What’s more important than fall’s last drive? The next one

There’s a special poignance when you do something for the last time. The last time you drive a beloved car before you sell it. The last time you’re in a house or apartment before you move away. The last time you see a loved one before they pass.

The last drive of fall before putting the car away for winter isn’t quite up there with the above list—the seasons are at their very core cyclical, so you know the layup is only temporary and that spring will push the shoots out of the ground and the car out of the garage. But still, here in New England and other similar climes, “The Last Drive That Isn’t Really The Last Drive” is a ritual.

Maybe you’re putting the car away in far-flung storage. Maybe it’s in your garage, but it’ll be blocked in by other vehicles. Maybe there’s a big project you’re planning that you know will take the car out of commission until spring. Maybe it’s none of those, and with good weather and salt-free roads, the car may see use all winter. But even if that’s the case, it doesn’t make the drive any less poignant or feel any less special.

I just went through this with Lolita, the 1974 Lotus Europa Twin Cam Special, and Rene, the ’73 BMW 3.0CSi. I had very different reactions to both.

Lolita had two separate goodbyes. The first was an absolutely wonderful leaf-peeping trip to western Massachusetts. A few years ago, I wrote about driving the car out to Amherst to the very spot I first saw a Europa. I began following that same path out Route 2, but this time, just to change it up, I got off the highway onto smaller Rt 2A, something I’d never done in the hundreds of times I’d run back and forth between Amherst and Boston. I was astonished by what I saw.

It’s one thing to see whatever selection of trees happen to be visible from the highway. It’s quite another to drive through the centers of small New England towns where many of town squares or commons are populated by prized maples. Every New Englander knows that the maple is the Lord God of autumn, and to drive through one little town after another and see the maples on fire with foliage left me so mumbling and weak-knee’d in oh-my-god, oh-my-god, oh-my-god adoration that had there been anyone in the car with me, they would’ve thought I was having a series of When Harry Met Sally  (“I’ll have what she’s having”) experiences. I was so totally in the moment that I didn’t stop and take any photos until I was nearly in Amherst and took in the iconic overview of Quabbin Reservoir.

Unfortunately, on the drive home, something odd happened. The Lotus’ brakes began feeling spongy. They’d pump back up firm, but the next time I hit the pedal, even if it was just a few seconds later, they felt soft again. I stopped, verified that the fluid level in the reservoir was full and that there wasn’t brake fluid dripping anywhere. I did, however, find that I’d left the handbrake on for who knows how many miles, so maybe I’d heated up the rear brakes enough to boil the brake fluid.

Of course, you don’t want to be driving if you think the brake master cylinder is failing. The classic symptom is putting your foot on the brake pedal and having it go slowly to the floor. The Lotus wasn’t doing that, but it was still odd and unnerving. Weighing the risks and the options, I drove home very carefully, taking the Mass Pike back instead of curvier Rt 2, figuring that the interstate route would involve less braking.

When I got home, I ensconced the Lotus up on the mid-rise lift, figuring that that was it for the fall. As I wrote about here, bleeding the brakes on the car has proven troublesome, as my Motive power bleeder doesn’t have a cap available for the Lotus’ odd Girling master cylinder, and as a vacuum-style bleeder didn’t prove useful. So, I tried something new—I ordered a set of Speed Bleeders. These are bleed nipples that have a little check-valve in them that allows one-person bleeding. That is, you don’t need to have someone like your less-than-thrilled spouse pumping the brake pedal while you open and close the bleed nipple. I installed the Speed Bleeders, pushed a reasonable amount of fluid through the system, and the pedal felt firm.

Then, a few weeks later, I was invited to give a talk on the Lotus’ six-year-long resurrection at the Larz Anderson Auto Museum in Brookline, Massachusetts. It was basically a live synopsis of what’s in my book The Lotus Chronicles. The museum folks said that, if possible, it’d be great if I had the car with me as a live prop for the talk. The lure of actually having Lolita inside the museum was too good to pass up. I guess Lolita wasn’t done for the season after all.

The evening of the talk, I took the car down off the lift. When I backed it out of the garage and stopped at the top of the driveway, the pedal was alarmingly soft. Oh. Right. Forgot about that. I’d installed the Speed Bleeders and ran a bunch of fluid through them, but never actually test drove the car to see if it fixed the soft pedal.

So, I drove the Lotus several circles around the block, jamming on the brake pedal to the point where the brakes locked up, basically daring the system to break. I then went through all the same fluid inspection steps again, and again was convinced that the car was on the safe side of the line—that is, that the pedal was soft but would pump right back up. It never ever went to the floor.

And, with that, I decided to drive the car the eight miles over to Larz Anderson.

It was the least-relaxing drive I’ve ever taken in any car. I rarely drive the Lotus at night, as it’s so little and low that I’m not convinced that people see it. I’d never driven the car in rush-hour traffic before, and the amount of stopping complicated the issue of hitting the brake pedal to pump it up before I needed to actually brake. And the car has so little suspension travel that hitting any bump or pothole feels like you’re about to bend the front wishbones, which you probably are, and in the dark, I wasn’t able to see the potholes. So, imagine the joy of experiencing all three of these in one drive. The entire drive over to the museum I thought, “Idiot! Idiot! Idiot! You’re driving a car with potential brake failure, and for what? So, you can have it as a prop for a talk? Idiot!”

But safety-wise, it was fine. I’d checked the car thoroughly before I left. I wasn’t really driving a car whose brakes could fail at any moment—I was driving a car that probably had a little air in the lines. I made it there and back without incident. It was wonderful having the car with me inside Larz Anderson for the talk, and it generated a lot of attention.

However, I was relieved when I got the car home and was more than happy to put it in the garage and back on the lift, this time knowing it’d stay there until the problem was found and fixed.

Fast-forward a few weeks to two days before Thanksgiving. The temperature had dropped to the mid-40s, but the weather and the roads were still clear. My middle son, Kyle, was in town from Santa Fe. We were assigned the task of picking up the turkey my wife had ordered at Verrill Farm in Concord. As I say over and over, part of the joy of owning a cool car is that driving it turns any mundane task into an occasion. So, Kyle and I drove my favorite car—Rene, the ’73 BMW E9 3.0CSi I’ve owned for 34 years—to pick up the bird. This wasn’t a foliage drive, as any leaves with color had already dropped, but the stark pre-snowfall browns and the hard sunshine made the E9’s Signal Red paint positively pop. Again, I was living in the moment, and forgot to photograph the turkey in the box in the trunk, but we did stop for an impromptu photo shoot.

The only thing more flamboyant than the car was Kyle. He’s always marched to his own drummer, and that’s only accelerated in his adulthood.

The drive in Rene wasn’t long, maybe a half hour each way, but I’m intimately familiar with these roads in the leafy suburbs west of Boston, as I regularly exercise the Lotus there. We had a delightful hour piloting the beautiful E9 coupe along the gentle curves and through late November’s bare branches.

When we returned, I put Rene back in the garage and under cover, but I left her in the easily accessible spot just behind the roll-up door. After all, I still need to take Kyle to the airport. Maybe that will be the E9’s last drive of fall. But who knows? As long as the roads stay salt-free, I’ll continue to turn errands into events for as long as I can.

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Rob Siegel’s latest book, The Best of the Hack Mechanic^TM: 35 years of hacks, kluges, and assorted automotive mayhem, is available on Amazon. His other seven books are available here, or you can order personally inscribed copies through his website, www.robsiegel.com.