Across 110th Street,
Pimps trying to catch a woman that’s weak…
Across 110th Street,
Pushers won’t let the junkie go free…

Every racer worth his HANS Device lives for the first corner after the green flag. It’s in that corner that the most complex problems will present themselves to the driver, and it’s in that corner that he will have the least amount of time to make the right decision. Only one car can come out of each corner first, and if you are that car, it doesn’t matter how you get there. There’s no substitute for it. It gets in your blood the way Africa was once said to get into the blood of adventurous European men, and it swims in your veins the way heroin quickens the junkie’s pulse when the needle punctures the skin.

If you’re an off-season racing junkie looking for a first-corner fix, however, there are few that hit finer or harder than renting a brand-new Crown Vic and putting it sideways on Columbus Circle in the process of beating two taxis and a Town Car to that next seventy-eight-inch wide hole in traffic. Call it Spec Panther Street Racing, call it the most terrifying way to do seventy miles per hour in a modern vehicle, or call it a ridiculous waste of resources, but I call it top-notch fun. It’s so much fun that I made a little road course out of Manhattan and drove it for a couple of hours today, taking a little time out to visit New York’s rest home for aging Panthers, across 110th Street.

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I’d like to personally apologize to the readers of TTAC; while everybody else was rushing out of BMW’s showcase Manhattan dealership to file their instant-dispatch posts regarding BMW’s twin introductions today, yours truly was standing in front of the infamous “Squid and Whale” diorama at the Museum Of Natural History and feeling very conflicted about my urban youth and rural adulthood. So here we are, ten hours after the press event, and I’m finally getting around to posting this.

Anyway… Got $499 a month? Are you interested in a 170-horsepower electric 1-Series which zips to 60 in about nine seconds? Nope? How about a super-high-tech BMW turbo four-cylinder that doesn’t quite match what the Koreans are doing?

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It was easily one of the best entries in the old CAR magazine “Good, Bad, and Ugly”: “Good: Her name is Rio… Bad: …and she’s crap.” Don’t look for this new-generation Rio to receive the same dismissive insult, at least not among the journalists who actually have a chance to drive and honestly evaluate the vehicle.
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If a rally car drives through the forest, does anybody care?

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Disgraceful so-called “pay driving” has been a part of racing since the very beginning. Whether it’s ABBA drummer “Slim” Borgudd’s Formula 1 career, “Malcolm In The Middle” star Frankie Muniz backmarking Formula Atlantic, or even a lame-ass church guitarist driving in Grand-Am, there’s no getting around the fact that the vast majority of people on most racing grids wrote a check to be there.

Ford has a better idea. Instead of letting dentists, attorneys, trust-fund kids, and other no-talent morons pay them to drive their rally cars, they’ve decided to tarnish the already less-than-stellar reputation of rally “racing” by finding the biggest douchebags in the universe and paying them to drive. First it was Tanner Foust, the guy who really, really doesn’t want you to know he’s almost thirty-eight years old. Then it was Ken Block, a fellow best known for having shoes made overseas in conditions that are, ahem, possibly quite terrifying. Where do you go from there?

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Don’t click the video if you are at work, are sensitive to multiple abuses of the English language, or are prone to motion sickness. The rest of you… go right ahead, and see how awesome it is to be a cop. Every sixteen-year-old driver in the world dreams of doing things like this, right?
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Three companies, each alike in dignity. Or not. Don’t look at the numbers just yet. Instead, consider the following. One of these companies is Japan’s largest automaker and relies heavily on that country for its production and its profit. Another one, although Japanese, produces the bulk of its vehicles overseas. The third company is American and relies very little on Japan for production.

Baseline their stock at Jan 1, 2011. When an earthquake, a tsunami, and an authentic nuclear disaster strike, which of the three end up with the same stock price as the baseline afterwards, and which take a big dive?

