Confessions of a DeLorean owner

**[EDITORS NOTE] pictured above, Don Weberg’s 1981 DeLorean DMC-12**

• Never Drive Your Heroes… Why buy a DeLorean?
• 88 mph… is the struggle real?
• The involvement of the British Government and Lotus Cars in the development of DeLorean.
• JZD didn’t design his own car, the connection with Giugiaro.
• What’s it like owning a DeLorean? Where do you find parts?
• We hear the DeLorean is quite strong, is that true? How has this changed now that Steve Wynn has purchased DeLorean and moved it to Humble, TX?
• What’s the future of DeLorean? Thoughts on the DeLorean EV.

and much, much more!

[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Gran Touring Motorsports podcast, break Fix, where we’re always fixing the break into something motorsports related. The following episode is brought to us in part by Garage Style Magazine. Since 2007, garage Style Magazine has been the definitive source for car collectors continually delivering information about Automobilia Petroliana events and more.

To learn more about the annual publication and its new website, be sure to follow them on social media at Garage Style Magazine or log onto www.garagestylemagazine.com because after all, what doesn’t belong in your garage. When people hear the name John z DeLorean, whether they’re a car enthusiast or not, they will tend to associate it with the DMC 12 made famous by the Back to the Future franchise.

Most people don’t realize how much of an influence John DeLorean had on the automotive industry as a whole. His level of vision and talent exceeded many [00:01:00] quoted as the Godfather of the Muscle Car era. When he introduced the legendary Pontiac g t o, he was always toying with the idea of his biggest venture, the DeLorean Motor Company, which in 1975, he began to realize with full control, John was able to work on any concepts without restrictions.

His first and only creation would be the DMC 12. And with us tonight is returning guest Don Weiberg, founder and publisher of Garage Style Magazine to share with us his true confessions as a DeLorean owner. So Don, I wanna unpack more of this DeLorean story because I’ve never personally sat down and talked to a DeLorean owner.

So, ok, I, I’ll real, real quick, I’ll tell you something, that DeLorean is a secret nobody knows about the DeLorean. So this will be really wild when your podcast comes out if people hear this. But Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Got a DeLorean, where’d that come from? Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

You know, so it’s fine. Do what you gotta do. I brought it up, I opened the door, as they say in court. So, [00:02:00] alright, so then I’ll make sure all my paid subscribers are sick that day. That’s all. You have struck a nerve with this DeLorean thing, which is really, really important. And, and it’ll, it’ll be good, it’ll be beneficial.

People ask me all the time, why do you have that car? Don’t ask me that cuz that depresses me. You know, cause that makes me think, well, maybe I shouldn’t have this car. Maybe it’s a stupid car. Maybe it’s not a good car to have. Okay, here I go, getting off track. But it comes right back to it. My daughter went to a youth function last night at the church and all these young people running around and, uh, she asked me to pick her up and it’s, uh, it’s very attention getting.

And that’s one reason, you know, I, I’ve loved the Laure since I came out. I, I just, that car, I was what, five or six years old when it came out and it just blew my mind. It just, that car, the stainless steel, the gold wing door, the look of it, I, God, that car just has an unforgiving look to it. It just looks like it’s gonna burn lasers through you or something.

I love the look of that car. One of giros masterpieces, right? It really [00:03:00] was. And yet, you know what’s funny is, is you’ll meet people who don’t know what it is. It’s familiar to them, you know? And I see about DeLorean, you’ve seen one who’ve seen most of them. Well, except for the black one or the copper one, or the the yellow one that somebody’s repainted.

You know what I mean? What kind of car is that? Oh, say it’s a Volkswagen Rocco. Oh, it’s an A zuzu impulse. Well, they’re designed by the same, same guy. Same The same guy. Yeah. And they look kind of similar, you know, it’s really funny you say that. Oh, okay. That’s nice. You know, my running joke as an aside is, you know, we’ve been a VW Audi Porsche family forever.

You are Cuatros what? I drove in college. Wow. You know, flare fenders, like I was the odd kid. I had strange cars. Right. So we’ve had all sorts of stuff. I grew up in the back of Rocco’s and whatnot, so I always tell people, they’re like, oh, you know Audi cou? They’re like, what is that? I was like, oh, it’s a fat Rocco.

Right. But then when you get to the DeLorean and they’re like, what is that? And I’m like, well, that’s an overweight truck. Yeah.

Uncle was a Bosch distributorship. And. Porsche, Audi [00:04:00] dealership owner always drove Audis. And my big joke was, uh, I grew up, I knew what Audis were before they were popular, you know? Mm-hmm. I’d go to here, here’s kind of a funny story. So, you know, they existed, you know, they existed before 1984. Yeah. Good.

Good job. Right? Exactly, exactly. Yeah. Way back when. In fact, kind of a funny story, not a funny story. My, my uncle was a World War II vet, and that’s where he grew. His appreciation for German engineering was, he was stationed in Germany during World War ii. One of the cars he fell in love with had those four circles on it, and he just, he always said it was one of the most graceful, beautiful cars, and it was an Audi.

And he learned all about Audi when he was over there. Came back here and started the box distributorship, and that led to working with Volkswagen, Porsche and then Audi. And there they were, the cars with the circles, and he was so excited to see those. He always had Audi, but kind of a funny story. Junior high school, he had the Coop gt, which is the [00:05:00] emasculated version of the Quatro gt.

You have? I have two. I’ve I’ve had two. My sister still owns one. She had one restored. You know, it’s, it’s funny, it’s only the goofballs like us who were like, oh, who? Look at that. You know? Yeah, right. Everybody else like, yeah, okay, Don here have a coke. You know? Yeah, right. No, I love those cars. In fact, that was his last car was a Mars red Coop gt.

Oh yeah, yeah. Mar Mars Orange. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Tornado, tornado pink and Mars orange. They were never red at any point. Yeah, exactly. No, that, that was his car though. But that, that was when I fell in love with, but here’s the funny story. Not a friend, but just a guy I knew in junior high saw me getting dropped off in that car and he said, what kind of car is that?

That looks really, really cool. Well, you know, bright red, you got a 14 year old guy there, whatever. So we’re all impressed by it. And I told him that’s an Audi. So what’s an Audi? Um, it’s a glorified Volkswagen. Oh, cool. 40 years later, I accidentally run into that guy and he is driving Audis. Nice. Yeah. [00:06:00] I, I just thought that was just so funny.

I’m like, do you remember my uncle’s red Audi? No. Really? You gotta be kidding me. The irony of this, eh, whatever, I, I know where we were and it, it is a little bit something No, go ahead. Uh, the church, the church last night, picking her up in the car, a lot of the boys came out. They were fawning over the car, taking pictures of the car.

The older boys finally left leaving three of the younger boys, and so I just walked over and I said, if you want, you know, make sure there’s nothing in back pockets, but go ahead and take a seat, take some pictures. Oh, cool. They were so excited by it. One of the kids in particular really knew his cars. You could tell just by the questions he was asking, by the statements he was making, he was, he really, really knew his card.

I, I think it’s important to, you know, embrace people like that. Let them sit in the car, let them, the parents are good with it. Take ’em for a ride in the car. You know, do whatever you can to introduce them to the car and, and let them experience it. And even if they don’t know what it is, they’ll, hey, whoa, whoa, whoa.

That’s the spark. They don’t know what it is. Well, what is that? That’s such a [00:07:00] weird little car. What is that thing? And they want to know. And the next thing you know, oh, it’s an Audi. Wait, wait, wait. My dad has an Audi. It doesn’t look anything like this Uhhuh, because this is an old Audi, you know, and then the conversation goes from there.

And it doesn’t just have to be an Audi, it could be a weird car, like at the Lian, or it could be an even weirder car, like a Brooklyn or, you know, what is it that turned somebody on? You know, when I was at Motor Trend, I had a little cubicle and I, I took pictures on my cubicle. One of them was a 66 Lincoln Continental with the suicide doors.

I had that car. The other one was a DeLorean. And uh, the other one was a Kunta, one of the other dream cars. It was pointed out to me by one of the editors walking by. He sees the pictures, he stops to look at, you know, what cars are they? And he looks at me and he says, you like weird doors. And I never thought about it before, but he’s right.

I have a thing for weird doors. I, I just never thought about it before. That’s my little hook. I like cars that. Have some sort of oddity to them. You know, I, I, I’ve got nothing against you. Go to an Italian car [00:08:00] show. There’s a billion fiats. Hello? I have one. There’s a billion Magnum pi, Ferrari 3 0 8.

There’s nothing wrong with either one of those cars, and I hate to sound like this. I don’t mean it to sound negative or mean or anything. To have one. You’re kind of just a run of the mill Fiat guy or run of the mill Ferrari guy. You know, you, you’ve got the one car that everybody kind of starts out with or everybody has, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.

I love three oh eights. I really do. I’d still love to have a 3 0 8. I don’t care what kind of stigma they come with, what I don’t. I like man. Okay. Does that tell you how psychotically stupid I am when it comes to you? You’re the only person I’ve ever met that says that. Yeah. Yeah. I like Mondi. You know, back in the day when I was growing up, when they were new, I thought they were ugly.

