|
next page | preceding page |
|
kept us
fairly dry but still caught the wind,
billowing out our gear. "You look like crash dummies," said Samantha Fryberger, the Crawford marketing director, who quickly added that she meant that,'in the nicest possible way. Public relations, indeed. Fortunately, it was reasonably warm, so the rain was not unpleasant, and there was a kind of childish, jumping-in-puddles joy to it, a kind of contagious lunacy that prompted an unusually high number of waves and friendly horn honks from motorists in modern vehicles. The tyranny of terrain Driving the 1899 is fairly easy. |
Your left hand holds the tiller,
which replaces the steering wheel.
You simply move it back and forth.
It is attached directly
to the front
wheels, and the smallest movment
of the tiller provides an instant
response. The right hand is for the manual transmission, which means there are no hands left to cover your eyes in heavy traffic.In this case, "working through the gearbox" means all of two gears. One lever is pulled back to |
engage the low gear, which gets the 1899
rolling. If
you want to nudge it forward a few feet --
as in traffic- you can slip the gearing a
little. Once moving at a few miles an hour, the low-gear lever is pushed forward into neutral. Then, the high-range gear is pulled back for maximum speed, maximum being a relative term. For more speed, you push down on the "throttle button" on the floor. Under way, the ride is surprisingly comfortable, even on a rough surface--if |
a bit jiggly. We
don�t even think about exploring the
handling, partly because we
are afraid of, what we might find.
Besides, any
quick maneuver or
hard cornering causes the engine
to starve for fuel. The gas goes from a 3-gallon tank and drips down onto a plate in the carburetor. The plate is heated by the exhaust, and the gas then evaporates an is sucked into the engine's intake valve, where the mighty single piston does it's work. |