Category: General

Amazing: The Bonneville Salt Flats

One of the strongest memories from our Lincoln Highway trip in May 2014 was our visit to the Bonneville Salt Flats. This also made it one of the easiest sections to write about.

Both of Ivelis and I had agreed quite early in our planning process for this trip that we positively wanted to visit the Bonneville Salt Flats in western Utah, something that has been on our automobile racing related “bucket list” for many years. If the salt is dry enough (and it isn’t always so), the land speed record attempts happen every year in the middle of August (a streamliner with a twin-turbocharged small block Chevrolet V8 was clocked at 437 mph in 2013). The rest of the year, the salt flats are a “special recreation management area” managed by the Department of the Interior.

Once we had passed the ghost town of Arinosa, we left Interstate 80 just east of the Nevada border and drove slowly out on a several-mile-long ribbon of asphalt. The speed limits are aggressively low—as if the civil engineers involved knew that there would be speed freaks driving along this road. The pavement ends in a kind of cul-de-sac, except there are (of course) no houses. What you do (if the salt is dry enough—and we were lucky that it was when we visited) is just gently drive off the asphalt and onto the actual salt flats.

Front quarter view of Lauren on the Bonneville Salt Flats
An outtake from Lincoln Highway 101—
I ended up making a poster out of this picture.

There were six or seven other cars and trucks of various types (we spotted everything from minivans and crossovers to late-model Mustangs) on the salt flats. Everyone present tried hard to avoid getting into each other’s camera angles—I believe because all of us understood the flats’ relevance. While Ivelis waited patiently, I spent about twenty to thirty minutes cleaning up Lauren’s exterior enough to make me comfortable with taking some (perhaps way too many) pictures.

The eerie silence for the entire distance you can see and the absolute emptiness of the famous salt flats were both impressive and also striking—and not just for the beautiful pictures it produced. Finally getting a chance to visit the Bonneville Salt Flats after so many years met both of our high expectations.

Lincoln Highway 101, Second Edition

Visiting Franklin Grove

Continuing with my “exactly five years ago” series—by this point we had made it to mid-Illinois and one of our carefully planned stops.

Parked quite stylishly outside the national Lincoln Highway Association headquarters in little Franklin Grove, Illinois

In the quiet village of Franklin Grove, about five miles southwest of Ashton, we stopped for a little over an hour in the early afternoon at the national headquarters of the relatively new but very active Lincoln Highway Association. Ivelis and I walked in and quietly signed the guest book. Already inside was another couple traveling the Lincoln Highway in what they told us was a far more leisurely fashion (measured in many months versus a few weeks) than ours. They were driving in an impressively well preserved and maintained (and evidently quite functional) 1980s Volkswagen Vanagon Westfalia—I neglected to get the precise year.

An amiable woman named Lynn Asp (in general, folks were wonderfully gracious to us during this entire trip) spoke to us at length about the Association and their various upcoming events. It was only well after departing Franklin Grove that we realized that there is a picture of Lynn in one of the many Lincoln Highway-related books that we were carrying with us in Lauren’s rear compartment—we definitely should have gotten her to sign it!

Lincoln Highway 101, Second Edition

The relatively newly reconstituted Lincoln Highway Association’s online presence includes much useful information, context, and advice, but the absolute star of their site is a fantastic, stunningly detailed, and extreme accurate Google Maps overlay of all the Lincoln Highway routes.

Starting Along The Lincoln Highway

It is exactly five years ago today that we started the actual Lincoln Highway portion of the journey chronicled in Lincoln Highway 101. For some reason, it’s important to me to travel all of whatever route we are taking, so starting our trip on the Lincoln Highway had to be at Times Square.

