by Doug DeMuro
A week or so later, we received the call from the shop: they got the diagnostic computer to read the car’s over-revs. And ours?
Stage two.
Unlikely to cause damage. Unlikely to affect resale value.
That night, I took my girlfriend to a special dinner—not to celebrate her birthday, or my birthday, or our arrival in a new city, but to commemorate something even more blissful: the stage two over-rev. And trust me when I say that it was a lot more glorious than any birthday dinner I’ve ever been to.
With that said, we still couldn’t confirm with certainty that there had been no engine damage. And so, at Daniel’s request and in an effort to err on the side of caution, we paid to have the engine removed from the car. Out came the transmission, out came the engine, and in went the technicians to diagnose any potential problem they could find—all to be paid for by me and Peri.
Imagine this: Porsche technicians, who get paid to fix problems, poring over an engine in order to look for a problem. This would be like sending Pavarotti to an elementary school musical to get his take on the singing.
More waiting. More misery. More anxiety.
And then, finally, we got the call: the technicians were done. The engine had been thoroughly checked—and aside from the accessories pulley, there hadn’t been any damage. We were free. We were clear. The nightmare was over.
But despite the fact that nothing happened, despite the fact that our over-rev was only a stage two, and despite the fact that the only real problem was the broken accessories pulley, this whole event wasn’t cheap. Between the engine removal, the engine inspection, the computer diagnostics and the pulley replacement, we were on the hook for two thousand eight hundred and thirty-three dollars and seventy-three cents. All for going 400 revolutions per minute over the rev limiter.
Peri had spent virtually every weekend throughout the entire summer filming videos for my YouTube channel, all without a dime of compensation. I paid the entire bill.
Less than a year later, I received a text message from Daniel with a picture of his GT3 smashed up on Peachtree Road in Atlanta. A teenage girl driving a Jetta had made an illegal turn in front of him, and he couldn’t avoid crashing into her. Daniel’s car was in bad shape—so bad that his insurance company eventually totaled it.
The last time I saw the GT3 was in pictures on an Internet salvage auction website, with a smashed hood, a damaged bumper, mangled fenders, deployed airbags … and a recently installed accessories pulley, the product of more anxiety than any future owner will ever know.
The Ferrari and the Steepest Driveway in Philadelphia
I will always remember the moment my girlfriend and I first arrived at our new home in Philadelphia. It was a huge day for us: we had met in Atlanta and spent the last several years there, so the move north was a fairly big change, sort of like how a blue whale is a fairly big fish. And we weren’t just moving to a new city: we were moving in together for the very first time, in a new house, hundreds of miles away from home.
So when we arrived in Philadelphia, it was a big milestone. Living together. In a new house. With a couple bedrooms. And a yard. Hundreds of miles away. And a garage! That’s right: we had a GARAGE! For the first time in my life, I would have a GARAGE! A REAL LIVE GARAGE! And a DRIVEWAY! A BRAND NEW DRIVEWAY! THE CAR ENTHUSIAST’S DREAM!! ALL FOR ME!!!! OH MY GOD I’M SO EXCITED!!!! I hadn’t been this happy since Amazon started offering next-day Cheetos delivery.
And then … SCRRRRRRRAPE.
That’s the sound of my Ferrari bottoming out on my BRAND NEW DRIVEWAY the first time I tried to park it in my REAL LIVE GARAGE.
The horror of that moment will forever be etched in my mind, like the two-second gap from when you drop your iPhone to when you pick it up and turn it over to see if the screen looks like it’s been mauled by a hungry jungle creature.
We had started the process of looking for a place to rent in Philadelphia several months earlier, but we had limited abilities, because we were still living in Atlanta. The problem was, we couldn’t exactly fly up to Philadelphia every time a potential place came on the market—and we couldn’t exactly ask anyone we knew in Philadelphia to go visit new houses repeatedly, any time we found something we might want. So we had to rely on the next best option: Craigslist photographs.
And in Craigslist photographs, the place we chose looked pretty damn good. There was a garage. There was a driveway. There was a backyard. There were three floors, on a quiet block, with two bedrooms on top and a large open living room and kitchen thing in the middle. It seemed ideal. So we spoke to the owners, and we signed the papers, and we were pretty damn satisfied with ourselves for being able to find such a cool place from hundreds of miles away using only our highly honed Craigslist browsing capabilities.
Until … SCRRRRRRRAPE.
I first realized it would be a problem the very first time we pulled up to the house, and we started bringing stuff in, and I discovered that the driveway angle was approximately the same as the Matterhorn. I am not exaggerating here. OK, maybe I am exaggerating slightly, because nobody ever died attempting to ascend our driveway. But I bet some postal workers have needed a drink of water afterwards.
The worst part was that even as we were moving in, I had absolutely no idea whether or not the Ferrari would make it up the driveway/ramp/back country ski slope. This is because I had shipped it up to the dealer to get some work done before we moved, and it was still at the dealer when we arrived.
