Tonight I'm in Braselton, Georgia, just minutes away from Road Atlanta. I'm super-stoked about tomorrow, when I'll be visiting this legendary racetrack for the first of four straight days of American Le Mans Series action! Tomorrow will start with practice, building up to Saturday's Petit Le Mans, a ten-hour endurance race and a crucial event on the ALMS circuit. In the meantime, here's a more official image of the B-K Motorsports team's all-new all Lola coupe—the hard-roofed version of its LMP2 racecar that'll be making its debut at this grueling race. According to Dean Case of MAZDASPEED, the coupe will get 10% more downforce and 7% less drag than its open-cockpit predecessor, and will be the first coupe to race in the ALMS LMP2 class. The picture was taken while the car was testing last week at Road Atlanta—I can't wait to see it in person at the track tomorrow, and I'm hoping to get a chance to talk with the team about the new car. Is there anything you want me to ask them about it?
For that matter, how about a chance to check out Le Mans racing for yourself! All you have to do is upload your most beautiful pic of your car for the Amoco Ultimate Your Car Is Worth It Photo Contest. They're giving away gas money on a weekly basis, and one Grand Prize Winner will get to go to France for 24 Hours Of Le Mans!
This weekend I took my first road trip in my new Audi A5, and while I kept it cool for the most part, I did have a little fun just to see how the car felt at higher speeds. Here is what I found: The sweet spot is in the 95-100 MPH range (on closed roads of course), vehicle speed is limited to 130 MPH (going to need to fix that), average gas mileage at highway speeds is just above 26 MPG, the S-Line suspension is awesome, and I don't think there is any need for the H&R coil-over kit aside from stance. Lastly, I think it's time for a new radar detector because the Valentine 1 was a little too quiet throughout the trip.
Some dude in Croatia decided to stuff two VR6 motors into a humble VW Lupo, and he's been updating a thread on VWVortex with a ton of pics to document the build. As you might imagine, two engines creates multiple problems opportunities, but it looks like he's been able to make the most of them, with plenty of ingenious fabrication work along the way. Don't believe this could even work? Check out the 20+ page thread on VWVortex and watch the video of the car on its first test run.
Continue reading "Twin Engine Lupo" »
John is still with Hankook in Korea, Jen just left for Road Atlanta to cover Le Mans, and Ryan called in sick to install wing doors on his smart car. So I'm all by my lonesome.
- Lamborghini just released more teaser shots of their four door grocery getter. Look for the full unveil Thursday. Autoblog.
- Porsche accused Nissan of cheating on their GT-R Nurburgring Lap Times. No word from Nissan... yet. Jalopnik
- The Truth About Cars thinks that the General is about to file Chapter 11, and that only Cadillac and Chevy will survive. And they are predicting that all this will all be even worse for Ford, Chrysler and... Toyota? TTAC
- The New York Times has a nice little writeup on the Detroit LeMons race. And if you watch the video, you'll see the Team Size Matters Fury. The New York Times
I miss Japan days of old. These days I see less and less of this hardcore stuff on the street in Japan, but back a few years ago I’d be amazed often while just walking down the street. I took this picture in a parking lot in Japan and that's all that really needs to be said. The car pictured is a beautifully done Monocraft widebody ZZW30 Toyota MR-S. It even has a bag over the seat, so I think the owner just had it serviced or detailed.
Anyway, the Monocraft widebody is always a classic. It was kits like this and the natural light weight of the MR-S that always made me want to get one. This setup with a 300hp turbocharged engine would be a whole lot of fun.
Named after a sleepy town just 17 miles north of the Mexican border, where Carroll Shelby, Bill Neale, and crew would spend their downtime drinking, shooting guns, and blasting Shelby cars on the vast expanses of open highway, the Shelby Terlingua Mustang represents a slap in the face to what society expects a muscle car to be. So says Shelby President Amy Boylan, who spent some time with me yesterday talking about the history of this wonderful town and the inspiration for their latest creation. I wouldn't want to mis-quote her, so I will simply paraphrase:
Amy said that Carroll Shelby and crew spent long hours for weeks on end building race cars for Ford, designing new components, testing, and racing, and Terlingua was a place where he could get away from everything and everyone. He bought 120,000 acres, built a small ranch on it, and when he wasn't racing, would head down to Terlingua and break all the rules. Continue reading...
