According to my friends at WeLiveInOurParentsBasementAndTalkAboutRacingOnTheInternet.com, the Viper ACR is currently the ‘Ring record holder, having beaten the Lexus LF-A’s 7:14 mark.
It seemed suspicious that nobody had wasted a perfectly decent trip to Europe attacked the North Shu-Life-Uh lately, and our suspicions were confirmed when “DriveSRT” released the above video…
I received a press release from the Atlanta Motorsports Group this morning talking about their 2012 Speed World Challenge program. Press releases from SWC and Grand-Am teams usually boil down to one or two things: announcing recent race wins and/or crowing over the “signing” of drivers whose MASSIVE TALENT just happens to be accompanied by a half-million dollar budget courtesy of indulgent parents, a well-respected practice in the field of orthodontia, or smuggling bales of Acapulco Gold into short airfields in Texas.
This one was no different, except it had something in it about “MX-5 Cup Champion Michael Cooper.”
Wait a minute…
It’s probably fair to say that, of all the ridiculous Special Advertising Awards in the print rag business, the Car and Driver “10 Best” comes closest to being a legitimate honor. True, the years where the awards had to be split equally between “import” and “domestic” were kind of ridiculous, and the backslapping, manufacturer parties, and exchange of honoraria between C/D and the “winners” cast an unfortunate shadow of cronyism and back-room dealing over the whole thing, but it’s some order of magnitude more respectable than the “Car whose manufacturer bought the most ad space Of The Year”.
This year’s awards, like always, are predictable enough that most TTAC readers could guess most of them ahead of time. If you want to test your knowledge, go ahead and write ’em down then click the jump. You’ll be semi-wrong about one of them, however. This year, there’s one “surprise” that will either confirm or destroy your faith in the so-called “10 Best”…
I’ve linked to this before from TTAC, but what the heck. It’s Friday, and we gotta get down on Friday — JB
She’d entered our dealer principal’s office as a coltish, blinking young woman, stepping awkwardly in new high heels. Almost six feet tall, impossibly thin, painfully beautiful, wearing a purposely dowdy pantsuit. It was always fun to see the new dealer reps arrive from Ford; without exception they were tall, good-looking young men and women with impeccable degrees from Michigan universities, earnest Midwestern faces, and a charmingly naive sense of the world. They’d meet the dealer, a hard-assed former B-17 pilot who had built the dealership with his own hands, and they’d meet the general manager, a hulking man with a Mafioso’s hair and the easy yet malicious attitude of a professional assassin, and those two old bastards would grind ‘em into the ground. We enjoyed the show. Sure, these kids were on their way to six-figure salaries, a home in Bloomfield Hills, and the outrageously hedonistic life of a Detroit executive – but before they could make the big money, they’d have to take a beating from our guys. Of course, things were slightly different this time. Our dealer principal had recently handed over the daily operations to his phlegmatic, fortysomething son, whose demeanor and physique had long ago earned him the nickname “Droopy The Dog”. Droopy had insisted on seeing the Ford rep alone, probably hoping that he could earn some respect among the sales staff by beating up a twenty-three-year-old girl. Rumor said this meeting was to discuss an extra “allocation” – the amount of stock sent to each dealer on an annual basis. We all knew what we wanted from this girl – we wanted extra allocation of PowerStroke diesels, we wanted more three-quarter-ton trucks, and we wanted to become an SVT dealer. With any luck, Droopy would get the job done.
When she walked out of his door, the awkward young volleyball player had become a triumphant Valkyrie. She grinned at the assembled sales staff and strutted to her cream-colored Town Car Cartier. From colt to racehorse, in one meeting flat. Our general manager frowned, went into Droopy’s office, and slammed the door. Hushed voices turned loud, and before long the two men were screaming at each other. The rest of the salesmen had melted away by the time the door banged back open, leaving me to face the general manager alone. He looked at me and said,
“Aerostars. Aerostars! The bitch made him take four AEROSTARS!.”
Based on a Speed:Sport:Life article. Several TTAC readers have pointed out in the past that the “dollar theory” of tire traction fails to account for dynamic weight loads, so consider that pointed out up front — JB
It seems like yesterday, as the man sang, but it was long ago. In April of 2008 I ordered a new Audi S5 in a rather unique color — the “Lime Green” used by Porsche in 1973 and referred to as “Lime Green” and “Viper Green”. Not “Signal Green”, mind you: that’s a different color, with more blue, and less cheer, in the mix. The car arrived in September of 2008. I drove it for two years and 38,000 miles before selling it for approximately five grand more than “regular” S5s were fetching.
Long-time TTACers know that it’s usually possible to request your humble author as an instructor at any TrackDAZE event. If you secretly want to beat me up, and you’re too lazy to drive to central Ohio, this can be a good way to save yourself a trip. I will be attending several of their 2012 events with my anything but trusty Boxster Anniversary Edition and/or my Plymouth Neon racer.
This year, however, the nice people at TrackDAZE have a new option for instruction, and it’s an even better idea than letting me boss you and your triple-supercharged Corvette Z07 around VIR.
Looks like it’s time for some more Scott Burgess news! Mr. Burgess, whose very existence had long been unknown outside a select circle of hotel room-service supervisors and parakeets who had acquired literacy due to a ruthlessly effective program of eugenics at Petland stores, briefly made Internet headlines last year when he went crazy on a Chrysler 200, quit his paper, was rehired, and fell back into line — not to mention obscurity.
