Back in November, I brought Bertha (my transmogrified ’75 2002 that I turned into a track car in the Eighties, sold to my friend Alex in 1988, bought back 30 years later after it was stored and allowed to self-demolish, and resurrected) back from storage in Monson. The car had been little-used since its run down to The Vintage in 2019. I decided to give it some much-needed attention, as well as to have it around as a poke-a-thumb-in-the-eye-of-winter vintage car that I wasn’t afraid to drive when the roads were clear.
As it happened, there was very little of the latter. After a decade of fairly light winters, it’s been a snowy one here in Boston, and the snowblower mounds from two big snowstorms wound up blocking in my garage for nearly two months. That combined with a nearly month-long bout of RSV left me doing very little (I’m better now).
Not kidding about the garage being inaccessible.
But as the Earth swung closer to the sun and the calendar swung into March, a week of warm weather rolled into New England that rapidly melted most of the snow. Last Tuesday, it hit 75 degrees in Boston, so at long last, out came some of the cars.
Bertha was in the spot behind the garage door, so she hit the asphalt first. Amazing, Bertha with her dual Weber 40DCOEs and Iskendarian 300° cam bucks the image that carbureted cars have of requiring blasts of starting fluid to start after a winter sit. I cracked the key to let the electric fuel pump run for a few seconds and fill the float bowls, pulled out the choke, stabbed the gas pedal a few times, and the car snorted to life. She does need warm-up time to run without stumbling, but hell, so do I.
Out she came.
In addition to simply wanting to take advantage of the warm day to drive the cars, there was another more strategic reason I wanted to run Bertha around. Someone posted on the Facebook page for The Vintage “Only four more weeks to do all your vintage prep.” I thought “Wait, what? No, that’s not possible.” I’d forgotten that, with the traditional Hot Springs site still out of commission from the flooding in the fall of 2024, event organizer Scott Sturdy had to find another location, and for this year moved the event to Maggie Valley, and along with that came a change in the date from the long-held weekend before Memorial Day to April 9th through 11th, now less than a month away. Yikes!
I try to let all the vintage BMWs take turns at going to The Vintage. The jewel in the crown, my precious red 1973 3.0CSi, has been down four times, the most recent trip being in 2022. Last year I drove the FrankenThirty after its unlikely purchase and resurrection. The year before that was Hampton, rolling its odometer over the 50,000-mile no-longer-a-pampered-survivor threshold. I sold Sharkie and the Bavaria last year (both three-peaters), but I still have the E9, the three 2002s, and the E30 to choose from.
The ’69 Lotus Elan +2 came out to play in the warm weather as well, but she’s not part of the Vintage-heading stable.
The E9 is generally a very well-sorted car; I don’t feel like there’s much I really need to do to it other than squeeze the hoses, check the fluids, pack it with tools and spares, and hit the road. However, to state the obvious, it is a notoriously rust-prone car, and I’ll only take it if the weather forecast looks generally clear. If it doesn’t, I need a Plan B.
She will always be my first choice.
Enter Bertha. Even though the dual Webers, hot cam, and 10:1 pistons means that it’ll drink five-dollar-a-gallon 93-octane fuel at an alarming rate, it feels like I owe the car another road trip. Unless, of course, it feels like it’s too needy.
It roars and snorts like it should, but unless you drive like there’s an eggshell between your foot and the accelerator pedal, you’ll get 12mpg.
So, Bertha, let’s see what you got.
I did the drive I usually take in the vintage Lotuses, heading out the rural leafy roads west of Boston coming up near Walden Pond in Concord, emerging onto Rt 2, and finishing on a stretch of I-95. Nothing felt show-stopper amiss. No stumbling, no pulling on braking, no ominous driveline rumbles, just the requisite thunks, clunks, and rattles from a 50-year-old car that had a recommissioning from a 26-year-long sit but not a systematic refreshening.
Happy car, happy driver.
The car does badly need tires. It’s sitting on a set of 195/60R14 General Altimaxes that are—wait for it—18 years old. They were on the gold E30 basketweaves that I had on half a dozen 2002s over the years and are now on the FrankenThirty. When I swapped them, I pulled the Altimaxes on them and had them mounted on a set of E30 steelies that I bought cheaply and repainted. At the time, I wasn’t really driving Bertha, and the Altimaxes looked okay for exercise-only driving, but there are now cracks opening up in the tread. But it seems like new rubber is the only must-do item on the punch list.
That plus 18-year-old date codes = “You’re an idiot if you don’t replace them prior to a two-thousand-mile road trip.”
So I have Plan B. Let the clock tick away. Bertha and I have yer vintage prep right here, pal.
Leftover parking lot plow mound shown for drama.
—Rob Siegel
Rob’s new book, The Best of The Hack Mechanic, is available here on Amazon, as are his seven other books. Signed copies can be ordered directly from Rob here.
