Mercedes Show You What You Can't Afford.

Mercedes has seen fit to show us what very few of us will be getting with their new SL 65 AMG Black Edition. The release of a video of a test driver putting the car through somewhat leisurely paces around a test track shows us a few things: One, Mercedes has a sense of humor. It's like they're taking pleasure in the fact that you can't afford this car which is obviously beautiful, and quite fast. Two, it doesn't make a very good noise. There does seem to be a V12 snarl in there somewhere, but it's overlaid with a loud, unpleasant whooshing noise that reminds one more of something made by Hoover, than by Mercedes. Three, there may be more development work to do. this is obviously not a production car because the launch is still months away, but though the pace doesn't seem that high, the car seems to jump around a bit, especially at the rear. More work on stability may be ahead. Still though, it's nice of Mercedes to think of us little people and give us the chance to see what we're all missing. More manufacturers should hurt my feelings thusly. Ive included the video below so that you can feel all the disappointment I do.

ZR1/GTR, Head To Head.

The guys at Garage 419 have gone and made the simple matter of figuring out which baby super car is fastest around a 14 mile strip of German tarmac more complicated. They've synced the video of the Nurburgring laps of the Chevrolet Corvette ZR1 and Nissans new GTR; and they've added a master timer to clarify the situation. The results are... interesting. First off, both timers seem a little optimistic compared to 419's, with the Chevy's being the brighter of the two. Second, the Corvette is clearly faster, which I'd bet half the Internet wasn't expecting.

I wasn't really expecting it either to be frank. It didn't seem possible for the GTR's new-tech approach of combined AWD and super-quick dual-clutch transmission to be bested. It has been. The ZR1 is a simple combination of light weight and large grunt, but that's not all it has going for it. If you watch closely you can see that the driver of the Corvette is pushing much harder than the GTR's pilot. I think that's because the Corvette's softer suspension is letting him attack the curbs more. Anywhere there's a straight though, the Corvette is off into the distance and the GTR is looking at a tailgate. Oh, and it also shows that I can no longer claim disinterest in this affair.

What the video really shows up though is the need for some measure of standardization. I'm not to the point of calling for one driver to drive all these cars in like conditions as I fell that will actually limit the performance of all of them. A driver familiar with the car he or she is driving will be able to extract more performance by knowing what the car can do in extreme situations. I would however like to see one line on the track where these tests start and stop, and someone from the press should be able to hook up independent timing equipment.

Alas, this is not really a likely scenario, so maybe the best thing to do is sit back and watch the video.

New Cars: "I Like My Mercedes Benz Strong And Black, Like My Men" Edition.

Just days after the Corvette Zr1 and Nissan GTR finished (for the moment) a Nurburgring street fight that has lasted months and was driving me nuts; Mercedes Benz has shown both companies the way to tighten the trousers of performance car fans everywhere. Meet Joe Black's car, the AMG SL65 Black Edition. As you can see from the photos it's a stunning example of how to apply the stripped out racer treatment to a production car. It's also a very different car to the capable, but in many ways stodgy Mercedes Benz SL. It's the automotive equivilent of Franka Potente

For one thing, fans of overweight, folding steel hard-tops everywhere have cause to mourn, because the Black Edition replaces that contraption with a beautifully wrought, carbon fibre panel to become a pure coupe. Black buyer's will lose the open air posing option, but combined with the car's new, and beautifully judged carbon fenders the roof allows them to shake hands with a weight decrease of a staggering 570lbs, down to a still violently obese 4,080lbs overall weight. The 6.0-liter, twin-turbo, V12 comes in for review with mods taking power up to 661bhp, though torque is still limited to 738lb-ft to save the dignity of the 5-speed automatic transmission's inner workings. Ah that transmission. It's an auto, so of course this isn't really my kind of car, but what can you expect from Mercedes? If they let the buyers shift for themselves, the car might not last quite as well. At least the shifting, even at 250 milli-seconds, stands to be much better accomplished than with any of the current manu-matic super cars.