Turns out you can’t keep a good man down. Having briefly tasted the Internet fruit, Scott’s decided to take a job at the salad bar.
Back up in yo’ass with the resurrection! The elder Niedermeyer’s Curbside Classic on the Boaterhome got a bit of an unexpected boost from links on Reddit and elsewhere over the weekend. The Boaterhome is an odd device, for sure, but it doesn’t really speak to the imagination the way the newest Blastolene special does…
This article appeared in S:S:L in April of 2009, so adjust comments regarding the “current” Honda and Acura lineup appropriately, thanks! — JB
I remember the event as if it were yesterday, although in fact it was twenty-six years ago. My relentless, Rommel-esque campaign to get my mother into a 1983 Honda Civic 1500S had very nearly reached a successful conclusion. For months I had worked tirelessly to steer Mom towards a Honda dealership for our new “family car”, always with the ostensible and sensible goal of purchasing the $6,995 1500GL wagon. Once we were inside the doors of the dealership — doors I had personally darkened many a time before then, since it was only a four-mile walk each way from my house — it would be a simple matter of bait-and-switching her away from the wagon and into a bright red 1500S hatchback. I’d walked to the showroom the day before and verified the presence of one, priced at a compelling $6,495.
As fate would have it, however, the red 1500S had sold, leaving just a black one available. (The 1983 Civic 1500S, the only Civic of that generation to carry the “S” tag, was available in just two colors: black and red.) No matter: we’d take it. In just a few nearly tearful moments, I convinced her that the 141-inch long, two-door hatchback was an ideal car for a single mother and two growing boys. The sales manager, displaying the utterly despicable greed that is still a hallmark of Honda dealers today, allowed us to buy the car at sticker. Providing, that is, we would pay an additional $349 for a two-speaker cassette player and $99 for a useless tape stripe.
That Civic was a truly great car. Economical, quick enough, sporty-looking, bulletproof, fun. It certainly would have lasted my mother a decade or more, had she not been struck just two years after the purchase by a drunk driver in a Cadillac deVille. The impact put parts of the back seat into the front seats. Hondas were not terribly crash-safe in those days.
Still, the ’83 Civic was the best Civic in history up to that point. The ’84 “breadvan” Civic was better. Much better. The Civic that followed was even better, and so on, until we reached the point of the 1999 Civic Si coupe, widely acclaimed as nearly everyone’s favorite Civic. And then a funny thing happened.
Originally published in Speed:Sport:Life April, 2010 — JB
Imagine that you’re an alien. Not an undocumented immigrant, mind you, but a genuine, green-tentacle-and-glass-helmet monstrosity of a visitor from beyond the stars. While your fellow aliens examine the defense systems of Earth (not so hot) and the intelligence of the population (somewhat simian), you attempt to reconcile all the written history you can find with the evidence before your massive, bloodshot, singular eye. You are particularly interested in the history and psychology behind the local transportation devices, known as “cars”, “whips”, “hogs”, or “causes for divorce”.
Most of what you’ve learned is pretty common-sense stuff, even for an alien. There’s a problem, however, and you have, after some months of study, come to call it “The Grand National Problem”. You’ve used your indistinguishable-from-magic science to read everything in the vast record-keeping halls of General Motors. You know from the documentation that the vast majority of Buick Regals produced during the Eighties were chrome-laden, velour-lined “Custom” and “Limited” models. It’s as plain as the order codes on all the old Selectric-typed order forms.
It was best of auto shows, it was the worst of auto shows. Actually, it was neither; it was simply a well-planned event which suffered from a near-deadly lack of new product introductions. Probably the most interesting thing I personally saw was the journosaurs hitting a cupcake stand like they were trying to save Private Ryan or something.
There were a few news items and observations which didn’t fit in with our model-by-model reporting method, however, starting with a curious surplus of supercars…
In terms of new product, this year’s Chicago Show hasn’t exactly set the world on fire. Let’s see… facelifted crossover, hatchback version of existing car, convertible version of existing car… It’s the proverbial “slow news day” in million-square-foot format.
Lacking even a new bodystyle or three-year-old Japanese-market van to debut, Chrysler did the smart thing to make sure the journalists were satisfied: they broke out the cupcakes. Now for the trivia question: Can you spot the former Monte Carlo Rally winner in this picture?
We’ve already heard that the 2013 GT500 droptop will be limited to a relatively poky 155MPH. That’s probably for the best, really. It’s much safer to roll a convertible over at 155 than it would be at, say, a buck-ninety.
During the press conference, however, we heard an interesting factoid, one that got us interested enough to sucker-punch SVT’s Jamal Hameedi for a brief Q-and-A:
Ah, the unbearable lightness of being Hyundai! The Elantra GT has arrived, looking quite sleek, quite desirable, and clocking in at 2,784 pounds. That’s 151 pounds lighter than the next-best player in the segment — Mazda’s similarly Tyson-faced Mazda3 — and
well ahead of the Focus and Golf. The point was driven home by a little show-and-tell, as seen above, to which the Chicago media reacted with thunderous applause. Hear me now, believe me later, and remember it when you are shopping for your next car: The Elantra GT is the lightest car in its class.
The Elantra Coupe? Well…
2011 was the best sales year yet for the Acadia. No explanations were offered for this surprising statistic, but GMC was happy to talk about the “class-leading fuel economy”, center airbag, and LED headlamps…
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