I sing the coupe eccentric;
The doors of those I love engirth me, and I endure them;
They will not let me park till I deal with them, wrestle with them;
And do not ding them, and close them with solid sound unknown by Kia Soul.

It wasn’t that long ago that I recorded my generally favorable opinion of the outgoing Nissan Altima during an impromptu trip to Nashville and parts south. That car was obsolete even as I was reviewing it, supplanted by a zoomy and flame-surfacey new sedan. As of yet, however, the corresponding new Altima coupe has only appeared in renderings and rumors. Therefore Nissan has returned the old two-door for a very limited 2013-model-year engagement. It’s available in one trim level (S), with one drivetrain (2.5 four-cylinder/CVT) and at a relatively steep price ($25,230).

As a child of the Seventies, I have a not inconsiderable attachment to the idee fixe of the mid-sized coupe. The Altima Coupe is the natural successor to the Cutlass Supremes and Monte Carlos that prowled the neighborhoods of my youth. For some time I’ve been trying, unsuccessfully, to rent a new one; that quest came to a successful conclusion when I stepped off the plane in Houston Friday night and found a 2013 Altima Coupe with just 1,400 miles in my assigned stall.

My purpose in making the trip was to compete in the third round of the Texas Rally Sport championship and to cover said event for a certain print magazine which can be readily found at your local airport bookstore. I know it can be found there because I’ve been there, surreptitiously signing copies of the April issue while pretending to leaf through them. “Don’t Stop Believin’! Your homeboy, JB II” is what I usually write, although sometimes due to the angle at which I have to hold the magazine to do this unobserved it looks like “Don’t Start Bleedin’! Your Homo Boy, JB ill”. Those will be the Billy Ripken Fleer cards of the year 2089, trust me.

My rental Altima was black inside and out and it still smelled new. As I backed it out, I noticed that rear visibility was not very good at all and that the mirrors seemed a little small. Over the course of the next few days, I would repeatedly reconfirm those findings, particularly while doing lane changes. The Altima’s mirrors simply don’t cover enough ground to make up for the C-pillar blind spot. Be careful. I kid you not. I haven’t “not seen” a car in the next lane since I was an indifferent teenager but on the Texas freeways with their wide disparities in closing speeds I nearly caused an accident two separate and distinct times, after which I learned to swivel my head in all directions before moving laterally as I used to with my similarly sail-paneled 1980 Marquis Brougham Coupe.

My personal motto regarding out-of-state travel was mostly stolen from Tony Montana and runs like so: “First you get the luggage, then you get the rental, then you get the women.” My luggage consisted of nothing besides my Impact! Carbon Air Draft, a toothbrush, three sets of underwear, and a pair of Angry Birds pajama pants identical in design to a pair owned and enjoyed by my son, so that was easy. The Altima firmly under my command, it was time to complete the third task, so I fired up the “Neverlost” GPS and entered in the address of the Snow Queen.

When I first met the Snow Queen, during some random race-related Texas trip, I was very much under the spell of another woman and she was very much under the spell of… nothing in particular, really. She doesn’t get emotional about men. She has what the psychologists call a flat affect and she has a truly improbable body, lean and muscular with a nice rack, hot to the touch. I quite like her and I flatter myself that she quite likes me and best of all I don’t foresee anybody getting terribly emotional about anything.

The Snow Queen was amused by the Altima, correctly guessing that it wasn’t a very expensive car. At the time I didn’t know much they were asking for the thing but now that I do I have to wonder if it isn’t overpriced by a few thousand bucks. The 2013 Accord EX has more equipment and a more upscale look both inside and out. It costs the same and you can have it with a manual transmission, if you’re so inclined. I’m of the opinion, however, that the Altima has the edge on looks, even with the dopey standard-equipment wheels and the lack of brightwork that’s part of the “S” trim level. I hate to say it, but I think it’s better-looking than the current Infiniti G Coupe, if not the original one, and the rear trunk detailing and Kamm tail are just plain nice. Inside, of course, it’s the same equipment as the sedan but the lower roof and repositioned seating make it far more intimate.

After a supremely indulgent two-hour dinner at the Pappas Bros Steakhouse I piloted the Altima back to the Snow Queen’s place. The Hertz nav is almost deliberately stupid, taking a solid three minutes to boot and refusing to automatically select the previous destination. If you start the car moving at any point before it’s fully awake, you can’t do anything with it until the next time you come to a halt. “This is, without a doubt, the worst fucking nav system ever,” I fumed.

“Why’d you buy it then, if you hate it so much?” my companion queried.

“I didn’t buy it. It’s part of the rental.”

“Are you sure?”

“IT SAYS ‘HERTZ’ ON IT!”

“That’s odd.”

“No it isn’t, because it comes from Hertz.”

“Oh… Are you going to tell your readers I said what I just said?”

She’s been a TTAC reader for a long time so she had some concerns about that. She was also unhappy about her proposed nickname, “Snow Queen”.

“Why do I have to be the Snow Queen?”

“I don’t know… you’re a little distant and very pale and well, you bought me a bottle of Snow Queen vodka.”

“It makes me sound frigid.”

“Aren’t you a little bit frigid? I mean, we’re in bed and we aren’t doing anything right now.”

“That’s because you’re wearing Angry Birds pajamas.”

“My son likes them! He has the same pair! We wear them together!”

“Is he here?” She had a solid point. In the end, she proved to be a good sport about everything, adjusting her schedule to meet my rallycrossing demands and even posing for a slightly risque photo at the “Twin Peaks” restaurant we went to the following night. I’ve included it in the gallery below if you’re interested. It’s almost work-safe most places.

Where were we? Oh, yes. The Altima Coupe. There’s something really upsetting about the ease with which the Japanese manufacturers have driven our domestic players off their home ground. This is a reasonably priced, lightly equipped, stylish-looking two-door version of an established sedan, made in Tennessee and available in a rental fleet near you. Back when the Snow Queen was a little flaxen-haired snow princess, the Americans owned that segment. Defined it. Created it. Sold a million units a year into it. And now the best “American” mid-sized sedan is built in Mexico and the prospect of a coupe version is slightly more distant than Alpha Centauri and this Nissan is more American than the American cars, it’s a 1974 Colonnade for modern times.

I swear to God it’s like the effing Descolada, you know? Ford and Chrysler and particularly feckless General Motors sit on the sideline, afraid to do a product like this, and Nissan cheerfully keeps the old car around just for hell of it because they have that kind of power, people will still buy the old coupe with the new sedan sitting next to it in dealerships. Honda Accord coupes prowl the freeways of the Midwest like angry doorstops, driven by secretaries and angry middle-aged dads and friendly old people, and GM’s answer is to suggest that somebody buy a Camaro that weighs five hundred pounds more and looks like a cartoon. Since when did Americans retreat from the Japanese? The answer is: 1941, then not for a long time, and then continuously.

But you aren’t thinking about that, and you aren’t thinking about the Snow Queen, stretched across her Stearns and Foster like a teenage boy’s dream rendered in hot flesh, awake and annoyed while I drunkenly snore away in my Angry Birds pants. You’re thinking about that Pinto. Alright, you win. It’s owned by a fellow named Drew, who is six foot nine and who bolted an aluminum race seat flat to the floor so he would fit in it. Cologne V-6. Factory three-speed auto. Diamond Racing wheels in a massive offset. Sounds like thunder on the move, goes sideways constantly, throws the front wheels into the air on a bumpy rally course. He offered me a chance to stick around after the event and drive it but I wasn’t sure I’d be able to reach the pedals and I wanted to get back to a second evening back in Houston without the interference of alcohol or Angry Birds, so there you go. Let’s meet the man and the car:

My connecting flight home was delayed, and I was tempted to be bitchy about it, but it’s hard to be unhappy sometimes, I tell you, no matter how hard I try. Great people, fascinating cars, beautiful women, turboprop commuters that sound like a B-25 to take me hither and thither and yon! What a life I lead in the summer! What a life I lead in the spring! And there’s more to come if I can stay upright and above ground. I’ll share all of it with you. Most of it, anyway. See you next time.

In the weeks to come, you will be treated to a set of racing tales to make the most ardent consumer of Schadenfreude blush.

During the summer of 2012, I competed in the Canadian Touring Car Championship and the Grand-Am Total Performance Challenge, racing a B-Spec Mazda2 on both sides of the continent against some of the most talented sedan-class drivers in North America. By turns, I experienced mechanical failure, ineptitude, bad luck, narrow avoidance of high-speed collisions, despair, defeat, fear, hope, joy, and finally mechanical failure again.

I won nothing and finished all three of my races either dead last by a margin best described as “considerable” or at the end of a tow chain. At one point in the process I actively considered quitting the sport entirely. At another point I was cheered by hundreds of people as I successfully made an almost impossibly bold move to catapult from worst to (nearly) first. I paid nine dollars for a Quarter Pounder in Mont-Tremblant, QC and nothing at all for a first-rate hotel room on the bay in Monterey, CA.

In short, it was the worst of times, it was the even more worst of times. But I learned quite a bit from the process and I’ll be sharing all of it with you. While I re-familiarize myself with my on-track data and sob heavy teardrops onto my well-worn laptop keyboard for a while, here’s something to keep you occupied and give you some insight into what you’ll read next: a practice lap of the Mont-Tremblant road course behind the wheel of the CTCC B-Spec Mazda2 Media Car. Note the speeds at which the Civics and BMWs close on me; it will become relevant later…

Your humble author’s affection for the Pentastar-powered Chrysler minivans is relatively well-known within these electronic pages. In the interest of examining the so-called “alternatives”, however, I’ve been attempting to rent non-Chrysler minivans during my travels. A 36-hour unscheduled trip to San Francisco gave me a chance to do just that, deliberately walking past the six Corvette droptops in the Hertz #1 Gold Choice spaces and picking up a Toyota Sienna. The things I do for you, dear readers! My appointment was a couple of hours inland, in Lodi, CA; the thought that I was pedaling a minivan away from the ocean when I could be driving a topless ‘Vette along it had me sobbing lightly behind my Prodesigns.

I was eventually able to screw my courage to the sticking-place, as it were, and get on with business. What follows is a 388-mile review of the Toyota Sienna LE, but there’s one little catch: if you want one just like my test vehicle, you’re out of luck.

