If you ask the people who’ve spent a lot of time around me, talk to me on a routine basis, or possibly have spent more than a half-hour in my presence, they’ll tell you that I’m an argumentative person. I love a good argument, it gives me a chance jog my memory on a wide range of topics, improves my mental agility, and lets me stretch out to see things from someone else’s viewpoint. Arguments are like a gym membership for the mind, and I think it’s something that people should do more often, if only to really test what they believe in and exercise those critical thinking parts of the brain that go seriously underused these days. As listeners to the podcast will attest to, I’ve never shied away from making my opinions heard, and if there was some way to allocate all the time I spend saying the same line sixty-three billion times in an effort to make it sound like I haven’t coated the inside of my mouth with Vaseline and instead spend it talking and arguing with real people out there, I would do it in a heartbeat.

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I know that sometimes it’s hard to tell from the world-class quality of the background noise that leaks into every single podcast, but I don’t record our internationally renowned automotive news podcasts from some million-dollar soundproof studio. Rather, it’s produced in my bedroom, and unfortunately, as much as I’d love to tell you what I think about the new Camaro (and trust me, I have something to say about it) and the other bits of cruft that floated to the surface last week, we’re being fumigated for termites. Since it’ll be a little hard to record a podcast with my recording booth full of sulfuryl fluoride, I have to call off the podcast for this week. As always, this means that I’ll have an extra-large edition of SSL Radio for all of you next week, complete with coverage of not just the Camaro, but all of GM’s recently announced product plans. Talk to you all next week.

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Doesn’t look too bad, does it? Just a little tap in the right rear bumper, caused by a driver who was perhaps a little angry at getting passed by a “slower” car in the first lap of our Sunday race. And what a great first lap we’d had! Long-time readers will recall that our engine blew up on the cool-down lap of May’s race at Putnam Park. With four weeks between races, we did just what you would have done: we procrastinated until the very last moment and then spent 72 hours in a state of utter panic, installing the engine only to find out that the timing was off 90 degrees, causing fuel to spray from the intake. Oh noes! But by Sunday we had the car kind of sorted out.

Come the qualifying session on Sunday, we had our rain tires on and were ready to rock… but the qualifying session turned out to be completely dry. Oops! That put us 11th of 14 drivers, which meant we had to boogie when the green flag flew. Boogie we did - up seven places before the first lap was completed. Unfortunately for us, one of those places was a Spec Focus. You kids know what that means, right? An attempt on my part to protect my line long enough to drop that sucker in the infamous Turn 13 made that Focus really angry, so he decided to put me in the wall. Let’s see what happens when you “bump and run” a poor little Neon at 90+ mph:

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Ah yes, the Precision Immobilization Technique, or PIT, really works wonders when you’re trying to whack somebody. We hit the wall hard. Unfortunately for the Focus, he was turning left into our bumper so hard that he forgot to unwind the steering when I obligingly spun away from him, and he drove right across the track into the concrete wall! It would appear that my karma ran over his dogma, or something like that.

We have video and more photos of the incident, and we’ll be bringing them to you for your amusement as soon as everybody settles down a bit. The bad news? Our car’s dead, gone, totaled. The frame’s twisted and the roof is buckled inside. But in the famous words of Starship, nothing’s gonna stop us now. We’re building a new Neon from the ground up for the August Mid-Ohio race. Our crew is donating hundreds of volunteer hours to the cause. We’ll keep you posted on the build this month.

Oh yeah, if anybody cares, I wasn’t killed. Thanks to the HANS device, my Impact! Carbon Fiber helmet, and the superlative cage-welding skills of Matt “Tinman” Johnston, I’ll live to race another day. Ha! It takes more than that to kill me. However, dear readers, I feel compelled to make a small request. If you have a problem with one of my columns, feel free to use our provided “Comment” feature. Go ahead! Write all the mean stuff you want! That’s why it’s there! But please, please, stop trying to cancel my check on the track. To begin with, it’s expensive for everybody involved; also, it ain’t gonna work. Cheers!

Hate can sometimes be a very good thing. In the right hands, it’s an agent of change, it makes us speak up and act out against the things that we know are wrong. Since so many news articles this week involve it in one way or another, we thought we’d dedicate this week’s episode of SSL Radio to hate. It’s not all anger this week, we start off with the immensely powerful Mercedes SL65 AMG Black Edition and the Alfa Romeo 8C GTA, and towards the end of the podcast we talk about some of the manufacturers that are still doing well during the current sales drought and Fiat making a wonderful new deal with BMW. Aside from that, there’s a whole bunch of bad news about the Chevrolet Volt, Hummer thinks that now is a great moment to debut the H3T, and Lexus is killing off the SC430 (although, if you can’t tell, I happen to think that we should throw a freaking party over that bit of news). Also, in the place of Useless Automotive Tchotchke this week, we have an extended rant about fanboy baiting and journalistic integrity, so if you like that sort of thing, the last one-third of the podcast will be a special treat. Share and Enjoy™.

