B/F: The Drive Thru #31

• A Chevrolet Camaro is less expensive to lease than a Malibu right now

• 2024 Polestar 2 Adds More Power and 300-Mile Range
• Lightyear's Operating Company Atlas Technologies Declared Bankrupt
• Amazon's self-driving unit Zoox puts driverless taxi on road

• First Images of Alfa Romeo C43: Goal for 2023 F1 Season is to 'Aim Higher'
• Side-by-side: Compare the 2023 Ferrari SF-23 and 2022 F1-75
• Hamilton in the process of selecting Brad Pitt’s co-star for F1 movie

Ford returning to F1 with Redbull?

Ford Announces Return to F1!

Netflix reminder - Drive to Survive Season 5 starts Feb 24, 2023

2023 F1 “car launch” - did ANYTHING really change?

• 'Barn find' 1979 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am driven just 37 miles up for auction
• Danika Patrick's ARCA car is still for sale on Facebook Marketplace

The Boomer Special

• Mercedes-Benz cars to have 'supercomputers', unveils Google partnership
• 2024 BMW X5 M and X6 M Gain Hybrid System and Go Full Competition

• The Grand Tour Cancellation Ends Jeremy Clarkson's Post-Top Gear Era
• Dealership Makes Woman Sitting Right In Front Of Them Confirm She's Not A Robot
• Catalytic converter stolen from Oscar Mayer Wienermobile in Las Vegas
• Hertz to Pay $168 Million in False Arrest Settlements

• Hendrick-built Garage 56 Le Mans entry hits track in VIR test
• Alfa Romeo teases a return to Endurance Racing after exiting F1
• Forza Motorsport Looks Fantastic, But the Release Date's Still Up in the Air
• Unimproved/Off-Road Course coming to Summit Point!

WRC Season is heating up, added 2 new venues to 2023 Schedule

Tony Kanaan is Retiring!

• All the Superbowl 2023 Commercials
• Safety Concerns as More Maryland Drivers Flock to Historic License Plates

KIA “Binky Dad”

Will Ferril is back with GM EVs

Jeep “electric boogie”

RAM premature electrification

Fast & Furious X (10)

Anti-Tesla FSD

Honorable mentions - Weathertech

Honorable mentions - Uber One Jingle

Honorable mentions - Travola T-Mobile

• Elon Musk reportedly fired a Twitter engineer on the spot after the worker told him his popularity was sinking on the site
• Here’s What We Could See at Tesla’s Investor Day
• Tesla coming back to California, Musk announces

• Volkswagen design chief ousted over retro designs, replaced by Bentley design head
• ICYMI - VR & W engines Explained!
• The Wild 2024 Lamborghini Invencible and Autentica Are a Fitting Farewell to the V-12

Executive Producer Tania: [00:00:00] The Drive Thru is GTM’s monthly news episode and is sponsored in part by organizations like HPTEjunkie. com, Hooked on Driving, AmericanMuscle. com, CollectorCarGuide. net, Project Motoring, Garage Style Magazine, and many others. If you are interested in becoming a sponsor of the Drive Thru, look no further than www.

gtmotorsports. org. Click about, and then advertising. Thank you again to everyone that supports Grand Touring Motorsports, our podcast, Brake Fix, and all the other services we provide.

Crew Chief Brad: Welcome to drive through episode number 31. This is our monthly recap where we put together a menu of automotive, motorsport, and random car adjacent news.

Crew Chief Eric: After some minor Technical difficulties. Are you guys ready for this?

Executive Producer Tania: Yes. I can now fully concentrate on my unpreparedness that my technical difficulties are resolved.

Crew Chief Eric: All you did was buy [00:01:00] time. So Brad could read the articles this month. And you know how many articles I read?

Executive Producer Tania: Zero. How many more is that than usual?

Crew Chief Brad: Bingo. Now let’s pull up to window number one for some news. Just news. Just news. That’s it. All we have is news. Well, we’ve got news about some of the stuff we’ve been doing.

Let’s talk about Rolex. Oh yeah. Let’s

Crew Chief Eric: do that.

Crew Chief Brad: I’m not talking about the watch, although the watch is involved. I mean, like the actual race, the Rolex 24 hour race in Daytona.

Crew Chief Eric: It has been five years since we have been to Rolex in person. Although we religiously watch it every year, regardless of what’s going on.

This is the first time we’ve been there on purpose, right?

Crew Chief Brad: In

Crew Chief Eric: person.

Crew Chief Brad: This is also Tanya’s, if I’m remembering correctly, her first official professional race attendance.

Crew Chief Eric: Endurance race, sports

Crew Chief Brad: car race. Not

Executive Producer Tania: professional because I’ve been to F1 twice.

Crew Chief Brad: That’s true. Endurance. That’s right.

Executive Producer Tania: Endurance specifically.

Crew Chief Eric: And?

Executive Producer Tania: And? [00:02:00]

Crew Chief Eric: Let’s get her thoughts.

Executive Producer Tania: Florida side. No, just kidding.

Crew Chief Eric: They’ll be talking about Florida, man.

Executive Producer Tania: No, it was fun. I think it’s more accessible, is probably the first word that comes to mind, more accessible to someone versus having had the experience multiple times of going to a Formula One race where now the tickets are even way more expensive than when I ever went.

And then you’re there for such a brief time. You don’t get access to anything. This is the complete opposite, where basically, if your feet can take you there, you can go there, and it’s way more affordable in terms of ticket price and what that’s granting you access for, and even if you went all out on everything that you could get access for, it still pales in comparison to a Formula 1 ticket.

I don’t know how that compares. To NASCAR or other forms. I’ve never been to a NASCAR race either, but it was definitely an interesting experience. I will say what I didn’t expect was [00:03:00] the car show that was happening at the same time.

Crew Chief Eric: Oh, in the paddock

Executive Producer Tania: in the paddock parking lots and even like the parking lot outside of the venue.

It was like everybody. Came from somewhere, tons of different out of state tags or, you know, different specialty place. They pulled their garage queens out of the garage and took them for a stroll to Daytona. That’s aside from marks that had specific corrals, like the Porsche Corral, BMW had a Corral, and et cetera, et cetera, where they’re showcasing You know, members cars and whatnot, but still, like, if you’re just walking around the parking lots, people had some pretty cool stuff.