For 2013, Toyota has discontinued availability of the 2.7-liter paint-shaker four-cylinder in the Sienna. As we’ll soon see, it won’t be missed by most potential buyers. All Siennas are now powered by the appears-in-just-about-everything Toyota 3.5-liter V-6. The equivalent 2013-model V-6 Sienna to the one I drove would cost you a whopping $30.980 plus the usual reprehensible Toyota-dealer stripe/tape/paint protection/frottage charges. That’s a full eight thousand bucks more than the Caravans I normally rent would cost before incentives. It also represents a considerable price increase over last year. The 2012-model-year four-banger Sienna I rented would only cost you $26,990, assuming you could find a time machine or a dealer with some overstock, and that about splits the difference between a Caravan SE and the current Sienna LE.

This generation Sienna acquired what John Updike would call “minor fame” as the chosen ride of a swaggering MILF, but the gap in desirability between the fully-loaded SE and this poverty-spec LE is apparent from two hundred feet away and becomes more so as you draw closer to the thing. Opening the door reveals an unpleasant sea of elephant-testicle polysomethinglene in a color best described as “dirty ivory”. The odd texture molded into the door panels can’t hide a series of waves and ripples seemingly baked into the plastic during manufacture. I was initially willing to attribute the warping to 31,600 miles in the California sun, but even where the tinted windows protected the plastic, there were visible finish imperfections. If Toyota was trying to channel the spirit of the original K-car-based minivans, they’ve done it; I remember similar defects all over the place in those ancient Voyagers. Of course, the current Caravan is well beyond that standard, and comparing it back to back with the Sienna the much cheaper Dodge comes off as the upscale contender.

While the Chrysler minivan’s dashboard has always been intended to mimic that of a traditional sedan as closely as possible, the Sienna goes the other way, splaying an array of oddly oversized controls over an asymmetrical plastic wave between driver and passenger. The climate controls are frankly ridiculous, particularly the fan control which uses two buttons and multiple LEDs to unsatisfactorily accomplish what’s done with a single knob in better cars. Blank panels are everywhere. This van doesn’t appear to have any features except cruise control. The steering wheel has no secondary buttons whatsoever. Perhaps the kindest thing one could say about the Sienna’s controls is that they would all be easy to operate using gloves. They’re also perhaps deliberately optimized for Toyota’s aging customer base. The Avalon’s like that, too; every button and knob in the thing appears to be designed for people suffering a combination of Alzheimer’s and loss of motor control. The 12-volt outlet is too close to the floor — this is one detail that the Sienna has in common with the Caravan. One bright spot: the stereo is actually pretty decent. My two current test tracks (“English House” by Fleet Foxes and “My Activator” by 100s) were easily capable of annoying pedestrians in the vicinity and, in the case of the latter song, earned me a knowing nod from a stunning chica working the Jack-in-the-Box drive-through.

While the Sienna has about the same mouse-fur bucket seat for the driver you get in the cheaper Chrysler minivans, the story is completely different for rear-seat passengers. Chrysler offers their outstanding Stow N Go seats as standard pretty much everywhere in the lineup. They work just like you’d expect, folding quickly into the floor without fuss and turning the Caravan into a very capable work van in the space of five minutes. The Sienna, on the other hand, has two very conventional and very large bench seats in back. They’re well-bolstered and, for this writer at least, are usefully more comfortable than the Stow N Go. If you never expect to do anything with your minivan besides drag people around in it, the Sienna scores a big win here. If you need flexibility, the Chryslers are untouchable in that regard.

On the move, it’s quickly apparent that the Sienna and Caravan are from two entirely different schools of vehicular-dynamic thought. Simply put, the Sienna sucks as a driving proposition in every way that matters. The engine is completely gutless and feels thoroughly overmatched in this application, lugging against too much gear before giving up, changing down with an audible clunk, and hellishly moaning at its retro six-grand redline. The brakes feel completely worthless in hard usage, although that can probably be at least partially attributed to the miseries of rental life. Fast lane changes in the Sienna are positively nautical; my Town Car is noticeably better at controlling its body motion in the same situation. In the evening cut-and-thrust around the SFO airport, I gave up early and resigned myself to being dive-bombed for lane position again and again. My knee repeatedly turned off the low-mounted cruise control, exacerbating the situation somewhat and no doubt further alienating my fellow motorists.

I had hoped that the Sienna’s futuristic shape might pay off in wind noise reduction, but it was louder inside than the Caravans by some margin. There’s an extra A-pillar window as a consequence of that sleek silhouette, but as far as I can tell it’s completely worthless in actual use and I’d rather have a lower sticker price with a GM-style modesty panel shoved in the gap.

After a pair of 115-mile jaunts in the Sienna, I was more or less sick of the thing and I looked forward to returning it as soon as possible. From the wavy interior plastic to the gutless engine to the total lack of surprise-and-delight features, my tester van felt like an extremely cynical effort to cash in on the brand loyalty earned by other, far superior Toyota products. It’s worth noting that Toyota has never really had a killer app for the minivan market, unless your idea of the perfect family wagon is a supercharged suppository shape with the engine somewhere under the driver’s ass. It’s hard to imagine any reason for purchasing this current offering other than naked fear that the competition won’t be as reliable. I would suggest that these fears should be partially mitigated by the fact that one could buy three Caravans for every two Siennas one might hope to own.

It is true, however, that I have seen many an utterly miserable-looking old Sienna continuing to plow away with a quarter-million miles on the clock. Perhaps this Sienna is meant to anticipate a similar future by already looking crappy at 31,600 miles. Perhaps it would never get any worse. It’s hard to tell. If it still looks like this years from now, that wouldn’t be so bad. I also wonder if Toyota’s decision to drop the four-cylinder was such a great idea. Yes, it’s very slow, and yes, it’s very coarse, but I trust it more than I trust any Toyota V-6. If I had to drive a Sienna for the next decade and cover all the expenses myself, I might be tempted to choose the four, even though it barely clocked 22mpg in my unenthusiastic stewardship. There’s no possible reason to own a Sienna other than the explicit expectation of Land-Cruiser-in-Africa-style long-term durability, and the 2.7L would be an asset on that particular balance sheet.

I’m a car guy, you know? I like cars and I can usually find a reason to get enthusiastic about almost anything I drive. The Sienna LE 2.7L was a rare exception. I disliked it from the moment I backed it out of its stall at Hertz and realized it didn’t have parking sensors, and our relationship never got better. I’m not saying you should buy a Caravan over this thing — some people have been too badly burned by Chrysler minivans to ever give them a second chance. I am, however, saying you should choose something else. Even the most die-hard Toyota fan deserves better than this.

Why, why, why the hell is the new BMW 328d called the 328d? It’s a 3-Series, so that part’s legitimate, even if today’s 3er dwarfs the old Bavaria. It’s also a diesel, so the “d” seems appropriate, even if the absence of a “t” rankles a bit among those of us who remember the 524td. Not that “t” always meant “turbo” in BMW-land; sometimes it meant “touring” like fast, sometimes it meant “touring” like station wagon.

The problem is this: the “28″ in 328d suggests a 2.8-liter engine. Just like the 528e had. Well, actually, that was a 2.7-liter engine. The same engine appeared in the 325e, where it was also 2.7 liters. Still, those are relatively white decklid lies compared to the effrontery of putting a two-liter engine in a car and badging it as a 2.8, right? There has to be a rhyme and reason here somewhere, surely. And it there isn’t, then surely there’s a way to put some sense and sensibility back into the German-car game, right?

Good news: I, your humble author, have a solution.

Before I detail my easy-as-pie and completely reasonable idea, however, let’s consider just how BMW and Mercedes in particular got themselves into this mess. The idea of naming a car after its engine displacement isn’t a new one — in fact, it dates from very nearly the first automobiles — but since cars in Europe were often taxed on their displacement the importance of knowing said displacement right up front took on a rather outsized importance in that market. It never happened here, otherwise the fellow chasing the “hot rod Lincoln” would have bragged that “nothin’ will outrun my three-point-six-liter Ford.” Here in the United States, we named our cars after animals, cities, natural phenomena, and other fun stuff. Who would want a “Ford 4.7S” when you could have a Ford Mustang?

In the dour environment of postwar Germany, however, Mercedes-Benz chose to name their cars after their displacement, with only the addition of an “S” for “Super” executive sedans spoiling the purity of the naming scheme. Later on, more letters appeared after the numbers, but those numbers tended to be trustworthy. A “180″ probably was 1.8 liters. The “300SLR” really was a three-liter engine. It mostly made sense.

The first real cracks in the scheme appeared when Mercedes-Benz decided to boost the available power in the S-Class sedans. When the 6.3-liter V-8 was dropped into the 300SEL, somebody realized that calling it the 630SEL might give it more decklid authority on the Autobahn than the “600″ limo. (That should have been the “630″, come to think of it.) Something had to be done, and that something was to create a car called the “300SEL 6.3″. Other 300SELs arrived after that, including the 300SEL 3.5 and the 300SEL 4.5. The last one always amused me because presumably it was done to prevent the crass horror of calling a car the “450SEL”. Naturally, the next big Benz to appear was, in fact, called the 450SEL.

BMW had been struggling with a rather confusing displacement-based scheme of its own, where the 2002 was a two-door 2000 rather than a 2000 with two additional milliliters of bore. The sensible decision was made to create a universal naming scheme. To prevent the silliness of a 300SEL 4.5, the displacement was given second billing behind an arbitrary number meant to denote the size of sausage being sold. A 320i, therefore, was a 3-Series with a two-liter engine.

This scheme lasted all of ten minutes before BMW decided to fit a 1.8-liter engine into the US-market 320i without changing the badge. Presumably this was done because customers, who had already caught on to the general idea that a higher number was better, would balk at paying more for this year’s 318i then they had paid for the previous year’s 320i. The “318i” moniker didn’t appear until the E30 did. Note how quickly the number really started to matter. Fewer than five years after adopting a logical model designation system, BMW was already having to fudge it. Let’s not forget the 745i, of course, which was a turbocharged 730i. The “4.5″ was meant to represent the, ah, equivalent power potential or something like that.

