How Not To Buy a Rally Car
Mark Weber
My
very first Saab was a 1972 Saab 96 with the 1.7 L engine and
was OD Green, that ugly green you could never keep a shine on. I'd wax that car
and three days later it was as dull as in this picture.
My
first wife and I fought over that car in our divorce (she didn't really
want it, she just didn't want me to have it) and once I finally
gave up, she turned around and sold it.
During the summer of 2005, my friend, Rob Walden, owner of Scanwest Autosports started helping me look for another Saab 96. Unfortunately, everything we looked at was either a piece of rusted-out junk or the owners wanted a small fortune for it. In hindsight, that small fortune would have been cheap.
In September of 2005, I bought a 1969 Saab 96 from a guy on eBay who assured me that the car had "a quiet engine and a strong transmission". For the two weeks between when I bought the car and when I picked it up, I peppered the guy with questions about the engine, tranny, ball-joints, tires, cooling system, etc. He kept assuring me that the car was good to go to Seattle. The car was in Oakland. Because of business obligations I flew to Oakland on Labor Day weekend (Saturday) and arrived at 7:30 PM. I took a cab from the airport to his house, drove the car, which did have a quiet engine, and seemed to be in good shape. He had detailed the car to pristine condition. I paid him his money, got the title and started for Seattle.
I made it to
Arbuckle, California, which is on I-5, just 105 miles from Oakland, when the transmission
locked up. I got the car off the freeway, barely, and I settled in for the night.
By the way, there is nothing, and I mean "not a damn thing" in Arbuckle,
California. There is a small store but they closed at 10PM and
wouldn't open again till 6 AM.
Parked at the end of a off-ramp of I-5, I was visited by a county sheriff about 3:00AM. After the usual question and answers, checks for wants and warrants, etc, he turned out to be a very nice guy. He helped me push the car around the corner and off the road where it wouldn't be a bother to anyone. I was out of cell phone range and he drove me to a store in Williams where I was able to call my wife. She, in turn, called AAA and found out the nearest truck rental place, that had a truck and a car dolly, was in Yuba City. Yuba City was 55 miles away.
This part of the Central Valley of California is tomato country. And even on a Sunday morning, they start early. Truck after truck filled to the brim with tomatoes went by headed to the processing plant where, I was later told, they were turned into ketchup.
At 4:00 in the morning, with my thumb stuck out, I
started for Yuba City.
At about 4:30 I was picked by a Hispanic gentleman who spoke
almost no english but was kind enough to take me to my halfway point of Colusa. Colusa is a charming little town on the
banks of the Sacramento River with oak-lined streets, Victorian and Craftsman style houses
and very little else. I know, I walked from one end of town to the other.
Just as I got to the outskirts of town, a younger Hispanic gentleman offered to drive me the remaining 25 miles to Yuba City for fifty bucks. I offered ten and we settled on twenty. His pickup was a mid-sixties ford with a leaking exhaust system, but that was okay as we had the windows down all the way, and a 200 amp stereo system which drowned out the lack of a muffler. The speed limit meant little to him and I was in Yuba City by 8:00 AM.
The Yuba City U-haul dealer didn't open till 9:00AM so I found a little diner across the street and a block down where I sat down to a pair of overcooked eggs, toast and burnt hash browns. Let me tell you, and no offense to the residents of Yuba City, but that is a hole in the dessert I never want to fall into again. Hot, dusty and nothing but burnt, brown hills surrounding it. And here was Yuba City sitting like a cow pie in the middle of some farmers field.
While I was
eating breakfast, a line had formed outside the dealership so when I returned half an hour
later, I was about tenth in line. The first weekend of the month is not the best
time to rent a truck and it seemed that everyone ahead of me had, or was having, some sort
of problem. Some people were returning trucks rented out the day before so they had
to be checked out, argued about whether it was clean enough to get their cleaning deposit
back, etc. I swear, the guy in line in front of me told the clerk, "there's no
f***** way my horses caused those dents on the inside of that box."
Hmmm..., if he was hauling horses in a U-haul and there were dents...Oh
well, not my problem.
I finally got a 14' truck, a car dolly and was on the road by 10:45. I was also $1,842 lighter in the wallet. Can you believe it! $1,842 one way to Seattle. Thank God for VISA Platinums!
The return trip to Arbuckle took me an hour and by now the temperature was well into the nineties. I had originally planned to be home about now but here I was in Arbuckle trying to figure out how I was going to get my Saab onto the dolly. I thought about finding some blocks or perhaps some lumber, jacking up first one side of the car, getting a block or lumber under it and then doing the same thing on the other side, then backing the dolly under the front tires. Somehow I saw disaster in that plan and fortunately, saw several young men about a block away. I approached them and after some negotiations, reached a price of five bucks a piece and they helped me pick up the Saab and set it on the dolly.
Finally!!!!
after setting the straps and making a slow test run through Arbuckle, I was on the road
north. Then it struck me. If this guy was wrong about the transmission, how had he
been about doing the simple things like keeping the rear wheel bearings lubed? One thing
I'll say about the
California
freeways, they have rest areas every thirty miles or so and I stopped at
every one of them for the first 2 hours to check the straps and reach
through the slots in the rims and to feel the rear brake drum to see if it
was hot or even slightly warm. Fortunately they stayed cool for the
remainder of the trip north. Other than being hotter than hell, the road
construction, the RVs, and the almost constant pinging coming from the
rental truck engine, the rest of the trip north was pretty uneventful.
I usually enjoy the drive up I-5 from Redding to Eugene since its almost constant mountains but in an
underpowered truck towing a questionable car, I was a little STRESSED.
I arrived in Seattle at approximately 3:00 AM Monday morning. Except for a few fitful hours of sleep in the cab of the Saab, I hadn't slept since Friday night and once in bed didn't rise again till well after noon. I got the Saab into my driveway, returned the truck and dolly to the nearest U-haul dealer and filed this one away as one of life's unexpected little diversions, that if taken with the right attitude, can be a great story to tell your car-buddies and the grandkids.
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