Teh Car Blogz

Spotted this gem while I was sitting outside my local Starbucks today, sipping on a cold beverage. This is, apparently, a prototype for the upcoming “Short Bus” edition Mustang Cobra.

Rumor has it that it’s powered by a twin-charged Honda F20C from the S2000, has all-wheel-drive from the Subaru WRX STi Type RA Spec C 5.9 Cummins Type-R LSD R1 Turbo, and that each door comes complete with a poorly made vinyl silhoutte of an utterly retarded Horse on the side. This will be a serious performance car - Lotus had better watch it’s puny little back. Those Elise’s are going to be littering the sides of the road, doors blown clear off, like so many dead leaves during the cold nights of Autumn…

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One of the most rewarding experiences you can have while driving a car is attacking a truly challenging piece of tarmac. At least, that’s my opinion. Some people get their jollies from heads-up drag races. That’s interesting once; then the result is the same every time if your technique is any good. Revs up, drop clutch, spin tires lightly, hold till redline, clutch and shift, rinse, repeat, snore. Great, your Mustang runs 13.1 seconds in the quarter mile.

But a good road is different every time you go down it. On a long curvy piece of tarmac, there is an infinite number of permutations as to how you can take it, what line to follow, how late to brake and which gears to use. On a truly good road, a better driver in a slower car will beat a mediocre driver in a more capable car every time. That’s why I love a good road. Plus, lateral g-forces are more fun that frontal.

The question then becomes: what exactly is the best conveyance to fling yourself down that favorite backroad like your hair’s on fire? The answer: there is no answer. Like the cat-skinning question (as an aside: who would want to skin a cat? That’s just mean. I love cats) there are many answers.

1) With A Scalpel

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One thing I’ve noticed about car magazines in the US (besides the boring ones like Consumer Reports) is that above anything, they like to emphasize acceleration as a defining characteristic of a car’s worth. It’s not hard to notice. On the front cover of the latest Car and Driver, they have a few headlines. The big one proclaims “The Fast Lane!: BMW 135i, 0-60 4.7s.” Further down there’s “Nissan GT-R 0-60 3.3.” At the bottom, in small font is “The Slow Lane: Smart ForTwo, 0-60 14.4s.”

Let me be the first one to say: Who gives a shit how fast a Smart Car gets to sixty miles an hour? No one’s going to be drag-racing from light to light in their Smart. A Smart is an economical fashion accessory, like a Swatch (imagine that!) It’s a conversation piece. It’s the new Prius. The only people racing smarts are the ones with Smartuki conversions, so all three of them. The 0-60 time on a Smart is about as relevant as the fuel efficiency of a dump truck.
But this is America, where we have (comparatively) cheap gas, the roads are wide and straight, and if you’re not going 80 on the highway, you’re getting run over. So magazines shout about how fast a car can reach 60 - which is a pretty arbitrary number.

There are a lot of fast cars out there. But let me let you in on a secret: some of them really, truly suck.

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Editor’s Note: This is the second part of an article I intended to finish a few weeks ago. I got distracted. It happens.

Moving along in the dream garage, we come to an absolutely crucial choice:

6) 1995 Volvo 850 T-5R Estate

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Yes, the return of the car with a really long name. The perennial rally boy special is now decidedly upmarket. Now equipped with so many letters, your head will spin. WRX, STI, SI-Drive, DCCD, VDC, AWD, EBD, DAVCS, TPMS, DRL, ABS, HID, LED, BBS, and a partridge in a pear tree to boot. In reality these systems work very well together for a seamless driving experience…

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