2010 Honda Accord Crosstour EX-L AWD

by Byron Hurd. Photos courtesy of Honda.

It takes about six seconds to travel from the stop box to the “time writer” official at a NASA Mid-Atlantic autocross (or “NASA-X”). If you’re in it to win it, those six seconds are excruciating. What should really be a short time might as well be an hour-long debriefing. Six. What did I screw up that time? Five.Did that wobbler back at the offset box fall over? Four. Did I tap one in that second slalom? Three. Does Jon Felton hate Miatas? Two.

One.

But this time, I don’t give a damn. I’m not playing for keeps. Brian, this heat’s time writer, is smiling and shaking his head as he leans in to his radio. He writes it on a post-it note and reaches out toward my driver-side window as I roll up. “You are consistent.” He tells me, laughing. I know what that means before I take the slip from him.

Another 67.

That’s a healthy six seconds off what would be my normal pace for a course this size. I normally peak mid-way through my session, and if I’ve settled to a 67.49 on run four, it’s pretty much a given that I’m not going to improve much from here. So why the lack of concern? Simple. Today, I’m not driving a Mazdaspeed3 or an RX-8 or a NA Miata. I’m not even driving our Focus.

I’m driving a 2010 Honda Accord Crosstour. And let me tell you, there’s nothing quite like hanging out the ass end of a 4100lb hatchback-on-stilts.

Continue reading Lord Byron — Over the river and through the cones: The 2010 Honda Accord Crosstour

Price: $38,470

Major equipment: Touring Trim, Sport Package, Sirius Satellite Radio

In the fleet: 12/01/2009 – 12/08/2009

Approximate mileage driven: 650

As often happens when we receive a sporty press car here at Speed:Sport:Life, winter paid a visit during my time with Nissan’s latest Z-car. No matter. When snow and slush threatened to spoil a weekend plan filled with back roads bombing and general hooning, I simply adapted. Instead of back roads, I spent some time in a back lot, as you can see above. With the stability control disabled and a fresh layer of slushy accumulation in front of me, I set about making snow art. I call it “Snowrifto Blues.” No wheels or curbs were harmed in the production of this entry.

Continue reading Speed:Sport:Life Speed Read — The 2009 Nissan 370Z Touring

Happy CX-7 is happy.

I glide to a stop at a red light. It’s Thanksgiving and I have my ladyfriend and parents in tow. This is the first time my folks have been inside our CX-7 tester and they’re still getting acquainted.

My dad pipes up from the rear seat: “So this has a V6?”

“No, 4-banger,” I reply. “165 horsepower or so, I think” (it’s actually 161).

“Ahh,” he says. “So what’ll it tow?”

“It won’t, really,” I respond. “Maybe 1,500lbs tops.”

“Oh…”

I can tell he’s mulling that over. This is a man–a computer programmer–who dailies a turbodiesel Dodge Sprinter. Yes – the big white plumber van. You could say he’s a fan of practicality.

“So what’s the point, then?” he finally asks.

I shrug and gesture around the cabin at the four comfortably-seated occupants.

“This.”

Continue reading Lord Byron — Plus-Size Frugality: The 2010 Mazda CX-7 i Sport

Price: $52,400
Major Equipment: “Prestige” equipment, navigation, DSG transmission, uprated leather interior.
Approximate mileage driven: 800

M. MITIAS: Since being introduced in 1998, the Audi TT has been known more for award-winning design than race winning performance, developing a loyal following among stylish urban professionals and little interest amongst hardcore track rats. Devoted Audiphiles wishing to devour sweeping turns and late apexes along with their creme brulee and mochaccinos typically opted for the street-cred approved S4, which rapidly became the tuner Audi of choice.

