“We made another turn and almost rolled again. The Coupe de Ville is not your ideal machine for high speed cornering in residential neighborhoods. The handling is very mushy … unlike the Red Shark, which had responded very nicely to situations requiring the quick four-wheel drift. But the Whale — instead of cutting loose at the critical moment — had a tendency to dig in, which accounted for that sickening “here we go” sensation.
At first I thought it was only because the tires were soft, so I took it into the Texaco station next to the Flamingo and had the tires pumped up to fifty pounds each — which alarmed the attendant, until I explained that these were “experimental” tires.
But fifty pounds each didn’t help the cornering, so I went back a few hours later and told him I wanted to try seventy five. He shook his head nervously. “Not me,” he said, handing me the air hose. “Here. They’re your tires. You do it.”
“What’s wrong?” I asked. ”You think they can’t take seventy-five?”
He nodded, moving away as I stooped to deal with the left front. “You’re damn right, he said. ”Those tires want twenty-eight in the front and thirty-two in the rear. Hell, fifty’s dangerous, but seventy-five is crazy. They’ll explode!”
I shook my head and kept filling the left front. “I told you,” I said. “Sandoz laboratories designed these tires. They’re special. I could load them up to a hundred.”
“God almighty!” he groaned. “Don’t do that here.”
“Not today,” I replied. “I want to see how they corner with seventy-five.”
He chuckled. “You won’t even get to the corner, Mister.”
“We’ll see,” I said, moving around to the rear with the airhose. In truth, I was nervous. The two front ones were tighter than snare drums; they felt like teak wood when I tapped on them with the rod. But what the hell? I thought. If they explode, so what? It’s not often that a man gets a chance to run terminal experiments on a virgin Cadillac and four brand-new $80 tires. For all I knew, the thing might start cornering like a Lotus Elan. If not, all I had to do was call the VIP agency and have another one delivered … maybe threaten them with a lawsuit because all four tires had exploded on me, while driving in heavy traffic. Demand an Eldorado, next time, with four Michelin Xs. And put it all on the card … charge it to the St. Louis Browns.
As it turned out, the Whale behaved very nicely with the altered tire pressures. The ride was a trifle rough; I could feel every pebble on the highway, like being on roller skates in a gravel pit … but the thing began cornering in a very stylish manner, very much like driving a motorcycle at top speed in a hard rain: one slip and ZANG, over the high side, cartwheeling across the landscape with your head in your hands.”
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson, © 1971 by Hunter S. Thompson
