22 Oct Stealing the Show
Recently, Fluid MotorUnion took its E90 M3 on a goodwill mission to a car show. You see, our shop boy John goes to nearby Neuqua Valley High School, and this week is their Homecoming. Naturally, with every Homecoming (or at least every good one) comes a car show. Students bring in their rides, their parents’ rides, or just any cool car they can grab up, and it’s a good excuse for all the gearheads in the school to get together and share the common bond of automotive enthusiasm. This event was definitely one of those, and Andrew was there to soak it all up. Since writing in the third person is sort of weird, since he was the only one there, we’ll switch to first-person for the description of this event:
I had never driven the M3 prior to this week. Most of my experience with that car, aside from the trip to Supercar Saturdays during which I sat shotgun, has been from afar and involves lots of drooling and daydreaming. This past Wednesday, though, I got to experience the fury of the E90 firsthand. It took a trip to Starbucks earlier in the day to acclimate my left foot to the clutch, but all was good. I left Fluid at 3:15, and began the ten minute trek to NVHS. On the way, a bus full of schoolchildren stopped next to me at a light. I could hear them hollering at me, but the lack of a sunroof and the low-slung Status racing seat kept me from associating faces with voices. Much to their delight, I gave them some pretty good blips of the throttle and kept moving towards the show. This thing grabs attention whereever it goes. Seriously.
Arriving at the car show wasn’t much different. I had shown up a bit late (and if you asked me in person, I’d tell you it was intentional and fashionable), so I made my way past the dozen or so cars already there. The first thing that I thought was, “Man, there are a lot of domestics here.” And there were. Camaros and Mustangs were the vehicles du jour, in a variety of dark colors. The M3 definitely stood out. Heads once again turned as the custom 3″ stainless steel exhaust rumbled its dark, deep tone through adolescent ribcages. Driving this car is demanding, not in the sense of actual physical effort (the car drives quite nicely, actually), but in the sense that you know you’re being watched, constantly. The first open spot I found, at the end of the line of American muscle, was next to a brand new Ford Mustang GT500. A clash of the titans, if I’ve ever seen one.
John registered the car for the show, and since he is a student at NVHS, our car was eligible to win in the Best Engine category, which may or may not have been fair to everyone else in that category. Not everybody’s engine bay includes homemade carbon fiber velocity stacks and a polished catch can bearing our shop’s namesake. But either way, I popped the hood and people’s brains started popping veins. There was almost constantly a crowd around the car, and every time I left to take pictures of everything else, I’d turn around and see 20 more people surrounding the engine bay. Of course they liked the way it looked, but they wanted to hear it, and I always returned to oblige them. Nothing beats having your ears blown off on a bright, windy Wednesday afternoon. Once I had scared a small child, I deemed the aural cacophony a total success. That seems to be how it works at car shows with the M3; if you can scare a small child, the day’s work has been done.
I did eventually manage to sneak away and shoot some pictures, though. There was an interesting mix of vehicles, owned by males and females alike. Automotive love knows no genders.
This first-gen Mustang was ridiculously clean. The paint shined brighter than most other cars, and the chrome’s reflection could burn a hole through titanium. The interior was in the same vein; the original (and very O.G.) Pony leather interior lent that extra piece of Americana to the car.
Up until this point, I assumed the words “high school student” and “Maserati Spyder Cambiocorsa” to be mutually exclusive. Well, that changed. This was one of two entries in the Best Looking Car (Female Owner) category, and in my opinion was a total shoe-in. Nothing beats a clean Italian car with leather that looks like God had picked the cows himself and sewn the pieces together by hand. Maseratis aren’t seen very often in and around Chicago (with the exception of the Gold Coast), and this was an excellent specimen of a specific model that I hadn’t seen in a very long time.
Towards the middle of the show, this old Ford rolled through and parked towards the back of the group. Seeing a Maserati in the suburbs is somewhat rare, but catching a glimpse of a pre-war Ford is like winning the lottery twice in one day. To call this car immaculate isn’t even doing it justice. This blog normally caters to the Euro crowd, but everybody who likes cars can respect a clean, shining example of what Ford used to be. My favorite part was the MGD shifter; perhaps it isn’t terribly appropriate at a high school car show, but it’s just one of those extra pieces that drops your jaw even further into the asphalt.
When it comes to cars, my original passion was centered around the Japanese Domestic Market. As a result, I will always have a sweet spot in my heart dedicated to pushing the JDM envelope in crazy directions. This IS300 is certainly one of those cars that will hit me right in that sweet spot. With the hood down, you might notice the massive exhaust in the rear and the even more massive intercooler tucked behind the bumper, and assume that something mildly crazy was happening with that car. Upon opening the hood, however, brought about a different feeling — pure fear. You see, tucked away in this engine bay, leaving literally no room to breathe, was a Toyota Supra Turbo’s 2JZ-GTE engine. Capable of 1000+ horsepower with internal modifications, this engine is revered in certain circles, and it blew my mind. Truly a sleeper, this was probably my absolute favorite car at the show.
Then it came time for the awards to be presented. I was secretly hoping we’d win for Best Engine, but having graduated high school over half a decade ago, I wasn’t too hung up on the results. Which turned out to be a good thing, because we lost to a MKII Golf with the petrol engine swapped out for an all-electric setup. It was one hell of a homebrew setup and definitely deserved the win.
The first-gen Mustang won Best Looking Car (Male Owner), and a brand new Camaro SS took that category for the femmes. The overall winner, Best Overall Car, went to the GT500 I was parked next to. It was shiny, it was new, and it was a GT500. ‘Nuff said.
Overall, I had a great time. It was good to see so many petrolheads at so young an age, still wholly interested in the automotive scene. With all the talk of Teslas and HY-KERS systems, it’s good to see people are still growing up with posters of good-ol’ gas-powered fury on their walls. Everyone loved our car, I answered a lot of questions, handed out a lot of business cards, and got to see some really sweet cars in the process. I couldn’t have asked for a better Wednesday.
On the way back to Fluid, I scared two guys in a Cadillac and got a thumbs-up from a dude in a mid-70’s Corvette. I love this car.
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