Driving old cars in Manhattan is not for the faint-hearted, so I attempted to limit our vulnerability by leaving the hotel at 7:00 AM on a Sunday morning. We drove over to Times Square on what seemed to be fairly awful even for New York City streets. From the book:

Where it begins: early Sunday morning, Times Square, New York City

When we arrived at Times Square itself (our precise starting point was 47th and Broadway), I slammed Lauren’s long-suffering THM 700-R4 (the THM stands for Turbo Hydra-Matic—a General Motors trademark dating all the way back to 1964) automatic transmission into park. Next, I wrenched the long and substantial driver’s side door open and dashed across 47th Street to take a few of the all-important “beginning of the trip” pictures. If you look extremely carefully at the photograph, you might be able to sense Ivelis waiting just a little impatiently in the passenger’s seat as Lauren’s “Tuned Port Injection” engine rumbled as it idled—making the entire car twitch.

After leaving Times Square, it was off toward the west side of Manhattan. Early Lincoln Highway motorists took the New York Central’s steam ferry across the Hudson River from 42nd Street to Weehawken, New Jersey—the NY Waterway company runs a similar route today, but its modern boats do not carry any vehicle larger than a bicycle. Instead of traveling across the surface of the river, we took an almost empty one and a half miles in the Lincoln Tunnel about 100 feet underneath the Hudson to Union City. It seemed that our plan of leaving Manhattan quite early on a Sunday morning was working out!

Lincoln Highway 101, Second Edition

It Is Five Years Ago Today

It is five years ago today that Ivelis and I began the trip that I would end up writing about in Lincoln Highway 101. In spite of our many preparations, both of us were quite aware that there were many unknowns, including whether we would even complete the trip successfully.

This situation was something that had not been true of our two previous “Big Trips” back and forth across the United States. The possibility of a catastrophic failure of some essential component of our 1985 Corvette was part of an honest and realistic assessment of our plans. A few of our friends heightened this awareness: they were quite enthused by our trip—until they figured out that we were driving it on our own.

Despite this concern, we hit the road with optimism. I’ll let the second edition of the book take it from here:

After a final check or two, we departed from our home in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. Once we had traversed a few local roads, we drove up to New York City via first the Pennsylvania Turnpike and then the New Jersey Turnpike on what turned out to be a lovely spring afternoon—definitely a good sign at the start of this long and potentially fraught trip. As I had hoped, it was generally “smooth sailing” on this particular Saturday as we drove slightly over 100 miles. Ivelis and I encountered our only significant traffic issues during the day as we traversed the many merges (including The Helix—yes, a merge with an actual name) into the Lincoln Tunnel before it deposited us right into the center of Manhattan on West 38th Street.

Corvette Sting Ray poster in Times Square
Immensely motivating banner for the then new
Corvette Stingray as we near Times Square

From there, we drove along 42nd Street through Times Square itself toward our hotel. On our way through “The Crossroads of the World,” we passed a giant billboard advertising the (at that point) almost brand new 2014 Corvette Stingray—very cool and definitely another good omen. I would eagerly search for any positive indicator I could find throughout this trip.

Lincoln Highway 101, Second Edition

Inspirations—Viewing the Buick Y-Job in Person

The Buick Y-Job is often described as one of the first—if not the first—concept cars. Designed by stylist George Snyder to show the late-1930s vision of GM design head Harley Earl, the long and low convertible had power windows, wraparound bumpers, and flush door handles. Its powered convertible top was concealed by a metal deck when retracted, and it lacked the running boards that were standard issue in 1938. Finally, the Y-Job had power-operated hidden headlamps—likely influenced by the manually-operated hidden Stinson lights in the mid-1930s Cord 810/812.

Unlike many concept cars that followed, all the features shown in the Y-Job were functional—Harley Earl drove it regularly until about 1951. This extravagance was made at least a little easier by the fact that the Y-Job used the same Dynaflash 141 bhp 5.2 liter/320 ci straight-8 as Buick’s Series 60 Century, Series 80 Roadmaster, and Series 90 Limited cars did in 1938 and was built on a stretched Century chassis.