Continue reading "Driving the Shelby Terlingua" »
We're working with Yuichi of GenCoupe.com to get pics of the car Rhys Millen is building for SEMA. Mods will include a turbo kit for the 2.0-liter four banger, HKS sequential race transmission, coil-over suspension, big Brembo brakes, Enkei wheels, eight-point roll cage and a RMR wide body kit. Check out the ride page for shots of the teardown, and stay tuned for more pics of the build!
John's comment the other day about print being dead or dying got me thinking about the car magazines that I buy. It's true that newspaper and magazine circulation has been shrinking, but like anything, the pick of the crop always survives. And really, if you're going to spend your hard-earned money on car magazines they may as well be good ones, right? Being a one-eyed Mopar fan, I subscribe to Mopar Muscle and Mopar Action. Both are always informative and have a lot of tech articles, but I'm probably going to drop my subscription to Action because I prefer the editorial style of Muscle. Also, because I'm a car nut, I do occasionally stray to the dark side and read about other makes, and for this reason I can often be seen browsing the pages of general-purpose mags Muscle Car Review and Car Craft. Those are my top choices—what are yours?
More than 100 officers swarmed on the street racing scene in Ontario, California early Sunday morning, arresting two drivers and one flagger, and citing almost 200 spectators and impounding over 70 cars. Check out the sensationalistic TV coverage on KTLA. Techweasel
Paul Newman, racer, actor, and philanthropist, died at home on Friday at the age of 83, following a protracted battle with cancer. He'll be deeply missed by the automotive community, though we're glad that he got out to the track last month for what he probably knew would be his last laps. Rest in peace, man. Here's the news:
- The Detroit automakers got their $25B in federal loans approved, so expect much gnashing of teeth from TTAC. But don't worry, they'll get the vindication they've been hankering for: Wall Street's mega-bailout plan was rejected, so the automakers will surely be screwed by proxy. Freep.
- Why is Kyle Busch's Toyota such junk? Why? Following a heim joint failure at New Hampshire and a grenaded engine at Dover, the former JGR wunderkind suffered more hope-destroying mechanical demons this weekend at Kansas when his engine started sputtering with a fuel-pressure problem. This makes Busch's mechanical failure rate in the Chase so far three for three, in what Rowdy.com's Buck and Bass are calling the worst Chase start, for any driver, ever. At this point, I'm almost starting to feel kind of sorry for the guy. NASCAR.com.
- The NICE (for No Internal Combustion Engine) "MyCar" has won the electric car of the year at the 2008 GreenFleet awards. Nope, I'd never heard of 'em either. The Auto Channel.
- In the UK, an amputee was issued a ticket for parking in a handicap spot. The attending officer felt the woman's prosthetic leg didn't carry as much weight as one of those little blue wheelchair badges. APP.
So if you're a Mopar Or No Car kind of guy and are sick of high gas prices, what do you do? You build an electric Duster. Bruce bought this A-body back in 2006. It had a fresh 360 but otherwise was pretty rough. Over the course of two years he did a resto-mod on the car, which included body work, new paint, and even digital gauges and an RFID keyless ignition system.
But Bruce didn't stop there. With gas prices on the rise, he was already researching alternative fuels. Then he heard about Tesla and the Volt. In June he picked up a copy of The Zero-Carbon Car, and within an hour was planning his new project. Since he's a meteorologist, he decided to call it the Electrical Storm. Continue reading...
Continue reading "Electric Duster" »
This morning, I hopped on to a bus with the other journalists and left downtown Seoul for Hankook's R&D Center in Daejeon. The drive took about two hours, and while the country—Korea is 80 percent mountains and lush—was beautiful, I have to admit that the burly jet lag from the 13-hour flight across the Pacific made it impossible to keep my eyes open for the entire trip. After arriving, we had a Q&A session with Hankook's top engineers before heading into the facility. Unfortunately, all the various testing gear they demonstrated for us was top-secret, so they didn't let anyone take pictures. The first piece of equipment was the flat-track machine, which basically looks like a giant belt sander. Once it's running, the engineers then lower a tire mounted to a shaft on to the surface, and can compress and twist it to simulate the kind of stress it will endure in the real world.
Continue reading "Touring Hankook's R&D Center, Keumsan Plant and Proving Grounds" »
