Built for a life of grocery getting and highway cruising, the 1983 Toyota Camry LE my friend Gus and I had bought for $500 was now rumbling over off-road trails in northern Michigan. Considering the car is eligible for an antique license plate, it had been handling this new life with surprising aplomb. Until we tried to force it through a small pond of standing water.
Gus was driving as we headed straight for the 25-yard-long brown puddle, and I yelled for him to wait and reconsider. We all stopped?Gus and I in the Camry, and his fraternal twin, Guy, who had been following us in a 1991 Buick Roadmaster with a friend. As far as we knew, this heavily wooded trail was the only route to a campsite where hundreds of crap cars were to gather as part of the Detroit Gambler 500, the reason we were in this situation: Two guys in a rusty front-wheel-drive four-door hatchback with off-road tags, hopping through sand and dirt trails, chased by a Buick Roadmaster leaking a trail of oil we could have followed back to the road.
A 1991 Buick Roadmaster prior to entering the Detroit Gambler 500.
Always Be Gambling
The gist of the Gambler 500 is this: Find a vehicle for $500 and gamble on the likelihood it will make it through two days of adversity. Although the ?requirement? is that entrants spend $500 or less on a car or truck, enforcement isn’t rigid. Those who already owned an off-road vehicle could, presumably, show up in it. And some did just that.
But the essence of th...