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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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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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“So, yeah, it’s a new Focus, but it’s not the one we want. In fact, had we been asked what we’d want for the latest Focus, ‘old mechanicals,’ ‘horrifying exterior styling,’ and ‘no hatchbacks’ wouldn’t exactly have sprung to mind.” – “Automobile” magazine, on the 2008 Ford Focus

“Not only does Saturn need the Astra, but North American buyers need it too.” – “Automobile”, on the 2008 Saturn Astra

Focus Sales in 1Q 2008: 49,070

Astra Sales in 1Q 2008: 1,477

“Four, five press cars a week!” The violence of his own enthusiasm was starting to get the better of the old fellow; sweat stains were visibly creeping down the wrinkled sides of his cheap Hawaiian shirt as he waved both hands forcefully in an effort to keep my attention. “The manufacturers know they need to put cars in my driveway, because when I write about a car, it puts customers on the front door of that damn dealership Monday morning, bet your ass.” Ugh. It’s common practice for manufacturers to “match up” journalists on press events, and judging from my experience they aren’t exactly using eHarmony’s patented relationship-predicting algorithms to do it, because I keep getting matched with drooling morons who appear to hate my guts from the moment I climb into the airport courtesy car. Oh well. Might as well keep the conversation going, if only for my own amusement.

“But how do you manage to review five cars a week?” I asked in as innocent a tone as I could muster. “I mean, how do you even drive that many?”

“I DON’T!” was the near-shouted reply. “My daughter drives ‘em, and if she likes a car, I’ll give it some of my time. We don’t even own any cars any more. No reason to. They’re free when you know what you’re talking about.” Clearly, it was going to be a long ride to the test site, but it turned out to an instructive one. For nearly three decades, I’d been a passive consumer of automotive magazines and websites, always wondering what it would be like to make it to the “inside” and actually live the lifestyle of a super-cool automotive journalist. Then one day, our senior editor, Zerin Dube, picked me out of utter obscurity to impose my worthless opinions on you, our valued readers – and before I knew it, I was a player in the whirlwind motor-journo lifestyle of free food, free hotels, free fuel, and all the bacon I can eat at the breakfast bar. It’s kind of like being Paris Hilton, without the pocket dogs and the “Nightshot” videos with Rick what’s-his-name.

Unfortunately, in the same way that Ms. Hilton appears to have gone, oh, shall we say, completely insane as a result of her fabulous life, I’m starting to suspect that all autowriters eventually lose their minds as well. It would explain a lot, you know. It would solve the mystery of why I recently had some crazy old dude whose sole racing experience consisted of transit driving in a cross-country rally give me a drunken lecture about my braking points on-track. It would help me understand why people who barely earn fifty grand a year prance around like the Prince of Wales and bully the staff at the press event hotels. Most importantly, it might offer a clue as to how the Press As A Whole did such an incompetent job of reviewing the latest arrivals on the small-car scene.

Continue reading Avoidable Contact #12: Why the motoring press can’t even Focus on its own Astra.

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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…

Continue reading Avoidable Contact #11: How Fake Luxury Conquered The World.