By 1990 or thereabouts, the German model schemes were being honored more in the breach than the observance. The small Mercedes was called the 190E 2.3, or the 190E 2.5, or the 190E 2.6. You could buy a 190E 2.6 or a 260E. They were very different cars. BMW was selling the same engine in the 325 and 528. Mercedes blinked and created the ridiculous notion of C, E, and S-Class cars. This should have made it possible to honestly state the displacement, since the letter was there to denote prestige. Naturally, the minute the C230K went from a 2.3-liter to a 1.8-liter supercharged four-cylinder, the scheme was broken and we then had a C230 1.8. BMW, meanwhile, was selling a 3.0-liter six-cylinder in a car and calling it the 328i. In the 3-Series, the turbocharged 3.0-liter was called a 335i, but that same engine in a 7-Series made it a 740Li. This was odd, because once upon a time a 740Li was a 4.4-liter V-8.

This brings us to the present day, which looks like so:

320i — 2.0L
328i — 2.0L (four-doors)
328i — 3.0L (two-doors)
328d — 2.0L
335i — 3.0L

This won’t do, will it? Only one of the five configurations is even close to being named after its actual displacement. You can’t even rely on the engines being smaller than their listed displacement; the old carry-over coupe has a larger engine than the decklid suggests.

I find the whole situation thrilling because it’s yet another case of people “misusing” a technology or a language or a tool. Engineers and designers and marketroids love to sit around and determine exactly how somebody will use or buy or regard a product, but those plans never survive the first contact with the enemy. In Africa, smartphones are bank accounts. The World Wide Web mostly transmits content types that weren’t even suggested when the first HTML pages were written. Somebody goes through the trouble of making a nice pre-surgery drug like Rohypnol and the next thing you know, ugly guys in New York with the ability to lift and carry 150 pounds are getting lucky like you wouldn’t believe.

Whatever ideas BMW might have had for its naming system in 1974, the market has its own ideas, and those ideas run something like this: a bigger number is better. Well, duh. The 328d has to be a 2.8 “marketing displacement” engine because the 328i is a 2.8, and that is a 2.8 because it’s meant to have equivalent power to the old 2.8, which was really a 3.0 but which was downgraded to create more marketing space between it and the significantly more expensive 335i. BMW could just reset everything to actual displacement but customers would expect the price to drop. How could a 320ti cost as much as the old 328i? How could a 320d cost more than a 328i?

Let’s not even get into the 7-Series, where the fine old name 735i can’t be used because it sounds cheap compared to 740i, and 730ti absolutely positively cannot be used under any circumstances. How about those Mercedes-Benz E63 AMGs which don’t displace 6.3 liters any more and in fact never actually did?

The pressure is on the manufacturers to offer more number for the buck. Pretty soon, the 328i will have to be a 330i, perhaps. It’s easy to imagine a situation where a high-efficiency 1.5-liter “330i” exists. Two marketing liters for every real one! Not to mention the fact that a two-liter turbo will eventually power US-market 7-Series sedans and no way in hell are they going to be called “720Li”. Meanwhile, Mercedes is selling a 1.8-liter C250 and a 3.5-liter C300. It’s all getting cray-cray up in here.

The proper solution to all of this is blinding in its simplicity. For the majority of consumers, the number on a BMW or Mercedes is only relevant insofar as it provides an approximate estimate of price. The numbers are also judged against the competition, a fact which caused Audi to rename its new “300″ sedan to “Audi V-8″ at the last minute lo these many years ago, since the Audi “300″ would have cost a fair bit more than a Mercedes 300E and a hell of a lot more than a BMW 325. So why mess around with all this stupidity about equivalent turbocharged marketing displacement and whatnot?

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the newest BMW: the BMW 32,250. Formerly known as the 320i, it’s now named directly after its price. If you put options on it, the number will go higher. Or, you could choose a full-sized sedan like the BMW 73,550, formerly the “740i”. All the mystery is gone. The price is on the trunk. Show it to your neighbors, who just took delivery of a Mercedes-Benz 51,500 instead of the E350 they’d had their eyes on a year or so ago. From now on, you’ll know what everybody around you paid for their car. No more obscurity. Sure, we won’t know what size the engines are, but we don’t know that now. You can find that boring crap out right here on TTAC, while your girlfriend looks at your mid-engined Audi 114,200 and calculates what her engagement ring should cost.

In a single unilateral move, I’ve destroyed all nomenclatural confusion for all time. Until, that is, BMW starts offering rebates. Pretty soon, the BMW 89,400 will go out the door for $60k or less. Leased examples won’t say BMW 339/month, but maybe they should? What about used cars? Will they have their logos jumbled the way second-rate bodyshops often create S450 Benzos with heavy orange peel? It’s all too much to think about. Maybe some legislation should be introduced to give every car a name — but what if that name is Cutlass Calais Brougham?

“YOUR CAR!!!! I LOVE YOUR CAR!!!!” She was a Slavic-faced woman in her mid-twenties, not bad for New York and positively model-grade by Midwestern standards, and she was literally hopping up and down on the streetcorner.

“It’s not a car,” I said, wedged into the Morgan’s extremely tight drivers’ compartment, feeling self-conscious in a half-face helmet that I wasn’t strictly sure was necessary or even required by law. “It’s a trike.”

“I WANT A RIDE!” she yelled. A crowd was starting to gather. The stoplight seemed to be taking an unusually long time to change.

“There isn’t room.” Wedged next to me, the Morgan’s owner, professional bon vivant and recreational speeder Alex Roy, was making a “no room” motion with his hands in her direction as he explained the situation.

“Oh,” I smirked, “I think there’s room.” But then the green light flashed and with an incongruous but very forceful Harley-blat we departed the intersection, leaving Miss Hopping Estonia 2007 in our blue-smoking wake.

Most modern gearheads know who Alex Roy is; he’s even managed to get on the Letterman show in order to brag about making it across the country in thirty-one hours and change in one of his “POLIZEI” BMW M5s. Like fellow journalist and daredevil Matt Farah, Mr. Roy is notorious for all sorts of high-dollar hijinks in various Bullruns, Gumballs, and other velvet-rope driving events. Also like Matt Farah, the real-life Alex Roy is a thoughtful intellectual with a genuine, childlike passion for cars. It’s hard not to like them both once you have any in-person exposure to them.

A few years ago, I had a couple of caustic words for the bald-by-choice Roy. In response, he sent me a copy of his book and invited me to stop by his place in New York to discuss it. I arrived ready for a good solid scrap but ended up laughing all evening at Alex’s ability to turn a phrase in the service of a story. At the heart of it, he’s one of “us”. He’s a car guy through and through. Whatever my opinion of the Gumball Rally might be, (hint: it rhymes with chucks rocks) my opinion of Alex Roy is high.

When he offered me an opportunity to spin his Morgan Trike around Lower Manhattan in the dead of night, therefore, I accepted before he could finish the sentence. I arrived at his Greenwich Village loft last Tuesday evening and found Alex screening films with his cross-country co-driver, the impeccably handsome David Maher. With Mr. Maher’s departure to do whatever millionaire playboys do in New York, Alex and I headed to the parking garage beneath his building. The trike was parked on a very steep blind exit, so my first task was to fire it up and drive away without rolling backwards and hitting my own rental car.

I hadn’t been exactly sure what to expect when I squeezed myself into the leather-lined open cockpit, but the reality of operating the 3 Wheeler is very pleasant. Three pedals, no hand clutch or anything deliberately odd like that. It starts up like a car, although there’s a master switch to flip on before hitting the starter button. My size 10.5D New Balance 993s fit the pedalbox with no difficulty, although there’s no dead pedal to speak of. This would not be a great vehicle in which to cross the country, even if one suspected it could be done in thirty-one hours. Which it could not, for reasons I’ll discuss shortly. Although final drive is by means of an unconventional and fairly delicate toothed belt, I had no trouble balancing it on the clutch and then rolling it up and out of the garage.

The last trike I drove was the the rather imperfect CanAm Spyder, which was basically a snowmobile with wheels. This, on the other hand, feels like a somewhat attenuated version of a Caterham Seven. Control efforts are very low, from the wrist-action shifter to the quick-to-engage brakes. I found it easy to place my left palm flat on the ground without altering my seating position. I don’t recommend doing this on the move, even for a moment, even just to see if you can do it. The Morgan offers a doorhandle’s-eye view of New York City traffic.

The power from the S&S-built Harley twin is more than adequate, even short-shifting to save the already-battered drive belt. It’s possible to dive for gaps between taxis, but this is no Crown Victoria and it has to be understood that in any metal-mashing encounter with anything more substantial than a Vespa the Morgan will likely come off the loser. Best to use the power to get out of trouble, rather than into it.

With 1,996 miles of hard downtown use showing on the odometer at the start of our journey, Mr. Roy’s trike has already suffered a variety of mechanical issues including the departure of both exhaust hangers, a failure of the accelerator pedal bushing, and a gradual collapse of the headlight brackets. After a few minutes in Chelsea it’s easy to see why. You, the urban Morgan driver, must continually steer between manhole covers and potholes. Striking any of them will result in a crash and rattle from the front kingpins violent enough to reposition one’s spectacles. Thankfully, the front end steers with perfect clarity and precision. It’s the back wheel that causes a spot of difficulty, really. At fifty miles per hour, any sudden manhole-cover-avoidance maneuver results in a rather startling oscillation from the rear wheel as it meanders up and down the road crown looking for a place to settle. I can easily imagine it breaking free entirely under less than considerable provocation. The way it interacts with the various steel plates and whatnot making up a large part of city streets has to be experienced to be understood but if you’ve driven an old motorcycle in New York and you’ve felt a narrow bike tire scoot on steel sideways you’ll have an idea.

The Morgan is far from autobahn-ready, and Roy describes the few racetrack laps he’s taken in it as “slower than the safety car,” but in this downtown environment it’s absolutely perfect. Not because it’s safe, spacious, easy to see, or terribly competent to drive, but because it pulls female attention like Mark Purefoy’s bathing scene in the second season of HBO’s Rome. At every one of Manhattan’s crowded crosswalks, the trike creates an absolutely hilarious phenomenon that goes something like this: children stare open-mouthed, men pretend to ignore it, and women of all types start twitching from the knees up. I experienced this phenomenon when I used to drive a Seven clone around central Ohio, but let’s face it: Columbus is a hick town and every time somebody in the city buys a Mustang GT the local paper runs a front page story entitled NEW SPORTING VELOCIPEDE PURCHASED FROM LOCAL PURVEYOR OF NON-TRACTOR MOTORIZED VEHICLES.

