#JackBaruth

As Arthur Dent once said, “I seem to be having this tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle.” Unless something bizarre happens at the dealership where it is being Audi CPO Certified, my infamous Lime Green S5 is sold as of last week. This means that I am down to — ugh! — Porsches for transportation. My 944 is locked in a garage and requires heroic measures to start. My 993 has rear tires so bald the tread pattern isn’t even visible any more, and the new Goodyears seem long in arriving. My Boxster seats two.

Therefore, when I had the chance to squire a couple of female friends around an amusement park this past weekend, I found myself unable to offer them a ride in any of my whips, yo. “Not a problem,” the younger one said, “we can take my Ford. It has 116,000 miles but it runs great.” Beggars can’t be choosers, so I agreed. Imagine my surprise when she arrived in said high-mile Blue Oval… and it’s a four-year-old Five Hundred! With the oft-derided CVT! “You’re the race driver,” she said, “so you have to drive.” Off we go!

As reported on KVAL:

A state trooper rolled his car multiple times while chasing two reckless motorcyclists, one of whom returned to taunt the injured trooper, officials said… As the trooper tried to close in on the fastest biker, he told Pratt (the spokesperson for the Washington State Patrol) that two other bikers cut him off. “Had he not slowed down and slammed on the brakes, he would have hit them,” Pratt said. “At his speed that made him lose control.” The trooper’s vehicle rolled several times, finally landing in a ditch alongside the ramp.

Clearly, it’s time for these “trained police drivers” to quit driving wayyyyy over their personal limits on public roads. To save lives, I am personally willing to fly to Washington State and teach their patrolmen how to avoid the deadly combination of inept braking and inept cornering.

As I crest Monticello Motor Club’s Turn 17, I am speaking directly to you, the TTAC reader, through the magic of a complete video, data, and audio recording system installed in my six-speed manual CTS-V Coupe.

“I have an idea,” I say, as I hold the throttle pinned to the stop way past the braking markers, over the hill, down the back of the left-hander, the speedometer swinging well into the triple digits, tach reaching to redline. “I think… this section can be taken flat.”

Flat, as in flat-out, as in without the mild braking before Turn 17 recommended by the instructors at Monticello and practiced by all reasonable individuals. And, indeed, I make it over the crest pointed in nearly the right direction… but any experienced racer knows that traction on the back of a hill is never as good as traction on the front of the hill. In under a second I’ve reached the absolute maximum slip angle of the tires. I haven’t done it. I’ve overstepped my limits, and the limits of the car. To turn more is futile and perhaps deadly, since I am pointed at the grass and traveling at over one hundred miles per hour. If I have any steering dialed-in to the car when I touch that rough surface, I can cartwheel end over end in the fashion of Antonio Pizzonia in a Jag S-Type. Have to exit the track straight. What happens now?

As established in a previous article, the Volkswagen-Porsche 914 was rather more profitable for Volkswagen than it was for Porsche. No wonder, then, that VW was anxious to repeat the experience. This time, Porsche was explicitly hired as the engineering subcontractor, and the end product was meant to be badged solely as a Volkswagen. The result was what you see above: “EA 425”, a front-engine sporting hatchback using the four-cylinder water-cooled engine from the Audi sedans (and, infamously, the Volkswagen LT van).

The energy crisis made VW reconsider the production of a rear-wheel-drive sporting car. The bigwigs decided to produce the Scirocco instead. At that point, somebody had the bright idea: Hey, let’s sell the project back to Porsche and build the cars for them! Cue the ominous music…

Watch it if you must, and if you haven’t already: this is “Top Gear USA”. The three people involved are:

• Rutledge Wood, a television personality best described as “professional douchebag”;
• Adam Ferrara, stand-up comedian and character actor;
• Tanner Foust, a fanatically self-motivated and successful individual who has made a name for himself participating in a variety of low-talent driving events such as X-Games Rally and “Formula D”.