Still, this looks to be one of the most hardcore sports cars from Mercedes in years, and I'm including the SLR in that assessment. It's better looking than the rather snouty SLR and it may end up being faster as well, though thankfully it has yet to sprout a "'ring time." It's also cheaper than Big Mac II, though a price north of $320,000 isn't going to have them flying off dealer floors. Mind, that probably won't bother Mercedes much, they're only planning to make about 350 of them. So far, I really like this car, and I think it will make a great development tool for the rumoured SLC Gull-wing. We'll just have to see where Mercedes go from here.

Child Seat Laws, And Why I Hate Them.

When I was very young and the world was fresh and new, I thought the world didn’t have much of a place for children, if I’d only known then what I know now… Adults are very protective of the existence of children, and most of us think that we are looking out for the development of our kids as well. But I think that in some ways those two ideals are counter intuitive, and the more you try to keep a child safe, the less safe he’ll be when you’re not there. I know, by the way that this is hardly an earth shattering idea. I know that most of us have come to roughly this same conclusion, both as a child, and if we have children of our own, as an adult. What none of us count on is a politician backed by bureaucrats, for it is they who take a perfectly good idea like caring for our children, and turn it into law.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for laws protecting children; but society goes so far these days, both legally, and through the influence of special interest groups, that a child has nowhere to turn but to authority. Things that were Ok in my formative years and child endangerment now, while today’s parents must goggle in wonder at the fact that my parents both lived to produce me, such is the level of apparent incompetence on the parts of their mothers and fathers.

But let’s stay with things I know for sure. One of those things is that Cookie Monster does not exhibit addiction behavior, and if he does, it’s to cookies. He cannot be blamed for the obesity epidemic in the US, and he should not be forced to eat carrots. Carrots suck. I know also that kids should not be made to wear uniforms to school. I understand the authorities concerns over gang and other criminal related attire; I just think they have the responsibility to do their jobs.

My biggest pet peeve though, is the law in California requiring kids to be kept in those ridiculous car seats until they reach, what is it now, eighty pounds? I didn’t weigh eighty pounds until I was ten! If I’d had to ride around in one of those confining, embarrassing, kid carriers for that long I’d have missed out on quite a lot. Keep in mind this is me were talking about. When I was still very little, less than half the age kids have to be to get out of the plastic purgatory these days, I would ride around in the regular, adult sized seat of my parent’s cars. Sometimes in the front! I remember leaning down to play with the gear-lever gaiter on my dad’s Super Beetle, which I thought was the coolest car in the world at the time. It made a ton of noise and it really felt like it was moving quickly when my dad drove it.

The biggest treat though was in my mother’s Oldsmobile Custom Cruiser station wagon. It was blue, and yes, it had the wood-grain paneling down the side. This was not a fast car, and my mom was not a fast driver with me in the car (I’d later learn that she rather likes sports cars, but that’s another story.), but when I rode to nursery school in that car, my mom would let me sit on the bump. The bump, for those of you who don’t know (and that includes just about everyone) was an armrest that divided the front bench seat. When it was folded down there was a gap between the two seat-backs, but there was about an eight inch gain in altitude over sitting on the flat seat. From that height I could see out of the car, see the world go by. That I knew what my home town looked like was predominantly due to that bump.

My parents would put a seatbelt around me, and didn’t drive very fast with me up there. I’m not sure that made it any safer, but I am sure I’m still here, and that there were a million other ways I could have died as a child. I’m sure too that if a parent were to be caught today doing the same thing they’d be written, if not strung, up for it. If that parent happened to be a celebrity then it would take the tabloids years to stop roasting them. I realize that we live in a different world than the one of the 1970s, but is it really so much more dangerous? Do we have to do everything we can to keep kids safe? Because if that’s true we haven’t begun to scratch the surface of what’s necessary.

But I hope we don’t. I know that it’s sad when I child is hurt. I’ve thought so ever since I was a child. But I think it may turn out worse to have a race of people who never develop because the shelter we place around them turns into a prison. There’s just too much out there to miss out on while you’re sitting at home, not moving at all lest you lose the opportunity to do so the next day.

Corvette ZR1 Trips 7.26.4 Lap! Now With Video! Sort Of!

