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"         When Executive Editor Sam Smith handed me the keys to the red Elan he&amp;#039;d been fiddling with for months, he was surprisingly confident. &amp;quot;Don&amp;#039;t worry,&amp;quot; he said, &amp;quot;you can&amp;#039;t hurt it.&amp;quot; He wanted me to drive his car as its designers intended, so I did. And it was a pretty big letdown.   What happened? This beautiful car, a car that I really wanted to be great, was just kind of owly. The engine was unhappy and the suspension didn&amp;#039;t want to settle down. Overall, it was merely okay\u2014very light, pretty agile, kind of interesting. Legendary? Hardly. Give me a Miata, with its minutely duller handling and its pedestrian little motor and its 98-percent-greater chance of not catching fire.   Sam took this news stoically. &amp;quot;It needs work,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;But I just drove Ben Thongsai&amp;#039;s Series 3&amp;quot;\u2014the green car on these pages\u2014&amp;quot;and trust me, it&amp;#039;s right.&amp;quot;   I was nervous, but Ben was determined to be cool. He shrugged, saying, &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s just a car. You just drive it.&amp;quot; Then he went quiet and got a faraway look in his eyes. I got the impression there were about 600,000 things he wasn&amp;#039;t bothering to mention.   All the same, I can happily report that, on a good day, a well-set-up Elan lives up to every bit of its legend. The green car&amp;#039;s motor was eager, its suspension planing out all the unimportant parts of the road. In a car as good as this, you don&amp;#039;t ghost along; you feel precisely what the tires are doing, but the information is passed along fluidly and unobtrusively. The sensation seems like it could go on forever.   It can&amp;#039;t, of course. Famously not. And I realize that I didn&amp;#039;t earn this transcendent bit of driving with my own blood and toil. But I&amp;#039;ll take it. This is the car I&amp;#039;d always pretended my Miatas were, the Platonic sports-car ideal. In those brief moments, when all the stars align, the Elan is exquisite. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.roadandtrack.com/new-cars/first-drives/reviews/a21128/the-skeptics-perspective-1/>