Lately, I’ve found a lot of videos on YouTube of cars falling off dynos. Enough that I thought it would be worth putting them all together in one place for your viewing enjoyment…

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While visiting my very good pal Randy Panno, proprietor of R&J Auto in scenic Escondido, California, I came across something you don’t see every day - A dragged-out ‘63 Avanti.

The original Avanti, built for just two model years by Studebaker, was available with powerplants ranging from 240 horsepower for the “base” engine all the way up to the Paxton-supercharged R-2 that was rated at 289, all based on the same 232 cubic inch V-8. The customer car in Randy’s shop still has the factory 232, but with a somewhat stouter Novi head unit pushing boost.

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Back when I was doing OverRev, I met a lot of cool folks in the sport compact racing world. Unfortunately, with that era at an end, I don’t get to see them too much any more. Imagine my surprise to run into former ProFWD driver Chris Rado and his World Racing team at a PSCA event in Fontana, California…

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When we last left off, the trailer was together, and only awaited a way to actually pull it…

That took the form of a Class I (wheelbarrows, Radio Flyer wagons, and kids on skateboards, age 10 and under) Hidden Hitch from etrailers.com, which goes under the part number 60887 for my particular Mustang. This same hitch is also sold as Reese part number 77029 and Draw-Tite part 24687, which says something about the stranglehold the international hitch cabal has on the market.

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The last PSCA race in Vegas convinced me that I needed a better way to get my stuff to and from the track, and lock it up while I’m there. I can fit my jack, toolbox, drag radials, helmet, jacket, and spare nitrous bottle in the trunk and back seat, but there’s not much room left for anything else, and once I’m there, a long chain threaded through everything and wrapped around a light pole is the best I can do for security while I’m actually racing. When KJ brings his rig out to Fontana, I can throw my junk in his trailer, but I’d rather not have to mooch a chair and cooler space.
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Woohoo! My article on upgraded turbos for diesels is on the newsstands….

One of the things I love about going down to JBA is that there’s usually something interesting on the dyno. Today, it was the Obsidian SG-One, a unique 1967 Mustang that, according to the builder, has $1.3 million invested. Speed shop general manager and tuning guru Bruce Tucker was on the laptop, tweaking the BigStuff3 standalone to dial it in.

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A while back, I brought you the Ken Block Gymkhana video that posed the question, “how many cars do you have to wreck to get this good?” Turns out the number is somewhere between zero and one, as you’ll see in the just-released outtakes:

(video after the jump to defeat the obnoxious auto-play)

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Another gem, courtesy of an email forwarded from my dad. This time, it’s vintage drag racing pictures and captions from an unknown source. You may have seen this email floating around - if you have info on where this came from, please pass it along.

Back in the day, anything was possible. How about an Offy with a side-mounted blower on Ed Donovan’s dragster?

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I’m old enough to remember back when every auto parts store had a big barrel full of Cherry Bomb glasspacks sitting up by the registers, like the world’s biggest impulse buy. Today, the merchandising is slightly more sophisticated, but the mufflers and the sound are still the same. Since I’m always looking for ways to screw up my perfectly good 2004 Mustang V6 coupe, I’ve had an itch to throw a glasspack on in place of the 2-into-1 stock exhaust. I had no idea whether it would work any better, or even whether or not it would sound like ass. But it seemed like an easy project, and the parts were cheap, so I dove in. Here’s how it went:

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Winter does funny things to people. All that bad weather, stuck inside, you might take it in mind to join the body from a kid’s ride-on F150 to an ATV chassis, or put a big gas engine on a Barbie Jeep. You might even discover your friends have all had the same idea…

At the Winternats in Pomona yesterday, former NHRA Sport Compact All Motor racer Scott Kelley made the first pass in the new SS/EX class. The class was basically created at the request of racers to give all the orphaned FWD N/A cars a place to race now that NHRASC and NDRA are dead. They’ll be offering the class at all the Lucas Oil points races this season, and some of the NHRA pro races. Cars must be naturally aspirated, full-body, FWD, methanol only, and weigh 11.5 or more pounds per cubic inch. The class index is a 10.20 at the moment, and Scott ran 9.687 on his first hit.

