Date: 2008-07-28 09:30 Subject: Racing Deja-Vu Security: Public Location: Office Music: Villa-Lobos Tags: automobiles, formula 1, racing

From the LA Times:

A telling image that something was very wrong at this year's NASCAR race at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway came before the race was even one-third completed.

As the 43 cars in the Allstate 400 at the Brickyard crawled around the massive track under a caution period, track safety workers were picking up dozens of rubber fragments strewn across the back straightaway.

The shards were residue from a ruptured tire on one of the cars, the latest in a spree of early tire failures Sunday that plagued the Sprint Cup Series' second-most prestigious race behind the Daytona 500.

Indeed, more than 200,000 saw reigning Cup champion Jimmie Johnson win his second Brickyard 400 from the pole -- or perhaps survive is a better word -- after one of the most bizarre Cup races in recent memory.

When it became clear that Johnson and the other drivers couldn't run more than a dozen laps around the famed 2.5-mile speedway without risking catastrophic tire damage, NASCAR repeatedly threw the yellow caution flag every 10 to 15 laps for teams to put on new tires.

The problem: The tires supplied by Goodyear were being chewed up prematurely by Indy's abrasive pavement.

This was the 15th running of the Brickyard 400, so NASCAR is familiar with the track's pavement. But it was the first race at Indy with NASCAR's new Car of Tomorrow, which causes more right-side tire wear than the previous car.

A trio of drivers tested the COT here early this year, but the tire Goodyear developed from that data was ill-matched for the race.

The race called to mind another controversial day at Indianapolis in 2005, when a tire problem prompted 14 of 20 drivers in a Formula One race to protest by pulling off the track just before the start.

Yeah, I was there for that mess of a "race" in 2005. Those tire failures had cars flying into the wall. Wonder what Indy's thinking with having such an abrasive surface (apparently compared to other circuits)...

Date: 2008-07-09 09:41 Subject: I Want, I Want... Security: Public Location: Home Mood: excited Tags: automobiles, cars

From the LA Times:

Where are the hot-cool small cars, the drive-all-night cars, the panties-on-the-mirror cars? Where they've always been: In Europe.

For a generation of American Alfisti, the return of Alfa Romeo is the Christmas that never comes. The brand -- an upscale imprint of the Fiat Group -- left the American market in 1994 in a choking cloud of aggravation and mediocrity. It wasn't that the cars were particularly awful -- not particularly, anyway -- but that when something did go wrong with Alfas, the dealerships were insufferable, the electrical problems insoluble, and the fixes uneconomical. And scoring replacement parts was like trying to buy a human kidney on the black market.

It's a measure of how indelibly erotic, expressive and cool these cars were that people ever bought them or ever felt a twinge of nostalgia when they were gone. The fact is, you could fit all the Americans who ever heard of a Disco Volante or Vittorio Jano or Tazio Nuvolari in a high school football stadium.

The brand narrative here has never been about performance, motorsports or value. No, Alfa Romeo is, for most Americans, about a quintessential Italian style, an aching, blushing, toe-curling loveliness of line and profile. It is about the inconvenient passion of Dustin Hoffman in "The Graduate." It is about Fellini's moonlit "Juliet of the Spirits," in which Giulietta Masina is pursued by a man, a Romeo, in a Giulietta Spider (which may qualify as the most knotted meta-reference in film history). It is about youth, cool and the whispered promise of sex under the parapets.

...Aimed like Jove's thunderbolt at the BMW Mini, the MiTo was styled with all the brio the word conveys by Alfa designer Juan Manuel Diaz. The young Argentinian was in the studio one day in 2002, drooling over prototypes of the 8C sports car, feeling frustrated that he himself could never afford such a car. According to Automotive News, he began sketching the MiTo as an affordable version of the audacious and priapic 8C.

You have no idea: owning an Alfa, even this wee delicious hatchback, makes me feel...well, erm..."inappropriate."

How did it all start?

Well, would you believe that it's cos of James May?



Eepers. Makes my existential crisis over keeping the ol' Volvo 245 guzzler rather insignificant. Panties on the mirror, indeed.