My take on Piastri was he kinda screwed himself with the heavy braking under the safety car (if that’s what Scott is referring to). Not only was it a pretty significant slowdown, the track was still wet and visibility was crap. In the on-board video from back of Piastris car, you can barely see the cars behind him in the spray, he hits the brakes, and Max comes flying out of the spray and jukes to the left to avoid hitting him. Questionable move in the dry, dumb move in the wet.
I mean, cat & mousing the field coming off a safety car is not at all an Oscar invention. But he definitely crossed the line from “Is he messing with me?!?” (see Verstappen in the same situation) to “Hey Stewards, suck on this!”
I like the way McLaren exposed themselves by challenging the penalty and then opting not to void the penalty when it was completely within their control. Shameless.
I was very happy to see Hulkenburg take a podium. He’s a good driver and for him to stick around F1 as long as he has does attest to that. Reading here that the other teams and drivers helped Hulkenburg and Stake celebrate makes a guy feel even better about the long denied podium.
Rain always seems to show who is a great driver in a mediocre car and who is a so-so driver in a great car.
I always love watching a driver who has been racing for a very long time get his first podium, both because it's nice to see hard work and tenacity rewarded and because the other drivers are usually so excited for them. It provides a glimpse of the community these guys are a part of.
what I find interesting is that the depth of field looks good at first glance. Looking at it again the bi-directional shadows raise an eyebrow, or three, as the generator might have it, in what should be an overcast day.
Horner really fucked up. He should have gone to Flavio for advice on how to stick his pecker in different places and not have everyone get mad about it.
Flavio could have also counseled Horner to stick it in four supermodels, not to stick it in a four.
So the six word replies I send back to my lady friend in response to her short novel actually doesn’t mean I’m an unfeeling jerk, as is often perceived!!
At the Frank Zappa show in 1981 at Chicago’s Uptown Theater that I attended as a youngster, Frank had a clothesline strung on stage and at one point asked the women in the audience to throw their panties on stage. Many panties were thrown at that time and for the rest of the show. While the band jammed Frank was hanging the panties on the clothesline. I distinctly remember one large and wide white pair that Frank held up. This was when America was not obese.
This was an impressive display of power by Mr. Zappa. At the end of the tour a quilt was made of the panties and is hanging in the Hard Rock in Biloxi.
Does anyone have a copy of or YT link to the guy with the “Yooooouuuu ain’t a Model” song? I can’t find it on YouTube, algorithm deliberately misleading me again
Dude. What? You went to school with Tiffany Teen? I spilled many a seed and spent many hours looking for nip slips and such back in the day. Holy shit.
Here's the thing, though - I don't think Flavio could have helped Christian. Flavio has a certain style, a _je ne sais quoi_ that Christian can only aspire to.
More simply put, Flavio is one cool motherfucker. Christian is a dork.
I think COTA is the only place that F1 and Indycar have gone recently. It's a ~13 s gap there (1:32 vs 1:45) so a 7-9 s gap at Mid-Ohio is about right just on time (nothing about track differences).
You can't calculate it because you can't separate the car from the driver. This is a dumb query.
The best a driver car combo can do is its best, unless you have some secret info to simulate what a different driver in your car would do. This is impossible.
Simulations generate an ideal driver, and clearly your faster driver is the one closest to him at all times.
If your slower driver is doing f2 lap times he is the problem.
the Solstice had the dumbest soft top ever designed, followed by the stupidest targa top ever (it would not fit in the car). plus it had a truck manual transmission. further it had 0 effective luggage space. just FAIL.
That soft top is INFURIATING. Never have been around the targa, but I have had to fiddle with those stupid fucking tops while furiously googling how to make it work several times
Compare this to a Miata, which is so easy a literal small child could do it intuitively.
