The car with no fame gets back in the game
or . . . better yet . . .
The car in last place gets back in the race.
I was inside a 100 year old dirt floored barn looking up at the rusty sill panels of one of the most desirable convertibles ever built when the understanding hit me so hard that it would have knocked me down had I not already been laying flat on my back 'getting down and dirty' having a real close look at the under belly of a unicorn to make sure I wasn't looking at another donkey with a large pointy wart on its nose.
The understanding was to realise, with the luxury of hindsight and a love of automotive history, what the previous owners might never have known and few have suspected - significant pause - that at one time in it's life – insert dramatic music - this high end exotic sports car, like so many others of its kind, - insert even more dramatic music – might have been an old school drug mule.
I realised that what I had been hearing for years, that 'rust in the sill panels of high end exotic sports cars is caused by salting the icy roads' was a very convenient 'cover story' to explain why so many 'high end exotic' convertibles have obvious sill panel repairs underneath them. Yep, sometimes, you only need to fool some of the people, time after time, whilst committing a high end exotic sports car selling crime.
The global significance of this find did not for a moment escape me, 30 years this machine has been hidden and when it emerges into the bright light of the open market it will be the only one in it's condition on the planet available for purchase and it's sudden reappearance might recalibrate the entire world wide market, yes indeed, a bright red right hand drive pagoda roofed 1964 Mercedes Benz 230SL manual is a rare and almost mythical machine, hence all the unicorn references.
Rectangular rust holes, exactly the same size and shape on both sill panels, drug mule scar tissue no longer hiding the openings through which they would stuff the drugs, the kind of drugs with the kind of value that it makes sense to cut holes in high end exotic sports cars and drive them across borders, indeed, a professional smuggler wouldn't necessarily even need to buy the car, just 'engineer' the opportunities to load it and unload it while it was on 'holidays' abroad, yep, sometimes you only need to fool one of the people all of the time when committing a high end exotic sports car drug smuggling crime.
All of which gives rise to another possibility and that is that sometime in its life, this car was suspected of being a high end exotic drug mule and that the rust was caused by the police (or others) ripping open the sill panels with a can opener looking for drugs.
Either way, both sill panels need rebuilding soon or the whole car will look like the wreck of the Titanic on which the only thing still working is the swimming pool and while I was still thinking about the swimming pool on the Titanic and wondering if – back in the day- I would have thought of strapping floaties onto a deckchair and testing it in the pool while the ship was sinking that I started thinking about “The Old Man and the Sea” by Ernest Hemingway, the epic chronicle of a “has been - who once was” that near the end of his life fought and caught the biggest fish anyone had ever seen and I remember how it came to be that fish was attacked by sharks and other things until all he got to shore was the head, the tail and the gutted skeleton in between. Page after page of torment and stoic endurance snatching defeat from the jaws of victory and back again thrice.
Which led me next to thinking about what could be called the reverse Bilbo Baggins fairy tale factor. In 2018, this rusty and dusty high end exotic drug mule is a much better thing to find than a magical gold ring that makes you invisible to Orcs, Elves, Hobbits, Goblins and other things that only exist in the imaginations of non mechanically minded people, this old drug mule has an innate quality even more precious than precious, a thing that makes you the exact opposite of invisible when you drive it in public. This unicorn makes everyone who drives it - with top down and sunglasses on - visible in a Rock Star, Movie Star kind of way that makes everyone who sees it want to be seen in it.
And as soon as I started thinking about movies about the stories this car could tell, the thought occurred what a great title for a movie or a story... The Drug Mule Pagoda... I mean how exotic is that?
and yes. that is a dead rat on the passenger floor.
till next
peace
;O)