And so I wasn’t expecting that. I didn’t know that was a thing, but that was pretty cool. So there’s a whole other experience of not just watching the race, but car watching as you walk through the infield and around the outside.

Crew Chief Eric: I always feel like events like Rolex, petite salons, other ones that we’ve been to, it’s more family feeling because even when you wander around the infields or the outfields, like places like Rhode, [00:04:00] Atlanta, there’s people everywhere.

They’re camping all over the place, bonfires parties. I mean, the longer the race, the more chaotic it is. You don’t get that same experience. Like you said, in an F1 race, that’s 90 minutes and it’s over. I mean, there’s other races that happen, you know, headliners and things like that, that go on at those other races, but it’s very different in that endurance IMSA setting.

Executive Producer Tania: Yeah. There’s other races. Cause I don’t really have like Porsche cup races or vintage races, blah, blah, blah. And like the Saturday before formula one and, or in the morning, those go by really quick too. Yeah. 45 minute hour races or something. It’s like, okay. By time you’ve found your seat and sat down, it’s like half the race is over.

This is a lot harder. Well, at least the Austin track is a lot harder to kind of navigate around.

Crew Chief Brad: You know, Tanya mentioned how the track was very accessible, much more accessible than. Say Austin, but dare I say it wasn’t really from a walking standpoint, it was kind of one way in one way out to get to the infield, which is kind of frustrating.

Basically, if you’re on one end of the [00:05:00] track, you’ve got to basically walk all the way around. The entire infield to get to the outfield or to get to the stands and vice versa. So if you do decide to go to Rolex, Daytona, make sure you bring your walking shoes with you. Cause you’re going to need them

Crew Chief Eric: or take the trams

Crew Chief Brad: or take the tram with 15 million other people that are doing the exact same thing.

Executive Producer Tania: That’s pretty simple to navigate around Daytona and it’s a 24 hour race. So there’s always something going on. So there’s always something to see. And the visibility of the track is pretty good. Multiple spots, you’re always with the action. So to speak,

Crew Chief Brad: that helps. So there’s zero elevation change at Daytona.

Executive Producer Tania: Yes,

Crew Chief Eric: you are the elevation change. When you’re in the grandstands,

Executive Producer Tania: the elevation change was like walking through the tunnel to like, go under the oval and come back out the other side.

Crew Chief Eric: From that perspective, you’re right. Daytona plus the infield. It’s a pretty simple configuration compared to something more challenging like the Glen or road [00:06:00] Atlanta, but still the experience when you go to those other tracks is very similar.

Though those races are shorter. The support races are quite long. I mean, well, let’s take Watkins Glen as an example. The official race is six hours long, but the Tioga downs race is four hours. So you’re there in the day for 10 hours of GT racing. Even though it’s, you know, they’re not consecutive, it’s just different groups running throughout the day.

And then there’s the other support races and headliners that go with that. So IMSA events are just action packed from sunup to sundown in some cases, multiple times over.

Crew Chief Brad: You can’t knock the value for money. No, it was like what?

Crew Chief Eric: 75 bucks for the tickets.

Crew Chief Brad: 75 for how many hours of actual legitimate racing.

Yeah, it’s ridiculous

Crew Chief Eric: on top of that this year was the biggest field in Rolex history and like the longest time 61 cars started on grid amazingly enough. Daytona is so big it didn’t feel like we were watching cars on the beltway running around and getting in each other’s way. And obviously [00:07:00] traffic splits up throughout the day and throughout the evening and conditions change and things happen in cars break.

But. It was pretty exciting to see everybody mixing it up. And obviously we have new classes, new cars, new everything. I felt the racing personally, it was like a long test weekend because there were so many breakages, so many new cars, some of the cars, I think we’re a little disappointing and maybe they’ll get better throughout the season as, especially as we get closer to Lamont’s

Executive Producer Tania: I’m not as familiar with that whole balance of power thing or balance of performance, excuse me, whatever you want to call it.

It was just. Often frustrating to watch, because to watch lap after lap of Go Iron Dames, the all female team driving the Lamborghini Huracan, to watch that car lap after lap not be able to get around a 911, I’m like, you’ve got to be kidding me.

Crew Chief Eric: When in real life, that Huracan would destroy that 911.

Crew Chief Brad: After other conversations, Tanya was very disappointed in the lack of a manual transmission in any of the vehicles.[00:08:00]

Crew Chief Eric: That’s been a while since they’ve had manuals in those cars.

Crew Chief Brad: What the hell kind of race cars are these? What’s the point? They don’t even shift their own gears. Exactly. We need another point of failure. Maybe we should throw some amateurs out there.

Crew Chief Eric: It would make the racing more interesting. You miss a shift.

I mean, you’ve blown that lap, right? And somebody gets around you. That is frustrating. And that’s what we complain about a lot. Complain is a strong word, but I have an issue with it. I mean, some people like it. Balance of power is great for television, but I feel as though, you know, interviewing drivers over the course of this last season and talking to other people, the consensus often seems to be that, you know, a it’s out of their control, the sanctioning bodies make all those decisions, but It’s not racing as racing was intended to be years ago.

It’s like, if your car can’t compete, build power to weight or whatever, build a better mousetrap when it comes down to it,

Crew Chief Brad: it hampers innovation, the technological leap. And I guess that’s where racing series like [00:09:00] F1 and IndyCar come into play because they do have those less restrictions and they don’t have a balance of performance or something like that.

It’s a

Crew Chief Eric: giant BOP because. They’re basically spec races. All formula cars are the same. We’re going to talk about them more when we talk about the unveiling of the 2023 cars and stuff and the Indy cars are the same. It’s like, it’s 2 chassis and you know, 2 motors and everybody basically drives the same car.

So sports car is always been grounded in the manufacturers are coming to the table to do battle with one another. But as soon as balance of power became what it is today, I think we lost some of, to your point, Brad, that ingenuity, that imagination. Like I’ve joked before, you don’t see the six wheel TRLs and the chaparrals with the fans on the bottom with the

Crew Chief Brad: front wheel drive Nissan.

Crew Chief Eric: Exactly. All that stuff is just gone. You know,

Crew Chief Brad: watching the Corvette C8. I’m not really impressed with that car. I’m a Corvette, a team Corvette fan, but I’m not really impressed with the C8 R bring back the C7 R although I will say. The pit crew was doing a [00:10:00] phenomenal job. The car would get passed two or three times by the Aston Martin, kept getting around them.

