Old School

Jim has owned his 1966 Shelby GT350 since 1969. In 2020 he took it 1,800 miles down the Blue Ridge Parkway to the 318 turns of the Tail of the Dragon. Not because he had to. Because, as he puts it, when things get bad, nothing beats heading out on the road.

Jim was the third owner. He bought the car in 1969 and calls it "Blue". Fifty-seven years later, the two of them are still together. "He and I have grown old together," Jim says. "My wife would argue that neither of us has grown up."

Blue is not a museum piece. Over the decades the car has been tinkered with and changed, and today it runs a 347 stroker with Webers and a five-speed. It is far from stock, and it is built for one thing: to be driven.

A driver's car

What Jim loves about Blue is exactly what most people would find exhausting. Manual steering, manual brakes, and what he calls "260 air conditioning": open the two windows and drive 60 mph. You don't hang an arm out the window and relax to the radio. At speed, you can't even hear the radio.

He once explained it to his friend Ron Ananian, the Car Doctor on national radio: Blue's purpose in life is to put him into the trees if he isn't paying attention. "That's actually fairly close to the truth," Jim admits.

Modern cars, he knows, have more power than he could ever wring out of Blue, along with comfort and civility. That's rather the point. "Blue is noisy, smells and is obnoxiously twitchy. There are no intermediary systems managing it for you. You take control of it and direct it. Fail at it and bad things happen… very quickly."

He finds that challenging. And enjoyable.

"Blue, like a Harley, doesn't leak… he marks his territory."

Getting ready

2020 was the year of the pandemic, and New Jersey was in lockdown. Jim had just finished getting Blue's engine rebuilt and sorted out: oil pushing past the breathers, blown header gaskets and assorted other gremlins. He was bone weary of staying home. So he decided to drive the Blue Ridge Parkway down to the Tail of the Dragon.

A long trip in a car that old can end badly, even with the best preparation, and Jim is well aware of how much he has changed from the original. It gives him, he says, a greater appreciation for his wife Sandy, who rides along on these trips trusting him to get her home safely.

His friend Ron, who has a lift, swapped the rear springs and the front calipers; the lay-on-your-back work isn't getting any easier. On the way south they stopped at Virginia Classic Mustang, where Brant supplied a new set of calipers to replace ones that were leaking a bit too much for a trip like this. Then they hit the Parkway.

The Parkway

The Blue Ridge Parkway runs 469 miles through Virginia and North Carolina, from Shenandoah to the Great Smoky Mountains. For Jim it was a spectacular run, for the views and for the road itself, apart from one washed-out section that detoured them through Roanoke and another that was temporarily gravel.

The real secret of a trip like this, he says, is logistics, and that was Sandy's department. She found a string of small, reasonably priced motels that offered sanctuary for the two of them and the car. Sandy won't drive Blue. Jim gets the driving and the shifting, she gets the scenery and the touring, and a comfortable place to end each day keeps both of them happy. "It's no good at our age to be ridden hard and put up wet," Jim says. Good rooms, he adds, go a long way towards marital harmony.

At the Blowing Rock Inn they stayed two days and explored the town. They struck off the route to Grandfather Mountain, where the switchbacks on the way up were incredible, the run back down gave the brakes a real workout, and the two of them walked across a swinging bridge a mile in the sky.

At the Little Switzerland Inn, right on the Parkway, they could actually eat indoors, a real treat with New Jersey still in lockdown. Jim loosened up in the hot tub, then took Blue around the Diamondback, Route 226A, another great run for motorcycles and sports cars. At the Pisgah Inn they watched the clouds settle down onto the mountains, and the next morning they drove through them as fog along the cliffs. Tense, Jim says, but enjoyable once you're through.

Then the Parkway simply ends. No warning, no signs, it just tees into another road. "Not that that is a bad thing," Jim says, "it was just a little abrupt."

The Dragon

A couple of hours further on lies Deal's Gap, and the Tail of the Dragon: eleven miles of US 129 between North Carolina and Tennessee, with 318 turns. At the store they stocked up on swag, a tin Blue Ridge Parkway sign for the garage and two Tail of the Dragon shirts, before they had actually run it.

It is a challenging run, and a watched one: commercial photographers stand along the route, capture every car as it passes and sell the pictures online. That is where the two best shots of Blue in this story come from. Jim got most of the way through on his first pass before he caught up with the sightseers. On a public road there's little you can do about that, though most drivers pull over to let faster traffic by, and Jim returned the favor for a couple of much faster bikes. His advice if you want to run it fast: don't go on a weekend.

"Blue's purpose in life is to put me into the trees if I'm not paying attention."

They ran it once in each direction, then headed for a small motel in Robbinsville as the weather turned and the rain came in.

Home

The next morning they took the Interstates home, and Jim was grateful for that five-speed. All told: 1,800 miles, seven states, ten days. A great time, and home safely.

Blue, SFM6S1801, is listed in the HiPo Registry as K-0160.