I really thought that cab forward that I just thought they were hideous. But one day I was at Concorso Italiano years ago, and we’re walking through, and I gotta tell you this one, it hit me like a brick. It was a coop, not a [00:09:00] convertible, and it was sort of a medium metallic silvery gray. It had lightly tinted windows.

The wheels were not chrome, but they were just polished enough to have a little bit of a glint to the, oh my God. That was the car that turned me. That was the car that made me realize the mon deal can be a really, really nice car. You’ve just gotta know how to dress her up. That’s the thing. So, yeah, no, I, I look at 3 0 8 s and I think, man, those things are something else.

They really are. But there’s some of us out there who, we don’t want the run of the mill. You know? We want something a little different. We want something off the beaten path. And it’s not that we’re trying to be better than anybody. It’s not that we’re trying to be the weirdo of the group. No. We are the weirdo of the group.

That’s why we like the mom deal. That’s why we like that Audi gt. That’s why we like these cars that people say, well, what is that car? And I think a lot of younger people, I’m, I’m, I’m listening to a lot of ’em. A lot of ’em like those cars too. I know one guy who will admit to wanting a [00:10:00] pacer, and he’s just a little older than I am, but he really wants a pacer.

Okay, fine. That’s your hangup. That’s your hangup. I don’t know anybody else in this age bracket who wants a pacer. Not voluntarily, but I’ve met several younger guys. Oh, they want a pacer. They want a Pinto. They want a maverick. They want the Vega. Now the sad thing is I like all those cars too. I think they’re goofy and I love them.

Will I go outta my way to buy one? No, probably not. I want to spend my money elsewhere, you know? But these younger guys, no, no, no, no, no. They’re actively seeking them. They’re looking for these cars. I’m blown away. And these guys are in their twenties, so I was the pacer kid back in the day. I wanted the car nobody else wanted.

I wanted that bastard child car that nobody else wanted. Why? Why do you want that car? You know, that’s not a great car. I, I know, you know, I love nine 20 eights. And again, back then, that was a tiny little community who was like, yeah, nine [00:11:00] 20 eights, 9 28. That’s the way to go. You know, there was, there was like seven of us.

That’s it. And six of us have died. So I’m the only one that’s left. But what’s interesting is that’s not true. What’s interesting is what I’m seeing, the guys that are my age, your age, they love 9 28. We are the kids who grew up looking at those cars on the street saying, wow, what a knockout kind of car.

Look at the headlights, the way they pop up. Look at that rear end, that thing. Uh oh. Did you also notice the 9 28 looks a lot like a pacer. Okay, I don’t want to go there, but there is a similarity there. There is a familiar look. Okay. The 3 0 8 was in the same ballpark. I had a mechanic for my Fiat and he had, oh, did he have a 3 0 8?

It was gorgeous. It was an 85, the very last of the 3 0 8 before the 3 28 came out. 85. Oh, Ferrari red. It was Magnum PI all over the place. Magnum pi. He comes to me one day. I had a Toyota four by four pickup, gorgeous truck, bright red, the whole [00:12:00] nine yards. He says, Don, how do you feel about trading my Ferrari for your Toyota?

Oh, you gotta be kidding me. But in the day that 3 0 8 was $30,000 car, my Toyota was a $27,000 Toyota. So price to price, they’re in the same ballpark. I really wanted to do it, but the Toyota was my daily driver. It was the one that graduated the fiat into becoming the fun car. You know? So I really, if I got the Ferrari, I’d be back in the fiat for the daily driver, and that kind of ruined my goal.

Boy, do I kick myself today for not having traded that car and, you know, whatever. But ba ba. But again, a lot of the older guys were always telling me, don’t do that. Don’t do that. That 3 0 8, eh, it’s not worth anything. Never gonna be worth anything. They built too many of ’em. They were underpowered, they’re not comfortable.

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, what kind of Farage should I get? Oh, you know, a 67, 3 30. Seriously. Come on. Well, what fantasy island do you live on? [00:13:00] Because I don’t live there, you know? And then they would say, well get a tester. Oh yeah, lemme just go get a tester. No problem. You know? So Don, we can probably wax poetic about all sorts of cars that we love from the eighties, but I think we need to get back to talking about your DeLorean.

What’s it like? Is it as cool as they say it is? You know, we’ve written some articles about how awesome they are and there’s obviously the mystique behind John Delore and all this kind of thing. So are they as cool as they seem to be? Or are they really kind of as, as slow as everybody makes ’em out to be?

Let’s talk about this DeLorean. Let’s unpack it a little bit. Well, you, you’re talking to a guy who has a fiat, so. And I don’t care about going slow. It doesn’t bother me. That car taught me the art of driving slow. It, it really did. It, it, it made me realize you don’t have to go rocket speeds and you can still have a really good time and look cool doing it.

Is it true that it is a struggle to get to 88 miles an hour just like it was in back in the future? Honestly, no. It, it’s really not. [00:14:00] They, I, I’m not gonna say they’re quick. No, I’m not gonna lie to you like that for the day. I think they were slow quick, if that makes sense. Today they’re just flat out slow.

I mean, you’re not gonna outrun much of anything. It that car, it is not a quick car. It is a fast car. You know, there’s a difference between cars in that regard. There, there are quick cars that are not fast. And there are fast cars that are not quick. This is definitely a fast car that is not quick. It, it’ll do 130, no problem, I’m sure, and that doesn’t sound like a lot to today’s market, but when you go back to 1981 and you say you’ve got 130 mile an hour car, that’s pretty damn fast.

You know? And it is funny too, they always say, oh, it’s a piddly little v6, 2.8 liter from Reno. It had 130 horsepower. It was piddly. Again, I’m not a math guy, so this might be a little wonky, but when you do the math, the 5.7 liter Corvette with its 180, 190 horsepower, the [00:15:00] 2.8 liter reno at one 30, the Renault is making more power per liter, per cubic in ch Wanna do it?

The Reno is making more power. Than the Corvette. The Corvette was quicker. It was Torquer probably lighter too, right? No, Corvets are heavier. The, the DeLorean only weighed 2,800 pounds fully loaded, full fuel, full oil, twenty eight hundred and sixty five pounds, something like that. It wa was not a very heavy car at all.

It was heavier than DeLorean wanted it to be. It was heavier than a Lotus, but Lotus helped engineer DeLorean and Lotus. Wanted DeLorean heavier because Lotus couldn’t have a car better than Lotus. You see what I’m saying? Conflict of interest right there. No, they will move. You just gotta know how to drive it and you gotta keep it tuned up.

And so many of these cars, I mean, when I got mine, it was in the same boat. It hadn’t, I got my car from the guy who, who got it in 97. The car had 17,000 miles on it. When he bought it in 97. I got it from him. In [00:16:00] 2018, it had 20,000 miles. So from 97 to 2018, 3000 miles, that’s all the car rolled. So it was riddled with, uh, deferred maintenance.

It was riddled with rubber that just wanted to break. So we’ve gone through, we’ve dumped a lot of money into it. We’ve dumped a lot of time into fixing those little things that. Broke because they were never used. And I gotta tell you, the last thing was just fixed. Actually this past week. I had a bad exhaust leak.

Yeah, this car was the textbook of it. Struggled to move. Once it got going, you were fine, but getting off the line, whew. Good luck it. It just didn’t want to go. Fortunately I fell back on my Fiat upbringing and realized I don’t need to go quick. I just need to go. And that’s what kind of got me through it here in Texas, they do state inspections and the mechanic who is helping me get the cars to the state inspector, he said, you know, it’ll probably pass, but I worry about that [00:17:00] exhaust leak cuz it, it just click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click.

It sounds like a diesel. And I don’t know. He said, if you don’t mind, I’d rather fix it. And I said, uh, all right, go ahead and fix it. You know? So he fixed it night and day. The personality of that car is night and day. It is so much more powerful. It is so much quicker. It is, it is. The best word I can use to describe it is aggressive.

It’s not quick. It it, it’s quicker than it was, but it’s still not real quick. But boy does it get too fast. A lot quicker than it used to, if that makes sense. Yeah. So yeah, no, they’re not, you know, the burnout you see in back to the future, that’s bullshit there. There’s no way it boring. Could do a, a burnout like that.

It’s just not gonna happen. 2,800 pounds, all stainless steel, right? So you don’t have to worry about rust other than the frame and things like that. How does it handle, because for that day, 2,800 pounds is pretty heavy. When you consider, like a Rocco was weighing in 1981, Rocco was weighing in at sub 2000 [00:18:00] pounds.

Fiat X 19, sub 2000 pounds nine 14, barely above 2000 pounds. Nine elevens were what, 2200 pounds? Something like that. I mean, it’s a heavy car for 1981. So how does it handle, how does it feel to today’s standards? You know, 40 years later, my wife had a 2015 Honda Accord with a v6. And you give it just a quarter of a chance, it’ll rip a Mustang G through throat out.

I mean, it’s incredible how quick it is. It doesn’t handle very well. You’ve gotta do a lot of driving. When you take it through the curves and the corners up through the canyons, the Honda, it’s very nose heavy. It really, you know, it plows into things, but it’s quick. It’s really, really quick. The DeLorean guy, you feel its weight.

