I’m not buying “fastest” until it’s pitted against an Alta

We can nix police chases without having a new solution ready, it’s a trap to think the two are tied together. There still isn’t a material that competes with Asbestos. It undoubtedly reduces fire deaths, but we still banned it (in the US at least). In a sense it’s like police chases: Your home builder is put at real,…

And you don’t care about the innocent grandma who just died in a horrific car crash during pursuit - LET ME KEEP MY POLICE CHASES!

If he’s not suggesting it, I will.

I take a harder line on this. High speed chases are inherently dangerous, so its unethical for the police to take part. It doesn’t matter what the stakes are, risk to the public shouldn’t be on the table for law enforcement. If you set a standard for when an officer can endanger the public, it will erode, it’ll be…

You’re nearly there... the easy answer is this: cops don’t do anything that endangers the public in the course of their work. Period. If that means some suspects escape, so be it. They are suspects after all, this isn’t war.

Yes, lets do something materially dangerous to prevent a hypothetical future danger. Real galaxy brain stuff there.

Especially since resto-mods are doing so well on BAT right now. A GTV with all the Alfaholics mods goes for more than a stock resto. People want that old-car purity with modern reliability.

If we’re talking Nord-era Alfa, that would be very good news.

The vast majority of people on this site have never driven on a track, and they’ll never get around to it. At the traction limit in a corner you want predictable throttle, power doesn’t matter. If you don’t have telepathic throttle response, that’s one less input you can rely on to balance the car. Racing drivers put…

People always say “police can just catch em later”. I don’t think it’s all that relevant if they catch runners. They could also target the suspect with a drone, but sane people know that’s too risky. High speed chases are risky, too. How they catch em is it’s own problem, just because we take one solution off the…

The last time I read one of these chase stories, the driver was *suspected* of driving drunk, the cops pit maneuvered the car, and kid(s) in the car died. IMO there are very few situations where they’d have enough info to justify a chase, or where reckless driving is the safest option for the public. It’s like a…

I’ve driven cars with less than 130hp that were plenty powerful to tap out any fun American B-road, which is where this car lives. If a car is 2000#, it’s going to travel through corners faster than a 3000# car all else equal. “Turns are for fast drivers”. The magic of sports cars is in getting the power/weight…

Yeah, it’s painful before you get good at it... no car I built is rusty with seized fasteners. In fact I know everything is done correctly and assembled to torque specs, following the factory manual. You get it right with experience. I don’t think I’ve ever owned a performance car that was hard to get parts for…

The designer behind Alta is working on a project called TREVOR motorcycles now. Similar ethos, no clue if it will have the same level of performance though.

You don’t let it get hot enough... turn the voltage way down, tack weld the butt gap dot by dot, moving around to spread the heat out, until it’s a solid weld. You’ll still blow through every once in a while, a copper bar behind the hole helps as a backer to fill those in. It takes forever, but that’s the way it’s…

Working on them is at least half the fun ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. You can only develop mechanical sympathy for a specific car by breaking it, then improving it. Cars of that age have a personality you have to drive to, if you want to be fast.

I’ve found the opposite... way more injuries on my road bike than my motorcycle. On a bicycle you’re usually slow, always silent, often invisible. And even when you are noticed, most people don’t respect your road position. Things always happen to me on a bicycle. I escape nearly all of the hairy situations I…

One of those things is more willfully destructive than everything else in the chain. Maybe the drunk driver never gets pulled over and still crashes that night, but probably not. Maybe he flips his car while fleeing the scene, but probably not. Drunk driving didn’t flip that car, a PIT maneuver did.

I would buy a brand new electric car without seeing it... modern cars are all converging. I’d have a hard time giving any specifics about the last rental car I had. It had video game steering, the transmission was a knob and the starter was a button. The key was too big for my pocket. I couldn’t hear anything outside…