New York, on the other hand, is the capital of the world and the women here have seen it all. I’ve personally observed an F430 snarl its way down 7th Avenue without anybody looking in its direction whatsoever. And when the ladies of the city do deign to notice your Reventon or what have you, it’s usually with some comment regarding lack of endowment. The common-and-garden-variety 911 Turbo S is more of a hindrance to getting your groove on the Village than a BUSH/CHENEY FARM AND RANCH TEAM T-shirt would be.

Not so the Morgan. After a solid twenty minutes of seeing beautiful women run into the street for a mere chance to more closely examine the vehicle and its pilots, I asked Alex if this was par for the course. “Oh, yes,” he laughed, “I can get in trouble with this thing if I drive it around. Better to stay at home.” At perhaps sixty grand all in — the price of a Boxster 2.7 PDK with vinyl seatbacks, 13″ steel wheels, and a molded-plastic blank plate labeled “POVERTY” where the radio’s supposed to be — the Trike is an absurd value, assuming you have no concerns about the future of your marriage or the present state of your prostate gland.

Before I knew it, we’d arrived at Roy’s chosen restaurant, where we just parked the thing out front as if it were legal or advisable to do so. While I dined on some top-notch roasted chicken and chucked back the Ketel One, he laughingly observed women climbing into the Morgan for photographs again and again. “I don’t mind,” he allowed, “as long as they aren’t hurting anything.” When we walked out, a young couple was attempting to photograph themselves in front of the Morgan.

“I’m the owner,” I announced, and simply put my arm around the lady’s waist, dragging her away. “Take a picture,” I commanded, which the boyfriend dutifully did. Then, amazingly enough, he turned to Alex to ask him about the car. “Perhaps you’d like to take a spin with me,” I whispered in my impromptu companion’s ear. She nodded eagerly; it didn’t appear that she spoke English. I caught Roy’s eye; he was clearly prepared to wingman for me. This was a man who had bluffed his way out of a hundred dicey situations. It occurred to me that the key to his rather impressive loft was probably also on the trike’s keychain. I could absolutely rely on Roy to keep this fellow occupied for hours while I alternately serenaded and violated his significant other. How could I not do it? In a moment, I attained what the Buddhists call satori. I understood why Fate had decreed that I would never be handsome, successful, or lucky: I’m simply not prepared to handle any of those things with grace. I released the lady’s waist with a final and thoroughly inappropriate caress and slumped back into the Morgan, helmet askew, prepared for the next destination.

Perhaps thirty people crowded around us as Alex hopped in and I selected first gear. I’ve seen other trikes decorated with the Flying Tigers gaping-maw graphic; I’d be tempted to select that for mine. It makes sense. In the city, the Morgan makes fighter pilots out of ordinary men and adventure out of a trip to dinner. It’s best left to people whose sense of self is just as larger than life. It was a relief to exchange it for my Caravan and once again become an observer of, rather than a participant in, the city’s nightlife. Still, I can’t say that I haven’t looked at the Morgan website since then. Celebrity’s a hell of a drug, isn’t it?

A vow of celibacy? Threatening to cut someone’s throat at a race track? Flowing locks? No, silly. They both love the Volkswagen Phaeton.

Our raven haired race car driver famously owned not one but two Phaetons, thereby earning himself the title of “masochist of the century” and a complimentary membership to Opus Dei – Jack’s self-mortification was only financial, rather than physical, but I’m sure the order will admit him anyways.

Meanwhile, our Pontiff is a Jesuit, and is more concerned about things like social justice and acts of humility. No wonder he’s shunned the Mercedes SUVs of the past in favor of the discrete Volkswagen Phaeton with a TDI powerplant. I wonder if Herr Schmitt, our other resident lapsed Catholic (now practicing Shinto) ever envisioned this coming to pass during his days at VW.

I haven’t seen it yet — my only current magazine subscriptions are The Economist, Vintage Guitar, and Juggs — but I am reliably told that your humble author has two, count ‘em, two articles in the newest issue of that well-beloved and august publication, Road&Track. TTAC readers are already comparing me to the Emperor Napoleon as I triumphantly return to color magazines the way Napoleon returned from Elba.

Yes, I said return.

Twenty-two years ago, I began writing for Bicycles Today magazine. In a monthly column entitled “One Racer’s Perspective”, I railed against the excesses of the industry, provided advice for new racers, and exposed the too-cozy relationship between the manufacturers and the color mags. I even wrote a little fiction. Sounds thoroughly familiar, right? Most of all, I campaigned for riders to be given a voice in the sport of bicycle motocross, which at that point was run by an unholy coalition of parents and sunshine-state scam artists.

When BMX Action! became GO! magazine and a fellow pro racer named Chris Moeller took control as editor, he invited me to contribute and I did so… only to see the rag fold before my first column could be printed. Oh well. The first experiment in letting the inmates run the asylum was a failure.

A decade after that unhappy ending, I wrote an angry letter to Car and Driver objecting to their praise of a certain South African kit-car manufacturer. C/D printed the letter and a major online car forum of the era made said letter a subject of discussion. My decision to join that discussion started a chain of events that landed me right here nine years later.

Road&Track is not the first major car magazine to ask me to contribute. I declined for a variety of reasons in the past and when Sam Smith contacted me in August my first impulse was to decline again. Over the course of a couple discussions, however, I became convinced by the three-inch-thick stack of Benjamins Hearst Publications offered me clarity and integrity of Sam’s vision for the mag.

To bring me on as an occasional contributor, Sam not only had to convince me, he had to deal with a firestorm of objections, criticism, and negative reactions from automakers and fellow journalists who have been on the receiving end of my cordovan MacNeils since 2007 or thereabouts. To his credit, he did that and his boss, Larry Webster, stood behind him. They’re still hearing that they’ve made the wrong decision — from people in the business, from the yes-men in the PR cliques, from the whispering cowards at the press events.

If you pick up the April issue of Road&Track, you’ll see that my editorial voice and personal commitment to truth were allowed to shine through without modification or mollification. The comparison test I wrote, which pits the 911 Carrera S PDK against the Lotus Evora S IPS on the back roads of South Carolina, may shock the mag’s regular readers but it won’t shock you.

I will continue to do the majority of my writing right here at TTAC, but I am pleased to note that for the foreseeable future, you’ll also be able to read me at Road&Track. I’m also asking you, the reader, to hold me accountable for what I write here and there. I’m not doing this for the money or the perks; I’ve owned the kind of cars most autojournos have to sign two waivers just to touch and when I want to fly somewhere nice I just take out my wallet. I’m in this business because I believe in truth and I remain deeply passionate about cars. That won’t change.

This experiment that Hearst is trying — that of stacking a color magazine with actual club racers and letting them run wild — may fare no better than Wizard Publications’ decision to let Chris Moeller run BMX Action! I’m hoping that’s not the case. This time, the good guys deserve a win, and I expect to be standing right next to them when it goes up on the scoreboard.

Be seeing you.

When Joni Mitchell finally agreed to release a Hits album, she did so with the stipulation that the label also release a Misses album full of music that she was happy to have made even if the critics and buyers didn’t dig it.

So. What follows is five bona-fide, hit-counter-spinning hits, and five how-dare-you-turn-your-nose-up-at-my-talent misses. Let the second-guessing begin!

The Hits

Avoidable Contact: How Fake Luxury Conquered The World I’d written this for Speed:Sport:Life a few years previous, but I dusted it off and brought it to TTAC in order to test our august founder Robert Farago’s theory that “content longer than 800 words dies on the web.” We got a lot of inbound links and traffic on this one. Some people thought I was trying to dump on GM again but my real purpose was to examine consumer behavior and indulge in some authentic nostalgia for Seventies B-Bodies.

Avoidable Contact: Color my world, the case for front wheel drive. Everybody knows that the best Autobahn machines are steel-grey machines with black trim and exclusive drive to the rear axles, right? I made the case for automotive peacocking and high-speed stability with a push, not a pull. A lot of 17-year-olds with extensive experience borrowing their parents’ 328i automatic sedans told the Internet I was a n00b and a loser based on this column, which warmed my heart.

Avoidable Contact: The end, and the beginning, of great Japanese cars. This was a nostalgia piece mixed with criticism, much like the “Fake Luxury” piece, only discussing the way Japanese cars had become reflections of their customers’ worst qualities. An extended 1200-word digression into Orson Scott Card’s Speaker For The Dead and the “Descolada” was snipped in a half-hearted nod towards brevity.

How GM Could Save The Cadillac ATS From Its Otherwise Inevitable Fate of Complete Marketplace Failure This one was so globally popular that it was translated into German. It turns out that the Cadillac ATS is actually doing okay, in the sense that it has cannibalized CTS sales. Any chance at greatness, however, was engineered out during the product-planning phase.

Two Minutes Hate: David Sirota Is Ashamed Of His Inauthentic Masculinity My master plan to do a series of “Two Minutes Hate” articles, in which various autojournos and enemies of motoring would be eviscerated sans mercy, ground to a halt when Jalopnik appropriated the idea and ran it into the ground with a vengeance. Week after week, Hardigree and company went after various journalistic misdemeanors often enough to make the dish stale. After ten or so Gawker features about THIS IS THE AUTOMOTOTOTIVE JOURNOMALIST WHO BLAH WHILE BLAHING I felt like Peter Green being forced to watch a Nickelback stadium concert. Perhaps we’ll revive the feature in 2013, but I doubt it.

Now, for the Misses!

Hype and Hypertrophy: How Lamborghini Lost Its Man Card. Strictly speaking, this wasn’t a “miss”. It set a TTAC record for Facebook shares and was recommended and linked everywhere from “The Car Lounge” to a webforum for currently-serving Navy Seals. I wrote it at the end of a long work day, in about 75 minutes, and published it without even checking for typos. It was definitely my favorite article of the year, however. Sometimes the music comes to one’s fingertips, and sometimes it doesn’t.

Fiction: The little death. Written to memorialize a drunken three days in Destin and ignored by the readers with the same disdain they typically show for last week’s news. The readers who did comment thought that the protagonist was a horrifying person. I finally understood how Updike must have felt when the reviews for “Rabbit, Run” came through.

