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Gather ‘round, everybody. I have an epic tale to tell. It’s the story of how Fake Luxury Conquered The World. There are heroes, and villains, and sweeping vistas, and if we don’t exactly have a princess cooped up in a tower, we might have a few sexually liberated young women in airbrush-mural vans. Interested? Follow along with me as we return to the dark days of the early Seventies…

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Story by Jack Baruth, photography by Matt Chow

Don’t look now, but Dubspeed Driven has become a pretty big deal in the past year or so. Thanks to you, our faithful and patient readers, we’re knocking the teeth out of some of the biggest names in auto-blog-o-lism. While our competitors spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on snazzy offices, first-class flights to Europe, “branding consultants”, and high-priced, low-talent hack writers, we’re getting it done with the proverbial two tables and a microphone… which is really more like four part-timers and a couple of Canon DSLRs, but you get the idea. There’s no money in this for us, no banner ads funneling cheddar into offshore accounts. You won’t find any ulterior motives at work here - we just want to have fun and share some neat cars with you along the way.

With so many “eyeballs” in the same electronic room, so to speak, it’s time to shove the walls out a bit and remodel to serve you better. In the next month, the site you know as Dubspeed Driven will formally re-brand as Speed:Sport:Life, with a new, more readable format and a double-barrel blast of new content. I’d like to tell you that we’re getting a ground-up redesign along the lines of our big-dollar “e-magazine” competition, but let’s face it: if we had that kind of money, we’d spend it filling a Daytona Prototype with strippers, not building a photo studio and filling it with trolls. Sorry about that. We will, however, be making a solid effort to make it easier for you to read and enjoy the articles. Fonts, whitespace, formatting - we’re working on all of that.

Oh yeah, we also have a new test driver. He’s an evil cyborg made from German scrap metal, artificial eyeballs grown in a dry-ice-flooded laboratory, and a stolen pig heart.

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Story by Jack Baruth, photo by “bubba sideways”

I can’t count the number of times during my long and painful BMX career when I sat on my bike, sized up some dirt jump, wooden ramp, or fifteen-stair drop-off, and thought long and hard about how much I’d regret what I was about to do, should it go wrong. Most of the time, my pessimism was unfounded - I’d clear the jump, bound over the obstacle, land the drop. Every once in a while, however, I’d lose my balance, slip a pedal, or just plain run out of talent, and for a tiny, sickening fraction of a second, my breath would catch in my throat before I hit the ground to the accompanying “crack” of a broken bone. I never actually heard a bone break, mind you; it always felt like a really sharp pinch in a place where no pinching should be possible. The memory of that little “pinch” is what made me sit on my bike for an extra moment or two before cranking off towards disaster. There were times I’d have liked to just sit there until it was time to go home, but the difference between the rider and the poser is that the poser never stops just sitting there on the bike. You’ll never get hurt just sitting there.

If I don’t make the prediction I’m about to unleash - if I turn this column towards a safer topic, like E85 pricing or trail-braking techniques for FWD race cars - I won’t get hurt. There won’t be any hate mail. Zerin, my long-suffering editor, won’t get any calls from the manufacturers. It’ll be business as usual. I should really shut up right now.

Oh, the hell with that. Let’s pedal towards the jump and make a prediction. I believe that Nissan is making a potentially serious error in importing the new GT-R to the United States and Canada. I believe that they will eventually regret doing so, and that the GT-R will join that time-honored long list of big-money automotive marketing mistakes that contains everything from the Edsel to the Lincoln Blackwood. Yeah, yeah, I know. Some of my dear readers are already searching for the “Respond” button at the bottom of this column so they can make unpleasant and biologically improbable suggestions regarding my momma, while the more action-oriented among you are already GoogleMapping a very special trip for the purpose of beating my face in at the NASA season opener. (It’s April 12, at Mid-Ohio, if you must know.) If there’s anybody left who simply wants to know the reasons behind this particular piece of prophecy… you’ll just have to put the chainsaw down and keep reading.

