When I was 18 (1964) I would have climbed the Empire State Building in bare feet and without rope to own that! It would have needed to be unbearably hot inside, have a two litre, four-cylinder engine with a cam like a cow's backside, two fat side-draft Webers, a 'talented amateur'-manufactured banana-branch exhaust system and most importantly, be unable to idle
at all. It would always overheat in traffic. The constant clattery chatter of the valve-train would fill the (almost bare) cabin and the ride would make a go kart feel like a Citroen 2CV.
Your then-girlfriend would pretend to like it but would hate every second she was in it and be mostly terrified at your flat-out driving style, as you made the most of your 18-year-old reactions to avoid crashes, at least five-per-mile. You would only learn of how much she hated it and your crazy driving once she'd left you and cozied up to a nice-but-oh-so-boring accountancy student with a side-parting and a clapped out VW Beetle. She wouldn't know the Beetle was probably even more dangerous than your cool car.
The cool factor of such a car would have been completely off the scale.
God, I can almost smell it right now, hot oil and a slight petrol leak from somewhere, never located, but who cared?! Ah, to be young and bonkers again.