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It’s not a good idea to wire around your bottle heater’s thermostat so that it stays on all the time. You WILL forget you left it turned on, and the nitrous bottle WILL overheat. If you haven’t abused the bottle with a torch at some point in the past, and you took the time to actually install a blowdown tube, all that happens is a loud whooshing noise, frost on the tube, and a trip to the local speed shop to get a replacement burst disc and a refill…

I can understand forgetting to put them on one. But all four?

A couple of thoughts on this video: One, this is why I always wear a helmet, even in a fifteen-second car, and two, are the retaining walls in New Mexico made from drywall or something? A faster car would have gone right through…

The car - a 600-horsepower Group B Audi S1 Quattro.

The driver - Walter Rohrl

Any wonder why this class only lasted from 1982 to 1986?

Two days late for April Fools’ Day, it will arrive:

Will the combination of product placements (note the NOS Energy Drink signs in the trailer), action set pieces lifted from other films (anybody remember the first scene of The Matrix?), goofy stunts (gotta time it just right to get under the burning tanker!), unlikely street racing, and the original cast blend? Yes, Vin Diesel and Paul Walker reprise their unconsumated cryptohomoerotic relationship from the first movie, with Michelle Rodriguez, fresh off of “Lost” and a Hawaiian DUI, once again cast against type as a woman, and that chick who played Diesel’s sister in the first movie who’s name I dare you to remember is back again as an unconvincing beard for Walker’s character.

Should be fun. I’ll watch it…

What must it be like to be internet superstar Tom Dixon, of “Will it Blend?” At least he’s got good taste in cars, as shown in this video, where he straps a crash helmet on one of his überblenders and takes it for a spin in a GT-R…

What can stop an out-of-control Jeep from plowing right into a gas station? America’s best-selling vehicle, the Ford F150, that’s what!

You may recall the video of Rhys Millen trying to kill himself practicing for last year’s aborted truck flip attempt. Well, this year he did it. Sort of.

ProTip: When your sponsor puts their logo on the underside of your vehicle, it’s time to rethink your profession.

How many cars do you have to totally destroy to get to this level of skill?

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One of my co-workers, the intrepid David Wong, came across this scene of misfortune just a few blocks from the office. From the looks of it, the folding end of the lift broke off, and the car slid bass-ackward onto the pavement. The poor delivery guy apparently left in the back of an ambulance after riding the Aston to the ground.

For those who weren’t at the 2008 NMRA awards ceremony at PRI (or those who were, but want to see it again), here’s the video we shot:

When I was a kid, I used to beg my dad to hit stuff on the freeway, like cardboard boxes, styrofoam coolers, and so on. His response was always, “What if that box is filled with concrete?” I took his advice to heart, and I steer clear of the many ladders, patio chairs, hollow-core doors, and abandoned shoes that litter Interstate 5. But not everyone feels the same way. I don’t know if it was a case of Jeep owner arrogance (”I have a 4x4 and can drive over anything!”) that started it in the first place, but driving until the leaking gas tank finally forced this guy to stop and address the problem is definitely just stupidity. In any case, here’s what you get when you run over a mattress on the freeway…

From WranglerForum.com

In Australia, it’s not good enough to just get the tires hot with a burnout - you gotta rub the sides of the Ute on the pavement, too…

What do you get when you combine time-lapse video with a tilt-shift lens? Real monster trucks and demolition derby cars that look like toys…

Metal Heart from Keith Loutit on Vimeo

Tilt-shift lenses, which are commonly used in architectural photography to correct perspective and make parallel lines look straight, can, as the name implies, tilt and shift relative to the plane of the film or image sensor. They also have the interesting property of being able to simulate a very shallow depth of field, which is what makes everything look like a model in the video.

For more videos, visit Keith Loutit’s website.

Somehow I doubt these two morons ended up getting a second chance at their failed flip…

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Last New Year’s Eve, Rhys Millen was supposed to backflip a truck on live TV. One problem - he broke his spine in practice. He’s going to try again this year, and to promote the stunt, Red Bull has released a one-minute video that shows, in sickening clarity, what went wrong last year. Enjoy!

I’ve recently wasted a lot of time in a flame war (pun intended) on Yellow Bullet about heating nitrous oxide bottles with a propane torch. For the uninitiated, a cold nitrous bottle screws up your tune-up, because the pressure in the bottle is dependent entirely on its temperature, and a cold bottle will make the engine run rich when the system is activated. To bring the pressure up before a run, a lot of racers apply heat from a propane torch. It’s easy, effective, and probably the most dangerous thing you can do to a nitrous bottle short of drilling a hole in it or whaling on the valve with a hammer. The problem is that it’s very easy to accidentally exceed the temperature at which the aluminum bottle is permanently damaged, leading to eventual catastrophic failure of the sort seen in the photo above. It doesn’t happen immediately, and there’s no way to tell that you’ve pooched the bottle until it actually blows up.