Fiction: The Dangling (Sponsored) Conversation Based on a date-that-wasn’t I had about six years ago with a girl from a VW owners forum, stirred together with the concerns I have about “sponsored conversations” in car (and other) web forums. For the record, the actual “TDIRiotGrrl” was quite fit and a solid twelve years younger than me, and we parted company after drinks.

Trackday Diaries: Consider Phlebas Meeting the mighty Panamera Turbo as a driving instructor, and trying to address the question everybody asks us on Mondays: why do you risk your car on a racetrack?

Never Mind The Shuffle Steering: Let’s Take The Falcon To Hyperspace This should have been hugely popular, right? I flew all the way to Los Angeles to help Hooniverse editor “Mad Science” kick some ass around a racetrack in a 1964 Ford Falcon — and he did kick ass, and we all learned a few things about trackdays that are applicable no matter what you drive — and it just landed with a thud. I’m still bitter about that.

All of these hits and misses, plus many more besides, are available at my author page at TTAC. I’d like to thank all off you for making 2012 a truly great year for me at TTAC. I’ve scaled my contributions to the site back a bit for the new year, and I’ve been involved in some new and different automotive adventures elsewhere about which I can’t wait to tell you, but I continue to believe that there is no group of “car people” out there as consistently knowledgeable, interesting, and worthwhile as The Best and Brightest. See you all again soon!

A few years ago, we drove the Switzer P800, a Nissan GT-R that put slightly over seven hundred horsepower to the wheels. Switzer has since gone on to sell dozens of P800 kits; in fact, your humble author worked with Switzer for the summer of 2010 in an advisory capacity to help sell even more of them. If you’re going to drive a GT-R, you might as well drive a really fast one, right?

Switzer’s customers weren’t satisfied with 800 horses at the crank, though; they wanted a thousand at the crank. And once that was done, they wanted a thousand. At the wheels. Getting to that level wasn’t easy.

A long blog post by Switzer’s Jo Borras describes the process. It wasn’t exactly painless:

But before my adventures for the day were over, the transmission went into limp mode… They discovered a broken 4th gear in the box. A broken 4th PPG gear, as my car had the full gearset.

…The car immediately stalled when started up. I tried it a few more times to no avail, and finally decided to feather the throttle for a few revs to see if that would help. Bad idea, the car noticeably rocked when I did this, and it quite frankly scared the shit out of me. We spoke to Switzer, reviewed the install and refill procedure, then reinspected…and found a cracked transmission case. A hairline fracture in the case with some fluid dripping out.

On the 3rd big pull 2nd through 5th gear, with my cousin frantically telling me to slow down because there was a bend in the road, I let off. I pressed the brake and looked behind us for any sign of the Escalades headlights, but could only see a cloud of white smoke.

…Unusually, the drivers side bank was unscathed, but the passengers side bank had catastrophic damage including a hole through the head which drained all the coolant through the exhaust system.

You get the idea. This is big-boy territory, so if you’re the kind of otaku who starts crying through your Goth mascara and “cutting” again in your Mom’s bathroom because one of the taillights in your FR-S has condensation in it, owning a thousand-wheel-horsepower supercar ain’t for you.

Just how fast is a Switzer R1K? Let’s see:

Click here to view the embedded video.

9.38 seconds at 155mph, on a track that looks awfully slick.

Here at TTAC, however, we’re more interested in how a car performs on a track with a few turns between the start and finish line, so we’ll put in a request and see if any R1K owners want to let us beat the piss out of their car perform some professional testing. Something tells me this car could be even faster around a road course than a Mustang V6!

In our second installment, we take the Scion FR-S to the track, along with the heavier, but more powerful Hyundai Genesis 2.0T and its spiritual antecedent, the Mazda MX-5. Oh, and there are special guests from Japan and America.

As Jack mentioned, we’ll be at Toronto Motorsports Park on Monday to film episode deux of TTAC Track Days with Jack Baruth. Any of the B&B who wish to spend a day with myself and Jack are welcome to join us. Now that everything is set in stone, I’m happy to announce the lineup for the next installment.

We’ll be conducting a 3 +1 car shootout, with the Scion FR-S, Hyundai Genesis 2.0T R-Spec, Mazda MX-5 and our benchmark “Brand P” roadster. I took a brief drive in a privately owned FR-S and felt it didn’t live up to the hype. I agree with Motor Trend’s Randy Pobst when he says that the MX-5 is still the best affordable drivers car – Jack’s opinion may vary. The Genesis Coupe R-Spec and Brand P are heavier but more powerful. Aside from the subjective evaluations, we’ll also have timing gear on hand, provided it makes it from VIR to TMP on time.

Anyone who wants to come can drop us a note, editors@ttac.com for more info

Finally, our long-promised video series makes its debut, with our very own Jack Baruth at the helm, doing what he does best; bullying PR people into paying his obscene room service bill putting today’s sports cars to the test on a closed circuit.

For our first episode, we took a Hyundai Genesis Coupe 3.8 Track model to Toronto Motorsports Park, as well as a certain vehicle from “Brand P” to use as a baseline. While we were there, we ran in to a few “exotic” machines that cost far more than our humble Hyundai, but didn’t exactly perform any better.

We’re hoping to do further installments of the series. For now, enjoy Jack and his questionable wardrobe choices.

Thanks to Hyundai Canada for providing the car (which is known as a 3.8GT in the Great White North), and Chris Blanchette for his amazing video production.

Tomorrow will kick off the start of our new video series; TTAC Track Days with Jack Baruth. Our first vehicle will be a Hyundai Genesis Coupe 3.8 Track model.

Now that TTAC has access to a top-notch video crew (thanks to our parent company, VerticalScope) we’ve decided to take advantage of our relationship with a local track day organizer, and Toronto Motorsports Park. TMP is used to accommodating video crews, and Jack’s proximity to Toronto, combined with his experience on track made it a no-brainer.

Myself, Jack and the video crew will be out today filming the car. You can check our Facebook page for live shots, but you may have to sit tight for the actual video. If everyone makes it out alive, we’ll be doing lots more.

Carnewschina brings us the story of the black-and-white Audi S5 Coupe. Black (matte black) on one side. White on the other. The perfect car to perpetrate crimes with, and to confuse witnesses.

The canvass for that Jackson-Pollock-on-wheels does not come cheap. Carnewschina informs us that the S5 Coupe costs 728.000 yuan in China. That’s $115,000. And some still claim that the Chinese currency is undervalued …

Kevin writes:

Sajeev and Steve:

Q1. Do you like it?
A1. Unequivocally!  It’s amazing.

Q2. Are you going to buy it out or extend the lease?
A2. Absof@!%inglutely not.

Q3. Why not – you just said you loved it?!
A3. True, but it’s a constant reminder of the adages (i) never buy a first year vehicle (ii) never lease a car out of warranty and (iii) someone, somewhere, is tired of her sh!t.  Well, maybe just the first two.

The car itself is amazing to drive in any conditions on any road – almost too good.  It’s very, very fast, comfortable, handles beautifully (with the usual Quattro understeer), beautiful to look at, has rear view camera, parking sensors, iPod integration, heated seats, bluetooth, navigation, B&O sound system, etc.  I’ve had it at the track a number of times, drive it to work in traffic every day and have dedicated rims and brilliant snow tires for winter (making snow and ice something to smile about).  The trunk is massive; I have taken two other people and all our ski and snowboard gear to Blue Mountain, and often take a passenger and two full hockey bags two the rink once a week.  Hell, I have even managed to escape the concentric circle of hell that is IKEA with a twin mattress in the back and still been able to see out the back window.  For some inexplicable reason, I still hand wash it and park it far away from anything or anybody; it looks and drives like it’s brand new.

That said, it also has had at least $5000 worth of work done to it under warranty, including new front control arms, an entire new clutch assembly and master slave cylinder, new blower motor and fan and new window regulator.  On top of the repairs, the 4.2L V8 is a very thirsty beast and it costs a second king’s ransom to lease and insure every month.

So – the question isn’t whether or not to buy it out or extend the lease.  I won’t own this car one second out of warranty and I don’t see any point extending the lease on a 2008 when you can spend the same money leasing a newer model.

The question is – where do I go from here?  November isn’t exactly the best time to be putting a new car on the road in this part of the world.  Hell, I’m not even close to being convinced that I want a brand new car.  This was my first new, never driven by anyone else, vehicle.  Definitely the nicest car I’ve ever owned as well. I previously had a nice 2004 Infiniti G35 I picked up off of Leasebusters after some chump put $7000 down, didn’t drive it and then walked away.  Prior to that I had a well used Integra that simply wouldn’t die no matter how much it was abused. Previous rides are of varying levels of embarrassment and, for that matter alone, deemed irrelevant.

What else has the style, handling and versatility of the S5?  I’ve toyed with the idea of a GT-R, but those things are now almost $130K here (taxes in).  I am going to have a hard time justifying spending $100K on anything given the (i) state of the roads (i) lack of parking lot manners (iii) inadequacy of driver training and (iv) lack of traffic violation enforcement for anything other than speeding in a straight line on an empty road.

Steve Answers:

1. Bitching about the lack of reliability.
2. Bitching about the cost of repair.
3. Delusions of grandeur involving even more expensive vehicles… all of which have abysmal ownership costs.
4. Inability to perform simple addition
5. Bitching, bitching, moaning, whining, and even more bitching!

I would look at lowering the overall costs by opting for a good independent shop that specializes in Audis. Subscribe to a few forums that are Audi-centric. Figure out what parts companies offer high quality replacements for the lackluster and under-engineered components… and have at it.

Sajeev Answers:

Wow, that’s a nice list of things to fix under warranty! You and Jack Baruth can trade war stories on your S5 mechanical woes, except he dumped the green monster pictured above.  He wisely moved onwards and upwards to Panther Love…via Lincoln Town Car Signature Limited, son! (HINT- HINT)

We all know that modern German cars are absolute crap relative to their Japanese and American counterparts.  Fine.  But I am still dumbfounded as to why modern German cars eat through control arms in the infancy of their lives. Two Benzes in the Mehta family, a friend’s BMW, another friend’s VW, and your Audi. And here I was bitching because the complex suspension in my Lincoln Mark VIII needed a full rebuild after 10 years and 130,000 miles on the road!

