Over the last few weeks we’ve been to Malta, Bangladesh, Venezuela, and then last week was a trip down memory lane to the USA in 1986. Now we board our plane again to travel to Cambodia…

Yes but you might not want to go to Cambodia this week – I hear some of you moan already…That’s OK I will respond, because I’ve prepared 155 other countries for you to visit in my blog, and I can tell you it is just great, so click away!

The one thing in common Cambodia has with America is: their love for the Toyota Camry!

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Some 24 Hours of LeMons fans get all excited about the team that turns the most laps at a race, but the real cognoscenti know that the Index of Effluency (the prize given to the team that accomplishes a great racing feat with a car that never belonged anywhere near a race track) is the pinnacle. Only the most legendary LeMons heroes manage to win the Index of Effluency more than once, and now South Carolina’s Tunachuckers have driven their two-ton Ford to that achievement. Read More >

They won the Southern Discomfort race in February, the ‘Shine Country Classic in May, the Cain’t Git Bayou race in August, and now Hong Norrth has taken the overall win at a fourth 24 Hours of LeMons race this year. That run of victories makes Hong Norrth one of the most dominating teams in LeMons history. Read More >

In an era where family cars run fourteen-second quarters flat and sport-compacts can walk Seventies Ferraris and Lamborghinis without breaking a sweat, burnout videos and photos have become the most played-out, suck-tastic, shark-jumping thing possible. Lame! Lamer than that! The lamest photo in human history! Who would have thought that a 470-horsepower sedan, new Ferrari, or Viper could actually smoke the tires? I don’t know, about about everybody with a brain?

Thankfully for all of us, a few brave wrench-it-yourself warriors have come forward to redeem the burnout video from its current “abuse-a-free-car-that-I-can’t-drive-worth-s*&$-anyway” hell. Behold… the SRT-4 swap minivan. More fun stuff after the jump.

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After a long, occasionally rain-soaked race session, it was no surprise to find that Hong Norrth, winner of the Cain’t Git Bayou race (and two others in ’11) held the lead at the end of the day. Read More >

Randy Pobst came to the Where The Elite Meet To Cheat 24 Hours of LeMons to drive Speedycop’s MR2-chassis’d Lancia Scorpion, but we couldn’t resist seeing what would happen if we put him behind the wheel of the Goldbrickers MGB-GT. In the rain. The result was startling. Read More >

Last fall, the first tests of the new Chevy Caprice PPV, Dodge Charger Pursuit and Ford Taurus Interceptor generated quite a bit of interest here at TTAC and beyond, as three all-new contestants battled to replace the outgoing Crown Victoria as America’s cop car. At the time, the Caprice seemed like the clear performance favorite, but as Sajeev Mehta has pointed out, there’s more to the cop-car equation than pure speed. Although good luck trying to tell the Detroit Three that, as all three are cherry-picking performance stats in the wake of the latest round of Michigan State Police testing.

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Here we are at historic Charlotte Motor Speedway, after a long day of BS Inspections, and we’ve got quite an interesting field of cars preparing for tomorrow morning’s green flag. Read More >

Does the above car look familiar? It should; we tested it earlier this year. I noted the IS-F’s desire to step sideways in wet conditions when the eight-speed autobox clunked through the gears, but honestly I thought it was more annoyance than danger.

Turns out I was wrong. Yesterday, a journalist put a halt to the fun of the “International Motor Press Assocation” Monticello track-and-buffet-day when he crashed on his very first lap. When my spies at IMPA (as you might suspect, I’m not a member, the same way I’m not a member of the Midwestern association) told me about the crash, I was surprised. Not because some hammerhead drove off on his first lap to the track — that’s virtually mandatory at these events — but because there’s almost nothing to hit at Monticello. That track has been engineered in a cost-no-object fashion to prevent even the biggest idiots from stuffing their cars into a wall.