You know when you get it in the curves and the corners, you’ve got some weight under you. But you gotta remember, DeLorean’s original thought was somewhere right around 2000 pounds. That’s where he wanted that car weight. It was right around 2000 pounds. He wanted a mid engine that wasn’t gonna work, [00:19:00] and it was just way too exotic, way too much money for what he wanted to do.

And then the conversation came up too. Mercedes are classically heavy, but there is a reason for that heft. You feel the quality, you feel the heft, and you know, boy, you’ve got a tank. Ford used to call it road hugging weight, right? Road hugging weight. That’s right. That, and I’ll tell you, growing up in a Ford family, I’ve had a number of Lincoln Mark fours, especially those cars, do not discount the mark.

Four. If you know what you’re doing in a mark four, I’ll hold onto your Rocco any day of the week through the canyons. I guarantee it. People always wonder, well wait. Whoa, whoa, whoa. You got a 5,000 pound boat? How are you keeping up with me? I know how to drive it. This is what I was raised. You put me in your Rocco fish outta water.

I, I have no idea how to make that car go. It, it’s just, it’s too small. It’s, it’s not my wheelhouse. The DeLorean is kind of that nice in between car. It’s got a hef to it. It’s got a size to it. When you’re in it, [00:20:00] you feel very low. You feel very isolated in that car. But yeah, if, if you know how to run the gear, don’t buy the automatic.

Uh, that’s just my opinion. A lot of guys like the automatic, they are really, really slow. They are really, really slow off the line. Are they fast? Yeah, probably. They’ll probably get going, but it’s gonna take ’em forever to get there. So if you’re gonna get one, get a manual transmission. That’s just my thought.

No. Compared to today’s cars though. Yeah, I think they still, I think they’re still valid. I do. Is they’re gonna keep up with your Rocco through the canyons? No, it’s not. But it couldn’t even way back when they were both brand new, it couldn’t do it. It’s not gonna do it now. Well, it keep up with the Lotus.

Maybe if you’ve got the right driver, maybe it’ll hold onto an old Espree, not a new one. But an old one. They are fun. They really are. Back in California, we had a lot more mountains back there than we do here in Texas. I took my daughter on a little drive up through one of the mountains and that was the first time I ever really got to get it into the curves.

And I [00:21:00] realized, geez, this car is 10 times the handler of anything I’ve ever had. You gotta remember, I grew up mostly in a muscle car family. We had a lot of big, heavy cars. My dad wasn’t into little cars. He was into the big heavy stuff, which is why I’m more comfortable canyon taming with a Lincoln Mark four than I would be a raco.

Most guys call me crazy. Well, that’s what I like. I I like those cars. I know how to make a move. I think you’ll understand what I’m saying, but you might not get what I’m saying. The Lincoln just to go crazy. Mulholland Drive. I don’t know if they’re still doing it or not, but back in the day, you had the timers club.

And the timer’s club. It was an illegal club. You met at one two o’clock in the morning and you went from point A to point B through Mulholland and you timed yourself and that was it. Well, the Mark four did it three times. I hate to admit that because I realized how stupid it was now, but back then it was a lot of fun and I was the only one there.

I had the air conditioner on. I had power brakes, I had the [00:22:00] radio. I mean, I was as comfortable as could be, but the car is leaning like the Queen Mary. But if you know how to make that lean work for you, oh brother, you are really gonna be having some fun because when you come through that curve, you got more torque.

Then you know what to do with, to get out of it and you’re gone. You know, so it was fun, but you gotta know how to do it. You gotta know how to take a long, wide car into that curve and make it come out without going over the edge. The DeLorean, the first few curves I almost found over the edge because I was oversteering, I was over trying to correct that car.

Short wheel, base narrow. It’s actually not that narrow of a car, but it is more narrow than what I’m used to. It. It was too touchy. It was really, really something. What was interesting to me was the three oh eights I’ve driven. That’s what it felt like. It felt like a 3 0 8 with a lot less power coming out of the curve.

Yeah. That’s 3 0 8. Interesting. You blip. Yeah. You blip the throttle of a 3 0 8. You’re gone. DeLorean’s not [00:23:00] like that. It takes a little while for it to get going if you’re not, and I’ve, I’ve driven a 3 28 QV and I’m assu, you know, not too different. So I’m assuming that DeLorean is also, it’s a transverse v6 so the layout’s the same.

All it, so it’s, it’s designed, modeled very much after that similar style of, of car of that time. So it should handle relatively the same. It probably does. I think it does. But don’t let the DeLorean Go ahead. You There is a lot of weight behind the rear axle. It’s more like a nine 11. That might actually be a little bit more because it’s not, you know, the DeLorean’s motor is not mounted transversely, like the 3 0 8.

3 28. They are longitudinally. Oh, okay. Yeah. So you got all that engine sticking out past the rear axle. It is a little more nine 11 maybe because nine elevens are longitudinal instead of, uh, transverse. I, I learned something new. There we go. Yeah, they’re, they’re lengthwise and just like a nine 11. You know this growing up in the family You [00:24:00] did, you blip that throttle on nine 11.

You better know what you’re doing because they will just spin. Trailer drive over steer. It’s the name of the game. There’s too much weight, there’s too much weight back there. The polar moment on that is it, it, you know, the pendulum effect, right? It, it’s like a front wheel drive going backwards. So you’re gonna have that washout where it’s basically under steering as you’re going through the corner.

But it’s, it’s harder to control when it’s behind you than when it’s in front of you. It is. And you gotta know how to run that throttle. Mm-hmm. You know, so many people, when they, when they, when it start to slide, they want to back off that throttle with a nine 11. That’s how you spin it. Mm-hmm. You know, you really gotta dig into the throttle more.

And that’s when the card digs its way out of the slide. It’s, you really gotta think backward. Uh, it’s just like a front wheel. Drive open the wheel and hammer it and it’s gonna pull itself out. Exactly. It’s gonna go wherever you point it. Exactly. Now the DeLorean, fortunately it doesn’t really have enough power to get, to get out of its own way.

Yeah. Yeah. So when you come around a curve, you’re already going fast [00:25:00] into the curve. If you start to slide. You’re not gonna power slide into it. Yeah. You, you’re gonna, you’re already going too fast. The gravity, the inertia is gonna start pulling that rear end out, and then you’ve gotta know how to correct it, because again, you don’t have the power of the Porsche.

You’re not gonna be able to nail that thing, and it’s just gonna dig its way out. DeLorean probably won’t do it. Yeah. I mean, it just won’t, it is funny. You get one of these cars and yeah, they look like they go a million miles an hour and they don’t, but you start to realize, you know, if you’re going a million miles an hour, nobody can see the car.

Nobody can appreciate it. Nobody, you know. Well, like I said, I had it to the church for my daughter last night when she was in the church doing her youth thing. That car was outta gas, so I ran it over to get gas and wash the windows and do all that stuff right there at the gas station there. There’s one guy who said, do you mind if I take pictures?

No, go ahead and take pictures. You know, knock yourself out. And then there must have been it. Yeah. It’s eight o’clock at night in the middle of nowhere, Texas. I’m filling [00:26:00] this thing up. There must have been seven or eight people who only one talked to me, but, well, no, two, two talked to me. But they drove by and they saw the window go down and the camera clicked, and then they drove off.

You know, so they’re taking pictures of the car. A buddy of mine who also has a DeLorean, he says, I, I, I rate my car by, by smiles per mile. And I say, well, what do you mean by that? He goes, you know, I’ll drive down the middle of the freeway cuz I want everybody to be able to circle that car and take a look and take pictures and smile and give, gimme thumbs up and all that.

He loves that, you know, and the people love that. You know, and, and yeah, there’s a lot of negativity around DeLorean. Oh, they’re not fast. Okay, well, yeah, they’re not fast, but you know, to today’s standard, a Ferrari 3 0 8 is not very quick either. 9 44, 9 28. I mean, you could list off a hundred cars that aren’t that fast by today’s standards, right?

And yet the 9 44 s oh, you talk about a brilliant underrated machine. Bring up 9 44 in a Porsche circle. You’re gonna be ostracized, you’re out, you’re done. They [00:27:00] don’t want to hear anything about you. But they’re a brilliant car. I love 9 28 to the end of the earth, but they’re heavy. They’re really heavy.

So you’ve gotta know what you’re doing with that car. 9 44 is a brilliant machine. It’s the same layout, front engine, rear trans, but that four cylinder is tucked back. Oh, the balance is wonderful. The balance is wonderful. On those cars, all the things of slowness aside, there’s obviously something that attracted you to the car and it probably wasn’t Hollywood or whatever.

No. Why buy a DeLorean? No. Okay. You ready for another Dom story? You, you’re poor bastard. You keep opening the door for these things. You know? 1981, my dad is getting a Buick Regal Company. Car, car, family. We all go to the dealership to get the car. We don’t care that it’s a cheap little regal. We’re gonna go, you know, I’m little, you know, I’m, I’m five, six years old, something like that.

I don’t know. I must have been being rambunctious because my mom took me for a [00:28:00] walk on the lot. So we’re walking the lot, we’re we’re walking every row of every car. In retrospect, I think she must have been trying to wear me out, you know, just kind of burn off some of that little boy energy, you know? And I’ll never forget, we’re, we’re walking along, there’s a row of cars on our.