So I’m walking up the driveway like a mule climbing the Grand Canyon—except I’m carrying our couches and tables, not a tourist from Milwaukee trying to figure out how to take an iPhone video—and I’m thinking exactly two things: One, local teenage skateboarders probably have a name for my driveway. Something like the Davis Street Drawbridge, or the Killer Kar Ramp, or Skatemurder. (“Guys, you wanna do Skatemurder?” I could imagine them saying. “Nah, let’s just shoot heroin.”)
And number two: Is my Ferrari really going to make it up this thing?
The answer came a few days later when I went and picked it up from the dealer. That should’ve been a glorious reunion: I had shipped the car north a couple of weeks earlier, and then it was getting serviced for about a week, so I hadn’t seen it in almost a month. And there I was, picking it up from the Ferrari dealership in Philadelphia’s western suburbs, which are home to precisely two things: a) amazing, exciting, twisty, curvy back roads, and b) people who pay two grand for their dogs.
So this should’ve been a glorious reunion, and I should’ve had a great drive home in my car, thinking about how great I had it—moving to an exciting new city, living with my wonderful girlfriend, driving on these excellent roads, listening to the roar of the engine, a week’s worth of Cheetos just one Amazon click away. Instead, all I could think, the entire time I was heading home, was: Oh my God, is Skatemurder going to claim its next victim?
The answer was: SCRRRRRRRAPE.
As it turned out, the Ferrari had no problem clearing the initial entrance to the driveway, which was pretty level. Where it had trouble was at the top: the driveway’s steep angle was so incompatible with the flat garage that the middle of the car was actually scraping at the point where the two met. You can imagine how this felt: I was sitting there with my Ferrari, outside my brand new house, in my brand new city, hundreds of miles from my home, eight states away from all my friends, with HALF MY CAR hanging out the back of the garage. And the bottom had just scraped the ground like the Titanic against that big ice cube.
All I could think was: What the hell have I gotten myself into?
So I did what any rational, logical person would do: I forced the Ferrari into my garage (SCRRRRRRRRRRRAPE), and I decided I would solve the problem with some help from an old college math class. So I broke out my sophomore year math textbook and put it to good use: I rested my laptop on it and created a model of my driveway angle, complete with a 1:18th scale Ferrari on top. I took this picture of the DeMuro Textbook-Laptop Dri
veway Model, when I was sitting at home, a week after moving into my new house, my Ferrari downstairs with scrape marks underneath its rocker panels.
Here’s what I figured out: When I closely approximated the driveway angle in the DeMuro Textbook-Laptop Driveway Model, the toy Ferrari scraped precisely where the real Ferrari scraped: where the driveway meets the garage (or, more accurately, where the laptop meets the other laptop). However, the Ferrari didn’t scrape if I placed some object—in this case, a couple of security envelopes—down on the ground to lift up the rear wheels just ever so slightly.
So I went to Home Depot, and I looked around for the following item: something I can put under the rear wheels of my Ferrari to make sure it doesn’t get damaged when I pull into my garage. When employees asked what I was searching for, I told them I was doing an art project. I did not want to worry them by announcing that they shared their city with Skatemurder.
Eventually, I found some giant rubber mats with holes in them that seemed like they would do the trick, and I brought them back to my lair for testing.
Here’s what happened: I put the mats down on the driveway. SCRRRRRRRAPE. Then I moved them a little. SCRRRRRRRAPE. Then I moved them again. SCRRRRRRRAPE. If my neighbors looked out their window, what they would’ve seen was a guy anxiously scrambling around his driveway, adjusting black rubber mats under his Ferrari like a makeup artist desperately trying to make a congressman look presentable before going on live television, even though he has spent the last thirty-six years walking into restaurants and ordering “whatever ya just killed.”
The good news: after about five tries and about five scrapes, by God, the mats worked. I burned their optimal location into my memory, like my childhood address. The car never scraped again.
In the days and weeks that followed, I took many walks around Philadelphia to try and get acclimated to my new city, and I paid close attention to all the driveways I saw. After miles of walking all over many neighborhoods, I never did see a single driveway in the entire remainder of Philadelphia as steep as mine. I think that I—the guy with the lowest car in Philadelphia—moved into the house with the steepest driveway.
Of course I did.
Interestingly, the Ferrari wasn’t the worst part about that driveway. The worst part came a few months later, when it snowed. Imagine, if you will, attempting to shovel the Rocky Mountains. Except you have to start at the top. And you can’t drive your car anywhere until you finish. And oh yeah, the building next to the driveway casts a huge shadow over it, so the whole thing turns to ice if you don’t shovel right away. After going through roughly four million bags of road salt and falling on my face approximately eleven times, I’d had enough. We moved out of the place after only a year.
Skatemurder claimed another victim.
Driving on the Bonneville Salt Flats
I once had the opportunity to drive my car 155 miles per hour, legally, on U.S. government property. This occurred in a place so desolate, so barren, so stark, so dismal, and so grim that no sane human would ever wish to live there. Geographers call this place “Utah.”
