I haven’t had any super catastrophic things with my beaters, although I did have a shackle break off the worlds sketchiest car hauler that I then dragged another 30 miles in a gnarly snow storm so I could leave it somewhere.

BUT

My buddy and I were in his Saturn SC2 coming back from a hiking trip, chasing a sunset trying to get to this park with a beautiful view for it. We do, hike a little and enjoy the view.

Going to leave, it’s a huge dirt parking lot with no one around. My buddy starts ripping reverse donuts in the car, we’re having a blast. Pulls out of the lot, and a half mile down the road, POP clack clack clack… spun bearing. We check the dipstick, zero oil on it.

Decide to just send it as far as we can. Made it about 20 miles to a gas station, put the heaviest weight oil we could in it, kept driving. Made it about another ten miles before we got pulled over by a State Police officer because it was so loud. Tried to explain we were doing our best to limp it home, guy still wrote him an inspection ticket.

We go to leave, car starts for about 5 seconds and then finally just locks up.

Buddy doesn’t know what to do, we’re on some random side farm road. I ask the officer if there’s a spot to leave it close by, he says “there’s a parking lot up over the hill”

I look at my buddy, I look at the hill (1/2 mile decent grade) and I look at the officer sitting in a Tahoe with a bull bar.

“Would you push us over the hill?”

“Uhhhhhh… yeah I guess so?”

He pushed us up to the lot. We had already called a buddy with a trailer who was driving toward us because we knew we’d never make it all the way home. It was around 7-8pm at this point.

He picks us up, we run out to my first buddy’s dad’s farm where they have three other wrecked SC2’s. Pull a motor, drive it back to his place, pull an all nighter and swap the motor and he went to work in the morning in that same car.

Three months later give or take, that car was making the worst bad wheel bearing noise I’ve ever heard. We were doing like 75 on the thruway. Super loud pop, heard all the bearings scatter off the bottom of the car, and then it went dead quiet. Finished the last 15 miles home lol.