It was 2002. I was taking my son back to school at Ann Arbor, and I was going to stash the hot rod up in the Little Village By the Bay. I did not want to have the new paint on the fenders out in the Virginia weather, and Raven had a heated garage spot and the promise to start the heavily-modified 1991 GMC Sonoma that had earned the title of “The World’s Fastest Production Pickup Truck.”

I came to have it through the death of my Uncle Dick, whose great toy this was. He drove the truck at Mach speed to the dump when he needed to. His normal ride around town in the later days of his life were BMW autobahn rockets and Corvettes. He chose to live out in the hills of central Pennsylvania, and they use a lot of salt on the roads. Accordingly, though the truck only had 36,000 miles on the odometer in its 11 years of operations, the front fenders and undercarriage had some corrosion damage. That is why I had to turn it over to the Vietnamese.

The Vietnamese took the truck at 0845 on a mid-week Tuesday, and I crossed my fingers for luck as I walked away from the scene. The prognosis was uncertain but I had hope. It was finally time.

Early reconnoiters of the vicinity of my new post-marriage digs had revealed several likely several body shop cadre in the immediate vicinity. The leader was a lithe man in his mid-thirties named Thai, for the country where his refugee camp had been located. He sported an elaborate tattoo of a baby that climbed up out of the neck of his shirt, tracing the carotid artery and ending just under his jaw.

I wondered about that when I first met him at the body shop, which came with a recommendation from a good friend who was an Arlington native. Tattoos and burn-marks commonly signify membership in Asian gangs, and I tried to imagine which one. The “BTK” is a logical choice, since they have a national footprint, and operate out of Washington.

Ty is a fast talking young man. His office is hung with pictures from Vietnam, and there is a Buddhist shrine and the thick smell of incense. I don’t know it that is Ty’s choice, or that of his mother, who runs the business end of the garage. She is always there, in her little cubby, and her accent is thick.

Ty is almost always out and about, hard to pin down. He is a busy guy. His shop employs several gentlemen of a certain age who were likely all ARVN officers who had to make career moves after 1975. They are good craftsmen, and reliable in their work.

The truck was worth saving- so I would visit periodically over the weeks it took for the repairs to be completed. I couldn’t wait to get behind the leather-wrapped wheel again.

Here is how fast it is. The other evening, I had been motoring sedately down Glebe Road- a major north-south artery here in Arlington. It is an old road, sort of like Outer Drive in Detroit, which isn’t anymore. This one ran to the Glebe House of the Church of England in Colonial times but that died with the Revolution. But the road is still there.

Anyhow, though it is a four-lane road it is narrow and there are no left turn lanes. So if someone needs to turn across traffic, the left lane stops. I saw it happening up ahead and looked in the mirror to see if I could change lanes. I couldn’t, because a sleek black Corvette was coming up fast. I let him go by then goosed the accelerator and followed him, glued to the bumper, then took the left lane again when it was clear. We were side-by-side at the next light and I saw his window coming down.

I didn’t know if it would be a fist or a finger that emerged, but I hadn’t done anything unsafe and had given way. I hit the power button and lowered the passenger’s side window. A young man with long dirty yellow hair was at the wheel. He leaned out and said “Hey, Man! That’s a Syclone. Cool! My buddy had one of those!”

“You know what it is! Have a great day!” I yelled. When the light went green we punched it off the line and I had him by a half car-length going through 50mph when I shut it down and went back to being a safety conscious driver. We waved when he turned of onto Columbia Pike. I heard him shout “I gotta sell this thing- I can’t afford the insurance….”

The Truck ran great on the way up to Ann Arbor, though the oil pressure gauge was fluttering up around the 60psi mark for no discernable reason. Either a bad indicator or something impending, I didn’t know which. I decided not to worry about it. Maybe it was just the usual jitters starting a long trip and my son drove about halfway. We had two bouts of torrential rain, and he did well and I got to sleep for an hour.

I thought about a lot of things, in the hum of the tires and the rumble of the engine. Country music blasting….. By ten o’clock we had left the Potomac and were cresting Town Hill, elevation 1,250 feet and plunging into the hill country of Western Maryland, bound for Pennsylvania and points west.

