Last year, Volkswagen decided to hand a truly spectacular insider freebie to the fellow who runs a popular VW owners’ forum: an all-expenses-paid race in the TDI Cup at Road America. The TDI Cup is meant to be a talent showcase for twentysomething novice drivers whose parents can come up with $45,000 and all related expenses, but VW waived all the age, talent, financial, and racing-resume requirements for our forum friend.

Prior to the event, several people asked me “How’s he gonna do?” My iron-clad prediction was that he would finish DFL, and that would only be because there’s no place in a race behind DFL. I’d only met the guy once, but I’d seen the video which is freeze-framed above, and that was enough for me to play amateur odds-maker. In this video, we repeatedly see him “shuffle-steer”. Shuffle-steering is a word for what most of us do on the street every day: change the position of our hands on the steering wheel while turning. It’s comfy, it’s useful for downtown parking, and I find it to be very useful when I’m texting on back roads, but on a racetrack, it is the mark of the chump.
(Read More…)

Now it can be told, more than twenty years after the fact. This recent kid-smashing-up-press-car incident has caused me to think about my own misspent youth and the potential parallels between it and that of Little Lord Cheney. My father was a decorated war hero rather than a demoted war reporter, and when I crunched the nose of my first car my dad responded by taking away my license for an entire year and forcing me to ride a bicycle to my job washing dishes from 8pm to 2am at the local pizza-delivery place. He also made me learn how to drive on his stick-shift BMW 733i, so I never had the chance to drive a car through a garage door.

Still, I can point to a few incidents of damn-the-torpedos bad judgment in my teen years, and perhaps my favorite one was the day I found myself behind the wheel of a brand-new BMW 750il and decided to take a shot at one hundred and fifty-five miles per hour.
(Read More…)

The auto-journo world has been a-Twitter all night about the journo’s kid who crashed a 997 Turbo.. The actual “crash” doesn’t amount to much (about fifteen grand in damage to car and house, most of it covered by insurance) but the article Peter Cheney wrote to describe the incident provides some near-priceless insight into the manner by which automotive “journalism” has become PR by another name.

(Read More…)

As I exit Turn Eleven at Summit Point Raceway’s twisty, concrete-lined “Shenandoah” course, I’m confronted with a rare opportunity to put my money where my mouth has been. In a review of the 2011 Mustang GT 5.0, I perhaps foolishly opined that “C5 Z06 pilots will need to find a twisty road lest they be […]

Everybody knows a “Mr. Euro”. Hell, you may even be “Mr. Euro” to your friends. Mr. Euro is the guy who, for some reason, wants the cars he cannot have in the United States. He’s the guy who says he would drive a 520i “in a heartbeat” given the chance, the dude who thinks we’re […]

I’m going down to Memphis Where they really playin’ the blues I’m going down on Beale Street And have a good time like I choose “Thank you for coming to Budget. I have you booked for a Kia Optima.” “The hell you do.” “That is a full-size car as you requested.” “Well, in that case, […]

I was born in the city A city with no shame And when I play guitar They all know my name Well, as fate would have it, they only really know my name at the local restaurant where I play lunch gigs on my Gibson CS-336. I don’t consider myself a blues man, but I […]

Powered By Ford. There’s something special about those words, something iconic, something that evokes a grand American scope, from the first cross-country trips in a Model T to a majestic GT40 hammering down the rain-soaked Mulsanne straight. Powered by Ford. It’s the logo stamped into the cam covers of the five-liter Mustang, but you won’t […]

“Hey there!” “Excuse me?” “Ain’t that one of them Ay-cord koops?” “Why, yes it is. Aren’t you sporting the hairstyle commonly referred to as a ‘mullet’?” “I sure am! Good enough for Brian Bosworth, it’s good enough for me. Is that Ay-cord fast?” “It has 271 horsepower.” “Well, shucks! Mah Mustang here done got Three. […]

[Ed: part one of this piece can be found here]

Six hours of completely sober sleep! As I arrived at Laguna Seca for a double race day in the Skip Barber MAZDASPEED Challenge, I felt like a new man. It’s customary for most club race days to start with practice sessions, but Skip Barber chooses instead to put the drivers in their trusty Econolines for a morning ride-and-coach session. My rather humbling lack of pace on Saturday — two full seconds a lap behind the leaders — led me to take this one seriously.

(Read More…)

As far as publicity stunts go, it was an outstanding one. No doubt inspired by the many stories of “10/10ths driving” out there in the motoring press, Skip Barber decided to hold a media-only round of its MAZDASPEED Challenge, dubbing said race the “Skip Barber Media Challenge”. The purpose of this event would be to determine the fastest journalist in North America. Unfortunately, it didn’t really happen that way.

(Read More…)

The fastest car I have ever driven is, without a doubt, the Switzer P800 variant of Porsche’s 911 GT2, as reviewed here. The folks at TPC have a roughly similar tuning package that retains the Porsche variable-geometry turbochargers, claimed to produce 775 horsepower and rather amusingly called the “775 Blitzkrieg”. This past September, I had […]

As a child, I owned something called the Lego “Expert Builder Car”. It was a fascinating product. From one box of a thousand or so Lego pieces, it was possible to build many different kinds of cars, up to and including a two-seat roadster with a working transmission. Top-notch fun, and if Lego eventually took […]

It would be difficult to conceive of a vehicle better-suited to demonstrating TTAC’s diversity of automotive reviewers than the massive and massively outrageous Ford Raptor. Robert Farago would have eviscerated it with a zero-star diatribe on the inadvisability of building three-ton boutique trucks with borrowed funds. Sajeev Mehta would rhapsodize about the graphics but demonize […]

It is said of Frank Lloyd Wright that he was an unbelievably annoying and offensive man; worse than that, every home he ever built ended up with a leaky roof. More than eight years ago, the first major gathering of North American TT owners took place, not at a racetrack or in the banal confines […]