Meanwhile, Audi continued their steady march to introduce an S model of each car in their line to keep abreast of the dizzying performance arms race amongst luxury automakers. The Beetle in a black dress was sent off to martial arts class, and the result is less Laura Ashley and a lot more Lara Croft. The TTS package features an upgraded 2.0 direct injection gasoline engine, now producing 268hp and 258lbft of torque, Quattro AWD and six speed S-tronic direct shift transmission, along with electronic stability control, handy for keeping your TTS shiny and undamaged during those times when you get it all wrong.

In an attempt to do exactly that, we took our bright red test car to historic Waterford Hills Road Racing course for a few hours of very private lapping. There are few things in this world which make one feel as utterly privileged as having a race track entirely to oneself, and I’m unlikely to experience any of them. When it comes to track testing a car, an empty track is a luxury with purpose, however.

Continue reading Speed Read: 2009 Audi TT-S 2.0T Quattro

A 2010 Volkswagen GTI 5-Door 2.0T 6MT just got dropped off at the S:S:L offices for us to test for the next 7 days.  If you have any questions or want to know anything specifically about the latest generation GTI, please drop us a line via email @ tips@speedsportlife.com or leave a comment.  We look forward to answering your questions!

Call me skeptical. Go ahead; it’s a label I wear with pride. I’m a half-ass Catholic with a solid education, and though I chose to pursue the arts instead of the sciences, I evaluate the results of both disciplines with a critical eye. Blind faith is another matter entirely (unless we’re talking about the spectacular Magic Hat brew, which is a notion I can fully support). So a couple years ago, when I was a bit more naïve and a steadfast Euro devotee, I chuckled at my auto industry friends’ (and Kia’s and Hyundai’s) insistence that the Korean manufacturers were poised to take the auto landscape by storm.

Continue reading Prepare to Believe: A Weekend with the 2010 Hyundai Genesis Coupe Sport and the 2010 Kia Soul Sport

Is there such a thing as having your automotive cake and being able to drive it too? If you drive any one of the handful of available sport sedans, then it’s possible to get a slice. Sliding behind the wheel of the 2009 BMW M3 Sedan however, I received a face full of Funfetti cake and pressing the gas pedal further only spreads the frosting wider across my smeared, “why-so-serious” gaping maw.

Continue reading Road Tested: 2009 BMW M3 Sedan

An empty two-lane road. Press the “Sport Plus” button. Shift into Drive. Press the brake, then the accelerator. The LCD panel in the middle of the right-side dial says “Launch control activated”. Release the brake. Now we’re in the hands of the Panamera’s formidable array of computers. There’s a fantastic noise, a massive lurch as the PDK dual-clutch transmission briefly spins all four wheels, and we are on the way to a twelve-second quarter-mile. It’s that simple.

The Porsche Panamera Turbo is the fastest mass-produced sedan in history, by virtually any measuring stick one would care to use. Only the AMG biturbo V12 cars come close in a straight line, and on a racetrack they wouldn’t see which way the beetle-backed Por-sha went. Our passenger laps with Flying Lizard driver Patrick Long only served to confirm what we learned driving the Panamera Turbo around Road America ourselves: this is the Corvette of luxury sedans.

And therein lies the problem. The Panamera is supposed to be the Porsche of luxury sedans: characterful, beautiful, desirable, perfectly conceived to suit the needs of its owners. That was the goal. Unfortunately, the “Porsche of luxury sedans” was, and continues to be, the Audi A8. By contrast, the Panamera is fast but flawed, dramatic but disappointing. It produces the numbers but fails to hit all the targets for true satisfaction. After years of reminding auto enthusiasts that pure power and performance numbers don’t make for a perfect car, Porsche has gone ahead and proved the point themselves.

Continue reading 2010 Panamera Turbo: The Porsche that doesn’t zig as much.

