“It’s just sooooo much better on coke, you just wouldn’t believe it, that’s how I prefer it, really, it’s so much better it almost isn’t worth doing it sober.” Though I remained professionally impassive behind my Prodesign 4360 eyeglasses, I was simply amazed at the story that my old high-school classmate was telling me over a few drinks. Back in 1986, she’d been just another quiet, reasonably pretty girl, and in the present day she’s a suburban housewife with the requisite $70,000 Toyota and the mandatory country club memberships. In between, however, she’d apparently done some pretty crazy stuff, including a couple of cocaine-laced three-way weekend throwdowns in Las Vegas. “You go to Vegas for your car thingies, don’t you?” she inquired, her nostrils flaring in Proustian sympathy.

“Er, not any more I don’t,” I hastily replied. Twenty minutes later I was quite deliberately out the door, heading home on my little Honda motorcycle, and feeling quite square. Not my kind, dear. I’ve never done cocaine. Never plan to. But it seems like every woman I meet nowadays has climbed a veritable Everest of the stuff. Was I missing something? To find out, I decided to ask my resident expert on kink, drugs, department-store clothes-shopping, and all other things vaguely disreputable.

“I suppose sex might be better on cocaine the first few times,” the infamous Vodka McBigbra told me as I knelt in my driveway, scrubbing bugs off my Boxster’s smudged 3M nose shield, “but every guy I ever saw who used coke to enhance sex ended up giving up the sex in order to focus more intently on the coke, you know? There’s just never enough of it, you understand? There are these great hits, but then there just isn’t enough. I don’t think you understand.”

Oh, sweetheart, but I do understand. After all, I’m an automotive journalist.

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Once upon a time, Land Rover was a classic British marque and I counted myself proud to have taken delivery of not one (which is mere interest), not two (which is simple optimism), but four new Discoveries and Range Rovers in my twentysomething years.

Now, of course, the “Britishness” of LR is a marketing angle, designed to con the “punters” into parting with increasingly ridiculous amounts of cash for ever more nouveau-friendly vehicles such as the absurd Range Rover Sport HSE Luxury. To make that Britishness more palatable, Land Rover has “formalised” a relationship with the crazy people who used to make the Bowler Wildcat.

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Interested in meeting your least favorite TTAC author? Perhaps you’re a fan of my unique lyrical styles, or you’re a lonely female journalist stuck on the West Coast with a boyfriend who plays Goth music through a Les Paul that isn’t even from the f**king Custom Shop. Maybe you’re one of the GM forum loons who nearly crashed your ’96 Grand Am GT automatic into a Jersey barrier when you saw that my awesome article on the Crapillac ATS was translated into German, complete with fun illustrations, and now you want to choke me with the power of your massive, Cavalier-tattooed biceps. Failing all that, perhaps you’d like to appear in the next TTAC video?

Good news! I am doing an international tour during the next two weekends!

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Did you miss “HyperFest” this past weekend? If you did, then you missed out on what is turning out to be a genuinely American tradition: road racing, drifting, beer, open lapping, brawling, bikini contests, and general debauchery, all held at Summit Point’s outstanding Main Course.

The video above shows an incident that had everybody talking: a high-speed meeting with Bambi on the front straight. But wait, as the AutoBiWeek people say, there’s more.

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Two years ago, we met the five-liter Mustang at Summit Point’s Shenandoah course and pronounced it to be an outstanding track car with perhaps too emphatic a nod of the head to the bare-bones aesthetic. This year, we have a 2013-model five-liter with the same performance equipment but another eight thousand dollars’ worth of options […]

Yes, that’s a real race car, and it’s expected to turn an LMP2-prototype-level laptime despite having tires that are just four inches wide and a 300-horsepower, four-cylinder, direct-injection-turbo engine.

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When I was a young pup shucking out new Willow Green 1995 Explorer XLTs at MSRP or close to it, the Explorer Sport was the unwanted, low-markup, undesirable-demographic, showroom-poison, short-wheelbase, ugly-duckling, obvious-descendant-of-the-Bronco-II, credit-criminal-friendly… oh, you get the idea, right? Nobody wanted them and we didn’t bother to stock them in any quantity.

Those days are long gone, and so is the two-door SUV; the last short-wheelbase Explorer to darken a dealer’s floorplan left the factory over a decade ago. Now, Explorer “Sport” means six-cylinder Ecoboost.

