A guest at Drink requested a tequila and Scotch cocktail. I was a little thrown by that since folks that want agave and smoke usually just opt for mezcal, but I set off to craft something on the fly in an Old Fashioned direction. I was still thinking of the Vaquero's Suze-Benedictine combination, and I supplemented some of the sweetness with honey syrup. For a name, I later dubbed this the Devil's Highway after the Luis Alberto Urrea book.

One night, I was inspired to create a drink based off of my luck with the honey, Amaro Montenegro, and lemon combination in the Golden Ticket and the much weirder All of Freud's Beautiful Women. Like the latter's inspiration, I had just come back from an art expedition with this one being at Fruitlands. There was a statue there called Clown by sculpture Joseph Wheelwright, and that got me thinking of the term clown car. Somehow I landed upon the split base of Fernet Branca and Campari known as a Ferrari shot, and that is perhaps how the name stuck given the vehicular theme with a lot of flavor packed into it. Instead of a liqueur component to stretch out the Gold Rush/Bee's Knees structure, I opted for passion fruit syrup which worked great with honey in the Don's Special Daiquiri. Moreover, passion fruit complemented Campari in cocktails like the Novara and Fernet in the Sea Beast. Without realizing it until later, I had previously put the trio together in the Cornerman. Links to those drinks in the source reference URL.

Jack’s Manual of Recipes for Fancy Mixed Drinks and How to Serve Them: A Pre-Prohibition Cocktail Book. By J. A. Grohusko

A variation on a Paris Manhattan, which was first served to us in Terminal A, J.F.K. airport