For only $195, you can run a “twilight” session at Mid-Ohio on Wednesday evenings. Given that I wanted to turn respectable times in Thursday’s Grand-Am test day, it seemed like a no-brainer. Until, that is, my ride in the Continental Challenge fell through due to the unavailability of my co-driver. Since I’d already paid for the Wednesday, I loaded up, (with a set of Hoosier A3S05 autocross tires) headed out, and arrived on Wednesday night to find precisely three cars signed up for evening practice. Neither of the others (a track-prepped M3 and a Nissan GT-R) would be running quite at my pace, but they wouldn’t be far off it, so once I passed them I wouldn’t see them again for most of the session.

Driving around a track all by yourself is an interesting thing to do, particularly if you honor the request of the Mid-Ohio School and do not directly time your laps. How do you know if you’re doing well? How do you determine how hard to push? And when you see a Viper come in on the flatbed right before your session with the rear end basically torn off (I have photos, but I want to protect the driver’s privacy), what does that do to your mindset? As it turns out, there’s another situation which is very similar to this one: amateur endurance racing.
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The comments on yesterday’s review of the Caprice Classic Estate reminded me how fundamentally deep the Ford-vs-Chevy rivalry is among American auto enthusiasts. Even in the modern era, when both iconic brands are on the run from Toyota, Hyundai, and (soon) the Chinese, there’s still time to catch one’s breath and take a swing at the other guy.

So. The “Panther” platform is scheduled for termination within the next year or so. The General Motors B-body departed nearly a decade and a half ago. There will likely never be another American car of the size and proportions of those two. Which was your favorite? My thoughts, and a link to a credible source, after the jump.

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Donk, Box, Bubble. Say it with me now. Donk, Box, Bubble. And thus the full-size General Motors “B-body” exists in the argot of the urban street. The Donk is the long, flowing, Baroque fifth-generation Impala and its platform twins, sold from 1971 to 1976. The Box is the tidy 1977 model, downsized to perfect, squared-off proportions. To this day, I am not certain that there is a cleaner visual expression of the American full-sized car than the 1977 Impala. Last but not least, we have the Bubble, as seen above. The Bubble was sold as the Caprice Classic (and Impala SS) from 1991 to 1996.

This is my Bubble. Or, I should say, was my Bubble, a casualty on one of the many nameless hills and dimly remembered battles which characterized my marriage. Purchased for $1200 with fifty thousand miles on the clock, it was quiet, reliable, and characterful to a fault. I loved that car. But the boss said I could not own three full-sized cars (I also had two Phaetons at the time) so the Bubble had to be popped.
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OSB. “Other Sports Beckon”. It’s what Skip Barber instructors reportedly used to write on the report cards of utterly feckless driving students. While the phrase may be long gone, the attitude persists among the instructing community that some people just shouldn’t be in the car. I often hear instructors at various events talking about just how horrible/dangerous/contemptible their students are. That’s not right. We are supposed to be coaching the driver to his or her best possible performance, not humiliating them by listing their flaws.

With that said, some drivers present an active danger to themselves, and to their instructors, on the racetrack. I’ve come up with a few guidelines to keep you, the reader, from becoming one of those people, should you decide to give this open-track business a whirl.

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I do not know precisely when I became an itinerant. For a long time, I traveled the Midwest racing bicycles. When I was too crippled to race a bike I changed to cars. Some years I am gone from home more than half the weekends of the year, racing cars and teaching at various trackday events. I am on the road four days a week at a minimum in my day job anyway.

Constant motion distorts time, preventing one from seeing the growth of flowers or children. It distorts perspective, focusing attention on the next event and blurring what comes after or came before. It distorts relationships. Friends exist on the phone and the Web. We never touch or meet, comets locked on disparate orbits. A contrail of romantic episodes crystallizes to angry ice in the sky behind me. “I should have known,” an e-mail in my inbox reads, “that nothing you ever told me was real, or true.”

This is what is real and true: the next racetrack and the road to get there.