Well, yesterday I was going on about Chevy's new super-'Vette and my displeasure at their attempts to lap a certain German racetrack faster than Nissan could with their semi-comparable GTR. I now retract those comments. I still don't care which care is faster around the Nurburgring and I won't care any more when Nissan's GTR V-spec debuts in 2010. But I'm glad Chevrolet went out and gave it a try, partly because I like the idea of going very fast mechanically over using a computer to do the same, but mostly because it allowed them to make this video as proof.

It's a very exciting thing to watch. Unlike the GTR which goes about its 'Ring lapping with an almost surgical precision, the big Vette is all over the place with the driver having to apply loads of corrective lock. It even catches air over the Flugplatz.

The video also answers the question about which car has the better motor. I'm sure the GTR's twin-turbo V6 is a great thing what with its 480bhp, but the LS9 is a truly mega-motor with what seems to be the mother of all mid-ranges and a roar that will send anything this side of a Koenigsegg CCX crawling under the nearest rock.

As I still can't figure out how to bring you video on this site I've been forced to include a link to Jalopnik below. Click it, you'll be glad you did.

Very Fast Car

And Now Chevy Is At It As Well...

My first post on this trifle of a blog was a wordy little grump about Honda jumping into the fray with a car that promised to be based less in the philosophy of driving enjoyment, and more in the camp of the extreme performers. It's a disturbing trend that I see all over the industry these days,on e countered only by the likes of Lotus with their flyweight Elises and Exiges. It's a trend that seems to have its roots in Germany's Eiffel Mountains, and that most famous strip of dangerous tarmac, the Nurburgring.

In truth I think even the ring is only a symptom. The public has little understanding of the benefits of light-weight sports cars, and those cars are gradually being regulated out of existence by increasingly draconian safety and emissions laws. Combined with a market that thinks their cars are supposed to be mobile living rooms those laws make sports cars under 3,000lbs a rare sight these days. So, if the already hard to quantify quality of driving enjoyment is also increasingly difficult to produce, who can blame manufactures for generating headlines by turning up the power and using computers to stand in for driver ability in an effort to put real speed in the hands of the masses?

Me, that's who. I'm sick of it. I'm sick of watching cars that should weigh two thirds what they do fly around tracks at break-neck speeds, consuming huge quantities of high-test gasoline. I'm sick of the mantra of speed at all costs, and I'm sick of people buying cars they can't be bothered to learn to drive properly while producers cater to them with stability control programs, and all-wheel-drive systems that stand in for the ham-fisted control in-puts of today's "sports car" buyer. I can't stand to watch the label sport attached to machines that have had all sporting integrity programmed out of them in the name of shaving precious seconds of their lap-times on the world's most exciting toll-road.

And so it is that I've had a change of heart in recent years, or maybe there's been a convergence of philosophy; I've decided that I rather like the Chevrolet Corvette. It's been a long, slow road, to such a fast car. Don't get me wrong, I've always loved the older Sting Rays with their out of this world style and mechanical fuel-injection. I like the 50s cars as well, and I've always thought that the '68-'72 cars made for attractive, and reasonably priced sportsters, at least before the market went through the roof.

Truth is though, the Corvette and I, at least at the more extreme ends of the performance scale, go our separate ways in 1966, with the arrival of the Big-Block. I am not a fan of Big-Blocks. In fact, they are the antithesis of performance in my mind. They don't really achieve anything out of the ordinary for an engine, they just do what any engine does on an enormous scale, and they have no place in a car like a Corvette. Because of the Big-Block, and their lock on the American enthusiast's mindset, I grew up think of the Corvette as an agricultural, and very heavy pseudo-sport. Factor in the decline of the entire US auto industry in the 70s and from 1967 to the present day only one car had any impact on my perception of "America's Sports Car" as being a well intentioned myth.

That car was the C4 ZR-1 of the late 80s and early 90s. With its Lotus developed, DOHC, 350ci LT5 V8 that developed between 375 and 405bhp over its lifetime, the ZR-1 was a Corvette apart. It wasn't the performance that made the car different for me, it was the way the car went about going fast. Here was a Corvette with the specification I craved.

