[ QUOTE ]
"You boy, You're ina heeep of trouble here! Don't you know it's againt the law to operate a race car inside the city limits?"
Reminds me of the time in the late '70s when I took my GT40 to a Shelby Club convention in Pennsylvania (Hershey, I think). It was actually running then, so I decided to take it out for some runs with friends outside of the convention grounds. The only minor problem was that the car wasn't registered and hence had no license tag. "No problem," said a buddy from North Carolina, who promptly volunteered to lend me the tag off his car. So, off we went with the borrowed license plate, figuring in our stupidity that we would take it easy and wouldn't give cause to any of the local gendarmes to pull us over. HA! Little did we know that the locals were already fed up with all the loud Cobras (a quarter century ago guys still brought their original Cobras to conventions--and drove them on public roads) and Shelby GT350s that had been scaring the chickens zooming around the county for a few days already, and were out in force looking for some poor schlump to make an example of. BINGO, along we come, admitedly at a tad faster rate than we initially thought we would adhere to. I don't know how long the cop followed us with lights and siren on until we noticed him over the din and poor (non-existent) rear visibility of the 40, but I gingerly pulled onto the side of the road and was looking up into his gunbelt as I opened the driver's door to get out of the car. As the cop proceeded to ream us out for harassing the citizenry and their livestock with all the noise and stupid stunts on the roads, I'm thinking "Kerrriiist, what if he asks for a registration certificate?" Even if I had remembered to get it from the buddy who loaned me the license tag--which I had not--whatever the description of the vehicle was on the registration sure wouldn't have matched up with what the cop was eyeballing as he walked around the GT40. Finally, the guy says that he wants me to go back to whatever event brought all these hooligans to his quiet and peaceful bailiwick and tell everybody to stay the hell off his roads for the remainder of the event--PERIOD! "YESSIR!" said I, breathing a sigh of relief that he didn't ask for the registration. As he was walking back to his cruiser, he turned and said, "And by the way, this here's the strangest lookin' truck I ever saw," and pointed to the license tag on the tail of the 40. I walked back to see what he was referring to and only then noticed for the first time that the tag that my friend loaned to me must have come from his truck, because plain as day was the word "TRUCK" embossed on it along with the tag numbers. YIKES! I was very happy to get back into the 40 and crawl back to the convention site at around 20 mph. Long-time members of the Shelby American Automobile Club (SAAC) will have some evidence of this incident on the front cover of the club magazine from that time, which has a photo of my friend who loaned me the license tag driving my GT40 somewhere outside the convention site. I might have a photo of the car with the "truck" tag on it buried somewhere. If I can find it, I'll post it.