On Borrowed Time; WAVARMADA.(Special Report)

Byline: MARK VAUGHN

If you could live your own little Walter Mitty racing fantasy, who would you be? Schumacher? Fangio? How about John Morton in the 1971-72 Trans-Am?

Chris Horn would probably pick Morton. Horn owns two Datsun 510s, both of which he races in SCCA competition as often as he can. His day job is providing strategic marketing and communications solutions for aftermarket companies. Which is how he got the Armada that he calls a Weekend Assault Vehicle (WAV).

This Armada, sadly, is a crusher. In less than one year it will be squashed like a disoriented armadillo on a Texas farm road during trucking season. Our federal government requires that any preproduction prototype, brought into the United States under pretense of product development and therefore exempt from the EPA's and DOT's "No Fun of Any Kind'' regulation, be destroyed. So, this stylin' BRE-badged (Peter Brock's Brock Racing Enterprises) sport/utility vehicle, with roughly $18,000 worth of cool stuff on it, will feel the whack of the 10-ton federal fly swatter before SEMA '05.

You know this truck. It debuted at SEMA last year, done up in BRE red, white and a little blue. It had a matching 510 on its trailer. But that wasn't just any 510. It was going to be at first. At first Horn, whose project this is, was going to park his own Datsun 510 SCCA club racer on the trailer for SEMA.

"I came up with [the project] because I race a Datsun 510 and thought it would be a good idea to tie in the 9200-pound towing capacity of the Armada with Nissan's racing heritage.''

A skeptic (or a racer who had tried the same thing and failed) would say that was just an excuse for Horn to get a free tow vehicle.