I don't know if the patent had not expired yet but I always wondered why they didn't just copy the Miata's. I was unfamiliar with how slick the Miata's was until I saw a friend one-hand it from the driver's seat at stoplight. Fastforward several years later I overheard a guy in a grocery store saying he had to get a half gallon of milk instead of a full gallon because it didn't fit in the trunk of the Solstice with the top down.
they designed it with those stupid f’n buttresses,
they have stupid product managers,
and so on.
I’m still pissed to this day. Having grown up in a Pontiac family, I really wanted one. Fortunately I got one as a rental on a business trip.
Then that beautiful coupe version came out. Only to be stunned in disbelief when found out a targa top would not fit inside the car. And to make the insult worse, the soft top that one was supposed to use when leaving the hardtop at home was not a standard item. AND was not available from GM Parts! F’n idiots.
Please explain further as I cannot see this from what I know of the man. Everything I have seen of him from his CART championship, Indy 500 win, his competition with teammate Hill, and his scraps with Michael indicate a strong mental state.
As Patrick Head once famously snarked, he "made heavy weather" of winning his world championship, and afterwards he seemed unable to put together any consistency in the BAR.
Yeah, I should have elaborated that his error was in thinking he could magically turn them into a championship winning team overnight just because he was there.
Jacques couldn't even keep his shit together during his 24h charity ski race. Shoving people off the chairlift and berating the other skiers around him for slowing him down.
0. Are you indirectly admitting to being a "clown" here?
1. My mom has a long and colorful car history that includes a manual 1973 RX-3 wagon, which was the car I was brought home from the hospital in; the car in which I (four months old) was swaddled with blankets, placed in a dresser drawer, and driven from California to Washington; and, later in its life, the car that became notorious in the neighborhood for loudly backfiring 30-60 seconds after the engine was shut off. It's very hard for me to believe given my early memories of how stinky that car was that it had any emissions benefits whatsoever.
Yes that is an odd claim. The Wankel has always been notoriously dirty and loud and an oil burner besides and isn't in production today mostly for those reasons.
makes even less sense when some people chose an automatic over a manual when rotaries are gutless at low rpm but some people dont understand rotaries or that modern piston engines are fine at high rpm
To understand the claim you have to understand what form of emissions was being outlawed. They are pretty bad by default for unburned hydrocarbons, but the emissions laws at the time didn't care about that. Those laws were completely focused on smog. Before the three way catalytic converter the only ways to deal with smog were to reduce compression, or go rotary. So rotary engines were the future and Mazda was way ahead of the competition. Right up until the laws started caring about the other things coming out the tailpipe.
'0. Are you indirectly admitting to being a "clown" here?'
I've done it a dozen or more times and only got penalized once. Never lost pace doing it, either. I'm saying there's a non-clown (but still unsporting) way to do it.
Did Danny Ric's last name start with "V"? Because he certainly got more second (third and fourth) chances from Horndog than anybody in my recollection.
None of us will ever be privy to if there really is/was an internal power-struggle at RB, but Horndog very much carries himself like a man who long ago came to believe his own press and thought of himself as bigger than his wife, than Newey, or even than Red Bull (the company) itself. The sad fact is that RB dropped the scent and lost the trail sometime in 2023(?), even though the otherworldly talent of Verstappen carried them through 2024.
I suppose it was his treatment of every driver besides Max and Danny Ric that soured me on him. What he did to Lawson was nearly criminal mismanagement.
I hope he lands at Aston. He and old man Stroll deserve each other.
Agreed. Horny seems like a dude who loves the smell of his own shit, and who came to believe that no one else in the world could do his job. Twenty years is a long time. This is a good change for Red Bull regardless of who ends up helming the team, or driving the cars.
Hulk on the podium is the best story of 2025 so far, with Piastri's nascent steely-eyed rocket man persona a close second.
"traded it in on the first of my many Mitsubishis, disguised as Mopar vehicles."
