Sarasota Teens Travel to Canada on Fast-Food Grease

Brian Lutton and Andrew Dowdell had been marinating in the smell of hash browns for days.

The crispy fried potato odor had been the 17-year olds’ constant companion in a 1985 Mercedes retrofitted to run on discarded food grease for a 6,000-mile summer road trip. There was a brief stretch after filling up at a seafood joint where fried fish aroma wafted through the interior, and one regrettable encounter with mozzarella stick grease, but Waffle House had been their most consistent source of old grease, and hash brown had become the air they breathed.

 

But on July 25, as they inched through rush hour traffic outside of Worcester, Massachusetts, smoke began pouring through the dashboard and the familiar down-home smell was replaced by the stench of melting plastic. Brian steered the car across six lanes of bumper-to-bumper traffic, and the boys thought about what they would say to their mothers in the obligatory phone calls home.

After they put out the fire, caused by a faulty starter solenoid that melted a mass of wires under the hood, Andrew broke the news to mom, 1,400 miles away in Sarasota.

“I told my mom, ‘We’re OK, but the car caught on fire,’” Andrew said.

The New England Wire Fire was just one adventure on a journey to the Canadian border in a jerry-rigged car that gave the seniors at The Out-of-Door Academy the chance to see the country, troubleshoot mechanical problems on the fly and test their mettle as aspiring automotive engineers.

While many parents would be nervous allowing their teenagers to make such a trip, Andrew’s dad, Rod Dowdell, said experience is the best educator, and he wants his kids to learn outside of a protective parent bubble. Plus, he said, with five kids, he and his wife Kerri are too busy to be helicopter parents.

“If they don’t screw stuff up now, they’ll screw it up later,” Rod said.

The boys both love to tinker and found inspiration from “John,” a Lutton family friend from Ohio who had built race cars for Mercedes, Porsche and Volvo. John was a regular consultant during trip preparations, sometimes casting doubt on their youthful excitement, especially as he learned more about their 34-year old car that had sat outside through at least four hurricanes.

“His whole saying was, ‘If that car could talk, the stories it would tell,’” Brian said.

John never killed their dreams though, and with his guidance the boys got the clunker up and running, complete with fuel lines running to a plastic tank in the trunk that would supply the discarded cooking oil to power their journey.

The boys paid homage to his tutelage by naming the car after him, and on July 4, “John,” painted cherry red and emblazoned with the boys’ Instagram handle for curious motorists, pulled out of Andrew’s driveway, powered by grease from Poppos Taqueria.

Like many great journeys, this one came with a false start. John only made it 42 miles before blowing an oil cooler line and requiring a tow home. But two days later, with new homemade oil lines, the boys pulled out once more, this time making it all the way to the Canadian border (they were too young to cross alone), before heading west for Flint, Michigan, home to Kettering University, a private engineering school where students work alongside auto-industry professionals.

Neither of the boys are given to big displays of emotion, but making it all the way to Kettering, an engineering mecca both hope to one day attend, was a surreal and pivotal achievement.

 

“We are not really big criers, but it hit home, I would say,” Brian said.

The boys returned home to Sarasota on Aug. 1, and they are already planning their next trip, this time in a car retrofitted to run on electricity.

“The best way to learn is by doing,” Brian said. “That hands-on experience is something that was really important.”

Source: Herald Tribune