Full fathom five my 944 lies;
Of its wheels are spider nests made;
Those glass E-codes that were its eyes;
Nothing of it that doth fade.

Hard to believe it was more than four years ago that I rolled my 944 into a friend’s barn with the intent of perhaps uncovering it in a decade or so. Times change, plans change, people piss off their soon-to-be-ex-wives and lose the barn storage they had given to their friends. It would come out today or be sold at auction, but how do you tow a Porsche across a farmer’s field too wet for a tow truck?
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Our friend, frequent RoundAbout Show guest Mirko Reinhardt, has found an Infiniti dealership that’s kind of like Surf City. In Surf City, as our older readers will remember, there are two girls for every boy, but in Germany, there’s an dealer with two Infinitis in stock for every one sold across the entire country last month. What’s a Japanese wanna-be luxury brand to do?

We’ll let Mirko tell the tale:
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Today, the automotive world rocked to the news that ethical hero journalist Scott Burgess had finally deigned to return to his old job, telling his colleagues “the reason for me to come back has everything to do with all of you. The Detroit News is filled with world caliber reporters in every department. And the strength of your character and commitment to journalism has shined—” Oh, who gives a shit. Click the jump and we’ll talk about a time I successfully evaded the Ohio State Highway Patrol.
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“Dude, Jalopnik’s put a hit piece out on you.” The voice on the other end of the phone was on the edge of tears or laughter, I couldn’t tell which.

“What’s a jalopnik?” I responded.

“You know, that website that talks about airplanes, and ekranoplans, and tsunamis, and erotic male photography.” Oh, that Jalopnik. I’d recently offended the nice people at that particular branch of the Gawker Media octopus by pointing out that the fellow they’d praised to the sky for his ethical stance on auto journalism had a little credibility issue. Since the aforementioned fellow has now forgotten all this “ethics” crap and returned to his old job, one might even say I was ahead of America’s Favorite F-15-Crash-Centric Website on that one.

“What’s the name of the article?”

“The Seven Crappy Kinds Of Car Reviews.”

“Well, that’s not fair for them to discuss. I mean, they don’t even do car reviews. It would be like if TTAC did ‘The Seven Worst Kind Of Articles About Large Train Tunnels’.”

“Still, dude, they’re after you. They specifically talked about someone who races Dodge Neons and writes car reviews.” The tension drained from my face. Whew! What a relief. After all, I race a Plymouth Neon. I’ve also raced Mustangs, Mercedes-Benzes, a Supra, the Jalopnik V8olvo itself, the occasional Ford Focus, and a Grand-Am Civic, so I felt pretty sure that Ray’s minions weren’t taking aim at me. No website with Jalopnik’s historically admirable record of fact-checking would call me a “Dodge Neon racer” when I’m obviously a Plymouth Neon racer.

Still, just because I wasn’t on the hit list didn’t mean that someone else wasn’t being unfairly criticized. With that in mind, I’ve found seven people in the automotive world who raced Dodge Neons. Any one of them might be the very person about whom Jalopnik’s prodigal editor, Mike Spinelli, was complaining. Let’s investigate.
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Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.) — Walt Whitman, “Song Of Myself”

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds… With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance”

“Overall, the Sebring is a very comfortable vehicle… On the road, the Sebring convertible is fun to drive… Even with the hardtop closed, the Sebring remains sharp… the Sebring convertible is definitely worth a spin… This stylish convertible offers an excellent combination of amenities, solid performance and that gorgeous disappearing top.” — Scott Burgess, on the Chrysler Sebring

“It’s vastly improved, but that’s only because it was so horrendous before.” — Scott Burgess, on the Chrysler 200

When Scott Burgess resigned from the Detroit News over that paper’s ex post facto editing of his Chrysler 200 review, Jalopnik and many other sites couldn’t wait to hail the man as a veritable hero of journalism, a lone wolf defiantly standing alone against a shadowy coalition of evil manufacturers, greedy dealers, and weak-willed publications. I wasn’t so sure about the whole thing. Surely the amiable junketeer who wrote “The Volt may be Mr. Right for the future, but the Cruze is Mr. Right Now” hadn’t really been that horrified by the 200, which is a perfectly reasonable mid-sized car and not in any way the apocalyptic, symptomatic, prophylactic hell-hound described in the original DetNews draft.

So, I did what nobody else was willing to do: I found Scott’s review of the Chrysler Sebring. Sit down, crank up Rebecca Black’s horrifying, Sebring-centric song “Friday”, and let’s ride our drop-top time machine back to April 4, 2007…
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Divorce really sucks. Not my divorce, mind you, but the divorce of the fellow who has been letting me store extra cars in one of his barns since 2004 or thereabouts. I’ve got a few things out there which will now require homes. Some of them — like my loved, yet despised, ’84 944 — will find the proverbial “place to stay at” elsewhere. And some will end up in a junkyard, unless you, the cheap-car racer, intervene.

What you see above is a genuine 1994-build Neon ACR. It was sold for racing use and had just 12,500 miles on it when it was put into storage. The cage was installed in 2008; it meets NASA, SCCA, and Grand-Am specifications. This car has won dozens of races and is a former SCCA Regional Champion. And it’s yours, free of charge… sort of.
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Carly Simon was right: When it comes to automobiles, these are the good old days. Don’t know which car to buy? No problem. Simply throw a dart at the listing of mass-market new cars for sale in the United States, purchase that car, and you can be more or less assured that you will experience 100,000 miles — or more! — of low-hassle, low-cost operation. The consumer expects that every car on the market is reliable, reasonably comfortable, and extremely safe by historical standards, and those expectations are met by everyone from Kia to Rolls-Royce. It’s a great time to be a new-car buyer, but there’s never been a worse time to be an automotive “journalist”.