And then they pull into the pits at the same time. The Corvette was consistently out in front of the Aston Martin, every single pit stop. So the pit crew was on point, but the car itself just could not. Hold it. Disappointing. I will say it’s more fun to watch on TV with a group of friends sitting around smoking and joking, as they say.

But one thing I do love about the EMSA series is the speed differentials between the classes, the prototype one, the prototype two cars, the fact that they’re after, what is it, three or four laps, they’re lapping the GT cars is insane. And they’re all out there racing together. It’s just.

Crew Chief Eric: Coverage on TV is better, right?

They’re giving you all the angles, but you can’t really. Fathom the closing rates, you know, the breaking speeds into the corners, things like that, when you see it live and the sound itself, we’ve talked about that before, a totally different experience.

Crew Chief Brad: Speaking of the sound, something was missing [00:11:00] this year.

And I think, you know, exactly what it was.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah, it was the other Corvette and the Corvettes old motor.

Crew Chief Brad: Yes. The C seven are the sound of the earth ripping itself apart. Trying to stay together when it’s Corvette pounds down the road. It was just. Gone. We used to say that the Lexus sounded as good and the Mercedes sounded as good.

Crew Chief Eric: Correction. The Mercedes sounds bad.

Crew Chief Brad: No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You see, that’s where you’re wrong, but I digress. So the C7R was missing. I think some of the LMP, whatever the top class

Crew Chief Eric: LMDH, the GTP cars,

Crew Chief Brad: some of the, the LMDH cars sounded really, really good, but they still didn’t have that. Pounding on your chest, really throaty, nice growl.

So I missed the C7R sound, which is a big part of going to these races. That as you mentioned, the auditory feelings and everything you get. The faster cars. Yes. The speed differential is insane. The flashing of the lights when [00:12:00] you’re coming up on traffic, so

Crew Chief Eric: annoying.

Crew Chief Brad: If I was a GT car driver, I would purposefully sit in the middle of the road and make you fucking go around me at the worst part of the corner.

You can sit there and flash me. The restarts. For no reason in the last two hours of the race, three hours of the race.

Crew Chief Eric: That’s new too, right? The way they’re doing restarts now where they’ve adopted the whole NASCAR idea. SRO does this too, where they’re re gridding. Dude, we lost how many laps watching them re grid up and then go to green again.

And then it was like, Oh, we have not any action for a while. Let’s throw a yellow.

Crew Chief Brad: Well, not even that. It was also because the Porsche, uh, LMDH car was trying to catch up. So, I’m sensing a bit of Porsche and IMSA collusion.

Crew Chief Eric: Forever unclean.

Crew Chief Brad: One of my favorite parts of the race was after every yellow, and after every restart, the safety car, Coming around out of the bus stop would floor it and you can see it just kind of take off and it was like, God damn, that McCann [00:13:00] has some legs on it.

Holy shit. So I was pretty impressed with both the CT, the black wing and the, uh, the McCann or whatever the McCann turbo or whatever it was, they were ripping coming out of the final turn. That was always fun to watch. The checkers outside the track was greater than the concessions inside.

Crew Chief Eric: It was good value for money, actually.

That was good. Eats great value

Crew Chief Brad: for money. Yeah, the weather was phenomenal. I think this is the first year that the weather was clear, the entire race,

Crew Chief Eric: and warm too. It was actually very, very pleasant.

Crew Chief Brad: I don’t think you got any lower than 55, 50, 55 even at night. It was really nice.

Crew Chief Eric: Would you do it again and if the answer’s no.

Would you consider a different IMSA race?

Executive Producer Tania: Both. I would do it again, and I would go to a different one.

Crew Chief Eric: Maybe VIR, the Glenn, mid Ohio?

Executive Producer Tania: I’m hoping to go to VIR myself, with my car. I need a new shirt!

Crew Chief Brad: As you mentioned, there were way more people than 2018, so that did kind of, you know, Take away from me [00:14:00] from the experience because we didn’t get to do as much as we had in 2018 because there was just too many people to wait through.

I did say that it’s better to watch on TV with a bunch of friends, but I do want to go again and actually stay in the infield and camp just once. Yeah, I think that would be like that could add to have a home base. actually in the infield to go to and from, I think would make the experience a little bit better on site.

Crew Chief Eric: Do you see the appeal of endurance sports car racing now that you’ve seen it in person versus on TV?

Executive Producer Tania: I don’t know that I needed to see it in person, right? It’s not that I was unaware of this discipline of racing or have never seen it before. Road racing tends to be far more interesting sometimes because the top prototype cars aside, it’s The lower class, it’s like, it’s an 911, it’s a Mercedes, it’s a Lexus.

I can relate to these cars. Like, even a Huracan, technically you could relate to it, but that’s a little bit out of my price bracket, right? That’s what makes road racing a little more interesting, because it’s like, ooh, look at that Audi A4. Yeah, [00:15:00] I have an Audi. I don’t, but I have an Audi A4. I have this BMW, right?

Versus like, Formula 1, it’s like, I don’t have a fucking Formula car. You know, and it’s like NASCAR is like, okay, yeah, and I don’t have a NASCAR and okay. Cause it says Camry on the front ain’t no Camry.

Crew Chief Eric: That’s like that Supra that they have in NASCAR. Now I don’t, that has no relation to the real thing.

That’s all I’m saying. But yes, I hope that as more people, you know, maybe shift their attention or maybe getting bored of other disciplines that they. Turn their eyes to endurance sports car racing, because to your point, it is really relatable and it’s really exciting too. I look forward to the rest of the season.

I mean, obviously I’m looking forward to Lamont’s I’ll be recording from France and things like that while I’m there. So I’m super excited to be at the crown jewel of sports car endurance racing this year. So looking forward to more on that, but we do have to move on. We have to talk about some other things that happened in the last month.

I know we’ve covered this in a another special episode that people can tune into on our [00:16:00] Patreon, but some quick thoughts on the DC auto show.

Well, that

Crew Chief Eric: about wraps that up. And if you want to know the full report, you can check it out for free on our Patreon.

Crew Chief Brad: I just want to say, I went to the Richmond international auto show this weekend.

Oh man. Because we’re kind of in the market for a larger vehicle to replace her pilot. If the DC auto show womp, the Richmond auto show was The

Executive Producer Tania: DC auto show to retract my statement was actually the Toyota auto show.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah, 100 percent.

