Yeah, because that asshat on the onramp is wearing safety equipment that restricts his ability to turn his head and check his blind spot.

1985 RX-7, because I grew up in mid America where everybody always worshipped Corvettes as the ultimate sports car, with Mustangs, Camaros, and Firebirds as the more attainable prize.

I’m looking at a bunch of vehicles that would make for far more interesting pace cars.

165 horsepower from a V-6 in 1976? That actually sounds impressive, I didn’t think V-8s of that era were making much more.

There’s nothing tasteful about that.

As long as it's still enough to blow the seals off the fuel injectors, it's enough.

So it's not really the same engine, unless we also consider modern Chevy small-block engines to be the same as the ones they produced 50 years ago.

I wish they'd let me take my car out on the flightline.

This reminds me of the video that keeps popping up of an old Chevy longbed truck beating a Lamborghini at the drag strip. Don’t care, still prefer the Lambo, and the Bentley.

Ugh, headlights aren’t round enough.

ugh, no way I'd drive that. Flat bottom steering wheel isn't flat enough.

Great read Alex, thanks for sharing. As a spectator sometimes it's really easy to gloss over all the hard work that goes on inside the cockpit, so it's nice to be reminded what it takes to get these cars around that track at those speeds.

huh, neat. I stand corrected!

Yeah, almost certainly the blow off valve/recirc valve. If the noise happens as you close the throttle, it’s coming from the intake side. If the noise happens while the throttle is open or being opened, it might be the wastegate.

Yeah I've never heard a wastegate that sounds like that; fairly certain it has to be a blow off valve venting to the atmosphere rather than a recirculating valve venting back into the intake.

If it’s a high pitched chirping it’s almost certainly not the wastegate, but the blow off valve, aka recirculation valve. With that, it just depends on what part they use. It’s basically a one way valve that releases pressure from a system, so they can tune the noise to be high pitched or low pitched or whatever. I’ve…

I can’t watch this video with sound at work, but I’m seeing comments that are confusing me so I want to clear this up.

The blow off valve sits between the compressor and the intake manifold and exists to blow off excess boost pressure when the throttle is shut.

The wastegate sits on the exhaust side between the cylinder…

I don't think so. I've heard some cars converted to external wastegates that dump straight to the atmosphere and it's always sounded terrible to me. Kind of like a tractor trailer using its jake brake.

It’s a shame that this beautiful car will get such a garbage engine.

Sincerely,
Former owner of two RX-7s

The one thing I dislike about the Abarth is how it looks, which is something I could get over. Everything else about it screams perfect daily driver to me.... not fast enough to get me into any real legal trouble, but fun to push, and makes amazing sounds.

It's entirely possible I may end up with one for that reason in…