SUSPENSIONS UNLIMITED:
Dune Buggy Son of a Beach!
By: Mike Marino
Let's face it, in Southern California, lifes a beach! It's a giant outdoor sand and dirt playground that Scooby Do and rest of the cartoon gang could only dream about in this palm tree paradiso. However, thousands of real live dune dudes and dudettes have a fanatical passion for the reality of Claifornias plentiful playgrounds.
Dune buggy enthusiasts from around the world descend on southern California with a thirst for dirt and a hunger for heavy buggy metal and someone has to feed this need. One company in Ontario, California, just 90 minutes north of San Diego can rightfully claim the world championship title as "The Sand Toy Superstore"
Suspensions Unlimited and Ontario Off-Road are two companies under one roof with a whopping 45,000 square feet of showroom and service area that caters to the unique fuel injected machine mania that revs the adrenalin engines of dune buggy and dirt bike afficiandos from Riverside to Baja.
Once you enter the intoxicating world of the Dune Buggy Kingdom your face will light up like an overload of Las Vegas glitz, glamour and neon. You'll think you died and ended up in Dune Buggy Heaven. The accessory showroom has a dazzling display of buggy seats, buggy clothing and assorted buggy supplies. On display you'll find a wide range of sand eating machines to appeal to every taste from mid-engine two seaters up to deluxe five seat models.
If your hopped up on power, speed and maximum motorhead machismo, they have hopped up hotrod buggies that would bring a smile to the face of dragracing legend TV Tommy Ivo.
Don't be confused, these are not your grandfathers dune buggies either. Today the can include a communications system for passengers that would put NASA to shame. Want to crank it up? No problemo! You can get XM radio installed to kick out the jams while your kicking up sand. Models and prices do vary, however, you can get a sleek, sexy sand pro-ultralight for around $41,000 or feel free to spend more than that on larger or custom models. The only limitations are your imagination and of course your bank account.
Henry Ford may have invented the movabel assemblyline but Suspensions Unlimited has taken it to the outer limits. They have nine chassis tables for chassis building and custom creations. The raw tubing is sent out for shaping and a final coating and then sent back to the shop for assembly. The whole process takes about a day. They also take service seriously and can boast of a 5,000 square foot service department that is so well run it's like a professionally orchestrated symphony by maestro's of machinery.
Suspensions Unlimited and Ontario Off Road also has RV supplies and a dirt bike showroom with helmets, apparel and protective gear. So when you want to get down and dirty with dunes and dirt, and get into those offbeat offroad areas, do what the other dunesters do and head on into Suspensions Unlimited, The Sand Toy Superstore. Remember when you were a small kid you probably had a toy sandbox in the backyard that kept you amused for hours. Now, you're all grown up and your sandbox is now as big as the Sahara Desert..so your sand toys damn well be bigger too!
Classic Cars, Rock n' Roll, Elvis, Drivein Movies & Route 66! Kerouac, The Beats, Haight Ashbury, Easy Rider & Vietnam!
The Roadhead Chronicles goes from the Cold War Fifties Pop Culture of classic cars and rock n' roll to the spaced out Spare Change Sixties of Vietnam and Hells Angels. Not the usual look at the era, instead It's written by someone who lived it and spent a life of being on the road from his beach bum days in Honolulu to the glitz and dangers of the Sunset Strip in LA, and his purple hazed and double dazed days in North Beach and the Haight Ashbury in San Francisco. The Roadhead Chronicles also looks at the history of Route 66, Roadside Neon Culture and old diners and dives!
Mike Marino writes in an offbeat and irreverant style with a beat and a cadence that is all his own. His writing style has been compared to John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck and Terry Southern and one reviewer likened him to Frederick Lewis Allen on acid! Readers and critics call the book "wickedly wonderful", "delightfully weird" and "automotively sexy."!!