Right row cars on our left, but there’s a row car on the, on the right and there’s a gap between the parked cars. And I figured, oh, that, that must be where dad’s car was that that must be the parking space where they pulled his car out from Well, as we get closer, no, there was a DeLorean in the space. It was so far forward.

The long Buicks just buried it. You didn’t see it from until you were right on top of it. And the Buicks were so tall that DeLorean’s only 44 inches tall. A six year old boy sees a gleaming steel car. The car of the future. Right. It looks like nothing else at that time. Yeah. And it’s so short. I can look right in the side glass.

I don’t have to go on my tippy toes to look in, you know, the Buicks, I’ve gotta be up here, you know, looking [00:29:00] for the, for the glass. The DeLorean was right here with eye level with me, and then my mom opens the door. And it goes up, oh my God, hugely impressionable age five years old. Hugely impressionable that that car stuck with me for the rest of my life.

That was the car that was the one to get. I think that same year Canal Run came out and I went to see that film with my family and the beginning of the film. What the heck is that thing? What is making that glorious noise running across the middle of the desert going so fast? Oh, it’s a Lamborghini Kunta.

And look at those doors, Don. They opened this way again, same year. 1981, the little boy and one are my two top dream cards. DeLorean and Kunta let you into my white trash side. I really want Trans Ams. I love Trans Ams. I just love them. Start, you know, with where you can. So I started [00:30:00] with the DeLorean.

We’ve only had it for a few years. We have been broke since we started the magazine. This car kind of fell into our lap and it was a friend of a friend who owned it. We had a good deal on it. It was 20,000 mile car. Uh, it had had two owners. It had, I mean, it, it really, really is actually a pretty stunning car, even if I say so myself.

It is. People look at it and they’re like, holy cow, this is nice. It was one of those moments where my wife agreed, you know what, let’s bite the bullet and live on some ramen for a while and just. Go get that stupid car. If you can get a loan for it, go get it. We did. We took a year to get the loan, but we finally got the loan, we bought the car, and it was one of those moments where now we gotta pay the car off.

I have no money to fix it. I didn’t want to tell family. I didn’t want to tell friends, oh, I’ve got this DeLorean because wait a minute, wait a minute. You’re dead broke. You borrowed money from me, you bastard, and you run out and you buy this stupid car. That’s why I never wanted to tell anybody. That’s the true [00:31:00] car guy right there.

It’s the true car guy. Oh, no, totally. We were hiding it in the garages. We were hiding it down the street, you know? Oh, so-and-so’s coming over. Get the DeLorean outta here. Oh, okay. You know, so literally you’re, you’re limping it down the block cuz it doesn’t wanna run it. It was amazing. It really was. You know, you’re, you’re paying this picture, you got the car now.

All this kind of things. And then obviously he needs repair. I wanna put a number out there for folks and we do have some follow on articles on our website about DeLoreans that were written by Mount Mandan. He has a fascination of those cars too. And he dug into the history. We’ve watched a lot of the documentaries, like, you know, some of the fun ones like framing John DeLorean and some of the other new ones that have come out and, and things like that.

And it’s always good to dive back into that 9,000. That’s the number. 9,000 DeLoreans were built in one year and a lot of people have 9,000 cars. That’s nothing. That’s a lot for a boutique manufacturer to have cranked out in one year. I don’t know. Cuz you know 27% of all statistics are made up, right?

That how many are still on the road? I don’t have those facts and figures, but I hear that the DeLorean [00:32:00] community is very strong. And so I’m wondering, does that help keep these cars alive, help keep the parts out available out there? How difficult is it to, let’s say, keep a DeLorean on the road, if that’s your dream car as well and you’re listening to goes, man, I wanna be like Don, I wanna own a DeLorean.

So what’s it like being a DeLorean owner on a day-to-day basis? It’s a lot of noise. You know, it’s funny being a publisher, being a writer. Most of us are attention whores. We just want the attention. We need the attention. I’m not that guy. I’m really, really not that guy. I don’t need the attention. I don’t want the attention.

I, I love flying under the radar. That’s why, believe it or not, I keep mentioning it, my wife’s Honda, the Honda Accord, that car is probably my favorite car in the driveway right now because you hop in it, you are totally anonymous. Nobody knows who you are. Nobody paid attention to you. You blasted through that red light.

Nobody saw you. Nobody saw you. You get in the DeLorean, everybody in Alaska sees you driving it here in [00:33:00] Texas, you know that they, you just, you get seen everywhere. It, it, it is a different experience. If you don’t mind the attention, you know you’re okay with it. You’re gonna be fine with it. I think the only thing that bothers me about it, which is really ironic, the only thing that I, I’m not gonna say I don’t like about it, but I don’t like about it, is the back of the future stuff.

The irony is that’s the reason that car is so popular. That’s the whole reason. I mean, you’re gonna tell me a Bricklin has the following of a DeLorean. They’re the same basic car, but they’re not. They’re very, very different. But they’re the same basic car. They’re a little two-door gull wing made of a funky kind of material.

One’s fiberglass. The other one’s stainless steel one’s Canadian one’s, Irish, you know, whatever. Potato, potato, potato. Yeah. There, there. Yeah, exactly. But nobody even knows what a bricklin is. I do. There’s so many people out there. I know you do. Yeah. But there’s so many people out there who don’t, you know, they have no idea.

They don’t, they’ve never even heard of a bricklin. I would love to have a bricklin. I think they look [00:34:00] horrible. I really do. There’s something about something, it’s like a C3 Corvette and a DeLorean had a a baby. That’s what the bricklin is, you know? Yeah, yeah. But there’s something wrong with that baby. I mean, there’s just, you know, there’s just something wrong with that baby.

But, you know, I would, I would love to have a bricklin. I really would. Yeah. What is it like to own one? You get a lot of attention. Uh, you really do. Some of it’s good. Some of it’s not so good, depending on your opinion. You know, I hate. Pulling into a gas station, and the first thing outta the mouth is, uh, Hey, where’s the flux capacitor?

You know, are you using a plutonium or a 91 octane? You know, well, what are you using? Okay, yeah, whatever. But again, that’s one of those things you just have to grin and bear it. I mean, how many Ferrari guys do you know with a bread 3 0 8? Hey, there’s Magnum. I mean, how many TransAm guys do you know?

They’re saying, oh, there’s the Bandit, or there’s night rider. It’s one or the other. You know, you’re gonna get that. So you’ve gotta be okay. You know, taking that with it. You really, really do. The DeLorean [00:35:00] community is hugely strong, and they’re very supportive. They’re very opinionated. If you’re okay with that, you’ll be fine.

You know, for me, I learned to bite my tongue because there’s a lot of misinformation out there, and I’m not saying I know everything. You know, 85, 83 was always the number for production. 85, 83, that’s what you might call the John DeLoreans. My understanding, the 85 80. That was when the company shut down because DeLorean was arrested, receivership, took possession, blah, blah, blah.

Consolidated industry stepped up a guy we call the Russian, and he finished the cars that were on the line. That’s where you get 9,100 or 91 83, whatever it is. It, it, there was, it was like 500 cars were completed by Consolidated industry, and that’s where you get that funky number of 90, 91 83 or something like that.

So it, it depends on who you’re talking to. Are you, some guys really just think 85, 83, that’s the number. Some guys just round it and [00:36:00] say 9,000 and I’m fine with that. But then you, you got a lot of experts out there who want to. Correct. Everyone who actually knows stuff and you know, those are your younger guys, those are your guys who, and God bless them, they love the car, they’ve got the spirit.

That’s why the community’s strong. I mean, we live four hours from Houston and that’s where the mothership is and that’s where, you know, you need a part. You go to Houston, they’ve got pretty much everything you need, almost everything you need. So is it hard to get parts for it? No, it’s really not. Uh, believe it or not, during the, I don’t know what you want to call it, it wasn’t a restoration, but during the maintenance period of getting my car back on the road, believe it or not, the majority of them came from an online auto parts store.

And, uh, my mechanic Chris, he blew me away. He would just say, yeah, just go on this online thing and, you know, order me this part, order me this part or okay. You know, so he’d gimme the part numbers and I’d go search ’em out and there they were and buy ’em and he’d install ’em. Car runs like a champ. No problem.

You’ve gotta know how to do a lot of cross pollination with these [00:37:00] cars. Know the, the engine is called the P R V six. It was EO Reno Volvo, and it’s a v6. So those three companies jointly got together and said, let’s develop one engine that we can all share and use. You can take the Volvo’s engine and put it in the DeLorean, but those who know what they’re looking for, they look different.

They have a very different look to them just looking down on top. The internals are all pretty much the same, but looking at them, if you know you’re DeLorean, you’ll look at that and say, that’s not a Reno. And you know, this is one argument I’ve had with, uh, not even an argument cuz I don’t really engage.

But one guy was online and he was trying to tell me that these are all Volvo engines. And he’s an owner. He’s actually got a DeLorean, but he is all of 24 years old. I, I don’t know where he got the Volvo thing from, but John DeLorean signed the contract to buy these engines from Reno in 1980. So these are all Reno vvc?

