Roadside repairs. They’re an unplanned part of many driving adventures. Sometimes they become the stories we remember more fondly than the trip itself. They tap into that primal need to conquer, overcome, problem solve, fix situations and succeed. Sometimes they become opportunities to help people and spend a little extra bonding time together.
I’m writing this from the side of the road, waiting for a tow truck. Not for one of my classic cars, but a rented 2025 Ford Escape sitting on the side of a highway in southern Utah on a scouting trip for the 2027 Pavement Pounder Events tour.
A cloud of smoke trailing me like a wounded P-51 was a pretty good indication that I better start looking for a safe place to ditch. Being in a rural area, the first thing I did was look at my cell phone to check service – SOS – which I’m pretty sure stands for Sh*t out of Service. My only hope was to rotate the shift knob (I hate having to say those words) to neutral and coast as far as I could. The noise and jolts from the drivetrain were reminiscent of a 10-bolt with chunks of spider gears floating in the diff. By the grace of God, I rolled into one bar of cell service as the car came to a jarring halt on the side of the road.
Avis dispatched a tow truck, which gave me two hours to reflect on previous unplanned road-trip repairs – some on the side of the road, some in hotel parking lots, one even at Wrigley Field.
The lead photo is my longtime friend Mike Lane with me on the side of a highway in Iowa after one side of the 4 1/2-inch dual exhaust on my Pavement Pounder 1957 Chevrolet jettisoned itself from the car.
I wasn’t expecting that specific issue, but having an issue on this trip wasn’t that surprising to either of us. We had finished putting the car back together at 4:30 that morning and then set out on a 700-mile trip to start a Hot Rod Power Tour. There was no shake-down run – this was the test drive. It was a relatively easy fix, and Mike Cotton did a proper job of welding things back together a day later at his shop in Missouri.
Another episode was in my 1946 Willys CJ-2A, driving over the Rockies to get to the Easter Jeep Safari. About halfway up one of the first grades out of Denver, the engine quit abruptly. Patrick Hill was following me in a rental car. We pulled off and checked spark, then fuel. The electric fuel pump was silent and no fuel was coming out of the line at the throttle body. Since there is no gas gauge, we used a calibrated measuring device (a stick), to verify there was still gas in the fuel cell. Hmmmm…the pump must have died.
There happened to be a parts store in the town where we exited the highway, so we bought a new pump. For some reason, I tried the engine one more time before diving into this roadside repair which would surely leave me covered in fuel, and it fired up. I yelled to Patrick, “Pack up and catch up; I’m getting back on the road while it’s running.”
That was short-lived. The engine died again about 20 minutes later. Long-story-short, the culprit ended up being vapor lock. The 400-hp 350 puts a lot of heat underhood, especially with headers and my unwillingness to cut out the inner fender wells to vastly improve airflow. I had never run into vapor lock on a fuel-injected vehicle with a return line. But a couple lengths of Heatshield Products Lava Tube cured it, and I haven’t had that issue again.
My pièce de résistance, though, was a broken lifter in my 1957 Chevrolet. I was on Power Tour, driving from Los Angeles to Detroit. The 557-cid engine in the car is a bit on the extreme side, especially for an old-school big-block. It made 890 horsepower at the crank naturally aspirated but still ran on pump gas. The super-aggressive lobe ramps on the camshaft put so much side load on the lifters that it was a matter of when – not if – a lifter would fail.
This is the 557-cid engine in my Pavement Pounder 1957 Chevrolet. Built in the 1990s, this was a pretty serious street car. The proof that it was a street car was to drive the car across country on Hot Rod’s Power Tour. The car did it, but ate a lifter 2,000 miles into the trip. This photo shows the engine bay more recently when upgraded to a new Flex-A-Lite radiator (no longer in production) and electric fan system, and I began a conversion from a Holley 1150 Dominator carb to a Holley Dominator Sniper EFI system.
The answer to the question when came after 2,000 miles of the 2,300-mile trip, just as I pulled into Wrigley Field in Chicago for that night’s cruise and car show. Something in the valvetrain let go. With the engine solid-mounted to the roll cage, I could feel the vibration through the down bar near the dash, almost like using a screwdriver as a mechanic’s stethoscope.
Once I parked, I told Todd Ryden, who was my driving buddy that year, that I was pretty sure I killed a lifter. His expression went blank and he asked, “What are you going to do,” half anticipating me to throw in the towel for the trip and start hunting for a trailer. I told him I was going to get a hot dog, let the engine cool a bit and then pull the intake manifold off the car and see what I could find.
A lifter had, in fact, been damaged, with the roller pushed out of the body. I found several others on the brink of similar fates. The cam didn’t look too badly damaged.
Since I was pretty much expecting this, I had brought the specialty tools this race engine required to change valvetrain parts, as well as a new set of lifters, intake gaskets and even an oil drain pan, engine oil and a filter to flush shrapnel out of the engine. By 9:00 p.m., I was driving to the hotel. I arrived in Detroit the next day with the rest of Power Tour.
As I sit here waiting for someone else to haul away a vehicle I can’t fix on the side of the road, I realize those unplanned repairs have become some of my favorite road-trip memories. At the time, they were frustrating, inconvenient and occasionally miserable. Years later, they’re the stories we still tell.
And there’s some irony in this one. After decades of keeping temperamental hot rods and Jeeps moving across the country with spare parts, tools, ingenuity and friends, the vehicle that finally left me sitting helplessly beside the road was a 2025 rental car.
What’s your most memorable roadside repair? Post it to our Pavement Pounder Events Participants Facebook page!