Hear the rhyme of the Tetanus Neon
See the pictures on T-T-A-C
Mesmerizing the unlucky reader
Stay here and listen to the nightmare of defeat
Well, that’s more the Iron Maiden version of “Rhyme Of The Ancient Mariner” than Coleridge’s, isn’t it? And yet, this is not a dissimilar tale. There’s plenty to tell about my stint as a driver for last weekend’s 24 Hours of LeMons — misfortune, dehydration of the aqueous and fuel varities, damage, failure, and, finally, escape.
A couple of years ago, I was lucky enough to have noted Speed World Challenge and Grand-Am driver Randy Pobst on my team for a weekend endurance race. He was calm, gracious, and absolutely committed to the success of the team. He even allowed me to compare my data with his for the purpose of improving my performance. At VIR, that data showed that on our fastest laps I was almost 0.3 seconds faster than he was from the start-finish line to the exit of Turn 5a. Unfortunately for me, the race was not just to Turn 5a, and in fact he made up that gap (and, um, 2.2 seconds more) over the rest of the course.
More impressive than his driving, however, was the absolute sense of preparedness he brought to the event. He showed up right on time, no earlier, no later. He brought everything he needed and knew exactly where to find everything else. He was visibly fit, well-rested, and alert from the moment he stepped out of his rental car to the brief moment of consolation he offered me at the end of the race (“Did you survive? Yes? Well, that’s enough”). He communicated with the crew chief and team owner in short, informative bursts. When the team needed him to be present, he was simply there, and when his presence would have added nothing, he was mysteriously absent. In short, he was the perfect fly-in racer.
My plan for this weekend’s 24 Hours of LeMons at MSR Houston was to be the perfect fly-in LeMons racer: down to a reasonable weight, prepared for a three-hour stint in 105-degree heat, physically strong and mentally sane, alcohol-free, and with multiple nights of eight-hour sleep under my Nomex belt. That’s what I wanted to be. Here’s what I currently am: completely non-packed for the flight, celebrating my second day of vomit-free existence, feeling quite sleepy, and frustrated with myself for wasting valuable prep time learning the guitar part for Prince’s “Computer Blue”.
Who would be stupid enough to buy a brand-new “CUV” and then drive it across a four-foot-deep stream? Surely, dear readers, you already know the answer to that. My Freelander was actually a capable little fellow off-road despite being fundamentally a jacked-up 1994 Civic with a creeper first gear.
More importantly, who would be stupid enough to believe that Tata would retain all Jaguar and Land Rover production in Great Britain, when a limitless supply of cheap labor is just a continent away?
When Nissan introduced a six-speed manual transmission for its Sentra SE-R, Chiat did a really cute ad campaign called Master Of The Sixth Speed to trumpet the fact. For many years, a “6” on the gearshift was the sign of a serious performance car (or the serious diesel pickup which towed it.) The original mass-market six-speeders were all serious business: the Viper, the autocross-conquering L98 Corvette, and, of course, the Porsche 964. The Viper would have been fine with four forward gears, as would the ‘Vette, but the relatively peaky 3.6 non-Varioram Porker did benefit from having the shorter spaces between ratios.
Now that base Hyundai Accents and Kia Rios offer their owners a chance to become “masters of the sixth speed”, however, Porsche has decided to up the ante.
“Ten Years Of Faith” is the title of Porsche’s press release. Faith in what? The M96 engine’s ability to stay sealed for up to 15,000 miles? The residual value of normally-aspirated $130,000 convertibles? George Michael’s career? No, in this case it refers to the giant “leap of faith” Porsche took when they decided to enter the Chinese market.
To celebrate this trustafarian, er, profitarian, um, onanistic, no, wait, humanitarian effort, Porsche has released a limited edition of ten very special cars for the Chinese market. Warning: the images below the jump are not safe for human consumption.
Acura has had a tough couple of years lately. Of the three products which once defined the company — the Integra/RSX, Legend/RL, and NSX — two are long dead and the other is effectively invisible to the public. This TTAC review more or less sums up our opinion of their current offerings, although recently I met a rather fabulous young lady who temporarily hypnotized me into expressing enthusiasm for the TL.
Something should done. So.. IN A WORLD… WHERE THE MOST SACRED BRANDS HAVE LOST THEIR WAY… ONE MAN… WILL TAKE A STAND.
The “B5” Passat, which signaled the beginning of Volkswagen’s brief but luminous arc of twenty-first-century success in the United States, was priced at $20,750 including destination charge. For that kind of money, the buyers, of which your humble author was one, received a 1.8T engine, full-sized interior room, German assembly, and a fabulous set of luxurious appointments which usually did not completely self-destruct until the car reached its fourth or fifth birthday. It was a gorgeous game-changer of a car and for many people the juice of the driving experience was worth the painful squeeze of frequent dealings with VW’s “service” departments.
Fourteen years later, the price is the same — $20,765 including destination — but the game has definitely changed.
Those of you who are not stupid well-connected enough to have a bunch of autojournos in your Twitter and Facebook friend lists are missing out on all the, er, coverage coming from the “Midwestern NAMBLA pump n’ dump for morbidly obese auto journalists” track event going on today. Let me give you the precis. It turns out all these cars are ZOMG AEWSUM and track records are falling left and right as America’s finest drivers deliver Vic Elfordian levels of all-weather punishment upon them. No word on whether the Midwestern journo who cracked up a MINI at Autobahn and followed it up by driving off the first corner at MAMA’s event a few years back has caused his usual mayhem.
