For better or worse, I recently moved and picked up a subscription to digital cable when I did. This service includes Speed, a channel that I often imagined would harbor countless hours of quality race programming, and hoped for such blasphemous things as WRC coverage and maybe a little F1 to see what I’d been missing. Instead, I see largely how-to shows for rednecks with a truck fetish that are really thinly-veiled advertisements for such quality products as Lucas fuel injector cleaner. Give me a break!
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Some rice I understand—in the same way I understand Birkenstocks, Ben Stiller, automatic transmissions, and Sylvia Plath: They serve a purpose—that I begrudgingly tolerate. But some rice is so odd, so disproportionate, and so inexplicable that sometimes I wonder if people like us here at the Pansy Patrol aren’t the butt of a tremendous joke. For it would be very embarrassing for us to learn, after all of our ridicule, our photos (and this column) that many ricers are great tongue-in-cheek comedians baiting us into anger.

Let me restate in pictures. Please view them in the order they are listed:
Extreme Close Up
Slightly Less Extreme
Extremely far away

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All the situations we have looked at so far have involved the best way to get through a single corner. We assumed that there was a long straightaway before and after the corner. In the real world, however, many of the corners you will encounter will be followed immediately by another corner in the opposite direction. In these situations, the basic Line is actually NOT the best way through the corners. Read the rest of this entry »

German tuner Novitec Rosso has decided that Ferrari’s new F430 just wasn’t quite up to par. So, they have supercharged its 4.3 litre V8 engine to the tune of 656 hp and 488 ft/lbs of torque, and added a wing and additional aerodynamics. The result is the Novitc Rosso Ferrari F430 Evoluzione:

0-60 mph now comes in 3.7 seconds, and its top speed is reported at 216 mph. It also has the distinction of being 1 of only 2 cars that actually looks good in white, the other car of course being the Ford GT90 concept car. Kudos to Novitec Ross! This is no small feat, and I am duly impressed.

RUF, a firm that specializes in making your Porsche go very too fast, has decided to ditch Porsche’s platforms and start from the ground up. The result is breathtaking:

The drastic, aggressive body style gives a good indication of the what has been updated under the hood as well. Autoblog.com reports that the CTR3 is powered by a twin-turbo 3.8L flat six pushing out 700bhp and 656 ft-lbs of torque. 0-100 kph (thats 0-62 mph for us yanks) comes at 3.2 seconds. If you find an open runway, you can attempt to verify the reported top speed of 233 MPH.

Most exciting, however, is the low weight of this machine. The CTR3 tips the scale at only 3086 lbs. Thats still quite a bit heavier than my Miata at 2300 lbs, or an Elise at just under 2000 lbs, but consirably less than many of the other supercars in this class. I am a staunch advocate of lightweight vehicles, so the CTR3 please me greatly in that regard. Its low weight should help it to be a formidable vehicle, both on and off of the track.

Rumors had circulated around the web that the CTR3 was based off of a Porsche Cayman, but RUF has since confirmed that it only borrowed the rear tail lights. The rest is all RUF.

Price, to me, is moot, since I won’t be able to afford one any time soon (though for all of you big spenders, plan on reaching deep into those pockets for €300,000.000). Nonetheless, the CTR3 definitely has a place on my list of “cars to buy before I die.”

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You’ve decided to buy new wheels for your car. If you’re buying them for your VR-4 or Stealth TT, you probably know that you need to be knowledgeable in the way wheel fitment works because it is difficult to find wheels that fit the VR-4 properly. The problem is that, because many people do not understand backspacing and offset, they rely on the numbers that other people give them. Sometimes this works, but many times it does not. You end up with a wheel that doesn’t fit. A few simple calculations, however, can save you this trouble.

Before I move on to the complex and important terms, let me define a few simple ones that you probably already know, just to avoid confusion:

• Wheel inner face: This is the side of the wheel that faces inward, towards the strut.

• Wheel outer face: This is the side of the wheel that you see (the spokes).
• Wheel width: This is the distance from the inner to the outer face of the wheel. It is not to be confused with diameter.
• Wheel hub: This is the part of the wheel that the lug nuts go through.
• Wheel hub face: This is the surface that mates to the hub on the car’s suspension.

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…he could have bought a car that was actually fast. As it is now, he has a huge front spoiler with a gigantic air intake and huge shiny wheels:

None of these things make this car fast. They don’t even make it look fast. They just make it look like a slow, cheap car with a body kit.

I must give this guy credit for one thing though. I like his placement of his front license plate. Yes, he does have a front license plate. Can you find it?

And some animals lay rubber. In our younger and…um…more formative years, we did our share of burnouts and laid our share of strips. But nothing I ever did was quite like these marks I found in a parking garage. The marks are darkest at the end furthest into the space, and they begin quite close to the wall. That means they were made by a RWD car. Ripping them up, the driver exited the parking space and slid sideways out into the lane. The best part–which you cannot see in the photo–is that the parking attendant’s office is directly across the lane from this space.

Here is a “show car”. Whether or not this is “cool” (or rice), or worthy of my respect (or just ugly), or an example of a fine automobile (or not), or interesting, is not simple. In the automotive enthusiast’s world there is always the performance faction and the aesthetics faction (or the “go” and the “show” people, if you prefer the familiar cliché terms). But the place of performance and appearance modifications is far too complicated to fit into some binary opposition. Each major faction has subgroups. Owners’ personalities come into play. This week, I’d like to offer just some loosely connected thoughts about the issue. In all honesty, it’s not so important as to require a conclusion, and those of you who’ve seen my car or are familiar with our general philosophy here at PansyPatrol already know what my personal opinion is.

It seems to me that we need to define some categories. On the so-called “performance” side of things, I identify 3 types of cars: Those that one neither respects nor admires, those that one respects but does not personally admire, and those that one respects and personally admires. For example, I have no personal affection for any of the well-known dedicated drag cars in the VR-4/Stealth community. I respect the work necessary to make a high-powered drag car, but I wouldn’t give any of the 9- or 10-second cars much more than a passing look. On the other hand, I’ll look over a dedicated roadcourse car or even a daily driver that is regularly tracked for an hour or so, and talk to the owner.

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Buying a used 3000GT (or any car) can be a difficult process. Scams are everywhere. Sellers don’t know anything about their cars. Some sellers are trying to hide problems or unload cars that they expect to have problems, like a VR-4 that runs fine in the low-end but stumbles and has boosting problems in the high. When inspecting and test-driving a used 3000GT, you’re looking for these major things: Does the car behave normally when you drive it hard? Does the car appear to be well-maintained? Does the owner seem to either have a good knowledge of cars himself, or, failing that, does he seem to know enough to make sure that the car is taken care of?

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