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Photography by Andrew Didorosi

They say that sincerity is the new irony. So let’s be sincere. Prior to two weeks ago, I had never driven a car with the raw horsepower of the Switzer Performance P800 Nissan GT-R. We’re talking about seven hundred and seven ponies at all four wheels, on 93-octane gasoline, dyno-proven and road-tested. It’s terribly fashionable in this business to pretend that we’ve seen it all before, but you deserve to know the truth. Prior to driving this car, the most powerful car I’d driven was the six-hundred-horsepower 2008 Dodge Viper. On a weekly basis, I rarely drive anything faster than my poky little Audi S5 or Porsche 993. My Neon race car puts about one hundred and forty horsepower to the front wheels, although that’s enough to put you in the wall at a pretty high speed. Ask me how I know.

So while it would be very hip and print-journo of me to act like I get up every morning and drive random mega-horsepower cars, the truth of the matter is that it ain’t so. For that reason, I was very, very excited to drive the Switzer P800, particularly as it would be on a road course which I know reasonably well. This wasn’t the typical “press junket” kind of trip. I drove four hundred and fifty miles at my own expense, skipped work, and endured some really lousy weather to make it happen.

I wasn’t the only person busting tail to make sure our readers had a chance to experience the car. A notorious pro racer/road-rally bon vivant rented the track for the entire day and consented to let us share his playdate on the condition that we would maintain strict confidence about his secret new project. Tym Switzer, owner of the tuning shop which bears his name, arranged for the GT-R’s arrival and agreed that we, the Press As A Whole, would print the truth about the car’s performance, no matter what. Jo Borras, Switzer’s newly arrived PR mensch, coordinated the entire effort from the leather captain’s chair of his refrigerator-white VW Routan “press office”. The crew from Jalopnik agreed to share photographs with me in exchange for my services as camera-car operator and winter-weather stunt driver. Last but not least, the GT-R’s owner, J.R., agreed in the most nonchalant way possible to let me drive his pride and joy at one hundred and thirty miles per hour. In the snow.

Continue reading Avoidable Contact #26: Eight hundred horsepower and one little question.

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It’s sad but true: when I was a kid, Internet access pretty much didn’t exist. I didn’t even start reading USENET until 1990, at which point I was already eighteen years old. In the pre-Web days, if you wanted to know something, you went to the library. If you were lucky, the answer was in a book. If you couldn’t find a book with the answer, you were more or less screwed. For example, my elementary-school library had a copy of “The Car Book 1971″ that had all the prices of new cars from 1971, and I memorized the book to the point that I could instantly recall the prices and specs of every new car sold that year. Unfortunately, they didn’t have the same book from 1972, which meant that as far as I knew, there were no cars sold in 1972. Or they were all free. Or they were all $1,999. There was simply no way to know.

The arrival of the Information Age has made that kind of knowledge starvation a thing of the past, with a few exceptions. One of those exceptions is information on amateur and entry-level-professional sedan racing. Those who talk about it on the Internet don’t really know; those who know aren’t telling, for a variety of reasons we’ll discuss below. When I started my racing “career” a few years ago, I had to learn about the costs and difficulties of racing firsthand, at my own considerable expense, and my conversations with other racers have indicated that this state of affairs is nearly universal.

Universal it may be, but it isn’t right. So in this episode of Avoidable Contact, I’m going to give you a brief tour of amateur and entry-level-professional sedan racing. Specifically, we’re going to talk about requirements, costs, and results. I can’t put you in the seat of a real race car — only you can do that for yourself — but I can at least give you a reasonable idea of what’s involved. There are resources, both print and Web, which claim to tell the truth about the costs of racing, but trust me: most of them are either pursuing an agenda or making bizarre assumptions regarding your access to things like frame jigs, TIG welders, and $100 Hayabusa engines. Since most people can’t actually do things like “knock together” an SCCA GT-2 tube chassis, a lot of the advice and information that’s out there might as well be fantasy.

To keep things simple and comparable, most of the costs discussed here will be “rent-a-ride” costs; I will discuss ownership costs in a future column, assuming there’s any interest. We’ll start with the 24 Hours of Lemons and go as far as the Speed World Challenge. So, without further ado, let’s climb to the top of the “Pyramid Of Speed” and see what’s there.

Continue reading Avoidable Contact #25: Exploring the pyramid of speed — the real costs and stories behind entry-level sedan racing.

