a place to go see. It is not a place to “check out.” And it is certainly not a place to take pictures.
Then they cheerily explained that we should try and make it back next year for Maple Syrup Week.
The Most Bizarre Mechanical Delay Ever
So I’m sitting on a plane the other day at the Los Angeles International Airport, on the taxiway, a few minutes after pushing back from the gate, and the pilot gets on the intercom. “I’m sorry, folks,” he says.
I’m sorry, folks, is never good. Airline pilots are incapable of using extreme language, so this is the worst they have. If we were flying directly into a volcano, they would say only: “I’m sorry, folks. But we are about to become human pumice.”
The pilot continued. “We’re applying thrust and the plane isn’t going anywhere. It’s like the brakes are on, but we know they aren’t.”
He didn’t need to tell me this. I could already feel it. It felt like they were flooring the accelerator pedal while simultaneously holding down the brake, much like I used to do when I was back in high school, driving my used Volvo, right before stoplight drag races against people who didn’t even know we were competing.
But this was bad timing, because I was having a long day: I was trying to get from San Diego to New York City, because at eight o’clock the following morning I was supposed to be covering the New York Auto Show. Worse, this flight was only going as far as Philadelphia. When I arrived there, I was going to pick up my car and drive to New York City, where I was staying at the W Hotel, which is sort of like a normal hotel except all the couches are blue.
And this particular day was already off to a strange start, because it began with a flight from San Diego to Los Angeles, which is a distance of roughly 120 miles. Although this flight is only twenty-six minutes long, the pilot began by announcing the weather in Los Angeles. When we landed—I swear this is true—he told us the local time.
And now, the issue with the brakes.
“We’ve called a maintenance crew,” the pilot informed us, “and they’re going to come down and take a look to see if they can find the issue.”
This was not good. When they’re “having technical difficulties,” you’re mostly screwed. When they’re “calling over a maintenance crew,” it’s completely over. They’re not going to suddenly solve some problem that’s handicapped an entire 800,000-pound airplane by tinkering with it on the ground for fifteen minutes. You’re done. You aren’t going anywhere. You may never fly again. I pulled out my phone and started searching for apartment listings in Los Angeles, my new hometown.
Eventually, they hooked up one of those giant plane-pushy-back thingies to the front of our plane.
“I’m sorry, folks,” the pilot said. Not good. I wondered what my new life would be like in California. How are the property taxes? What are the schools like?
“The maintenance crew couldn’t solve the problem on the tarmac, so we’re going to hook up to some ground equipment to push back into the gate and try to figure it out. We’ll keep you updated with any more developments.”
I was not surprised that the maintenance crew couldn’t figure out the problem. The maintenance crew can never figure out the problem when they’re dispatched to examine a stranded plane on the tarmac, because the plane is an enormous, complicated, vastly technical flying machine with millions of unique and technically advanced parts, and the maintenance crew is a couple of guys with socket wrenches driving a Ford Ranger.
By now, we were about fifty minutes late to take off, and the passengers were starting to get antsy. No one was headed to Philadelphia, it seemed. They all had connections to places like Boston, or New York, or Washington, D.C.
Who the hell FLIES from Philadelphia to New York? I chuckled. That would be like flying from San Diego to Los Ang—oh, wait.
So anyway, after about thirty minutes, the pilot got on the loudspeaker once again.
“Well, folks.” Well, folks, is a good sign. It isn’t necessarily a great sign, but it’s better than I’m sorry, folks. Well, folks, could be used for a much smaller, less jarring airline event, such as: “Well, folks, we’ve accidentally opened the door to the luggage compartment, and your bags are currently raining down on suburban Omaha. But the good news is, we’re still looking at an on-time arrival.”
He continued: “The mechanics at the gate couldn’t find any issues, either, and we’re starting to think we just got stuck in a depression on the ground.”
We just … what?
The pilot was using pilot language, but his words were clear: We pushed back. We started taxiing. And then we were delayed for an hour and a half because we hit a pothole.
The pilot explained the situation further. “We’re limited with how much thrust we can use on the ground, so we don’t knock over people, or destroy ground equipment, or break windows,” he said. “And we were using as much thrust as we could, but we couldn’t get out of the depression.”
In other words: I’m sitting there with 200 people, riding in a 400-ton jet aircraft, designed by hundreds of highly skilled engineers with hundreds of years of experience between them, and we’re supposed to fly 600 miles per hour at an elevation of 30,000 feet and travel 3,000 miles from one side of the continent to the other, and we were stopped dead in our tracks on the tarmac … by a pothole.
It got worse. Because they couldn’t be “100 percent sure” the pothole was the cause of our delay, the maintenance company insisted that the pilot test the brakes before we embarked again. So we pushed back, and then the pilot taxied a bit, then he hit the brakes, and they worked, and then we had to go back to the gate so the maintenance crew could sign off on the plane’s mechanical state before our flight could take off.