Short answer? Just lease another Audi. You need them, and I don’t know if a BMW will charm you enough to justify jumping ship. I suspect your gut is telling you the same thing, especially if you love AWD as much as I envision.

As to your reference of smart money?  Join me in the ranks of stupid cheap Ford Ranger/Toyota Tacoma ownership, but go ahead and spring for a 4×4. Keepin’ it too real?  Stick with the four ring brand, and buy according to your pocketbook and what has the sweetest lease deals at the time of your visit to the dealership.

This coming week is the week when all car manufacturers wish they would have a split personality.  The New York Auto Show and the Shanghai Auto Show will take place in the same week. Jack Baruth will take Manhattan. (Hey, Jack: The famous Headquarter’s “Steakhouse” is right next door to the Javit’s Center.  Scores is just a few blocks south.) I’ll take Shanghai and my camera. I’m sure Jack will come equipped. Maybe.

As a special service to the Best & Brightest,  YOU can put in requests for what we shall take pictures of – apart from the obvious.

We’ll try to fulfill all requests – to the best of our abilities.

Last week, I reported on my decision to use E85 fuel in my 2009 Town Car for a week or so. How’d it go? Well, as it so happened, I accidentally veered off the road while texting and killed a

pretty solid “sexting” session with one of automotive journalism’s most prominent, and beautiful, distaff contributors. (I apologize for the placement of the “jump” there, but I’ve been told to “get my clicks up” or something to that effect.) Back to the math.

In the original article, I indicated that my “target mileage” to break even with E85 usage was 17.8mpg, based on my gasoline mileage of 21.4 average and the $2.29/$2.79 pricing of E85 and 87 octane fuel. The first tank was very promising; I averaged 18.1mpg with no difficulty.

The second tank was still $2.29, but gasoline was $2.63. This made my target mileage 18.6mpg, but from the moment I refilled the mileage began dropping precipitously, eventually settling at 16.4. Worse yet, twice during my morning commute I noticed a low-speed stumble. Was it because I had fuelled up at a different E85 station?

Over the course of the first 28.5 gallons, I averaged 16.4 mpg total. My third fillup, still priced at $2.29 but this time facing a gasoline price of $2.87, came just as temperatures in Ohio fell to the 45-degree Fahrenheit range. A Halloween weekend of serving as a designated-driver taxi for some female friends found me pulling into my driveway at 3:05AM, having burned thirteen more gallons and lowered my overall mileage to 15.7. There was a persistent smell of alcohol in the car, but this turned out to be due to the “to-go cup” of Abolut Apeach that somebody spilled down her costume. It turns out there was no cotton between her and the seat to absorb the drink, but I’m told that vodka can sterilize almost anything, including corrected-grain leather.

Today’s commute, done with the windows down just in case I got pulled over by the Ohio Highway Patrol, raised the average back to 15.9 and burned all but a gallon or so of fuel. I’m now sitting in a corporate cafeteria doing the math. A rough total of 42.5 gallons, purchased for $97, carried me approximately 675 miles. Assuming there would have been negative temperature effect for using standard gasoline, something of which I am not completely certain, I would have needed 31.5 gallons of gasoline to cover the same distance. Averaging out the cost of gasoline over the past eight days, I would be looking at about $87.

This is the kind of sample size and scientific methodology that probably makes Michael Karesh vomit directly into his pocket protector, but if you want some genuine, peer-reviewed literature, I suggest you read Social Text. The raw numbers indicate that it cost me ten bucks to run E85.

The intangibles aren’t as clear-cut. Using E85 decreases my range, shortens my refuel interval, and possibly causes the Townie to be a bit upset in the mornings. On the other hand, it raises the price of food, and I’m told that’s about all this country exports nowadays, so that’s a positive thing. right?

I’m semi-tempted to keep running the yellow-handle fuel for a week or so more. I will probably go through another 30 gallons or so before I leave for Toronto on Friday for another weekend catastrophe. If I can find an E85 station in Buffalo I might be able to run the Lincoln on corn for my entire trip and purchase no fuel at all in tax-rapacious Ontario.

I will leave the last word to one of my Halloween party pals. When informed that her short-wheelbase limo for the evening was running on alcohol, she frowned for a moment: “What are we going to drink, then, if the car drinks all the good stuff?”

After this week’s article on Sergei Rachmaninoff and his connection to the world of automobiles, I thought it might make sense to look around to find other interesting music/auto combos. I ended up constructing a mental two-axis graph in my head, where X was musical ability and Y is driving talent. Some people, like Damon Hill, are close to the left side of X and pretty far up on Y; others, like noted collector and Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason, are the reverse. I think of myself as being more than halfway up Y but less than halfway along X; you can decide for yourself where the autojourno group Exhaust Tones would place.

Since this is a car blog and not MOJO magazine, however, we’ll focus on the best driver we can find with musical cred, and that is… Force India stalwart Adrian Sutil.

Sutil’s parents were professional musicians and he pursued the concert piano path until his fourteenth birthday or thereabouts. I have not been able to find any recordings of him playing “proper” music; in all the available YouTube and other vids, he’s goofing off in one manner or another. It’s clear, however, that he can operate a keyboard with reasonable facility.

As a driver, Adrian is perhaps a bit too cautious and methodical; just what you would expect from a child prodigy piano player. This season is his best yet and he’s made short work of his teammate, ol’ V. Liuzzi. Liuzzi personifies that old joke, “He’s the driver of the future… and he always will be.” He’s unlikely to ever sit atop the Formula One world, but make no mistake: just to get an F1 test drive requires talent, discipline, and development of almost unimaginable proportions, and Sutil’s well beyond test-driver status.

It’s reasonable that talented musicians would do well driving, and vice versa; they are both fine-motor activities which require a solid sense of timing and the ability to pick up subtle cues from the surrounding environment. There’s courage required for both, I suppose; I am far more nervous playing a small gig at a restaurant or bar than I am when racing. Unless you’re a recreational autocrosser or solo performer, chances are that you are part of a team in both activities, and your interactions with that team will determine how you fare. Imagine what the Beatles could have given the world if they’d been able to put up with each other for another decade; imagine what Fernando Alonso could have accomplished with McLaren had he not felt slighted in favor of the local boy.

It goes without saying that both musicians and drivers can be difficult, to put it mildly, and that both are prone to self-destructive behavior (Kurt Cobain, meet James Hunt). Still, there’s solid money to be made, and respect to be earned, if you show up every day and do your best for a long time (Pat Metheny, meet Mark Martin).

If I had the chance to have truly world-class talent in either activity, I think I’d pick driving. As wonderful as it is to stand in front of a crowd and play great music, there’s something majestic about winning a race that soars beyond any mere entertainment. Perhaps it’s competition, perhaps it’s mortality. Your mileage may vary.

The real question is this, however: What does it mean when you have three Godin Synth Access guitars (two LGX-SAs and an LGXT) but can’t afford to put new back tires on your Porsche? I’d better come up with a few more decent article ideas, pronto:

So there I was, minding my own business, driving down the road, enjoying the new Isobel Campbell record and relaxing in the right lane, when I saw two Crown Vics from the local sheriff’s department running up hard behind me, lights, sirens, the whole deal. I moved halfway onto the shoulder to let them by, and then, motivated by nothing more than a love of mayhem, decided to follow them for a while.

The two sheriffs were pushing up to as much as ninety miles per hour in-between clumps of stopped traffic. I loafed along behind them at a distance that allowed those drivers to get started again before I went by. I never went as fast as the cops did, but I never went as slow as they did, either. Over the course of about eight miles, I watched them repeatedly come to screeching brake-and-swerve stops before picking their way through the cars, almost always in a manner that indicated they weren’t looking any further ahead than a few car lengths. Twice the second cop nearly, er, buttslammed the first, usually while applying some pretty heavy-duty steering input in concert with full ABS.

By the time the twin Vics screamed off onto a side road, tossing dirt and rocks in their wake, I was of the opinion that these “trained” drivers would have been out of their depths in NASA’s HPDE 1 group. They repeatedly endangered their own lives and the lives of others… and when I say that, you know some serious idiocy is going down, right? They were unable to separate their turn-and-stop motions. They ran too closely, which adversely affected their ability to make intelligent choices in traffic and dramatically increased the likelihood that they would strike either an innocent bystander or each other.

Perhaps the most damning statement I can make about their ability was that I had no trouble keeping up with them, and I never found myself coming close to other cars or experiencing the sky-high closing speeds they were creating. By running without lights and just working steadily through traffic at 70 mph or so, they would have made better time than they did by gas-and-braking their way down the road. Given a day or two at BeaveRun’s Vehicle Dynamics Facility, I could have completely straightened those two cops out… but I’m no more likely to assist the police than my personal hero, Professor Griff, would be. I’m here to fight the power, yo.

I did find myself thinking that it was a good thing these cops didn’t have any more horsepower than they did. Equipped with HEMI Chargers or Caprice PPVs, these cops would have been hitting 110 or 120 between the gaps. Somebody could have been badly injured.

We already accept, as a society, the idea that it’s better to restrict the capability of machines than to properly train their operators. (See: speed limits, gun control, the OSHA.) What if we simply extended this idea to include law enforcement? In other words, what if we slowed down the cops to protect the innocent? What say you?

You’ve heard the old joke about ham and eggs, right? The chicken is involved, and the pig is committed? Well, I’m going to give ethanol a shot for a while and report the details to all of you. I’m involved, and my Town Car is committed.

There are three E85 stations within five miles of my house. Two of them are operated by the Kroger grocery chain. E85 pricing is perhaps the one thing in America more subject to political and economic meddling than gasoline pricing, but it’s currently at a point where it could make sense to run it.

To find out for myself, I’ve run my 2009 Lincoln Town Car Signature Limited down to below “E” and refueled with E85. On October 24, 2010, E85 was priced at $2.29 locally for me, compared to $2.79 for 87 octane gas. My Town Car reports 21.4 miles per gallon in mixed-use driving, usually running between 75 and 85 on the freeway and with about five surface street miles for every fifteen ones on the Interstate.

I estimate that I need to average 17.8 mpg in order for E85 to “balance out” under these conditions. I’m scheduled to drive about 600 miles in the next seven days, so on Monday I will come back and tell you how I did.