Executive Producer Tania: Oh, nice. If you were looking for a Toyota, you needed to be At that show, they had every model possible and then some on display.

Crew Chief Eric: And if you were tired of Toyota, you could go look at all the Hyundais.

Crew Chief Brad: Toyota had probably 20 percent of the entire area, which unlike the DC convention center, the Richmond convention center is one floor.

Executive Producer Tania: Toyota had 50 percent of one whole convention room area.

Crew Chief Brad: Yeah, that’s crazy. So I did try and sit [00:17:00] in a Supra.

And one thing that really grinds my gears about these auto shows is they disconnect the batteries. So all these vehicles with power seats, they have them set to someone, Eric or Tanya size, the person that moved them into the arena. So someone like me who wants to put the seat all the way back and, you know, get in and fiddle with things.

Every car in the place is uncomfortable because I cannot adjust any of the seats.

Crew Chief Eric: I thought there was a solution to this. It’s like police Academy. You just come up and rip the seat out and you sit in the backseat. Isn’t that how you do it in every car? I

Crew Chief Brad: totally think I broke the third row seat of this Toyota Sienna that was allegedly sold to somebody.

So if you’re listening to this, you know, I hope it’s covered under warranty. I’m sorry.

Crew Chief Eric: Speaking of Hyundai’s, we got to see a new one that we actually wasn’t even on our radar and they call it the Ioniq 6. And so we had some choice. opinions about it. Maybe some choice words if you want to really summarize it down.

It looks like a Saab. It looks like a Saab 900 from the 80s, and you’ll never convince me otherwise. But [00:18:00] what was shocking was the other day I spotted a commercial with all people, Evan Bacon, talking about how he loves his Ioniq 6. And it includes his daughter, but I don’t know what her name is. But the punchline of the commercial was, you know, Ev, like Kev.

What?

Crew Chief Brad: Yeah, I don’t understand. You know what this car looks like to me? It looks like the Oldsmobile Aurora

Crew Chief Eric: with that

Crew Chief Brad: giant swooping cabin.

Crew Chief Eric: At first glance, Jon Capisci and I from Project Motoring, we came down the stairs and we said, what is that 9 11 looking thing? And then when you saw it in profile, you’re like, That’s a Saab 900 Turbo.

But no, the reason I bring up commercials is because other things that happen in parts of the world where they don’t care about things that go vroom, vroom, vroom, they go Omaha, 43, hut, hut, hut. We’re talking about the Super Bowl and the commercials they’re in. So let’s get your guys recap on the 2023 automotive Super Bowl commercials.

Crew Chief Brad: I have to be completely [00:19:00] honest with you. I watched exactly 15 minutes of the Super Bowl before I was asleep.

Crew Chief Eric: Was that the Rihanna part?

Crew Chief Brad: So I missed the halftime show completely. So I watched one possession for each team and that was it, then I was done. That’s all you needed. So I can’t really speak to any of these commercials.

Crew Chief Eric: So there was a bunch, I mean, obviously there’s lists out there that have every commercial that was designed for the Super Bowl that aired before, during, and after, but they’re specifically car ones. We’ve tried to highlight some of those. They come from Kia, Jeep, et cetera. So why don’t we run through some of these really quickly, Tanya, and get your thoughts on the commercials.

Executive Producer Tania: It felt like there were less car commercials in general than in past years, or maybe they were not quite as impactful in general. I don’t know. They felt different. The main hitters that are usually there were missing. So maybe that’s what kind of made the whole thing feel different. A little off in terms of the commercial experience when watching the Super Bowl.

Crew Chief Eric: Last year was the one with Eugene Levy and the Nissan

Executive Producer Tania: [00:20:00] Z, yeah, and

Crew Chief Eric: you always get the Audi ones, which you think is like the next transporter movies coming. Like there’s these just kind of epic commercials out there.

Executive Producer Tania: No. And this time we had Blinky Dad with Kia and Blinky being the little child’s baby’s pacifier.

And this family that’s gone somewhere in the mountains and then gets to the hotel and realizes that baby’s missing Blinky and dad takes off in the Kia Telluride X Pro all terrain edition super all wheel drive SUV and he’s tearing through the mountains and I forget if he’s going across dirt snowed roads and hills and all this stuff.

And

Crew Chief Eric: at the bottom there’s a disclaimer that says Professional driver on a closed course. Do not attempt at home.

Executive Producer Tania: No, the disclaimer says don’t drive your Telluride off road. It will break. Like, is this actually meant to be some Bronco, whatever, or Jeep Wrangler that can handle all this? I don’t know. I mean, they had it shooting out of a cement,

Crew Chief Eric: like the Italian job or

Executive Producer Tania: pipe launching out of it.

I’m like, yeah, launcher Keo. See what happens. It

Crew Chief Eric: is a [00:21:00] cool looking truck. Don’t get me wrong, but yeah, I don’t think it’s marketed as like trail rated rugged off roader, you know, substitute for other brand here. But yeah, the binky dad thing, I don’t know. Will Ferrell was back again for like the third year in a row, peddling.

Some EV from General Motors. He

Crew Chief Brad: was peddling all the EVs from General Motors.

Executive Producer Tania: I like this commercial because it was the GMC whatever version, because that’s how much I pay attention to GMC pickup trucks. I thought it was funny because it was GMC EVs and Netflix. And so he was driving through different Netflix TV shows.

So there was The Walking Dead, there was Squid Game, there was Bridgerton, there was Stranger Things, there’s like characters, actors, actresses from the actual like episodes that are like cameoing in here because in the beginning he gets bit by a Walking Dead zombie. In the end, he is a zombie driving the EV.

Crew Chief Eric: Are they trying to tell you something? Cause I’ve said that about driving Hondas for a long time.

Executive Producer Tania: Did you become numb?

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah, exactly. [00:22:00] They followed up with the Jeep electric boogie commercials. They’ve got variations of that for the 4XE platform. You see them now all the time. The Wrangler and the Grand Cherokee and, you know, snow up to their door handles doing 80 miles an hour.

Executive Producer Tania: Yeah. This one wasn’t bad. If this one was going through a safari, going through the forest, Going up the mountain, things like that. It was an upbeat commercial. It had the electric boogie woogie music playing. So you were happy. It had fun animals, smiling, that whole kind of thing. So it was a different tone than some of the other commercials.

