Posers and Non-Posers (was Re: Porsche Guys)

[Scott Fisher <sefisher@cisco.com>]

Rob Winchell details his distaste for a Certain Category of Driver of
Particularly Cool Car:

> My beef if with people who have 911 turbos who putter around, 
> maybe hit 5k on the tach when they are feeling really crazy 
> and take corners like the car is made from eggshells. 

As my subject line suggests, the correct word for such people is in fact
"poser."  The category is by no means limited to Porsche owners; a good
friend of mine (who is emphatically NOT a poser), who owns a really
lovely 1966 Ferrari 330 GT 2+2, was recounting a particularly unpleasant
tale of just such a person he had the misfortune to see in a 355 Spider
not long ago.

As for little old men in cool cars, I'll never forget the sight of the
late Juan Manuel Fangio, then age 78, driving the Mercedes Benz W196
Grand Prix car around Laguna Seca several years back.  M-B had a
brand-new 600SL as a camera car, with a factory driver in it and a
photographer hanging over the rear deck, shooting film of Il Maestro at
the wheel.  I was up in the Corkscrew that day, fairly close to the
track, and could hear the engine of the W196 -- Fangio would drop back
behind the camera car and the F1 car would sputter, then he'd nail the
throttle and the silver cigar would *leap* forward as though it was
about to drive completely *over* the camera car.  They disappeared
around turn 9 (the sweeping, weirdly cambered left-hander that
disappears under the bridge) and a few seconds later, the roar of ten
thousand throats lifted up over the oak trees and all of us in the shade
near the Corkscrew turned to see any sign of what happened.

Over the loudspeaker came the word: the camera car had spun off track,
trying to keep ahead of this little old man in a 40 year old single
seater.

The next time through, Fangio (and I'm sitting here with every hair on
my body crawling upright at the memory) *blasted* through the Corkscrew,
drifting the car just as though it was the Ring and he was trying to
stay ahead of the Ferraris (or worse, stay ahead of Moss :-).  He
shifted *hard* at the bottom of the right-hander, the rear squatted and
slithered as the car rocketed forward, and he took his hand off the
wheel to wave to the crowd and the corner workers as he shot off at
something a little closer to racing speed.

That's the kind of little old man *I* wanna be...

--Scott "still younger than JMF was when he drove for Mercedes" Fisher