1938 Buick Y-Job. Photo courtesy of Buick.

Over the years, I viewed many photographs of the Y-Job, but I never expected to see it in person. However, in 2011 I was able to visit the GM Heritage Center in Sterling Heights, MI. There are many amazing cars in the Heritage Center’s collection, but for me, there were two essentials—with every other one of the 150 or so vehicles on display being a bonus. Those two cars were the Y-Job and the Le Sabre.

I got so close to the Y-Job on that particular day that I could lean directly over the rather basic interior. As expected, the car is heart-stoppingly beautiful—but smaller than it looks in many photographs. At 58 inches tall, the Y-Job is also stunningly low, something George Snyder accentuated by fitting 13-inch wheels instead of the 15-inch and 16-inch wheels that were in common use in the late-1930s.

As I continue my work on the Riviera Project, one of the common threads is the highs and lows of Buick styling over the years. When Buick’s exterior design is differentiating in a positive way, I see it as a spiritual callback to the timeless beauty of the Y-Job.

Indirect Inspirations—CARS: New York City, 1974–1976

The Riviera Project has many inspirations, both direct and indirect. An indirect one I’ll write about in this post is Langdon Clay’s CARS: New York City, 1974–1976, which I received as a holiday gift in late 2018.

Cover of CARS: New York City, 1974-1976
(courtesy Steidl, © 2016 Langdon Clay)

CARS: New York City has 114 photographs of automobiles—and they’re almost all cars, with just a few trucks and vans. The vast majority of the images are side views, nearly all were shot in New York City, and all of them were taken between 1974 and 1976. Langdon Clay shot the photos on Kodachrome using a Leica with a 40 mm lens and a tripod. The images have an unusual look (at least to me) because Clay used sodium-vapor lights and long exposures. As Luc Sante writes in his foreword, the cars are “arrayed like mugshots but lit like Hollywood stars.” Published by Steidl Books on high-quality paper, this book has given me pleasure in a way few of my automotive books do.

Langdon Clay, “White Tower car, Buick Electra, Meatpacking District” (1976) (courtesy Steidl, © 2016 Langdon Clay)

There is a Riviera in the book—a boat tail whose large front bumper makes me pretty sure it is a 1973—but that’s not why I’m writing about this book. The point is Langdon Clay’s artistry from another place and time; as he says, “the cars sort of picked me.”

The selection of models seen in CARS: New York City is definitively from another age. A Datsun is the only Japanese car featured. No BMWs or Audis make the cut, though Mercedes-Benz and Volkswagen are reasonably well represented. Almost half of the photos are of General Motors products, with nearly half of those being Chevrolets of some sort. The sole SUV is a Jeep Wagoneer. “Dead” marques represent almost a third of the images and include AMC, Checker, Jenson, Mercury, Oldsmobile, Plymouth, Pontiac, Rambler, and Saab.

CARS: New York City is available in a hardback from many sources, including Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Echos Of Previous Books

When I’m working on a book, I often feel echos of previous books, whether ones I’ve read or ones I’ve written.

Yesterday the callback was to one of my older books. I was working on one of the introductory chapters of the Riviera Project, discussing the General Motors Technical Center. The Technical Center was designed by prolific and influential Finnish American architect Eero Saarinen. In a 13-year period between 1947 and 1960, Saarinen designed the Technical Center, the MIT Chapel, the TWA Terminal at JFK International Airport, the Bell Telephone Corporate Laboratories, the Dulles International Airport, the CBS Building in New York (otherwise known as Black Rock), and the Gateway Arch—among many other things.

