My bride once had an itch for a sports car of her own.........a BRITISH sports car. I could type out a nice, long story but if you've been around cars for any length of time you've already read about "Lucas, prince of darkness", and heard about the bumper sticker that reads "The parts falling off this car are of the finest British craftsmanship" and so on. All of them are true, and more.

Then there are times when God protects the fool. Many moons back we went shopping for a new (to us) family car. Saw this nice '68 or 9 Malibu wagon on a dealer's used car lot. Went through the initial blah blah and drove out on the test drive, salesman in the back seat. A few miles down the road one of the rear tires blew out......BOOM! Opened the spare tire well, spare was flat, but that didn't matter because the jack was gone too. The salesman found a pay phone (that'll give you an idea how long ago) and got a lot boy to come out with another spare and a jack. We then went on our merry way continuing the test drive. A few miles later the car starts to sputter, pop, then stop running all together. Despite the gauge showing 1/4 tankful, it had run out of gas. Fortunately we had been headed back to the dealership so only had about a 1/2 mile walk. We didn't even stop at their building, just walked straight to our car, with said salesman in tow promising to fix all those "little" things if we bought it, and me punching the throttle to get out of there as fast as I could.