I’ve been told that “everybody does it”, “I’ve done it and never had a problem”, “pro teams do it all the time”, and even that it’s just my “opinion” that using a propane torch is a bad idea. Since I have a feeling that this topic will come up again on YB, I figured it would be worth spending some time to spell out the facts. That way I can just link to this post and go on with my life, instead of typing it all over again.

These are not matters of opinion. These are facts. As for opinion, well, there’s a word that perfectly describes the kind of person who risks other people’s lives and well-being for no reason, other than being cheap, lazy, or stupid - that word is “asshole”.

I know I keep posting video links (the lazy man’s way to blog) but doing real work has kept me pretty busy lately. Until I get some time to generate some actual content, please enjoy the following…

In California, even minor car-to-car contact is reason enough for everyone involved to stop right in the middle of the damn road and discuss the situation in great detail, while traffic backs up for miles behind the crash.

In Germany, you just keep driving, apparently…

More importantly, would you buy it from Sears? Sure, it’s “Accurate to +/- 1% of reading from 20% to 100% of wrench capacity. Operates in up to 7 common torque units including in-lbs, ft-lbs, in-oz, Nm, cNm, mKg and cmKg. Allows 99 preset torque values to be programmed into the wrench and manually or automatically advanced during use. Stores up to 1,000 torque readings in memory for extended use before download of data is required. Alternately, the data can be downloaded continuously to a PC during use.” But $2500? And Sears? I’ll stick to “a quarter turn before it strips.”

Update: It’s possible to spend even MORE money on a torque wrench from Sears…

A friend over at Ford sent me some pictures and a video link of the new FR500CJ going through its paces at Milan Dragway, and I thought I’d share. More pictures and the video after the jump…

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Three arrests (two drivers and a flagger) for street racing, 184 citations for watching an illegal activity for the spectators, 47 juveniles popped for being out after curfew, more than 70 cars impounded…

According to KTLA, “More than 100 officers from 12 agencies, including the Ontario police department, the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, Riverside Police Department and California Highway Patrol were involved in the arrests, which took place at 12:45 a.m. on Airport Drive west of Etiwanda Avenue. The officers were part of a task force targeting street racing in different cities.”

So I’m watching an old episode of Top Gear, and I discover something I had never known - you could get second-gen SVT Lightnings in the UK with the steering wheel on the wrong side! Clarkson, being Clarkson, hates it…

I know I have a Syclone I have shamefully neglected. And yet, I was filled with a desire to find an original RHD Lightning, or convert one myself… Unfortunately, a little research reveals that the conversion appears to be an aftermarket job, rather than Ford OEM. But that same research also turned up this website:

How much fun would that be?

So I came across this website for a company in Kansas called Fannin Fabrication that makes rollover simulators - they take the cabs of old S-10 pickups, bolt them to a rotisserie mounted on a trailer, and power it all with a hydraulic drive system to spin it around. The idea is for public safety agencies to use them to demonstrate the importance of seatbelts. I got all excited until I read the part about the company not providing the crash test dummies to be used in the demonstration - here, I thought they were actually putting volunteers in there and twirling them around like a hillbilly carnival ride. Oh well…

Let’s say you’ve never, ever been on a dragstrip before. What better car to pop your 1320 cherry than a brand new, 420hp, all-wheel-drive Nissan GT-R?

On Sunday, me and the rest of First Round Racing were out at Fun Ford Car Weekend, and amidst all the domestic iron hitting the track in the bracket class was a fresh, new ‘09 GT-R. As you can see by the level of help the track staff had to give the driver, he’d obviously never taken the tree before. It was also obvious that the car and driver weren’t legal for the 11.60 dial-in on the window. God loves drunks and idiots, though, and a redlight in the other lane gave the win to Godzilla despite a slow light and leisurely launch. Photos after the jump…

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If you’re a fan of precision driving, royalty-free industrial video soundtracks, or Hyundais, you’ll enjoy this eight-minute video…

I can’t imagine how many cars you have to wreck in the process of getting this kind of mad skill. I guess that explains why you’d want to do it with Hyundais, though - no big loss when you do wreck one (or six)

I’ve seen some over-the-top pit vehicles at our races, but this is something else entirely. A Yamaha R1 motorcycle engine that puts 125 horsepower to the wheels? Seems like an elaborate way to kill yourself, and I mean that in a good way.

