From the August 2018 issue

Like so many ideas that seemed good at the time, it started with a text on a Saturday night. Technical director Eric Tingwall had—as one does—come across an ad from the Atlanta Craigslist: seven Geo Metro hatchbacks, all running, $500 to $1250 apiece. By the time we called on Monday morning, the seller was down to five. The cars were in York, South Carolina, so we rang photographer Clint Davis, who lives about an hour from there and whose plans for the day didn’t yet include buying five Geo Metros.

View Photos Clint Davis, Marc Urbano, and Andi Hedrick Car and Driver

Or four. At the last minute, the seller, George, decided he wanted to hold on to one for sentimental reasons. (As you read this, George, you’ll probably be very happy about that decision. Sorry.) He sold us two at $1250 each and two at $1000; two manuals, one automatic, and one automatic that George, a retired aircraft mechanic, had converted to manual shift and called a hydro-stick.

We had a field. Now we needed a race. So, one morning a few weeks later, eight of us would board a 7:00 a.m. flight for Charlotte, North Carolina, and then caravan to York in taxis. Nobody other than Davis had seen the cars in person yet. Once we got to George’s, our four two-driver teams would have five minutes to look them over before drawing straws, picking their mounts, and racing from his yard to the front door of Car and Driver’s home office. If all went well, it would be about a 10-hour race back to Ann Arbor. This would comprise Stage One of the competition.

View Photos From left: Tingwall’s Cornholio routine always kills; a pink floral backpack full of pretty petrochemicals; just a couple of Metrosexuals; George’s last drive. Clint Davis, Marc Urbano, and Andi Hedrick Car and Driver

We hoped all wouldn’t go well. To ensure surprises, nobody was allowed to touch the cars during the inspection period. As executive online editor Erik Johnson put it, “Any funk inside is part of the risk.” Each team—the drivers matched for weight parity, since a three-cylinder Metro weighs only about 1600 pounds—was issued two mounted spare tires, a new battery, and a backpack in neon-pink floral print. Anything else the team thought it might need to get from York to Ann Arbor had to fit in the pack. Some teams brought water/pee bottles and candy bars, some packed octane booster, and one had an alternator and a water pump. Deputy editor Daniel Pund and features editor Jeff Sabatini had a bottle jack but not, they realized too late, a lug wrench.

If any cars made it back to Michigan, their finishing order would determine handicapping for Stage Two: the next day’s Fight to the Death at Bundy Hill. A former gravel pit, this off-road park near Jackson is quickly becoming C/D’s unofficial mud-bogging, rock-crawling headquarters. There, we charted out a brutal quarter-mile lap that included a hill climb, a water crossing, and plenty of whoop-de-dos. We were so sure it’d kill the cars that we mandated a driver swap every two laps so that everyone would get in on the fun. (Though, after lap one, even lap two seemed unlikely.) We’d dump 100 pounds of sand into the previous day’s second-place finisher, 200 pounds into the third, and 300 pounds into the fourth. Spoiler alert!—we’ve still got 300 pounds of zero-mileage play sand piled out back.

Additionally, each team would supply a sealed box containing an olfactory agent of its choosing. We would draw lots and mix these into the sand. If the stink of 200 pounds of fish-head sand in the back wasn’t sufficient to ensure nobody pussyfooted around until the other cars died, we also stipulated that any car falling more than four laps behind the race leader would be disqualified.

Before we’d wired Davis the purchase money, George assured us that all his Geos ran and that he took a different one for a drive every Sunday. When we told him we planned to race them to Michigan, he grew a little cautious: “I wouldn’t attempt to drive any distance in any of them.” But many a memorable tale has its roots in bad judgment. Bad judgment and Craigslist.

View Photos Clint Davis, Marc Urbano, and Andi Hedrick Car and Driver

Clint Davis, Marc Urbano, and Andi Hedrick Car and Driver

While it took 11 pointless hours and 420 torturous miles for Sabatini and me to be defeated, we actually started losing before the race began.