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I could bore you all with the long story of how I ended up in the check-cashing business — it involved an attack with a broomstick and a coffee mug — but instead we will simply join the action in medias res some time in 1996. I am standing on the used-car lot outside Welsh […]

In my off-site review of the Porsche Panamera Turbo, I wrote

After years of reminding auto enthusiasts that pure power and performance numbers don’t make for a perfect car, Porsche has gone ahead and proved the point themselves.

So. Take a sedan which is primarily notable for its racetrack performance… and remove that performance. What do you have? You have the Porsche Panamera V6.

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So where were we? Oh yes. After wandering the earth (and working in a call center) for the first few months of 1995, I ended up at a very small Ford dealership located in the heart of Columbus, Ohio. On my first day, I was paired with another fellow who was also starting out at […]

“We need young, college-educated people like you,” the man said, “because the old way of selling cars is dead and gone. That’s why I was hired — to bring the dealership into the present day.” And with those thoroughly self-deceived words, the new sales manager at “Infiniti Of Columbus” welcomed to me to the team […]

As a nameplate, Lexus is now old enough to consume alcohol in all fifty states. Make no mistake, though: the brand Lexus has become is not the brand it was perhaps originally intended to be. Toyota and Nissan each launched with a (mostly) clean-sheet big V8 sedan and a warmed-over home-market showroom filler. For Nissan, […]

Are those people wasting their time, or do they provide the necessary base for the racing pyramid? This question was asked by a reader in my recent piece about racing an ARCA Tempo, and I think it’s worth discussing for a moment despite the fact that autocross-related articles have consumed enough electrons on the ‘Net to cause jealousy among the folks who operate the Large Hadron Collider.

I will start off by freely admitting that autocross is an area where I do not particularly excel as a driver. In the right car, on the right track, I’m nearly as fast as anyone in the business and I have the track records and wins to prove it. In my single season of National-level SCCA autocross, however, I finished slightly above midpack in three Tour events and almost exactly midpack in the Solo Nationals PAX Index. My modest gift as a driver is a willingness to accept a little bit of danger, which means I frequently find a little more velocity in high-speed corners around racetracks. In autocross, that’s a useless skill. My weakness as a driver is temper, which makes me a solid passer but absolutely abysmal third-run autocrosser.

Since I’m the closest thing TTAC (or nearly anybody else in the autoblogging world) has to a National-level cone-chaser, however, I’ll talk a bit about what autocross is and what it is not.
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What is that car? Some of you will figure it out immediately, while the rest will want to sneak a peek at the end of this article. Regardless of the make and model, here’s what it is: it’s a race car that competes in an entry-level ARCA series. No longer street legal. Not even close. Since it’s a race car, it uses (some) racing safety equipment. That’s all well and good. There’s a problem, however. In the past couple of years, I’ve seen more and more drivers incorporating “harness bars”, four-or-five-point belts, and other racing-style accessories in their street/trackday cars. Those people are risking their lives, and if you’re one of them, you should keep reading.
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It was a gloomy April afternoon when I “won” my first “race”. Hours before, I had stood among a nervous, shuffling group of men as Tommy Byrne, the mercurial, self-destructive, and inhumanly talented Competition Director of the Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course, had explained what we would need to do to survive his “comp school”: Don’t […]

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Formula One is back in the United States starting in 2012. This time, it’s Austin, TX which has decided to pay crazy Bernie his crazy dollars. Presumably this will be a street course, as nobody has spotted Hermann Tilke crawling through the desert with a bulldozer to remove all possible elevation changes from a potential track site.

Your humble author happened to be in attendance for the infamous six-car “Michelin race” which happened in 2005. I cleared out before the final lap, which turned out to be the right choice as there were a few post-race incidents. The drive out was surreal; locals had quickly made “F1 IS FAKE RACING” and “F1 SUCKS” cardboard signs. Still, I would recommend a trip to the USGP for anyone who hasn’t seen the F1 circus.

Story via Formula 1