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“…so we’ll hunt him. Because he can take it. Because he’s not our hero. He’s a silent guardian, a watchful protector. A Dark Knight.”

It feels more than a little trite and melodramatic to begin this column with a quote from a Batman movie, but if the auto business has any profession which lends itself to celebrity culture, it is that of the stylist. Harley Earl set the template: physically enormous and personally outrageous, he created our modern notion of the automobile as aesthetic object. And while there have been many flamboyant “superstar” designers who followed in his footsteps, from Tjaarda to Stephenson, history will surely acknowledge that a few men managed to accomplish more than merely sketching a pretty shape. Bill Mitchell brought us the 1961 Chevrolet, which set a visual template for modern sedans that persists to this day. William Lyons fathered the XJ6, perhaps the greatest sporting sedan design in history, even if he didn’t actually draw it. Alex Issigonis invented the “small car” as we know it today, and Giorgetto Giugiaro rationalized it into the unmatchable first-generation Golf. Marcello Gandini created the supercar; Jack Telnack revitalized the Mustang and with it an entire generation of automotive enthusiasm.

Years from now, when the smoke of history clears, another name will be added to that list of designers who were capable of re-imagining the automobile. Born and raised in the American Midwest, Christopher Edward Bangle joined BMW with a rather singular goal in mind: to create what would be only the second major design direction in the company’s history. His complete and utter success in this task has permitted BMW to become a major player on the global stage; along the way, he rewrote the design language for the entire auto industry.

Such is the man’s star power that, like George W. Bush, Bill Gates, or the Almighty Himself, Bangle is regularly blamed for or credited with the accomplishments of others — but it isn’t necessary. His own successes are enough. To understand them, and to grasp why it is possible to respect or even admire the man himself without particularly loving his creations, we will have to take the advice of David E Davis and open our hymnals…

Continue reading Avoidable Contact #24: The man who saved BMW.

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“All I need is a nice basic car. Something like, maybe, a Saturn or something.” This unassuming, if perhaps ungrammatical, combination of sentences has come to be a long-running joke in my family. You see, one of my relatives married a woman back in the Eighties and subsequently provided her with a string of relatively upscale whips ranging from an Infiniti J30 to a Siebener BMW. Every time it was time to go looking for a replacement, however, she would ardently protest to anyone who would listen that “All I need is a nice basic car. Something like, maybe, a Saturn or something.” My relative ignored her and kept shoveling the Audis, Bimmers, and Infinitis her way, and each time she would accept the new ride reluctantly, reminding us about her preference for “a basic car”.

Some fifteen years after their marriage, this woman told me at dinner, “You know what I did today?”

“No. What did you do?”

“I rode in a friend’s Saturn to lunch. You know, I’ve talked about how that’s all I really want.”

“And?”

“It was horrible! It smelled weird, the windows rolled up by hand, it was cramped inside, and it was really noisy, like something was wrong with it.”

Continue reading Avoidable Contact #23: Airbags killed the AM radio star.

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Story by Jack Baruth

Hey there, Mr. Average Car Enthusiast! Do you like watching Top Gear? Of course you do. I mean, what’s not to like? They have cool, super-sarcastic reviews of new cars, some on-track hooligan behavior, and wacky “comparisons” between Bugattis and scooters. Everybody loves TG. Well, I have some good news for you. There’s a magazine out there, and it’s, like a hundred times cooler than Jeremy Clarkson, Captain Slow, and The Guy Who Crashed the Jet Car could ever be. Their reviews are better, because most of the reviewers have a background in automotive engineering, wheel-to-wheel competition, or both. The writing’s funny yet informative. Instead of screwing around on an empty track somewhere, doing trivially easy stunts and “racing” against their own times, these guys build real racecars for real race sanctions, not to mention a series of outrageous engine-swapped project cars. They test tires under controlled conditions and report the results honestly. They’ve developed completely new methodologies for performance testing, making their results the most consistent and reliable in the history of automotive journalism. There’s even a considerable amount of authentic, documented civil-disobedience-mixed-with-raw-stupidity in each issue. Best of all – and this is what separates them from Grassroots Motorsports, the reading of which affects any genuinely literate man in much the same manner that the sound of nails scratching a chalkboard does an elementary-school teacher – they’ve recruited nearly every great writer in the industry to contribute monthly columns ranging from the aggressively erudite to the simply heartbreaking. Trust me, this is all good stuff.