Fifty years ago, a chummy cadre of insiders with million-strong captive print audiences lined up at an invitation-only perpetual buffet of manufacturer-paid perks and privileges. Today there are hundreds of media outlets, major blogs, and video producers all fighting for an ever-declining number of eyeballs, press cars, and wheel time. The journos of the Nixon era faced a delicious choice: either recommend 50,000-mile-life-expectancy garbage to the American driver and reap the considerable financial rewards for doing so, or fill up the poison pen and textually molest a lineup of sitting ducks like the Pinto, Vega, and Renault Le Car — while still making that bank. Their successors have a tougher job: explain the ever-shrinking differences between a vast array of perfectly competent automobiles in a manner which will generate “unique clicks” and repeat readership without burning too many personal and professional bridges. Get it wrong, and you’re history.

Scott Burgess got it wrong, but his mistake wasn’t an excess of ethics.

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The opening minutes of Le Mans contain perhaps the most subtly powerful automotive endorsement in film history. It’s the day before the race is slated to begin, and Steve McQueen’s character, Michael Delaney, is driving his 1970 Porsche 911 around the course, stopping to look at the spot where he’d crashed the year before. There’s nothing exciting about his trip along the small French streets, no speeds above perhaps thirty or forty miles per hour, none of the ridiculous, staged tail-out antics which are now found in everything from video games to Nissan Altima advertisements. There’s merely the plain implication: The Porsche 911 is the car chosen by the world’s finest sports-car drivers. If you don’t want that 911S desperately by the time the sequence is done, you don’t love cars very much — and if you wanted it very desperately, now’s your chance.

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Honda’s in better shape than its contemporaries after QUAKEOLOPNIKPOCALYPSE or whatever our friends in the biz are calling this particular disaster. Although production will be stopped this week in several Japanese plants, the bulk of Honda’s automobiles worldwide are built, and sold, in North America. A little bird told me that Honda has weeks of Japanese-sourced parts for US production. Things are so good that the Big H can afford to donate a thousand portable generators (and five thousand gas cans) to the relief effort.

Let’s say production takes a while to come back, however. Here in the United States, that means dealers will face short supply of the Acura RL (who cares), Acura TSX (might be a problem) and Honda Fit (Uh-oh). Honda has an alternative to supply the latter. Will they take it, and make history in so doing?

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Life as a Porsche owner/supporter is remarkably like being an Eric Clapton fan. You are continually assaulted with a veritable fusillade of utter and complete garbage created for no possible reason other than to squeeze every last red cent out of a thoroughly impressionable audience— Money and Cigarettes, the Cayenne, Clapton, the Panamera, Crossroads Festival 2010, the upcoming Cajun, the list goes on. Just at the moment when you’re ready to pack it in and find another object for your affection, however, you happen to put on the ’66 Bluesbreakers record or take a drive in the current GT3 or GT3 RS, which are likely to go down in history as the last great Porsches.

Last but one, anyway.

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WIZARD… NEEDS… FOOD! Okay, only some of you are the right age to remember where that phrase originated, but if you are, just imagine that same voice saying, SOUTH… CAROLINA… NEEDS… CASH! There’s an $800 million hole in the state budget. If I ran the state, I’d slap a $400 tariff on every smartphone from China that crosses the border and get David Boies to argue that the interstate commerce clause shouldn’t be any part of “the living Constitution”. That’s my awesome idea and I’m excited about it.

Since most of you live in the so-called “real world”, however, you’ve no doubt realized from whence some of this missing money is going to be extorted: the hapless, helpless American motorist.

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How did we miss Colin Bird’s Cars.com post about Buick outselling Lexus for the second month in a row? I suspect it’s because we aren’t on the GM-blogger approved-stories distribution list. Typically, writing a GM puff-piece after going on the free parrot-the-party-line trip means you’re then rewarded with a sweet whip to roll around and impress your friends. The only way your humble author is getting a Buick this week is by renting one. As Peter Green once said, oh well.

Back to the topic at hand. Buick outsold Lexus in February. Does it matter?

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What if Gawker redesigned their sites and people stopped coming? It’s a question being asked with more and more seriousness as the nice people at Sitemeter continue to display some genuinely terrifying statistics regarding pageviews for Jalopnik, io9, and the rest of the cutesy-name sites in the Denton Media Mafia, er, Family, er, Domestic Partnership. One recent chart suggests that Jalopnik readership has dropped by a staggering seventy-five percent since what’s been called “the worst site changes in human history, I mean, this makes that one crazy bridge somewhere that, like, wiggled and broke look like the Pyramid of Khufu, solidity-wise, kinda, uh, is my latte ready yet?”

Read on for the big picture and an alternative explanation for the crazy stats…
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Miles had a little Mercedes 190SL. and one night he said to me, “Cannon, I’d like you to take a ride with me.” Which is dangerous. — Cannonball Adderley

Sergei Rachmaninoff wasn’t the only prominent musician who was willing to put himself in financial harm’s way to own the car of his dreams.

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Raise your hand if you’ve actually flown a Goodyear blimp for a solid forty-five minutes and actually made it go where you were supposed to take it.

I thought so. I’m the only guy with his hand up. Sucks to be you, you non-blimp-flyin’-mothertrucker.

To keep this from being Blimplopnik or whatever they’re calling Mr. Wert’s Wild Ride nowadays, I’m going to bring you content never seen before: blimp review emulation. Follow along as I review the Goodyear blimp, one paragraph at a time, in the style of each of our most famous contributors. This will be no worse than the Dune continuation books, I promise.

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