Sophomores with new driver's licenses our parents let me and my best friend take his sister's Plymouth Arrow to West Virginia for spring break, our first time away "on our own" (we both had many relatives in the area) staying in an empty trailer up the holler. We visited a lot, his Aunt and Uncle were so tickled they went out into the yard and killed a chicken for supper, but most time was spent in that very tail happy Mitsubishi on the twisty roads of Roane County. If it had a little more horsepower we would surely have hurt ourselves.
When I met my wife she was driving a LeBaron convertible equipped with the 3.0 Mitsubishi v6. That powertrain was the star of that absolute pile of shit. I put valve seals in it when it started smoking. Otherwise it was completely trouble free as the doors sagged, radio quit, and top leaked.
A Dodge Shadow "duster" with the 3.0L hooked to a 5spd with the "power bulge" hood is on my beater wishlist. Common car among the rural kids that went to my highschool, I'm nostalgic for this era of "throwaway" domestic FWD (nowhere as disposable as modern cars, in hindsight).
I'm pretty nostalgic about the Daytonas and what have you from that time period. They were terrible cars, but I have a hard time not buying a non-runner turbo car or v6 model to manual swap. But then self control gets the better of me as I remember working on those when they were maybe 10 years old and them already falling apart.
I'd much rather a CRX Si, Prelude, or a even a brick Volvo wagon. But they have a lot of charm and a good aesthetic.
When I was like 8 years old in the mid 90s, my friend's older brother immigrated from Moscow. This guy was an accomplished gymnast, wore an earring (just on the one ear, which ever was the non-gay one), cool haircut. This guy was Vanilla Ice levels of cool to us. He saved up and bought an 84 ish Challenger, base non turbo 2.2 from what I recall, but with a stick and louvers over the rear deck, blasting Ace of Base lol.
There is nowhere on the market a car as cool as the 2000-ish dodge avenger coupe. Presumably where Audi got the idea for the shape of the A5/S5 coupe 😂
I like the BRZ/FR-S/gt86 twins but none seem to possess this level of panache. The Avenger only needed a bit more power to be a street legend
agreed 100%. Never knew how good we had it with the 90s coupes until we were subjected to modern design. They've got the 420a motor, so with some stronger pistons/rods it should handle boost decently.
I was a photographer at a vintage race in Louden, NH where I was witness to an RX2 absolutely battling it out with a similar vintage Camaro. It honestly looked just like the one in your photo. Wonder if it was the same car. Those things could really hustle.
It's strange to recall how odd the 80s were with these RX rotary cars and Opel Mantas, GTs, and other sports cars in econo-box clothing running around on the same roads with dumb air-shock/wide tire equipped domestic muscle pigs.
I found a Manta in a salvage yard when out scavenging for side hustle parts. A quick glance at eBay showed the carbs and other bits don't bring much. So, I left it alone in a corner because I can recall how these little Eurasian hot boxes practically had to include a case of Schaeffer's in the trunk to seal a 2nd hand sales deal.
But there were a greater than average number of very fun little cars around back then despite the prevalence of "hot brown" (to borrow a term from Mr. Furrygular) malaise (and the Lithuanian gentleman) barges.
When I was in middle school I joined the legion of boys who wanted a 50s-70s muscle car to impress our Nam-Vet Dads and Uncles. This was the same time the Fox Body was beginning to absolutely curb stomp the big name plates at the strip and in the redlight wars. The aero front and the "fuel injection bullshit" were pushing all of us to accept that fast might not look like a car with cragars and alphanumeric tires, glasspacks, and a big Holley or two that helped turn gasoline into noise.
The very first kid in my middle school to turn 16 was a blocky, quiet, strong kid named Shannon who looked like he would shrug off a hard right cross with sheer Neander toughness, but not the insult of it. Shannon didn't show up with a shitbox F-body or a clapped GTO when he parked across the street at the local funeral home. He showed up in a bright green Vega GT that was in pretty decent shape. When pressed, he took me for a ride in it. I think that was the first time anyone went around a curve with any vigor while I was in the car and it didn't feel like it was going to fly off the road.
