Ettore Bugatti. The Italian-born self-proclaimed Frenchman known as Le Patron built some of the world's fastest and most advanced cars and dominated European racing for three decades while being a complete whackadoo. The man would flatly refuse to let even European nobility buy one of his cars if he met them and…

The "sticking it to Il Commendatore" contest is really a tie between Ferrucio Lamborghini and Henry Ford II...

Okay, this one is a little weird and one-off, but hear me out. My grandfather ran the service department at a Ford dealership in western Kansas. In 1957, he had a customer who ran a number of roadside fruit stands in the area, and wanted to be able to get between them as fast as possible, while raising as little…

Ford inadvertently upped its sleeper quotient (while murdering its identifiability and desirability) when they brought out some "sport" package or other for the Crown Vic that looked exactly the freaking same, minus all the go-fast stuff. After that, it was even harder to tell it was something special.

This one. Not only is it my favorite sleeper, it's on my very short list of the best cars ever made by anyone, anywhere, ever.

So long as the snow doesn't come up to the bumper, and it's got decent snow tires... any lack of capability on the snow would be driver error. I'm not saying it has the makings of a world class rally car, but with snow tires and barring excessively deep snow, I would have no apprehension whatsoever about driving a…

NP all the friggin' way. It's from the utterly gorgeous E38 / E39 / E46 generation, it's a MANUAL, it's a V8 (and not the bankruptcy-inducing V12,) and it's in nice shape. Yes, the E38 can get extremely spendy if things go wrong, and 145,000 miles indicates that they might go wrong. Of course, the simple fact that…

A Viper can't handle snow because it's RWD? This guy would like a word with you.

Step 1: Find the ESP button.

While KC and STL aren't up there population-wise, check where the metro areas rank in terms of geographic size. They're ridiculously sprawly. I live in Olathe, and to get around the KC area requires more range than an EV gives. In order to take one up to where I run A/X, I'd need a charging station at the track. …

Let's also plot out the areas with sufficient population density for electric cars to make sense. In the big coastal cities with entrenched public transportation and in the regions with major cities packed closely together, electric cars probably make sense. Here in Kansas, where everything is 200 miles from…

Meh. In college, I laid down a more impressive set of donuts in a '93 Thunderbird SuperCoupe, and I have the police report to prove it.

"NOW they tell us, Nick!"

Europe. That should be all the explanation you need.

That's pretty much how he comes off in the build thread. I kind of wish this look would have stayed confined to the VW ghetto. Too bad about the car, don't feel sorry for the owner.

You'd have to loop it with AC/DC's "Rocker," since the Night Rider's lines are directly from that song...

Oh, don't get me wrong, pretty much everything in that collection appeals to me in one way or another, and I'd do seriously morally questionable things for just about any car there. But AS A COLLECTION, they display a serious, glaring lack of car-guy cred. It's like he asked a hyperactive thirteen-year-old what to…

Except it's just a stupidly obvious car collection. Not a surprise in the bunch; when the headline talked about a con artist getting his collection confiscated, I already knew exactly what he had before reading the article. It's your basic nouveau-riche starter kit; he went to an exotic dealer and said "Give me…

I give you the Merlin, designed by Rolls-Royce and produced under license in the US by Packard. In the Supermarine Spitfire, North American P-51 Mustang, Hawker Hurricane, Avro Lancaster, DeHavilland Mosquito and Handley-Page Halifax, it went a long way toward winning World War II. That's cool.

I would totally drive that car with a hot blonde in the passenger seat while blasting awful German techno...