Other than the AC/Shelby Cobra, which has been ineptly reproduced in horrifying bulk by various people up to and including Carroll Shelby, and Bentley, which for the past decade has been the unwitting target of a sustained global counterfeiting operation in which Volkswagen Phaetons are refitted with welded-up pairs of turbochaged VR6es and cross-eyed Kia Amanti front ends to make so-called “Flying Spurs”, no major automaker has been the subject of so much fakery as Ferrari. It’s not always as simple as Mister Twos pretending to be 360 Spyders. Some of the most controversial “fake Ferraris” started their lives as real Ferraris.

Now, a prominent Ferrari broker (and faker) says that the company is taking steps to prevent the sale of fake Ferraris, even (or perhaps especially) ones that originally hail from Maranello.

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Note: This is a sequel of sorts to The little death and as such contains adult language, sexual situations, and descriptions of illegal driving— JB

“I think this next turn is… oh, let’s guess and say right, shall we?” Of course, Sebastian knew perfectly well that the road curved right after the blind crest. He’d been driving these roads for twenty years, since he’d been a humiliatingly poor student in an eighty-one-horsepower Volkswagen, working in the cafeteria to make twenty bucks a week and then spending it on ninety-cent gasoline. Learning how to drive these hills one mistake at a time while his friends disappeared to Jackson Hole or Daytona Beach for the weekends or simply plowed their way through a couple of willing Tri-Delts back at the fraternity house. Sebastian had always been short the fifty-or-hundred-dollar buy-in needed for the parties and his presence had been resented there as a result. Easier to go for a drive. Sometimes he’d just driven until the VW had a gallon left before curling up in the back seat at one of the parks and sleeping until it was time to wake up and go to class. His Pirelli P4 tires had been thirty-eight bucks each after all the price-matching and with careful rotation they were good for a whole spring-to-fall before showing cords. Thousands of miles, at full-throttle, alone and untutored. He knew the roads, and he knew this one would curve right after the crest.

With this knowledge firmly in hand, he snagged fourth gear with a practiced insouciance and the Ferrari’s flat-crank V-8 belted him past one hundred and twenty miles per hour and the whole car went dizzyingly light over the hill and he kept his foot in it all the way down before stroking the silver 360 into ABS for the second-gear left-hander at the bottom. He chanced a look to the right and saw Katrien braced in the passenger seat, her long legs open and taut up to a pair of very short shorts, her makeup-free face shining, her lips parted slightly. Hey, kid, Sebastian laughed to himself, you didn’t know it, but the story you were writing twenty years ago ended pretty happily. Then it was time for third gear again and a quick step over the double-yellow, blowing by some hick family in a smoking-tailpipe minivan, and then both of them were laughing out loud, like children who had gotten away with something, safe and sound, all-ee, all-ee in free.

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It’s one of those too-good-to-be-true things that turns out to be true anyway: Volkswagen is sponsoring a fifty-freaking-dollar trackday at Summit Point’s Shenandoah Road Course. You need to be a VW owner and you need to bring that VW to the track. There are probably a few other little caveats and fine-print things in the registration as well, but generally this is what it sounds like: a stellar opportunity to get on-track with one of the best organizations in the United States.

Your humble E-I-C was scheduled to be an instructor at this thing, but I just got out of the hospital with some pretty fire-resistant pneumonia and I won’t be up to speed in time to come hang out. Have a good time without me, okay?

Three-plus years ago, your humble E-I-C pro tem was quite impressed by an 800-horsepower Nissan GT-R. After a couple of years racing in the NASA Performance Touring “E” class, where “big power” cars have 160 horses at the crank, having a chance to boot the proverbial ten-second car around for a while was quite a hoot.

At Switzer, however, I suspect they look at those old 800-horsepower days the way Justin Timberlake does at his N’SYNC records.

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From our friends over at the SCCA Solo program comes this brief film about Mitsubishi Evolution driver Tasha Mikko. It’s a nice feature about a very accomplished young woman, and if you’re kind of confused as to how a ProSolo event runs some of the footage might clear that confusion up for you. Check it out!

The English High Court is trying to stop it, but it’s hard to know how much authority they have over the upcoming USENIX Security Symposium. If, as I suspect, the answer is “None”, then attendees to that event will be treated to a presentation on how to break the Megamos Crypto system, the RFID-based immobiliser that prevents counterfeit and physically-copied keys, to say nothing of plain old “hot-wiring” at the ignition switch, from starting the Bentley Continental GT that, apparently, uses it.

Of course, some of you will have already considered that if the system is in use in the CGT, it’s in use in the Phaeton, and probably the Touraeg, as well. You’re right, and there are far more cars at risk than just those.

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TTAC might be one of the few places where the Lincoln brand continues to inspire passionate discussion. Whether it’s my open letter to the company or Derek’s dissection of the star-crossed MKZ, our Lincoln-related posts have been among the most widely read, and fervently discussed, ones on this site. People ’round these parts still care about the idea of American luxury automobiles and they’re unwilling to just forget about the brand the way we forgot about Curtis-Mathes or Florsheim after they sank beneath the waves of imported competitors.