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senna3x @RacerJones I got an email from you-know-who last night. They want to buy my ID lol

RacerJones @senna3x No way. I guess they’re tired of people ignoring their new-user shills and sponsored conversations. Might as well try to buy names everybody knows and use those names to market stuff, right? Did you sell, or am I still talking to an actual human being?

senna3x @RacerJones no I’m holding out for more cash lol still an #actualhumanbeing or lets make that #ahb lolz

RacerJones @senna3x tell you what. If you-know-who is trying to buy #thecrew out, we should start putting #ahb on every post. So everyone knows we haven’t sold out.

TDIRiotGrrl @RacerJones @senna3x count me in #ahb #ahb #ahb for lyfe! #thecrew #nosellout

From his seat in his half-height cube, covering his screen carefully with his broad shoulders against walk-by supervision, surrounded by color-printed shots of Evolutions in full rally flight and one of his now-departed Evo IX just caressing a cone at that one autocross he did a long time ago, Jones snickers. Actual Human Beings. That’s what they are now. Him, Senna, Riot, KeyzerVTEC, about ten other people. They started using #thecrew around the time things the original writers left and things got “awesome”. As the old-time posters abandoned the site in droves, #thecrew has come to represent the old-school people, the ones who know the way things used to be. #thecrew. Now, they can add #ahb. For, he supposes, lyfe.

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This is the companion piece to yesterday’s pilot episode of our new video series. Did you watch it yet? If you didn’t, why not? Don’t you know that my son needs to eat? Have you no heart? Have you no sense of decency Sir, at long last? — JB Context, to distort the phrase, is […]

Sourcing Canadian-market Fits from China instead of Japan is about one thing and one thing only: the globalization of the automotive business. Look, we’ve got Camaros made in Ontario, Nissans from Tennessee and Fiats—yes, Fiats—made in Mexico, so a Fit from China shouldn’t be a surprise. In this case, if globalization allows Honda Canada to be more profitable and employ more Canadians, then it’s all upside, isn’t it?

So says my occasional competitor and racing partner Brian Makse in his recent review of a Chinese-built Fit. Brian notes that Fits sold south of the Windsor strip clubs continue to be sourced from Japan. If Honda knows what’s good for them, they will keep it that way.

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General Motors’ decision to reanimate the corpse of the Saturn Vue for rental fleets was not entirely scorned by the always-practical B&B, so your humble author has been keeping an eye out for any news regarding the Captiva “Sport”. Now, thanks to automotive industry consultant and wrongly accused Lexus-smasher Seung “Mel” Min Yu, I have some news about the pricing for GM’s insider auction of low-mileage Captivas, as well as some information regarding the imminent arrival of Captivas at your local dealer.

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Will the Scion FR-S drift? My opinion could be summed up as: who cares? Drifting ain’t fast, yo.

Consumer Reports, however, has decided to answer this question with the same diligence they usually reserve for toaster duty-cycle measurement. In the above video Jake Fisher handbrakes his way to glory in the little Toyobaru. This is a sequel to a similar, and well-received, Subaru BR-Z test.

If nothing else, the video buries the image long-cultivated by Car and Driver, among others, that the CR guys are a bunch of lab-coat dipsticks who are too busy compiling reliability data to have any fun.

TTAC will have an FR-S track test video coming up in the next few weeks. Don’t look for me to showboat the car. For that, apparently, you’ll need to visit America’s most-respected consumer advocacy publication.

It’s the end of an era, as perhaps the best of the remaining American color car rags moves from Newport Beach to Ann Arbor. As the slightly snobby California counterpart to Motor Trend‘s unhappy mediocrity and Car and Driver’s wild swings between brilliance and boorishness, Road & Track has always provided pleasant, well-illustrated automotive content with a motorsports focus. No doubt part of that was due to the magazine’s distance from the Detroit manufacturers and its proximity to West Coast racetracks and the car-club culture.

No longer. Hearst Corporation is choosing to geographically merge R&T with C/D, and just in case there’s someone out there who isn’t getting the memo about what’s expected, they’re changing leadership as well.

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Have you ever been driving behind some random stranger and just wished that person could take control of your car while you read a book? Me neither, but Europe is apparently full of people who are interested in doing just that. The EU’s Project SARTRE has pioneered the concept of “road trains” in public trials for about half a year now. Their latest test was the most ambitious yet — and it was apparently a complete succcess.

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This to me is a classic case of the corporate world trying to flex its muscle on the “nobodies”. Is the MOCA the appropriate place for this kind of flexing? Of course not …or is it? Giving the power of curation and enforcement of corporate policies on an exhibition and venue like this is not the way it is supposed to go down. Is MOCA a car lot? Is MOCA a venue for advertisements where the interests of the brand comes before the art? Who empowered them to simply go around and pluck whatever art out of the show to throw in the trash? I made this art on my own dime, traveled down there on my own dime, displayed it on my own time.

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