It’s been six bitterly cold months since Blackzilla was stored away for winter in my lonely single-car garage.i But now Spring is here! I think!!1ii
After this long pause, we can stop to admire the… paws, or rather pawprints left by my feline friend Benny. Can you find a square inch that he hasn’t left his filthy mark on ? Because I’m not sure there is one. A quick trip to my old pal Des Ross will fix all that, but it’s still just superficial shit.
Out on the road again, after half-a-year’s distance, a new battery,iii and the re-installation of the sexy Black Edition wheels,iv I can’t help but gawk slack-jawed in amazementv at the performance of this fucking car. Holy Good Golly Miss Molly! It’s a kamikaze flurry of turbo whooshes, cracked-off paddle shifts, and tensed sphincters before you’re going triple-digits and need to find the brakes (in town). The wide-eyed infusion of adrenaline and intoxicating smell of lubricants simmering is all that’s left a moment later. It’s fairly glorious that it ever happened in the first place, and it’s all available again at every new gap. You just have to be bold enough and it’s yours.
I won’t keep the GT-R forever – in fact this might be my last summer with itvi – but I can already foresee missing it, such is its presence.
I guess I’ll just have to make the most of the time we have.
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- Yes, that means that Jay parks on the street or driveway at home, but with an unheated garage and Jay’s remote starter, this actually isn’t a terrible arrangement at all. Yes, snow and ice have to be scraped off on frosty mornings, but at least I get to hop into a warmed car with the driver’s seat all toasty! It’s only unfortunate that Jay’s steering wheel heater and rear window defroster don’t stay on when the car is turned off. Goddam why can’t all buttons be click-to-hold ?
Dreidel ? She has her own storage shed out in the country. A feline-free one, I might add. ↩
- It’s been known to snow in May – not a little bit either – but this Spring has been particularly tardy. And cold. But fuck me if the summers aren’t absolutely gorgeous. Still, I’m now accepting suggestions for places to “winter” (as in the verb) from November to March. The place should ideally be warm and have sunsets after 8pm for most of that period.
Does that limit me to Brazil, Chile, Argentina, BBistan, South Africa, New Zealand, and Australia ? If so, aside from Brazil and Australia, which I’ve been to and can form my own opinion of, which would you suggest for a fambly of four and why ? ↩
- The new battery was needed for the same reason that I didn’t put on a car cover, viz. I fully intended to drive the car in the winter at least a handful of times. But fuck me if it wasn’t one of those bitterly cold, low precipitation winters where it was always -20°C and icy as shit.
But even in January, who’s to say that it wouldn’t turn around at a moment’s notice ? It never did, of course, so by the time I hooked up the trickle charger, it was too late, and after the first week the cat had already marked his turf (thankfully only with prints) and I could hardly see the harm in a few more. I didn’t even pause the insurance, such was the so-close-yet-so-far prospect of urban rooster tails. So that was basically the first winter of unexpected car storage in a nutshell. ↩
- The standard “Premium” wheels were originally purchased and installed for my first few track days because the Bridgestones they came fitted with were better suited for the circuit. But now that I have a proper purpose-built track toy, and seeing as the RE070Rs were almost as bare and unsightly as the chests of #trilema this month, it finally made sense to put the Rays Forged wheels and harder-wearing Michelin tires back on. ↩
- Yes, amazement. It isn’t just overly fashionable hyperbole when your eyes bug out of your skull and your head involuntarily shakes side-to-side in incredulous “whatthefuck”-ery after the first few multi-second throttle applications. ↩
- With the return of a proper summer car to my modest fleet, an annual rotation appears to be emerging whereby the winter/all-season car is replaced every even-numbered year and the summer/sports car is replaced every odd-numbered year, which could mean that I’ll be saying sayonara to Blackzilla come 2019.
If you know a bit about cars and fancy a rousing game of “dream garage,” what would you pick to replace Blackzilla with ? And don’t shout “Lambo!”, I’m not some ethertard, but let’s say under C$150k (it can be way under too, I have no problem with $20k cars), built in the last 7 years, available in the Canadian/American market, four-seater, and unlikely to depreciate appreciably between 2019-2021. That should be enough of a scope, ya ? ↩
Wintering in Uruaguay and stealing a second summer would be possible, maybe even to Pete standards. Except there isn’t much of a car culture here. In Montevideo you have Punta Carreretas, Neuvo Pocitos, Malvin (but NOT Malvin Norte) and Carrasco are solid candidates for the D. clan. Carrasco and Punta Carreretas seem most likely to win a Pete’s heart. Out east you have Punta Del Este, Alantida, Piropolis, and Rocha. It would definitely be worth a summer visit before committing to anything.
Is it stealing if you pay for it ? I jest, of course. The local knowledge is much appreciated, BB! A quick survey from this end of the interpipes indicates that the Hyatt is ~the only passable hotel in Montevideo and that there’s not much in the way of rent-a-beds (VRBO, Airbnb), at least at the high-end.
At the more permanent end of the spectrum, however, there appears to be at least the odd diamond in the rough. NYT featured a pretty posh pad about a year ago (picture, adverticle). Bado lists more current ones still, though if the prospect of getting a mortgage is as slim as the NYT adverticle made it sound, the prices are absolutely bananas for all-cash transactions. Must be the same set of “real estate investors” that cracked up MP during his Argentinian adventures.
Well, there is one mortgage bank here. Generally the impression here is that Uruguayan real estate is largely used by Argentines to store value they can’t keep in Argentina.
The high end is in Punta Del Este, which is the official center of Wintering/Summering in Uruguay. December through February they host a six figure population and present reports are the place is a ghost town now that we are in Autumn.
And the NYT advertised place has a very central location, but… as a very rural and multi-centric city there are better kinds of central then you will find in the Barrio named Centro. Give Punta Carretas and Nuevo Pocitos a second look.
Sounds like it’s worth a look. Cheers.
How many wrong hand drive blackzilllas exist? Surely low molestation models appreciate.
There were about 10k LHD models made for the US market from 2009-2016 and about 1k made for the Canadian market during that same period. Models from the first few production years have indeed seen appreciation, almost regardless of how abused they’ve been, simply because the sticker price has ticked up $5-10k/yr every year since the R35 series was launched. Mid-series cars like mine depreciated more than the early ones but they’ve still found very strong buy-side support around C$80k, which is incidentally exactly what the ’09s sold for new. But that was a decade ago now! Today that kind of pocket change will barely buy you a new GLA45 AMG with a four-banger.