A New Adventure For An Old Soldier

by Jack Baruth

Published: March 28th, 2011

Somebody took me up on my offer. My old 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…

The full story can be found at neons.org. I’ll just excerpt a few of the photos from that story, in rough chronological order:

That’s our little Neon, from start to finish. It made podiums in three different classes across three different sanctioning bodies. It ran up over 13,000 racing miles. And it’s not done yet.

I’d like to say that I was sad to see the little Neon disappear on the road towards $500 crap-car racing, but if a car has a soul — and I want to believe that this one does — than it has a racing soul. Racing is life. The rest is just waiting. For our Neon, the waiting will soon be over once more.

Jack Baruth

More by Jack Baruth

Comments

Join the conversation

2 of 23 comments

Russty1 on Mar 29, 2011

That looks like Nitro Yellow Green Pearlcoat, one of the greatest factory colours ever invented, especially shocking that it came from a domestic mfr. of that era. When Neons first emerged I had hoped for a whole lineup of wonderful crazy "neon" colours to go with the name but Dodge mgmt must have chickened out and went back to Basic Bland. The other Neon colours such as "aqua" and "magenta" paled by comparison so to speak. For a while Ford Ecorts had a couple of wild hues, metallic purple and metallic pink. Now on modern roads we're surrounded by a thousand shades of metallic grey i.e. silver. I still find it hard to believe but I have to resign myself to the fact that unusual factory paint colours must in fact be really that much harder to sell to your average citizen who wants to blend in??

Like Reply
Murilee Martin on Mar 30, 2011

Is it #187 as in "187 to the dome?"

Like Reply

Recent Comments

Kjhkjlhkjhkljh kljhjkhjklhkjh A prelude is a bad idea. There is already Acura with all the weird sport trims. This will not make back it's R&D money.
Analoggrotto I don't see a red car here, how blazing stupid are you people?
Redapple2 Love the wheels
Redapple2 Good luck to them. They used to make great cars. 510. 240Z, Sentra SE-R. Maxima. Frontier.
Joe65688619 Under Ghosn they went through the same short-term bottom-line thinking that GM did in the 80s/90s, and they have not recovered say, to their heyday in the 50s and 60s in terms of market share and innovation. Poor design decisions (a CVT in their front-wheel drive "4-Door Sports Car", model overlap in a poorly performing segment (they never needed the Altima AND the Maxima...what they needed was one vehicle with different drivetrain, including hybrid, to compete with the Accord/Camry, and decontenting their vehicles: My 2012 QX56 (I know, not a Nissan, but the same holds for the Armada) had power rear windows in the cargo area that could vent, a glass hatch on the back door that could be opened separate from the whole liftgate (in such a tall vehicle, kinda essential if you have it in a garage and want to load the trunk without having to open the garage door to make room for the lift gate), a nice driver's side folding armrest, and a few other quality-of-life details absent from my 2018 QX80. In a competitive market this attention to detai is can be the differentiator that sell cars. Now they are caught in the middle of the market, competing more with Hyundai and Kia and selling discounted vehicles near the same price points, but losing money on them. They invested also invested a lot in niche platforms. The Leaf was one of the first full EVs, but never really evolved. They misjudged the market - luxury EVs are selling, small budget models not so much. Variable compression engines offering little in terms of real-world power or tech, let a lot of complexity that is leading to higher failure rates. Aside from the Z and GT-R (low volume models), not much forced induction (whether your a fan or not, look at what Honda did with the CR-V and Acura RDX - same chassis, slap a turbo on it, make it nicer inside, and now you can sell it as a semi-premium brand with higher markup). That said, I do believe they retain the technical and engineering capability to do far better. About time management realized they need to make smarter investments and understand their markets better.