YouTube user Bajabusta has done us quite a service by uploading so many old Car & Track road tests from the late 1960s and early 1970s. We watched the ’72 Volkswagen 412 exhibit some scary trailing throttle oversteer last week, and now it’s time to watch a classic Detroit land yacht make its stately way around a test track. (Read More…)

When my father arrived at the accident scene, I was huddled in the back of Mom’s Nissan King Cab 4×4, head between my knees, just about managing not to cry. My sixteenth birthday present, a slick, five-speed Datsun/Nissan 200SX hatchback, was broken nearly in half and skewed across the middle of Ponset Street. The parked car I’d hit, a Nissan Stanza, had been launched up the curb, past two houses, coming to rest in the lawn of the third house down. We didn’t know to call it drifting back then. We called it powersliding, and I’d been determined to master it on my first legal day behind the wheel. I’d been doing nearly sixty miles an hour, full opposite lock, in some vague control of the two-tone Datsun, when I realized that it was legal to park a car right where I was headed, and that somebody had done so.

The old man appeared in the window of Mom’s truck. I couldn’t look at him.

“You okay?” he inquired.

“Yes, Sir.” There was a pause.

“Don’t expect to drive again. No time soon.”

“No, Sir, I don’t.” And, in fact, it was a year and a half later before I got another car. That car was a 1980 Marquis Brougham Coupe. Blood red on the inside and out. White Landau roof. Two thousand, two hundred, and ninety-nine dollars was what Dad paid. There wasn’t a straight panel on the car, and it ran down the road as crooked as the dealer who called it “a clean, two-owner example.” Maybe we got ripped off, but without the Marquis I wouldn’t have known Tanya.

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