In the end, we were two and a half hours late to Philadelphia. I didn’t get into New York City until 2 a.m., and I had a 7:30 a.m. wakeup call the next morning. And every single other person on the plane missed their connection. All because our plane got stuck in a pothole.
I’m sorry, folks.
The Porsche 911 GT3, the YouTube Video, and the $2,800 Repair Bill
As long as I live, wherever I go, whatever I do, I will never forget the feeling of sitting in the passenger seat of a $100,000 Porsche 911 GT3 I had borrowed to film a YouTube video when my cameraman and closest friend Peri missed a shift at 45 miles per hour. He was going from second to third, and instead he got first.
I will never forget this feeling for three reasons. Number one, because it was a warm day and the air conditioning immediately stopped working. Number two, because the car was driving just fine until the missed shift, and then the temperature gauge shot up. And number three, because at that moment, I was more afraid than any person in the history of human existence on earth, including the children in the Hunger Games arena.
Let’s back up. I first met the owner of the GT3, Daniel, about a year earlier. At the time, I lived in Atlanta, and so did Daniel; we met when he contacted me after reading a few columns I had written. On paper, most people would probably hate Daniel, because he’s an investment banker who wears expensive clothing and drives a Porsche. But he also loves cars. This is my primary consideration when it comes to liking people. You could tell me about your friend Hank who eats live guinea pigs while peeing on random suburban lawns, and if you also told me that he drives an S60R, I’d probably give him a break on the whole guinea-pig-eating-lawn-peeing thing.
Although Daniel had an older Porsche when I first met him, he upgraded to a 2007 GT3 a few months later. Whenever one of my friends buys a car like this, I always do the very same thing: as they’re appreciating their gleaming new vehicle, perfect in its beauty, temporary license plate in the window and first tank of gas still burning through the wondrous engine, I send them a message and say: Can I make a video with it?
And so, Daniel dropped off his GT3 with me just a few weeks after he bought it so I could make a video with it. If you’ve watched this video, you’ll know that it was a quite a special one, for a few important reasons. Number one, I demonstrated the car’s many excellent benefits. Number two, I revealed several of the car’s serious, crucial limitations. And number three: Peri and I played ping-pong on the spoiler.
It was after the ping-pong when The Incident occurred. The incident that scared me like a teenager who just backed his father’s car into the garage. The incident that scared me like a child seeing a snake in his backyard. The incident that scared me like a guinea pig at the pet store Hank frequents.
Here’s what happened: I was riding in the passenger seat with Peri behind the wheel so I could get some film of the car in motion. As we were heading down a hill in a beautiful wooded section of Atlanta with some truly amazing twisty roads, it happened: Peri shifted from second to third at about 4,000 rpm. Except he didn’t shift into third. He shifted into first.
Cue the air conditioning cutting off. Cue the temperature gauge shooting up. Cue the unadulterated, primal, face-splitting fear.
Now, let me tell you something that you can probably already imagine. Calling up the owner of a recently purchased $100,000 Porsche 911 GT3 to let him know that you’re sitting by the side of the road with your hazard lights on and the temperature gauge through the roof is not one of life’s finer moments. It would be like an official calling up your parents to let them know that their son got in a fight with an alligator, and they need to come down to the morgue to claim some of his personal effects, such as his toes.
As I recall, the conversation went something like this:
Me: I—uh—we—
Daniel: What?
Me: Um—well, the um—
Daniel: Well? Spit it out!
Me: Well, uh—I, uh—the car—
Daniel: The car what? What the hell are you trying to say?!?
Me: Remember, uh—remember back when your car was working?
As it turned out, Daniel was spending the day with friends a few hours away, which meant he wasn’t around for what came next: loading the car onto the flatbed. Loading a Porsche 911 GT3 onto a flatbed is not like loading a normal car onto a flatbed, because it’s so incredibly low to the ground. Loading up a 911 GT3 requires skill, and finesse, and expertise, and some specially designed tools. What we had was a toothless tow truck driver with some wood planks.
As the tow truck driver prepared to load the car on to the flatbed, I couldn’t help but muse at how this day had gone: an hour ago, I was driving a Porsche 911 GT3 on some great roads, with the sun out, and the windows down, surrounded by beautiful trees. Now, I was silently hoping that an overweight southerner named Randy wouldn’t destroy the car any further than we already had. This was looking increasingly unlikely. He got his tow truck into position, he secured his strap to the front of the car, he placed the planks at approximate width of the wheels, and then, just as he was about to start winching it up, he said: I ain’t never towed one of these before!
The plastic piece under the bumper rubbed against the wood planks as the car rolled up on the flatbed. I cringed.
Eventually, we followed Randy and the GT3 up to a local shop Daniel trusted to work on the car, which is where we dropped it off. By “we dropped it off,” what I mean of course is that we stood there while Randy inched the car down his flatbed, all the while swearing that he “gotta get more boards” in case he had to tow “another Porsh like this one.”
