“So, yeah, it’s a new Focus, but it’s not the one we want. In fact, had we been asked what we’d want for the latest Focus, ‘old mechanicals,’ ‘horrifying exterior styling,’ and ‘no hatchbacks’ wouldn’t exactly have sprung to mind.” - “Automobile” magazine, on the 2008 Ford Focus
“Not only does Saturn need the Astra, but North American buyers need it too.” - “Automobile”, on the 2008 Saturn Astra
Focus Sales in 1Q 2008: 49,070
Astra Sales in 1Q 2008: 1,477
“Four, five press cars a week!” The violence of his own enthusiasm was starting to get the better of the old fellow; sweat stains were visibly creeping down the wrinkled sides of his cheap Hawaiian shirt as he waved both hands forcefully in an effort to keep my attention. “The manufacturers know they need to put cars in my driveway, because when I write about a car, it puts customers on the front door of that damn dealership Monday morning, bet your ass.” Ugh. It’s common practice for manufacturers to “match up” journalists on press events, and judging from my experience they aren’t exactly using eHarmony’s patented relationship-predicting algorithms to do it, because I keep getting matched with drooling morons who appear to hate my guts from the moment I climb into the airport courtesy car. Oh well. Might as well keep the conversation going, if only for my own amusement.
“But how do you manage to review five cars a week?” I asked in as innocent a tone as I could muster. “I mean, how do you even drive that many?”
“I DON’T!” was the near-shouted reply. “My daughter drives ‘em, and if she likes a car, I’ll give it some of my time. We don’t even own any cars any more. No reason to. They’re free when you know what you’re talking about.” Clearly, it was going to be a long ride to the test site, but it turned out to an instructive one. For nearly three decades, I’d been a passive consumer of automotive magazines and websites, always wondering what it would be like to make it to the “inside” and actually live the lifestyle of a super-cool automotive journalist. Then one day, our senior editor, Zerin Dube, picked me out of utter obscurity to impose my worthless opinions on you, our valued readers - and before I knew it, I was a player in the whirlwind motor-journo lifestyle of free food, free hotels, free fuel, and all the bacon I can eat at the breakfast bar. It’s kind of like being Paris Hilton, without the pocket dogs and the “Nightshot” videos with Rick what’s-his-name.
Unfortunately, in the same way that Ms. Hilton appears to have gone, oh, shall we say, completely insane as a result of her fabulous life, I’m starting to suspect that all autowriters eventually lose their minds as well. It would explain a lot, you know. It would solve the mystery of why I recently had some crazy old dude whose sole racing experience consisted of transit driving in a cross-country rally give me a drunken lecture about my braking points on-track. It would help me understand why people who barely earn fifty grand a year prance around like the Prince of Wales and bully the staff at the press event hotels. Most importantly, it might offer a clue as to how the Press As A Whole did such an incompetent job of reviewing the latest arrivals on the small-car scene.
Now that the rememberances, barbeques and emergency room visits are done, it’s time to relax and unwind with this newest episode of Speed:Sport:Life Radio. This week, Aston Martin fixes the V8 Vantage, we get to point and laugh at Toyota again, Alfa shows that they think we’re all morons and will probably win because of it, Chrysler proves that Alfa is right, idle Formula 1 speculation, and a personal confession in this week’s Useless Automotive Tchotchke. Share and Enjoy™.
Story by Jack Baruth - Disturbingly poor photography by Jack Baruth
And… we’re back! The reaction to the first Towin’ Speed:Sport:Life article has been good, so it appears that we weren’t totally crazy to think that a lot of our readers are dragging various clapped-out race cars to tracks and events across the country. With that in mind, then, we’re trying again, this time with an epic 1,400-mile journey to the SCCA Solo National Tour event in Atlanta, Georgia. Last time we had a positively luxurious Lariat Crew Cab, but this time we’ve got a truly hardcore tow rig - a regular-cab, diesel-powered, six-speed manual F-250 4×2 in XLT trim.
Once upon a time, regular-cab trucks were pretty cramped affairs, causing taller drivers to assume all sorts of odd positions on the completely flat vinyl bench seats common to most trim levels. At 6′2″, your humble tester found his 1995 F-150 Regular Cab to be a real bow-legger of a truck - and the competition was even worse in that regard. It’s hard to look cool in your new rig while simultaneously rubbing your earlobes with your knees, and as a result, over the last ten years the market share for extended-cab and crew-cab body styles has risen to the point that most Ford dealers don’t bother to stock any regular-cab Super Duty trucks on their lots. Note, also, that unlike the F-150 Regular Cab, which now has a reasonably-sized cargo area complete with mini-window behind the door, the Super Duty is still an old-school short-cab.
