Sunday had been all about enjoying the cream of US muscle car action, so Monday was back to Stuttgart’s finest. We wanted to get down town and see what was going on, plus I had some bits to find for the Varmint, so after a quick liaison with the following day’s shoot subject, we downloaded directions for the famous Porsche parts specialists at EASY San Francisco (European Auto Salvage Yard) and headed towards Emeryville.
I’d be lying if I said that we got there first time – we never get there first time. Put both of us in one method of transportation together and it is guaranteed to go tits up. Just check our flight history: 3 flights together and all either cancelled or delayed. So it was a roundabout trip with many laughs, but we arrived in the end. Took some great pics en route also: the shot of a battered-to-near-death Alfa Spider, scorching across the Bay Bridge with the SF skyline in the background, was one of the best ‘Go USA’ shots Jamie got all trip.
We arrived at EASY and pulled up behind a well-worn orange 914. Looked good to me in that CA way that the Varmint appeals: honest, done its fair share of work, now just getting driven hard for fun and loving it. We walked in and were greeted by the orange car’s owner, Rich Breazeale, son of owner Jim. A good chat ensued with Rich, and John, who is on the tools there. Jim was away in Maui, which was a shame as I had a great line to use on him: “Hey, I love what you’ve done with the place, Jim.” OK not great, but I would have laughed regardless. They didn’t have what I was looking for, but they let us have an interesting wander, and we spoke about how business was doing.
While we were there, two guys came in trying to sell cars/find buyers. One was a guy with a shoddy 944 Turbo on 19s that swore he had a trick top end on his car, and Cosworth pistons (stick-on Cossie badge near the VIN plate). He took some abuse from a regular, while the rest of us were quite nice to him in that “we’re way too nice for you, sod off you maniac” kind of way. Made no difference.
The other guy was a nice bloke with a clean 3.2 Carrera – a Cali car all its life. The car was not bad, and had a G50. It was painted in some Special Wishes custom colour that looked like Penske Blue, but was identified as Doom Blue when the guy started talking. How he was struggling to get $15K for this car was initially beyond me, as he’d advertised it “everywhere”, but I guessed he must have had fairly dull phone patter, as the car sold itself to me while I was standing there.
It was way past lunchtime, so we said our goodbyes and shot around to Rudy’s Can’t Fail Cafe. This is owned by Mike Dirnt of Green Day – felt cool eating at the bar in a bona fide rock joint. The food was OK, not amazing but it was great to get a picture of Varmint outside. Seemed like a good omen. I had a few other SF errands to do that didn’t quite come off, so we avoided failure by heading up to the mall at Dublin to get our hostess a present.
We took a wrong turn leaving the place, then swung a U- turn, flew towards an unseen stop sign, locked the fronts at the last minute and sailed right through with huge screeching and tyre smoke filling the air. Spotting a cop about 200 metres further down, we made ourselves scarce using an iPhone escape route, all at the 30 speed limit, and managed to escape without a tug. Happy days – we were delirious laughing about that one.
0 Comments