Digging through some old photos on the server today, I came across some that I shot at SevenStock a couple of years ago. As you might guess from the name, SevenStock is an event centering around the Mazda RX-7 in particular, and rotaries in general. Why these guys had a table full of tiny, working piston engine models on display there is anybody’s guess, but I thought you might enjoy them nonetheless.

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From a friend of a friend, I bring you this video of the British Steam Car undergoing static testing:

Based on the copious amount of steam coming out the back, you might assume that it’s powered by a reaction motor. You’d be wrong.

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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.

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?

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.

When it rains, it pours… Today on the way in to work on the I-5 northbound near the 73, Donut and I spotted what was definitely a BMW, wearing distributor plates and wearing the slimmest possible disguise – black gaffer’s tape over the BMW roundel. I fired up my trusty Instinct and snapped some stills and video, but while we were patting ourselves on the back for the “get”, we discovered that the car we’d shot was just the tail end of a whole convoy of new Bimmers…

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This time, it’s a not-yet-for-sale Suzuki Equator pickup, a rebadged Nissan Frontier due to hit showrooms this summer as an ‘09 model, spotted wearing distributor plates and headed southbound on the I-5 in San Clemente, California. Sorry for the picture quality, but as they say, the cell phone camera you have with you always takes better shots than the SLR sitting back at the office…

The addition of a pickup to Suzuki’s limited slate of US offerings, and a badge-engineered one at that, makes me sort of wish they’d stick to kick-ass motorcycles or make a serious attempt to turn their huge success in the Japanese mini-car market into something cool for the States.

One of the fun things about a 160-mile daily commute is that I see all sorts of odd things on the road. Usually, it’s just clapped-out dualies stacked 15 feet high with mattresses and washing machines headed for the border, but occasionally I run across something cool. On the way back from Simi Valley to Santa Ana, we came across this camo’ed mule. I’m guessing BMW, based on the wheels and door handles, but as you can see, it’s been heavily disguised with riveted-on plastic panels.

I am, in many ways, a donkey on the edge. I have a hand-printed sign I carry in my car that reads, “The world is not your ashtray, you pig!” I have knocked a clergyman down with my suitcase at the airport baggage claim for standing right next to the goddamn belt and making it next to impossible to see or retrieve a bag. Two weeks ago, I got into a (verbal) altercation with an old woman at Costco Gas when she got mad at me for driving around her and making it slightly more difficult for her to pull out, after waiting for more than two minutes for her to get into her car, adjust the seat, put her seatbelt on, count the change in her purse, call her grandchildren, and recite the Apostle’s Creed before finally turning the key. That encounter ended with her admonishing me that “patience is a virtue!” and my response that I assumed she’d be in a bigger hurry since she had so little time left on this earth. Nothing gets the attention of your fellow gas station patrons like reminding an old woman of her impending mortality, let me tell ya…

In any case, I was gratified to discover youparklikeanasshole.com, which, as the name implies, is devoted to singling out those who park like assholes for ridicule and retribution. The best part is the downloadable “parking ticket” pdf file that allows you to specify a category, like Two Spots, One Car or Diagonal Parking: Not So Cool Car.

I should point out that the site specifically says they don’t support printing the warnings on blank sticker stock and gluing them to the offender’s car…

So back in the heyday of TechWeasel.com and its sister site, SDDragRacing.com, I got involved with a film project devoted to the subject of street racing. I got a call from the guys working on it about a year or so ago, saying they were finally almost finished (and looking for a release!) Forgot all about it until this week, when they got a trailer for the movie up on YouTube…

(I’m at about the 1:35 mark)

I haven’t actually seen the finished product yet - hell, I can’t even remember exactly what I talked about on-camera - so I can’t vouch for the overall movie. But since I am inherently fascinating, I’m sure that it will be worth seeing for my bits alone.

Update - 6/7/08
The website for the movie is now up.

I updated the Suctapus page with pricing information and a contact email. Hopefully I’ll have some more videos up in the near future too.