We made another turn and almost rolled again. The Coupe de Ville is not your ideal machine for high speed cornering in residential neighborhoods. The handling is very mushy...unlike the Red Shark, which had responded very nicely to situations requiring the quick four-wheel drift. But the Whale -- instead of cutting loose at the critical moment -- had a tendency to dig in, which accounted for that sickening "here we go" sensation.
At first I thought it was only because the tires were soft, so I took it into the Texaco station next to the Flamingo and had the tires pumped up to fifty pounds each which alarmed the attendant, until I explained that these were "experimental” tires.
But fifty pounds each didn’t help the cornering, so I went back a few hours later and told him I wanted to try seventy five. He shook his head nervously. “Not me,” he said, handing me the air hose. “Here. They’re your tires. You do it.”
“What’s wrong?” I asked. “You think they can’t take seventy-five?” He nodded, moving away as I stooped to deal with the left front. “You’re damn right,” he said. “Those tires want twenty eight in the front and thirty two in the rear. Hell, fifty’s dangerous, but seventy five is crazy. They’ll explode!” I shook my head and kept filling the left front. “I told you,” I said, “Sandoz laboratories designed these tires. They’re special. I could load them up to a hundred.
“God almighty!” he groaned. “Don’t do that here.”
“Not today,” I replied. “I want to see how they corner with seventy-five.”
He chuckled. “You won’t even get to the corner, Mister.”
“We’ll see,” I said, moving around to the rear with the air-hose. In truth, I was nervous. The two front ones were tighter than snare drums; they felt like teak wood when I tapped on them with the rod. But what the hell? I thought. If they explode, so what? [...]
As it turned out, the Whale behaved very nicely with the altered tire pressures. The ride was a trifle rough; I could feel every pebble on the highway, like being on roller skates in a gravel pit ... but the thing began cornering in a very stylish manner, very much like driving a motorcycle at top speed in a hard rain: one slip and ZANG, over the high side, cartwheeling across the landscape with your head in your hands.
--H S Thompson