Even if you don’t watch the trailer, you should be able to figure out that this series will be an absolute train wreck. With that said, the original Top Gear has never exactly been compelling television, yet it’s found a worldwide audience. The USA version won’t, and here’s why…

Oops! Under the influence of “Ketel One Citroen” I misnumbered this. Fixed now – jb

During the Seventies, Porsche was, as Katt Williams might say, in turmoil. Some very strong-willed men were fighting to determine the direction of what was then a very small firm. Ernst Fuhrmann, famous within the company for developing the quad-cam “Carrera” engine that made the 550 Spyder such a giant-killer, was running the show, and he wanted the 911 dead. His arguments were all quite valid: the 911 was not aging well, it was not selling well, and nobody had any idea whatsoever how to make a decade-old car conform to a raft of upcoming safety and emissions regulations.

I’ve heard a lot of derisive comments about NASCAR lately on this site, many of them from people — my fellow racers and fast-road drivers — who should know better. While it’s true that the common template is a disgrace, the idea that NASCAR is a low-tech ghetto compared to the oh-so-modern sports-car series like the ALMS is, to put it mildly, false. There’s a reason that the abortive USF1 team wanted to locate near the NASCAR guys. It’s where the tech is. Click the jump to find out why racing NASCAR takes more brainpower than any Touring Car or prototype series out there…

Well, this feels kind of like kicking a dog, doesn’t it? It’s not exactly opening up a new journalistic frontier to say “OMG THE CAYENNE SUX”. Rarely has a vehicle been as reviled as Porsche’s platform-promiscuous porky-pig of an SUV seems to universally be. Still, as Pope once said,

Yet let me flap this bug with gilded wings,
This painted child of dirt that stinks and stings;
Whose buzz the witty and the fair annoys,
Yet wit ne’er tastes, and beauty ne’r enjoys…

And of all the vile variations on the Cayenne (at least two of which, it must be disclosed, your humble author operated as occasional-use vehicles) this “V6” is the worst, the lowest, the most base, the most loathsome.

“As West Germany debated last week whether it should have an army, East Germany was unmasking one.

Five thousand jackbooted, blue-uniformed toughs swarmed into the border districts to put down disturbances by farmers trying to save their homes as the Reds bulldozed a three-mile-deep isolation corridor between East and West Germany. The blue-uniformed men, part of a 100,000-man force, are called the People’s Police (Volkspolizei, or Vopos, for short).”

Oh, just the tone of that article (from TIME) makes me nostalgic for the days when American journalists kind of, you know, liked baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, and freedom. Nowadays, the Times would probably “embed” somebody with the Vopos and he would enthusiastically shoot farmers while talking about the need for social justice.

But I digress. The car in the photo above is also a “VoPo” — a Volkswagen-Porsche. Styled by the consumer-goods design firm Gugelot, who were the folks responsible for the Kodak “Carousel” slide projector, it was assembled by Karmann in Germany. In Europe, it was sold as a Volkswagen; in the United States, as a Porsche. Although I’m personally a bit of a 914 fan, the car has to be understood as an aesthetic, critical, and commercial failure for Porsche. Most importantly, it was yet another episode in the strange “Inside Baseball” relationship between Volkswagen and Porsche. From the day Ferdinand Porsche started thinking about the “People’s Car” to the very last who-bought-whom stock manipulation of 2009, Porsche and VW have been engaged in a bizarre, operatic, and occasionally fraudulent relationship — and Porsche always loses. Every. Single. Freaking. Time.

Great artists steal, and I’m obviously inspired by Paul Niedermeyer’s GM’s Deadly Sin series here. I am currently the owner of three Porsches, as pathetic as that may be, and I’ve experienced firsthand the many ways in which Porsche disappoints its fans and buyers. Few companies have been as comprehensively whitewashed by the media and the corporate biographers, but the truth is available to those of us who wish to look a bit harder.

We will start with the big betrayals, of course, and the unassuming fastback you see above represents perhaps the worst of Porsche’s many middle fingers to the customer base. It is a 1999 Porsche 911, known to everyone in the world as the “996”.

