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American road warrior Accounts inspired by actual events 1969 Ford Mustang Mach 1 supercar RARE PHOTOS! This page last updated on or about 3-20-11 a - p r e s e n t a t i o n - of - j m o o n e y h a m . c o m

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There's two kinds of road warriors: fictional characters played by actors and stunt men (some of the best of those from Australia)-- and the real thing (likely mostly composed of Americans).

There's good reason the best real life road warriors around are likely Americans. For they've had more opportunity for such than just about anyone else. How so?

One, for at least 50 years millions of Americans enjoyed easier and cheaper access to fast cars than anyone else on the planet.

Two, few other countries of the past 50 years could boast nearly the quantity or quality of highways America did, by which to support road war play. Three, North America has for decades offered one of the least restricted continents on Earth in terms of unfettered automobile travel. Few if any border checkpoints, or anything like that, to slow the flow. And four-- well, many Americans love their independence and freedom. And will often express and explore them further than reason might allow. [To get a better idea of just how 'road-dense' the USA is, check out All Streets by Ben Fry. To see 'where the action is' within America's highway system, refer to these interactive maps of both the safest and most dangerous roads in America. For more information on the system, refer to 40 Years of the US Interstate Highway System: An Analysis The Best Investment A Nation Ever Made.]

Finally, five: few places on Earth allow the degree of civilian personal firearm wielding options as America. But don't take my word for it. Check out this chart of gun ownership by country.

Anybody want to argue with the above points? I didn't think so.

Everybody knows the fake Australian road warriors of feature films (i.e., Mel Gibson). But the closest thing to real American road warriors anyone knows are famous race car drivers off TV.

Mad Max Falcon The last of the V-8 Interceptors is alive and well in Illinois. (12-3-08)

Technically however, those guys aren't real road warriors either; they just play them on closed tracks in front of TV cameras. Places where there are robust limits on the mayhem they might encounter. I.e., no guns, no police pursuit, no purposeful road blocks or ambushes, no cliffs to fly off, etc., etc. Heck, if debris is noticed on the track, everyone slows down until special clean up crews can remove it(!)

Of course, real road warriors have good reasons to stay unknown. Just like their American moonshine running predecessors of decades past. For they frequently fought the law, and won. And government and big business bureaucrats definitely don't like uppity citizens like that!

But let sufficient time pass (like decades), and maybe such stories can finally be told, with minimal risk to the road warriors themselves.

Below are my own accounts (with details like names, dates, and more changed of course). I know I wasn't the only American road warrior of those days. But I could be one of the last survivors of that generation. And maybe have a few more (and better!) tales to relate than most. But I'll leave that for you to decide.

My very first car was a 1969 Ford Mustang Mach 1. Which looked much like the pic above soon after purchase.

Above is what's left of one of my car's original Mustang emblems from behind the small quarter windows. Such ornamentation was stripped off during his transformation to outlaw supercar to reduce weight, aerodynamic drag, and reflective surfaces (less reflections meant for better night-time stealth).

Above is an artistic rendering of the car's final front end appearance, including the removable lower rubber air dam, and dual headlight 1970 Mustang corner posts replacing his quad 1969 versions. Unlike the original factory forms, every opening here was functional: engine ram air, brake cooling scoops, and hood louvers to help create a vacuum underneath the car at speed to boost his handling performance.

My friends and I competed in things like hot rodding our cars and testing the results via racing. Throw in some random altercations with strangers and the police here and there, and things begin getting serious. At least for the survivors. My car and I were definitely survivors. Outlasted (or outran) virtually all our peers of the time. Though I knew guys who died in awful crashes or gunfights, like Wyatt Earp I personally never got wounded by gunfire, or Shadow himself rendered undrivable by a crash. I was also never imprisoned or Shadow impounded. I guess all that made us either the best of the lot-- or the luckiest-- back then. Me and my car's earliest adventures happened when he was still largely factory stock, and me mainly green in many matters. But we learned and adapted fast. As you'll see below. (the rare photo at right shows my car in near final form) If you'd like to see all the technical details of Shadowfast's construction in the form of a single ebook, Dark Horse: The Official Shadowfast Supercar Technical Reference is now available for any Amazon Kindle or Kindle app.

Please select your vicarious thrill below

My high school days

• Slip, sliding away; Femme fatale? Got it. Daring rescues and escapes? Got it. Hair-raising race? Got it. High speed night runs by moonlight alone? Got it. What more could you ask for? Oh. Maybe a once-in-a-lifetime narrow escape over water, the likes of which might never work again.

• A Halloween to remember; How Halloween became my favorite holiday of the year. I get tricked into taking on a seemingly impossible challenge. But teen age boys often don't fully understand the concept of 'impossible' yet. Why else do you think armed forces (and criminal organizations) prefer to recruit the youngest men they can for their most dangerous jobs?

• One small taste of Hell; Young men are easily lured into associating with the wrong kinds of people. Me and my best friend Steve were no exception to the rule. Want to see an example of what the phrase 'out of the frying pan and into the fire' can mean in real life? Then check out this awful turn of events...!

• A call to arms; Our local law enforcement personnel could be downright criminal themselves in some ways in the 1970s (and there's numerous official records to prove it). But when they let a killer escape to murder some of the best people you know-- and look likely to do it a second time as well-- you can't stand by and do nothing.

