SSL-East is off to Summit Point this weekend to shake down a 2012 Carrera S. Follow us at @SpeedSportLife and @SSLByron for updates and impressions throughout the weekend, and stay tuned for a full road and track test from Zerin and Byron. As usual, if you’re in the area, feel free to drop by and check out the 991 in person.
Don’t have access to a 911 of your own to drive? Fret not. All you need is an XBOX 360. Remember, the Porsche pack for Forza Motorsport 4 will be available starting Tuesday. $20 gets you 30 iconic Porsches and some new track configurations. Don’t miss out.
When Ford resurrected legendary 5.0 engine with the 2011 Mustang GT, muscle car enthusiasts everywhere waited with bated breath for the seemingly inevitable return of the iconic Boss 302 nameplate. With Dodge heating up the muscle car wars with the Challenger 392 and the Chevy Camaro SS flying off the showroom floors, it only made sense for Ford to slot a higher-performance model in between the already competent Mustang GT and range-topping GT500 models. Enthusiasts didn’t have to wait long, as Ford proudly announced the return of the Boss 302 for the 2012 Mustang model year.
When Lexus first introduced the IS F in the United States in early 2008, I was participating in a discussion of the results of one of its early comparison tests. One particularly stalwart BMW fan thought the idea of a track-ready Lexus sport sedan to be absolutely ludicrous. When others pointed out the obvious, that German sport sedans were a staple of track events everywhere, he scoffed at the notion of the Lexus gaining acceptance. “What would happen if somebody showed up in one?” somebody eventually asked. “People would point and laugh,” he declared. As if it were obvious, you know?
Three years later, Lexus saw fit to loan us a 2011 IS F so we could find out just how accurate our bimmer-banging buddy might be. As it turns out, he was partly right. Plenty of people were pointing. I, on the other hand, was the only one laughing.
It’s a brisk, gray November day. My gaze wanders around the paddock at Virginia International Raceway. It was a day much like this one that I first drove VIR in my Mazda6 (exactly three years prior to this posting). As then, I’m here with TrackDaze, only this time I’m doing hot laps in somebody else’s car.
Right. The car.
I arrived in the driver’s seat of a 2011 Genesis Coupe 3.8 R-Spec, but I’ll be leaving in the passenger seat of a tow truck. I look down, my thumb hovering over the the send button on my phone. I re-read the message I’ve prepared for my friend and instructor, still trying to absorb the magnitude of what has happened.
Z. DUBE: Anyone who has known me long enough knows that I lust after family sedans that have been pumped up with a healthy dosage of horsepower. My love affair for sedans on steroids started with my former “B5”-generation Audi S4; it started life with the factory-provided 250 horsepower, but through some careful part sourcing and a bit of fiscal irresponsibility, my relatively calm family sedan turned into a 400+ horsepower monster. There’s nothing more satisfying than stomping a Corvette or Mustang Cobra in a four-door luxury sedan. Unfortunately, all this power came at the cost of a voided factory warranty. Pumping up a B5 S4 to those horsepower levels required that the engine be pulled out of the car, painstakingly tweaked, and then stuffed back in so it could generate enough heat to roast a pig. Back then though, this was the route you had to take if you wanted that level of performance in a sedan.
More on the C63, and on-track timing/impressions from Grand-Am/NASA GTS driver Michael Mills, after the jump.
Story by Jack Baruth, photos by Sydney Davis Photography/MSR Houston
Three hundred thousand dollars’ worth of damage. Imagine owning a car so valuable, so difficult to fix, so chock-full of unobtanium parts that it’s possible to cause three hundred G’s worth of damage simply by running it at low speed into a Jersey barrier. Hard to believe – and yet that’s exactly what happened to movie producer Daniel Sadek when comedian Eddie Griffin borrowed his Ferrari Enzo and understeered straight into the concrete during a promotional event.
With Enzo values hovering in the million-and-a-half-dollar range, a $300K hit wasn’t enough to total the car, but it was enough to raise doubts as to whether the car could ever be repaired well enough to satisfy a potential buyer. What happened next has quickly become an Internet legend: Exotic-car dealer Matt Groner bought Sadek’s Enzo, purchased over $91,000 of authentic Ferrari parts, and invested an undisclosed but presumably massive amount of labor to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. It’s now up for sale on Ebay with a starting bid of $1,200,000. The winner of the auction is unlikely to be disappointed; Groner was painstaking in his efforts, modestly allowing that the paintjob just might be better than Ferrari’s notoriously sloppy original work.
Still, consider the fact that this is one of fewer than four hundred Enzos in the world. It’s a car that can be six-figure damaged by having an autocross accident. A crunch that wouldn’t cost ten grand to fix on a Mustang. A “crash” that, at the very worst, probably happened at thirty miles per hour.
Did you hear that?
That’s the sound of Michael Mills blowing by at one fifty.