The rarity of regular-cab Super Duty trucks means that we instantly achieved hardcore trucker status the moment we stepped up into our test rig, but this particular truck had a few more features to endear itself to non-sissies everywhere. To begin with, we had the monstrous PowerStroke diesel, complete with six hundred and fifty pound-feet of torque. That’s like having a Lamborgini Murcielago and a Mazda RX-8, torque-wise. With that much twist, accompanied by the angry compression-ignition rattle and audible turbo spool on each shift, we were tempted to start demanding access to the “professional driver” showers at our local Pilot station - but just to make sure we felt totally hardcore, Ford thoughtfully provided the truck with a six-speed manual transmission. Make no mistake - were Ernest Hemingway still alive today, he would insist on having the shift-it-yourself model. He would note with immense satisfaction that the eighteen-inch-long shift lever and super-vague gating makes every shift a voyage of discovery, while nodding approvingly at the amount of double-clutching required to uncork the PowerStroke’s savage pull up a long hill or smoke a Civic Si at the stoplight outside a movie theater. He’d also probably be completely cool with the regular cab, noting that the slightly pinched interior would still be more luxurious than the ambulance he drove in The Great War. The only question would be: in an era of male manicures, would we be able to cope with Hemingway’s truck?
And finally, after what has seemed like an eternity, we’re back. Mostly. This one’s a little on the short side, but it’s still all-new. This week, we have the new Ferrari California, the Canadian labor union news you’ve all been clamoring for, and the hopefully final act in the saga of NBC’s Gear. So relax, kick back in your office chair, put your feet up on the desk and enjoy the smooth grooves of SSL Radio.
Story by Jack Baruth - Photography by Dave Everest and Jack Baruth
Welcome to the first installment of Towin’ Speed:Sport:Life. In this series, we will be trying out different trucks with just one purpose in mind: towing to races and other auto events. We aren’t going to talk about residual value, slalom speed, or global warming - we’ll save that for the mainstream press, who typically “review” these rigs by driving little Austin and MacKenzie to their local Goddard School. Instead, we’re loading them up and running them hard. Each review will focus on Ten Important Questions For Your Race Rig, which isn’t a trademarked phrase as far as we know. Without further ado, then, let’s meet our truck: the 2008 Ford F-250 Super Duty 4×4 Crew Cab Lariat Styleside Triton V-10 156″ Wheelbase. Doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, does it?
The Super Duty pickups were kind-of-new for 2008, featuring a revised frame, upgraded interiors, and a new front end designed to produce involuntary urination in five out of six Prius drivers. The list of options and configurations possible in a Super Duty makes for literally millions of possible combinations, and we’ll be trying more of them in the next year, but for now we decided to start with a variant that is relatively common among club racers - the 4×4 crew cab. Although having four-wheel-drive in a tow rig seems like a waste of money and fuel economy, it only took one start in wet grass to convince us of the benefits. Since then, we’ve found plenty of uses for 4×4 in towing, including backing the trailer up a steep hill, using the Low Range to tow a disabled race car out of the weeds, and dragging a stuck trailer out of six inches’ worth of mud. We’re not the only people to understand this, so more and more Super Duties are showing up at the races with the “4×4 Off Road” sticker on their beds.
Where this truck does deviate from standard club racer doctrine, however, is in the short bed and 6.8L V-10 gasoline engine. For the committed race driver, bed space is like money in the bank. It’s just not possible to have too much. However, this F-250 has a trick up its sleeve to help bridge the gap, as well see. We were also a little unsure about the Triton V-10, which serves up 362hp at a relatively lofty 4750 rpm and 457 lb-ft of torque at 3250 revs. Compare that to the 6.4L Powerstroke’s 350 horses at 3000rpm and 650 lb-ft of torque at a basement-level 2000 rpm, and it’s easy to see why many racers choose the diesel. Could the V-10 compete? Let’s ask the questions and find out.
