The Best Odds

The cars I recall most fondly were neither the prettiest nor the quickest.

- by John Phillips

Certainly not the most expensive. They were machines that emerged willfully peculiar and intractably idiosyncratic.

ABOUT 35 YEARS AGO, Car and Driver's editors gathered around an oval table similar to what a Love's truck stop uses for rebuilding starter motors. A building inspector had already declared the room “sick,” and back then it didn’t mean “majorly cool.” It meant Legionnaires’ disease. All of us had just returned from new-vehicle debuts, and technical director Csaba Csere asked if there was anything outstanding at Nissan. Our Nicholas Bissoon-Dath, formerly a Formula 1 aerodynamicist, responded: “Nope [cough, heave]. Okay, well [hack, blow, spit], there’s a version of the little Sentra. Stupendous engine.”

Then the ambulance arrived.

Nicholas meant the 1991 Sentra SE-R. When it alighted in our parking lot, our editors (including me, snorting phlegm) celebrated a 140-hp DOHC 16-valve 2.0-liter four that right then was raining cats 'n' cams of joy upon the automotive cosmos. Never missing a chance to bloviate, we called it “the first automotive wonderment of the 1990s.”