A remarkable change of life, I thought. I always had to drive as the three of them slept. No more. It made it fun. We listened to his CD’s and played the music loud all the way, except for the Ohio State football game. How can they be playing the season already? It is too hot.

My son loved the power under his right foot. He was smooth and professional. He had a ball. There is nothing quite like the Syclone for under $70K these days. Even then, the power is not as raw as it is in this little black truck.

Sticker pirce? Back in 1991 it cost $28K, a not inconsequential sum in those days. Dick had his standards- he told me he also got a deal.

I recovered it from his house when the family was sorting out the estate for bottom blue book, since no one knew quite what it was worth and it needed some significant work.

Syclone production had been peculiar little experiment that GM had done at the dawn of the SUV era, cramming the soul of a race car into the sheet-metal skin of a little utility truck. The run was limited, so it is an odd duck, with low miles, and I was determined to save it for posterity. Jay Leno agrees- he has a specimen of the equally limited Typhoon, Syclone’s SUV sister of in his collection.

At the time it was introduced, the Syclone was the quickest stock pickup truck being produced in the world. The Auto magazines compared its acceleration favorably to a variety of sports cars, including the Corvette. In a memorable comparison test in Brock Yate’s Car and Driver magazine, it was lined up against a Ferrari and a Maserati.

Featuring a turbocharged 6-cylinder engine, all wheel drive, and 4 wheel anti-lock brakes, the specifications had more in common with a Porsche than most other pickup trucks.

I nursed it down from the mountains of Pennsylvania and did the necessary work to stabilize its disintegration. I replaced the racing tires with new original equipment and flushed the transmission that provides proportional power to all four wheels. With the restoration mostly complete, it looked nice, but it needs some tender care. Today, mostly we poked along on the new big racing tires and worried about the oil pressure gauge. It is not the greatest expressway vehicle since it was designed to eat Mustang Cobras off the line at stoplights all across America.

I bought one of the black t-shirts that commemorates the original sales pitch: “Syclone: 0-60-0 in 4.4 seconds. In the rain.”

Car writer Brock Yates reported that the Syclones, when new, were capable of “accelerating from 0-60 mph in 4.3 seconds and could do a quarter-mile run in 13.6 seconds at 93 mph terminal velocity. Speed was produced by flogging Mitsubishi TD06-17C 8 cm² turbocharger and Garrett water/air intercooler attached to a 4.3 LB4 V-6 engine with unique pistons, main caps, head gaskets, intake manifolds, fuel system , exhaust manifolds a 48mm twin bore throttle body from the 5.7 L GM Small-block engine.

All 2,995 Syclones had a GM 700R4 four speed trannie and a Borg-Warner all wheel transfer case to split torque with 35% forward and 65% to the rear wheels. The Syclones featured sport modifications to the standard suspension, and were the first production truck to receive a 4 wheel anti-lock braking system.

They were special- I discovered that when I had a custom replacement manufactured for the stainless exhaust system out in Loudoun County, the only place I could find to have the work done, or the sand-blasting on the undercarriage that could only be done in Staunton, VA.

The interior on mine is flawless. I needed- then and now- to keep it out of the sun and out of the salt bath of the Northern Virginia winter.

Pennsylvania was boring. I have swept up and down these hills so many times I know them like the back of my wrinkled hands. I swept through the Hole in the Wall under Alleghany Mountain, and past the crash site of Flight 93. There was a new bill-board that offered charter tours of the insta-shrine.

Then on past Pittsburgh and the big construction zone that occupies the last thirty miles to the East Gate of Ohio, where the land becomes level and featureless. That is normally where I fall asleep on these trips, but we had tunes and conversation about the flat land and rich soil and our roots down on the Ohio River Valley.

There was no point in looking at the fuel gauge, since that hadn’t worked since the tank was replaced. I had to keep track of the fuel level by the push-button trip indicator and made a point of refueling with high-test every two hundred miles. I was not sure how big the replacement tank was, and was not interested in finding out to the liter how much it actually held. I calculated the average highway mileage and we re-filled every two hundred miles, whether I needed to or not.