And it was just, you know, Hey, look how much fun you’re going to have in our electric Jeep. You too can smile with giraffes.

Crew Chief Eric: I will say the 4XE commercials, the new hybrid Jeep platforms do have my interest. I am curious to go test drive one to see what the torque is like. How it puts down the power, how it uses it.

I mean, obviously we’re accustomed to the Pacifica hybrid and how it functions. I am really curious how the Jeep works and that kind of stuff. So you got my attention. Stellantis.

Crew Chief Brad: Speaking of Stellantis, the premature electrification [00:23:00] commercial, it’s like one of those pharmaceutical drug commercials for, yes.

Yeah. But having these couples talk about how they bought electric trucks and they’re always running out of juice and everything, it looks like it has the potential to be an excellent commercial.

Crew Chief Eric: But does it have our disclaimer? If you suffer from Stellantis for more than four hours, please consult your nearest physician.

Probably not.

Executive Producer Tania: This commercial is all about the new Ram 1500 Rev, which they debuted at CES earlier this year and whatnot. So it’s like how much better the Ram Rev is going to be in your life versus You know, everything else. It was a pretty good commercial. So definitely go back and watch it.

Crew Chief Eric: If it’s not named after a prehistoric lizard creature, nobody’s going to buy it.

And then there was 10.

Executive Producer Tania: Okay. The only good thing about this movie was the scene of the alpha. And I was like, okay, it’s another one. I don’t think I saw nine. I don’t know if I saw eight. I can’t remember. And 10 going to be two parts, so it’s really 10 and 11.

Crew Chief Eric: Just like 5 and 6 were.

Executive Producer Tania: And if you don’t know what we’re talking about yet, [00:24:00] Fast and the Furious.

Crew Chief Eric: Yes, I’m excited.

Executive Producer Tania: Now that’s what I call Fast and the Furious 137.

Crew Chief Eric: Oh yeah, it is going to be like those now CDs. They’re just going to go on forever.

Executive Producer Tania: It’s going to be Fast and the Furious 20, and it’s going to be that scene from Days of Thunder where they’re racing in the wheelchairs, except there’ll be geriatric racing in the wheelchairs.

Crew Chief Eric: Well no, now they’re bringing in Jason Momoa to replace it. God knows who. So we’ll just keep adding action heroes. It’ll become like the expendables after a while.

Crew Chief Brad: I think he’s replacing the rock because the rock has not been back. The

Crew Chief Eric: rock’s too

Executive Producer Tania: busy making turds like black Adam. So come on. That’s because the rock and Vin Diesel can’t work together.

That’s

Crew Chief Brad: yeah. That’s the real reason. The rock and Taye Diggs, they got into an argument.

Executive Producer Tania: Then there’s multiple people. Cause there was definitely a beef with the Vin Diesel.

Crew Chief Eric: I think it all centers around Vin Diesel.

Executive Producer Tania: All I’m going to say is. I haven’t watched Slumberland, okay, which also stars Jason Momoa, which is based off of the cartoon or comic strip Little Nemo.

[00:25:00] Yes. The kid on the flying bed or whatever. There was an original Nintendo game based on it too. Blah, blah, blah. I don’t know the full story. care. He’s in that. And when the first scene of him sitting in the car, I swear to God, I was like, Oh my God, it’s slumberland. Except he’s like, gonna race a car.

Crew Chief Eric: That other movie slumberland that you mentioned the little Nemo story, that’s going to end up like the Aladdin Sinbad movie from the 90s.

I had that thought. It’s the Mandela effect. Like we all know it exists. It happened. It was a real thing. There’s a trailer for it. And yet there is zero evidence. that it ever existed. If you ask Sinbad, he’ll tell you. I don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s lies. It’s a conspiracy.

Executive Producer Tania: The evidence is here.

And now we’ve said it. There was a movie slumberland with Jason Momoa.

Crew Chief Eric: You heard it here first,

Executive Producer Tania: based off a little Nemo and the flying bed.

Crew Chief Eric: There was a commercial that spoke to you. Did you get up out of your chair? Were you cheering at this kind of laughed

Executive Producer Tania: and not because it’s funny to see what was being depicted, but [00:26:00] it’s just like, funny because of all the troubles that they’re facing.

Crew Chief Eric: And who are we talking about, pray tell?

Executive Producer Tania: Tesla.

Crew Chief Eric: Oh, shucks.

Executive Producer Tania: So the thing about this commercial actually is it did not air across all states. So this was Maryland and like I think two or three other states that this actually aired in. So the majority of people commercial. That’s

Crew Chief Eric: okay. We have a YouTube link for it.

Executive Producer Tania: And it’s this dawn project and it’s basically the anti a false self driving some sort of advocacy group probably based out of California since California is actively trying to sue against the false naming of that. And they put together this whole video and they’ve got like little dummy toddlers and children that are like are walking across the street and just get run over by Teslas that aren’t stopping.

So. Now, I didn’t make the video, so I am skeptical. I can be. Were they really in full self driving and didn’t see them? Or is there a little bit of BS going on here to paint them in a bad light? I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. There has [00:27:00] definitely been other videos of Tesla’s doing safety drives and whatnot where they have hit objects that have gone in front of them because they haven’t seen them.

So it’s not out of the realm that this is possible. But then on the other side of the camp, you have all the Tesla people. There’s been reports of people literally putting their own children in front of the car and letting it stop. And I’m like, you’re a psychopath because you must not love your child.

Cause I wouldn’t trust anything right now to like not run my kid over. Like how dumb are you? But anyway,

Crew Chief Eric: that’s intense.

Executive Producer Tania: I was not expecting this commercial.

Crew Chief Eric: You rejoiced. I’m sure of it.

Executive Producer Tania: I don’t like that it’s advertised as something that it’s doing something it can’t do.

Crew Chief Eric: Oh, yeah. Like, just

Executive Producer Tania: change the name.

Crew Chief Eric: Oh, our fans know. I mean, there’s a whole retrospective episode about this exact topic that you can review. But

Executive Producer Tania: no, I am not

Crew Chief Eric: part of the Dome Project. But send her some leaflets. She’s definitely interested. All kidding aside, there are some other honorable mentions on this list. We got to tip our hat to [00:28:00] weather tech.

