I’ve had flashier and fancier cars than this one, but this is the one I plan on keeping forever. I may even buy other vehicles, probably a Miata, but this little guy isn’t going anywhere. Two of my favorite automotive things are boxes on wheels (check) and manual transmissions (check). I have a better chance of…

Uh oh - this is hitting a little too close to home. I drive a six seat minivan with room for one right now. The back is filled with a big-ass shop vac that I don’t want to take into the basement (yet), laundry supplies, several cases of water and other large stuff from Costco that need to get into the house. If I…

Luckily for me, the car I could afford was also the car I wanted; after all, how many manual transmission minivans could you find new in the US in 2012? I could have bought something more expensive, but I’m at an age where I am no longer interested in driving something fancy, flashy and full of toys; been there, done…

I think I found that lake:

I still fire up an emulator on my old Mac mini to play M.U.L.E. No M.U.L.E means no sale.

I repaired, or at least attempted to repair, enough of those Atari joysticks (and their unlicensed Commodore clones) to know that they were fragile pieces of garbage. I got a Wico Command Control stick in the early ‘80s and it still kicks ass 35 years later. Too bad there isn’t a USB adapter to get it to work with…

Wel, he was trying to go directly from 5th to 3rd, but pulled the shifter a little too far to the left and jammed it in. I guess he wasn’t as experienced with manuals as he said he was.

100K on a clutch? Not if you do it right. My BIL only got 40K out of his first manual car and somehow persuaded the dealer to replace it under warranty, whereas I finally had to replace the clutch in my 525i at 231K miles only because a co-worker did a 5th to 1st downshift and vaporized what clutch material was left.…

Thanks for the kind words.

It’s the best of all worlds IMHO - fun, practical (sliders are the best things ever), cheap to buy, insure and run, small on the outside and big inside. It doesn’t attract any undue attention, and being a minivan it’s more-or-less ticket repellent. Sure, there are faster and flashier cars out there, but I’ve already…

I was first introduced to Alain via Speedvision, back in the mid ‘90s on a pirated cable TV signal. A friend and I were F1 junkies and needed a fix when we discovered the unlocked cable connection point and did a little splitting and splicing, this in the days before everything was scrambled and encoded. From sailing…

Thanks for the kind words; It was just a little something I threw together whilst waking up this morning and doesn’t necessarily flow as well as I might have liked. The topic intrigued me since it’s something I believe in and figured that I should share my thoughts with a different author/forum; I’ve written similar…

There is nothing like the wail of a BMW I6 at full-tilt. Someday, should I become stupidrich, I’m going to import an E34 M5 Touring...

The one and only! After years of expensive German machinery I’ve come to appreciate the honesty and simplicity of relatively basic transportation. Thankfully it’s a pleasure to drive, unlike some appliance-like minivans I’ve had in the past.

When you grow up in a household with nothing but manual transmissions that’s just what you learn on. As a child I remember being in the back seat as a friend of my mom’s was teaching her to heel-and-toe in a Lotus Cortina. Step-dad’s cars were all manual as well, from the MGC GT through the many 5-series he had. When…

F1 lost a lot of its appeal for me after Gilles’ accident. At least I got to see him race and be on the podium, at Long Beach in 1982, before he died. I still have the pictures I took that weekend, and although they’re not all that great, they bring back a lot of good memories.

Agreed. The defensive style of racing, or the winning at all costs even if not sportsmanlike, really annoys me. Three names come to mind in this regard, and I may be crucified for saying this, but I never liked the antics of Schumacher, Prost and Senna. Yes, they have lots of titles, but they way they got those titles…

This was the pinnacle of F1 IMHO. 1979 French Grand Prix, the duel between Villeneuve and Arnoux for second place, not ft the lead. Lots of passing, banging wheels and drivers actually taking some chances.

Welcome to our future, comrade...

Nice, but not NP, at least not for me. I’d love to have something like this for my daily 2.3 mile commute, but I couldn’t justify that kind of money regardless of condition.