Story by Jack Baruth - Race Photography by Dave Everest
My mother used to say, “It’s better to be lucky than good”, and there was no better proof of that saying than the fact that our poor little Neon’s junkyard motor didn’t commit suicide until the cool-down lap of Sunday’s race. Literally two thousand feet after I crossed the finish line, there was a massive “BOOM!” and smoke started billowing from under the hood. Accompanied by the hideous rattling sound of two cylinders flopping around uselessly in their worn-out bores, I nursed it in to the pit lane and shut that piece of junk down for the last time. How lucky was I? It turns out that, thanks to a timing and scoring error, they threw the finish flag a lap early… so without that error, I’d have blown up during the race. Instead, I managed to snag my ninth podium in a row (not counting DNFs) before coming to a halt right in front of the impound lane, a quarter-mile from our paddock. No worries, though; we just used our hilariously awesome new F-250 Lariat Crew Cab to tow the long-suffering Mopar the rest of the way back to said paddock. That truck, by the way, is going to be the first subject of our new series, Towin’ Speed:Sport:Life. In this series, we will be evaluating trucks solely from the perspective of race vehicles, so if you’re trying to decide what you’ll use to tow your race rig, we hope to put some solid, no-nonsense information in your hands.
We won’t miss our old engine, known non-affectionately as “Mr. 130K” for the 130,000 miles it covered in its original home before being pick-and-pulled into competition duty, but we did manage to score third-place finishes on both Saturday and Sunday in very different fields. Saturday’s race saw my pal Steve Jones, whom I dutifully followed into the sand trap during April’s Mid-Ohio event, win big despite starting in the pit lane. On Sunday two Hondas battled it out about half a lap ahead of me for what turned out to be virtually a photo finish. We’re running about three seconds a lap behind the very fastest Performance Touring “E” cars in qualifying, although in the actual races the gap isn’t that far due to my willingness to try any and all available passing maneuvers regardless of their merit. As you’ll see below, the lower-power NASA races have the potential to get a little crazy…
Our man, Jack Baruth interviews Audi Product Manager, Carter Balkcom about the new 2009 Audi A4. Even though Jack thinks the camera makes his butt look huge, there is a ton of great information in this interview. Everyone leave comments about Jack’s first on-camera experience
Story by Jack Baruth, photography and video by Murilee Martin and Jack Baruth
Tragedy struck the 24 Hours of Lemons Saturday afternoon when the #39 Ole’s Volvo struck the wall at full speed. The owner/driver, Court Summerfield, was the owner of Ole’s Waffles in Alameda. Edited to correct previous misspelling. A former CHP officer, he was well-known and loved in his hometown, and while we can never know for sure, the officers who investigated the incident believe that he was already unconscious from a heart attack or stroke before he hit the wall.
Yeah, you see that post down there? The one that’s right below this one? Umm, ignore that, because here’s a podcast! Well, it’s not a full-blown podcast, no matter how much I’d love to make fun of Volvo’s plan to design cars made out of bubble wrap, Styrofoam packing material and down pillows, GM’s Q1 profits dropping $3.25 billion from last year and applaud Volkswagen for preparing an entry for the Baja 1000, I just don’t have the time. So instead, here’s a brief selection of my favorite news items over the last week. Think of it as a Greatest Hits album, except it’s all brand new. However, this will probably be the last podcast until the week after next, unless my physics professor changes his mind in regards to the importance of homework. So until then, I thank all of you who are still bothering to listen in to my voice talk nonsense about cars, despite my greatest efforts to chase all of you away though poor scheduling. I’m still having the time of my life doing these, and I hope you’re all enjoying listening even one-tenth as much as I’m having making them. Anyway, until next time, Share and Enjoy™.
Right now, it is 12:23 AM on a very early Thursday morning. I have spent the last few hours staring at a barely quarter-done podcast script, trying to hammer my mind into the shape required to make something that even approaches what I’d consider an acceptable level of quality, and you know what? It’s just not coming. The sheer mental effort required to cram information about the molecular processes behind intercellular communication and the other things I have to be able to regurgitate in a week’s time has completely sucked up all my time and energy. I could try to slap something together, but it wouldn’t be something that you’d want to listen to, nor would it be what I want to put out. So instead of blowing a big hole in both my college grades and the quality of the podcast, I’m taking this last week and this upcoming weekend off. Speed:Sport:Life Radio will be returning in less than two weeks, not necessarily rested, but certainly ready to deliver the high quality mediocrity that you’ve come to expect from us here at Speed:Sport:Life. If there’s anything that’s particularly groundbreaking that happens between now and the end of the semester, I will make a post about it here, but I highly doubt that something like that will happen. So, failing something completely unexpected, I’ll talk to you again in a week and a half.
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