TTAC 24 Hours Update: The Benz We Didn't Race And The One We Did

Jack Baruth
by Jack Baruth

Gorgeous, huh? She appeared in the night like a white-robed dream, resplendent in her restrained livery and requiring just four or five hours of work to be ready to race.

Problem was, the race had already started.



In the upcoming week, you’ll get to hear from each one of the participants in our ill-fated LeMons race, but here are the salient points: The SLC wasn’t ready to race, so we borrowed another Mercedes-Benz that was also not ready to race and a Jetta that probably should not have been racing. We got the Benz ready and it ran for 1.5 laps before it died. Then we got it ready again and it rained.

How many laps did we complete? Not very many. How did we finish? Not well at all. But our rookies have been appropriately blooded, so to speak, and there was more than the usual hilarity and stupidity involved. Watch this space.

Another thing that didn’t happen: our TTAC shirts didn’t arrive. When they do arrive, we will be awarding a total of ten shirts to randomly selected commenters in the original TTAC racing post.

Jack Baruth
Jack Baruth

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  • Felix Felix on Oct 01, 2013

    See....107 Classy

  • Autojim Autojim on Oct 02, 2013

    It came. Eventually. It saw. The track. Briefly. It conquered. That piece of grass in the back paddock next to Spec Racer Sports where it spent most of the event. At least there's a picture of Jack pretending to be sorting something underhood on the Rattan Jetta in Murilee's C/D writeup. :) It was great meeting everyone I hadn't met previously, and I'm really glad you didn't wreck my supervisor-for-the-weekend's Ruckus, DK. ;)

  • Bill Wade I was driving a new Subaru a few weeks ago on I-10 near Tucson and it suddenly decided to slam on the brakes from a tumbleweed blowing across the highway. I just about had a heart attack while it nearly threw my mom through the windshield and dumped our grocery bags all over the place. It seems like a bad idea to me, the tech isn't ready.
  • FreedMike I don't get the business case for these plug-in hybrid Jeep off roaders. They're a LOT more expensive (almost fourteen grand for the four-door Wrangler) and still get lousy MPG. They're certainly quick, but the last thing the Wrangler - one of the most obtuse-handling vehicles you can buy - needs is MOOOAAAARRRR POWER. In my neck of the woods, where off-road vehicles are big, the only 4Xe models I see of the wrangler wear fleet (rental) plates. What's the point? Wrangler sales have taken a massive plunge the last few years - why doesn't Jeep focus on affordability and value versus tech that only a very small part of its' buyer base would appreciate?
  • Bill Wade I think about my dealer who was clueless about uConnect updates and still can't fix station presets disappearing and the manufacturers want me to trust them and their dealers to address any self driving concerns when they can't fix a simple radio?Right.
  • FreedMike I don't think they work very well, so yeah...I'm afraid of them. And as many have pointed out, human drivers tend to be so bad that they are also worthy of being feared; that's true, but if that's the case, why add one more layer of bad drivers into the mix?
  • ChristianWimmer I have two problems with autonomous cars.One, I LOVE and ENJOY DRIVING. It’s a fun and pleasurable experience for me. I want to drive my cars, not be driven by them.Two, if autonomous cars have been engineered to a standard where they work 100% flawlessly and don’t cause accidents, then freedom-hating governments like the POS European Union or totally idiotic current German government can literally make laws which ban private car ownership in their quest to save the world from climate change bla bla bla…
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