Oh well. Make something idiot-proof, and IMPA, MAMA, or (especially) TAWA will engineer a bigger idiot. Apparently the rest of the event was conducted with a maximum speed of sixty miles per hour. A maximum speed. Of sixty miles per hour. On a racetrack that I drove in wet conditions and saw speeds of 140+, while I had a helicopter flying overhead. Why bother to have journalists on the track under those conditions? Which leads to a better, broader question: Why are journalists on a racetrack at all?

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Matt writes:

Hey Sajeev. Looking for your wisdom, or perhaps that of the B&B. I’ve got a 2005 Hyundai Elantra with about 50k miles. Back around 40k, we had new tires put on it at Sears. Now I want to rotate the tires (yes, I know, I should have done this a while ago), but when I got to the very last wheel, I ran into a roadblock. The rear right wheel is fused to the hub! It seems to be rusted on. Poking around a few forums online, I got a couple of ideas:

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After I hauled all my stuff 2,500 miles in the Impala and settled in Georgia, it was time for me to go job-hunting. After a few boring office-temp jobs, I spotted an ad that got my attention: Copywriter needed to write catalogs for large auto-parts company. Must know classic American cars. Within minutes of showing up for my interview at Year One, I had my first full-time writing job… and a nickname inspired by my car: Mad Max. Read More >

Give any long-haul truck driver enough beer to loosen his tongue, and he will tell you something you don’t really want to know: that tractor-trailer drivers are both fully aware of their ability to murder their fellow motorists with impunity and occasionally desirous of doing so. This simple fact — that in a collision between car and truck, the truck always wins — is the basic premise behind Steven Spielberg’s 1971 film, Duel. Originally produced as a made-for-television “Movie Of The Week”, Duel could easily have been forgettable garbage, a simple thriller, or a plodding drama.

Instead, with just one minor change from what was already a conventional formula, Spielberg created a truly great movie. The change? It’s simple: we never meet the truck driver. (More) spoilers ahead…

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While in California to check out Billetproof Nor-Cal last weekend, I had the chance to visit The Island That Rust Forgot. It didn’t take long to find this ’67 Barracuda convertible and today’s find. Read More >

Speak the truth, even if your voice shakes. Robert Farago didn’t invent the idea of telling the truth about this business, but he made it possible for me, and others like me, to bring that truth forward. At this very moment, there are several “respected journalists” flying business class to Europe where they will be fêted and pampered like kings in five-star hotels along the Spanish coast. There, they will pretend to be the customers for cars they will never be able to afford as they attempt to drown the still, small voices of their stunted consciences with free alcohol. Best of luck to them.

Back here in the United States, one East Coast autowriter received the following email and decided that the best, the most fitting, the most ethical thing possible would be to forward it to me, so that I, and all of our readers, can see “how the sausage is made.”

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The Chevy’s steering is light and reacts quickly on turn-in. Handling eventually gives way to understeer…

Hmm. Is this a review of the Corvette Z06 Carbon? The new Camaro ZL1? Perhaps a lucky journalist has been permitted to hack a C6.R around Road Atlanta for a few laps? Nope, it’s from Car and Driver‘s recent powder-puff piece on the 2012 Sonic.

You know, the Sonic. The fourteen-thousand-dollar subcompact.

Handling, apparently, “eventually gives way to understeer” in a fourteen-thousand-dollar subcompact. Amazing. I’d figured there would be some kind of hideous snap-oversteer swing-axle murderball hidden inside that bitch. What a joke. Here’s a hint: any time a writer appears to be surprised by understeer in a modern mass-production street car, assume that writer is a moron and close your browser page lest you accidentally catch the stupid through a dirty keyboard or something.

‘Twas not always the case, however. In this article, and a sequel to follow shortly, we will discuss a few things: what understeer really means, why you want it, why it is now the default handling behavior for all “regular” cars, and how making it the default handling behavior is accomplished. Boring stuff, sure — but when you’re done reading it, you will be more qualified to review the Chevrolet Sonic’s handling than the guy who actually got paid to do it.

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