Not a musician story, but it happened at a major music festival - Buddy of mine was a young marine about 6-7 years ago, fairly fresh out of boot and stationed at 29 Palms. Coachella was happening and they’d worked out a deal where they got marines to work security for the venue. He’s a pretty big dude and trustworthy,…

My old volvo 245 has a “liar board” installed in the temp gauge. Many cars do. It has one because the normal operating temps for the car would put the needle circa 2/3 of the way up. While the gauge shows this as within normal temp range, so many people brought their 240’s in on warranty claims because they thought it…

Once a month or so, I drive by the big chevy dealer in this area and they have a car hauler slowly and carefully unloading a wall of vettes, all bagged up and pristine. They’re apparently moving them though, as they never have one on the lot for long at all.

A friend of mine is a former stunt performer and driver and she used to complain about how few and far between the driver roles were for female drivers.

Note - The environment of the sales dept was such that I could get up in another sales guy's grille, threaten violence, and when he put his hand on me, I shoved him hard enough that he bounced off a wall, and no one said a thing to me about that. Because that's just the sort of thing that went on there when salesmen…

Worked for a "no haggle" dealer as a used car salesman for a year straight out of college. Horrible job. As a "no haggle" place, the salesmen did not get commission based on how much profit the deal made (the F&I guys did though), but on how many units they moved per month. The book where deals were tallied was this…

Copying good ideas is Standard Operating Procedure for 98% of the car industry, and it works for them.

Yet another reason why I refuse to fill out contact cards at dealerships.

Growing up an army brat, hueys were a relatively common sight on some of the bases we lived on. But I'll never forget being in the 4th grade on the army's birthday and they decided to do a show and tell at the school with a couple of helos. Usually this meant that they'd have the bords on the ground before we got out…

Bricks, you are on the exact same page I was referring to. Never in my life have I wanted a modern vette until I saw that episode.

No. 16 years of writing damage on stuff like this tells me no. Not even close. Not even as a go-kart. Better to buy a neglected corvette with a dead transmission, rip off all the body panels, and go.

As if I needed more reason to mistrust carfax.

I used to work for a bodyshop for a dealership chain that had a Hummer dealership and that meant whenever Hummers needed bodywork, they came to us. With the H1’s, it was always always always the same thing - rust.

Depends. The bottom right of his core support got plowed into the sand after that wheel came off. It’s sand, which is better than pavement, but it’s still not a force the core was designed to absorb. So he may find out later that there is additional pain down the road.

This has been something I’ve been talking about for a while now, and people seem split between skepticism and excited anticipation, based largely on how they feel about cars themselves.

I believe that a highly modified firebird could indeed be stable at high speeds. In the article I recall, a stock camaro was not. And, if I remember correctly, they ran a mustang as well, and it wasn’t quite as scary as the camaro at top speed, but was indeed slower. Wish I could find the article.

James May is one of the very few people on TV that I would honestly like to sit down and have a conversation with. He seems like a legitimately interesting cat.

“Are you sure?”

It was an article from the early 90’s. The one I recall was all stock, off-the-lot cars. They went out to the world’s longest driveway and did top speed tests with a corvette, a camaro, and a caprice. I want to say they had other cars, but those three were the ones I recall. The vette had the highest…

Back when I still had a subscription to Hot Rod and waited each month for it to arrive.

I am very tolerant of pussy. One might even say I am enthusiastic about it. You should try some, it might relieve some stress. And decaf. Definitely decaf.