I totaled my first car on a rainy Southern California day. Actually, that fateful day was preceded by a solid week of rainy days, which is why the road I  was traveling on was completely washed out when I rounded the curb at 40 plus mph in my ’76 Camaro.

Dumb move? Absolutely. However, at age 17, I thought I could drive like Mario and so I told my mom that since my Camaro had air shocks, that I could pump it up and navigate any lake, ocean or river I might encounter on the way to picking my younger brother up from school.

I was a superhero behind the wheel of my Second Gen muscle car and I peeled out of my parents driveway with authority. So there I was, mobbin my beige four-speed steed through town with a gleam in my eye and a fogged up windshield. Of course I had no heat or AC in the car;  I was a broke high school kid who could barely afford to put gas in the tank. Anyway, a few miles away from my brother’s school, I went to pass a peasant in some kinda gray colored OldsMoBuick and I would have been just fine had there not been a literal river running across my well-worn residential street.  I’m talking about depth and volume and force the likes of which mankind had never seen on California Oaks Road, Man!

To my pubescent self, this river belonged at the bottom of The Grand Canyon, not in my hood. I hit the brakes and nothing happened. I downshifted from Third to Second gear and my Camaro just kept on truckin. I had so much time to ponder my fate that I said “Oh, Sh%t!” four times before my car finally made contact with a cinder block wall that was directly in my path when the road curved left and my car went dead straight. The Camaro absorbed the initial impact fairly well but then it spun sideways into a light pole and that would prove fatal. For the car, not me, obviously.

My car hit the pole square in the driver door, which smashed into the roof. The roof spiked violently upward, splintering the OEM paint and shattering nearly every window in the F-body. Displaying equal violence was the stock rear axle, which was knocked loose from its mounting points when the driver side wheel slid into the curb during the spin. The result of the melee was a vehicle that was now u-shaped, with a nose shortened a solid 12 inches, and a rearend that was punted sideways an equal amount. The car looked like it had hit by a freight train and was on a never-ending quest to just turn left. The only way for me to get out of the car was to crawl out of the rear window opening. I sat on the curb in the pouring rain with not a single scratch on me, a testament to the sturdiness cars of the 1970s. 

What does this story have to do with the newest Finnegan Speed and Marine shirt design? Simple; See that skeleton? That’s the face I was making as I wrecked my beloved Camaro.

So drive fast and take chances but wear this cuddly soft FSM shirt as a constant reminder of what can happen if you act a fool behind the wheel. Good luck, my friends!