Famed TTACer “Crabspirits” is known here for his “Last Rides” series, which culminated in this hugely imaginative and enjoyable tale. But did you know that he also builds minicars with LMP2-style power-to-weight ratios, thirty forward gears, and parts from actual fighter jets?

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“Ben. Wake up. Wake up, Ben.” He came swimming up from the depths of an indistinct but spectacularly troubling nightmare to find his mother sitting on his bed, fully dressed in one of her going-to-church outfits, makeup on, eyes wide and burning with that insane fire that meant trouble. She had pulled the sheets from him and he was conscious of the underwear he had outgrown, thin and worn-out. From before he’d gained a foot in height across six painful months. In gym class he used the toilet stall to change. “Guess what? Guess what, Ben. Guess what we’re doing today.” When she woke him like this, which happened every few days, Ben always had trouble getting his head together. What day was it? What had he forgotten? Or was this just what his dad used to call the illness, in his mother, or in him, or both of them?

It was Tuesday. October 15, 1985. The more he thought about it, the more certain he was. His alarm clock, which was perched perilously on the far end of the windowsill from him, was dark, but the window itself was light. Which meant she’d been in here before, earlier, and had unplugged the clock. He’d already missed the bus that picked him up in the dark, out with the other kids from the apartments. “Is the answer,” he snarled, trying to pull the sheets back up past her weight on the bed, “going to school?” Ben’s mother laughed and lay down on the bed facing him, her breath hot on his face, her scent an assault.

“Of course not! Today is the day Mommy gets a new car!”
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Yes, that’s right: it’s now easily possible to blow seventy thousand dollars or more on a two-liter, four-cylinder BMW sedan. The image you see above is not an attempt to make the most expensive 528i possible; it’s simply a car with most of the options. The ones you’d want, like the best sound system and the heated/cooled seats.

Of course, most of the cheapo Funfers you’ll see on the street won’t be loaded like this; they’ll be $53,000 Premium-Packaged specials designed to lease for $600 a month including tax. In other words, they’re base Delta 88s, and the one above is a Delta 88 Royale Brougham. BMW has become Oldsmobile circa 1973, the same way Mercedes-Benz has become Cadillac circa 1973. Were you alive for the Seventies? Did you enjoy the era? I hope you did, because it’s returning. Brougham is back, baby. With a vengeance.
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Image courtesy RallySportDirect

It came in the middle of a trip that verged on the surreal, and I didn’t think too much about it at the time, but it is possible that I was one of the last people to take a lap with Roger Miller around the track that bore his father’s name.

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They don’t call you guys the Best&Brightest for nothing, I tell ya.

When I complained that Mercedes-Benz was using Renault-sourced diesel engines in its small cars, one of our Deutschland-based readers disagreed with my “facts”. Which is fair, because I got my facts from a variety of US-based auto media, and he’s getting his from, well, Germany.
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An “unidentified buyer” in a “private transaction” reportedly acquired the 1963 TdF (not the bike race) winning Ferrari GTO for fifty-two million dollars.

Other GTO owners are fielding offers in the $40M to $50M range for their cars. If you are one of those people, this sale amounts to brilliant news and will no doubt give you an even greater sense of satisfaction at having purchased at prices ranging from $7500 (out of an old R&T classified) to $6M (the “ridiculous” price set during the previous collector-car bubble). For the rest of us, this is bad news — but not just because it means you’ll never see a LeMans Ferrari in LeMons.

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While your humble Editor-In-Chief was brake-torquing his mighty 560SL — about which more will be said in the near future — over to the liquor store to pick some Alizé for some morally-challenged females, Mercedes-Benz USA was holding quite a party for the CLA Press Drive. I’m reliably told it was the most upscale event in history to feature a vehicle priced head-to-head with the Ford Fusion. I’m also reliably told by the same people who told me about the event that the cheapest Benzo is the bee’s knees and just totally awesome in every respect.

We’ll see.

But there’s already one bit of off-message news emerging about the transverse-engined Teutonic travesty:
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“Would you like the damage waiver for just $30.99 per day?” “Absolutely.”

Last week, a group of motorcyclists “boxed in” a Range Rover on the freeway, apparently so they could “shut down” the road as part of a larger celebration. Alexian Lien, the Rover’s driver, struck a motorcyclist who brake-checked him; afterwards, he was chased into the city, dragged from his vehicle, and beaten savagely in front of his wife and two-year-old daughter. The District Attorney for NYC has elected not to prosecute the biker who allegedly smashed Lien’s window and dragged him out of the car for the beating, causing outrage around the country.

Now, new information has come out suggesting that the city may be willing to effectively cede control of its streets to those same bikers.
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Gorgeous, huh? She appeared in the night like a white-robed dream, resplendent in her restrained livery and requiring just four or five hours of work to be ready to race.

Problem was, the race had already started.
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Comments can be bad for science. That’s why, here at PopularScience.com, we’re shutting them off.

Well alright then!
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The Truth About Cars has long had an explicit editorial policy and tradition of not covering motorsports.

However, nobody ever said that we couldn’t go racing ourselves. For the first time in the site’s history, TTAC will be fielding a race team. And because we love our readers, we’re having a T-shirt made to commemorate the disaster occasion, and we will be giving those T-shirts away to our commenters.

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I have no idea why this happened. Bad pace notes, a navigator who was distracted by a bit of tail-out recovery. But no matter what started this incident at a Finnish road rally, the end is truly spectacular, and frightening.

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We called it on April Fools’ Day. Sort of, anyway. The new high-power XTS uses a twin-turbo 3.6L V-6 to twist out 410 torque-steering horsepower on its way to a C/D – tested 0-60 in 5.2 seconds and a quarter-mile in 13.5@105. (Naturally-aspirated Porsche owners should feel free to turn right at stoplights unless they have 3.8 liters or direct injection.)

Big, fast car. Well, kind of big. And kind of fast. But what are we supposed to call the thing?
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Caterham’s showing off the “Aero Seven” concept, its latest attempt to comprehensively update the idea of the Seven for the next generation of drivers. (Their last attempt, the Caterham 21, was not well received and ended up being discontinued.) In addition to showing this very polished and very modern-looking car, Caterham’s co-founder Tony Fernandes discussed some future product that falls well outside the company’s traditional mission.

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