I ran into Ken Payne the other day at the North American International Auto Show. Ken is a project engineer at Michelin Tire in Greenville, S.C., and he was a part of Michelin's contingent at the Detroit show. Ken has had a variety of interesting jobs at Michelin, including working as test driver for the tires Michelin created for the Dodge Viper.
Unlike so many people in the auto industry who like cars because it is fashionable to do so, Ken is a real car guy, the kind who has a Morgan and a Mini in his garage and a shop behind his house filled with a couple more Mini projects, several vintage racing cars and an unfinished Lotus Seven project. I'm not sure if being a car guy is a hereditary thing or if it comes from one's environment. I do know that Ken Payne has been one for a long time.
A decade ago, when I worked at Michelin, Ken would let me drive his 1959 two-stroke Saab 93 sedan in vintage endurance races. A decade before that we were running Pro Rallys in his Saab 99. And almost 30 years ago, when both of us were in high school in St. Petersburg, Fla., both of us were part of something called the BAE, or British Auto Enthusiasts.
To us, BAE was the big time. Its members were adults with real-life jobs who were as crazed over cars as we were. They too had gasoline in their veins. But these weren't the same motorheads whose hopped-up Mustangs and Camaros filled the high-school parking lot. BAE was a club made up of sports-car enthusiasts in the best traditions of string-back driving gloves and tweed flat caps. Sports cars in the early '70s meant either cranky British roadsters or the occasional Corvette or Porsche. By its charter, the president of the BAE was required to own a British car, although all during the time I was involved with the club, the president's Morgan was actually in pieces, hanging from the rafters of his garage.
I was on my second car by this time, a pretty, bright yellow 1968 MG Midget. Ken Payne was already showing his predilection for Saabs; he had an early 1960s two-stroke Monte Carlo Model 96 sedan in the same color red the factory rally cars wore. Fortunately, he also had a baby blue Triumph TR3 to qualify him as a true British car nut. You had to own a British car to be a member of BAE, but you didn't have to own one to take part in its events.
The club's monthly events were its entire raison d'tre. The club ran rallys. Other sports-car clubs were more into hammering around a parking-lot autocross, or amateur sports-car racing or polishing their wire wheels for car shows. We were into rallying. If this brings to mind images of small European sedans dashing at breakneck speed through snowy mountain passes, lights blazing in the dead of night, then you get the idea, at least in theory. Except that we lived in Florida, where the highest point around was 40 ft above sea level. The tropical climate wasn't too conducive to snow either, so scratch that. Most rallies work on the principle that cars must arrive at secret checkpoints along a route at exactly the right time, given a specified average speed. So perhaps the biggest obstacle between fantasy and reality was a countywide rule that prohibited timed automotive events from taking place on public highways.
Enter the gimmick rally. They were once popular during the early days of sports-car ownership in the U.S. In the early 1950s, couples in their MGs, Austin Healeys, Triumphs and Aston Martin sports cars would scour the countryside looking for clues that would answer the questions on their rally score sheet. The answers could only be found by traveling on the correct route and being rather clever about interpreting those clues into answers. For sports-car enthusiasts in St. Petersburg, frustrated by the police department's obvious prejudice against us, the gimmick rally was the only answer.