[THEME MUSIC PLAYING]
[MUSIC - PUNK COVER OF "WHEN THE SAINTS GO MARCHING IN"]
MIKE PRICHINELLO: We started off by going through all the
cars we had as kids on our walls, posters, right.
So that was a good starting place, things like the AC
Shelby Cobra, '67 Chevelle, 911s, we got through those
pretty quickly.
308 Ferraris, 328 Ferraris.
ZAC MOSELEY: We also made our share of mistakes.
MIKE PRICHINELLO: Yeah, we did.
What was our very, very first car?
ZAC MOSELEY: The Aston V8.
MIKE PRICHINELLO: Oh, the Aston Martin.
Yeah, OK, so this is a good example.
Aston Martin 77 V8, epic car, it looked like American muscle
in the front, European business in the rear.
Had a really good exhaust note.
Everything about it was cool, it just never worked.
Basically, it would go out.
We'd take apart, put it back together so the next member
could drive.
MIKE G: It was just an older car that we couldn't figure
out what was going on with it.
My predecessor, the guy before me, had taken one of the heads
apart and figured, OK, this is what it is.
But unfortunately, he didn't adjust any of the valves.
I ended up having to redo all of the valve lashes, redo all
of the timing, and resync the carbs.
Finally got the thing running after like three years just
[BLEEP]ing around with it, got the thing running.
And as soon as I got it running, they got rid of it.
ZAC MOSELEY: We're at this place called
The Classic Car Club.
I'm Zac Moseley, and this is Mike Prichinello, we run it.
We have a fleet of cars, about 40 some odd of them, ranging
from '60s American muscles to brand new exotic cars.
And our job is to keep them on the road and get members
behind the wheel and deliver awesome automotive
experiences.
Right?
MIKE PRICHINELLO: Yeah.
We actually do keep all 40 something cars on the road.
It's not too often you see something like this.
Actually, that's not true.
You see this all the time, but it doesn't last very long.
ZAC MOSELEY: Yeah, people walk in all the time and say, how
do you keep these things going?
It's pretty simple, if you get to drive them.
You can get the best car out there, show-winning trophy
car, and you drive it 10 miles, then it breaks down
because it never get driven.
Everything is dried up and not working, so you've
got to drive it.
You have to exercise mechanical sympathy.
Mike and I could get in to this Shelby Cobra running on
three cylinders with no clutch and drive 400 or 500 miles on
it, and get there.
Because we were meant to race Le Mans in the '50s.
MIKE PRICHINELLO: [INAUDIBLE] the side of the road.
ZAC MOSELEY: We know how to nurse the thing into the pits.
But we could hand the key 100% totally running to someone who
doesn't know what they're doing, and they could blow it
up before the first stoplight.
So you just have to feel the car and sympathize with it.
Every time you step on the gas pedal, there's thousands of
moving parts capturing a chaotic explosion and turning
it to kinetic motion.
And you have to have some appreciation for that.
MIKE PRICHINELLO: Yeah, just because an old car has an
8,000 red line, doesn't mean you should bring
it to 8,000, right?
It's just a line on a gauge, right, like have a little
sympathy in your foot.
Sort of feel out how much your car can handle.
ZAC MOSELEY: And then the other stuff is basic
maintenance.
Every car we get in here, we put out on the lift for four
weeks and go through everything and drive it.
And Mike and I try to break it just to see what else is on
its way out, and replace it, and get ahead of the curve on
all that stuff.
MIKE G: My name is Mike G, I take care of all the cars here
at Classic Car Club.
The best thing about working here versus just your typical
shop is it's not a rush to get the car done, it's a passion
to get it right.
Because we're going to have any one of 300 plus different
guys with lead feet.
You don't want to be able to get into it and find a lot of
stuff broken.
You want to be able to get into it and everything is
where it should be.
MIKE PRICHINELLO: You gotta add a bit of modern equipment
to an old car.
You drive modern day cars, and you expect them to stop in
this distance.
Things like brake boosters are really important, putting
power brakes when we can.
If something happens to have drum brakes, we put in some
disc brakes, just to keep people safe.
We like to make things go faster, actually, as long as
they'll stop quicker.
So Zac will always do some kind of work on cars.
A lot of the old cars we'll do like custom headers, custom
exhausts, let them breathe a little better,
make them sound better.
ZAC MOSELEY: Cooling systems, you know it's number one.
Number one thing that old cars do is overheat.
So put a big aluminum radiator and an electric fan in.
Make them more usable.
MIKE PRICHINELLO: Everybody loves an iPod
adapter, gotta do that.
