Sure, the official name is the Porsche 918 Spyder, but I will simply call it the "wow", as it is simply one of the most beautiful cars ever designed.
Apparently it has some greenie-approved hybrid crap in it, or something, but who cares. It should be fairly easy to rip all that crap out and throw it in the dumpster out back, while slipping in a 3.8L boxer six out of the 911 GT2, dropping a ton of weight, and go fast while not sucking.
posted by Mr. Lion
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10:01 EST | comments
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| Thursday, March 4 2010 |
Required Viewing.
I really need to have an adult beverage with Bill Whittle sometime. this is probably the most concise summarization of my own views on glow-ball warming I've ever seen.
When this becomes an instructional video, rather than the blatantly freaking obvious to any driver, I think it's time to buy a goddamn helicopter and be done with it.
This, evidently, is how far it's come in the 16-ought years since I became a duly licensed motorist. (And, I'll admit, some while after I actually started driving) When I was a lad, there were occasionally careless motorists. Every so often, someone would fall asleep at the wheel, or be drunk off their wazoo, or just plain not paying attention. And they'd crash, those of us who weren't idiots would mock them, and life would go on.
It would appear that in less than two decades, that generally amiable degree of aptitude of the average motorist has completely, entirely gone the way of the public school system. I mean, honestly, what kind of a complete effing idiot do you have to be not to grasp these simple concepts, and be all together overcome by The Vapors when something unexpected happens to your vehicle? How utterly inept must one be to actually operate a motor vehicle without the least iota of how to control the bloody thing, much less how it works?
Not long ago, I was rather aggressively against increasing requirements to get a license, via graduated licensing for youths or what have you. I liked, and do like the entirely American concept of jumping into your car and barreling a thousand miles down the highway with no particular destination in mind, without having spent several years in a bureaucratic Finnish or German style nightmare, because we're one of the very few nations in the world with the freedom to do so.
However, when I was a kid, driving was still seen as a skill. Something of an art. Something you endeavored to better yourself at. For some, perhaps in some places still a majority, I suppose it still is. But the fact that we have enough complete freaking morons in the world so that even a few dozen of them manage to spam themselves because they honestly haven't got the first damn clue that the brakes on their car will in fact work when it is accelerating, or that yes, indeed, you can disengage a gear while accelerating, is entirely beyond my comprehension.
It would seem that thanks not only to an ever decreasing licensing standard, but also to an ever increasing removal of a given driver from the act of driving, we are in effect spiraling toward a nation whose motorists are primarily comprised of people who, by any measure, do not know how to drive, and could not be bothered to learn nor in any way be interested in the concept.
Used to be, when I was a kid, there was a solution for these people: Busses. Small wonder then that the ubiquitous soccer mom piloted SUV so resembles one these days. posted by Mr. Lion
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11:37 EST | comments
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| Tuesday, March 23 2010 |
[redacted]ing awesome.
Lets say you want to go racing, professionally, in a WRC event. Now lets say you have a $500 craigslist-purchased BMW 318i, and some credit cards.
Would you believe you'd come third in class? Neither would I.
This is probably one of the most honest, enthusiastic and wonderful stories of motorsport I've seen in a very long time.
Also, after fixing fuel pump, we show up at the next stage late. The officials are like, "The fans think the stage is over, people are now walking down the stage, there are pickups in the middle of the road, you can't run it." I had to drive 15 mph, while being timed, through a stage we normally would have gone 100 mph through. If that wasn't enough, [redacted]ing Kimi Raikkonen launched his car off the side of the cliff. A flatbed wrecker was pulling his car out of a ditch and blocking the road. When the tow truck finally moved, we finished the stage.
Had to make up time and was later told I went by a cop with the car [redacted] in [redacted] and never lifted. Someone said the federales set up some sort of road block but we never saw any lights or anything.
Just.. yeah. If that doesn't make you want to buy this guy a beer or six, I don't want to know you. posted by Mr. Lion
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15:16 EST | comments
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| Tuesday, March 9 2010 |
So stupid it's fit for California.
The latest happy-fun out of the New York Assembly is this.
It bans the use of salt in food at restaurants. And the use of salt by patrons in restaurants.
Well, the veil of Marxism that serves as the basis for the Health Takeover Bill, and the various other economic mastication the Democrats have been foisting on it has finally been lifted.
I'll warn you, if you haven't heard this yet, to place all firearms, throwable objects, and blunt instruments well away from your person.
Senator dipshit here would like you to know that in all probability, you make too much money, and you should give a big chunk of it to people who don't work as hard have less of it.
Nevermind, that as Lileks pointed out in one of the best screeds ever, Senator Dipshit here is a fifth-generation member of the silver spoon club, heir to a modest ranch in Montana.
Did I say modest? I meant 125,000 acres. If you need a size reference for that, the whole of Manhattan island comprises about 14,500 acres.
