Reply to "Pre-LMC trip to the Swiss Alps"

So left the garage, going to the ferry DK-Germany. And then one of the highlights of the tour, German highways. It’s amazing in this day and age, you can on long stretches (fewer and fewer) go as fast as you can/dare. Not that I race that much, I cruise at 150 km/h in the LC, the occasional sprint to 180-200 km/h. Last year I bought a Cadillac CTS-V in the UK, Geiger tuned to 650 HP, and drove it home. It topped out on the rev limiter at 303 km/h leaving an AMG Merc in the dust, and when you were doing 200, it felt like 130. The Longchamp is different, at 200 km/h, it feels like 400 km/h would feel in the V. Not that it’s unstable or anything, but it’s quite noisy: engine, wind, like a race car. Sorry guys, but after decades of enthusiast being able to build a better car than the factories could build these days it’s the opposite, you can’t build as good a car as you can buy today.

Still the Longchamp has its advantages. Many thumbs ups from other drives, people wanting to talk at gas stations, etc., and the very unfiltered sense of driving. And this Longchamp handles extremely well, it can be felt that Mr. DeTomaso was more racecar builder than anything else. It’s only let down by its narrow 70 profile tires, something I may fix soon. But they look so good…

Already in Denmark the first problem arose. The inside mirror fell down last trip, I glued it on last autumn and it’s been ok for a year almost, but it started to come loose. No glue in my car. But gaffa tape, but at the bottom of the well packed trunk, and rain. I saw a painter in a van, asked if he had some tape, he sure had, and being a US car owner, he would have given me the shirt of his back, a small community in Denmark. So that was sorted. After a few more km in the rain I noticed the new wiper blade was working its way out of the arm. I had feared that, the new wiper blade combined with the very unique DeTomaso left wiper arm which is a two-rod thing that turns the blade to the right angle, those parts don’t fit entirely together. A cable binder fixed that. So two hours from home, already the car is kept together by tape and cable binders. This could be a long trip. And that was small stuff compared to what happened later in the day…