• The Daytona 1200; Here I end up forced to race a legendary factory supercar, due to plain old bad luck. A winged 1969 Dodge Charger Daytona with 426 Hemi motor. Sheesh!
  

• Wild horses; In terms of sheer numbers, this marked the height of Mustang mania among my own little crowd, with me and my buddies boasting a veritable fleet of the mechanical horses. However, this memorable battle against the elements to save innocent lives would drastically reduce that number.

  Sometimes pony cars literally go out in a blaze of glory!

  My earliest college days

  During my last year in high school and the summer after that I took some night classes and community college classes to get some typically first year college classes out of the way. I was working full-time during much or all of this too. It seems hard to believe I still had time for hot rodding adventures as well-- but somehow I did.

• Blue light special; My hometown's scandal-ridden police department is forced to clean house and bring in lots of new hires. With all this disarray among local law enforcement, many local outlaws are having a field day. My own building reputation-- plus string pulling by certain folks-- end up giving me the opportunity to help train the new guys in pursuits. But this turns out to be a bad idea...(this section still being written up).

  Around this time I left my hometown to attend the same college my best friend Steve had chosen. It was halfway across the state from home. I usually refer to it as "Tech" in the accounts (for it was primarily an engineering college).

• Fast times at Sigma Chi; My best friend Steve pulled me into his fraternity circle for a bit in school. Those guys turned out to be just too hard core for me, party-wise. However, we did share a few other things in common (this section still being written up).
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  A summer break from college, spent working in Texas

  • Too close to the bone; My pals and I weren't really prepared to pull up stakes and move a thousand miles away to work for the summer. So it's small wonder we had problems!

  • No good deed goes unpunished; I guess after resolving my basic survival problems in Texas I wanted some new troubles to deal with. Ergo, I tweaked the nose of the law.

  • Kissing the wall; Some good cops saved me from a bad cop in the previous episode. But I'm on my own here. Fortunately my subconscious recalls a similar close call from my past, and reflexively saves me when I don't have a clue. But this incident only makes my bad cop stalker even angrier.

  • When push came to shove; My bad cop problem worsens tremendously during a drive to Houston. This turns out to be one of my closest calls ever.

  • Tornado Alley; Considering how brief a time me and my buddies spent in Texas that year, we witnessed an amazing amount of wild and stormy weather. At least one tropical storm, with lightning which blew up a huge oil tank in a nearby refinery; an honest to goodness water spout (water tornado) in the Houston ship channel (I think that was the place) witnessed by Lloyd and his crew. And me-- well, that's what this story's about.

  • Heartbreaker; The very best and worst of my Texas experience can be found here. Yes, much more fun than the pit and wall escape-- and yet worse than the tornados!
  The true source of this page is

• Breaking up; My return to school from Texas proves to be rougher than I expected. For it turns out one of my military instructors is in even worse shape than I, desperation-wise. He apparently decides to take his students on a field trip into his own private abyss. Thank God I drove Shadow!

  I must also give thanks here to a giant rat I met along the way (yes, I'm talking about an animal there).

  My stint as a college drop out

  The aftermath of recent events proves too much for me, and I drop out of school for a while.

• Liars and traitors and bears; It may be the only thing worse than a con-artist is a beautiful female con artist. She manages to get away with most of my savings, turn an old chum against me for life, and secure her escape by putting me up to my armpits in cops.

  I really hate it when that happens (this section still being written up).

• Black and blue magic; I need a job bad. A high paying job. The best option I know is on the shady side. Unfortunately, my prospective boss wants proof I'm up to the task. So I have to help a friend of his in a most harrowing audition.

• Ring of fire; One ten year old boy proves to be the undoing of a band of ruthless killers. I basically act as the little guy's sidekick here, having accidentally wandered into the vicinity at a crucial moment.

• Over the edge; I was surprised many times by my experiences with Shadowfast. This ranks among the top shockers, as I find myself trying to outrun four wheel drives and motorcycles in a trackless wilderness with my two wheel drive street car.
  

• Daytona 2.0: Between a Ferrari and a hard place; I pay a visit to my best friend still in college, and am surprised there by a Ferrari owner spoiling for a race. Although his car makes the hellacious winged 1969 Dodge Daytona 426 Hemi of The Daytona 1200 look slow and clumsy by comparison, I eventually decide to accept his challenge.

• What goes around...; Quite a number of guys have threatened my life before. But relatively few really made serious stabs at it. This was one of the serious fellas. Along with a small army of his friends (or lackeys).

• Nowhere to go but up; My job as part of a secure transport convoy for V.I.P.s was terribly dull-- until my final run with the team. Only me, the limousine driver, and our V.I.P. charge make it out intact. Shadow himself was heavily damaged.

  This-- my final run with Shadowfast-- would basically wring out the last of my own desire for automotive derring do. As well as leave Shadow so badly broken as to make me unwilling to rebuild him. Amazingly enough, he would still be drivable. But the amount of effort and money required to get him back into proper form would just prove too much for me. I'd had it.

• Notes from the actual owner/driver of the Shadowfast super car; If you'd like to see particulars regarding the real life events which inspired these accounts, this is the link!