Then we waited.
You know that Tom Petty song called “The Waiting,” where he says that “the waiting is the hardest part”? Well, it’s pretty clear that ol’ Tom has never over-revved someone else’s 911 GT3, because this is some fairly dramatic understatement. The waiting is not the hardest part. The waiting is the excruciating part. There are moments, during the waiting, when you want to reach up through your eyeballs and start poking around your brain until you damage the part that remembers you still haven’t heard anything about the 911 GT3. Or that you broke the 911 GT3. Or that Porsches exist at all.
To his credit, Daniel was great about the whole thing. He never got upset or angry. He didn’t seem to care that we had damaged the car, just so long as we paid for the damage. But that wasn’t necessarily going to be easy.
Right away, we knew there were three scenarios. One was that nothing major happened, and the car’s only problem was that some little pulley driving the accessory belt had sheared off during the over-rev. That would cost maybe $2,000 to fix. The number two scenario was that the over-rev caused serious engine damage and would require a full rebuild. That’d be more like $13,000. And then there was the worst-case scenario: the over-rev caused catastrophic engine damage, which would require full replacement of the engine. For that, we’d have to fork over about $40,000. We had no idea which one it would be. And whenever we called the shop to check, they always said the same thing: “Oh, yeah, we’ll get to it, we just have one more car ahead of you.”
My entire life hangs in the balance, and these idiots are putting a new windshield washer fluid reservoir in a 2004 Cayenne.
During this time, Peri and I were, shall we say, a little nervous. What I mean by this is that we spoke on the phone several times per day, analyzing every moment of the over-rev, including what speed he could’ve been going, what speed the engine was turning, how long the car stayed in the wrong gear, etc. We were one step away from checking barometric pressure readings from the day it happened. It was all we could do to stay sane.
The very next morning after we damaged the GT3, I filmed a video with an original Honda Insight. I was going to be testing its hypermiling capabilities, and I absolutely had to shoot the video that day, because the owner was coming down from Tennessee just for the video, and he was moving to Asia soon after that. Today, as I look back and watch that Insight video, I have no idea how I kept it together. Although I’m laughing and talking and joking about the little Honda, what I’m really thinking is: Forty thousand dollars. GT3 engine. Over-rev. Thirteen thousand dollars. Engine rebuild. Engine replacement. Engine damage. 2004 Cayenne windshield washer fluid reservoir. Tom Petty is really an unattractive man.
And then, after a few mind-numbing days of waiting, we got the call from the Porsche shop: the over-rev had damaged the accessories pulley, so we’d have to drill out the old one and install a new one. Is that all? we asked. The shop didn’t know. They’d have to hook up the engine computer to their diagnostic tool, and potentially remove the engine from the car to look for more damage. Why don’t you hook up the engine to the computer right now? The computer is down. When’s it going to be back up? We don’t know.
More waiting. More excruciating waiting. More face-splitting fear.
It was about this time when I became an expert in 911 GT3 over-revs. I spent days looking over every single Porsche web forum result for “GT3 over-rev” as if I was an expectant mother desperately searching for any possible baby-raising tips, Googling things like “Will the baby thrive best if his wall color is royal blue or cerulean?”
Here’s what I learned: every time you over-rev the engine, the car records it and stores it in its engine computer. A “stage one” over-rev is fairly common and causes no damage. A “stage two” over-rev is less common and leads to slight damage. A “stage three” over-rev rarely happens and causes serious damage. The over-revs go up to stage six.
To complicate matters, Daniel informed us that if the computers indicated the over-rev was anything stage three and above, he would want to be compensated for lost value—since any potential future GT3 buyer would almost certainly check the prior over-revs during a pre-purchase inspection. Of course, that compensation was in addition to paying for whatever engine damage we had caused.
So now we weren’t just hoping there was no damage. We were hoping the car’s computer confirmed our over-rev was limited to “stage two” and not “stage three.” And if we were even 50 r
pm too high, we’d be looking at lost value compensation and potentially serious engine damage.
Four days ago I had been excited to drive a Porsche 911 GT3 for the first time to film a silly YouTube video where I showed the car pushing a roll of paper towels to demonstrate how low it is to the ground. Now, I was memorizing the exact rpm levels a Porsche 911 GT3 engine requires in order to reach the “stage three over-rev.”
Waiting. Excruciating, debilitating, face-splitting waiting.
During this time, another major event happened in my life: I moved across the country. I filmed this video at the beginning of August 2014, right before I packed up my things and moved with my girlfriend from Atlanta to Philadelphia, where she was starting graduate school. So as I was driving a fully loaded U-Haul north to our new home where we’d start new lives and meet new friends in a totally new city, I was primarily thinking about only one thing: stage two over-revs.