40 mph would have been 5.0. For the full Kinja effect (jumbled up, shortened, and unuseable for anything more useful than a Twit-length comment, but we're trapped in it and it's OK because it makes somebody money) you'd need to smash the car between two loaded semis doing about 80 each, then condescendingly piss on…

How about a Last Chase themed Porsche 914? Plenty of room to put decals of F-86s.

Were there also advocates of the manual choke and spark advance once the automatic versions came around? Let's face it, we've lost touch with the machine by not controlling those via levers on the wheel.

Give me the Audi in a heartbeat. I don't care if not even RockAuto has the parts, I'd rather have a car with some decent fastback looks and responsible for creating a crapflood of pedal-offset models due to idiots than yet another Volvo, no matter how practical and fast it may be. Not unlike a British sports car or an…

I think that no matter how it looks on the outside, god help him if he ever wants to change components on the inside. As a system builder since about 1985 (granted, when I was 5, I was doing it with the supervision and help of a professional) I've accumulated enough scars and horror stories—including nearly passing…

The VW Rabbit. I /like/ tiny cars but I've been in go-karts that felt more safe than a Rabbit on Washington, DC highways. It made a Metro's interior feel like a Country Squire wagon, a 300D's acceleration feel like a top-fuel dragster, and a CRX HF's curb weight feel like a loaded Kenworth, all while being made out…

Weren't Anglias popular with the gasser crowd? The way the rear was constructed supposedly made it pretty easy to tub one out and throw some ginormous rear tires on, plus the bulky engine bay made for easy swapping of a monster motor of one's choice. I seem to recall around the time that movie came out, original cars…

Funny you'd say that, my grandfather fought in WW2 with the Navy engineers (Pacific Island campaign) and was going to be on the second transport for the Japanese island landing if they'd dropped the bomb, yet he came home and was perfectly willing to buy a succession of Corolla starting in the 80s because they were…

Well, a 96 DX has survived two years of senility, 220,000 miles of my lead feet, and gone from the Mexican border to the Upper Penninsula to halfway to Alaska, through Montana at speed, and is now undergoing elective open heart surgery while I'm in Oklahoma. Net condition after that distance and 260 total K on the…

I'd pick the AE86, because if you're sticking with Toyota bits and original engine mounts you can have the 20-valve 160-horse quad-throttle 1.6 liter 4. If you step it up a little to 2 (or 2.2) liters, there's the 3(5)SGTE to put in and run ~500 horsepower for not too much work. If you choose to depart the fold but…

What is with people not shooting portraits with a proper portrait depth of field? Call it bokeh if you must but if you're emphasizing the foreground and the background is mostly irrelevant clutter, open up that aperture and let it blur itself away. I don't understand the trend.

It's not that nobody wants to get squeezed in the middle, it's that the traditional combination of sloppy shocks, one-finger steering, lap belts only, and leather bench seats means that when you corner on the doorhandles you'll be using the wheel as a chicken strap to prevent pinballing yourself to the other side of…

What the hell is wrong with flip-flops and motoring? Flip 'em on to walk to the car. Flip 'em off so you can drive with bare feet and eschew the wankery of driving shoes. I don't care how thin the condom is, it's still between you and your partner. Do you trust your partner not to be full of AIDS or broken glass? Then…

Life-long go-karts, all the racing games I could get my hands on (including five-fingering a 5.25" floppy copy of Test Drive 2), and riding shotgun with Grandpa for years, who patiently passed down all the tips and tricks he'd learned, one innocent piece at a time. Until when I got behind the wheel of the Corolla we…

Computational solving is boring and straightforward, the nerdily interesting part is the algorithms to get there. Wake me up when speed limits at variable times of day are represented with a little proper matrix math.

Headphones are one of the better ways to make a dull, repetitive, filthy, solitary job in an overnight workplace more enjoyable. Wearing headphones and a big VISITOR badge means that customers of the client won't approach you in assumptions that you work there...because just the badge alone doesn't. Wearing…

It's refreshing, in a sad sort of way, to see something caused by unintended deacceleration.

So like Test Drive Unlimited but without the pointless emphasis on dressing up your avatar and without road segments that connect at suspension-destroying angles? Count me in, here's hoping for a proper PC port.

"A one-piece leather suit is sort of the bike equivalent of a nice pair of driving shoes." Not to take things on too much of a tangent, but for those of us who don't give two shits about fashion and just kick off our shoes and socks to do any spirited driving (no broken glass or gravel on my floormats, thanks, I know…

And to be fair the other kind of avgas is about 80 octane. Remember, turbosuperchargers were invented to keep a decent level of performance at altitude, and the early rotaries (WW1 era) had compression ratios of about 6:1 precisely because the gas was so terrible. Warbirds as you probably think of them are maybe…