After that, I learned from tangling with Escort GTs, a rotary RX7, and a bunch of other cars that you don't let the guy in the flyweight car with wide tires choose the road. My domestic style-barge was just sheet metal stapled together with a spot welder, and would scrape the door handles around curves. That's about the time I ordered a copy of the Boss 302 chassis manual from a Cougar parts house in Michigan because I was picking up a copy of Mustang Monthly every chance I could and they were nut hugging the Trans Am efforts with maximum squeeze. I thought if I could get my Cougar to turn I could put the wee Eurasian buzzbombs in their place with the 351 Cleveland under the hood. At some point there would be a straight, and I would get them in the old Dearborn Headlock. Then one of my friends got his hands on a 280Z turbo and that was the end of that.
I was wrong. But I was a teenager and embarrassment was my main learning impetus back then.
I have a deep respect for the little RX series along with the various Datsuns and Toyotas that hurt a lot of feelings around "legendary" domestic junk. They worked very well as a package and had a really interesting aesthetic. I get why they're cult classics.
"The very first kid in my middle school to turn 16 was a blocky, quiet, strong kid named Shannon" not sure if middle school was a typo or it was common for kids to still be in middle school when they turned 16 where you grew up. Either way I'm here for it.
Yeah, it was a poor industrial town in central NC, so we had a lot of kids who functionally had no parents because one parent would work 2nd shift and one would work 3rd for the extra shift differential pay. They'd be asleep or off doing stuff when the kids were waking up and going to school.
My schools had a lot of kids who were held back one or two years by 8th or 9th grade. Middle school was grades 7/8/9, so we had a handful of kids who drove to 9th grade. One guy who drove to 8th grade had a full on broom mustache and could successfully buy beer over the counter. He was like a folk hero to the rest of us pubescent dorks.
My take on Piastri was he kinda screwed himself with the heavy braking under the safety car (if that’s what Scott is referring to). Not only was it a pretty significant slowdown, the track was still wet and visibility was crap. In the on-board video from back of Piastris car, you can barely see the cars behind him in the spray, he hits the brakes, and Max comes flying out of the spray and jukes to the left to avoid hitting him. Questionable move in the dry, dumb move in the wet.
I mean, cat & mousing the field coming off a safety car is not at all an Oscar invention. But he definitely crossed the line from “Is he messing with me?!?” (see Verstappen in the same situation) to “Hey Stewards, suck on this!”
Oscar was very stupid in the eyes of the stewards for not being British.
I like the way McLaren exposed themselves by challenging the penalty and then opting not to void the penalty when it was completely within their control. Shameless.
Yes this. One feels like the safety cars were thrown to bunch the field back up to give Blando a chance as Oscar was running away.
In other news, the Lego trophies were a disgrace. (Apologies if it's already been discussed elsewhere)
I was very happy to see Hulkenburg take a podium. He’s a good driver and for him to stick around F1 as long as he has does attest to that. Reading here that the other teams and drivers helped Hulkenburg and Stake celebrate makes a guy feel even better about the long denied podium.
Rain always seems to show who is a great driver in a mediocre car and who is a so-so driver in a great car.
I always love watching a driver who has been racing for a very long time get his first podium, both because it's nice to see hard work and tenacity rewarded and because the other drivers are usually so excited for them. It provides a glimpse of the community these guys are a part of.
On his last lap when Alesi won Canada his tears were hitting the inside of his visor under braking. I may have been crying a little myself.
Remember when he was a big deal?. Would have been cool to see him go to Ferrari, with his personal number.
sounds like what i always say---wide tires ruined racing!
Mid-Ohie!
just west of laxingten
That surely must be a city in Guangdong province.
what I find interesting is that the depth of field looks good at first glance. Looking at it again the bi-directional shadows raise an eyebrow, or three, as the generator might have it, in what should be an overcast day.
Laxingten
The place where women always stroll ahead of us
And every brah has lots of lettuce
Horner really fucked up. He should have gone to Flavio for advice on how to stick his pecker in different places and not have everyone get mad about it.
