When you’ve got a team of LeMons veterans who have been racing a Volvo 245 wagon since the earliest days of the 24 Hours of LeMons and you want to add a second car to the stable, you’re going to face stern disapproval if that second car happens to be a BMW E30 or a Mazda Miata. Those choices lack imagination! There must be some way to make a Miata fit Bernal Dads Racing’s Volvo-wagon ethos… but what could it be? Read More >
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During my recent trip to California, I stopped by one of the biggest self-service wrecking yards in the San Francisco Bay area, a steel-company-owned yard that turns over its inventory of many hundreds of cars and trucks about every two months. If you see a car in this yard, you can be sure that its steel will be on a China-bound container ship within eight weeks. Such is the case with this 59-year-old Buick sedan. Read More >
Kiwi writes:
Howdy Sajeev. I’m looking to the general crowd of enthusiasts and experts here to give me some advice. I am most assuredly not a car expert myself.
We have three cars, two of which are a 2000 Toyota Camry (177k miles) and a 2000 Chevy Blazer (78k miles). The Camry is my daily car, and I drive 55 miles round trip to work five days a week (sometimes more as I have night school twice a week). The Blazer is my mother-in-law’s car, and she drives very little, mainly just to pick up my daughter from school a couple of times a week (less than 10 miles round trip), down to the local shops, etc. We are up in the PA/NJ area.
Back in 1976, the Italian automaker Fiat had been badly battered by a global energy crisis and the resulting malaise infecting the global auto industry. In what Time Magazine described at the time as “a devastatingly ironic example of petropower,” Col. Muammar Gaddafi instructed his Libyan Arab Foreign Bank to invest some $415m into the Italian automaker, giving it a stake that would eventually grow to some 14 percent of the firm’s equity.
By 1986, Fiat’s Libyan stakeholders were becoming more trouble than they were worth. In the wake of the Lockerbie bombings, the US introduced sanctions on Libya, and Fiat’s Libyan connection left its attempts to bid for US military contracts (particularly those related to Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative) dead on arrival. As a result, Fiat and its shareholders bought back the entire 14 percent Libyan stake in the firm, presenting the Libyan Arab Foreign Bank-controlled Banca UBAE with a $3.1b check. And, according to what a Fiat spokesperson told us yesterday, that is where the story ends. But thanks to the now-ubiquitous Wikileaks, we have found that this story may in fact go farther than that. In fact, as the evidence stands right now, either the US State Department is working with bad information (which major news sources have yet to correct), or Fiat is lying about its ties to the embattled Gaddafi regime.
You’ve read Ed’s writeup of last weekend’s 24 Hours of LeMons race at Infineon Raceway, and now we’ve got more photos of the fender-bashing, engine-trashing action for you! Read More >
When I returned to my old DOTS stomping grounds to help defile a once-proud race track, I figured I might find an interesting street-parked car or two on the Island That Time Forgot. First there was this semi-custom ’62 Continental, but then I spotted the real prize. Read More >
“Guys, can get your attention for just one more minute?” Jay Lamm, the genial founder and “chief perpetrator” of the 24 Hours of LeMons series has just wrapped up a colorful pre-race briefing from the roof of a Fiat 600, which itself is welded to the running gear of an equally ancient and abused Mini Moke. “Guys,” he shouts through a megaphone to the packed trackside garage, “the president of Infineon Raceway wants to say a few words.”
The crowd’s volume drops expectantly as the man whose racetrack hosts everything from NASCAR to ALMS rises and takes the bullhorn. “I just wanted to say,” he intones, “that this has got to be, without question, the crappiest bunch of cars I think I have ever seen in one place.” The crowd of costumed racers and crew members explodes in thundering approval, nearly drowning out the speaker’s final words: “you should all be extremely proud.”
When Better Place launched their Visitor Center in Tel Aviv, the attending journalists’ fingers couldn’t keep up with all the numbers and the promises flogged by the company chiefs: tens of battery switch stations to be built, hundreds of charging stations to be deployed and a thousand cars to be sold to Israeli customers each month.
Just over a year has passed since these statements made air, and in typical Israeli fashion – most of the goals were not met. Despite promising to begin delivery of cars in the beginning of 2011, Better Place has not sold a single car over the four months that passed since New Year’s Eve. And the number of battery switch stations built in Israel was – you guessed it – exactly zero. Until now.
I know, the sniping at Jalopnik is getting old, and I’m sure this article will receive a lot of complaints. But this is The Truth About Cars, and the truth must be told. Banking on the limited attention span of its readers, Gawker’s outlet for things remotely related to cars headlined yesterday: “European Union wants to ban gas, diesel cars by 2050.” A headline like that is sure to produce clicks. Too bad, clicking readers are being had.
Just for this occasion, we break the TTAC rule of not copypasting whole articles. Here is the Jalopnik article in full length:
“The European Union’s transport chief wants to ban diesel or gas-burning vehicles in cities by 2050, mainly through higher taxes and new rules. Maybe now’s the time to start broadening those U.S. import rules…”
That’s it. No more. Where’s the beef the Jalopies have with the brutal transport chief?
The site that just a few days ago did pride itself of its investigative journalism skills, not only fornicated the puppy on this one, it also missed out on the juicy stuff. Read More >
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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Elorac writes:
Sajeev,
Not sure if this is an appropriate Piston Slap question, but here goes. I’m the owner of a 2009 Infiniti G37S coupe, manual trans, approx 30,000 miles. I’m very happy with the car (aside from a touchy clutch that gets tiresome in slow traffic), but ever since I bought it I’ve felt that I won’t really have gotten my money’s worth until I do some real hooning. I recently received a track day package as a gift, consisting of five half-hour sessions, the first with some manner of instructor. I’ll be attending next week, with just about equal parts excitement and trepidation.
Having never done anything of the sort before, and with little experience with truly “enthusiastic” driving, I’d like to ask you (and the B&B) for any advice you might have, in all aspects of the experience but with a particular emphasis on potential damage to my car’s powertrain innards. As laughable as it may seem, given the context, I do actually care about the long term health of this car, and I’d like to avoid doing anything too grievous to it. A fool’s errand?
Does General Motors have an unfair advantage when it comes to taking the top prize in 24 Hours of LeMons racing? The General’s LeMons soldiers have taken something like a third of all Index of Effluency wins during the course of LeMons racing’s four-year history… and today another GM marque was added to the IOE victors’ list: Opel! Read More >
The Sears Pointless 24 Hours of LeMons race was all about a Nissan NX2000 versus BMW 3 Series versus Honda motorcycle-engined Geo Metro battle for quite a while, but black flags on the Nissan and the Geo gave the Spin-N-Out Burger BMW E30 the chance to grab the win on laps. Read More >
My friend Goto, a former Japanese judo national champion who somehow got caught up in the Summer of Love as an exchange student in Berkeley, and who never looked or went back, once told me: “My father say, some people have death wish, and you have to glant it to them.“
There are some people who are just dying to lose posting privileges on TTAC. It’s fast and easy. Simply do what some commenters did. Read More >
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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