No they’re not. No they’re not. They’re, they’re, they’re Volvo engine. [00:38:00] Oh boy. Here we go. So that’s when I just back off. Cause I figure either a, the community’s gonna dog pile this guy and say, no, no, no. Don’s right. They’re all renos. But at the end of the day, does it matter? It really doesn’t because here’s the thing, I can go to an auto parts store and say, Hey, I need something for a Volvo 2.8 liter.

It’s probably gonna fit the Reno V six, probably not a hundred percent, but probably the trick I think of owning the DeLorean. And I, I really haven’t had mine all that long. Like I say, I got on 2018, so I haven’t had it all that long, but just from what I’m hearing from the other owners, the body panels are almost impossible.

So if you get a dent, you need to find yourself a good metal worker who can straighten out that panel. If it gets bent beyond recognition, you’re gonna be paying a really, really pretty penny to replace those panels. Uh, the windshield alone can cost as much as $4,000 and everybody says, oh, it’s a Lotus Espree windshield.

No, it is not a Lotus Espree windshield. I was one of those [00:39:00] guys who thought it was an espree windshield for a long time. Haha, because I read it in the magazine article. And you know how it is. We read it in a magazine, the newspaper, we hear it on the tv, we read it on the internet. Oh, it’s gospel. It must be what it is, and nobody wants to be wrong.

You know, above everything else in the world, a person wants to be right. They want to be correct. So what they’ve read, well, I read it, so therefore it is, you know, no, it’s not a lotus espree windshield. That’s what makes them so expensive is you gotta find one of these things. As far as I know, it was a one-off windshield.

Good luck. There were a lot of differences. Between early DeLoreans and late DeLoreans. Most people don’t even know that, but that’s kind of one of the fun things of owning the car in the community. You’ll notice a lot of guys will say, uh, hello, you know, from this number, you know, 2,500. Well, that’s the guy who VIN number.

And by knowing a ballpark, Of your VIN numbers, you know that this guy is probably a gray [00:40:00] interior automatic with a gas flap. So he is a little bit of an earlier car. Guy comes along and says he is 10,414. Okay. He’s a way later car. He’s gonna be an 82 or even an 83 registration, even though it was built.

Earlier back, he’ll have a flat hood, he’ll have the antenna in the back. He’ll, you know, there’s all these little nuances that make the car unique. So many people look at them and they, and I said it earlier, if you’ve seen one DeLorean, you’ve seen most of them. Well, yeah, to a generalist, it’s true. But they, they do have their differences and that’s fun.

You know, to me that’s kind of fun figuring out. Which car has what? So two things as we talk about the future of DeLorean, I did a little segment a while back on one of our drive-through episodes, and I’m sure you picked one of these up cuz I did. I had to have one and the, it’s the marketing slogan got me Charlie Foxtrot watches out of the UK under official license from the Dolorean Motor Company put out.

Time machine watch. Right. Their slogan was Now it your Oh yeah. Now is your chance to own a [00:41:00] time machine. Right. So I bought one, I got, can remember the style? It’s the black louver, like the rear car. Yeah, the louvers car. Yeah. Yeah. It’s, it’s, it’s a beautiful watch. I bring it out and people like, what is that?

And I’m like, you know, I just handed it to them and they’re like, wait, what? So I’m wondering what did, what did you think about that as the, basically the precipice for Steve Wynn buying out DeLorean, moving it to Humboldt, Texas. And you’ve been teasing us now for years about the resurgence of the brand.

So let’s start there. I, I thought it was great. I really did. It’s like we were talking earlier, encourage the young people. Steve Wynn liked the car. I mean, bottom line, he just had a thing for the car and he took it to the mega extreme by doing what he’s done. If it wasn’t for that, we wouldn’t have a centralized community, per se, to buy parts from, you know, it would be very shattered.

It’d be very bricklin. You would have a community. But there’s no one go-to guy. There’s no center point. There’s no focus of effort, and that’s what Steve Wynn has done. If he’s given [00:42:00] us that center of effort, that’s where you can go to get the part. Or if you’ve got the money for it and you want Steve to just give you a perfect turnkey, reliable, he’s worked out all the bugs, DeLorean, he’ll do it for you.

You just gotta be able to write that check. But I think that’s great. You know, I, I really do. And yeah, things like the watches and the bag accessories and, you know, all the little fun things that they put to it. Absolutely. I, I think that’s necessary. I don’t necessarily have one, but yeah, so it, you know, I, I think it’s fun because like, you, you don’t have the car, so you’ve got that little bit of spirit going with it.

It’s in the back of your mind. What would it be like to have a DeLorean, I might like to have a DeLorean one day. They’re almost as weird as an Audi, you know? Um, I, I mean, I’d like to drive your DeLorean, it’s like somebody else’s kids, right? I’ll play with you for a while, but then you can take ’em back home, you know?

Yeah. They’re not that bad. But, but again, you’re talking to a fiat guy. I fear nothing. I mean, really, I fear nothing. You know, you know, the, the Fiat, I don’t know if you know this or not, but, but Fiats [00:43:00] have three turn signals. Did you know that? I did not know that. Yeah. Oh, I can guess what the third one is, but go ahead.

Left, right, and flicker. It just kind of sits there and flickers and you know, the other ones doing this and this one kind of, you know, the, and the, the driver behind you are like, which way is he going? And you’re like, nah, I’m just going straight. You know, it’s the, the wonderful world of Min Yeti Morelli electronics.

Right. Just exactly second, second only to Lucas. Right? Yep. Which is why the English drink warm beer. Right. They make all the, all the refrigerators back there, so, you know. Yeah, yeah. No, it, it’s fun though. I mean, there are deficiencies to the car. You know, DeLorean, getting back to that, there are a lot of deficiencies that came with the car off the assembly line.

But today, thanks to guys like Steve Wynn, thanks to dedicated people who wanted their car to work, they figured out how to make ’em work. Yeah. And they figured out, oh, if we do this, it gets better. Are most DeLorean owners [00:44:00] proper purists, or do you still have the hot rodders out there? They’re like, scratch that, Rene, let’s drop an LS in the back of this thing and have a lot of fun.

Yeah. No, they run the gamut. They really do. They, you’ve got the purists like me. I call myself a preservative, and uh, I like it. As close as it left the factory as possible. But there’s a guy right now on Facebook, he’s building a fascinating car. He’s taken the um, I want to say it’s the Echo Tech, 2.2 liter for cylinder turbo.

He has totally restored his DeLorean. He is totally. Rebuilt this 2.2. It is spectacular. They’re putting it in there. It’s a little four cylinder, but it’s like we were saying before, it’s a modern four cylinder. This isn’t the Vega four cylinder. No, no, no. This is the new four cylinder. That thing will really, really cook.

We got another guy with a, um, a Honda Civic motor he’s put in there. Somebody out there has a North Star Cadillac engine, which that thing must be a beast. And the same with your LS swaps. There’s a lot of guys who are doing these LS [00:45:00] swaps now. Subaru was a popular one. There’s a lot of guys who do this.

They just want the power. They want it to go, they want it to move. I, I think that’s fine. You know, go ahead and do that. Enjoy the car. I’m like, your dad. I don’t like it cutting and welding and doing all that stuff. I, that’s just me. Some guys are fine with it. Now that I have mine, I really don’t care what y’all do to your car.

You know, I’ve got mine and I know what I’m gonna do with it. You know? So there you go. You know, there’s a lot of guys out there who get, they get really bent outta shape that they get modified. Uh, the, the time machines. You talk about a modification. The, the guys who do these time machines, Hey, you want a time machine?

Go do a time machine. I, I don’t care. I’ve got my car. I’m good. I can die now a happy man, you know. But these time machines are also bringing a hundred thousand dollars. That’s where the motivation is. You’ve got these guys who see these and there’s guys out there who are really good at building these time machines.

They’ll slap ’em together, a hundred grand, slap ’em together, a hundred grand. I mean, they’re just, you know, they’re just going through ’em. And a lot of guys are getting nervous about [00:46:00] that because, dude, you’re decimating the community. With all these time machines, we’re gonna have no original ones left.

It’s the same argument about Singer and the Nine Elevens, right? Using nine 90 threes and nine 60 fours, and now I hear they’re moving on to the Carreras and stuff to build these beautiful, they’re gorgeous bespoke nine elevens that are bringing in, you know, hundreds of thousands dollars a piece. But it’s a double effect, right?

You’re causing the what’s left of the market. The prices are surging like crazy. Good luck trying to buy a 9 64 right now, or a 9 93. They’re harvesting rather than building their own chassis like Roof did, and a lot of the other manufacturers in the Porsche world. It’s like, I, I agree. I see it from both sides.

I mean, granted, I would love to drive your DeLorean. I would also love to drive an LS swap, DeLorean, you know what I mean? It’s like, it goes, it goes both ways. I do, I wanna own one. I don’t know, I gotta thin the herd a little bit first. Right? Talking about owning a DeLorean, I have said it more than once on this show.

I am waiting for DeLorean to put [00:47:00] out an ev. Uh, and I said it’s the most appropriate just combination of the two worlds. Give me an ev, DeLorean. And you know, they teased it more often than not. And I think now it’s starting to become a reality. And there’s some more recent spy photos showing what’s coming out of Texas.

