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Let’s get something straight right away: There are only two reasons to participate in motorsports. The first reason is to impress and seduce women, and this applies when you are single. The second reason is to escape your wife, and this applies when you are married. The Cannonball One Lap of America is a miserable failure when it comes to Reason #1. After all, women only know about two kinds of racing: NASCAR and Grand-Am. They know about NASCAR because it’s on TV, and they know about Grand-Am because Patrick Dempsey races in it.

Therefore, if you want to impress women, you’d better be a NASCAR driver, a Grand-Am driver, or a club racer who is willing to blur the barrier between racing an old Neon in the rain and the 24 Hours of Daytona. The One Lap of America, like autocross, rallycross, rallying, drag racing, and the Red Bull Air Races, does not impress women. Don’t bother to try.

It is a fantastic way to get away from your wife, however, which covers Reason 2 and accounts for One Lap’s popularity, waning though it may be. Your humble author is a former One Lap champion, although that, ahem, “championship” came in an uncontested class at the wheel of a diesel Mercedes. For that reason, I feel eminently qualified to make authentic One Lap predictions. We’re also trying to throw Brock a bone here: nobody’s cared about One Lap for years, and we’d like to change that. So, without further ado…

Continue reading 2009 One Lap Of America Preview and Predictions

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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.