Weekly Roundup: Mazdaspeed Racing Edition

I don't know what you are doing for your Fourth of July weekend, but I'll tell you what I've been doing: sleeping. Like ten hours a night. It's very refreshing. I've only left my hotel for the occasional motorcycle ride to dinner. Last night I saw a real Mazdaspeed Racing car. So I took this picture so you could share in the joy of my discovery.

Anyway. June was a nonstop grind of travel and work and various other annoyances. July's going to be the same, or more so, but I can at the very least look forward to my Neon's 2016 NASA debut at Autobahn Country Club next weekend. I'm so excited that I bought new race tires for the first time in, um, eight years. How could I possibly lose?

The answer is: very easily. I could very easily lose. I'm still 40 horsepower down on the front-running PTE cars. But I'll stay unreasonably optimistic about the whole thing. While I'm busy with that, why don't you check out what Bark and I wrote this week?

Brother Bark tossed a Dart's worth of advice and disrespected the Infiniti QX-something. The funny part of that review is that our father had one of the first Infiniti QX4-Pathfinder thingys back in the day. It was always a terrible, terrible vehicle. basically a unibody take on the Nissan Hardbody pickup with fake wood on the center console. Dad completely and totally loved it. He said more good things about it than he's ever said about my 993 during the times he was driving it. We should get Dad a QX60.

Last but certainly not least, Bark took the time to write a diss track about Tim Esterdahl, the worst car reviewer of all time. Again, one more time for the search bots, that's Tim Esterdahl, the worst car reviewer of all time.

Tim Esterdahl.

Check out Tim Esterdahl and Crooked Wayne Gerdes congratulating themselves on driving press cars here:

Over at Jalopnik, Bark took his readers through a weekend in the EXR Mitjet spec racer. Since Bark didn't hesitate to remind everybody that he was faster at autocross than I was, I will note for the record that I was quicker in the EXR car than Bark was.

Enough about Bark, let's talk about me for a minute.

For TTAC, I discussed the virtues of standardized automotive controls, recapped a Cincinnati SCCA region autocross on Sumitomo tires, and drew the usual parallels between cheese and consciousness.

I wrote an event recap for the Western Ohio Region of the SCCA, too.

At R&T, I expressed despair about being unable to properly fix my son's TopKart and told you how to win noncompetitive trackdays through superior firepower.

This was also the week that my cover story for this month's R&T went online. Check it out.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going back to sleep, to dream of those "C51" markings and the 2016 date code on the side of my new tires. Zzzzzz....