The hard news arm of the automotive press has been cursed with the grim task of reporting on the disaster that is new car sales figures over the past two months. I don’t envy them their task. The words “Black Tuesday” have been used to describe the July 1st release of June, 2008 sales figures, and for good reason. Truck sales are flatter than the Olsen twins, Chrysler is in what could only be described as a free-fall, and Ford and GM are hanging on by their fingernails. Whispers of a new recession and a return to the gas crunch of the 70s have prompted journalists, automotive and mainstream alike, to draw parallels between today’s industry and that of the late 60s.

At 23 years old, I haven’t been alive long enough that I can wax nostalgic about Detroit’s “heyday” and the troublesome years that followed. For that, I’ll refer you to Old Man Jack and his wayback machine. No, my knowledge of (and concern for) the survival of the Big Three is founded entirely in the present day. What does that do for my perspective? It would take a wiser man than myself to say for sure, I suppose. To a casual observer though, it’s uncanny how many similarities exist between these four-decades-removed time frames. But there are thousands of e-conomists on the Internet who can tell you how right or wrong you are about domestic product planning, so I’ll side-step the argument over Detroit’s short-sightedness for the time being. What’s done is done, and there is much more yet to do. Nobody knows for sure where the market is going (If you’re an exception to that rule, however, you’d do well to start applying for jobs in Detroit), but one thing seems painfully obvious: The automotive landscape of 2015 will look very different from that of 2005. The times, they are a-changin’.

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A respectful pause, please: our original 1994-build Neon ACR is on the way to the “Rainbow Bridge”. You know the Rainbow Bridge: it’s the special place where animals go after they die, assuming they are loved very, very much by their owners. What most people don’t know is that cars can go there as well, as long as they are small and sad enough. After fourteen years of racing, our little Neon has been hurt so badly he can’t get back up, so under the caring eye of crew chief Dave Everest, ol’ #187 was carefully propped on jackstands and disassembled down to the bare shell. We, the racers and crew members of Green Baron Motor Sports, placed our hands on him and wished him a safe trip to the Bridge… and then we started on our task, which is to build a race car from scratch in less than thirty days.

We had a great place to start - namely, a rust-free 1995 Plymouth Neon shell from Chrysler’s Toluca plant down around Mexico way. Compared to the ACR, this shell’s a little thicker in spots. The rear suspension pickup points are double-reinforced, perhaps to deal with those big bushels of leafy green, er, cabbage. (Come on - kids read this!) From the moment the infamous “Tinman” began measuring the shell, however, it was apparent that those fellows up in Belvidere, the other home of the Neon, are underrated - because this Neon’s a bit crooked in spots. Luckily, it can all be fixed, and then we’ll be racing with an undamaged car.

Did I mention that this was a Plymouth Neon? Some of our younger readers may not be totally conversant with Plymouth, so here’s the deal: it was like Dodge, only a zillion times cooler. To celebrate the essential Plymouthness of our new race ride, we’ve shucked aside the traditional Nitro-Yellow-Green team color for something that completely recaptures the magic of Plymouth Neons in 1995. Watch this space for more info.

After a quick trip out to Tinman’s shop in Johnstown, Ohio, the Mexican Plymouth (who will be temporarily known as “El Guapo”) was stripped and prepped for its new future as a famous racing car. Tinman’s prepping a new Grand-Am-spec cage with more tubing, more reinforcements, and more room for yours truly behind the wheel. While Tinman was doing the tough stuff, the rest of the team was at the Pick-and-Pull. Never heard of a Pick-and-Pull? It’s an awesome place where you can lie in a puddle of rusty, malaria-infested water and impact-wrench fenders off wrecked cars. We bought four doors, four front fenders (er, for no reason at all), a hood, some taillights, and some turn signals, all for the sum of two hundred and ten bucks. If only it hadn’t been over one hundred degrees outside, we might have gotten more stuff, but trust me, one’s enthusiasm for carrying car doors about three-quarters of a mile back to the checkout counter diminishes once it becomes hot enough to feel one’s metal sunglasses burning one’s face.

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Hey there! You should wear a mask when you sand the paint off old body panels. Really, you should. That’s another safety message from Hemi The Safety Cat ™. But part of the privilege of being the team driver is that nobody expects you to be terribly smart. Look at that Kyle Busch kid. He’s probably eating paint.

This weekend, we’ll finish the cage and paint the shell in the Mystery Color; at that point, we’ll be twelve days away from making the grid for August’s race at Mid-Ohio. We’ll be ready. Count on it. What you can also count on is that there will be a few hilarious and humiliating episodes in between, and we’ll keep you up to date on that, too!