No, this isn’t particularly scientific, and it ignores the other potential costs of E85 — wear on the engine, fuel system damage, food prices in Zimbabwe, and so on — but it’s a start.

I’m no attorney, but I’ve read articles posted anonymously on the Internet by people who claim to be attorneys, and therefore I feel confident that my extensive research regarding the statute of limitations for insurance fraud in certain Midwestern states is correct. It’s time to tell a story of minitrucks and maxipayments, of bumbling crime and hilariously apt punishment…

Much of my youth was spent in the passenger seat of a Toyota pickup. Many of my BMX pals left the sport due to age, injuries, or plain disenchantment and became minitruckers. While there were theoretically many minis on the market, from the Chevrolet S-10 to the GMC S-15, only the Toyota trucks had any real cachet among the hardest of the hardcore.

When I think about what a Toyota truck cost back then, and what you could expect to get out of it, my eyes get a little soggy. Note, by the way, that under no God-damned circumstances will I refer to these vehicles as the “Hilux”. I leave that for people who watch Top Gear. Here in the United States of America, these vehicles were sold simply as the Toyota Truck, except for the one-ton variant, which bore the stirring name of Toyota One Ton. Plain and simple. You can Hilux that right up your you-know-what.

Back to pricing. In 1989, one of my pals, whom we shall call “Jim”, bought a three-year-old, 20,000-mile, standard-bed four-speed for… wait for it… forty-six hundred dollars. I would buy ten of them today at that price. This was a basic vehicle, mind you. It had the so-called “Japanese” bed, the tailgate of which had two latches, one on each side. They worked by squeezing the very flexible sides of the bed together. Here’s a photo of a 1979 to show you what I mean:

They were single-wall beds and could be permanently dented by leaning against them. I found this out when I dented Jim’s truck by leaning against it. Oops.

Jim “tricked out” the truck by filling it full of stereo equipment and dropping it to the ground on “lowering blocks”. The lowering block is the most terrifying piece of engineering I’ve ever seen. It’s a block you put between the axle and the leaf spring. Torsional-slash-cornering loads? Handled with a U-bolt. The front end was lowered by uncranking the torsion rods. Later on, the truck was painted yellow and a set of Fittipaldi “5-star” wheels found their way onto the thing. Among Toyota minitruckers, it was considered awesome.

Jim got a better job and traded in his used Toyota for a new one. He tricked that one out too, with ten grand in upgrades. Then he realized that he hated his new job, so he quit. When the next set of truck and credit-card payments came, he realized that was a bad idea. Enter Clevon.

Clevon lived in the projects north of downtown Columbus. How Jim met him I’ll never know, but I do know that, after hearing Jim’s tale of truck-related woe, Clevon came up with a ready solution. He would “steal” the truck out of Jim’s driveway using a spare set of keys, strip the stereo equipment for sale, then roll it down a hill into a local river.

Jim didn’t want to break the law, but he also didn’t want to have the truck repossessed, so the deal was struck. That night, the truck disappeared. The very next day, the police called Jim.

“Sir, we have found your truck.”

“Oh, really? Is it… damaged beyond repair?” Apparently, it was all Jim could do not to immediately mention water damage. He wasn’t exactly Thomas Crown, if you know what I mean.

“Well, the dashboard has been ripped out, and there isn’t a single thing of value left in it, but once you get the tree out of the suspension, it should fix up.”

“Did you say… tree?” Upon hearing of this, I rode my bicycle twenty miles to Clevon’s apartment to hear the full story. Return with me, dear reader, to a fall night in the early Nineties. Clevon has stripped-out and trashed the truck to the best of his ability. He has positioned himself and the vehicle at the top of a long grass hill. At the bottom of that hill is a river. Now, as the mother of his child waits in her Cavalier with the motor running, Clevon puts the Toyota in neutral and starts running down the hill with the door open, pushing it along, before tripping and falling out of the way. The truck bounces down the hill… and makes a ninety-degree left turn into a tree. A more intrepid fraudster would have figured out a way to get the truck out of the tree and into the water, but Clevon was not such a man. He was in the Cavalier and down the road before the radiator stopped hissing.

“Why didn’t you lock the steering?” I asked.

“Why didn’t your momma put you in a dumpster?” was the response.

“A slavish devotion to middle-class mores.”

The next day, I watched a towing company winch the truck down into Jim’s driveway. His insurance policy entitled him to eighty percent of the lowest possible bid for repairing the vehicle. His stereo equipment and upgrades were not covered. A brief interview with Clevon regarding the return of said stuff, or at least distribution of proceeds from the sale, did not go the way Jim had hoped.

Faced with this situation, our unlucky fraudster did what he had to do. He went and asked for his crummy job back. He fixed the truck himself, using the cheapest available parts. Somehow, he ended up putting the fenders, hood, and grille from a four-wheel-drive Toyota on his two-wheel-drive Toyota. It started a bit of a national trend. To this day, Toyota minitruckers still consider a “4×4 conversion” to be a must-have for any serious “whip”.

Over the course of a decade, Jim revised and rebuilt the Toyota again and again. By the time he was done, it had obtained what John Updike calls “minor fame” in the minitrucking world. The bed went up, down, and around on hydraulic arms. There were three show-quality paintjobs, all different colors, stacked on top of the crappy original collision repaint. The interior was finished to a standard that would shame a Bentley Continental. The engine bay was completely chromed and/or polished. He devoted a room in his new tract home to minitrucking trophies and framed magazine articles.

I stopped by one day to find a 1963 Chevrolet in his garage. Somebody had walked up to him at a truck show and offered serious money. He had taken the serious money and signed the title over on the spot.

“You know,” he said, “I spent ten years of my life thinking about nothing but that truck, devoting my time and effort to it, spending every weekend with it.” There was a pause.

“I’m so glad it’s gone.”

Count on Rodney to ruin a fine romance. “I just thought you should know,” he said as I opened up the lockbox to find the keys for our only four-cylinder, five-speed Probe, “that I screwed your up.”

“You screwed me up?” It wouldn’t be the first time; he’d recently driven a new Taurus headfirst into our “JBL: The Sound Of Ford” display while trying to manuever it out of the showroom, approximately four hours before I was scheduled to deliver it to its new owner.

“No, I screwed your up. The girl sitting at your desk. With the hairy forearms.” Come to think of it, her forearms did have a fair amount of remarkably dark hair on them. “She still thinks my name is Cleveland Washington or something like that. We hit it off right in the club bathroom, like I am known to do.” And yes, indeed, Rodney was rather infamous for anonymous tile-surrounded sex. There were five waitresses who worked the late shift at our local Waffle House. Rodney had violated two of them on the women’s sink over the past year and was working a third with all the patience of a champion bass fisherman. “You know what it means when a girl has hairy forearms.”

“I really don’t.” So he told me. Well, I should have realized that.

The second-generation Probe was probably the best car to come out of the long, difficult Ford-Mazda relationship. In six-cylinder GT form, it was almost ridiculously satisfying to drive, combining tasteful styling, solid interior design, and a lovely snorting sound from the small-bore V6. Even today, one will occasionally see a Probe GT take an SCCA regional autocross win. Good car.

One problem: it was not an easy car to insure. Not only were they stolen at a rate that occasionally exceeded the daily production of Probes at Flat Rock’s AutoAlliance plant, the GT was quick enough to make a big mess when it crashed. Somebody at Ford had the brilliant idea of making a four-cylinder Probe that looked like a six-cylinder one, and the Probe SE was born. We sold them for about fifteen grand, when we could get them. It was a great car to drive, and although it was no Probe GT, it was considerably more stylish than, say, the Escort GT sitting next to it on the lot for $13,100.

We didn’t actually have a Probe SE on the lot, but our locator program said there was a blue one about 100 miles north of us and that it was a “friendly” dealer. Smaller dealerships like ours were usually willing trade partners; the three large Columbus, Ohio dealerships almost never honored a request. Why should they? If you’re “floorplanning” a thousand Fords on your lot, why make your inventory available to the shop with fifty-five cars in stock?

Our general manager, Glenn, was out, so his underling, Tony, was eager to make a deal. There were no real obstacles. The girl was an “A Plan” customer, meaning she paid the employee rate thanks to a father who worked at a Ford plant. She wanted a blue one, and that was the one we could get. Off we went to the finance office. Did I mention that this young woman, despite being rather hairy of appendage, was classically beautiful in a very Armenian fashion? She was so good-looking I had trouble speaking around her, and she made a point of mentioning that she was single.

“You know,” Rodney whispered in my ear while the F&I guy did his magic, “that if you go d…” Here, dear readers, he conjured up what we could call a “chain of custody” involving the order in which his, hers, and my body parts might have interacted and might potentially interact, with the end result being the implication that I would, by proxy, be retroactively servicing him. It is a measure of the customer’s mind-bending good looks that I was not entirely deterred by this.

Thirty minutes later she was out of F&I. “How’d it go?” I inquired of our finance guy.

“Total stone.” This was dealership argot for “credit criminal who wouldn’t qualify for a prepaid MasterCard.”

“Oh.”

“Not a problem. Dad called in and signed. All done.” And with that, I delightedly shook my new customer’s hand, looking deeply into her eyes so as not to notice her arms.

Three days later, it was delivery day. I’d worn my better shoes for this one and ironed my pants. The appointed time arrived, as did she… without Dad. Tearfully, she told me that she and her father had been through some personal problems. He had evicted her from his trailer (!!) and was refusing to sign. But she badly wanted the car… so badly! What could I do?

Well, dear readers, I could do nothing. Over the next six hours, our F&I guy called in every favor known to man. Meanwhile, the general manager called me into his office.

“If that car doesn’t leave tonight, don’t come in tomorrow. You let your (worse instincts) lead your head around.” Nine o’clock came and went as the phone rang back with denials. Finally, around ten thirty at night, a West Coast lender called in. The deal was structured in a manner I still don’t understand to this day. I lost my commission, the girl bought a six-year extended warranty, her payments went from $310 a month to $459. The initial disclosure of that payment caused her to run out of the dealership crying, but she was eventually coerced back in to sign the papers.

