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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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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In the past, I have brought you examples of what occurs in the area of the Venn diagram where technical aptitude, too much free time, and a total disregard for personal safety overlap.

This, however, will be hard to beat:

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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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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…

Why settle for the metaphorical chariot racing of stock car competition when we could be watching the real thing? This is pure, condensed awesomeness.

Who are these guys? Why did they do this? Kudos for the period-correct driving suits, as well… Turns out it’s not exactly a new idea, though:

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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Nitro-powered RC helicopters are breathtakingly expensive, noisy, hard to fly, and dangerous. So why not add a wireless video camera and a .45-cal 1911A1 pistol on the front?

It seems like you’d be better off with something in a smaller caliber with more magazine capacity and less recoil, like a 9mm Glock or even a .22LR, but I suppose that when one is working on a project like this, one uses that which is just laying around the shop at the time…

The next logical step here is to make this thing web-enabled so people from all over the globe can log in and fly it remotely!

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:

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!

Most of the time, the links my dad sends me are, well, the kind of links your dad sends you. Occasionally, though, my dad sends me gems…

You might assume at first that this is a video of a model airplane. It isn’t. There’s a guy in there. A very lucky, very cool-under-pressure, very talented guy.

I can’t imagine what it would be like to have a job where wearing a pair of pants with a built-in tourniquet in each leg is a good idea…

Blackhawk also makes a matching shirt, which is handy for the tactical needle drug enthusiast, too.

Take your pick - the pants and shirts are $90 each at Blackhawk.

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…

How about a little straight-up F-35B STOVL porn?

The clip’s title is almost certainly a lie - I find it unlikely that you’d make the first test flight in such a demanding regime, taking off in close proximity to obstacles (instead of in the middle of a conventional runway, with nothing around to run into for miles, for instance), then landing while perfectly silhouetted by the setting sun. But we can dream, can’t we?

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.”

Ok, this has nothing whatsoever to do with cars, but it’s still absurdly cool. Dolphins might not have all the same tools to manipulate their environment that we do, but that doesn’t mean they haven’t found interesting ways to keep themselves entertained. Watch the following clip to see a group of dolphins creating and playing with bubble rings, then click over to Snopes.com for an explanation of what’s going on.

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?

First up, a 650cc-powered cart:

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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.

I really, really hope that this is satire. The alternative, that it’s sincere, is just too absurd and horrifying to contemplate.

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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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?

Jet Ski + Hot Tub = Pointless

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.

We live in a golden age of amateur surveillance - any act of hoonage is likely to be recorded for all posterity. To wit, the blog HitAndCrash.com, devoted to videos of, well, crashes. It’s still in the early stages, but there’s some fun stuff to watch already.

Here’s a peek at part of what I do as editor of Race Pages magazine. I’m the guy on the ladder…