For only $195, you can run a “twilight” session at Mid-Ohio on Wednesday evenings. Given that I wanted to turn respectable times in Thursday’s Grand-Am test day, it seemed like a no-brainer. Until, that is, my ride in the Continental Challenge fell through due to the unavailability of my co-driver. Since I’d already paid for the Wednesday, I loaded up, (with a set of Hoosier A3S05 autocross tires) headed out, and arrived on Wednesday night to find precisely three cars signed up for evening practice. Neither of the others (a track-prepped M3 and a Nissan GT-R) would be running quite at my pace, but they wouldn’t be far off it, so once I passed them I wouldn’t see them again for most of the session.

Driving around a track all by yourself is an interesting thing to do, particularly if you honor the request of the Mid-Ohio School and do not directly time your laps. How do you know if you’re doing well? How do you determine how hard to push? And when you see a Viper come in on the flatbed right before your session with the rear end basically torn off (I have photos, but I want to protect the driver’s privacy), what does that do to your mindset? As it turns out, there’s another situation which is very similar to this one: amateur endurance racing.
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Wuchtig. I’m sitting, panting, trying to catch my breath on the side of a tiny two-lane road running through the vineyards of California’s Napa Valley. I’m in an American car. I haven’t spoken German regularly since I was 18. Adrenalin has chased everything resembling a coherent thought from my mind. And yet, strangely, the only thing left banging around my speed-addled skull is a single German adjective for which the English language has no translation: wuchtig.
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How does he stand now in your eyes, this captain,
the look and bulk of him, the inward poise?

Homer’s Odyssey, Book 11 lines 391-392

Via dinosaursandrobots.com come pictures of what may be the most predictable conversion ever… and it looks like this particular Kia owner went the full Amanti with it.

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With apologies to Robert Burns, the best laid schemes o’ mice an’ marketers gang aft agley. That’s certainly what’s happened to MINI’s plan to race a Porsche 911. Porsche said “no thanks” to MINI’s challenge, which is exactly what MINI was looking for. Then Hyundai had to come in and force MINI out of its underdog status, making it defend itself against a cheaper competitor. And the search for a meaningful race-as-marketing-stunt continues…

Baytown, Texas is easing up on issuing red light camera tickets in the hopes of diverting momentum away from a planned effort to place a photo enforcement ban on the ballot. Resident Byron Schirmbeck and a team of volunteers expect soon to turn in a second petition forcing a referendum. Statistics show that, in response, city officials and American Traffic Solutions have deliberately issued fewer citations. The program rejected 29 percent of violations in July 2008, but documents show the rate of rejections climbed to 54 percent in December.

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“Flirtation between Nissan and GM has a rich history,” said our Dear Leader. Here we go again. This time, with the whole cabal. Renault’s Ghosn has put an entry in the Match.com of the auto trade. Reuters says that Renault could work closely with a U.S. partner if the occasion arose, but it is not crucial. Not only is Renault flirtatious, they make it sound like it’s a no strings attached kind of a thing. It never is … Read More >

A strike at two Toyota-affiliated parts makers brought Toyota’s largest assembly plant in China to a halt. No parts, no cars. Toyota’s factory in the port city of Tianjin near Beijing stopped production on Friday. A day later, it is unclear if production would resume on Monday, Reuters says.

The strike at a small plastic maker stops production at Toyota’s most important plant in China. Read More >

America’s ethanol producers were some of the few Americans optimistic or cynical enough to find a bright side to the BP Gulf spill. Ethanol’s lobbyists-in-chief, GrowthEnergy, decided it would be real cute to run ads highlighting all the bad things ethanol hadn’t done. One of which is not “Ethanol has never harmed the Gulf of Mexico,” by the way. As the ad parody above points out though, even if the ethanol was creating a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico for years before the BP spill, there are quite a few other things ethanol hasn’t done. Like this, just in from the AP [via Google]: convince the EPA to buy into its shameful, manipulative PR line and rush a decision on increasing blending limits.
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Ford gives us [via Facebook] as good of a view of the 2011 Explorer… as you’ll get from the seat of a 2011 Explorer. Unless this is some kind of appeal to the spelunking lifestyle segment (you never know), we may have a new ridiculous pillar size champ on our hands.

Are pillars the new tailfins?

Whither the electrified market? According to this slide from a recent Johnson Controls analyst presentation [full PDF here], 2m global units by 2015 seems to be one of the models the industry is working on. And compared to other 2015 estimates, like Pike Research’s 3.1m worldwide number, it’s a fairly conservative approach. Still, there’s a long road ahead for plug-in and even hybrid vehicles. Toyota’s Prius, by far the best selling hybrid nameplate in America, sold about 152k units in the last 12 months. All hybrid nameplates sold 27,800 units last month [per Edmunds], for an annualized rate (non-SAAR) of about 333,600 or about half of the estimated 2015 market. Why that’s a problem, after the jump…

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William Vukson, author of The Great Auto Crash for a livechat about the decline of Detroit, the collapse of the American market for new cars, and US fiscal and trade policy here at TTAC at 33 pm Eastern time. Mr Vukson will be taking your questions about his book and the state of the American car market and auto industry, so don’t miss it!

A new study of the country’s largest red light camera program found no significant benefit to the use of photo enforcement. Rajiv Shah, an adjunct professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago released the final version of his exploratory analysis into Chicago’s photo ticketing program, which boasts 188 cameras.

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The car was the champ of the German Abwrackprämien-mania of 2009: Retire your clunker, collect €2000, and for just €5000 of pocket-change, you get a real car with a real trunk and 4 doors: The Dacia Logan. The car, built in Renault’s Romanian subsidiary  sold more than 150,000 units ion Germany since its introduction. It drove car executives bonkers, and engineers to their workstations to design low-cost cars. Now, it’s being pulled off the market. The reason? Read More >