Yahoo News Ezra Dyer: Living Legend
From the November/December 2024 issue of Car and Driver.
A couple of years ago, I drove a Legend car, a twee tube-frame spec racer powered by a manic 847-cc three-cylinder Yamaha engine that lives for five-figure revs and sounds like Paul Bunyan's Stihl. I was so smitten that I ended up buying one, intending to indulge my race-driver fantasies in a relatively affordable and reliable manner ["Meeting a Real Legend," October 2022]. It hasn't yet worked out that way, mostly because I just can't bring myself to care about oval tracks—I tried!—and that's where most of the action is with Legends. My car is set up for road courses, but those races are thin on the schedule. What to do? Enter the West Virginia HillFest—the best bad idea I've had in a long time.
I say "bad idea" only because my Legend, with its 73-inch wheelbase, is built for tight quarters, and the HillFest course at Snowshoe promised speeds above 130 mph for some of the quicker street cars. Fast corners have a way of highlighting the disparity between the Legend's gonzo horsepower and primitive chassis—imagine a corgi running as fast as a cheetah, and you're on your way to understanding what it feels like to shift into sixth gear in a car with 13-inch tires and a live rear axle fitted with drum brakes. When I asked the dealer how fast a Legend could go, he said, "Maybe 140 or 150 mph. But you wouldn't want to."
During the drive to West Virginia (state motto: Roads Ain't Straight), I had plenty of time to contemplate high-speed sweepers on cold tires, to the extent that I half-seriously considered scratching the Legend and running the Ford Ranger Raptor that I was using to tow it. The Raptor had already earned hero status by dragging a felled tree out of the road somewhere near the Virginia border, saving at least an hour's detour. The idea of treating it like a Stadium Super Truck was not unappealing.
But I banished the thought the second I got the Legend out of the trailer and saw that, finally, it was in its element, surrounded by similarly demented machinery. Putting a 12,000-rpm engine and sequential manual transmission in a five-eighths-scale bootlegger car seems downright rational compared with, say, stuffing a super-charged small-block V-8 into a bug-eye Impreza WRX, which was just one of the glorious misfit toys in the paddock. The hills were alive with the sounds of V-8s in places they shouldn't be—E30 BMWs, Nissan 240SXs, a non-Shelby first-gen Dodge Dakota. I could tell one was running a Whipple supercharger because of the telltale whine. And also because it had no hood. The crowd was divided between time-attack sickos like myself and drifters, the scurvy pirates of car culture. I asked one guy with an LS-powered Nissan what kind of time he thought he'd get, and he said, "I don't care. I'm just gonna drift the shit out of it." Drifters are so cool.
While the course itself is just over two miles, the loop back to the starting line is an 11.5-mile drive. This was its own fun, but I also confirmed that a Legend cannot even feign civility. It's so cammed-up that it bucks and protests under 4000 rpm, and the locked rear end makes a left-hand turn away from a stop sign an exercise in clutch abuse. I wore my helmet during the transit stage because the only in-car storage was on my head.
On my first run, I confirmed that cold Hoosiers and fast sweepers go together like peanut butter and arsenic. On my second run, I confirmed that the two lanes had a much different camber, such that taking a road-course line out of a second-gear corner would give the spectators an unplanned drifting exhibition. On subsequent runs, I ramped up the speed and trimmed my time, getting more comfortable with the car and the road. My last run was clean enough that a feeling of euphoria washed over me as I crested the finish line. Tasting danger and getting away with it releases good brain chemicals.
Back in the paddock, a guy and his family walked up, and with my head still ringing with the sounds of Yamaha FZ-09, I thought he said the Legend looked like it would be fast. I replied that it felt fast even if it maybe wasn't. "No," he said. "We were in the stands and saw you go by. It is fast." And right then, with my silly little green car, I was Michael Schumacher in 2004. That feeling was so good that I don't want to wait another year for it, but I think I have a solution. First, I'm going to need a 240SX and an LS3.
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