Flavio could have also counseled Horner to stick it in four supermodels, not to stick it in a four.
So the six word replies I send back to my lady friend in response to her short novel actually doesn’t mean I’m an unfeeling jerk, as is often perceived!!
👍😎👍
he would have a field day with onlyfans
yeah but they werent venerated or selling their bathwater then
At the Frank Zappa show in 1981 at Chicago’s Uptown Theater that I attended as a youngster, Frank had a clothesline strung on stage and at one point asked the women in the audience to throw their panties on stage. Many panties were thrown at that time and for the rest of the show. While the band jammed Frank was hanging the panties on the clothesline. I distinctly remember one large and wide white pair that Frank held up. This was when America was not obese.
This was an impressive display of power by Mr. Zappa. At the end of the tour a quilt was made of the panties and is hanging in the Hard Rock in Biloxi.
Does anyone have a copy of or YT link to the guy with the “Yooooouuuu ain’t a Model” song? I can’t find it on YouTube, algorithm deliberately misleading me again
Dude. What? You went to school with Tiffany Teen? I spilled many a seed and spent many hours looking for nip slips and such back in the day. Holy shit.
Here's the thing, though - I don't think Flavio could have helped Christian. Flavio has a certain style, a _je ne sais quoi_ that Christian can only aspire to.
More simply put, Flavio is one cool motherfucker. Christian is a dork.
I think COTA is the only place that F1 and Indycar have gone recently. It's a ~13 s gap there (1:32 vs 1:45) so a 7-9 s gap at Mid-Ohio is about right just on time (nothing about track differences).
What's wrong with the solstice?
Also, Yuki also beat me, but in my defense I didn't enter an F1 race in the third best car on the grid. Justice!
Nothing's wrong with the Solstice, but it was an odd fit in the dealerships. Just like there's nothing wrong with this Edifice watch.
Is the Red Bull the third-best car on the grid? I'd estimate fifth, behind McLaren, Mercedes, Ferrari, and Racing Bulls.
Based on lap time potential it's the second best.
You can estimate favorably so clown boy doesn't look so bad.
'Based on lap time potential it's the second best.'
That's a calculation I'd like to see. It would imply that, for example, Kimi Antonelli has been out-driving Max this season.
You can't calculate it because you can't separate the car from the driver. This is a dumb query.
The best a driver car combo can do is its best, unless you have some secret info to simulate what a different driver in your car would do. This is impossible.
Simulations generate an ideal driver, and clearly your faster driver is the one closest to him at all times.
If your slower driver is doing f2 lap times he is the problem.
the Solstice had the dumbest soft top ever designed, followed by the stupidest targa top ever (it would not fit in the car). plus it had a truck manual transmission. further it had 0 effective luggage space. just FAIL.
That soft top is INFURIATING. Never have been around the targa, but I have had to fiddle with those stupid fucking tops while furiously googling how to make it work several times
Compare this to a Miata, which is so easy a literal small child could do it intuitively.
can confirm
am small child
I don't know if the patent had not expired yet but I always wondered why they didn't just copy the Miata's. I was unfamiliar with how slick the Miata's was until I saw a friend one-hand it from the driver's seat at stoplight. Fastforward several years later I overheard a guy in a grocery store saying he had to get a half gallon of milk instead of a full gallon because it didn't fit in the trunk of the Solstice with the top down.
because,
GM,
Maximum Bob,
they designed it with those stupid f’n buttresses,
they have stupid product managers,
and so on.
I’m still pissed to this day. Having grown up in a Pontiac family, I really wanted one. Fortunately I got one as a rental on a business trip.
Then that beautiful coupe version came out. Only to be stunned in disbelief when found out a targa top would not fit inside the car. And to make the insult worse, the soft top that one was supposed to use when leaving the hardtop at home was not a standard item. AND was not available from GM Parts! F’n idiots.
Our focus group of cousins of senior GMI graduates say it is at least 73% fancier than the MG soft top that the Miata was based off of.
