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Story by Jack Baruth, photographs courtesy of Goodyear

Several years ago, I bought a Porsche 911 over the phone from a nice fellow whom I had met at a Mosport trackday. While this is usually a prescription for disaster, in this case the car was exactly as he described it, with one important exception. He’d told me it had “new tires”, and while this was technically correct, he failed to mention that they were new crap tires. I couldn’t understand it. As a semi-Nationals-caliber autocrosser and club racer, I’ve come to believe that tires are absolutely critical to a car’s performance.This is particularly true for rear-or-mid-engined Porsches, as those cars are notorious for abusive behavior on the back axle. Putting Cheapikomo (or whatever they were called) donuts on a 171-mph sportscar is like making Usain Bolt run the 100 in a set of pleather Kenneth Coles… assuming Usain would be at risk for hitting a Jersey barrier at triple digits if his soles disintegrated during the race.

Nevertheless, I decided that I would keep the Cheapikomos on there for a while, if only to save a buck or two. “How bad could they be?” I asked myself. Three months later, frustrated by the 911’s wayward behavior at speed and occasionally terrifying behavior at corner entry, I burned my credit card to the tune of nine hundred and fifty bucks for a set of Goodyear’s F1 GS-D3 “Max Performance” donuts. It was money well spent, and the fact that the 911 is capable of eating a set of them every eight thousand miles or so doesn’t change the fact that installing decent tires made the proverbial world of difference, both on the freeway and around a road course.

Most people understand that it’s sheer lunacy to put discount-brand tires on a Porsche - but what about on a BMW 325i? What about, say, a Honda Civic Si? The auto manufacturers’ headlong rush to put wide, low-profile tires on everything from Accords to Volvos has resulted in many drivers getting an unwelcome surprise when the time comes to replace their OEM rubber. It’s one thing to spend a thousand dollars or more on tires for a $75,000 coupe, quite another to face the same bill for a $19,500 compact sedan. Kumho and a few other tire makers have managed to provide a “halfway point” between super-cheap Chinese garbage and traditional high-performance tires like the Goodyear F1 or Michelin PS2, but none of them have really been worth getting excited about. The BF Goodrich g-Force Sport is a decent enough mid-priced tire, but it’s (indifferently) made in Malaysia and I’ve yet to buy one that was even close to being properly balanced.

There’s a pot of gold out there for the first manufacturer to make a decent $100ish tire, one that combines most of the performance virtues found in top-end products with a smidge of all-season ability. The new Eagle GT is Goodyear’s shot at the title - and although our driving time was limited, we’re cautiously optimistic that it might be a real winner.

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No clever image stolen from some unsuspecting website using Google Image Search this time, my friends. This week, it’s all about the great looks of the back end of the new Cadillac CTS Sport Wagon. It reminds me of the looks of the Shivan fighters from Freespace 2, which pleases me in a very geeky kind of way. We’ve also the final name for the Pontiac version of the Holden Ute, BMW’s new and much more…durable version of the X5, Toyota announces their plans to become even more boring than they already are, and Bugatti finally shows up in this week’s Useless Automotive Tchotchke. Share and Enjoy™.

 

 SSL Radio 8/20/08 [13:20m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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Story by Jack Baruth, photography by “Neon” Dave Everest

As racing seasons go, it’s been a challenging one. In April, I managed to put the car off before the first corner of the first lap; in May, the engine blew up; in July, the car was completely totaled. I couldn’t have blamed the team if they had decided to just forget about racing for the rest of the year - but instead, they rose to the challenge and built an all-new car in under four weeks. Our volunteers donated hundreds of hours doing everything from wire-brushing the frame seams to “weeding” the vinyl lettering on Friday night. After test driver Mark Mitias (not to be confused with Ferrari test driver Marc Gene, although they are both handsome fellows with a reported eye for the ladies) shook down the car on Friday, the crew went to work on fixing everything from oil leaks to alignment to a problem with the brakes which allowed the pedal to hit the floor on every stop.

Naturally, they were able to fix everything - except for the brake pedal. We went over everything and replaced any part we could find on the weekend, including the master cylinder and brake booster. There was no fixing it. The new #187 Neon simply wasn’t going to stop terribly well. Period.