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“I know some of these big guys, they’re all still driving their big SUVs. You know, they got their big monster trucks and everything. You’re one of them? Well, now, here’s my point. If you’re complaining about the price of gas and you’re only getting eight miles a gallon–(laughter)–you may have a big family, but it’s probably not that big. How many you have? Ten kids, you say? Ten kids? (Laughter.) Well, you definitely need a hybrid van then. “ — President Obama, speaking at a wind farm to a worker.

In what’s been called “a modern equivalent to ‘let them eat cake’,” the President instructed Americans with large families to buy a hybrid van during a speech yesterday.

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Good, cheap, fast: Pick two. Or so the saying goes. The new RAM 1500 Express promises to be all three, offering a 390-hp HEMI, the coil-sprung platform which supposedly offers better dynamic qualities than the commpetition, and some youth-oriented features like 20-inch wheels, at an out-the-door price around $23,830.

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Good news! Warner Bros. Jazz, still smarting from their loss of Pat Metheny to Nonesuch Records, has written me an enormous advance check for the rights to my newly-completed album. It’s titled The Most Beautiful Feeling: A Bossa Nova Tribute To Philip Michael Thomas, the buzz I’m hearing around the industry means I’m gonna have f*&%-you money before you know it.

I’ve decided to do something for you, my favorite TTAC reader. I’m willing to buy you any manufactured object which can be found on the market. Car, watch, musical instrument, plane, train, you name it. You want a Bugatti Sang Whatever? It’s yours. Got a hankering for a G6? I’ll meet you at the Gulfstream dealer or used Pontiac lot, cash in hand.

But there’s just one little catch…

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This weekend, Kamil Kaluski’s CarGuyDad blog featured a first drive of the refreshed Acura TL. Nothing new there, right? The introductory event was in Hollywood. The guests were flown in, shown a bit of the ol’ high life, and sent out for a day of road drives and parking-lot semi-autocrossing. Again, nothing new. This is all standard fare for press-preview events. Every working autojourno could sleepwalk through such an event, and most of them do.

There was no sleepwalking at this Acura event, however, because there were no working journalists. In fact, the people evaluating the less beaky, greatly more tasteful 2012 Acura TL on this particular press event weren’t members of the press at all. They were Acura owners.

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Doesn’t anybody read the Detroit News? I can think of 6,750 people who don’t. They are the people, rental agencies, or hopeless confused aliens trying, albeit incompetently, to fit into human society who took home a new Chrysler 200 in March. This kind of volume won’t worry Toyota, but a full year of this volume would pay back the likely development costs for the car and then some.

This 200-centric news is part of a pretty solid month for Chrysler overall. The platform mate Avenger rang the register for 5,954 units, while the brand as a whole sold over 121,000 cars and trucks. The full press release is here, but no matter how you look at it, this is good news for the Mopar crew. Let’s see what a few months of restricted Accord and Camry production does for them…

The ad says that cotton is “the fabric of our lives.” It wasn’t the fabric of my youth, I can tell you that. There were the blue school uniforms, seemingly forged in a single piece from iron-strong polyester, hot in the summer and abrasive in the winter. There were suits and ties in rough wool to wear during the weekends, sweaters in soft Lacoste velour and miserable Brooks cable knit, and the instantly dirty, plasticized leather of the Nike “Burt Bruin” shoes on my feet. And, of course, there was M-B Tex, eternal and unchanging, perennially youthful even as the car surrounding it disintegrated into flakes of chromed rust.
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Somebody took me up on my offer. My old #187 Performance Touring “E” Neon is off to another home, where, it is fervently to hope, it will become a first-rate LeMons racer.

I don’t want the history of this car to disappear. No, it’s not a Parnelli Jones Mustang or Sunoco Camaro, but it was a factory(ish) race car for much of its life and it deserves to be remembered. So, if you have some time, and you want to read about a car which spent sixteen years in rough-and-tumble competition, read on…
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David E. Davis, Jr. died today during an unspecified “cancer surgery”. Readers wishing to read a historically accurate, solemn, heartfelt tribute to the man from one of his most devoted acolytes should turn to Eddie Alterman’s blog entry at Car and Driver.

The rest of you can come sit here by me.
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