From 1964 to 1998, the 911 evolved on an incremental basis. As with the first and last Volkswagen Beetles, there are very, very few parts which survived the thirty-four-year journey unchanged, but there’s an amazing amount of interchangeability. It is possible to “update” a 1971 911T to look just like a 1998 Carrera 2S, and it’s also possible to “backdate” a 1994 911 Carrera to look like a classic 1973 Carrera RS. Both of these offenses against human decency have occurred many times, incidentally. Take a look here to see a rather lovely example of a “964” turned into a “long-hood” 911S, in a color that will be familiar to many TTAC readers.

I was born in 1971 and started actively reading about cars in 1976, subscribing to Car and Driver and absorbing the work of men such as LJK Setright, Gordon Jennings, and Gordon Baxter. Those men were waiting for America to create a truly outstanding small car, one that could meet the Germans (and, later, the Japanese) on equal ground and beat them in a fair fight. More particularly, since General Motors was the acknowledged leader of the American automotive industry, they were waiting for GM to create the Great American Small Car.

Those men are gone now, as dead as Julius Caesar and not nearly as well-remembered. I am standing here, waiting in their stead, waiting patiently for the Great American Small Car, waiting for General Motors to fulfill the promise they’ve made to us for nearly fifty years now.

The 2011 Chevrolet Cruze is a good car, although at least part of its goodness comes from the fact that it isn’t really that small. It’s well-positioned against the Civic and Corolla. I believe that it beats both of those cars in significant, measurable ways. This is what it is: a good car, a bold car, a car for which no purchaser need make an excuse or feel any concern. This is what it might be: great. That’s for the buyer to decide. This is what it is not: American.

What did you do this morning? I spent $101.78 at the local Pick-N’-Pull, using a completely inadequate set of hand tools to remove the last twincam Neon head to be found in any Columbus, Ohio – area junkyard. I removed the power steering reservoir by beating it to pieces with a crankshaft damper from a Chrysler LHS. I imagine Adrian Newey is doing something similar right now on the Red Bull RB6.

The reason for this outrageous expenditure is simple: NASA (the race sanction, not the folks who no longer build rockets) has partially come to its senses. In previous years, the minimum weight for doublecam Neons was 2650 pounds, while the twincam Sentras and single-cam Neons were both 2450. Needless to say, our single-cam Neon has never successfully beaten a Sentra in a Performance Touring race unless it was raining (I’m the Jenson Button of club racing, including pre-trophy-ceremony makeouts) or the aforementioned Sentra has made a major mistake.

This year, two interesting things have happened. First, NASA dropped doublecams to 2550 and raised the Sentra to 2525. Now we have a fighting chance. Second, the fellow who owns the other half of my race team acquired his racing license last week. Finally, I have a teammate! So we need a new name, and I’m taking suggestions.

It’s called “convergent evolution”, and it refers to cases in which two unrelated, or distantly related, animals evolve to similar shapes or capabilities due to the pressures of their environment. Examples can be found here, with the most interesting one being the “pronghorn antelope”. It really isn’t an antelope, you see. It turns out that when there is pressure in an environment, animals will eventually all adapt to their optimum form for that environment.

While there are many unforgiving environments around the world, from the Sahara to the Arctic Circle, few are as murderous as the American automobile market. It turns out that the aforementioned “optimum form” appeared some time ago, and everyone else has been evolving that way ever since..Don’t worry. You may not believe in evolution, let alone the Mitsubishi Evolution, but I will serve as your John Scopes in this auto-Darwinian voyage.

One week ago, I was given a “sneak peek” of the new Explorer at Ford’s Product Development Center in Dearborn. I learned then what you all probably know by now: The new Explorer is a D3-platform vehicle, offering reasonably spacious seven-seat packaging, the myFordTouch in-car entertainment system, a twin-LCD dashboard, and a 237-horsepower turbo four as the base engine.

In other words, it’s a car, just like the Honda Pilot is a car and the Toyota Highlander is a car.