Was it Ettore Bugatti who said, “I build my cars to go, not to stop?” Let me tell you, ol’ Ettore never had to race in a seventy-car field full of Spec Miatas. Sitting in the grid for Saturday’s race, I felt physically sick, so much so that I periodically had to relax my neck and let my head hang down off the straps of my HANS device just to avoid throwing up. I’d already asked my crew and friends to give up a month of their lives to build a car; I couldn’t do it again. The eyes of NASA were on me; if I so much as brushed another car’s bumper I’d be called on the carpet and possibly ejected from the sanction. The race group, and the spectators, contained plenty of well-wishers - but it also had people who were just dying to see me fail, hoping that our little team would be humiliated out of club racing forever. And the car had no brakes.

Then it was time to race.

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By 1999, productivity improvements at Chrysler’s Neon assembly plant in Belvidere, Illinois had reduced build time to slightly above twenty-three hours per car. One would think, therefore, that building a Neon racecar from a bare shell in just under thirty days wouldn’t be too tough, right? I mean, that’s way longer than twenty-three hours. Of course, we’d also have to weld in a full Grand-Am spec cage, perform some tricky relocation of the driver seat and controls, and paint it by hand. Still, how tough could it be?

The answer is - plenty tough. Our prep crew, now numbering more than a dozen part-time workers in addition to prep chief Matt “Tinman” Johnston and “Neon” Dave Everest, has been cranking well past midnight for the past few weeks getting the car squared away, but until this morning it wasn’t certain that we would even be able to show up for our tech inspection tomorrow.

The good news is that we are going to make it. We’ve gone from zero to Neon in under a month, a feat that would be too much for many Grand-Am teams to accomplish - and with a total cost well under ten grand. Even with the three-thousand-dollar fee from Mid-Ohio for damage incurred to the track during the July 13 crash, it was still slightly cheaper to build our Neon than it would have been to buy a new Neon ACR in 1995. Well, that’s the positive manner in which we’ve chosen to look at it, anyway.

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After doing little else than spread doom and gloom for the last few podcasts, we decided to try being upbeat and optimistic for a change this week. I know, it’s a radical change, but there’s plenty to be pleased about this week, with VW debuting their new Mark 6 Golf, Toyota bringing their five-door Yaris hatchback to the US, Lotus dropping some hints about hotter versions of the Evora GT car in the future, and BMW starts hustling to get their diesel straight-six into the US as fast as possible. It’s not all sweetness and light this week though, as Cadillac rolls out their fantastically pointless Escalade hybrid and Switzerland proposes a law that would ban almost every car on sale today (Link to Excel file of cars that could be banned). We return to the good news with Useless Automotive Tchotchke with more news from Lotus, as they’ve developed a device that will save the lives of millions of children each year from being crushed by those silent chariots of death, hybrid cars. If you find all this happiness strange and unnerving, we’ll probably be back on form next week, but until then, Share and Enjoy™.

 

 SSL Radio 8/12/08 [17:00m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time. – T.S. Eliot… or was it ex-PFC Wintergreen?

Soul. “Soul”. SOUL!

Could there be any more contemptible arrow in the pathetically trite quiver of general automotive journalism? How many times has a car been tidily scooted from last to first in a comparison test by the mere invocation of “soul”? How often has a lazy print-rag writer used the concept as a deus ex machina with which to salvage a worthless review of a nearly equally worthless car? Imagine, for a moment, that a law were to be passed banning the use of the word, or concept, of “soul” with reference to automobiles. How would Car and Driver fill an entire magazine every month, other than by bowing to the inevitable and simply making the whole thing a glossy ad for MacNeil Automotive Products, manufacturers of WeatherTech™ floormats, complete with innumerable pictures of the mystery brunette who is so frequently seen enjoying everything from side-window shields to cargo liners – you know, the one to whom the French would refer as une femme d’un certain age?

Soul is a crutch, a cop-out, a shield behind which the harried hack may hide everything from laziness to journalistic incompetence to plain, simple bias or hatred. The Nissan GT-R has no soul. The Peugeot 504 was a soulful car. When the straight-six engine disappeared from a particular car – and that car could be anything from the Jaguar XJ to the Mercedes E-Class to the BMW M3 – that car lost its true soul. What crap. What claptrap. What a waste of my time and yours, dear reader.