I still get excited when I see one, but not enough buyers shared my fascination and the car was a sales dud. It did succeed in generating interest in the Corvette range, and was an image builder for Chevy as a whole, but the car was over-priced. It didn't help that, other than the monster motor, there wasn't a lot of difference from the regular L98 engined Corvette, and once the asthmatic L98 had been replaced with the muscular LT1, there was even less. Sure, if you looked c lose you might notice the swollen rear arches housing tires wide enough to deploy all that power, and if you sat in the cabin, you might be able to see past the bits falling off long enough to notice the switches for the adjustable damping system. But you had to look hard, and most people couldn't tell the difference anyway.

And so it was that I lost interest again. The Corvette and I seemed destined to sail a different course. I think would have missed the C5 update entirely,, trans-axle gearbox included had it not been for the introduction of the Z06 model. Even that car proved to be only about two thirds of what was needed, bringing the Corvette only up to the level of interesting high-performer for those who wanted something that wasn't a Porsche 911. The C6 introduction though, that got my attention. First there was the news that this Corvette would do something Corvettes just didn't do in my experience, it would shrink.

That's right, the Big, Bad Chevy got... not as big, and with that move weight was kept down. Clearly someone was on an interesting tack here and when the news of the revised Z06 broke the spec sheet read like no American production car before. Carbon fenders, aluminum chassis, magnesium roof structure, Chevy were breaking new ground. Then there was the engine; no, it hadn't sprouted overhead camshafts or 32 valves, but what it did was somehow cram all the displacement of a 427 big-block into the external dimensions of a 350. It generated 505bhp and was lighter than the the Old LT1 (Chevy had supplanted that motor with the Aluminum LS1 in 1997). Chevy then went about demonstrating that they were sweating the details by mounting the engine lower, and further back in the chassis to improve the distribution of what weight was left. I didn't even blame GM for demonstrating their new found savvy by lapping the Nurburgring in search of a competitive time.

Now there's a new ZR1, with a supercharger, 638bhp, and an even more extreme chassis. It's lapping the Ring at 7:26, three seconds faster than Nissan's reinvented GTR. It's got a top speed of 205mph as well, but somehow, this time, the ZR1 and I just aren't playing for the same team. I find myself wondering what could have been if Chevy had stuck to the philosophy they employed so well with the Z06 and made the car even lighter. What if they made it rev higher, and used the ZR!'s carbon-fiber roof to make the car even lighter? What if they had spent the money they used to develop the supercharged LS9 engine on making a coil-sprung suspension would respond even better than the Z06's?

It probably wouldn't lap as quickly, that's what. In the current climate where performances is all that the public responds to the ZR1 makes sense, and it will be a fitting flagship. It's still my favorite of the forthcoming baby super cars too. I just wonder what the world will make of it in 20 years, when we look back, will we see it as a classic icon, or a wasteful dinosaur that, perhaps like the industry as a whole, failed to change with the times.

One You Can't Buy Here III...

I like Hondas. I like most of the cars they've turned out over the years, from the first S500 (Ok, I've only seen Hondas as far back as the S600, stay with me), to the S200 my 70-something mother just bought this year (I love my mom). I think I might like Civics most of all though; truth is, they're my kind of car. I like my cars small, light, quick, nimble, and stylish; and for every era it's been on sale, the Civic has been those things, until lately anyhow. The new Civic embodies very few of the above features, in fact, maybe only one, and then only the Si version. The Si is at least quick; as quick as any US market Civic has ever been, but it's not the quickest Civic there is, or was.

For almost every generation of Civic there has been an Si. First introduced in 1984 for the Japanese market, the Si came to the US in '86 following on the heels of its CRX sister with which it shared its drive-train and suspension. Even at this point there were discrepancies between the US and Japanese cars in equipment and performance. While Japanese Civics and CRXs enjoyed the advanced specification of a fuel-injected, DOHC, 1.6-liter 4-cylinder putting out 130bhp, the US got a carburettor ff\ed 1.5-liter SOHC motor with a less inspiring 91bhp. Still, that didn't compare badly with the competition in the form of Volkswagen's Rabbit GTi (1.8-liters, 90bhp), though Toyota's Corolla FX-16 nuked it with its then new 4A-GE twin-cam (1.6-liters, 115bhp). It was enough, combined with the Civic's small size to produce what passed in the day for a warm-hatch. The real sports customers had the lighter, shorter CRX to cater to them.

