“It’s nice to be liked,” my future third wife Liz Phair sings, “but it’s better by far to get paid.” When your humble author began a vigorous program of auto-media meta-criticism under the guidance of the august Robert Farago a few years ago, I expected to be hated by my peers, and I was. I expected to be shunned by the industry PR people, and I was. I even feared I might be the subject of underhanded personal attacks designed to cost me my job, my home, and my ability to feed my son, and I wasn’t disappointed in that, either. The only thing I didn’t expect was to be emulated.

Now we have the nice folks at FORTUNE doing their own meta-critical review-the-reviewers, complete with double helpings of cynicism and supposition. Their target: The new Chevrolet Malibu ECO. They credit TTAC’s own Michael Karesh with being “an early sign that consensus was building” on the car. And the verdict?

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Are we all Moose Test experts by now? Presumably so. TTAC has covered Moosegate from the perspective of a skeptical American and an indignant German so far, and now there’s more (moose) fat to chew.

Yesterday, I sent this email to Rabe Mattias at Teknikens Varld:

Thank you for contacting us to provide the full details on your test.

Can you offer an opinion or theory as to why the Grand Cherokee
repeatedly displayed the wheels-up behavior during your testing but
did not display the same behavior during Chrysler’s observations?
Thank you!

We didn’t get a response. Here’s what we did get:

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Sometimes, the Ford Facebook pages bring you horrifying news like “We commissioned Tanner Foust, Vaughn Gittin Jr., Brian Deegan, Ken Block, and other amazing drivers to take the Focus ST through its paces against competitors for our upcoming video series dubbed, ‘ST Sessions.'”

If the thought of indirectly paying those four, ah, individuals to “hoon” by purchasing a new Focus ST hasn’t completely made you lose your appetite, there’s now some actual news regarding the car to share:

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TTAC contributor-by-virtue-of-being-related-to-a-contributor “Bark M.” is in New York this week, without his new Boss 302, and sends this shot taken through the dealership window at Manhattan Jeep-Chrysler-Dodge. (Read More…)

Canadian auto-photo-guru Gary Grant reminds his colleagues that

Every now and then, mainstream media types who aren’t used to being around race cars show up to get video of the action as part of the daily local news. If organizers aren’t careful, these folks sometimes put themselves in dangerous places because they just don’t know what dangers exist for them.

Clearly, nobody told this guy that you can’t stand on the edge of the pavement during a drift event. TTAC’s upcoming Genesis R-Spec v. FR-S v. Mazda MX-5 video will, however, have plenty of footage shot by guys who were brave enough to lie down at the apex of Toronto Motorsports Park’s fast corners and let me buzz ’em. The difference? They were facing the action!

When I agreed to meet Hooniverse Editor-In-Chief Tim at Buttonwillow for an open trackday, I hadn’t fully considered what it would mean to coach in a 1964 Ford Falcon. To begin with, the car doesn’t have five-point belts; it has two-point belts. That’s right. Lappies only, no shoulder. And the bench seat moved from ratchet-stop to ratchet-stop in every turn, sometimes twice. Oh yeah, and there was the fact of vintage crash “safety” to consider. (The shot around 1:10 is particularly cringe-inducing.)

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The blogosphere has been buzzing for the past two days over a test conducted by Swedish auto rag Teknikens Varld, in which a new Jeep Grand Cherokee nearly rolled over. The so-called “moose test”, which purports to simulate a 40mph swerve-avoidance maneuver, made Teknikens Varld world-famous in 1997 when it caused the then-new Mercedes A-Class to roll over. Although the magazine was able to coax some pretty acrobatic behavior out of a Toyota truck in 2007, the news that compact pickups can roll over in certain situations didn’t exactly shock the globe.
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Two Chevrolets in a rental lot And sorry I could not thrash ’em both And be one reviewer, but I got The Cruze first, figuring I could not Fail, given Impala fleet sale growth To find one at another time and Compare them, though GM liked it not, Face to face and back to back […]

When did Americans start thinking the car-guy grass was greener on the other side of an ocean? Was it Tokyo Drift that did it, or was it David E. Davis’ thinly-veiled advertising copy for the BMW 2002 in the pages of the as-yet-un-revered Car and Driver? Perhaps it was the majestic Mercedes W108 that turned the trick, or James Dean’s Porsche, or the image of the overpaid, oversexed American aviator carelessly flinging an MG down a British B-road in the Lend-Lease era.

Regardless of when it happened, we all know that it did happen. Nearly every young automotive enthusiast wishes he could drive the ‘Ring, storm the Stelvio Pass, or deliver some tofu in a sticker-speckled hachi-roku. We’ve all imagined ourselves as steely-eyed arbiters of lane discipline on the Autobahn or standing-mile madmen nonchalantly betting a hundred grand on our chances down an Armco-lined two-lane on the dismal outskirts of Moscow.

Don’t be fooled. The United States of America has been, and continues to be, the greatest place in the world for a regular guy (or girl) to fall in four-wheeled love. Here’s why.