The Gateway Arch was yesterday evening’s particular echo. On our third Route 66 trip, we made specific plans to get a picture with our 2012 Corvette and the Arch in the same frame. I’ll let the relevant passage from Slightly Slower 66 cover the details …

Ivelis driving Louis in front of the Gateway Arch in St. Louis—April 2015

Ivelis and I got up, showered, dressed, had a good breakfast at our modern hotel, packed quickly, and checked out. We had decided the evening before that prior to leaving St. Louis we would at least attempt to take a picture of Louis and the always-spectacular Gateway Arch. A couple of blocks away from the hotel, I jumped out of the car with my Nikon and positioned myself across the street from the Arch grounds on the steps of the Old Courthouse (it deserves its name—circa 1839) as Ivelis drove around the block a few times. Despite the ongoing multi-year construction that is described as the “Gateway Arch Grounds Project,” I did manage to get a few at least somewhat reclaimable pictures.

from Slightly Slower 66

Inspiration: My First Riviera Writings

In June 2014, this entry was one of my first posts on the Eighties Cars blog. I believe it might look uninformed after I complete the Riviera Project—but this was one of my inspirations for choosing this topic.

“… the thrill of turbocharged performance and responsive handling.”

For 1984, the T TYPE (their spelling) version of Buick’s Riviera gained sequential fuel injection, yielding a respectable 190 bhp from the evergreen LD5 3.8 liter/231 ci turbo V6. Performance figures for the later Riviera T TYPEs are hard to come by, but I’m betting that 0-60 mph came in between 9 and 10 seconds.

Fuel mileage for the big coupe was decent by the standards of the day: 14 city/21 highway (13/20 by today’s standards). With the 21.2-gallon fuel tank, range was about 310 to 335 miles with a 10% fuel reserve. A T TYPE continued to be the only way to get your Riviera coupe turbocharged—you could get a “civilian” Riviera convertible with the turbocharger.

The $17,050 T TYPE (about $42,500 in 2018 dollars or about what a well-equipped 2019 Buick Regal GS goes for) came with a blacked-out grill, amber parking light and turn signal lenses, black mirrors, and P205/75R15 tires (a size still readily available) on 15-inch styled aluminum wheels. Additional instrumentation for the T TYPE included a turbo boost gauge and an LED tachometer. The 1984 T TYPE also included the Gran Touring Package which featured stiffer springs, re-calibrated shock absorbers, and larger diameter anti-sway bars front and rear.

Standard exterior and mechanical features on all 1984 Rivieras included a four-speed automatic transmission, power steering, power brakes, and a power antenna. Inside, every Riviera had air conditioning, power door locks, and power windows.

An extensive list of options included electronic climate control ($150), a rear window defogger ($140), and Twilight Sentinel ($60). Options available for every Riviera except the convertible included the Delco/Bose Music System ($895) and the Astroroof ($1,195).

Sales weren’t great—with only 1,153 made, T TYPEs accounted for only about 2% of the robust overall Riviera sales. T TYPE sales would continue to dip in the last year for the “big” sixth generation Riviera—there were only 1,069 made in 1985. My theory is that there weren’t a ton of folks searching for a big (206 inches long and 3,660 pounds) performance-oriented (but not really high performance) coupe in the mid-1980s and there was competition from vehicles like the brand new Lincoln Mark VII LSC.

Riviera page from 1984 Buick brochure, linked from the Old Car Manual Project's amazing brochures section.
Riviera page from 1984 Buick brochure, linked from the Old Car Manual Project’s amazing brochures section.

Unlike many other cars from the 1980s, folks are saving the sixth generation Rivieras. For example, there’s robust discussion and support on the AACA’s Riviera Owners Association sub-forum. T TYPEs also come up for sale every once in a while in the Hemming’s Motor News classifieds or on eBay Motors—when I last updated this blog entry in December 2018, there was a gray 1985 with 62,000 miles available on eBay Motors for $7,000.

According to Hagerty’s valuation tools, all the money for a 1984 Riviera T TYPE in #1/Concours condition is $15,500, with a far more normal #3/Good condition going for $5,400. Make mine the extra-cost ($210) Medium Sand Gray Firemist, please. I love those Buick color names and believe everyone should have at least one Firemist.