And this.. this.. useless waste of freaking oxygen has the bloody gall to stand up and proclaim that people who actually managed to bust their ass hard enough to facilitate a "comfortable" life, are making too much bloody money?
I'm at a loss for words that don't begin with "fu" and end with "ing". posted by Mr. Lion
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01:26 EST | comments
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| Tuesday, March 30 2010 |
It's a wonderful time to buy a Ford.
... no, I really never thought I'd hear myself say that. It's been an ever-increasing theme of late, though, and here's why:
Through my youth-- largely because my father, like most fathers, was an American Iron gearhead-- I naturally strived to be "not that", and gravitated towards the smaller, generally faster, generally better handling "foreign" cars. Specifically, Toyotas and old Porsches that unappreciative owners had abused to the point they became reasonably affordable as restoration projects.
I scoffed at Mustangs and Corvettes and the like as compared to the hyper-powered imports making thrice their power with turbochargers the size of oil drums, they were quite frankly, antiquated, unreliable junk with the build quality of... well, I dunno. Chinese baby toys? Or something equally bad.
Though, the last decade or so, and especially the last year or so, has brought some pretty significant change to that mindset.
First, Toyota, and most all other Japanese car builders, decided they didn't want anything to do with the honest to goodness sports car market. No more Supras, no more 300ZXs, no more silly little RX7s with their footprint slightly smaller than the average shoebox. No more Japanese cars trying very hard to be modern takes on 60's British roadsters, only with engines and electrics that actually worked.
Toyota abandoned me in their quest to be Chevy, and in the years that followed, the only mediocre blips on the import sports car scene were things like the S2000 (eh), the 350Z (slow, and ugly), and various other sundry attempts to placate, rather than excite, the motoring enthusiast. About the only exception were 4WD rally cars from the like of Mitsubishi and Subaru, but even those, at least on the Subaru side of the fence, got progressively uglier and generic. This left exactly zero rear-wheel-drive sports cars or GTs even worth a sniff at any import car lot you care to mention.
'round about the same time, something of a renaissance was going on in the American sports car marketplace. Specifically, Ford had delivered a new "retro" Mustang that actually looked good and wasn't held together with glue and wood screws. Chevy brought out successive improvements to the Corvette until such point it was actually pretty fast and handled well. And Dodge continued to produce, refine and improve the last hurrah of the driver's car, the Viper. These things did not go unnoticed.
Of course, recent events and general idiocy caused by people who are not car people running car companies; greedy and self-serving labor unions; and all manner of other interventionist nonsense-- were exemplified further by the infamous bailouts that effectively consigned Chevy and Dodge to the corporate-government dole line. While Chevy still manages to crank out a fairly respectable Corvette, and Dodge is still plugging out Vipers for at least a few more years, the end would seem to be near for the American sports car that tried so very hard to learn the "Japanese Lesson" of the 90's.
Except for one. The 2011 Mustang takes the classic pony car from something you buy, and then begin to fix, modify and generally improve until it's drivable and interesting, to something that is more or less such out of the box. It now sports its legacy-- a 302 under the hood, churning out over 400 horsepower and spinning north of 6,000 revs, in what is a thinly disguised middle appendage directed toward the Challenger and Camaro. It's even slathered in a yet-more "euro-esque" interior, which has always been a horrid association of parts flying in an extremely loose formation until very recently. And it's all yours somewhat below the $30,000 mark for a V8 stripper.
That, for me anyway, is enough. I'll take two. My own experiences with even the previous generation "new" Mustang has shown me that they finally got it right. The stock engine will happily produce twice its rated power in "extreme" conditions for hours and days on end without complaint. The suspension and brakes can be made as good as anything out there for relatively modest sums. While it's still big, and heavy if you read from a Lotus script, it is also good and cheap, two things that are typically mutually exclusive for a GT.
However, there is a bit more to the story, and that is this. I simply cannot, and will not bring myself to give money to the government-owned car manufacturers in good conscience, as it would support the very people who caused the downfall of the American car industry in the first place. A Ford, though, is a different matter. It's a company that said, okay, we're in the crap. So we're going to sell some stuff and work harder to get out of it-- instead of but.. but.. we're too big to fail!. That sort of management deserves support, independent of anything else, and the fact that they make the best, cheapest GT car currently on the market seals the deal.
Now, I really would love to see a new American car builder rise from the ashes of government waste and control, and produce an interesting small roadster, and an interesting light truck like the Hilux concept that Toyota entirely abandoned, and a light sports car that is as nimble and interesting, though perhaps not quite as fragile as a Lotus Elise. Though, until that happens my "not GT car" dollars are still going to go to the Brits, Germans and Italians. But for a GT car, and one made by an independent American car builder, you'd be hard pressed to show me anything like a Mustang from anyone else for anything like its price tag.