The best part of all? It’s totally free. Are you ready to start reading? Sure you are. Here’ s how to get started: Go to your local library and ask for the microfiche department. Once you find said department, file a request for “Car and Driver, any year from 1970 to 1990.” Load the film into the microfiche machine… and if you’ve never read anything from the Golden Age Of Car And Driver, prepare to be amazed. Those of us who are over thirty-five know that Ozzy Osbourne wasn’t always a shambling, disconnected shell of a man picking up dog crap and mumbling incoherently through a series of humiliating interludes; the guy used to be the effing Prince Of Darkness, screaming his lyrics with violent passion, biting the heads off bats, rendering parent-teacher associations speechless with terror. By that same token, it’s hard for my younger readers to understand that C/D wasn’t always a complete joke of a publication, that it wasn’t always a mishmash of tossed-off sarcasm and WeatherTech advertisements, thinly disguised press releases and threadbare prose, incomprehensible comparo-test results and Ten Best lists sorted in order of perceived dashboard quality. It’s been years since I met a young person who took the magazine or its content seriously. Today, the kids are all watching Top Gear or reading EVO, slavishly imitating Clarkson’s sarcastic style or quoting Dickie Meaden’s fast-road observations verbatim, not understanding that the English stuff is mostly entertainment, not journalism.

Enough is enough. The announcement that Csaba Csere is walking away from the Editor-in-Chief position has brought C/D temporarily back into the Internet’s itinerant spotlight, and before the magazine disappears for good from the enthusiasts’ collective consciousness, I feel compelled to explain why it was once great, how it lost that greatness, and why its days are all but over.

Continue reading Avoidable Contact #22: The rise and sad fall of Car and Driver.

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Photography by Dave Everest

SMACK! My right fist banged off the arm of my pumpkin-colored Natuzzi recliner as the swelling bloodthirsty tide of righteous f***ing indignation crested in my feverishly twisting heart. In the space of a moment I’d redone all the tendon and ligament damage so patiently healed over the course of the past month, an injury suffered in a last-ditch but ultimately successful attempt to keep my completely sideways Neon race car off the man-killing concrete wall in Putnam Park’s final turn by dialing in steering corrections faster than my hands could accomplish without literally ripping the sinew from the bone. The pure adrenaline which had then twisted the wheel into a blur of spokes now bulged my eyes from their sockets. I was going to find this guy and beat him until he couldn’t stand. I would pull him up by his neck, flick out my titanium-gold-nitrided Kershaw assisted-opening knife, and cut his eyeballs out, one at a time, taking care to pop each optic nerve off with a delicate finishing flourish. And then I’d really get angry. Death would be too good for this guy.

It was a single typed sentence that gave spur to my murderous rage. A single sentence that neatly encapsulates the sullen stupidity at the heart of so many so-called “automotive enthusiasts”. A single sentence that any thinking man would be ashamed to utter. It was, paraphrased a bit to protect the guilty:

lol american cars suck the last one im glad the last one i ever drove was a 1980 buick skylark that totally sucked

Putting aside the bloody infernal cheek of insulting the premium X-body compact, the friendly-looking, velour-lined small Buick known in contemporary advertising as “The little limousine”, can you see why I was angry enough to contemplate booking a last-minute flight to California (of course that kind of idiocy finds its expression in California) for the sole purpose of committing a bit of the old ultra-violence? This drooling moron wants the “Big Three” to sink into the abyss of history… because he didn’t like the 1980 Skylark? He’s deriving his perspective on perhaps the most dangerous moment in the entire history of the American middle class from a drive in a twenty-eight-year-old car? It’s too ridiculous to seriously contemplate – except for the fact that, judging by what I’ve seen and read of the Detroit “bailout” hearings, the elected officials of our government aren’t much smarter than Mr. Skylark.

It’s time to cut the crap, and that’s why this will be the shortest Avoidable Contact you’ll ever read. The “bailout” must happen. Without it, we’re all going to suffer serious consequences, and by “we” I mean you, me, the guy down the street, Mr. Skylark, and everybody who has ever spent more than five minutes of their life away from “World of Warcraft”. I don’t care if you love American cars or despise them; without the bailout, you’re in trouble, pal. You can take my word for it, or you can keep reading to find out why even the most testosterone-challenged, America-hating, hemp-wearing, Prius-pedaling tree-hugger needs Detroit to keep cranking out the American Iron.