Mm-hmm. And what they’re planning. And it looks really cool. I mean, we’re talking throwback of all throwbacks. I mean, the challengers are retro, the minis are retro. But this is a true throwback. As an ev, my only concern is what’s it gonna cost to get this new DeLorean? Right? Yeah. Yeah. It’s gonna cost a few bucks.

I mean, you gotta think the original DeLorean, they stickered for over $26,000. And when you do that inflation calculator, $26,000 in 1981 feels like $75,000 today. They were right there with the Porsches, really? And he didn’t want to be there. If you remember, he wanted to be pricier than a Corvette, but less than a nine 11.

There was a nice little sweet spot in the market that nobody was serving, and that [00:48:00] was where the DMC 12, the name supposedly came from that 12, $12,000. That’s what he wanted it to cost. It didn’t work out that way, you know? And even at $12,000 that was gonna undercut the Corvette. By that time, but you’ll remember this all started in the seventies.

$12,000 was more money than a Corvette. But as time went on and the company was struggling to get going, the Corvette suddenly surpassed $12,000. So now the name didn’t make sense. So we all knew the car was gonna be more, 16, 17,000, maybe it would kiss $20,000 when it hit 26. It really wasn’t DeLorean’s fault, it was the economy.

The economy, the trade debt, everything went crazy and all of a sudden, all of his parts, all of his labor, everything was more money. So that car shot through the roof. So too did Corvette. So too did nine 11. They all became more expensive, but especially painful for the DeLorean because it [00:49:00] was just getting started.

It needed to have, you know, a lower price point, but everybody wanted it. You, you gotta think 1981. I mean, isn’t that kind of the, the peak of the malaise era? There was nothing great coming out of anywhere except for the UR cuatro. And it sold for $35,000 because it was the only production all-wheel drive car available at the time.

So that was the hotness, you know, it was, it was also slow as dirt. It made 165 horsepower. I mean, come on. It was, it was pathetic. Yeah. Hundred 65 horsepower and you gotta drive all four wheels. Yeah, it was, it was, yeah, it was a dog. I mean, I’ll be honest, I owned one, I, I know all about the $10 turbo, but it’s got that mystique because it’s a rally car.

And what people didn’t realize was the homologation rules were garbage. And the street car that we got was nothing like the race car that was out on, on the rally circuits. But that’s, that’s a story for another day. But still at that time, you’re right, it was the probably second or third most expensive sports car available that [00:50:00] wasn’t super boutique like Ferrari or whatever.

Yeah. There wasn’t a whole heck of a lot else going on in in the eighties. No, you still had the 3 0 8. That was the only Ferrari available. Porsche had the nine 11 and the 9 24. You’re like, okay. You know? Right. And the 9 28 and the 9 28. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Get into a lot of trouble with this conversation, but.

I really think looking at that era in 1981 specifically, I think the most exciting car out there was the two 80 Z turbo. Oh, I thought you were gonna say the Chevette, which is no sports. We’re talking sports cars. Yeah. Which, which is an opal cadet where most people don’t realize, but that’s a whole nother thing, right?

Yeah. So, uh, the two 80, pretty turbo, but it was so bloated compared to a, let’s, I call it a proper Z The ZX cars were just, oh, they were so heavy and. They were marshmallowy, they were, but look what they did for the brand. You know, again, just like Mustang sales were slipping, [00:51:00] sales were stagnant for Z. So Dotson thought, let’s make it a GP car.

Let’s make it more on par with Corvette. Let’s make it more on par with Porsche, but let’s make it affordable and reliable and inexpensive to operate. Unbelievable sales shot through the roof. It was what people wanted. I, I, I think it’s funny you bring that up and not to diverge too far, but you’re right.

I think that 80 to 83. Was this weird period of in car history where it was like the gray zone or the dead zone because there really wasn’t a lot to write home about. It was maintain the status quo. Whatever you got is whatever you got. Mm-hmm. And then in 84, when the C4 Corvette came out and you had the new carreras coming out, all the new cars seemed to come out in 85.

And actually coincides with another theory we have is that the music world influenced the car world. Yes. And music had a drastic change in 1985 as well. And so the cars changed along with them. And so Chrysler was under [00:52:00] the gun, you know, ia Coca at the helm for the first time in the early eighties.

There was a lot of duress at that period, economically, but also in the automotive world. So DeLorean, I think, you know, with my crystal ball, if he had waited a couple of years, yeah, maybe stockpiled some money instead of embezzling it or whatever he was doing. You know, if he had waited till 84, 85 to introduce the DeLorean, it would’ve been a hit.

Without the movie, it would’ve come at the right time. Cuz if you look at that car, to your point, what we’ve kind of been skirting around here, pun intended, is that it was ahead of its time. It was. It really was. Yeah. And I think you’re right. If they had waited a little longer, that car might have had a better shot.

The electronics would’ve been better. Everything would’ve been better. Yeah. Yeah. There was a lot of forces that work against DeLorean. You know, it is just true. You look at, I mean, here we go again. Even the politics back then, when they started the company, It was a much more progressive government in Great Britain, and they were the ones who backed DeLorean.[00:53:00]

By the time the car came around, you had a very conservative fact government. Yeah. And they were not, they were not very interested in supporting a venture that may or may not make it. You know, that was a big part of, you know, what happened there. But yeah, I think you’re right. If the card come out a little later, it would’ve maybe avoided some of those politics.

It would’ve sidestepped the economy, which took a dump around 1981. 1982. It would’ve sidestepped all those electronic garbage. It may have even had time to get a better, that sounds bad, but a better drive train, a better v6, a better, you know, maybe even just put a turbo on it. Something you think back though, to 1981, you saw that car come around the corner.

Your mind was blown. I mean, 1981, what? What are you seeing coming around the corner? What blew your mind in 1981? The Corvette? I like them, but a lot of people don’t. Because they’re not the quickest. They’re not the fastest. They got the big gigantic fenders, that ridiculous wing back there. They, they looked like [00:54:00] a, a plastic filled stripper walking down the street.

They really did. And, and then there’s the nine 11, which let’s face it, looked the same for, for 20 years. Yeah, yeah. 30 years. Yeah. It was in a dark era. It wasn’t doing very well. DeLorean shows up and yeah, it’s not very quick, but you know what? It’s almost as quick as the rest of those big boys almost. The car and driver did a great article.

It was called DeLorean versus the World. You can look it up. It’s the Corvette versus the 3 0 8 versus the nine 11 versus the two 80 Z X Turbo versus the DeLorean. And it is the darnedest comparison because if you wanna learn real quick, How crappy that era was for performance. That test does it. The Ferrari was the quickest, the Porsche was second to that.

The Z was third, and it was right on top of that Porsche. Then it was the Corvette and the DeLorean. Then there was the top speed showdown. Boy was that an eyeopener. The Ferrari was the [00:55:00] fastest, of course, the Z and the Porsche, if I remember correctly, they were tied A, you got a what? 25, 20 $6,000 Porsche and a $17,000 dots in, and then neck and neck.

When you go top speed. That’s absolutely mind blowing. And then of course, you know the COR Corvette was one 30 and the DeLorean was right there at 1 25, 1 30. Whoa. Wait a minute. They were just as fast as each other. Yes, they were just as fast as each other. Nobody wants to admit that. For years and years and years and years and years.

Look, you know how many old guys I met who told, oh, don’t get a DeLorean. Oh, you don’t want a DeLorean. Those are junk. You don’t want a DeLorean. Okay. Well, these are guys who had their hearts broken by John DeLorean because he made the company and then the British pulled out and then he was supposedly embezzling.

We still don’t know. I’ll tell you, DeLorean was doing fine until Colin Chapman got involved. The minute Colin Chaptman got involved, everything started sliding sideways and you talk about a man who knows how to rob Peter to pay Paul. The man ran a racing team [00:56:00] and a car company. You can’t do that without robbing Juan to save the other.

Ferrari, I think is the only one who did it, right. He sold off the road car division to Fiat and then he was able to keep the racing division to himself and going, but they’re separate entities. Fiat controlled one, Ferrari controlled the other. Somewhere in the middle they made music and it worked, but they kept it separate.

They were very good at that. At least that’s the reputation. Lotus was not so good at that. Lotus was always right on the brink of bankruptcy or receivership as they like to say. So for the British government to turn to John DeLorean and say, oh, by the way, we think you should hire Lotus Cars to be your consultant and we think you should hire Colin Chapman to be a partner in engineering.

John DeLorean said it. He, he said it a hundred times. That was when I knew things were gonna not go well. I had no choice. Because the British are financing this whole operation. They’re really the ones who get to pull the [00:57:00] strings and they have just said, you’re gonna work with this guy. He’s our guy. He’s the one who’s gonna make this work for you.

What’s he gonna do? Well, he’s gonna make it work. Well, how’s he gonna make it work? Sigaro has already made it work. Bill Collins was DeLorean’s engineer between him and Sigaro and DeLorean himself. They were getting the car dialed in, but not fast enough for the British. The British wanted to see return on their investment and hey, fair enough.

They put up 250 million pounds in 19 76, 77, 75, somewhere in there. They put up all that money. You know, we just did it for the DeLorean. What does 250 million pounds feel like today? I mean, how much money must that have been back then? That was exorbitant. That was a huge amount of money. You know, when Colin came on board, he said, I knew then we were gonna start having trouble because the last thing Lotus needs is another damn sports car in the market.