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Story by Jack Baruth

She’d entered our dealer principal’s office as a coltish, blinking young woman, stepping awkwardly in new high heels. Almost six feet tall, impossibly thin, painfully beautiful, wearing a purposely dowdy pantsuit. It was always fun to see the new dealer reps arrive from Ford; without exception they were tall, good-looking young men and women with impeccable degrees from Michigan universities, earnest Midwestern faces, and a charmingly naive sense of the world. They’d meet the dealer, a hard-assed former B-17 pilot who had built the dealership with his own hands, and they’d meet the general manager, a hulking man with a Mafioso’s hair and the easy yet malicious attitude of a professional assassin, and those two old bastards would grind ‘em into the ground. We enjoyed the show. Sure, these kids were on their way to six-figure salaries, a home in Bloomfield Hills, and the outrageously hedonistic life of a Detroit executive - but before they could make the big money, they’d have to take a beating from our guys. Of course, things were slightly different this time. Our dealer principal had recently handed over the daily operations to his phlegmatic, fortysomething son, whose demeanor and physique had long ago earned him the nickname “Droopy The Dog”. Droopy had insisted on seeing the Ford rep alone, probably hoping that he could earn some respect among the sales staff by beating up a twenty-three-year-old girl. Rumor said this meeting was to discuss an extra “allocation” - the amount of stock sent to each dealer on an annual basis. We all knew what we wanted from this girl - we wanted extra allocation of PowerStroke diesels, we wanted more three-quarter-ton trucks, and we wanted to become an SVT dealer. With any luck, Droopy would get the job done.

When she walked out of his door, the awkward young volleyball player had become a triumphant Valkyrie. She grinned at the assembled sales staff and strutted to her cream-colored Town Car Cartier. From colt to racehorse, in one meeting flat. Our general manager frowned, went into Droopy’s office, and slammed the door. Hushed voices turned loud, and before long the two men were screaming at each other. The rest of the salesmen had melted away by the time the door banged back open, leaving me to face the general manager alone. He looked at me and said,

“Aerostars. Aerostars! The bitch made him take four AEROSTARS!.”

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Story by Jack Baruth

The word on the street is that GM’s new Malibu is quite the sales success. Nearly thirteen thousand of the “New ‘Bu” found homes in December - but wait! They could have sold even more, if they’d had any left! That’s right: for the first time in any of our recent memories, a domestically produced mid-sized sedan is “production constrained”. By any standard you want to use - sales, customer feedback, the drooling, incomprehensible babbles of The Press As A Whole - the Malibu is a winner. This is the one for which we’ve waited, the make-no-excuses product to take the fight to the Japanese. There’s nothing standing between General Motors and complete dominance over the HondOta CamCord.

Nothing, that is, except your inner chimpanzee.

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Story by Jack Baruth

I’d like to start this week with a bit of an apology - not for what I’ve done, mind you, but for what I am going to do. Fourteen years ago, I was a flat broke, know-nothing kid starting at the bottom of a small-town Ford dealership’s auto (and light truck!) sales department. The hours weren’t great, and most of the actual minutes were even worse, as Douglas Adams would say. On a monthly “draw” against commission of eight hundred dollars, I didn’t exactly live like a king. Heck, I couldn’t even afford to eat a real lunch. Instead, I’d buy two fifty-nine-cent McD’s cheeseburgers and wander over to the used car department, where “old Frank”, the finance manager for the “used side”, would be telling stories. After forty-plus years in the business, Frank knew all the tales of the car biz, and he wasn’t shy about telling them, no matter how disturbing, slanderous, or just plain obscene they might be. One lifeless Tuesday afternoon, I said to him,

“Hey Frank, you oughta write a book about this stuff.” Frank reacted to this mild suggestion with unconcealed disapproval and what was very possibly contempt, as if I’d suggested that he put a firecracker in the dealership toilet. His lit cigarette - yes, you could still smoke indoors at a car dealership back in 1994 - dangled dangerously out of his stained hand. He “fixed me with his eye”, as the Ancient Mariner did, and replied v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y.

“I could do that,” he said, “but I won’t. I would never write or say anything against this business. I wouldn’t share our secrets, our business, our life, with people on the outside,” and here his glare became quite focused and intense as I shrank back in one of the used car building’s rickety old wire-frame chairs, “and neither… should… you.” As the years went on, I came to appreciate and understand his statement. I arrived at a deep sympathy with, and later a bit of nostalgia for, the business as it once was. Once upon a time, the car business was a real profession, not a dumping ground for low achievers and double-fisted-handshaking douchebags. Those days are gone, and Frank went with them, dying at the end of a short but brutal bout with cancer well before the turn of this century. I’d like to think Frank wouldn’t mind it if I talked about the business now, but just in case, I want to apologize to him, wherever he is. I’m not going to write a book, but I am going to spend some time talking about the business. We’ll cover it all, from the way dealers finance their stock to the tale of the salesman who took a female customer in a Mustang convertible for a “test drive” that ended with the two of them having rather public sexual intercourse on the road adjacent to the service building…. Today we’re going to talk about how a dealership is really organized, and who really makes the decisions.