Continue reading Avoidable Contact #21: Oppose the “bailout”? You’re a moron.

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Story by Jack Baruth, photograph by Sideline Sports Photography

Nearly two decades ago, I had the unique privilege of attending Dr. John Romano’s ENG 131 class at Miami University. I say “privilege” because Dr. Romano taught me two important things. The second thing he taught me was that standards matter. Although I had received an “A” on every paper I had submitted in his class, he gave me a “B” at the end of the semester. Why? It was simple: he’d indicated that it was unacceptable to miss more than two classes, and I had missed three. Why had I missed three, you ask? I was in the hospital with some grotesque cycling-related injury. When I explained this to him, he explained to me that his expectations did not come with pre-printed excuse notes for “hospitals, sniffles, and unrepentant laziness”. This “B”, one of two I would receive during my time at the English Department at Miami, served as a harsh introduction to the real world, where nobody wants to hear your excuses.

The first important thing Romano taught me came during his lecture on the opening of The Canterbury Tales. “Ah, spring,” he sighed, “it promises so much, and delivers so little. Not unlike, I would say, many of you young ladies in this audience.” The reaction in the lecture hall was closely akin to what I suppose it would have been had Romano produced a Labrador puppy from one of the folds of his voluminous tweed overcoat, held it up to the sky, and snapped its neck. The shocked silence lasted for what seemed hours before the bespectacled, bewhiskered old professor smiled and resumed reading Chaucer in his ragged, creaking baritone. It would take me several dinner dates and a long “study session” with one of my distaff ENG 132 classmates before I realized that Romano had it exactly right. The payoff rarely meets the promise; the juice usually isn’t worth the squeeze.

Not so today, dear readers. I’ve promised you something simple: that if you read, comprehend, and implement the suggestions in this column you will, I repeat, absolutely will go faster. For many of you, the resultant benefits will exceed anything you could gain by spending thousands of dollars tuning your car; thus the photo above of a beautiful, fully-prepared, track-dominating 350Z being snuggled-up to by an absolutely bone-stock fifty-two-hundred-pound luxury sedan in VIR’s infamous Climbing Esses. I intend to deliver on this promise, so take a moment, clear your mind of your losses in the stock market, the pressures of work, and the burning question of whether or not Vanessa Hudgens was actually just fifteen years old when she took that camera-phone photo, and let us continue as Dr. Romano would wish: slowly, carefully, and with attention to detail.

Continue reading Avoidable Contact #20: Read this column and go faster, for free, without tuning your car, guaranteed.

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Shall… we… play… a… game? How ’bout that old Sesame Street standard, “One Of These Things Is Not Like The Other - One Of These Things Just Doesn’t Belong.” I’ll name four people, and you tell me which one “doesn’t belong”. Ready? Setta? GO!

• Brock Yates
• Alex Roy
• Felipe Massa
• Lawrence Pargo

Okay, time’s up. Which one doesn’t belong? That’s right - Felipe Massa, who is an actual race car driver. The other three are non-racers who have become semi-famous for jerking around on the freeway and endangering other drivers at triple-digit speeds.

Wait - you didn’t say Lawrence Pargo, did you? I mean, come on! Pargo’s right there with Yates and Roy, having recently been caught on a speed camera running a rented Hyundai Sonata down the road at a staggering one hundred and forty-seven miles per hour. In Pargo’s defense, it must be noted that his attorney told the court that he couldn’t possibly be guilty of the crime. It turns out that the lowly Sonata, commonly considered to be a crapwagon suited only to “credit criminals”, elderly people, and minimum-wage healthcare workers such as Mr. Pargo himself… well, it can only do 137.

Consider if you will, dear reader, that when Sir William Lyons released his all-new sports car in 1948, he was so proud of its top speed - a speed that made it possibly the fastest standard production car in history to that point - that he simply named the car after that top speed! The XK-120! One hundred and twenty miles per hour! It was the stuff of legends. Fast-forward to the modern day, and Hyundai doesn’t even bother to name a 137-mph car something appropriately cool like “G6DB-137″. Instead, it’s simply the “Sonata”, staple of rental fleets everywhere, capable of blowing by top-end postwar sports cars as if they were bolted to the ground. This Pargo fellow was no race car driver; he isn’t even a wannabe racer like, ahem, certain other people named in the list above. He was just a young fellow who was late for work. It didn’t take him an ounce of skill to reach triple digits, didn’t cause him a moment’s worth of concern, didn’t require a Nomex suit or a competition license. With a simple shove of the drive-by-wire, traction-controlled accelerator pedal, he was running a rental car at the same speeds Stirling Moss reached in the Mercedes 300SLR.