They’ve got the esprit. Theri is doing great. It’s in James Bond films. Everybody loves it. And here comes this [00:58:00] damn DeLorean with its stainless steel skin and it’s going doors and it has space behind the seats. We can’t have that. No. The problem started right when Colin Chapman stepped on board and, okay, let me just throw him to the wolves.

Maybe he played off of John DeLorean’s, greed and ego. You know, John, this is making good money. We could open up a research and development center and that’s a great way to funnel money to you. That’s how I get money to my racing team. Research and development. Oh, it’s just like having a marketing department.

People operate a marketing department the same way. So did he do it? Yeah. I hate to, you know, de my hero, but. He probably did, but why did he do it? Because what Colin Chapman says goes, because there’s the queen over there, and she just said, if you want my money, you’re gonna do what I say. Ooh. Yeah. So, sorry, I can get a little bit Oh, oh, no, no.

Because you saved me from telling this part of the story, which I think is [00:59:00] fantastic. And, and as we all know, the lotus past is sorted. And you can read, you know, the different biographies that are out there. Obviously one of the, one of the most accurate ones is by Cromb back, you know, Colin Chapman, the man in his machines.

I’ve written about it. I’ve reviewed it a million times. It’s, it’s a great story. There’s pieces that are missing and then, you know, when everything goes south, suddenly Colin dies quickly soon after all the, let’s say, the shit hits the fan, right? So, mm-hmm. We’ll, never, we’ll never. We’ll never know the truth.

Right. And obviously Mabel just died recently as well and I was hoping maybe they would expose the story behind why it’s called Lotus, cuz that apparently went to the grave as well. There’s a lot of mystery and, and subterfuge I guess you could say there. And it makes it, it makes for a good story right at this point, looking over the 60, 70 years of the company.

And for those that are Lotus fans, I can’t recommend enough going to Barber Motorsports Park to check out one of the largest lotus collections in the United States. I’ve been there. I’ve seen like the original Lotus, you know, all these kinds of things. It’s very cool. It’s a very neat place to go. I mean, the cars [01:00:00] are exquisite.

I mean, there’s nothing to say about that. But the one thing that has always puzzled me about this story, as we kind of wrap up this thought here about the DeLorean, this has been an excellent conversation. Historians have always hung their hat on the fact that John DeLorean is a noted car designer. Like he’s this boy genius.

And there’s been other people like this. I mean, ia Coca is credited for being the, you know, the father of the Mustang, although he never pinned a single line on that thing. But DeLorean was this hot shot. Car designer, but he had Giro design his car for him. And I thought that was always really weird and I never understood how that came to be.

And unfortunately, knowing that, knowing that the pedigree and, and the cars that Giro has penned, I’ll name a few, right? The Rocco, the golf. Mm-hmm. The launch of Delta, the Fiat Panda, you know, as something as basic and utilitarian as that, the, the BMW that became the M one, the nacas. There’s, I mean, if, if you look at his portfolio, it goes on and on and on.

And he [01:01:00] continues to design cars today, and he is involved with things even, even as we speak. But the DeLorean screams Juro, it just is, right. It’s a combination of other designs that he already had in the portfolio between BMW and Volkswagen. And by the way, the Mark two Rocco was a rejected BM W design.

I, I have pictures of the original, uh, I don’t know if you knew that. I didn’t know that. Yeah, the original one, like on the, on the back of the C pillars, there’s BMW envelope, round bells and stuff. It’s pretty cool. Anyway, I think he had a hand in Penny. You are Quatro as well, but I’ll, I’ll leave that where it is.

So anyway, I never understood how DeLorean and Juro married up and how they got together. Do you happen to have some insight on that? Not really, no. I mean, I, I know, yeah, the, the only thing I do know about is, uh, I know that DeLorean’s package idea, which was of course was a mid engine, et cetera, it just wasn’t working out.

And that was part of why Colin Chapman was brought in, was to clean up the mess that DeLorean was trying to [01:02:00] drag through. DeLorean constantly wanted more time, more time, more time to develop the best car he could. Perfect car, yeah. Yeah. And the British were just thinking, you know, how much more can we finance here?

We’ve already given you all this money and all these packages. We need to get a car on the road. We need to start recouping money. And that was where the research and development came from. You know, let’s just put a car out there real quick. Let’s get it done. So we start making money back. We’ll open a research and development and you know, we can start making a better car.

That was, that was the theory as it was told to me. The Juga connection, I can only imagine had something to do with, wrap this up, make a car that we can put together, we can get on a container ship. And yet I think about shipping. People don’t think about this. Cars have to be a certain length. And a certain width to be on the truck.

To be on the ship, et cetera. You know you’re gonna get more DeLoreans on a ship than you are Lincolns because the Lincolns are longer. You’re only gonna get six to seven Lincolns. You can probably get [01:03:00] nine or 10 DeLoreans cuz they’re shorter, they’re smaller cars. That was a big part of it too. How do we package this car so that it, and I’m sure Jaro had something to do with that.

You know, going back to the garage style conversation, you asked me the most amazing garage I saw, and I told you it was a. Building above a lot. He was a designer. I told you that he got a call around 1979 from John Delore in 1980 saying, uh, Shiro is pinning his car and he doesn’t like any of the wheels that the Italians are coming up with.

Would you mind designing some wheel concepts for me? He said, no, no problem. So he designed all these different concepts, sent them to DeLorean. DeLorean sent them to Sigaro. DeLorean said, I like this one. The turbine style that the car actually wears. And so that was, uh, that’s where that came from, was that man who has that garage that I’m in love with back in California.

The thing I’m really, really hoping to get my hands on, he still has the original sketches. Ooh, that’s cool. I’m [01:04:00] really, really hoping, you know, to get ahold of those. I don’t care if I have to pay for ’em or if I have to kill ’em, whatever, you know, I just really wanna get ahold of those sketches that just blows my mind.

Anything delo and I try to buy it, you know? But yeah, how Jaga really got involved. I, I don’t know. I, I could only imagine it had something to do with the packaging or that he was super popular at the time. Right. He was an up and comer. He had designed a ton of cars that were, were winners maybe, you know?

Yeah. And it, and it did give him cachet, you know, it did give that car cachet, you know, the bricklin was designed by. Somebody in Canada, I guess. I don’t know. Just Bill Canada too. Yeah. Yeah. Nobody cares. You bring up the Lori and if people know that, oh, that’s a Jaro design, you know, and then like you and I were joking, it looks like a Rocco.

It looks like an impulse. There’s your packaging. Jaro already had an idea of how we can put this car together. The two things John was adamant about were the gulling doors and the stainless steel. As far as I know, pretty much everything else he was negotiable on. He was willing to [01:05:00] listen to why we should do something different.

And when the British started squeezing him saying, look, we gotta get a car out and we, we gotta do this. And isn’t that ironic? Fast forward to now Humboldt, Texas, they’ve been teasing us with a new car For how long? I mean, forever. They seemed like they’ve been teasing us with a new car. That was kind of the road John DeLorean was heading down was he would just make it better.

Make it better. Make it better. Well, John, we’re not building a Mercedes here. We’re not building a Rolls Royce. We’re, we’re building a little sports car. So people are gonna have fun. People are gonna have something different. You know, we, we need to keep that in mind. At back of, uh, DeLorean’s mind was always quality, quality, quality, quality.

Well, then I’ll start as sight sideways. I love Lotus. I do. I’m an Spreet kid all the way. Everything started sliding sideways when tall Enc Chapman and Lotus Motors got involved. And so let me ask you this, and I’ve never asked this on a pit stop before, and this is my last question, I promise. Does the statement hold true for the DeLorean now that you’re an [01:06:00] owner?

Never drive your heroes. I, I can understand it. I mean, I have a rule. Never meet your heroes. You know, and I, I established that rule because I met some heroes from Hollywood. I met some heroes in the industry. I met some, you know, it left me cold, you know, so I just thought, well, anybody I admire in one of those industries, I’ll stay away from, no, I, I like driving the car.

I do, I, I’m not gonna say it’s a fun car. It does have a little bit of a ishness to it, because you got those huge A pillars. You know, you got that real low roof line. I’m, I’m six two, so I sit up pretty hard in that car. But DeLorean was six four and you know, he fit in the car, okay? It’s psychological, but you’ve got that little male slot window, that horizontal line right there for the window.

When you see it peripherally again, it ties in with those big A pillars and it ties in with that. And you look in the rear view mirror, you don’t see much. You know, there’s not much. So you really do feel cocooned in there. I mean, I’ve said it a hundred times. I’ll say it again. I [01:07:00] enjoy driving my fiat more than I draw.

Enjoy driving the DeLorean. It’s a much more fun car. It’s nowhere near as quick. It doesn’t handle as well. It does, but it rides nicer. It really does. The fiat rides beautifully. It drives nicely. It’s a humble car. People look at it, they smile, they give a thumbs up, they wonder, what is that car? And at some people are even, you know, they, they look, oh, this is the new Fiat.

