Roadside Rest

Roadside Rest For Automobiles, Arizona's Weather and Terrain Offer Grounds for Improvement

The eminent announcement of America's long-rumored pony car was furthest from my mind on that tense and gloomy day more than 30 years ago.

At the moment of highest priority loomed clouds like glinting black eyebrows frowning in furrows all around the horizons. Ms. Alice Pasterski, a Cutter Aviation courier still in her 20s, confessed via intercom that she didn't like the looks of it, not one bit. The abruptly enveloping weather had forced her to drop low over the jumbled desert terrain. Not even a single-engine Beech Bonanza could find a friendly hayfield down there.

Then the crackling thunderstorms closed in behind us, cutting off a retreat to Phoenix. The sky turned even uglier over our destination, Kingman, in northwestern Arizona.

"Sir," said Alice, "we can't go on, and we can't turn back. I'm going to find a place to park."

The chart showed only one haven: a dot named Yucca, site of Ford Motor Company's proving grounds. Without warning we zoomed overhead. We could see cars spinning 100 mph around the five-mile banked oval track. We slipped around a squall line, kissed the runway, and taxied to a halt. Immediately a motorized detail of polite but grim security officers whisked us to administration, where the beautiful blond pilot was sharply interrogated and the reporter was obliged to stow his armload of cameras. Right now.

Later we learned the why of the counterespionage treatment. At that very moment, Ford was testing advanced versions of the automobile that would define a whole new category of personal transportation. Alice and I had blundered into Ford's final all-out tune-up of the Mustang.

Almost from the beginning of the automotive age, Arizona served as one big informal proving ground. Hot days plus steep grades times long distances conspired to break down engines and tires manufactured to Midwestern specifications.

One of the first scientific programs sponsored by automakers was a torture test for fighting tanks during World War II. In the dusty desert air, filters were perfected to shield tank power plants from abrasive grit, which in North Africa had been costing General Patton more equipment casualties than Rommel.

From such beginnings, Arizona today arguably supports the greatest concentration of automotive proving grounds in the world. Chances are, whatever you drive, foreign or domestic, all or part of it ran the gauntlet of Arizona.

The trailblazing tank course long ago matured into the General Motors Desert Proving Grounds 30 miles southeast of Phoenix. There on 4,000 acres with a five-mile oval track, some 400 full-time permanent staffers oversee a spectrum of experiments, ranging from paint endurance to brake performance.

About equidistant on the opposite northwest side of Phoenix, Toyota a couple of years ago developed a 10-mile high-speed track on a 14,000-acre reserve. While test drivers push vehicles up to 160 mph around a closed course four times as long as Indy, desert wildlife migrate undisturbed through convenient tunnels. Most of Toyota's land has been left as virgin Sonoran Desert.

North by east of the Toyota site sprawls the Chrysler Arizona Proving Grounds with its two oval tracks and a variety of unpaved and primitive roads. A 2½-mile straightaway over its entire length is level to within one vertical inch. One area is devoted to the study of plastics, fabrics, finishes, and other materials for color and structural stability under an unrelenting desert sun.

In Arizona a dashboard beneath a sun-drenched windshield can generate temperatures up to 240° F., above the 212° F. boiling point of water.

As motoring considerations have changed through the years, so have the chores at the test tracks. Nowadays cars are routinely examined for regulatory compliance, that is, for meeting safety, emissions, fuel economy, and other government-mandated standards.

In bragging of advantages, engineers pay a sort of backhanded compliment to Arizona's climate.

By Don Dedera

They say that in addition to the obvious opportunity to torture machines and materials through extreme summer heat from Death Valley to Yuma sand dunes to White Sands, the region in and around Arizona also abets year-round testing in diverse terrain. Across four seasons, conditions are ideal for punishing engines and air-conditioning units. As many an Arizona tourist can testify, a steering wheel here may double as a weather dial: a two-hour spin can change from the semitropical zone of Mexico to the alpine zone of Canada.

As a test venue, Arizona also offers happy hunting for a small elite cadre of spy photographers, specialists who skulk about taking unauthorized shots of prototype cars. Automotive and business journals pay handsomely for such images.

Jim Dunne, dean of U.S. "spy" photographers, rented a helicopter to overtake a new model Corvette as it was undergoing hot-weather trials in Death Valley. Dunne had his chopper land just ahead of the cruising 'Vette. The unsuspecting test driver screeched to a halt. Dunne grabbed his shots and flew away, to sell his exclusive prints for $1,000 apiece to the journals.

That's what jogged my memory of that day long ago when Alice and I appeared in the sky above a whole herd of super secret pony cars circling Ford's test track. It didn't occur to me to get a picture.