But, yeah, it's all about making them run more like
people think they're going to run.
I use this analogy a lot, where I heard the guys from
KISS talk about their reunion tour, and they're like, oh
man, we had to do these fireworks and all this stuff
because that's how people remembered our shows in the
'70s, even though they weren't like that at all.
But you've got to live up to what people
thought things were like.
People think of '67 Chevelles as just like a grenade of
energy down the street.
But we had to create all of our cars to be what they think
they're supposed to be like.
And that's a lot of work.
ZAC MOSELEY: The rest is pretty simple.
The more interesting part is the heroic recoveries when it
does go wrong.
MIKE PRICHINELLO: In 2006, I think, we drove from New York
to Miami on all the back roads.
And we were in the Blue Mountains, Blue Ridge Mountain
Parkway, which is a really great driving road.
And there was a bit of a gaggle of Porsches.
I was in a GT3, and there was I think three others with us.
Actually this, was the trip to New Orleans.
ZAC MOSELEY: I was setting the pace in the Mini Cooper S.
MIKE PRICHINELLO: Mini Cooper S that we brought to Helix.
Yeah, and it was a bit suped up.
But still, it was a Mini Cooper amongst
GTs, GT3s and stuff.
And it was the middle of the night, and Zac hit
a rock in the road.
ZAC MOSELEY: It was like, I saw it, and I kind of zigged
and then zagged.
And bam, right in the middle of the wheel.
And the wheel was round like this, and it had
this fold like this.
MIKE PRICHINELLO: We're like in the mountains where they
make moonshine and kill people.
ZAC MOSELEY: So we had AAA on the phone, they're like what's
your cross street?
And we're like--
MIKE PRICHINELLO: There is no cross street.
ZAC MOSELEY: I don't know, I saw mile marker like 120 a few
miles back.
MIKE PRICHINELLO: So now it's getting dark, and it's
starting to rain.
And the only light is thunder.
Or lightning I guess would be the light part of it.
So Zac got the wheel off.
We ditched him because we had to get to the bar.
And so we left him on the mountain, and Zac with a
hammer, grass, and duct tape, got that car off [INAUDIBLE].
ZAC MOSELEY: We were bending it back--
it hadn't cracked-- and we were bending it back, and
we're like, oh we can almost get it to hold air.
And just got it just about ready to hold
air, the last whack.
And so it crack, it cracked and a chunk fell out of it,
and it was like oh no, it's over.
Then I had to get up and duct tape, stuff it with hay, and I
drove down the mountain.
It was pretty rough.
It was like, [BUMPING NOISES].
MIKE PRICHINELLO: It was 20 miles.
Yeah I know, but we made it.
We made it all the way down.
I always say have a fire extinguisher in your car.
It looks pretty bitchin', you know, if you mount it like in
the center column there there.
It's actually good to have.
ZAC MOSELEY: Because you don't want to be that dude with his
brand new Lamborghini, standing there with his arms
folded, watching it to burn to the ground.
If there's a little fire, and you can put it
out, save your car.
MIKE PRICHINELLO: That's not the way
to wind up on Jalopnik.
Be like the next [INAUDIBLE].
This car lit on fire, actually.
It happens to all the best of them.
ZAC MOSELEY: This one's intelligent, though, it went
on fire in the wash bay.
Literally, we finished washing it, started it up, boom.
But we had a hose there, put it out.
Burned up the air box and the air filter.
MIKE PRICHINELLO: So have a fire extinguisher.
That's rule number one on the side of the road.
Rule number two is, get off the road if you're actually
losing power.
You have to actually get off the road.
Don't be that dude in the right lane who broke down on a
bridge because he wasn't planning it out.
And everybody's got to sit in traffic.
ZAC MOSELEY: I've done that.
MIKE PRICHINELLO: [LAUGHING]
He's done that, actually.
ZAC MOSELEY: Uphill on the Williamsburg Bridge the fuel
pump went on the Jag.
And I could feel just as I got on the bridge.
And there was a point of no return.
Heard a little sputter, and then it kind of
sputtered some more.
And I'm like, come on, foot down, let's go, let's just get
to the top of the crest.
And I can see it coming, and then it died.
And it started rolling backwards on the bridge.
I just had to wait while traffic stacked up behind me,
it was like Sunday evening, it was a disaster.
MIKE PRICHINELLO: E Type Jag.
That is like the quintessential classic car
club car, right? '68, '69.
Anybody will tell you that a Series 1 is the prettiest.
It's got the covered headlights, the grille opening
is a little smaller, it's a bit more of like a feminine
look to it.