Obviously they sponsor IMSA and other racing series out there. So it was one of those, Oh, that’s sweet moments where they talk about, you know, the factory and made in USA and all that kind of fun stuff. So great support weather tech. They make good stuff and they support racing. So. Awesome. The next one was the Uber one jingle.

I very much enjoyed this. I thought it was cute, similar to the YouTube short. That’s floating out around there about the windows theme song and how Microsoft got it right. If you’ve seen that it’s like a Microsoft Azure type of commercial, but there was one other one that was pretty awesome and it goes back to one of our crossover episodes from season three and that’s the T Mobile John Travolta.

Musical commercial. Garbage. Hot garbage.

Executive Producer Tania: I heard about this commercial like there was going to be some John Travolta thing and I don’t know why I had it in my head from what I misheard that it was going to be Saturday Night Fever and I was totally confused when this commercial was going on because I’m like, what?

This is not Saturday Night Fever.

Crew Chief Eric: What’s the two dudes [00:29:00] from Scrubs, right? And then Travolta shows up.

Executive Producer Tania: Yeah, Donald Faison and Zach Braff. Because those two are in a bunch of T Mobile commercials recently together. Yeah. As neighbors in this neighborhood that they’re showing. And then suddenly, randomly, John Travolta’s here.

I don’t know why.

Crew Chief Brad: Isn’t he moving in

Executive Producer Tania: and then they bust out in Greece song.

Crew Chief Eric: It made me smile because it made me think of Steven Izzy and the review of trade and paint that we did back earlier in this season. So I’m not sure where his spray on hair went though. He was bald. Well, he was bald and trade and paint.

That was a weird hat. He didn’t have hair, like a bad toupee. Did he?

Executive Producer Tania: Yeah.

Crew Chief Eric: I’m going to pull it up. We’re going to pull it up as part of our season three retrospective.

Executive Producer Tania: You’re right. You’re right. You’re right. You’re right. There was hair. It’s right on the cover art.

Crew Chief Eric: So as we wrap out our showcase, let’s talk a little bit about season three highlights.

This is the first time you’re dialing in to the show. I want to let you guys know, this is the last episode of season three officially. And it’s. Episode number 82 for season three. That’s not counting all the bonus [00:30:00] material that went out on Patreon that won’t come out way later, maybe in season four at some point.

So record setting number of episodes for us, you know, more than one a week. For sure. We doubled down and tripled down some of the weeks throughout the year. Just to get content to you guys as fast as we could. And there’s some really great stuff left to come. And I’m sure you guys have some great memories from season three as well.

I want to start off with one that Tanya and I did together, which was the Zymal episode with Chuck Bennett. Talk about an incredible storyteller and what an epic journey his career has taken.

Executive Producer Tania: Yes. That was definitely a very fun episode to listen to. The man has a wealth. Of knowledge and experiences, and it’s interesting to have heard a story of like where he started in his career and his life and how he switched to Zymal and everything he knows about it.

Crew Chief Eric: And you got to flex your technical skills too, especially the episode we did with Rick Lee from Evolve and other things like that. So you get invested in different ways in the show too. So it’s always a lot of fun. I like the bonus [00:31:00] content when he started talking about Ralph Lorenz, Bugatti and Einstein’s car and all this kind of these other projects that he worked on.

Those are really, really cool too. I mean, just fascinating guy. Again, to your point, wealth of information and again, a great storyteller. I was really fortunate. I did a one on one with Barbie the welder. Her life’s journey is another one that is just like. You just sit in awe and you’re like, wow, how she pulled herself up from her bootstraps and how she’s become this noted artist in the community.

And she is related to the motorsport and vehicle community. She’s done work for SEMA. She’s done things for Harley Davidson and things like that. So if you’ve missed that episode, what a great and inspiring story that she told about her life’s journey. We were really fortunate this year, just by chance, we met Don Wieberg from GarageDom Magazine, and he introduced us to the world of auctions, classic cars, private collections, this whole idea that he’s got that he calls the Garage Lifestyle.

In general, I have to say [00:32:00] Don’s been a great addition to our team, and he brings some immediate comedy to every episode that he’s on, especially the What Should I Buy episodes.

Executive Producer Tania: Those are always fun. And that is a group of folks that have been in some of the more recent at a lot of color too. So what should I buy?

Crew Chief Eric: I mean, the collector car one, I was telling everybody, it’s pretty crazy episode. You’re going to have a lot of fun. You know, Don’s doing impersonations and Chris and Mark are going at it and there’s, you know, it was great experience. And I know, I know Brad enjoys getting together for each one that we come up with, but the Italian episode, I’m telling you guys right now, if you haven’t listened to it, All I gotta say is crack pipe and it literally starts from that point and it goes downhill very, very quickly.

Absolutely insane episode. I mean, on the other side of that, we had some real superstars.

Executive Producer Tania: We have some big names that anyone, you know, remotely tied into motor sports probably would recognize. Andy Pilgrim, Lynn St. James, Randy Lanier, Dennis [00:33:00] Gage, John Davis from Motor Week, Kat DeLorean. Bill Warner from the Amelia Island.

They all shared their own personal stories. And it’s very interesting.

Crew Chief Eric: And very inspirational. A lot of people wonder, they know these people by name. Well, I know so and so. Yeah, you’ve seen him on TV or, you know, John Davis. We’ve known him for 42 years. He’s been on the air for that long. Dennis Gage for almost 30.

But do you really know them? And when you get to hear their stories and how they became who they are and the steps and missteps that they made along the way, I mean, it’s really, really quite amazing. So hopefully that shed some light for other people. And there’s some other stories out there that they’re just like that even more tragic in some ways.

If you look at the. Epic coming of age stories of pro driver, like Andy Lee, and then of SRO driver, Joey Jordan, the fourth, who’s related to Jim Jordan, who was also on the show. They take us through their life and Joey, especially he goes on this 29, 000 mile journey from LA to the tip of South America, you know, looking at [00:34:00] Antarctica in a van.

The he bought sight unseen from Japan, just incredible

Executive Producer Tania: wild buck wild. I mean, that’s top

Crew Chief Eric: gear level stuff right there.

Executive Producer Tania: The journey through South America was just buck wild.

Crew Chief Eric: And he did it mostly by himself, which was risky, but just amazing too. When you listen to everything that he went through on that trip.

So Brad and I were super fortunate this year. We got to do something pretty cool, right?

Crew Chief Brad: Yeah, I mean, we were on a crossover episode with Mark Green from Cars, yeah. We double crossed with Mark. He

Crew Chief Eric: came on our show.

