RideLust

A few weeks ago I got a call from my buddy Matt Farah of TheSmokingTire.com letting me know that he was going to be in town and that he wanted to shoot the 1969 Dodge Daytona replica that I built with my buddy Todd Ford. The goal of this car was to combine the handling, braking and performance of a modern day muscle car with the 1960′s styling and excitement that made the muscle car an American icon. The car has been outfitted with air conditioning, cruise control, massive brakes, custom wheels and an updated suspension with the result being a turn key driver that you can take anywhere. Sure it’s still has an old school big block with a carburetor on top, but with mileage reaching about 15 mpg on the highway it’s really not that bad. The styling of the 1969 Dodge Daytona may not be for everyone, but when you realize that this shape was carefully crafted for the soul purpose of going fast, well then, it all starts to make sense.

Source: TheSmokingTire.com

I woke up at 4:30am on Friday morning, got dressed and headed up to Monitcello Motor Club to do a little instructing with the National Auto Sport Association in their HPDE (high performance driver education) program. It’s always a great time and aside from trying to teach people how to fully enjoy their rides, we also get the perks of doing a little driving ourselves around some of the best road courses in the country. Most of the time I use my trusty 1968 Dodge Charger for track duty, but since it’s been vacationing out on the west coast for the past few months I decided to hit the track in my 2006 Dodge Magnum SRT8.
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Classic cars that have been updated with modern components go by many names. Some refer to them as pro-touring cars and or g-machines while others simply don’t know what to make of them. The basic idea is to take an automobile from days gone by, and update it so that it performs just as well as a modern day road car, but retains that classic styling that we all know and love. The car in the above video has been brought to us courtesy of Matt Farah and TheSmokingTire.com and Craig Morrison of Art Morrison Enterprises. The formula for this 1955 Chevy Bel Air was simple – take a true American automotive icon and make it go, handle and perform overall like a modern day super car. Morrison says that this ’55 Bel Air will put down numbers that are equal to that of… wait for it… a Ferrari 575 Maranello. Now if that’s the case then what you are looking at here is a car that just redefined what your Grandfather’s garage queen can be made into. So at the end of the day you can call it a pro-tourer, hot rod, custom or whatever you wish. We’ll just call it badass and leave it at that.

We’ve all been asked if we have a perfect car. It’s usually something exotic and fast and one that makes us tingle in all the right places. We spout off names like Ferrari and Lamborghini in the hopes that maybe one day we’ll actually open our garages and see one sitting in there, but alas, for most of us, this will never happen. The real question however shouldn’t be what is the perfect car, but what would you do with it if you could use it to create your perfect automotive day.
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Second generation Chevrolet Corvettes are considered to be some of the best looking cars ever to come out of Detroit. Starting with the highly collectible split window Stingray of 1963 and running until the end of 1967, these Corvettes are still lust-worthy even after 47 years. As most people know the Corvette is the only true American sports car. Sure there was the Mustang and later the Viper, but the one that started it all for the United States came from the bow tie boys at Chevrolet.
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Can someone please tell me why we can’t bring back the Trans Am series like the one run back in the early 70′s. I mean just stop for a moment and look at this thing. This is the 1971 AMC Javelin of Mark Donohue that won the 1971 SCCA Trans-Am Championship. You wanna’ talk about some hardcore car porn, than look no further. From the dual exhaust cutting in through the rocker panel, to the strut-braced front air-dam, to the patriotic paint scheme and mini-light style wheels, this 1971 AMC Javelin is a ride that makes us car guys get that fuzzy feeling in all the right places.

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With all the hoopla surrounding the release of Gran Turismo 5 this November I was actually thinking that I may just have to pony up some big money and purchase a new PS3. After watching this video however I must confess that I’ve lost some of my excitement. Yes, the graphics are crisp and there are loads of new cars, but as soon as I saw the players car hit the wall with no damage I rapidly began to lose interest. Now, I know that GT5 has promised us damage, but this was actual game play and from what I’ve seen not one fender had even the slightest wrinkle on it. I mean really, in this day and age of gamers are expecting GT5 to simply blow the doors off the competition, but after what I’ve seen in this video, I have a feeling I’ll be sticking to my XBOX 360 and Forza Motorsport III.

Let me apologize to all those fans of first generation Ford Broncos; the pictures you see here probably won’t be easy to look at. Broncos, after all, are meant to be driven off road. They should be throwing up rooster tails of dust in the Nevada desert, or blasting down the Baja peninsula, with the Pacific Ocean a constant reminder of which direction is west. They shouldn’t be slammed, they shouldn’t be turned into pickups and they most certainly shouldn’t have a big block Chevy poking through the hood.

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It’s over… it’s finally over. This past Saturday was the completion of the 2010 One Lap of America. An event that covered 9 days, 8 racetracks and 4500 miles. If you’ve been following our progress you’ll know that we took my 1968 pro-touring Dodge Charger. This is a car that weighs in at 4000 lbs., makes about 415 hp out of a 440 cubic inch big block and has absolutely no climate control whatsoever.

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Right now I’m sitting trackside at Nelson Ledges Raceway in Ohio surrounded by some of the fastest street legal cars in the United States. For us it’s day 9 and well over 3000 miles and so far we’ve survived. We’ve got one more track session left for today and then it’s another 300 mile run back to the Tire Rack Facility in South Bend, Indiana – we’ll make that in two fuel stops. Once in South Bend we have only one more event to complete, the dry skid pad. We ran the wet skid pad on day one and came in dead last out of the entire field running. Sure it sucked, but in the end it worked for us because when you’re last the only place you can go is up.

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