Actually, I like Utah very much, in the sense that I do not wish to receive hate mail from readers in Utah. In fact, I often suggest the idea of living in Utah to my girlfriend. “Maybe we should live in Utah!” I occasionally say, with some enthusiasm. Then she looks at me like Godzilla looked at Tokyo.
But the place where I legally drove 155 miles per hour is not near the Salt Lake City area, which is somewhere you might actually live. Instead, it’s an hour and a half west of Salt Lake City, which is somewhere you might live if you’re the kind of creature people hit with newspapers. It’s on the Utah-Nevada state line, and it’s called the Bonneville Salt Flats.
For those of you who don’t know anything about the Bonneville Salt Flats, please allow me to educate you. I am highly knowledgeable about this topic, in the sense that I spent forty-seven minutes there two years ago and I recently skimmed the Wikipedia article about it. On Reddit, this would qualify me as an expert.
Here’s the situation: the Bonneville Salt Flats are a vast, smooth plain of hard-packed salt with nothing else around for miles. The area is so barren and the flats are so thick that there’s an annual “Bonneville Speed Week” where people travel there from all over the world to test out the top speeds of their vehicles. In fact, Bonneville is so well known for its empty, flat, salty plains that virtually every world land speed record from the 1930s to the 1980s was set here. (Surprisingly, this is all true. –Doug’s editor.)
What’s less clear is how the Salt Flats were formed. (Oh, no. Here we go. –Doug’s editor.) The current leading theory is that salt blows here from all over the country after leaving various other salt locations, such as giant mounds of road salt, or outdoor restaurant salt shakers, or ballgame pretzels, and then it all gathers together in Bonneville like it’s some sort of saline Woodstock. Another theory suggests that possibly the aliens created the salt flats in order to return later if they happened to be in the galaxy and wanted to stop by for a giant martini. (Oy. –Doug’s editor.)
Anyway: you may remember the Salt Flats from the movie The World’s Fastest Indian, wherein Sir Anthony Hopkins plays a guy in New Zealand who takes an Indian motorcycle, modifies it with his own parts, designs it for top speed runs, spends years testing it, and then is denied entry into the United States because they catch him at LAX trying smuggle four pounds of heroin. It is a very powerful story, especially the part at the end where he meets Morgan Freeman on a beach in Mexico and the two men get into a fistfight. (I think we’ve lost him. –Doug’s editor.)
Now, before we get into my own personal experience on the flats, I think it’s important to understand why the hell I was in western Utah. Here’s what happened: although many of you know about the Ferrari I owned for a year of videos and columns, and even more of you know about the Hummer and Nissan Skyline GT-R I owned for a year of videos and columns, only a precious few know that there was actually a car before any of these: a 2011 Cadillac CTS-V Wagon.
During the summer of 2013, my girlfriend and I drove my CTS-V Wagon 6,400 miles across the country and back in seventeen days. At the end of this trip, we were tired of the following things: driving, sitting, stopping, eating, America, road signs, the Google Maps voice, those little bumps on the lane lines, pressing the turn signal lever, small towns that claim to have the “world’s largest” something, etc. But along the way, we had great fun checking out all of the wonderful sights, like Hearst Castle in California, and the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, and the Grand Canyon in Arizona, and the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, and the Rocky Mountains in Colorado.
And a rather desolate state called Utah.
And so, after we left the central California ski town of Mammoth Lakes, we charted a course through the vast, emptiness of Nevada (state motto: “You think Utah’s empty? LOLOLOLOL”) to visit the Bonneville Salt Flats.
Along the way, we were trying to figure out whether or not it was actually legal to drive on the flats at high speeds. Yes, the Speed Week people come out every year and host a major event where people go 471 miles per hour in an old Volkswagen Beetle powered by the engine from a Chinook helicopter. But what about some guy and his girlfriend, alone, on a road trip across the country? Visiting the flats on a random Tuesday afternoon? With no organized event, and no advanced timing equipment, and a couple of bags of Cheetos in the center console? Could we really do 150 miles per hour out there, in the middle of nowhere, and nobody would care?
The best guidance I could find came from a travel advisory posted online by the federal government’s Bureau of Land Management, which began with the statement:
“The Bonneville Salt Flats are a unique and dynamic environment. The weather and surface
conditions can be extreme and challenging at different times of the year. Travel on the salt flats will always be at your own risk, and the Bureau of Land Management assumes no responsibility or liability for public use of this area.�
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For those of you who aren’t well versed in travel advisories, please allow me to translate. This is U.S. government-speak for: “Do whatever the hell you want. But if you screw up, we’re about as likely to come help you as those aliens looking for that giant martini.” Or, translated into another language (“mid-20s male”), it reads: “DO WHATEVER YOU WANT!! HAVE FUN!! THERE ARE NO RISKS!!! WOOOOOOOOO!!!!!”
Unfortunately, when you read further down into the document, the following phrases appear:
Once you go from the access road onto the salt flats, there are no facilities available at all. There are no surface improvements or signs. You are on your own.
The mud is often very soft and wet and may cause your vehicle to become stuck.
The salty water is highly corrosive and may short out the electrical system of your vehicle. This could leave you stranded, many miles from help.