You forgot “blind” in front of “cousins”.
Of course GM released this concept on the Kappa platform, https://www.supercars.net/blog/2004-chevrolet-nomad-concept/ but the focus group idiots must have rejected that good idea also.
Wait, Villeneuve emotionally fragile?
Please explain further as I cannot see this from what I know of the man. Everything I have seen of him from his CART championship, Indy 500 win, his competition with teammate Hill, and his scraps with Michael indicate a strong mental state.
As Patrick Head once famously snarked, he "made heavy weather" of winning his world championship, and afterwards he seemed unable to put together any consistency in the BAR.
Head probably didn’t like him because they are possibly too much alike, but no one was closer to the situation so it’s hard to argue with him.
BAR was a mistake from the get go. Classic big ego move.
Well yes, but it’s interesting to ponder how the failed BAR experiment in Brackley eventually became a multiple WCC winning team.
Yeah, I should have elaborated that his error was in thinking he could magically turn them into a championship winning team overnight just because he was there.
Jacques couldn't even keep his shit together during his 24h charity ski race. Shoving people off the chairlift and berating the other skiers around him for slowing him down.
Stroll showed his low traction skills in the 2021? Turkish GP.
Jack, your pictures are of an RX-3. The RX-2 looked like this:
https://bringatrailer.com/listing/1973-mazda-rx-2-4/
That's the most amusing part about it!
Google also thinks a Radical SR8 has the SR3 nose.
"So that’s the end for Christian Horny"
no newey no verstappen and now no horner. stick a fork in them theyre done
"Mercedes and Aston Martin providing champagne because Stake never bothers to bring any"
made me sad :(
"Seems unlikely that Max will pull off a fifth championship"
not happening unless piastris car implodes or norris implodes mentally
"$300 for the version with a forged carbon dial"
i think forged carbon fibre is dumb on everything
looking forward to checking out mid-ohie raceway sometime in the future though
0. Are you indirectly admitting to being a "clown" here?
1. My mom has a long and colorful car history that includes a manual 1973 RX-3 wagon, which was the car I was brought home from the hospital in; the car in which I (four months old) was swaddled with blankets, placed in a dresser drawer, and driven from California to Washington; and, later in its life, the car that became notorious in the neighborhood for loudly backfiring 30-60 seconds after the engine was shut off. It's very hard for me to believe given my early memories of how stinky that car was that it had any emissions benefits whatsoever.
RX-2’s and RX-3’s made cool rally cars. There wasn’t a deer within 20 miles of a special stage in the woods.
https://youtu.be/8e-3bK0ES2A?si=s9d5rC4x92LUgmX9
That’s a blast! Definitely not a car to go hunting in….
Yes that is an odd claim. The Wankel has always been notoriously dirty and loud and an oil burner besides and isn't in production today mostly for those reasons.
Thirsty too.
The figures I have been quoted for RX-8 mileage are astonishing. I can’t make them make sense
makes even less sense when some people chose an automatic over a manual when rotaries are gutless at low rpm but some people dont understand rotaries or that modern piston engines are fine at high rpm
To understand the claim you have to understand what form of emissions was being outlawed. They are pretty bad by default for unburned hydrocarbons, but the emissions laws at the time didn't care about that. Those laws were completely focused on smog. Before the three way catalytic converter the only ways to deal with smog were to reduce compression, or go rotary. So rotary engines were the future and Mazda was way ahead of the competition. Right up until the laws started caring about the other things coming out the tailpipe.
'0. Are you indirectly admitting to being a "clown" here?'
I've done it a dozen or more times and only got penalized once. Never lost pace doing it, either. I'm saying there's a non-clown (but still unsporting) way to do it.
Proust, Senna, Schumacher, Verstappen... all have done non-clown but still unsporting moves. you are in good company.
Didn't know Proust was a venerated racing driver.
I highly recommend his racing memoir, "In Search of Lost Time" or, as the French know it, "À la recherche du temps perdu."