If you ask the people who’ve spent a lot of time around me, talk to me on a routine basis, or possibly have spent more than a half-hour in my presence, they’ll tell you that I’m an argumentative person. I love a good argument, it gives me a chance jog my memory on a wide range of topics, improves my mental agility, and lets me stretch out to see things from someone else’s viewpoint. Arguments are like a gym membership for the mind, and I think it’s something that people should do more often, if only to really test what they believe in and exercise those critical thinking parts of the brain that go seriously underused these days. As listeners to the podcast will attest to, I’ve never shied away from making my opinions heard, and if there was some way to allocate all the time I spend saying the same line sixty-three billion times in an effort to make it sound like I haven’t coated the inside of my mouth with Vaseline and instead spend it talking and arguing with real people out there, I would do it in a heartbeat.

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I know that sometimes it’s hard to tell from the world-class quality of the background noise that leaks into every single podcast, but I don’t record our internationally renowned automotive news podcasts from some million-dollar soundproof studio. Rather, it’s produced in my bedroom, and unfortunately, as much as I’d love to tell you what I think about the new Camaro (and trust me, I have something to say about it) and the other bits of cruft that floated to the surface last week, we’re being fumigated for termites. Since it’ll be a little hard to record a podcast with my recording booth full of sulfuryl fluoride, I have to call off the podcast for this week. As always, this means that I’ll have an extra-large edition of SSL Radio for all of you next week, complete with coverage of not just the Camaro, but all of GM’s recently announced product plans. Talk to you all next week.

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Doesn’t look too bad, does it? Just a little tap in the right rear bumper, caused by a driver who was perhaps a little angry at getting passed by a “slower” car in the first lap of our Sunday race. And what a great first lap we’d had! Long-time readers will recall that our engine blew up on the cool-down lap of May’s race at Putnam Park. With four weeks between races, we did just what you would have done: we procrastinated until the very last moment and then spent 72 hours in a state of utter panic, installing the engine only to find out that the timing was off 90 degrees, causing fuel to spray from the intake. Oh noes! But by Sunday we had the car kind of sorted out.

Come the qualifying session on Sunday, we had our rain tires on and were ready to rock… but the qualifying session turned out to be completely dry. Oops! That put us 11th of 14 drivers, which meant we had to boogie when the green flag flew. Boogie we did - up seven places before the first lap was completed. Unfortunately for us, one of those places was a Spec Focus. You kids know what that means, right? An attempt on my part to protect my line long enough to drop that sucker in the infamous Turn 13 made that Focus really angry, so he decided to put me in the wall. Let’s see what happens when you “bump and run” a poor little Neon at 90+ mph:

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Ah yes, the Precision Immobilization Technique, or PIT, really works wonders when you’re trying to whack somebody. We hit the wall hard. Unfortunately for the Focus, he was turning left into our bumper so hard that he forgot to unwind the steering when I obligingly spun away from him, and he drove right across the track into the concrete wall! It would appear that my karma ran over his dogma, or something like that.

We have video and more photos of the incident, and we’ll be bringing them to you for your amusement as soon as everybody settles down a bit. The bad news? Our car’s dead, gone, totaled. The frame’s twisted and the roof is buckled inside. But in the famous words of Starship, nothing’s gonna stop us now. We’re building a new Neon from the ground up for the August Mid-Ohio race. Our crew is donating hundreds of volunteer hours to the cause. We’ll keep you posted on the build this month.

Oh yeah, if anybody cares, I wasn’t killed. Thanks to the HANS device, my Impact! Carbon Fiber helmet, and the superlative cage-welding skills of Matt “Tinman” Johnston, I’ll live to race another day. Ha! It takes more than that to kill me. However, dear readers, I feel compelled to make a small request. If you have a problem with one of my columns, feel free to use our provided “Comment” feature. Go ahead! Write all the mean stuff you want! That’s why it’s there! But please, please, stop trying to cancel my check on the track. To begin with, it’s expensive for everybody involved; also, it ain’t gonna work. Cheers!

Hate can sometimes be a very good thing. In the right hands, it’s an agent of change, it makes us speak up and act out against the things that we know are wrong. Since so many news articles this week involve it in one way or another, we thought we’d dedicate this week’s episode of SSL Radio to hate. It’s not all anger this week, we start off with the immensely powerful Mercedes SL65 AMG Black Edition and the Alfa Romeo 8C GTA, and towards the end of the podcast we talk about some of the manufacturers that are still doing well during the current sales drought and Fiat making a wonderful new deal with BMW. Aside from that, there’s a whole bunch of bad news about the Chevrolet Volt, Hummer thinks that now is a great moment to debut the H3T, and Lexus is killing off the SC430 (although, if you can’t tell, I happen to think that we should throw a freaking party over that bit of news). Also, in the place of Useless Automotive Tchotchke this week, we have an extended rant about fanboy baiting and journalistic integrity, so if you like that sort of thing, the last one-third of the podcast will be a special treat. Share and Enjoy™.

 

 SSL Radio 7/16/08 [18:28m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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Story by Jack Baruth - Photography by a somewhat bewildered Michelle Baruth

“HEY DRIVER, CAN WE GET AN AUTOGRAPH FOR THE KID OVER HERE?” That’s really nice, I thought, as I jogged back to my seat high in Flat Rock Speedway’s main grandstand. What a great dad, getting an autograph for his son or daughter from a local racing star. I hope that driver takes a moment to stop and sign that.