As the years progressed the Civic put on size and weight with every revision, but gained in power and sophistication as well so that by the time the 1992 rolled around the EG Civic Si was putting out 125bhp and sported what functioned as double-wishbone suspension, as well as four-wheel disk brakes. Once again the Japanese cars were allowed to out-run the American market. The Civic Si in Nippon sporting the first version of the DOHC VTEC 1.6-liter B16A putting out 158bhp, and if that weren't enough for the island nation an upgraded B16 putting out 168bhp was contained within the new Civic SiR. The US market would get the B16 in 160bhp guise in the CRX replacing Civic Del Sol. I owned one of those cars and the motor was terrific, but the targa roof that indirectly gave the car it's name robbed the chassis of anything like rigidity and spoiled the handling.

It would take the introduction of the EM Civic Si in 1999 to give the B16A the home it deserved. By this time the Si badge had moved to the more popular coupe body. It was a great package for around 17 grand; the B16 motor was smooth and revved to a stratospheric 8,500rpm, delivering its power in a rush at the top. But even then, the Japanese held the best in reserve. The original (EK9) Civic Type-R was a factory racer in the best tradition. Some say that it loses out the the legendary Integra Type-R which was slightly more stable, but by any standard the Civic was fast and sharp. Gone was any remnant of base-model Civic chassis, only the body and interior had any connection. The shifter was one of the quickest in FWD history, the suspension, combined with a well judge LSD (Limited Slip Differential), allowed the rear wheels to whip into a drift at the merest hint of a corner, but the best part was the motor.

In the US the B16B is a myth, a motor imported under the nose of customs and quietly slipped into the engine bays of lesser Civics in attempts to create something resembling the Civic Type-R. In Japan, it was a motor that could be bought off dealers lots in a light weight factory hot rod and driven up canyon roads the same afternoon. It produces no less than 185bhp from the same 1.6-liters as the B16A, but it does so at a truly racer like 8,200rpm, before maxing out at an ear-splitting 9,000rpm. In the lightened chassis of the already lighter Civic Hatchback it made for a 0-60mph time under 6-seconds. It was fast by any standards.

And it never came to the US. For reasons best known to themselves (The Integra Type-R was already on its way to becoming THE tuner car of the 90s) Honda decided that only the Japanese market would support the Super Civic. the second generation (EP3) car made it to Europe with 200bhp and a six speed. The US got another, heavier Si sporting only the same 160bhp from a much lower-revving and less charismatic 2.0-liter engine. Even worse, Honda decided that the double wishbone front suspension wasn't pulling tis weight and replaced it with cheaper, and crappier struts. US drivers learned to salve their wounds with the phrase, "Well, at least this one has more torque."

This time around though it looked like the US was finally through with the short end of the stick and ready to hand it to Europe. The current Si has a 198bhp motor that revs all the way to 8,000rpm. And while the front struts seem to be here to stay, at least were not saddled with the European Type-R's solid rear axle. We even got an LSD, which the Type-R had given up in Europe with the last generation and hadn't re-grown. Sure it's improbably large for a small coupe, but at least the US could hold its head high, at last Japan gave us the good stuff.

But good though our stuff is, the Japanese have saved the best for themselves. The current JDM Type_R is a monumental machine with 220bhp and a modified chassis that seems nearly immune to either under, or over-steer; it simply grips, and grips, and goes, like a rocket. And with their amazingly cool Single Vehicle Approval process, EU residents can import their own. Damn.

I want one. I'd save and buy one if only Honda would bring it in. It's lightened and hardened and exactly what I like a car to be. I want the MOMO wheel, and the Recaro seats, and the steering precision. I think some of you would buy one too, enough of us that there's a market for a fuel efficient, small performance sedan. It's just too bad we'll never find out what could be, or what might have been.