That actually works great as a racing title! Hope there's not too much gay French stuff in there.
Its actually about servicing women, thus the business about "the taste of Madeline."
😁
Did Danny Ric's last name start with "V"? Because he certainly got more second (third and fourth) chances from Horndog than anybody in my recollection.
None of us will ever be privy to if there really is/was an internal power-struggle at RB, but Horndog very much carries himself like a man who long ago came to believe his own press and thought of himself as bigger than his wife, than Newey, or even than Red Bull (the company) itself. The sad fact is that RB dropped the scent and lost the trail sometime in 2023(?), even though the otherworldly talent of Verstappen carried them through 2024.
I suppose it was his treatment of every driver besides Max and Danny Ric that soured me on him. What he did to Lawson was nearly criminal mismanagement.
I hope he lands at Aston. He and old man Stroll deserve each other.
Agreed. Horny seems like a dude who loves the smell of his own shit, and who came to believe that no one else in the world could do his job. Twenty years is a long time. This is a good change for Red Bull regardless of who ends up helming the team, or driving the cars.
Hulk on the podium is the best story of 2025 so far, with Piastri's nascent steely-eyed rocket man persona a close second.
If you're going to wish Horner upon Aston, please wish Alonso upon anyone else. He deserves better than to be subjected to both Stroll and Horner.
"traded it in on the first of my many Mitsubishis, disguised as Mopar vehicles."
Sophomores with new driver's licenses our parents let me and my best friend take his sister's Plymouth Arrow to West Virginia for spring break, our first time away "on our own" (we both had many relatives in the area) staying in an empty trailer up the holler. We visited a lot, his Aunt and Uncle were so tickled they went out into the yard and killed a chicken for supper, but most time was spent in that very tail happy Mitsubishi on the twisty roads of Roane County. If it had a little more horsepower we would surely have hurt ourselves.
When I met my wife she was driving a LeBaron convertible equipped with the 3.0 Mitsubishi v6. That powertrain was the star of that absolute pile of shit. I put valve seals in it when it started smoking. Otherwise it was completely trouble free as the doors sagged, radio quit, and top leaked.
A Dodge Shadow "duster" with the 3.0L hooked to a 5spd with the "power bulge" hood is on my beater wishlist. Common car among the rural kids that went to my highschool, I'm nostalgic for this era of "throwaway" domestic FWD (nowhere as disposable as modern cars, in hindsight).
I'm pretty nostalgic about the Daytonas and what have you from that time period. They were terrible cars, but I have a hard time not buying a non-runner turbo car or v6 model to manual swap. But then self control gets the better of me as I remember working on those when they were maybe 10 years old and them already falling apart.
I'd much rather a CRX Si, Prelude, or a even a brick Volvo wagon. But they have a lot of charm and a good aesthetic.
When I was like 8 years old in the mid 90s, my friend's older brother immigrated from Moscow. This guy was an accomplished gymnast, wore an earring (just on the one ear, which ever was the non-gay one), cool haircut. This guy was Vanilla Ice levels of cool to us. He saved up and bought an 84 ish Challenger, base non turbo 2.2 from what I recall, but with a stick and louvers over the rear deck, blasting Ace of Base lol.
Actually a really tragic story, the guy got paralyzed from the waist down while practicing gymnastics, cut down in his prime.
My cousin had a red and silver Shadow ES Sedan. 5 year old me thought it was a very cool car. 35 year old me still does.
There is nowhere on the market a car as cool as the 2000-ish dodge avenger coupe. Presumably where Audi got the idea for the shape of the A5/S5 coupe 😂
I like the BRZ/FR-S/gt86 twins but none seem to possess this level of panache. The Avenger only needed a bit more power to be a street legend
agreed 100%. Never knew how good we had it with the 90s coupes until we were subjected to modern design. They've got the 420a motor, so with some stronger pistons/rods it should handle boost decently.