Sabatini had arranged to have us picked up at the airport by Travis Simpkins, the man who wrote last month’s feature about his time in the shady world of exporting luxury cars to China’s gray market. This gave us the strategic advantage of being able to stand curbside for a half-hour waiting for the very late Simpkins. When he arrived in an ancient butter-colored Mercedes diesel, he carried in the back seat a dog that nearly took off Sabatini’s left ear. The dog’s name is Corey Feldman. Simpkins explained that he and his ex-wife once had a cat that they named Corey Haim. The day after they named the cat, the human Corey Haim died. So, said Simpkins, “I named the dog Corey Feldman just to see what would happen.”

View Photos From left: Rennsport-edition Metro deletes door panels; Satan is our co-pilot; Sabatini discovers that Metro owners’ forums exist; the unmourned. Clint Davis, Marc Urbano, and Andi Hedrick Car and Driver

What happened was that we were so late that the other teams, tired of standing in the rain and assuming we had tried to cheat, drew straws and chose cars without us. They left us a teal number with a three-speed automatic, three sketchy-looking 12-inch tires, and one with some tread on it. But the Metro fired right up and evinced many of the characteristics of a car.

Well, it’s probably better to think of it not as a car so much as a colony. Forget the thriving microbial universe feasting on the sticky interior goo or the two humanoids in the front seats; there was also a hornet’s nest under the hood. We left the inhabitants alone on the premise that killing is wrong. Then, when we stopped to swap out an entirely bald tire early in the race (George, we discovered, had made sure all the cars had lug wrenches, scissor jacks, and mini spares) and top off with gas, we found another nest in the fuel-filler compartment with three of the fat red bastards in there, too. The fuel filler kept clicking off, meaning that I had to hold the handle as one of the hornets slow-walked up the nozzle toward my hand. I doused it, its friends, the side of the car, and much of the concrete around us with gasoline, on the premise that, well, back to hell, Satan bugs. Later a mouse would poke its head out from between the hood and the windshield as we rambled along at 70 mph. It apparently enjoyed that experience less than cohabitating with hornets because it ducked back under the hood, its tail momentarily flapping wildly in the wind.

View Photos Clint Davis, Marc Urbano, and Andi Hedrick Car and Driver

Another thing we discovered at the gas station: One of our two provided spares was mounted on a wheel with the wrong bolt pattern. This would prove to be a problem less than an hour later when, on I-77 near Dobson, North Carolina, our car began vibrating violently. As Sabatini assured me that it was just a change in road texture—BOOM! Flappa flappa flappa—our right-rear tire, the only one that still had measurable tread on it, split open and puked out its belts. Back on went baldy. This is when the passenger door stopped opening, requiring me to crawl out of the window, Luke Duke–style.

Things went smoothly for an hour. Or as smoothly as things can go in a car that responds to any road heave with a sickening diagonal porpoising motion. Sabatini said that I just had to learn to ride with it, not against it, as you would a mechanical bull. About 80 miles from our first blowout, our right-front tire, so thoroughly dry-rotted that its sidewalls looked like crepe paper, exhaled a last dirty breath.

We swapped to the space-saver spare (only marginally smaller than a typical Metro tire) and limped to a Walmart auto center where we had our remaining new tire mounted on the wheel of the first blowout. This took all the time in the world and our chance of winning with it.

When the Metro died, it wouldn’t even give us the satisfaction of exploding or lighting itself on fire. No, it just expired. It refused to start after our final gas stop in the appropriately named Byesville, Ohio. We didn’t know why. We still don’t, and even if we did, it wouldn’t be worth fixing. The teal Metro now sits in our office parking lot, where we occasionally give it a swift kick as we pass.