It seems like yesterday, but it was long ago, as the song says. One day in the spring of 1982, my father pulled into the driveway behind the wheel of a new Lincoln Town Car Signature Series. His new Lincoln Town Car Signature Series, purchased to commemorate his ascension to the post of Executive Vice President in a small food brokerage. Let the record show that my father was thirty-seven years old, as I am now. If he was confused and occasionally frustrated by life, as I am now, he never showed it; if he struggled with doubts and fear, as I occasionally do, it was never apparent. He was a respected businessman and stalwart, if not particularly cheerful, presence at church each Sunday. Still, I take comfort in the fact that his Town Car was painted a particularly outrageous shade of sky blue, referred to as “Wedgwood” in the manual but immediately characterized by my automotively diffident mother as “Polock Blue”. Not as outrageous as a bright green Audi S5, perhaps, but neither was this the car of a man who shied away from attention.

His choice of a Town Car surprised me. My grandfather — his father — was a confirmed Cadillac man who piloted a stainless-roofed Eldorado Biarritz from home to country club and back every day. Surely a Sedan de Ville (French, amusingly, for “town car”) would have been a better choice? As always, though, Dad had his finger vaguely on the American pulse. The Town Car was “hot” and the de Ville was “cold”, so he chose the former. And how I loved to ride in that blue-velour interior, surrounded by chromed script and plastic wood, serenaded by the “Premium Sound” system complete with door-mounted subwoofers! And though my father would eventually follow that American pulse away from Lincoln, through a series of BMWs, Jags, Lexuses, and Infinitis, I never forgot this: sliding behind the wheel of a big new Lincoln meant that one had “made it”.

Fast-forward to the present day. I am in full attack mode, bearing down on the tail of an E36 BMW through a series of vicious decreasing-radius turns. He’s pushing hard, breaking the tail loose slightly at every exit. I’m holding the gap from braking zone to apex and closing it from there. A pair of utterly silent turbochargers quicken the cultured twin-cam music filtering into an exceptionally quiet cabin. We have all-wheel-drive and make full use of it, clawing the road at full throttle and ripping the scenery back through the windshield. On a wide sweeper, I see the needle swing well past the triple-digit hash mark, the Bimmer’s license plate swells to myopic visibility, and the chase is finally over. We’re on his tail, will not be shaken. My three passengers relax a bit. They are each reclined in a power-ventilated individual chair, surrounded by figured maple and stitched leather, lit by the sun through a panoramic glass roof and soothed by a studio-quality sound system. We’re in a Lincoln. More pertinently, we’re in a Lincoln station wagon.

Continue reading Avoidable Contact #28: Lincoln and Cadillac, MKT and CTS-V, one last time, to the death.

I’ve noticed over the past several months a certain shift in my attitudes toward driving. It’s a disconnect. I simply can’t find that groove these days. If you’re any kind of enthusiast (and you must be if you put up with our nonsense) then you know what I’m getting at. Every auto writer has waxed philosophical at one time or another about the connection between man and machine and how, from time to time, the elements come together to form a rare moment of perfect automotive bliss. Sometimes it’s triggered by the perfect road; sometimes it comes from having the perfect car. Hell, sometimes it happens when you’re stuck in traffic on a beautiful evening with the breeze coming through the windows of your ‘94 Caravan while one of your favorite songs crackles from the half-shot factory speakers. It’s in that confluence of events that we remember why we love what we do and why we’re willing to make sacrifices for it.

But those moments are few and far between for me these days and more and more I’ve come to realize it’s a product of my living situation. I have a super convenient apartment and a catered commute. I don’t need to drive at all during the week. Hell, I don’t want to either, because you can’t go more than ten miles in any direction before sunset without hitting traffic. Weekday or weekend, driving anywhere around here is a chore. When you’re at least 40 minutes from the closest two-lane that isn’t littered with cops or traffic signals (or both), just getting to the open roads sucks most of the joy out of driving them.

And any icebreaker conversation inevitably leads to the same question: “Wait a second, you live in an apartment in Alexandria and you own four cars?”

Yep. Four cars. And last week, when we hosted Mazda’s latest 3, it was five.

Continue reading Lord Byron — Driven: A Speed:Sport:Life Road Test of the 2010 Mazda3