I need to apologize to you, readers. I think I have failed in one serious move. Remember the Cadillac limo, the craptacular 1980 Fleetwood Formal extended-length beauty that I ran once at King of the Heap after a year of treating it like a $500 pickup truck? If you don’t remember the final bits to the story, it goes like this: Up until we ran the car at King of the Heap, the two worst things about the car was the sheer gutlessness of the 368ci Cadillac big-block underneath the hood and the power steering’s ability to piss out all of it’s fluid in maybe ten minutes. Other than that, the car started every time, could haul almost thirty bags of mulch in the back seat compartment, and proved to be dead-nuts reliable. But once it saw the racetrack, it decided that it was done being nice. We got black-flagged for excessive fluid leakage, we got rained out, and in boiling anger, once I got the car back to my house I did a neutral drop at full valve float, earning the TH400 a second neutral. We had spun a bearing in the 368, had twisted the car hard enough to get bondo to fall out of many different locations, and when we finally let the junkyard have it, the car’s back literally broke when it was picked up by the forklift.

Was the Caddy a good car? Hell no, it wasn’t. But did it deserve the death it got? In hindsight, no it didn’t. What it deserved was a high-flying leap to the valley below, where it could pancake itself to pieces in one final, glorious ending. What better way to celebrate the Fourth of July than by road-tripping that pile nearly four thousand miles northwest to Glacier Bay, Alaska with a couple of friends documenting the whole thing? Honestly, it would’ve made the drive just fine with a repaired power steering line and an oil check every thousand miles. The Cadillac was rock-solid in that regard. Once up in Alaska, we’d pick up something to bring back home with us and send that Cadillac flying off the cliff and towards it’s parking space in the used car lot in the sky without one ounce of regret whatsoever.

We should’ve done it. Next time…next time it will be considered.