View Photos Clint Davis, Marc Urbano, and Andi Hedrick Car and Driver

Clint Davis, Marc Urbano, and Andi Hedrick Car and Driver

Fried chicken is not good road food. Sure, you can wipe your fingers anywhere if you don’t care about your upholstery, but no surface is an appealing napkin in a car where you’d need a snow shovel to scoop all the mouse poop from the footwells. Distracted by this conundrum after our first—and, we hoped, only—stop for fuel and supplies, reviews editor Josh Jacquot and I missed the exit that would have taken us off I-77 and onto the more direct route to Ann Arbor through Columbus, Ohio.

We never admitted to our competitors or even to each other that our route was not a decision but a mistake. This might have been because we had an exhaust leak so loud that conversation was impossible. Or because we were half-asleep from the fumes. But our arrival in Columbus would have coincided with rush hour, and while Google predicted our route would consume an additional 12 minutes, we figured we could reclaim that and more by keeping our speed up.

View Photos From left: Name change results in no performance gain; belt change; penalty-sand installation; Geo Metros can do wicked stoppies. Clint Davis, Marc Urbano, and Andi Hedrick Car and Driver

We had some catching up to do. We’d started the race right on Tingwall and deputy online editor Dave VanderWerp’s tail, but recent California transplant Jacquot was scared to drive in the rain and let them pull out of sight in the downpour that tracked Stage One of this competition. Though, truthfully, being eye to lug-nut with semis in a vehicle with bald tires and A-pillars I could bend by hand, I didn’t feel much more courageous.

And my teammate was right to be concerned about a blowout. As we merged onto I-80 for the high-speed run across the pancake flats of northern Ohio, our top speed plummeted. If I pegged the little 1.0-liter in fourth, we could still maintain 65 mph or so, but then our temp started creeping up, so I dropped into fifth and down to 60. Then there was a loud bang and the front end started shaking so vigorously, I thought the engine had exploded. In spectacular and picturesque fashion, nearly every square inch of our right-front tire had failed simul­taneously.

View Photos Clint Davis, Marc Urbano, and Andi Hedrick Car and Driver

Did you know that the drag from a failing tire will cost you 15 mph of top end in a Metro? Our last spare fitted, we regained all our lost speed. For a few minutes. Then our accessory belt snapped, but we had a replacement in our backpack. By the time we swapped it in under the canopy of a dilapidated Marathon station, Google had revised our arrival time at the office from 9:06 to 9:33 p.m. We e-braked into the office parking lot one calamity shy of second place, about 10 minutes after Team Beard/Johnson. Worse, we’d been so preoccupied with the time that we missed the moment, just inside Michigan, where our Geo rolled over its odometer—probably not for the first time but most definitely for the last.

When the stinky stuff was doled out at Bundy Hill the next morning, there was almost a mutiny. I recently had lost power at home for a week and had forgotten my freezer was full of pig until day six, so I contributed 10 pounds of raw pork spotted with mold. I was quite pleased with this until Jacquot and I actually had the rotting treif in hand. Jacquot laid the sealed Ziplocs tenderly atop our 200 pounds of sand, hoping to keep the stink sealed in, and then Tingwall darted in and ventilated the bags with a pocket knife before we could close the hatch. Luckily for us, the previous day’s 10-plus hours of Geo exhaust had mostly burned out our smelling circuits.

Any concern we had about drivers not abiding by the spirit of the off-road race vanished the second the green flag waved. Barreling into the hairpin off the start, Jacquot dove inside of Tingwall, forcing his way to a lead we held for 20 laps or so. A Geo Metro can withstand a staggering amount of abuse, which makes sense. They were the Tata Nanos of their day, meant to traverse the goat paths and other rough-hewn travel arteries of the undeveloped world. They chattered around our course, wheels pumping furiously from limit jounce to full rebound, nosing into the sky and then crashing back into the ground (and occasionally one another) without flinching.

Okay, some flinching. We lost the lead after our coil wire worked its way loose and the car started stalling. And then Jacquot drove over a rock the size of a microwave oven and crushed our oil pan. A few laps later, the car sputtered to a stop.