 

 SSL Radio 7/16/08 [18:28m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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Story by Jack Baruth - Photography by a somewhat bewildered Michelle Baruth

“HEY DRIVER, CAN WE GET AN AUTOGRAPH FOR THE KID OVER HERE?” That’s really nice, I thought, as I jogged back to my seat high in Flat Rock Speedway’s main grandstand. What a great dad, getting an autograph for his son or daughter from a local racing star. I hope that driver takes a moment to stop and sign that.

“HEY, DRIVER!” came the call again, and then once more, this time with a barely concealed touch of anger. What was going on? Who was this son-of-a-bitch, and why wouldn’t he take a moment to sign something for some poor kid? It wasn’t until I was a few hundred feet away and halfway up a long set of steps, clutching my HANS Device in my left hand and my carbon-fiber Impact! helmet in my right, that I realized that:

• the “driver” at whom the father was yelling was me;
• and as a consequence, I had just ruined some child’s evening;
• and that furthermore, to avoid said child’s angry father, I should figure out another route to leave the grandstands at the end of the night.

Oh, damn. Still, the thought of it - that I was a potential signer of autographs for children, a hero, a role model, a veritable Tony Stewart of the small oval. Amazing. For a moment, I stood still, looked around me, taking in the fact that more than five thousand people had paid good, solid money to see me race. See! Me! Race! Me! Here, in the heartland of America, I had driven my heart out in an honest-to-goodness circle-track car, running at the ragged edge in a supremely skilled effort and demonstrating in rather Montoya-esque fashion that a road racer can step into the world of the ARCA Four Cylinder Class, presented by David’s Jewelry and, if not dominate, at least compete with honor. Yes, I was a driver, and quite a driver at that. I stood, facing the crowd, and opened my arms to embrace this uniquely American experience.

“THANK YOU!” I shouted.

“SIT DOWN, YOU JACKASS!” came the response. “I CAN’T SEE THE SCHOOL BUSES!”

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As I’ve said before, I have a theory that Ford of Europe is actually a completely separate manufacturer from the Ford Motor Company based in the US, and was actually founded in 1873 by an Earl Ford of Coventry. Further proof of this conspiracy theory is the announcement of the new Ford Focus RS. Surely, any rational automotive manufacturer would jump at the chance to roll out such a low-cost halo car in the small-car hungry US market, but it’ll probably never see our shores. It was a pretty thin week for news, but we do cover the new Focus RS, along with the new BMW 7-series, we take a break for a nap with the monthly sales figures, and a very expensive and slightly scary RV in this week’s Useless Automotive Tchotchke. Share and Enjoy™.

 

 SSL Radio 7/08/08 [10:19m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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The sound of a BlackBerry 8830 “World Edition” striking the inside of a Cadillac STS windshield at approximately fifty miles per hour is somewhere between a ‘clack’ and a solid ‘crack’. It was followed by a surprised yelp from my wife as she was momentarily suspended from her safety belt by the g-force of a full-ABS stop, having just lost her smartphone in mid-texting. Unfortunately, there hadn’t been time to warn her that we were about to test the Caddy’s 70-0 stopping ability on a twisting side road. Loafing along, chatting idly about this and that, I’d been almost inattentive to the view ahead – until I’d seen the flash of red coming around the blind corner towards us.

It was a kid, by which I mean a teenager. (When did I start using the word “kid” to refer to people old enough to drive? I suppose it was around the time I became old enough to potentially have a driving-age child of my own.) Young, wide-eyed, fighting for control of his late-Nineties Dodge Avenger R/T, sawing at the wheel to save a corner entry that was probably more than a bit too hot, he was just on his side of the double-yellow when he came into my field of vision. It looked like a solid head-on collision in the making, so I immediately left-footed the pearl-white STS to a halt with two wheels off in the ditch in the hopes he would save the car before he got to our position, or at least slow the thing down enough to keep us all out of the emergency room.

