Anatole Lapine, the former head of design at Porsche, was good friends with Dick Teague from Rambler/AMC, and he once said that designing a Porsche was easy, designing a Rambler is what’s hard. The Porsche pretty much has no limitations and only has to appeal to relatively few people. When you build something like a…

I can’t figure out if:

I love cheap crap. Expensive is easy, throw money at it (materials, engineering, development, etc) until you achieve results. Cheap? That’s *drastically* harder. Every material has to be analyzed, every step debated, every add-on checked for whether it adds value or not.

I like how the car tries to make no excuses for what it is: cheap. It doesn’t try to be nice, just happy and utilitarian.

At least they’re easy to spot now, they used to be in various kinds of cars driving like that. Now you can see them coming.

For what it’s worth, I don’t hate the Prius. Prius drivers, on the other hand...

1. All the more reason for Mitsubishi to shore its image up.

Several years ago, when a rather tony aftermarket CD deck quit playing CDs, leaving me with an expensive AM-FM radio, I pulled it out and decided, oh, what the heck, might as well open it up and give the problem a chance to be easy.

In the same vein, but probably my fault, a couple of years ago I started hearing funny knocking noises from the 5 speed on my old S10 PU. I got it home, and examination showed that there was an actual hole in the bottom of the bell housing. I figured I had run over something that had punched the hole, and continued to…

I was working on replacing the lower control arm bushings on a full size Chevrolet when my socket fell inside the frame, I got out the extendable magnet to fish it out and pulled out a different socket, huh, what, kept fishing around and got my socket too, bonus. I have found many tools left under the hood of cars but…

would suck if the socket became an integral part of the engine and been keeping things together

Word is that Stef Schrader is at home right now tearing HER Lancer apart looking for misplaced sockets and wrenches.

I hate 12-points.

It’s what the buyers at Barrett-Jackson look for.

The spring is fine. It looks like the spring created its own clearance with the socket. The Evo owner can replace the spring when he has to pull the head for a head gasket replacement.

The real surprise here is that an Evo not only made it to 64,000 miles without needing any engine work, but that it did so while remaining STOCK in the engine department.

Think of it like a crackerjack prize.