Posting day before yesterday’s tale got me thinking about that CRX.
It was the only “sports car” i’ve ever owned, and even though i did not get the fuel-injected version, it would still accelerate briskly since the body was mostly plastic and the vast majority of the weight of the whole thing was the little engine.
And oh, did it ever corner like a cat. Great at highway speed, too, as evidenced by an occasion when i was headed to work in Hayward particularly early, before six in the morning. In those days, eastbound traffic over the San Mateo Bridge was real light in the mornings, particularly at that hour, and i was antsy to get to work and was zipping along at near 90 up the bridge grade when i passed a red car.
Well, he thought, i can do that, and he tromped it, rapidly overtaking me and shooting past in the left lane at over a hundred. Alas, he couldn’t drive, or his car didn’t handle well at that speed, so when he cut back into my lane he lost control, spun out, slammed into the guardrail for the right lane, and bounced back into the middle lane facing me.
No problem when you’re in a CRX. One quick twitch and i was around him. Slowed down and watched in my rear view mirror as he turned around and moved over into the right lane. I stayed at more or less the speed limit, but he didn’t pass me again as he seemed to be moving at very low speed.
Yeah, the CRX could handle.
Actually, the only down side, other than it lasting less than 90,000 miles, was that for the first time in my life, i got speeding tickets. Repeatedly. I’d get one, endure the torture of traffic school to get the ticket expunged, and have to be real cautious for a whole year so i could go to traffic school again if (ummm, when) i got another ticket.
I once complained, in a jocular tone of course, to a CHP officer on CA92 that i didn’t used to get traffic tickets. She wondered, “Did you ever have a sports car before?”
The defense rested.
That was before the California speed limit on the freeways was raised back to 65 from the 55 imposed in the early seventies. And the very next day, all those commuters like me who were so frustrated at 55 that our speed routinely crept up to 75 or so simultaneously realized that, OK, we could live with 65 and stopped speeding…and stopped getting tickets.
Virtually all of us. All at once. Yes, the citizenry understand the difference between reasonable and unreasonable laws, and it takes a continual government propaganda effort to get people to accept unreasonable laws…like the draconian security restrictions supposedly required by our War on Terror as we swirl down into an Orwellian police state.
Sorry there’s no photo of my CRX, but we all know what a blue ’86 looks like. Here’s some Castro Street steps instead.
