So yesterday I drove a 2013 Ford Taurus SHO and my Buford T Justice Caprice, loving them both. I have a severe problem called automotive schizophrenia and there is no known cure. That’s a fact for which I am pretty thankful because I find it to be a damned enjoyable affliction. The Taurus was a fleet loan from Ford and you’ll see a full feature/review on it in the coming days. Chad makes fun of me for getting excited over driving stuff like the SHO, but to be honest I think it is pretty important to know what modern performance cars are like to benchmark older cars that have been improved with aftermarket parts. Plus it’s fun as hell.

Anyway, as you’ve already read today,I put a full exhaust system on Project Buford T Justice much to the relief of my neighbors and local law enforcement. The car is awesome to drive again and since I’ve had the Taurus, the Caprice has been waiting in the wings. So about 20 minutes after the Taurus went back to Ford, I grabbed my old GM keys and headed out the door to fire up and cruise the Caprice. The Taurus is a high performance four door car and the SHO is really a gussied up version of the Police Interceptor that you see cruising the highways. The Caprice? Go back about 25 years and you have the same concept minus all the luxury, refinement, and horsepower. Today, other than the fact that they share the same number of doors and four wheels, the cars are diametrically opposite and you can love them both for that reason.

Fire up the Taurus and there’s a very soft burble from the exhaust and no real indication that the twin turbo 3.5L V6 makes more than 360hp. Fire up the Caprice and you’ve got a face full of noise, some nice aromas of various automotive lubricants and liquids slow roasting, and a lope that is anything but subtle. There’s greatness in both of those scenarios and anyone who loves cars can appreciate that, especially if you experience them back to back.

The goodness of the new stuff makes you really appreciate the rawness of the old stuff. In the Taurus you can enjoy the fact that you are inside of what amounts to a vault. It is whisper quiet inside, the seats have heat and AC, not to mention 17.2 million adjustments. There’s dual zone climate control, a rear sun shade that you deploy at the push of a button, touchscreen dash, and on and on and on. In the Caprice there’s a rubber floor mat, beat ass split bench, and a radio that you can barely hear over the exhaust. It has sun shades that you deploy with your freaking hands. There was a visceral thrill I got driving the Caprice that you cannot get in the SHO. Dave Nutting and I pushed the Taurus pretty hard during our photo shoot to get some good action photos and to get impressions of the car’s capability when driven aggressively.

It’s when you drive the cars hard and do it with nothing else in between them when you really understand the core differences. The Taurus was fun because it all seemed so effortless. We’d hammer a corner on the closed road we were jamming down in that car and it would simply bite and turn almost regardless of how fast you went in. Drama was limited to Nutting’s panicked and feverish reciting of the Hail Mary prayer. It was fun because the car made me feel like a more competent driver…which is admittedly dangerous for people who don’t know their limits and assume the car will save them from their own stupidity. Physics still wins in the end.

Running the Caprice hard is a totally different experience because there’s nothing to save you other than judgement, driving ability, and good sense. Instead of being swaddled by the car, you need to be the one staying completely on top of it. Not a news flash to anyone who likes old cars, but it is a far more active driving experience. It is the kind of experience that us gearheads live for because we know what’s working under and in front of us. We know that the motor makes peak power at four grand and once we get close, it is going to pull like a mother. We understand that the new handling components we installed will stiffen the car up and the big rear sway bar may make it more apt to rotate on us. We revel in the fact that some stupid yaw sensor isn’t going to rain all over our sideways parade on a deserted back road.

There are many BangShifters out there who probably think that it is impossible to live with a foot in both the worlds of high tech new cars and low tech old stuff, but I think that’s total crap. How can you appreciate the past to its fullest without knowing the present? The new stuff isn’t bad because it is new and the old stuff isn’t bad because it is old. Both have their merits and the simple fact is that the majority of us don’t use old cars as our primary means of transportation, they are our fun cars, competition cars, or means of escape. New cars can provide that same means of escape and fun but by pushing the buttons and pulling the levers in a different way. Lots of people say that new cars have no “soul”. In my book “soul” is loosely translated as,”propensity for shit to fall of or malfunction”. The “soul” we see in old cars is our own because we have typically invested the time and blood to get them working again or at least working properly.  And hey, every new car is going to be somebody’s old car one day. It doesn’t magically get “soul” at some point in its life…right?

So I’ll keep getting excited about flipping the key and laying the lumber to new iron because it makes me miss my old stuff and appreciate it for all the right reasons when I drive the junk, which reminds me I have a 1968 C50 wrecker to drive. I’m an automotive schizophrenic…and so am I.