And yet we shall not let the bad be the enemy of the good. It does not matter how many plodding writers fall through the open windows of their own shallow talent into the luckily-placed rescue trampolines of “soul”; the idea resonates with us, however weakly, because at some level, we all understand its potential validity. We have all considered that a certain vehicle might well possess something very much like a soul, have all waved our hand at an irrational thought or preference regarding a car and chalked it up to the “heart of the machine”. Soul means something, whether we like it or not – and that means that we may discover what that something is through careful inspection and/or introspection. This is what I will now endeavor to do, and we will not pause to consider the myriad of metaphysical doors which open by the wayside, nor will we stop until we have reached something true, something real, a butterfly box in which we may pin “soul” and leave it to writhe out its final inconsistencies. Let’s find “soul”, you and I.

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And here’s the second half of the Special Extended Hiatus Edition of SSL Radio. This one’s all about business and motor sport news, including the sales figures for the month of July, GM’s announcement of their future product lineup, and the opening of the Leasepocalypse as all of the Big Three try to do a bit of triage by canceling the lease programs that are caused all three of them to lose billions of dollars over the first half of 2008. Plus, some choice bits of Useless Automotive Tchotchke, like a very special Bentley laptop and office chairs intentionally made out of very uncomfortable seats. Share and Enjoy™.

Link to the first half of the podcast

 

 SSL Radio 8/7/08 [11:32m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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Story by Jack Baruth, Photograph by “Neon” Dave Everest

As the sun hit high noon, me and my gang here - er, my race crew and I - rolled into the little town of Johnstown, Ohio to stir up a little trouble. Well, we had some seam-welding to do on our new Plymouth Neon race car, but make no mistake, if trouble showed up, we’d be ready for it. This here town was gonna learn right quick not to mess with us, and they were gonna learn right from the jump, if you know what I mean. In order for the local slobs to understand the kind of dangerous criminals we were, however, it was critical that we immediately show blatant disrespect for the local law enforcement, pronto. As we began to descend the long hill down into Johnstown’s main stoplight, I happened to see a sign on the side of the road.

“NO ENGINE BRAKE” was what that there sign done said. Well, we’d show ‘em something. We’d show ‘em that we don’t hold with no law whatsoever, least of all some small town law. With the maximum possible amount of calculated disregard, I callously depressed a small button on the center console of our mighty Ram 3500. The pictogram was a little tough to understand - it showed what looked like an ear of corn trapped inside a set of concentric circles - but the effect of the button was plain the moment I let off the throttle on the way down into the central square.

“BRAAAAAAAAAAAP! BRAAAAAAAAP!” That’s right - the newest six-point-seven-liter variant of the legendary Cummins diesel engine has a flippin’ engine brake. We shouldn’t call it a “Jake Brake” - that’s a registered trademark of Jacob Vehicle Systems - but I guarantee you that everyone with whom we spoke during our test of this monster truck used the phrase. As we cheerfully engine-braked our way into the small town, I happened to see a local cop coming the other way. Oh crap. I was about to get seriously busted for engine braking. How was I going to explain it to Johnny Law? We weren’t even towing anything. The bed was empty. I had no reasonable excuse to do it. I was going to do thirty days in a roach-infested jail cell just for pressing a button with a graphic suspiciously resembling an ear of corn! Why, oh why, did I have to show off for my gang? We’re not even really a gang!

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After a hiatus that was far longer than I intended it to be, thanks to the wonderful and intelligent people at Verizon’s technical support call centers, we’re back! There’s so much that I haven’t covered that we’re completely dispensing with the traditional brief overview, and indeed with the traditional podcast format altogether. We’ve split the podcast in half, with today’s episode covering the model news, including the Chevrolet Camaro, Subaru Impreza WRX, Lotus Evora and LA Auto Show rumors. The second half will cover business and motor sport news, and will be put up tomorrow or the day after at the latest. Now, as a way of apology for missing three weeks of podcasts, there’s a press video of the new BMW M3 GT2 ALMS race car out on the track, looking good and making all the right sounds, just below the jump. Share and Enjoy™.

Link to second half of podcast

 

 SSL Radio 8/4/08 [16:15m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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