What is a, this is a, this is a 79, 79. Fiat’s been around that long. Dude, Fiat came around in 1899. What? Yeah, they don’t know. But here we are with a young person who’s showing interest. So you don’t wanna insult them. You don’t wanna smash ate them. Yeah. Right. So bring them around, you know, if they’ve got the fiat bug, you know, let ’em, let ’em, let ’em, uh, let ’em have it.

So, no, I, I think that DeLorean is fun, but it’s its own brand. If look, this will be loaded because it’s an opinion is a nine 11 fun. Depends on who you ask. Yeah. It depends on who you ask, you know, and I like nine elevens. I do, [01:08:00] but. The few that I’ve driven have just kinda okay. Honestly, I, I just, I, I really don’t understand it anymore.

And you know what? Maybe that’s my bias because I had so many people back in the day, leave me wrong and tell me, don’t buy that 77. You know, I, I don’t know. Maybe I’ve got something wrong with me up here, but I think that DeLorean’s a lot of fun. I think it gets a lot of bad rap, and I think there’s a lot of misunderstanding floating around out there.

Again, it boils down to it. If you’re interested in it, go get one. You know, go, go try one out. Go, go get involved with the community. You know, I, I’ve always been a car guy. It, it doesn’t matter what kind of car it is, I’m probably going to like it, but I’m a little bit biased that way when it comes to cars.

My wife hates the cars. I mean, she does, she just, you know, get rid of all of’em and let’s just have the Honda and I just, okay. In an alternate universe, far, far away, that’s, you know, Rob Sterling, his president in, maybe it’ll work. I don’t know that that’s the same as when somebody tells you to get rid of all the appliances in your kitchen and just have an air fryer.[01:09:00]

You’re like, or Insta Pot. You’re like, oh yeah, I guess it can do everything. Sure. But it’s not the same. It’s not the same. Yeah, exactly. No, exactly. It, it’s a very different, I was worried about getting the car, like you say, I, I was because I thought, what if I hate it? You know, what if I hate it? You know?

That was a thought that ran into my head. And then how do I tell my wife, oh, I hate it. You know, I, I’m kind of stuck with it cuz she backed it up. I don’t hate it. I really don’t. Especially now that that exhaust leak gets fixed, it really woke that car up. It’s a lot quicker. It’s a lot more aggressive.

It’s a lot more fun. The more reliable we make it, the more fun it becomes. Yes know, I don’t Exactly. That’s true of any old car. Absolutely. A hundred percent. Yeah. Yeah. And you’ve gotta be able to, you know, you can’t stub your toe. DeLorean, there’s so much stuff swirling around about it and a lot of it is wrong.

A lot of it is correct and I learned that from my car. I, holy cow, they weren’t kidding about this. My car was literally all original when I got it right down to the fuses. Everything was original in that car and everybody would’ve blown away. [01:10:00] They thought, holy cow, this thing is original. Well, if I want a paperweight, that’s great.

But if I wanna be able to drive it, well, we’ve gotta upgrade the fuse box. We’ve gotta upgrade the fuses. We’ve gotta, and that’s where my mechanic, Chris came in and he started and he knew my budget. He knew it was very sensitive, very shallow. So we had to go piece by piece by piece and just slowly correct this car.

Yeah. When I first got it, I was terrified of him. My God, is this thing gonna leave me stranded somewhere? Is this thing, you know what? What am I getting myself into today? It’s a different ballgame and you can hop in it and enjoy it and have fun. And that, I think is what makes it fun. But people have to give it that chance.

You can’t get a DeLorean and it breaks down on, you can’t get any car and it breaks down on you. But DeLorean, especially because there is such misinformation about that car, about how piece of junk they are, you can’t stub your toe on that first problem and say, oh my God, here it is. The DeLorean Thunder Cloud is over me.

No, it’s not. It’s just, you know, this is a deficiency that came with the [01:11:00] car from the factory. You just have to correct it. You know, and there are a lot of deficiencies. There really are my best advice for anybody who’s even thinking about one, buy the best you can. It’s gonna cost you money any way you look at it.

You’re either gonna pay money to get the best one you can, or you’re gonna pay money piece by piece by piece to a mechanic. Or if you can do it yourself, that’s great, but you’re still gonna be buying those parts. My advice is, unless you don’t mind doing the piece by piece, just go get the best one. You can just find the best one you can, the one that’s sorted before this one came along, I almost bought a red one.

Of all things. And I never dreamed of a red DeLorean. I wanted the silver one, but this one popped up. It was out in Palm Springs. My wife and I were out there for a weekend. It was cheap. Apartment had 8,000 miles on it, you know, and I’m feeling like, boy, that’s a lot of miles for a DeLorean. So I called my DeLorean guy and I, I, it was before Chris and he said, if I were you, I’d play that car.

And I said, why? He said, the red, if you don’t want the red, we can take the red off and you’ll be right back to stainless steel. The fact that it’s got 80,000 miles [01:12:00] down, everything’s been done to it. That car is a runner. That car is solid. He said, let me ask you this. What kind of exhaust system does it have?

And I said, well, yeah, that was the other thing. It’s got the, uh, the humble Texas exhaust system. He said, see, that’s a good thing because it’s been upgraded. He said, if I were you, I’d buy that car. The price is right. It’s a runner. The only thing you’ve gotta do is take the paint off it cuz you don’t like the paint.

At the end of the day, I was, it was terrifying to me to buy a DeLorean with that many miles. I saw it the wrong way. Now that I have this really low, mild DeLorean. I see what he was saying. I’m having to go through all these little repairs. That that car never had the chance to get done. But the red one, man, that car was driven all over the place.

As it turned out, that was an Orange County car. That was a Newport Beach car. And my doctor at the time lived in Newport Beach. So I, I asked him, I said like, I got a weird question for you. He says, what’s that? And I said, you know, DeLorean, you know these cars? He says, yeah, you ever see a red one running around Newport?

Oh yeah, that belonged to Bob Paulson. That was Bob’s car. You know this guy? Oh yeah. [01:13:00] He ran that car all over the place. Was it a good car? Must have been. He ran it all over the place. He was always driving that car around. So where’s Bob now? Oh, he is dead. Okay. You know, but it gives you a hint right there.

Driving around a little old town that I live in here in Texas, believe me, that car gets a lot of attention and I’ve heard it two or three times. This has to be the only one in the county. Might be true. I don’t know. I never thought about it. But it might be true that red one was definitely the only one in Newport Beach Red.

There were a lot of DeLoreans in Newport Beach, but that was the only red one stood out. People knew that car and yeah, I dunno, I guess I’m rambling here now, but No, it goes back to the joke that you never buy a jag with low mileage cuz you know that it didn’t run right. It’s the same thing when you’re looking at those really boutique cars.

Maserati buy turbos are the same way. You buy one with high mileage because you know that it was a runner. Right. So sometimes it’s the opposite thinking and you just have to get over it. No, I appreciate that though. So I was gonna say, Don, this has been an absolute pleasure having [01:14:00] you on the show. I mean, we went well over time.

That’s great. We actually got, basically got two episodes out of this, which is awesome. But I want to, I truly, honestly believe in what we’re all doing in this community. We do need to help each other out and I look forward to seeing where GSM goes here in the near future. Yeah, me too. No, this is fun. You, you, you’ve overwhelmed me with this, but yeah, thank you.

I’m looking forward to, yeah, I’d love to collaborate on various things. I think there’s a lot to, to do and like you say, It, it is a very interconnected community anymore. And it’s not just the car community, it’s, it’s communications, which is what we’re, our business is. That’s what you do here with this.

That’s what I do with the magazine. We’re all in communication. You know, we’ve gone from the nuclear age to the, uh, to the communications age. Right. It’s very interesting, you know, when you think about that. Since 2007, garage Style Magazine has been the definitive source for car collectors continually delivering information about Automobilia Petroliana events and more.

The quarterly publication is distributed [01:15:00] through subscription newsstand and events and is now moving to full digital. And you can learn more about the publication at www.garagestylemagazine.com or follow them on Social Garage style magazine. Alright, well thank you very much. I’ve had a ball. I really, really have, and I’m sorry if I dominate the conversation.

I do tend to chat quite a bit. Like I say, I think it’s the, uh, the Irish me, I nearly married an Italian girl years ago, and the trouble would’ve been who gets to talk next? You know, we were both, we were both constantly talking and talking and talking and uh, and then she would, you know, she would inevitably start talking with her hands and all that.

I’m like, eh, this isn’t gonna work. And so, all right. Thanks Dawn. Have a good one. Thank you, you too. Bye. Bye now.

The following episode is brought to us in part by Garage Style Magazine. Since 2007, garage Style Magazine has been the definitive source for car collectors [01:16:00] continually delivering information about Automobilia Petroliana events and more. To learn more about the annual publication and its new website, be sure to follow them on social media at Garage Style Magazine or log onto www.garagestylemagazine.com because after all, what doesn’t belong in your garage.

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We’d love to hear from you. Hey everybody, crew Chief Eric here. We really hope you enjoyed this episode of Break Fix, and we wanted to remind you that G T M remains a no annual fees organization, and our goal is to continue to bring you quality episodes like this [01:17:00] one at no charge. As a loyal listener, please consider subscribing to our Patreon for bonus and behind the scenes content, extra goodies and GTM swag.

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