“HEY, DRIVER!” came the call again, and then once more, this time with a barely concealed touch of anger. What was going on? Who was this son-of-a-bitch, and why wouldn’t he take a moment to sign something for some poor kid? It wasn’t until I was a few hundred feet away and halfway up a long set of steps, clutching my HANS Device in my left hand and my carbon-fiber Impact! helmet in my right, that I realized that:

• the “driver” at whom the father was yelling was me;
• and as a consequence, I had just ruined some child’s evening;
• and that furthermore, to avoid said child’s angry father, I should figure out another route to leave the grandstands at the end of the night.

Oh, damn. Still, the thought of it - that I was a potential signer of autographs for children, a hero, a role model, a veritable Tony Stewart of the small oval. Amazing. For a moment, I stood still, looked around me, taking in the fact that more than five thousand people had paid good, solid money to see me race. See! Me! Race! Me! Here, in the heartland of America, I had driven my heart out in an honest-to-goodness circle-track car, running at the ragged edge in a supremely skilled effort and demonstrating in rather Montoya-esque fashion that a road racer can step into the world of the ARCA Four Cylinder Class, presented by David’s Jewelry and, if not dominate, at least compete with honor. Yes, I was a driver, and quite a driver at that. I stood, facing the crowd, and opened my arms to embrace this uniquely American experience.

“THANK YOU!” I shouted.

“SIT DOWN, YOU JACKASS!” came the response. “I CAN’T SEE THE SCHOOL BUSES!”

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As I’ve said before, I have a theory that Ford of Europe is actually a completely separate manufacturer from the Ford Motor Company based in the US, and was actually founded in 1873 by an Earl Ford of Coventry. Further proof of this conspiracy theory is the announcement of the new Ford Focus RS. Surely, any rational automotive manufacturer would jump at the chance to roll out such a low-cost halo car in the small-car hungry US market, but it’ll probably never see our shores. It was a pretty thin week for news, but we do cover the new Focus RS, along with the new BMW 7-series, we take a break for a nap with the monthly sales figures, and a very expensive and slightly scary RV in this week’s Useless Automotive Tchotchke. Share and Enjoy™.

 

 SSL Radio 7/08/08 [10:19m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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The sound of a BlackBerry 8830 “World Edition” striking the inside of a Cadillac STS windshield at approximately fifty miles per hour is somewhere between a ‘clack’ and a solid ‘crack’. It was followed by a surprised yelp from my wife as she was momentarily suspended from her safety belt by the g-force of a full-ABS stop, having just lost her smartphone in mid-texting. Unfortunately, there hadn’t been time to warn her that we were about to test the Caddy’s 70-0 stopping ability on a twisting side road. Loafing along, chatting idly about this and that, I’d been almost inattentive to the view ahead – until I’d seen the flash of red coming around the blind corner towards us.

It was a kid, by which I mean a teenager. (When did I start using the word “kid” to refer to people old enough to drive? I suppose it was around the time I became old enough to potentially have a driving-age child of my own.) Young, wide-eyed, fighting for control of his late-Nineties Dodge Avenger R/T, sawing at the wheel to save a corner entry that was probably more than a bit too hot, he was just on his side of the double-yellow when he came into my field of vision. It looked like a solid head-on collision in the making, so I immediately left-footed the pearl-white STS to a halt with two wheels off in the ditch in the hopes he would save the car before he got to our position, or at least slow the thing down enough to keep us all out of the emergency room.

His corner exit was disastrous at best, but a slight change in road camber past the turn gave our rather terrified Avenger driver just enough grip to straighten the car out, and he coasted past us looking for all the world as if he’d lost his primary parachute and been saved by the backup. A few hundred feet down the road, I heard him pick up full throttle again and steam away from us with all the vigor the bespoilered old Mitsu-Dodge could muster up. Reaching up to the dashtop to retrieve her BlackBerry, my wife looked at me expectantly. You see, I’m a veritable firehose of criticism behind the wheel, offering my passengers a constant stream of observations regarding the idiocy, foolhardiness, timidity, yellow-light-early-braking, left-lane-banditry, and general despicability of my fellow motorists. Surely I’d have something to say?

“Good for him,” I smiled, and with that, we resumed our boring little trip to the hardware store.

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In case you haven’t seen the car above before, that’s a rendering of the upcoming BMW PAS, or Progressive Activity Sedan. Yes, it’s a stupid name for an ugly car that doesn’t really need to exist, and we talk about it this week in this new episode of SSL Radio. Also on the list this week is information on the hot GTA version of Alfa’s as yet unreleased MiTo, rumors and facts about the Porsche 911 refresh, we use Saturn to talk about Ford, more news on the US version of Top Gear, and Chrysler decides that we need more things to distract us in this week’s Useless Automotive Tchotchke. For more renderings and information on the BMW PAS, check out WorldCarFans.com. Share and Enjoy™.

 

 SSL Radio 7/01/08 [14:49m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download