View Photos Clint Davis, Marc Urbano, and Andi Hedrick Car and Driver

Clint Davis, Marc Urbano, and Andi Hedrick Car and Driver

Our success as a pair of idiots racing a bunch of other idiots, technical editor David Beard and I figured, came down to car choice. Without the chance to hear the Metros run, open their hoods, or even get inside, our must-haves were boiled down to two: minimal exterior fungus and a set of tires that didn’t look like they had necrotizing fasciitis. It happened that the car that best met those criteria was the one we’d all feared most: the orangish-red/­reddish-orange Geo that George had converted to manual operation. It sounded horrifically unreliable, but all it meant was that you needed to downshift from D to 2 to L whenever you stopped, lest you start in third gear.

Still, it would be best to minimize stops. Our initial strategy called for just one, halfway through, to take on fuel. George told us he kept the tanks topped up over the winter to minimize condensation, but ours was either his favorite car or the most neglected, because we were the only ones to start without a full load. We stopped immediately to fill up and then made the call to drive just above the speed limit to save the tires and the car, which had no issues whatsoever. Over the course of the day, a series of images sent via group text of the various unlucky fates befalling the other shitheaps turned our confidence into full-blown hubris. Since we were clearly hours—days, even—ahead of the other teams, we made an additional stop about 50 miles from the finish line. We were on E and could use the gas, but the real point was to pick up beers with which to toast our victory. We started discussing the photo angle from which our Geo would look best with a couple of cold ones on its filthy roof.

View Photos From left: Fresh battery; orangish Metro begins racing; Johnson and Beard gleefully count their unhatched eggs; a dude wearing a helmet in a Metro. Clint Davis, Marc Urbano, and Andi Hedrick Car and Driver

Then another image came through, this one from the nerds in the white car: the “Welcome to Pure Michigan” sign at the state border, 10 miles to our north. In a panic, we whipped our Metro to 96 mph, begging it and the tires to hold together as we gave chase. Our Icarian fate sealed, we arrived a half-hour behind Tingwall and VanderWerp.

At Bundy, our second-place finish in Stage One meant we were racing with 100 pounds of ballast plus one of the twisted mystery boxes. I drew a slip of paper from executive editor Jared Gall’s stinky helmet and unfolded it; it said, simply, “squirrel.” Gall handed us a box and we peeled back the tape, revealing the words “I call shotgun!” scrawled on one of the inner flaps. Tingwall immediately piped up: “You have to have it belted in to your passenger seat, not mixed into the sand. It’s remarkably well preserved.” It might have been so described when he swiped the dead squirrel from a neighbor’s yard—our dual-degreed technical director filching animal corpses indicates the stakes at play here—but a few days wrapped in a garbage bag in a sealed box had done the thing no favors. It had begun to ooze. From what used to be its eyes.

View Photos Clint Davis, Marc Urbano, and Andi Hedrick Car and Driver

The squirrel brokered no complaints on the brutal off-road course, where we ripped off our Geo’s entire lower jaw within 10 minutes of the start, losing the A/C condenser, cooling fan, and lower radiator support, and draining it of all coolant. Ten minutes after that, we tore open the oil pan. Still, the thing ran and ran and ran, showing a shocking amount of grit.

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We were slower than the white car by just enough to make passing them or catching them virtually impossible. We were slower than Gall and Jacquot, too, but got around them when their coil problems started. We had to hope that VanderWerp and Tingwall would break before we did. They didn’t, but our Geo bounded and leaped around our circuit for 39 minutes before eventually succumbing to its injuries, its trio of pistons howling in their cylinders like coyotes on a fresh kill. They say silver medals are for the first losers, which, yeah, okay, they are.

View Photos Clint Davis, Marc Urbano, and Andi Hedrick Car and Driver

Clint Davis, Marc Urbano, and Andi Hedrick Car and Driver

Ivan Stewart didn’t win the Baja 500 17 times by stopping to water the cacti whenever the urge struck. So, yes, we did arrive in York with the means to store as much as 128 ounces of urine. As Gall pointed out, “If you’re not driving or refueling, you’ve already lost.”