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The McLaren MP4-12C may be a supremely competent and accomplished sporting supercar, but only someone with a creepy, shiny-vinyl Lewis Hamilton signature Vodafone pit-crew shirt would pick one over the Ferrari 458 or Lamborgini Gallardo. It’s a bland, generic-looking wedge that was named after a secret “performance factor” number using calculations known only to McLaren. Not since Pontiac named a car the “6000STE” has nomenclature been so uninspiring, and since the Audi R8 offers twice the visual drama for about half the money it’s easy to see why the MP4-12C isn’t exactly setting the world on fire. The old SLR “McMerc” may have been a claustrophobic sauna that was frighteningly vulnerable to its much cheaper SL65 AMG sibling in a straight line and at risk from the even more prole-oriented SL55 AMG around a racetrack, but at least it looked like something interesting.

Just like the SLR, however, the MP4-12C is being top-chopped to pique a bit of consumer interest. It must absolutely grind the gears of the faceless androids working at the McLaren Technology Centre that they have to add eighty-eight pounds of folding hardtop to their marquee road car, just to make sure the average Russian gangster puts one in the garage next to his Aventador, but as the English say: “Needs must when the devil rides”.

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You can tell it’s a slow news day when something like this gets so much traction across the blogosphere. Puritalia, a brand-new Italian company which claims to be able to build, like, whatever car you could imagine, has taken the wraps off a picture of a “427” roadster. Although they claim to be inspired by Shelby, there’s another possibility which is in no way undermined by the odd fin-and-gill-like structures on the fender. (Read More…)

I remember sitting on the pitlane wall at VIR in November of 2009, head in my hands, absolutely freaking out. In my Koni Challenge debut, I’d run about two seconds a lap behind my teammates Randy Pobst and 2008 series champion Jamie Holtom. The data said the difference was entirely confined to Turns 9 and 10, but no matter what I tried in those turns to fix the gap, it wasn’t good enough. I’d been pushed off the Climbing Esses by a GS-class Porsche 911, I’d struggled with brakes that were so bad Holtom refused to drive the car after me for more than two laps without a rotor change, and I had the distinct feeling that I’d let my team, Grand-Am champions Compass360, completely down.

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I come to bury Motor Trend’s Scott Evans, not to praise him. Scratch that: Jalopnik’s Matt Hardigree already dug and filled Mr. Evans’ grave with a double sprinkling of schadenfreude. It’s old news. Not that I don’t personally chuckle every time GM deliberately stacks their event with yes-men and useful idiots, only to see one of those puppets smash the Chinese wheels right off one of their press-trip whips, but it’s happening often enough now that it’s no longer particularly interesting.

Rather, I have a more noble purpose in mind: I want to make sure that the average TTAC reader won’t ever trash a car on the street the way Evans did. We’ll examine Scott’s version of the events, consider the likely truth of that version, and explain how he could have prevented the accident.

Before we do any of that, however, I have an extremely unusual story to tell: it’s the one about the journalist who backed off from the edge and didn’t wreck the car.

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The inimitable Ross Bentley likes to say that every driver, at every level of wheel-to-wheel competition, is a team leader. It follows, therefore, that auto racing is a team sport. In any team sport, a good system beats a great talent at least nine times out of ten, usually more. Michael Schumacher won because he built great teams, not because he could do something behind the wheel that others couldn’t. The same is true of Jimmie Johnson in NASCAR, or of the Audi efforts at LeMans.

When I’ve been drinking, or when I am trying to bore a woman into a state so comatose that she no longer has the will to resist, I like to tell the story of how I once drove from the Solo Nationals in Topeka, KS to Flat Rock, MI nonstop, jumped in my team’s Toyota Supra, and in the course of a three-hour stint promptly took us from third place to winning the 24 Hours of LeMons by 57 laps — the greatest margin of victory in series history, as far as anybody seems to know.

It’s a fun story, if you’re easily amused, and like any other story of endurance racing it’s chock-full of little dramas — the thugs from Car and Driver putting a previously-retired car back on track just to try to hit me, a failure of radio communication, Tony Swan’s mental failure and subsequent wall-smacking after I stepped on his throat with some horrifyingly aggressive but contact-free racing. It was a great victory and I’m still pleased to remember it five years after the fact.

Our team really didn’t win because of anything I did, however. We won because they were planning and executing a strategy while I was still packing up my brother’s RX-8 in Topeka. That strategy won the race, and I keep trying to share it with people… but nobody really wants to listen.

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Does the new 991 need more power? After all, in addition to the inevitable (and mandatory) color-mag fellatio you’d expect, it’s already impressed Brendan McAleer at a Porsche-operated press event and squeaked out a narrow victory over a Mustang GT in an impromptu challenge at Summit Point’s Shenandoah course.

In the days when Porsche was a manufacturer of sports cars, rather than a purveyor of two-ton plasti-metallic pig-mobiles doing the occasional sporting car for purposes of brand enhancement, its policy of continuous improvement meant that each year’s 911 was better than the last. Nowadays, however, the company sets out its marketing objectives and molds the product to suit.

Witness: the new 991 Powerkit.

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