RADIAL FLYER

A MEYERS MANX WITH AN AIRPLANE ENGINE IS A WEIRD FIX FOR SPEED ADDICTION.

- MATT FARAH

THE PROBLEM WITH DRUGS is that you have to keep doing more and more of them. No matter the drug, no matter how blitzed you get for a while, you eventually need more to chase the same high, until you get fed up, and find yoga, or Jesus, or meditation, and break the cycle of dependence entirely— and find joy.

It’s really the same with cars, right? We always want the next thing—the fastest, most powerful cars we can get our hands on, even if such things are wildly impractical for use in our lives and on our roads. At what point is there no point?

In time, one may want to exit this loop of performance addiction and instead seek engagement, whimsy, and maybe even a little silliness. The common refrain is “slow car fast.” I prefer “slow car fun,” a scenario where speed isn’t even really necessary. The addiction mentality is still there, just skewed toward weird rather than fast. This is how people end up with collections of French hatchbacks, Japanese kei cars, and Ford Model Ts.

Let’s take that to its logical conclusion: I have ordered a brand-new Meyers Manx Tarmac Edition buggy powered by an aircraft-style radial engine.

Wait, what? A quick bit of history: In 1964, Bruce Meyers— surfboard shaper, boatbuilder, artist, musician, and engineer—created a mostly new car out of a mostly disassembled Volkswagen Beetle. Many recognize the cartoonish roadster today as a lifestyle icon from the late Sixties. Few remember that the prototype won the Baja 1000 in 1967, setting a new overall record time. Meyers continued to build the buggies throughout his life until selling his company a few months before his death in 2021 at age 94.