The oil pressure was something else to watch. It had a tendency to go crazy when I operated the truck in rapid acceleration mode and I did not know what it might actually mean. It could mean that I would blow the seals on the 4.5-liter turbo-charged six-cylinder engine. We needed no breakdowns here in trackless Ohio, no holiday with a surly mechanic interfering with his dinner and mine a state away.

Most of the 700-odd miles we kept it at the lowest possible RPMs and for the first time in my life actually we did the speed limit on the Pennsylvania and Ohio Turnpikes.

We made it to Ann Arbor and unloaded the truck into his new digs. We ate at the Fleetwood Diner, a disreputable establishment downtown that has been poisoning patrons since before I went to school there. I told him to have a great semester, work hard and do well. He laughed and said “Sure, Old Man. I am right on it.”

I kept the truck’s blunt black nose pointed north. I found National Public Radio on the dial and listened to All Things Considered. NPR faded as I rolled through Alma, where there is a fine little college. Lady Bird Johnson’s legislation banning bill-boards along the interstate system did not affect this route, and there was advertising aplenty for sport outfitters and outboard motors and boats and snowmobiles.

I kept the Mackinac Bridge on the nose, and kept my eye on the oil pressure. But as I headed north in Michigan I got tired of the aggressive SUVs and sedans passing me. I was north of the Special Enforcement Zone at Clair (“Gateway to the North!”) and rolled past one of the official-only access cuts through the pines. No cop was there, and there wouldn’t be another place for one to lay in wait for a couple miles or so.

So on that lonely stretch of US-127 before it joins big Interstate-75 my foot got itchy.

I was close enough to my destination that I was pretty sure I could coast in to The Little Village By The Bay, if I got the knots up high enough. I tromped the accelerator and the truck leapt forward with a snap. I got to 95MPH and held it there. The pines along the side of the road disappeared in a blur of green and the road narrowed to a point of black asphalt before me. The dials on the turbo-boost shot up into the +15PSI range and the tachometer raced north to 4,500RPM. I held my breath, wondering if everything would hold together.

It seemed to. I slid back down around the speed limit and surveyed things. It was all working fine. I ran it up again, back pressed into the contoured racing seat. Then I went for it. From a flying start the little truck shot forward, dials racing around, the whoosh of the inter-cooled engine combining with the roar of the turbocharger. The red speed dial arced sharply up, 80, 85, 90, 95, faster than you can read it, pinning me to the seat.

Then over a hundred, the magic number and I held it there for a several seconds. It was a strange dreamy feeling, alone in the cone of hurtling empty roadway, measuring the sense of it, 105, wondering about the physics of it, the cams and parts and bearings spinning faster than thought, the feel of the road through the tires and the struts and the shocks. Straight and level. Comfortable.

The instrument panel was calmer than I was. All the other needles, oil pressure, temperature and ammeter stayed constant. I eased my foot off the gas and the individual trees became distinct once more. The black rocket slowed down through the 90’s and to loaf along at 2000RPMs, sedate at the speed limit.

So I am assured that it retains the quickness for which it was built, and the excitement that shoots up nerves to the brain from foot and wrist.

So into my Father’s garage went Syclone. He has vowed to start it every week and move it so the tires don’t get flat spots. Sooner or later I will get back to it, in this lovely little village by the Big Water.

When I shut the garage door and the truck’s aggressive little snout disappeared I was reminded of the words spoken by one of the last skippers of the battleship Iowa. He said at the decommissioning ceremony that it might not be the last time she would be needed.

“Rest well, yet sleep lightly,” he said. “For your Nation may need you again.”

That is the way I feel about Syclone, which is now sleeping under cover at Refuge Farm, ready for another round of refurbishment and a trip to the Culpeper Car Show next 4th of July. Somewhere, there lurks a Mustang that needs to be eaten for breakfast. Maybe in the Spring.

Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com

Twitter: @jayare303