And all that remained was to get her father, who would not sign any loan documents, to at least sign the “A Plan” authorization. Three weeks later, my wife and I used my “day off” to drive my F-150 demo two and a half hours into the deep Ohio wilderness. Back we went, off the paved roads, to a gravel track and up a steep hill. I was in mild fear for my personal safety as I knocked lightly on the crooked door.

“WHAT DO YOU WANT?” A gruff man’s voice.

“Ah, Sir,” I said, every syllable coming out sounding more and more like the prissy doctoral student I desperately wanted to in no way resemble at this particular moment, “I have this document…”

“GIVE IT HERE!” The door cracked open and a tattooed arm snaked out. There was a pause, a scratching noise, and it was shoved back out at me, with the “PIN code” filled out and, amazingly, an “X” on the signature line. It took me a terrified moment to realize that Dad had made his mark, so to speak. He was illiterate. But how did the numbers get there? “TAKE IT AN’ GIT OUT!” I heard giggling, low, sexy. It had to be the daughter… then I heard the man laugh. Oh boy.

By the time I reached the door of my truck, it was plain that the two occupants of the trailer were having noisy, extremely satisfying sexual intercourse. “Why are you smiling?” my wife asked as I fired up the straight-six and reached into the cupholder.

“Imagine that these two Coke bottles are anatomically correct dolls,” I said to her, “and I’m going to explain what Rodney, in a sense, has had in his mouth.”

TTAC tested the street version of this car a few years ago: check it out for a classic example of mid-RF-era TTAC reviews, complete with withering attention to interior-quality issues and not-so-gentle comments regarding the unwillingness of the average automaker to purchase a Ford.

At the time, the Focus sold for about fifteen grand. That was for the street car. How much does a racing Focus cost? The answer: One dollar. The answer is also $2500. And $6000. And $25,000. Confused yet?

The success of the Spec Miata racing class, both in the eager-to-embrace-it NASA and hideously-reluctant SCCA, was a pointed lesson to manufacturers struggling to build enthusiast bases for their cheap-and-cheerful cars. A few more spec street-car classes were spontaneously spawned from owner interest: the SE-R Cup, Spec Neon, and Spec E30 (BMW) classes all managed to get off the ground and running with little or no manufacturer help.

The Spec Focus class, on the other hand, was a deliberate creation of a few well-known Ford engineers and marketroids. A couple of so-called “dollar cars” were signed over to Leo Capaldi Racing, which had previously campaigned a Focus in Speed World Challenge competition. “Dollar cars” are cars which cannot be sold to the public for some reason. Normally they are crushed; VW, for instance, crushed the Phaetons by its reps to travel the country and train mechanics on Phaeton service. They might as well have crushed it before sending it out, if the quality of Phaeton service I received is any indication of said training program, but I digress.

Capaldi built the cars to a very high standard, finishing the cage and preparation almost to a Grand-Am Cup level — which, as we will later see, wasn’t the greatest idea. The coin-operated people at NASA were easily persuaded to carve out a separate class for the three Foci to race, and thus Spec Focus was born.

Ford engineers did a lot of homework to ensure that the four major Focus variants — 2.0 Zetec, 2.0 Zetec SVT, 2.0 Duratec, and 2.3 Duratec — would all produce about the same power with the permitted parts. A rather modest National Championship was held in 2006 among the rental cars, with a Ford SVT engineer thrown in to make sure there were enough competitors to round out a podium.

In 2007, two private competitors built their own Spec Foci and all of a sudden it was a five-car class. I joined Spec Focus as a renter, paying between $2500 and $3500 a weekend to drive the red ZX4 sedan. It was a complete arrive-and-drive program for me; I just showed up, paid, and was given a well-prepared car. When necessarily, Capaldi himself suited up to give me some competition. Just watching him race was worth the money; a lifetime racing in murderous Detroit kart classes and Speed WC had taught him every trick in the book and then some.

With Capaldi’s guidance and coaching from a variety of reasonably distinguished fellows, I obliterated the lap records set by the 2006 champion and prepared to cruise to a nearly uncontested 2007 National Championship. The private cars weren’t even close to Capaldi’s rent-a-racers; at one Mid-Ohio race I ran a 1:45.6 while the fastest private car ran 1:51. To put this in perspective, a reasonably-skilled “HPDE 3″ driver in a completely stock 911 GT3 or Corvette Z06 might expect to run a 1:43. These weren’t slow cars; although they only made 170hp or so at the wheels, grippy Toyo RA-1 tires and high-quality Multimatic suspension made them quick in the turns.

What’s a Focus race car like to drive? Well, it likes to roll:

My driving style was different from everyone else’s in the class; I have a particular touch for loading up an outside sidewall and I ended up deflating a tire during a race from bead separation under conditions worse than pictured above. (As a result, Ford changed the tire spec for 2008.) This was not a car for the faint of heart or stomach to race; although the handling was very safe, there was a lot of motion in the car. On the plus side, it had ABS, which absolves a multitude of driving sins.

Most importantly, however, a Spec Focus is a race car. That means: no interior trim anywhere, very loud inside, no rubber or slop in the bushings, full cage, deep seat, limited visibility. It actually feels a lot more like a conventional racer than a Spec Miata, which is not as obviously transformed in its journey from street car to race car.

During the 2007 National Championship itself I made a mistake going into the first turn, dropping into third place, and then kicked another driver into the dirt making up the time. Although I set fast lap of the race, I was demoted down to the third step of the podium in the disciplinary session afterwards. Including damages, entry fees, and incidentals, that was a $6000 weekend. Had I totaled the car, I would have had to write Leo a $25,000 check. When people asked me why I raced an economy car, I always replied,

“Because it’s only slightly more expensive than leasing a Murcielago.”

Despite the obvious merits of the cars, private racers have been slow in coming. I suspect it’s because racing against a fully-prepared team like Capaldi Racing is tough enough for other pro teams. For a guy with an open-deck trailer and a $300 Craftsman toolset, it’s even tougher. No private Spec Focus racer has experienced significant success.

My experience as a rent-a-driver convinced me that I could run my own team, and I was more or less correct. The Neon I built for a total of $9500 the next year was slightly faster than Capaldi’s Focus rentals and far ahead of the private Foci. I had the satisfaction of lapping one of my most outspoken critics in the Focus community during a 2008 race. Later on in the season, one of the Spec Focus drivers and I came together in a collision that totaled my Neon and put the other driver on the Life Flight, but that’s a story for another time. Eighteen months later, everybody’s friends. Things happen in racing. It isn’t World of Warcraft; temper can cost lives.

Capaldi Racing can still put you behind the wheel of a Spec Focus; click for details. The class hasn’t had a lot of subscription in 2010, but it’s a solid way to get started in your race career. The conventional wisdom is that it’s better to start in a large class like Spec Miata, but I found that having a relatively small number of in-class cars at every race allowed me to, ah, focus on getting my personal act together as a driver and racer. It might be the right choice for you, as well.

Book Reviewed: Where the Suckers Moon: An Advertising Story, by Randall Rothenberg, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994, 477 pages.

I don’t know what you get out of the current Subaru Legacy ad campaign, but what I get out of it is: “The Subaru Legacy is so banal, and sucks so unrepentantly hard, that we had to put extra crap on an old Kia Optima to create an alternative you wouldn’t automatically prefer.” This is not the first time Subaru has pointed a shotgun at its own feet, nor is it likely to be the last.

Where The Suckers Moon is, primarily, a story about advertising, but along the way we get a true sense of Subaru itself: a company stumbling from failure to failure, forever being rescued by market conditions, outrageously misinformed buyer perception, and completely random factors. It’s simply a company that is too lucky to fail, no matter how hard it tries.

Although it was originally just another one of the infamous Malcolm Bricklin’s get-poor-quick schemes, Subaru of America found itself an unwitting beneficiary of circumstances beyond its control. An early adoption of part-time 4WD, done at the suggestion of the Japanese Post Office, made the little “DL” and “GL” the darlings of the Northeastern ski set and those who wished to emulate them. Later on, the Voluntary Restraint Agreement meant that every Japanese car that could find its way onto a boat would eventually be sold at a healthy profit somewhere.

Subaru’s almost unbelievably bad advertising tagline, “Inexpensive, and built to stay that way”, wasn’t a bad way to sell extremely cheap cars as sixteenth-birthday gifts to bi-curious Vermont coeds, but as the rising yen pushed prices through the roof, Subaru decided to reinvent itself as a “desire” brand. Their subsequent choice of “Just Do It” creators Wieden+Kennedy, and the “What To Drive” campaign that follows, provides the meat of Randall Rothenberg’s delightful liitle book.

Time and again, Subaru reveals itself to be the most hilariously incompetent of Japanese automakers. In one vignette, Rothenberg describes how a Japanese designer proudly shows a visiting Subaru of America delegation the interior of the new XT, noting that he put in checkerboard seat fabric “for the American dude.” Another chapter details how Wieden+Kennedy’s “visionary” television director refuses to actually put any shots of the Subaru Legacy in his commercial, focusing instead on homoerotic shots of sweaty, muscular line workers.

Caught between the bumbling Japanese and the insane “creatives” are the Subaru dealers, most of them hucksters and confidence men who couldn’t get a Toyota dealership in the Seventies. Their simplest desires are repeatedly frustrated. They want more no-equipment sedans; Subaru gives them the SVX. They want regional advertising to move cars before summer sets in; Subaru spends the money on a magazine ad campaign for which they are later forced to apologize to everybody from MADD to the NHTSA.

At one point in the book, the author cannot restrain himself any longer and states a simple fact: Subarus are primarily sold to people who cannot afford (or, in the VRA era, cannot get) a Honda or Toyota. While that was entirely true in the early Nineties, we are now familiar with Subaru as the people who bring you the WRX, STi, and Legacy GT, to say nothing of the Outback and Forester which actually keep the lights burning at the stars-and-swoosh dealerships.

Still, as we take a look at the way in which Subaru continually manages to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory (look at the STi and current Outback for some great examples) it’s worth noting that reality as described in Where The Suckers Moon hasn’t completely disappeared. It’s worth a read for any number of reasons. And for those of you pointing to Subaru’s current sales success as a refutation of everything I’ve said above… well, perhaps you’re right, but I’d recommend checking Rothenberg’s work out anyway. TTAC readers have recommended it no less than four times in the comments section. Consider this a fifth thumbs-up.

Available on Amazon.