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Story by Jack Baruth

You’re a special snowflake. Your parents always told you so, and you believed them, and it turned out to be true. You’re such a special snowflake that you deserve to drive cars for free, to enjoy them at no cost and without any interference. But how can this be accomplished? Read on to find out, as I share my car sales and joyriding experience with you. Since the fateful day when the State of Ohio made the mistake of handing me a drivers’ license, nearly twenty years ago, I’ve driven everything from Sentras to Spykers, often without having a dollar in my pocket. You can do it too; follow along as I show you how.

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Story by Jack Baruth

Last week I promised to tell you how to bamboozle upscale auto dealers into letting you drive their precious cars for free, using nothing other than a few basic props and a strong dose of what the fellow who was my boss back when I was a young Ford salesman called “Playhouse 90″. We’re still going to do that - next week. This week, it’s Christmas evening and I’m feeling a bit sentimental. I’d like to borrow a few minutes of your time and talk about a subject very close to my heart: the Cadillac Motor Car Company, its long descent into darkness, and its thrilling climb back to respectability. You see, I’ve spent the past week or so behind the wheel of an all-wheel-drive Cadillac STS Northstar, and I’ve learned that I’m not the only person who still has deep emotional ties to Cadillac and its history.

Everywhere I’ve gone - from the drive-thru at a downtown Wendy’s, where a young black man at the cash register regaled me with the story of his ‘91 de Ville and the long hours of effort he’d put into making it “just right”, to the gas station down the street from my house, where a rather tough-looking kid with tattoos on his eyelids begged me to open the hood so he could see the V8, to my own cul-de-sac, where my neighbor, who has managed to utterly ignore everything in my driveway from Viper to CL55 AMG, completely amazed me with his exacting knowledge of the differences between the STS-V and the “regular” STS - people seem to resonate with Cadillac. They resonate with Cadillac as an idea, as an aspiration, and with the car itself. There’s a passion in this country for the wreath and crest, and it’s beyond anything I suspected.

There’s fear, too. Fear that the forty-year decline of “The Standard Of The World” hasn’t been properly arrested, fear that it’s too late for Cadillac to mean anything, fear that the cars are still junk. Thankfully, that fear’s unfounded. As David E. Davis might have said, turn your hymnals to page 2007, “A Mighty Fortress Is Our Caddy”, and sing along with me.

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Story and Photos by Jack Baruth

“YOU’RE GOING TO WRECK THE CAR!!!!!” A quick glance confirmed what I had suspected - as she screamed bloody murder, my instructor was actually trying to curl up in the passenger seat, and her hands were covering her face in the classic if-I-can’t-see-the-wall-it-won’t-kill-me pose. I would have studied this amusing little tableau further, but there was some work to do; although we weren’t in much danger of wrecking, we certainly had my Boxster pretty far sideways, at a speed somewhere north of ninety miles per hour, and there was a concrete wall rushing by, about five feet from my left quarter-panel. Best to straighten this thing out and then I could say something really cool, like something Han Solo would have said to Princess Leia back in 1977. Which is what I suppose they meant when they said “a long time ago, in a galaxy far away.” When I finally exited the turn, inside rear wheel lightly spinning and perhaps smoking, I looked at her and said, in as suave a voice as I could manage through the chunky chinbar of my Bell M2 Pro,

“Don’t worry. Water-cooled Porsches are just like Doritos.”

“Doritos?” she squeaked, the reality of our non-death now becoming clearer in her mind.

“Crunch all you want,” and here I smirked in true Han Solo fashion, said smirk being utterly wasted in a full-face helmet, “they’ll make more.”

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Story and Photos by Jack Baruth

Ten minutes ago it was a sexy, flashy, highly polished, turbocharged masterpiece of Japanese engineering. Now it’s a muddy, twisted piece of garbage on a flatbed truck, crinkled and compressed like an empty Old Milwaukee can. The passenger door looks like it’s been kicked in by King Kong, while the previously spotless interior is filled with dirt, metal shards, and the acrid odor of what is possibly urine.

“Thank God they survived the brake failure,” somebody said. I shivered once in sympathetic response. Anybody who drives a fifty-two-hundred pound sedan on racetracks, as I do, has a very deep, and very easily excited, fear of brake failure. That little demon of terror sat chuckling on my shoulder during the next track session, as I headed down the long back straight of Summit Point’s Shenandoah circuit, towards the turn where I, too, would have to lean on my stoppers, where the near-deadly equipment failure had just taken place…

Two black rubber stripes, more than fifty feet long, merging seamlessly into two muddy tracks leading all the way to the tire wall. There was a failure here, that’s for sure, but it had nothing to do with brakes. To paraphrase De Niro in Ronin, it was amateur night out here on the track. Incompetent instruction had struck again.

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