And then the Two got a little bigger, and then the Three was
a 12 cylinder.
They're all very beautiful.
If you put them all next to each other, you'd probably go
for the first one, Series 1.
But it never worked, it always overheated because of that
little opening in the front, not enough air got in there.
The key to owning an old Jag is throw away
the original motor.
That's what we did.
ZAC MOSELEY: When it came time to rebuild the original E Type
motor, it's about $10,000 give or take by the time you go
through a motor, and you have to change
everything around it.
This is a Series Three XJ6 motor they made until 1987
with the same architecture.
It's gotta be the longest running basic
engine design of anything.
They made it for like 40 years.
And the carbon exhaust manifold and the original oil
pin bolt right onto this XJ6 block.
It's basically, we have a disposable motor now.
You can buy a whole running XJ6 for about $1,800, or pull
a running motor for $400.
And it has a better cooling and oiling system, it's
modernized, it's more powerful.
MIKE PRICHINELLO: Also buy the year that--
not the year that everybody wants, but the next one that
everybody is going to want.
I'd never say buy a classic car as an investment, because
you're just gonna spend a ton of cash on it, and it's really
never going to be a good investment for you.
But with that said, you should at least sort of know what the
next one is, right, so you're not so far underwater.
So everybody wants a '73 RS Porsche, right?
That's the one, it's $400,000 now.
But the 964 RS America, you could get for like $45,000.
And I think that's a sleeper car, I think that that's a
really, really cool car.
It's kind of better than the first one, and it costs 1/10
of the price in Classic Car Club math, which is appalling,
but I think right in that case.
ZAC MOSELEY: And it's going to be mechanically stronger.
It's a more modern car, you can actually drive it.
MIKE PRICHINELLO: We got a 328 over there.
There's yards and yards of [BLEEP]
you could talk about that car.
ZAC MOSELEY: That's the car that you'd make the decision
to buy based on complete nostalgia.
So you've been working hard, to you're a hardworking
journalist at Jalopnik, and you just bought yourself a new
Honda Civic that's about $26,000.
And you say, oh man, a 308 Ferrari.
I saw one for $24,000.
Maybe I can get that instead of my Civic.
Don't do it.
I will say, these 328s, especially, are pretty good
work horses as far as they go.
MIKE PRICHINELLO: They're better than new Ferraris.
ZAC MOSELEY: They're pretty strong in Ferrari terms, the
parts are pretty reasonable.
But still like a clutch disc is $800, and it needs a major
service every 30,000 miles or three years, or 15,000 miles
or 3 years, that you have to take the old engine out.
Change all the seals, everything, and the parts for
that are about $2,500, the labor is probably $4,000.
And then they're going to find about $10,000 of other [BLEEP]
that's wrong with your Ferrari.
MIKE PRICHINELLO: But I still do love them.
It's a funny thing, my enthusiasm for cars has not
waned whatsoever.
But I just try to be more practical about them now.
MIKE G: This is actually one of the nine original cars that
we had here.
It was from Backdraft, and we beat it up so much that it
became their test car.
They actually changed a lot of modifications on the car, just
because of what they had gone through with us.
It's just a simple car, it's something that there's not a
lot of computer with it, there's no ABS, there's no
electronic crap that you have to deal with with most of the
newer cars.
It is just a basic original motor, tranny, drive gear.
Lights on and off, it doesn't even have a radio in it.
It's pretty fun to work on.
MIKE PRICHINELLO: Oh, I would love to have a
French car in the fleet.
In our London fleet, we have an old Citroen--
DS12?
Is that right?
Anyway, really cool, they make that noise,
[IMITATES QUIET MOTOR NOISE]
as they drive by with the air ride and all that stuff.
And I would like to have one here, but there
are no parts here.
So in England, it makes a lot more sense, it could not run
there efficiently.
Here it could not run inefficiently.
ZAC MOSELEY: Jensen Interceptor.
The London Club had one, and it was the best looking car
they ever owned, because it never turned
a mile on the road.
Didn't have a rock chip on it.
It was like perfectly glossy.
But every time they went to start it, the British
electronics would fight with the American motor, and like
the Italian interior would light on fire.
It was crazy.
MIKE PRICHINELLO: This is a category that I never buy.
Never buy Frankenstein cars.
By that I mean, cars made by two different manufacturers.
So that car, American drive train, English body, English
electronics, that never worked.
We had a Pantera, Detomaso Pantera, very, very cool,
Italian body.
See you're already in for some trouble.
351 Cleveland in it, American power plant.
Once you start doing those things, once countries get
together to make something stupendous, it never happens.