One of the things that’s happened to Lincoln has been what I think of as story compression. For whatever reason, most people forty or under remember an extremely specific version of the company’s history that runs, chronologically, something like this: founded whenever, freaky old cars nobody bought, the car Morpheus rolled around in, the car Kennedy got shot in, the Continental Mark V, livery service in New York. There’s this perception that the only desirable Lincoln in history was that Elwood Engel Continental, and that impression is so pervasive that, when I read about John Coltrane’s demand for a Lincoln Continental, my mind automatically time-warped him into a black ’63, possibly right next to a trenchcoated Lawrence Fishburne.

I was wrong, of course.

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Your humble E-I-C pro tem recently had the chance to rallycross a WRC-engined Subaru in Texas and I enjoyed myself like you wouldn’t believe. More importantly, I met the Texas Rally Sport crew, which is even cooler than Toretto’s crew in the first F&F, although not quite as cool as any crew containing both Ludacris and Sung Kang.

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As Detroit’s own police force tells tourists that the city is too dangerous to enter and local judges use the city’s financial collapse to interview for jobs in the District of Columbia, many of its residents would surely like something a little more bullet-resistant than, say, a Chevy Sonic purchased at supplier discount. Many of Detroit’s residents have previously worked in quieter, safer locales like Kandahar or Kosovo and remember that the proper vehicle for such an environment is a nice, solid, low-mileage main battle tank. But where can such items be purchased? And where can newly-minted tank owners learn the skills they’ll need to operate yesterday’s armored equipment on tomorrow’s streets?

The answer is here, and it’s called Tank Town USA!

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It was in late March that I found myself among the disinfectant smells and cracked tiles of an oncology clinic in western New York. This was the clinic where TTAC contributor and long-time member of the B&B, David Drucker, lost his fight with cancer. This was the clinic where he faced his final shots at chemo, the poison burning his arm, the duct-taped old vinyl recliners in a row, the enforced stillness that must have been agonizing for a man whose quick fingers on the guitar and brilliant singing voice entertained everyone he met. In these dismal corridors, in the long walk from the cracked asphalt of the parking lot, in the elevator that creaked and groaned on the way up to the third floor. I didn’t get there in time. I arrived in western New York to find him already gone, his passing announced without fanfare by his son on Facebook along with a link to a video of his last public folk-music performance. It would have been the first time I met him in person; I’d “known” him for years through TTAC and Facebook, but I never shook the man’s hand, never heard his voice. This would have been the first time.

David would chide me any time I bought a new acoustic guitar. “Why didn’t you go to Maury’s?” he’d say. “It makes NO SENSE to buy a Martin from anywhere else.” Well, today Maury’s is selling some of the guitars that David owned and played. The proceeds will benefit his family, which suffered financially from the full-throttle assault of his cancer and its necessary treatments. So I’d like you to take David’s advice as well, and I’ll do my best to make it worthwhile.

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Thirty-four months ago, during a “Panther Appreciation Week” that strained the patience of TTAC readers to the breaking point as we celebrated the last full-sized sedan platform to be built in North America, I detailed my purchase of a 2010 Town Car Signature Limited with approximately 22,100 miles on the clock.

As you can see, the Town Car and I have been remarkably busy, racking up an average of seventy-six miles per day for every one of the days between then and now. During that time, I’ve averaged about 21.8 miles per gallon while enjoying Panther Love in what amounts to its final form. But what until you hear what’s broken in the last seventy-eight thousand miles.

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Can’t slip anything by you guys. Some of you have already noticed the TTAC Staff byline. Popular theories so far have ranged from sweatshop labor in an overseas basement to the sub rosa return of valued former editor-in-staff Bertel Schmitt. They’re all wrong.

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Every generation of Maxima has some fans — I’m partial to the bespoilered black ’87 five-speed my father drove for two years of my childhood — but the reputation of the nameplate is built almost entirely on the brilliant third-gen 1989 Max SE and the 1992 revision of that car that added a BMW-matching 190 […]

After the leadership change last week, we opened up some communication with Steve Lang about returning to TTAC. Most of our readers would like to see the man behind the gavel back in action here. Unfortunately, Mr. Lang is as tough a negotiator behind the scenes as he is on the gravel of a buy-here-pay-here lot. We’ll continue to work with him to return “Hammer Time” to these pages, but in the meantime Steve’s asked us to print his “final goodbye”. While we haggle with the man, you can find him at Curbside Classic. Cross your fingers! — JB

“Wow! How many people have you helped?”

My father was looking at an article I wrote about car buying during the last few months of his life. He was shocked to see how many folks here at TTAC left their insightful comments and ideas within a matter of a few hours.

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Clip has strong language

The domain name “thetruthaboutcars.com” was registered by Robert Farago on September 24, 2001. At the time, most of America was too busy with other concerns to notice. In the nearly thirteen years since, the site has had just three Editors-in-Chief. First, there was RF himself, tirelessly tearing away the façade at General Motors. Then, Ed Niedermeyer brought the site to new heights in readership and reach, speaking truth to power all the way to the White House itself. Finally, Bertel Schmitt provided the Best&Brightest with some truly unique insider information  and insight about automotive happenings from Frankfurt to Tokyo.

Welcome to the third changing of the guard. In the next thirty days, Derek Kreindler and I will completely and thoroughly reboot TheTruthAboutCars. Our predecessors molded the site in their image, but we will be molding it in yours. Towards that end, we’ve created a five-point-plan to fix what’s broken here and bring all of you back home to TTAC. If you have a few minutes, please read it — even if you’ve long since given up on this site and the people who run it.

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