I visited Autotrader:
0 for sale nationwide
Yeah, this is gonna take a facebook marketplace crawl.
I was a photographer at a vintage race in Louden, NH where I was witness to an RX2 absolutely battling it out with a similar vintage Camaro. It honestly looked just like the one in your photo. Wonder if it was the same car. Those things could really hustle.
Loudon
Ha! Thanks for the correction!
It's strange to recall how odd the 80s were with these RX rotary cars and Opel Mantas, GTs, and other sports cars in econo-box clothing running around on the same roads with dumb air-shock/wide tire equipped domestic muscle pigs.
I found a Manta in a salvage yard when out scavenging for side hustle parts. A quick glance at eBay showed the carbs and other bits don't bring much. So, I left it alone in a corner because I can recall how these little Eurasian hot boxes practically had to include a case of Schaeffer's in the trunk to seal a 2nd hand sales deal.
But there were a greater than average number of very fun little cars around back then despite the prevalence of "hot brown" (to borrow a term from Mr. Furrygular) malaise (and the Lithuanian gentleman) barges.
When I was in middle school I joined the legion of boys who wanted a 50s-70s muscle car to impress our Nam-Vet Dads and Uncles. This was the same time the Fox Body was beginning to absolutely curb stomp the big name plates at the strip and in the redlight wars. The aero front and the "fuel injection bullshit" were pushing all of us to accept that fast might not look like a car with cragars and alphanumeric tires, glasspacks, and a big Holley or two that helped turn gasoline into noise.
The very first kid in my middle school to turn 16 was a blocky, quiet, strong kid named Shannon who looked like he would shrug off a hard right cross with sheer Neander toughness, but not the insult of it. Shannon didn't show up with a shitbox F-body or a clapped GTO when he parked across the street at the local funeral home. He showed up in a bright green Vega GT that was in pretty decent shape. When pressed, he took me for a ride in it. I think that was the first time anyone went around a curve with any vigor while I was in the car and it didn't feel like it was going to fly off the road.
After that, I learned from tangling with Escort GTs, a rotary RX7, and a bunch of other cars that you don't let the guy in the flyweight car with wide tires choose the road. My domestic style-barge was just sheet metal stapled together with a spot welder, and would scrape the door handles around curves. That's about the time I ordered a copy of the Boss 302 chassis manual from a Cougar parts house in Michigan because I was picking up a copy of Mustang Monthly every chance I could and they were nut hugging the Trans Am efforts with maximum squeeze. I thought if I could get my Cougar to turn I could put the wee Eurasian buzzbombs in their place with the 351 Cleveland under the hood. At some point there would be a straight, and I would get them in the old Dearborn Headlock. Then one of my friends got his hands on a 280Z turbo and that was the end of that.
I was wrong. But I was a teenager and embarrassment was my main learning impetus back then.
I have a deep respect for the little RX series along with the various Datsuns and Toyotas that hurt a lot of feelings around "legendary" domestic junk. They worked very well as a package and had a really interesting aesthetic. I get why they're cult classics.
Love it! Feels like we lived similar teen years.
"The very first kid in my middle school to turn 16 was a blocky, quiet, strong kid named Shannon" not sure if middle school was a typo or it was common for kids to still be in middle school when they turned 16 where you grew up. Either way I'm here for it.
Yeah, it was a poor industrial town in central NC, so we had a lot of kids who functionally had no parents because one parent would work 2nd shift and one would work 3rd for the extra shift differential pay. They'd be asleep or off doing stuff when the kids were waking up and going to school.
My schools had a lot of kids who were held back one or two years by 8th or 9th grade. Middle school was grades 7/8/9, so we had a handful of kids who drove to 9th grade. One guy who drove to 8th grade had a full on broom mustache and could successfully buy beer over the counter. He was like a folk hero to the rest of us pubescent dorks.
Yet Sherman is the one who claims to hold the hillbilly clout around here...9th grade in middle school makes this make sense.
Sherman is fauxbilly.