Of course, stopping for gas doesn’t get you closer to the finish line, either. That’s why our backpack contained a $9 battery-powered Harbor Freight pump. Actually two of them, because redundancy is the engineer’s comfort blanket, and Vander­Werp and I are both engineers. And because bad ideas are endemic to the C/D staff, we intended to use one of the pumps to refuel our Metro while sailing down the interstate.

View Photos From left: Those are definitely not pee bottles; 13-inch wheels provide an unfair advantage; dirty love; Geo Metrocide. Clint Davis, Marc Urbano, and Andi Hedrick Car and Driver

With the first pick of the lot, we drafted the Geo Metro XFi, the fuel-economy special that was also the only car George had upgraded to 13-inch wheels. Mostly, though, we liked it because it had a manual transmission and all four tires held air.



Heading north on I-77 out of Charlotte, we took an early lead, but the real surprise was how we fared compared with the modern cars around us. “I don’t understand how we’re driving faster than all the other traffic,” VanderWerp marveled from the passenger’s seat of a car that made 49 horsepower when it was new.

View Photos Clint Davis, Marc Urbano, and Andi Hedrick Car and Driver

We were the only team that had the foresight to pack an E-ZPass, which saved precious minutes. Minutes we needed, because as we slowed for the first tollbooth, a shrill squeal indicated trouble under the hood. Within a mile, the battery warning illuminated and the temperature gauge started climbing. We steered our XFi to the nearest gas station and installed our replacement accessory belt in a matter of minutes. We also gassed up and, in a moment of weakness, took the time to use the bathroom. Having covered 240 miles on roughly half a tank, we ditched our plan to buy jerrycans for our in-flight refueling scheme, figuring this fill would carry us the final 410 miles.

Crossing into Ohio, we began to doubt our ability to reach Ann Arbor without more gas, and when the opportunity presented itself—a gas station on our side of U.S. 33—we splashed four gallons into the tank with the haste and grace of Scuderia Ferrari. Feeling confident but not cocky about our position, we tried to coax information out of the competition with a text message: “We’re trying to plan our strategy. Where is everyone?” No one bit initially, but hours later, Gall shared pictures of a minced tire and a broken accessory belt. Pund submitted a shot of a julienned tire. We fired off one revealing our own chewed-up belt to suggest that things were not going well for us, either.

What nobody knew when their phones buzzed with the “Welcome to Pure Michigan” photo was that the picture had been taken a half-hour earlier, and as they were scrambling to close an insurmountable gap, we were soft-pedaling the final miles to 1585 Eisenhower Place. By the time Beard and Johnson arrived, we’d been waiting for 31 minutes, and our beers—plucked from the office minifridge—were empty. We took our second round from their fresh six-pack.

Gall and Jacquot held the lead for a time during the off-road race in Stage Two, but they never had a chance. We’d picked the right horse from the start. On our Metro’s firewall, someone—presumably our man George—had penciled the oil capacity and weight (3.7 quarts of 5W-30), the lug-nut torque (43 pound-feet), and the spark-plug gap (0.037–0.043 inch). This thing had been loved. After Gall’s car took its last gasps, our XFi still had the power to push his red Metro uphill through the washed-out ravine. When Johnson’s car died in the pits, ours still felt as fresh and tight as it did leaving George’s place. Admittedly, that’s not saying much about a car that left the factory with the rigidity of a jelly doughnut. But it felt as if it might run forever, and we wouldn’t wish that curse on any driver.

From high on the winner’s podium, we gave our car a hero’s send-off. The last 20 feet it traveled were vertical, a somersault from a cliff onto its roof atop a pile of rocks. If you stop by Bundy Hill this summer, you can probably drive over it.

Clint Davis, Marc Urbano, and Andi Hedrick Car and Driver

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