I'll tell you, so having owned hundreds of cars in New York
City, it's not an easy place.
As an individual, you don't really get a parking garage,
you just get a spot.
And old cars need garages because old cars need tools,
and old cars need maintenance.
And so you can't just go to 18th Street parking
garage and have that.
It's a really difficult thing.
It's one of the reasons why the Classic Car Club makes a
lot of sense in New York.
There's also the roads.
Traffic's not as bad as people make it out to be
in New York, actually.
Compared to most cities, we don't have it too bad.
We do have swimming pool sized potholes.
Cobblestones.
Not the smoothest road we could have driven down.
So you've gotta learn that a bit.
So having a car of any sort of consequence, a supercar or a
classic car, you're going to go through your set of
[INAUDIBLE], you're going to replace your bushings more
often than other places just to keep it all tight.
And we do that all here.
But at the same time, you know what's cool about it?
Let's say you take a convertible through Midtown,
and you're driving through all the skyscrapers, and you get
to see a side of New York you really don't see when you're
walking around or whatever.
We've had a lot of fun in cars, actually.
One time we had our old '68 911 out that had this ragingly
loud exhaust, and like a big Le Mans style wheel.
And Zac and I were hysterical laughing all through side
streets of New York.
It was echoing through the buildings, that
was a lot of fun.
We've spent seven years finding really good roads, and
we've tested every car possible in every kind of
environment from traffic in Midtown to full out on the
highways, to country backroads.
There's a lot of places to go.
For me, driving classic cars is a really cool time to
actually sort of go slow.
I'm always into driving fast, and being on the track, and
being in really competitive cars.
But driving something like an old E Type Jag, it just kind
of slows things down a bit.
I actually really like doing it.
I forget how much I like doing it until I'm in one.
ZAC MOSELEY: We had a 308 Dino, which actually you guys
were bugging me about when I kept dropping the price,
dropping the price trying to sell it.
Because it was rusting through every corner of the car, it
was just gonna fall apart.
But--
MIKE PRICHINELLO: And it's a bit unloved.
ZAC MOSELEY: Yeah.
When it first showed up, Mike and I got in, and Mike started
driving, and the steering wheel was over there, and his
feet were over the other side.
The gear shift is all grindy, but it made this kind of great
popping sound.
It was running really rich, but it came off gas like bah
bah bah bah bah.
And we just drove from here to 14th Street, we were laughing
the whole way.
It was awesome, [INAUDIBLE].
MIKE PRICHINELLO: Big grins and bleeding eyes.
Because it was just so much gasoline smell coming through
the car, but it was a lot of fun.
ZAC MOSELEY: And you wouldn't get that in a new BMW.
You'd just be bored, listening to NPR and driving up Hudson.
Come on.
Turn green.
ZAC MOSELEY: I'd say probably one of my most favorite heroic
saves of a car is the Mustang, actually, the
white one back there.
We put a five speed gearbox in.
And it had a cable clutch originally that went right
through the header, so the thing was just bound to melt.
Someone was coming back in traffic and melted
[INAUDIBLE], and eventually the cable broke.
And he called me just like stuck, and it was the day of
the gay pride parade.
And he wasn't far, he was on 14th Street.
So I'm like, alright, let me come get the car off you, and
you can go where you have to go, and we'll figure it out.
And I got there, and I'm thinking, can anyone come tow
me, what am I going to do, it's Sunday afternoon.
And I'm like, I can get it back, so I just put it in
first, turned the key, bump started off the starter, and
just sort of matched shifts all the way through.
But then I came across Christopher Street, there's
some people [INAUDIBLE]
coming across, I'm like alright, you guys gotta get
out of my way, because I have no clutch, I'm not gonna stop.
As soon as the light goes green, I'm hitting the starter
again, popping off.
MIKE PRICHINELLO: You couldn't even get it
into neutral, right?
ZAC MOSELEY: No, what I would do is I'd pull it in neutral,
coast to a stop, and then shut the car off,
put it back in gear.
And as soon as the light went green, bump it.
But people were still doing the late cross, I'm like, you
don't want to do that in front of me, because I'm gonna
launch right into you.
Because you kind of had to go for it, you had to lurch, and
then get on the gas to keep it all going.
I managed not to collect any people.
MIKE PRICHINELLO: Collect.
That's a really nice way to say kill, collect.
ZAC MOSELEY: Yeah, it looked like I was trying to terrorize
gay people.
I love gay people, don't get me wrong.
But I wasn't trying to run you over, I'm sorry.
I was just trying to get home in one piece.