True, loonies are rough. No pennies are nice, though

I ain’t about that 2.9% MasterCard exchange fee, and I find not many places take debit cards in the states, so I just use cash for everything. Pre-paying for gas does make change add up, though. After a week in the States I had nearly $50 in $1 bills.

I wasn’t aware of this at the time. I’d run into pre-pay stations before, but it’s always been between around midnight and 6 AM. I’d never seen one that you had to pre-pay at 2 PM before. I was standing at the pump looking like a fool for a few seconds, wondering why it wasn’t working. I then looked like a bigger fool…

I was actually driving through the centre of Oregon this past summer, and when I started pumping my own gas at a station, the attendant came running over from another car and asked what I was doing. I didn’t know about this law, and always wondered why he was asking why I was pumping my own gas. Especially since my…

Nah, I don’t mind those. They appeal to the “forever car” market, which is rarely marketed too (after all, you can’t make money off of somebody that keeps the same car for 20+ years). Some of these, especially the MX-5 one, make me want to buy the car.

At club-levels, those are all using older production cars, some of which are fairly desirable. Go to your local stock-car track and see how many people are running old Mustangs and Camaros. Even lots of local mini stock classes are building S13s, E30s, CRXs, and 944s, which are getting wrecked. And even if they don’t,…

I wouldn’t say so. There’s motorsports where the purpose is to wreck the car, like a demo derby. Stock car racing destroys cars constantly, and it’s not even the point of it. Rally racing probably puts the most mechanical abuse on cars, and causes the most crashes. Touring cars also constantly crash.

Literally every use of a car besides basic transportation is a waste of a car for no good reason....

This isn’t how it works in the UK, or a lot of other countries in the world. You’re essentially talking about a VIN swap, which is pretty illegal to begin with. But this isn’t about a private insurance company paying it out. If the car gets a Cat B mark on the VIN, that VIN becomes worthless. It’s government…

My dad told me this story once about him and his brother rolling his dads truck, a brand-new 70s Toyota pickup, three times into the ditch, and it only put a small dent in the roof and busted the mirror off, so they popped the dent out, bought a new mirror at the local dealership, and drove it home. They didn’t tell…

I’ve got another one that wasn’t me, but a friend of mine. He had an NA Miata with a hard top, which he drove year-round. He actually sold the soft top because he figured it’d save weight, and he’d never use it since he wasn’t a big fan of convertibles.

We were 16, and a buddy just got his license and spent his savings working part-time at a grocery store on a Chevrolet Cavalier, which cost around $800 if I remember correctly. We lived in a small town, so him and I were pretty much the only ones in our class that had cars, but since mine was a CRX (2 seats), we took…

My dad always did everything himself on his race car, so when I was old enough to start racing he showed me the ropes, and one thing that he was constantly doing was checking his toe. Pretty much before and after every race, practice session, etc., he’d be making sure those front wheels were lined up how he wanted…

I’d say if you’re leaving Ford for having head gasket issues, Toyota might not be the best place to go

CP, but it was a tough call. I really wanna NP this car, because I love the GS-R, and have owned both the DB2 and a DC5 variant, but there’s just not enough there to justify spending over $4k. This car is decent, but not perfect. And although I’m usually a sucker for a sedan, a GS-R sedan just doesn’t cut it for me.…

I had the same thing happen when trying to buy a 6-pack in Denver. They thought my Saskatchewan license was fake, and threatened to call the cops when I insisted it wasn’t. I ended up having to show them my passport

Born and raised

True. Whenever I go stateside and people ask me where I’m from, I like seeing their response when I say Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. The further you go south, the better their reaction is

Actually, as a 16 year old, I bumped into the back of another car near Saskatoon trying to cross a highway, because I was being dumb checking for cross traffic instead of looking in front of me. This older lady got out of the car and apologized to me, thinking it was her fault for some reason.

NASCAR’s an extreme example, though. Those engines alone are costing over $50k to build, and they’re running 12:1 compression ratio, revving at 9000 RPM. They have become an expensive and exotic OHV engine in that regard. And although they run flat-out, which will put extreme strain on any engine, they’ll never run…