My fellow car show denizen points, slack-jawed, at the sticker on the back of my car. He seems curious about what “BUMPSTOP AWARENESS” is all about. I smile, and shove my professorial glasses up the bridge of my nose while extracting a portable whiteboard from the trunk. Barely before I can finish the discussion of the basics of shock travel vs. wheel rate, his soul leaves his body with a sharp fluttering noise and he collapses to the ground, lifeless.
A crowd surrounds us, staring at the man who would rather leave this world than listen to me talk about suspension setup. An angry mob breaks free of the crowd, starts to accuse me of being a witch. I ask them if they’ve ever heard of camber gain before, and begin drawing a crude McPherson strut suspension on the whiteboard, switching dry-erase markers to illustrate the instant centre and the arc of the lower control arm as the suspension compresses. My efforts are rewarded with a bellowing shriek as the angry mob’s bodies collapse into a pile, their lives snuffed out by a desire to remain unaware of the true nature of camber.
By now, the surviving members of the crowd have identified that I am the most boring man in the world, and begin to back away, out of explanatory range. With every tentative step I make, I can see frosted-tip vape clouds scrambling to preserve their ignorance, to remain alive in the face of my otherworldly knowledge of basic suspension setup.
I figure now is the time to make good my escape. Reaching into the open window of my carbon-fibre ‘65 Imperial Crown, I grasp the PA system microphone as I key on the ignition with my other hand.
“Who wants to learn about tire deformation?” booms the loudspeaker, and the crowd scatters wide enough for even the big-body Chrysler luxobarge to fit.