Land speed racing is known for more than just the pursuit of maximum velocity - novelty is also important, and there are literally hundreds of record categories, including some recent ones for electric and hybrid vehicles. What you see here takes the novelty factor to the extreme; it’s a lakester powered by giant rubber bands. I got these photos in an email forwarded from my buddy (and land speed record holder in several two- and four-wheel classes) Jack Dolan, but not much in the way of information. I’ll try to get more details and update this post when I get a chance. Until then, enjoy the photos…

Update: Popular Mechanics has a few more photos (but no more information) on their website.

All things panda-related are near to my heart, so I bring you this news from the Big Apple - Apparently, a group of people dressed as giant pandas got roughed up by the NYPD. Coverage and photos on The Gothamist here, and the Pandamonium blog here.

It must be really nice to have enough cash to afford a house with a swimming pool and a pond, plus a snowmobile to destroy by driving it directly into the aforementioned pond…

Not since “Tailgate” magazine has there been a combination of cars and class quite like “Bikini Driving School”

64,000 or so views can’t be wrong, right?

Before we begin, let me apologize for the wonky color balance in this update’s photos. I had the white balance set wrong on the camera, and although I corrected it to some extent they still look a little weird.

Drunk with success from porting the turbocharger housing, I decided to match-port the exhaust manifolds too. Although the real-world benefits will probably be slight, I figured that since I was going to refinish the manifolds anyway, I might as well work them over internally as well. Here’s how I did it:

Unlike the manifold-to-turbocharger junction, I can’t simply use the carbon marks on the manifolds as a guide. That’s because they won’t be going back onto the same heads they came off of in the first place. Here, we can see that McCoy has done a little work on cleaning up the ports, and even if they were as-cast, they might be different from my old heads due to production tolerances and core shift.

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The other day, I came across a site called Fuelly that makes it easy to track your fuel economy online and compare it against the EPA estimates for your year, make, and model, and other users with similar cars. It supports multiple vehicles per user, it’s free, and it’s kind of fun - check out my personal page here, and add me as a friend if you end up using it yourself.