Expect this event to provide many tales of “pushing it to the limit” in the soul-crushing months to come. In the meantime, however, we’ve found an activity which is well-suited to the banzai buffet beasts out there: manned crash testing.
Oh, BMW. You so crazy.
What’s a BMW 5-Series “GT” anyway? Apparently, it’s a stretched Five body, plus hatchback, on the basic platform of the 7 Series. It’s cheaper than a “Siebener” while being bigger and uglier than the Five. It also fails to provide much of a wagon’s utility. Nevertheless, the GT was supposed to be a hot-selling “segment buster” for BMW, along with the similarly offensive-looking X6.
Turns out that the GT isn’t selling, and the people who do buy it are Bimmer diehards choosing it over a purchase of the more expensive Seven. Meanwhile, there’s a real 5-Series wagon coming for the rest of the world. What should BMW do?
I guess I became a blocker after my brother killed himself in his Challenger, back in the summer of 2041. No, I don’t mean he crashed. I know that’s why people hate us, because they say we kill people when we take action, and I guess that’s happened once or twice.
What I mean is this. My brother. My older brother. He joined the Army when I was still in grade school. He bought an old Challenger with his bonus pay. Drove it all around that fall, putting his whole check into gasoline and old retread tires, and then they sent him to Israel for the Suppression. Well, he killed those Jewish terrorists for three years I guess, and right when that was winding up, you know, we had the terrorists in Taiwan and we had to help China get rid of them before we had a fourth nine-eleven or something. For a long time he was just a face in my specs, bugging me about school, asking about news at home because our Internet was still “free” compared to the military one. Five years he spent in Taiwan, and he got sick, you know, like a lot of them did, with the bugs and the nightmares and the skin, but finally the good Chinese kinda won that thing and he came home.
He came home on a modbus. Late at night. Didn’t even come in and wake us up. He had gasoline. Don’t know where he got it. He took the Challenger out. And the cops stopped him outside the city limits. Told him he couldn’t drive himself. That he wasn’t in Taiwan, goin’ crazy with a MRAP and all. Told him about Modules and said they wouldn’t take him to jail because he was a hero and he’d served the country, and all that.
But they told him they would have to recycle the Challenger, so would he mind waiting in the back seat of the copmod until the crusher came, and he said, well Officer, I have to retrieve my personal effects, and they said yes, and he got in that old black Challenger, took a pistol out of the glove compartment, and shot himself in the head. I never saw him come home. Never met him for real, not as an adult, you know? I didn’t know what to do. I ran to my friend’s house, and he got me a beer, and he said, Brian, your brother didn’t kill himself, the system killed your brother, and you should do something back, and I know people.
Every blocker has a story, and that’s mine.
(Read More…)
The story goes that an English gentleman was sitting in his London club and noticed that the man reading next to him was David Brown, star-crossed industrialist and owner of Aston Martin.
“Say, old chap,” the fellow asked Brown, “I do quite fancy that motorcar of yours. Don’t suppose you could sell a fellow one of them, do you?”
“Be delighted to,” Brown responded. “Simply have your bank draft me a cheque for forty-two hundred pounds.” The gentleman cleared his throat.
“Well, old chap, since we are both members of the same club, one doesn’t suppose it could be done at cost?”
“I would be even more delighted to,” Brown responded. “Simply have your bank draft me a cheque for fifty-two hundred pounds.”
Feel free to file that story, along with the well-known tales of a young Prince of Wales absolutely dusting his personal bodyguards whilst caning his DBS-V8 through the leafy B-roads of Merrie Olde England, in the dumpster of history where they belong. Today, Aston is simply another reanimated wanna-be luxury brand chasing the favor of an international class of nouveaus whose breeding and taste make the miniature-giraffe Russian gangster from the Direct TV ads look like Lord Mountbatten. The V-12 Zagato is simply a gilded lure dangled before their nighmarish deep-sea mouths.
If there’s one thing you get here at TTAC, it’s diversity. Well, it’s actually sarcasm, but you also get diversity. Here’s an example: This week, we tested two different cars. Out on the West Coast, Alex and his partner were rolling around in a completely electric Nissan Leaf. Imagine them, gliding silently down the road, […]
“Far! Far!” The man in the corner station was screaming at me. Yes, I thought, as I steered out towards the grass, smoke billowing behind me from the twin tailpipes and blanketing the track like the thick fog of a dream, I’m getting it far off the line. Far. We came to a halt in the damp grass but the man is still screaming.
“Far! FAR! FAR!”
Understanding clicks down over me like the visor of a full-face helmet. He isn’t saying ‘far’. He’s saying ‘fire’.
When I saw this in the distance, I hustled up to see what it was, hoping it was part of an Airbus or Boeing of some type. It wasn’t, unfortunately. Do you know what it is?
“Building on the well-received 911 Carrera GTS with its extra power, visual panache and extensive extras for an attractive price, Porsche today announced the 911 Carrera 4 GTS.”
“The extra all-weather performance, visual muscle and standard equipment of the 911 Carrera 4 GTS comes at an attractive price. On sale this fall, the 911 Carrera 4 GTS Coupe will be available in the US at a base MSRP price of $110,200 while the 911 Carrera 4 GTS Cabriolet will be priced at $120,100.”
Not even Hyundai mentions “attractive pricing” so often in their press releases. Click the jump for the details and a much better way to spend your money.
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