Crew Chief Brad: We went on his show. I have to say the crossovers are probably some of my favorite. Episodes that we do.

We had on another podcast, Kate and Nicole from two girls, one formula. They’re bringing formula one to the masses. Very popular. Uh, I think more crossovers should be in our future. I think there’s some of my favorite those in the what should I buys for sure.

Crew Chief Eric: Our listeners might not know, but we also do a quarterly with Steven Izzy from everything I learned for movies where not only do they review [00:35:00] bad movies, they’re willing to review.

bad car movies with us.

Executive Producer Tania: I was going to say Trading Paint, our EILFM crossover with Steve and Izzy. Crossover episodes with them are always quite enjoyable. They’re a fun bunch. If you haven’t checked out their podcast episode, it’s everything I learned from movies. So it’s always a good time with them. The movie itself was kind of a bitch.

Spoiler alert. Consensus of that review. But check it out. It’s on Netflix.

Crew Chief Eric: We look forward to getting together with them. Be on the lookout for more between us and everything I learned from movies. But we have to congratulate ourselves. We broke the record. The record was held by Chuck at Zymal for the longest episode it took to get recorded, but that was defeated by the guys over at the Pontiac Aztec owners club.

Yes, folks, we did it. We said we were going to do it. We finally got Aztec owners on the show to talk about why they love the car. What’s so great about it. And Mountain Man Dan and I actually had a lot of fun recording with Paul and John and that episode turned out fantastically. So if you haven’t [00:36:00] tuned in for that, I highly recommend it.

Executive Producer Tania: That was a good episode. I did learn a lot.

Crew Chief Eric: More than you probably ever wanted to know.

Executive Producer Tania: More than I thought I needed to know.

Crew Chief Brad: But I gotta say my favorite episode is the next episode because our episodes just keep getting better and better. We’re getting great guests, great stories. Yeah, I think the next episode is always going to be our best episode.

Crew Chief Eric: You know, that’s a good way to put it. I like that. That’s very, uh, forward thinking, you know, it’s

Crew Chief Brad: the thing that gets us to the next thing.

Crew Chief Eric: Absolutely. On that note, one of the other things, as I look back over season three, which actually takes us into season four without giving too much away is our long standing partnership with the international motor racing research center.

And now In partnership with the society of automotive historians, we’re bringing you a new mini series every month. We’re going to put out episodes surrounding the history of motor sports. These are coming from different sources, academics, X racers, you know, things like that. And it’s very fascinating material.

A lot of it. [00:37:00] Older things that you were like, I always wondered about that. And so we’re really, really fortunate to be partnering with both the IMRRC and the SAH to bring you that kind of content and kind of mix things up from our standard fair. So look forward to more of that. And a lot of other surprises as we go into season four.

If you want to leave us feedback on any of the 82 episodes from season 3, or anything from prior seasons in our catalog, you can join us very easily on our Facebook group, or on our new Discord. All those links are available in the show notes, on our website, it’s all over the place. We’re pretty easy to find.

So, if you Also have ideas for stories that you’re interested in us exploring, please don’t be bashful. If you have a great story that you want to share, come on the show really easy. You’re just sitting down and having a conversation with friends. So if you enjoy what we’re doing, let us know we’re not fishing for compliments, but it’s always good to hear from our fans, you know, what they’re interested in so that we can dig a little bit deeper.

And as always, if you really, really enjoy the show and you want to help [00:38:00] us out, drop us a cup of coffee over on Patreon.

Crew Chief Brad: He’s talking to you, Mark Hewitt.

Crew Chief Eric: That said, it’s time we move on to Volkswagen, Audi, and Porsche news. So what’s on the docket this month, or should I say, who’s no longer working there?

Executive Producer Tania: Apparently their design chief got the boot. Oh, you’re out of here.

Crew Chief Eric: He designed one of your new favorite cars, as you told us about from CES.

Executive Producer Tania: I don’t know what they’re thinking.

Crew Chief Eric: Well, obviously they’re thinking that the ID buzz isn’t all that great. The buzz right now, but Tanya wants one. Everybody I’ve talked to that’s seen it says the same thing.

That’s super cool. I want to buy one.

Executive Producer Tania: It was really cool to see in person. I hope to see them on the road.

Crew Chief Eric: Feel like Volkswagen does this every time they tease us with something. And then everybody goes, that’s really cool. I will line up like it’s the Apple store in 2005 for the next iPhone to buy this thing, and then they never produce.

The thing that we want. Then we get the next Passat that [00:39:00] looks like it was made from cardboard and ex rental cars.

Executive Producer Tania: Exactly, because the headline of this article from Haggerty is Volkswagen design chief ousted over retro designs replaced by Bentley design lead. So he was fired because he’s trying to do retro redesigns?

Hello?

Crew Chief Eric: That’s what sells. That is the thing right now.

Executive Producer Tania: That’s what a lot of us now who maybe are in a better financial position to buy another car or something kind of want, because you’re going back to stuff that we wanted to obtain

Crew Chief Eric: in the first place,

Executive Producer Tania: in the first place when we were first starting to drive, but it was like, Oh, you can’t because they’re on obtainium or they’re going to be, you know, piles and rust buckets and pieces of crap that you guys think a lot of money into.

And it’s like, now I could have like this kind of modern day, all the bells and whistles retro. feel to it, but we’re going to get rid of that. Cause again, I’m saying, how dumb are you? The beetle again, which is like every time it’s just a retro of itself, I guess. I don’t know, but like an electric [00:40:00] beetle.

Oh my God. How easy is this?

Crew Chief Eric: We’re going to replace that with the guy that brought you the Bentayga. A stupid car with a stupid name.

Crew Chief Brad: And a stupid design.

Crew Chief Eric: Right? How could you ruin a Q7? I mean, it’s like

Crew Chief Brad: Looks terrible.

Executive Producer Tania: I feel like there’s a space for the retro stuff. It doesn’t all need to be vanilla that they all just look like passats.

Crew Chief Eric: Even Toyota is taking a step away from that. The new Prius is actually starting to look like a normal car. Then they have the crown and some other EVs and things like that. It’s like if Toyota is making them look more normal.

Executive Producer Tania: Well, I know that’s a stretch to say, look more normal. I’m not sure some of those design lines are all that new.