How did this happen?

Continue reading Avoidable Contact #19: Rich Corinthian swaybars.

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Story by Jack Baruth

Color me pleased; my 2009 Audi S5 has finally arrived, resplendent in vintage Porsche Lime Green. I hasten to add that this color is emphatically not the “Signal Green” which has become common on the current Porsche GT3 RS – it’s actually from Porsche’s 1973 and 1974 color book, and is a much brighter, more cheerful color than the rather more serious Signal Green. Readers of our S5 review may recall that I was smitten with Audi’s curvaceous V8-powered coupe from the moment I fired it up, so there was little doubt in my mind after our November test that I would eventually put one in my own garage. As with everything else in the Speed:Sport:Life “fleet”, from my Phaetons, to Zerin’s TT 3.2 Quattro, to the Big Dog’s Cayenne GTS, all the way to my sweetheart of a 993 pictured above, we had to pay for the car. We don’t get free “long-term testers” the way our friends in the print magazines or banner-ad-laden blogozines do. If we want a car for more than a week, we have to take out our wallets. It’s nice, in a way, because it means we’re putting our money where our mouths are. I liked the Audi S5, so I bought one. Simple as that. The other street (as opposed to race) car I bought this year, in case any of you care, was my mother’s 2008 Ford Focus SES sedan, another vehicle which received a generally positive review on these pages. So, as you can see, the manufacturers actually make money when they invite me to press events, because a bout 30% of the time I end up buying a car!

In the twenty-something days since I took delivery of the S5, pictures of the car have flown around the Internet with a rapidity usually reserved for lucky shots of Britney Spears making a bowlegged departure from Paris Hilton’s McMerc SLR. I’ve also received dozens of phone calls and text messages from friends and acquaintances who have spotted the Audi in traffic or parked somewhere. People who see the car in the metal seem to be about 70/30 in favor of my choice, while Internet users who see the car online (where, it has to be said, the color does not photograph quite “right”) are closer to 80/20 against. Some of the negative reactions are fascinating because their authors seem so… well, personally offended by the shiny S5. “I can’t believe Audi agreed to paint the car that color!” is a semi-common response. Well, they did agree, and they will also paint your new Audi in almost any color you like, thanks to their outstanding “Exclusive” program. The problem for most of these people is that they are afraid to own a German car in any color that is not silver, grey, or silver-grey, and the presence of brightly-colored German cars destroys their cherished Autobahn stereotypes. Of course, were they to ever sign off “World of Warcraft”, stumble blinking out into the afternoon light, borrow their parents’ Camrys, drive to the airport, and actually visit the hallowed Fatherland, they would see that the most common cars there aren’t silver Audis - they’re bright blue Lupos and yellow Renault Twingos. Germans like color, too.

Some of the younger Audi-forum readers are absolutely shocked that it’s possible to buy a car from Ingolstadt that isn’t utterly “tasteful” and “reserved”. How do I know that they’re young? It’s simple: they’re obviously too young to have ever seen the interior of a Seventies Audi, or even the seats of an ur-Quattro. The whole idea of “tasteful” German cars is a scam, kids. It was something the marketing people thought up twenty years ago so the dealers could stock a smaller selection of inventory. I grew up surrounded by lemon-yellow Mercedes diesels, brown Porsche 911SCs, pearl-white Audi 5000s, and baby blue big-bumper Bimmers, and believe it or not, none of the drivers of those cars ever died of color overdose. My father almost killed himself a few times pushing his orange Volvo off the freeway after it stalled for no particular reason, but I have no reason to believe that color was involved. Trust me on this one. I know that your local dealer has thirty-six BMWs on his lot and they are all either silver, grey, or black, but if you take out a BMW brochure and flip all the way to the back, past the endless photographs of optional skiing accessories but right before the disclaimer that tells you to obey posted speed limits, you will find little squares of color. While most of them are silver, grey, silver-grey, or black, chances are there will be a red or blue square on the page. It’s okay to go to the dealer, point to that square, and meekly inquire as to whether you might be permitted to purchase a car in that color. I’m not kidding. I even know a guy who bought an “arrest-me red” 740iL a few years ago… and they didn’t actually arrest him! Crazy, I know.

