Dear Ford Racing,

So much for the Canadian reputation for being nice...

Because we never have a second thought about taking 1000-miles each way road trips (usually driving straight through), my wife and I are inveterate alphabet game players. My kids have only started playing in the past few years, but they never win because the adults have had their senses honed by years of practice. One…

Technically this has already been done by Andy Bethune, the skipper of the Earthrace trimaran demonstration circumnavigation powered exclusively by biodiesel. Bethune, his wife, and a couple of more corpulent volunteers contributed about 10 liters (!) of human fat via liposuction that produced about 7 liters of…

At my last oil change at the dealer (free for 36,000 miles) they told me my car with 14,000 miles on it needed to have it's throttle body cleaned for $99. A little Q&A with the service advisor revealed this meant spraying a little carb cleaner down the throttle body. This is just as bad as nitrogen tire filling for…

I wasn't talking about Le Mans only. Every road course I've ever been to or seen in TV is clockwise.

I've long maintained oil is too valuable as a raw material to make useful things for us to burn as much as we do. Imagine life without just one of these modern conveniences: foam rubber (aka polyurethane foam). No comfy sofas, lumpy cotton mattresses, no more athletic shoes, etc. And foam is just one thing. Life…

That is almost certainly true today for pro racers today. However, we're talking about the roots of motorsport back when racing was based more on production cars. You don't typically add weight to a production-based racer in the form of ballast.

Road courses typically run clockwise, so right hand drive puts the driver's weight on the inside of the majority of turns. I'm not sure how this convention got started, but it might make for an interesting blog post should someone feel like researching it. Perhaps the first road racing tracks were developed in the…

Those pipes! The only thing that would make the engine bay sexier would be velocity stacks on top of 4x2V Webers.

I got my license to drive in 1980, deep in era of smog-choked engines and doubled gas prices. That meant most of the cars I owned had something like 89-90 HP and maybe 110 torques. EVERYTHING on the road today is faster than my 1977, 1978, and 1982 Celicas. My sister had ~1980 2.3L Mercury Capri with terrible 4-sp…

I would not want to give up having any 12V socket at all. For instance, I can use a 12V socket to run a 120VAC 100 watt inverter to run various small devices that aren't at all compatible with 5V very low wattage you get with a USB. For instance, I can't charge any of my laptop batteries with a 5V source.

Hmmm... A Google search for Hollywoodstuntz.com gives a result that says "this site may harm your computer".

Hope I'm no too late. Jimmy, well done by the team! What a gripping story. There is a lot of crazy speculation out there right now that there was some kind of quasi-legal if not illegal contraption put on the boat that automatically controlled the daggerboard angles of attack. Could you put this to rest for once and…

That's the full on Bunny Ranch whorehouse treatment. I wouldn't suggest shining a black light in there. Ever.

Neutral: Not so much cars, but transmission choices. Enthusiasts beg for manual transmissions, but even when offered nobody much buys them. Enthusiasts will tell you it's because automakers tend to offer the manual option only on the base model of a particular car. Therefore we bite the bullet and accept the slushbox…

Being a middle aged white guy with a US passport makes for a low key experience at TLV. They just smile and wave you through. US immigration on the return to ATL is always a much less pleasurable experience.

The biggest issue facing Subaru dealers, at least according to my buddy who is the sales manager one of the local stores, is they can't get inventory fast enough. If Subaru could make more cars, they could certainly sell them.

Actually, I found immigration and customs at TLV to be very easy. It helps that Israel isn't riddled with corruption. I did forget about the patrol boat anchored about a kilometer south of this photo. Talk about a dull duty station...

Customs and immigration at TLV Ben Gurion airport is very easy, especially with a US passport. It helps a lot that Israel isn't rife with corruption.