While browsing through Autotrader, I stumbled across this little beauty sitting on a dealership lot in Calgary. I’m tempted to head down there and ask them if they’d be willing to let me take it for a test drive.

  I don’t know how many of our wonderful Hoons out there have had the opportunity to take a T-bucket for a spin; my friend’s father has one that I finally talked him out of for an afternoon about ten years ago, and I still remember the experience vividly. This is the kind of car that any Hoon who has the opportunity should take for a spin at least once. During the 1950s and 60s, in those heady days of stoplight drag races and evenings at the Drive-In (a sort of culture that was still enduring in my hometown when I turned 16 and got my license), the ’55 – ’57 Chevy Bel Aire is widely considered to have been the stoplight champion until the muscle car wars started. The legend is perhaps slightly overstated, however.

  Certainly the Bel Aire was the prettiest car on the strip, and a respectable performer to be sure, but it was the Model T that was the hot-rod champion. With virtually no weight to pull around, and a chassis-drivetrain combination that was as interchangeable as lego, it was an outrageously simple car from which to extract some pretty frightening performance. Every engine shop was playing a game of one-upsmanship with its neighbouring shop to see who could extract the most performance out of the simple Flathead V8. That, combined with the fact that virtually any high-school kid with a job could afford to buy an old Model T meant that it was a likely candidate for a stoplight racer. And having driven one, I can testify that it was definitely a respectable performer. While perhaps not the best when the corners come along — meaning you’re more likely to just understeer right past the corner than to actually make the turn at anything faster than a walking pace — it is hard to describe any vehicle with a more exhilarating kick-in-the-chest level of acceleration. So while the rest of the automotive blogosphere seems to be foaming at the mouth about a bunch of Toyotas nobody gives a rat’s ass about experiencing “unintended acceleration”, you could head over to Calgary and experience some “intended acceleration” that might remind you why you shouldn’t be driving those worthless automotive appliances in the first place.