Continue reading Avoidable Contact #18: It’s actually rather easy being green; the case for front-wheel-drive.

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Story by Jack Baruth

Okay, class, put away your books. Time for a pop quiz. It’s just one question, and it’s multiple-choice:
Which car holds the official Nurburgring lap time record for production automobiles?

a) Nissan GT-R

b) Chevrolet Corvette ZR-1

c) Porsche Carrera GT

d) Radical SR8

So, what did you pick? It doesn’t matter. Whatever you picked, you’re wrong. It was a trick question. There is no “production car record” at the Nurburgring. Period. It doesn’t exist. You may find that shocking. After all, don’t the British car rags continually natter on about the “production car record”? Didn’t Edmunds.com recently devote several terabytes of hype to the idea of the GT-R setting a “production car record”? Isn’t there, like, a totally official list on Wikipedia somewhere? There has to be a record! Everybody talks about it all the time!

Sorry. There’s no “Nurburgring lap time record” for a simple reason: Real lap time records are set by real race cars, using real timing and scoring equipment, during actual competition or sanctioned practice sessions. They aren’t “self-reported” for the same reason the World’s Strongest Man Contest isn’t held by having everyone mail in their “results”: because people can, and do, lie and cheat.

Despite the obviousness of this concept, it is not yet universally understood that one cannot simply claim a lap time on the Internet and have it be “official”. Case in point: I happen to be a member of a small Web forum for Midwestern racers and open-lapping drivers. A few years ago, we had a bit of a tempest in a teapot when a fellow claimed that his $5000 project car had lapped Mid-Ohio in a certain time. He’d obtained this time by taping a stopwatch to the dashboard and timing himself during a NASA HPDE session. While this fellow was a competent driver, we were rather skeptical about his reported time, not least because it would have put him on the pole of the American Iron race which had also occurred that weekend, and his old sedan was pretty far away from being an optimized AI car. Furthermore, those of us who have to race under the cold glare of an accurate-to-one-ten-thousandth-of-a-second transponder system rather objected to the idea of just banging a stopwatch somewhere around the start/finish line every lap. It’s pretty easy to gain or lose a few seconds by sloppy stopwatching, you see. After much discussion, the driver in question agreed that the time probably shouldn’t be considered “official” in any sense, and everybody calmed down. It wasn’t that we didn’t trust him; it was simply that recording one’s own lap time is not, and will never be, the equivalent of setting an honest, independently timed lap under controlled conditions. It’s just plain common sense.

Or is it? After all, didn’t Nissan recently manipulate the all-too-willing media into “witnessing” and then reporting “official Nurburgring lap times” for their all-conquering R35 GT-R? First, there was the pretty-hard-to-believe 7:38 time which the fine journalists at Edmunds advertised, excuse me, reported, followed by the no-really-you-have-to-be-kidding 7:34 time, and finally the don’t-insult-our-collective-intelligence 7:29 shared with the world in a breathless press release a few months later. The Nissan media blitz was so successful that when Horst von Saurma obtained a 7:50 time from a real production GT-R, it went virtually unreported by the major automotive rags. Where’d those twenty-one seconds between von Saurma’s drive and Nissan’s “test” come from? The Internet had many answers, none of them credible, and none of them particularly persuasive to anyone who has ever driven the Nurburgring in anger.

And now, Porsche - the company which has had perhaps the most storied relationship with the ‘Ring, the company which has been testing production cars in the Black Forest since the Fifties, the company which has historically set the benchmark for excellence around the North Course – has called Nissan out on their self-reported times. Without quite saying as much, Porsche has implied that Nissan cheated at the ‘Ring. Did they? If so, how?

The answer is simple: Nissan did not cheat, because it’s impossible to cheat when there are no rules. There’s no official lap time record, remember? What they did do was knowingly manipulate a credulous, ignorant media and general public into misunderstanding the GT-R’s capabilities. It’s not the first time they’ve done it, and they aren’t the only guilty parties.

Here’s how it was done.

Continue reading Avoidable Contact #17: Cheating Nissan, Bitter Porsche.