My 1969 TR-6, license plate “PRESTO”, has been sitting in the garage since September, 2021, after an unsuccesful attempted theft. The villains broke into the garage and had hot-wired the car, carefully extracting from the front console the key that activates the starter, but they could not get the car out of the garage because the french doors would not open fully due to gravel accumulating from the alley pavement which is about 8″ higher than the garage level.
A friend came to visit and I mustered up the psychological stamina to resurrect the car, the break-in had weighed very heavily on me. A couple of sprays of starter fluid into its Weber carburetors, and it started right up. A miracle. I so love British cars – simplicity at its best. I’m pretty certain I had added something to the gasoline to prevent water separation, and that precaution rewarded me.
So off we drove for a short jaunt along a less-traveled street and in the tradition of British Motorcar Adventures, we had a breakdown. I ran out of gas, I guess over that 3 year period a lot of gas evaporated. My friend pushed the car (he was the younger) while I steered the car out of the travel lane into the opposing parking lane. Juli came to the rescue with a gas can and we drove home.
With all the rail tanker cars in the background where we ran out of gas, I thought:
Gasoline, gasoline everywhere,
But not a drop to drink.
– The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, with apologies to Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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