It All Started with a '68 Camaro . . .

In 1989, I went into debt to the tune of $2,900 in order to buy a canary yellow, "ten-footer" '68 Camaro (you know, looked wicked from ten feet away) during my senior year of high school in Lake Orion, Michigan. The guy I bought it from worked in a now-forgotten Corvette speed shop in Troy, and had done Wendy (that's what I called her, named after The Descendents' remake of the Beach Boys classic of the same title) the great service of swapping out her peashooter 250 c.i. straight-six for the hi-po Corvette engine from 1979, the 220-hp L-82. Don't knock the QuadraJet (had an iguana named Q-Jet; you could say I was pretty well-obessessed with small block Chevys).

I loved Wendy . . .and so did the little kids across the street, who started a club that met under my parents' bushes to argue about the coolest cars, known as the Hot Rod Club, and wait for me as came home from school everyday. While other kids got trips or big checks for graduation, I got a new exhaust, including headers that didn't really fit right because they were for the automatic . . . and I had the Saginaw three-speed stick shift (you know where first gear is normally? That was reverse). I grew up in a GM family. I've loved cars all my life, and have had a few good ones (1993 Beretta GTZ, yes really and a 1997 M3 Coupe) and a few less so (1980 CJ-7 when I lived in Colorado).

Some years later, both Wendy and Q-Jet were shipped to my cousins in Indy.
Wendy was completely rebuilt and later sold. Q-Jet, well, was not.

Fast forward nearly twenty years. Today, I co-manage a growing automotive practice at Weber Shandwick, one of the biggest PR firms in the world. I'm launching this blog to lend some (hopefully) unique color commentary on the fast-changing automotive industry in which we live and work (when you live in Detroit, you do live the auto industry, some of us more than others). I hope you enjoy, and maybe even find something here of interest for you. So buckle up (have to say this because my Dad a safety czar of sorts) and have fun.