His corner exit was disastrous at best, but a slight change in road camber past the turn gave our rather terrified Avenger driver just enough grip to straighten the car out, and he coasted past us looking for all the world as if he’d lost his primary parachute and been saved by the backup. A few hundred feet down the road, I heard him pick up full throttle again and steam away from us with all the vigor the bespoilered old Mitsu-Dodge could muster up. Reaching up to the dashtop to retrieve her BlackBerry, my wife looked at me expectantly. You see, I’m a veritable firehose of criticism behind the wheel, offering my passengers a constant stream of observations regarding the idiocy, foolhardiness, timidity, yellow-light-early-braking, left-lane-banditry, and general despicability of my fellow motorists. Surely I’d have something to say?

“Good for him,” I smiled, and with that, we resumed our boring little trip to the hardware store.

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In case you haven’t seen the car above before, that’s a rendering of the upcoming BMW PAS, or Progressive Activity Sedan. Yes, it’s a stupid name for an ugly car that doesn’t really need to exist, and we talk about it this week in this new episode of SSL Radio. Also on the list this week is information on the hot GTA version of Alfa’s as yet unreleased MiTo, rumors and facts about the Porsche 911 refresh, we use Saturn to talk about Ford, more news on the US version of Top Gear, and Chrysler decides that we need more things to distract us in this week’s Useless Automotive Tchotchke. For more renderings and information on the BMW PAS, check out WorldCarFans.com. Share and Enjoy™.

 

 SSL Radio 7/01/08 [14:49m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

That’s what Fox News calls it. And while we could debate the validity of any mainstream news outlet’s claim to objectivity interminably, it’s the sentiment that I’m interested in. For the longest time we’ve been told that the media’s obligation is to remain impartial and objective – to report the news as it happens and let us do the rest. That seems legit, right? After all, the underlying motives won’t change the fact that something took place. Are they newsworthy in their own right? Of course, but those motives should be the subject of news, not the gift-wrap in which it is delivered.

Now that’s all well and good if you’re talking about news. In the world of automotive journalism, however, we don’t really deal in hard news. Sure, there are times when all we deal in is hard news. Take the auto shows, for example — nothing but product announcements and unveilings. That’s news. Something happens and the press scrambles to be the first to scoop it. It’s in those brief moments that the motoring press acts most like its big brother, the media at large. The catch? We spend the other 45 weeks of the year being something entirely different.

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Many thanks to everybody who took the time this week to read our Imaginary Internet Millionaire Comparison Test. Your readership, comments, cross-posts to your home forums, blog links, intensely personal criticism, and thinly veiled e-mail threats to beat us to death have all combined to bring us hundreds of thousands of hits in the past five days. As many of you know, Speed:Sport:Life is an all-volunteer effort; we do this just for the love of the cars and the industry, and we’re honored to have you along for the ride.

So what’s next? We have an exciting month planned for all of you, featuring more of the sharp photography, unfiltered opinion, and socially irresponsible hoon-driving for which we are known. Some highlights include:

• A full report from our first-ever actual ARCA race. We’ll put you behind the wheel of our highly tuned Ford Tempo racer - well, it’s not so much “highly tuned” as it is “brightly colored” - and show you what it’s like to bang fenders on a Saturday night in a small town. Also, there will be footage of Figure Eight Schoolbus Racing, which is exactly what it sounds like.
• Driving impressions of the 2008/2009 Chrysler lineup. We’ll have a report on the new Aspen Hybrid for you to show your family and/or significant other, autocross runs in the SRT family of vehicles including the, ahem, VIPER ACR WHICH IS THE BEST CAR EVER TO BE A CAR OF ANY TYPE IN MY UNBIASED OPINION, and some hilarious off-road action featuring a Wrangler Unlimited and Grand Cherokee. Also, we put a Sprinter RV up on three wheels during our patented extreme handling test. Seriously.
• New installments of the old favorites: Speed:Sport:Life Radio, Avoidable Contact, and a fresh column from our newest contributor, Lord Byron.
• Ride and drive reports on the C63 AMG, Explorer Sport Trac, Yukon Hybrid, Caliber SRT-4 (on the road this time), Audi A6 3.2, Expedition King Ranch EL, Porsche Cayman 2.7, and anything else we can get our hands on in the near future. How’s that AMG drive? Let’s see…
  
  

• Event coverage of “BigOhio”, including a close-up look at a very special MkV Rabbit.
• Last but not least, we will be facing down the mighty racing juggernaut “Team Pakistan Express” in a no-holds-or-punts-barred double race weekend at Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course. Follow along as we explore the thrill of victory in club racing - although if history is any guide here, it’s more likely to be the agony of defeat.

See you soon!

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