Great, but they are definitely differentiating, like that crown did not look like a Corolla.

Crew Chief Eric: Definitely not.

Executive Producer Tania: You know, even them, they’ve kind of gotten into like the Camry and Corolla. It’s like until it passes you on the road, you’re not sure which one it is sometimes from like the front end.

Crew Chief Eric: We had that period in Volkswagen too, where the Passat [00:41:00] and the Jetta and the Golf, they all just looked the same.

I believe it was the Mark V period. And the Mark IV period. No, the Jetta was square in the front. Yeah. The Jetta looked nothing like the Golf. Although you could interchange all the parts. They look nothing like each other. It is a sad day in Volkswagen history because this month signifies the end of an era.

As Volkswagen moves deeper into electrification, that means there is no more room for motors like the venerable VR6. My heart is broken, let me tell you. Did you know that the VR6 has now officially been around for 30 years? Started in the early days as a lowly 12 liter and now exits with over 300 horsepower out of 3.

6 liters naturally aspirated. A hell of an engine, a hell of a sounding engine. It’s been in just about everything. When you look at the article that we’re talking about here, that was put together by the drive, it’s astounding. The number of cars that they put the VR six in some of them carrying badges, like Horsha.[00:42:00]

So you think, Oh, I got this mighty six cylinder in here. And it’s actually a VR six in your Cayenne or whatever it is. The VR six great engine, sad to see it go. I understand why they’re sunsetting it, but maybe in the future, who knows? Maybe the VR six will come back. It is a engineering Marvel in the fact that you can put an engine that big in such a tight space.

Crew Chief Brad: I’m just glad to have been able to nab one.

Crew Chief Eric: Oh, the price of all VR six is just went through the roof. Now they’re 2 Bob. 52 I got 50 well, we talked about this before and I feel like we’re in the middle of this weird grateful dead Rolling Stones unending farewell tour. Here we go. Lamborghini. Once again, we have another car.

It is going to be the ultimate final car with a V12. It was supposed to be some other Aventador, this, that, and the other thing. I can’t even keep them all straight anymore. And now we [00:43:00] have Invincible and Autentica. Yes. And I’m like, no one cares. And I don’t like the way it looks.

Executive Producer Tania: How is this different than a Huracan?

Crew Chief Eric: I feel like we’re back to the 80s where they only make one car for 20 years at a time and then, you know, the next one will come out.

Crew Chief Brad: How many years has it been since Jeremy Clarkson did that vignette? One, the Aston Martin that he drove, where he said, this is the end of an era, the end of the big V12.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah. I mean, like I said, this feels like a farewell tour. That’s never going to end. Everybody keeps talking about the last of the V12s and all this kind of stuff, especially the Lamborghini. Here we are all over again.

Crew Chief Brad: And it’s never going to end because people keep buying them. Yeah, exactly. They keep trying to find ways to sell them.

Crew Chief Eric: And offset their carbon credits

Crew Chief Brad: and no better way to stir up buzz and get people interested than to say, this is it. This is the end. This is the last one we’re going to make until the next one we make. Then that’s going to be the last one we’re ever going to make.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah. It’s, it’s a terrible sales paradigm there.

I [00:44:00] don’t care about this car. All I care about from Lamborghini right now, and usually I don’t resonate with his designs is the Magnus Walker redesigned Kuntosh. It looks so good. He put out another rendering the other day with a Marlboro livery on it from like the old school formula one days, not the Marlboro F1, which was, you know, Senna has anything to do with Lamborghini, but he looked good.

So I mean, whatever Lambo you do you. That being said, it’s time for some news from lower Saxony.

Crew Chief Brad: Why? Why not? I don’t care about either of these brands. Let’s move on.

Executive Producer Tania: Wow. Well, which is really

Crew Chief Brad: sad because I used to love Mercedes.

Executive Producer Tania: Some of our listeners might still care.

Crew Chief Eric: I mean, I care a little bit. Does it have two doors?

And a swooping rear end. I mean, then you have my attention, Mercedes.

Crew Chief Brad: Or is it a wagon?

Crew Chief Eric: What? Yes. Mercedes is good as those two things. The SLS GT model series there, the coupe and the wagons a hundred percent. [00:45:00] Yeah.

Executive Producer Tania: Well, anyway, the latest Mercedes news, aside from whatever their latest model is going to be EQ, this, that, and the other, I think they’re even actually changing their platform names and dropping that whole.

eqs thing. I’m not sure what they’re going with

Crew Chief Eric: because it’s dumb.

Executive Producer Tania: I mean, it was weird, but it’s fine. Their cars are getting more techie. Essentially, of course they have to, to compete against the Teslas of the world. And also probably to work out all their subscription models that we’ve

talked about in the

Executive Producer Tania: past.

That’s not what this is about. You know, this is about higher computing power in the electronics. I think they’ve already been partnered with NVIDIA for a while, but the latest partnership that was announced, which isn’t all that new for this entity because they’ve already partnered, I think, with the likes of Ford and others.

Google is coming to a Mercedes near you. No. Wop, wop, wop. Specifically, it’s their navigation that they want to embed in, in the navigation [00:46:00] system. So Google Maps for you.

Crew Chief Eric: Because Audi and BMW have the lock with Garmin. So we got to go with somebody else, right? I mean, that’s how that works.

Executive Producer Tania: I mean, I trust my Google overlord, so fine.

Crew Chief Eric: No, thank you.

Executive Producer Tania: It never driven me into a lake. So, although I did hear a report of apparently some dude’s driveway got labeled as a road and people are legit turning on it like navigation systems.

Crew Chief Eric: Must’ve been in Florida. That’s awesome. And then there’s some news from BMW.

Executive Producer Tania: Which might be some good news.

They’re already talking about their 2024 models, specifically the new X5M and X6M. And they’re kind of expanding their hybrid models a little bit, because right now they only have like four. So they’re going to add the hybrids to these as well. So that’s kind of exciting. That’s good. Hybrid compromise between gasoline and being full electric.

But I think the more interesting thing is the facelift or rather nose job that these [00:47:00] two have gotten. Because the grills are not as monstrous, so they’ve toned them down a little bit.

Crew Chief Eric: They’re still pretty heinous.

Executive Producer Tania: I think the other ductwork that’s going on in the lower part of the bumper now is distracting, maybe?

Crew Chief Eric: Have you seen the guy that mounted, like, the X7? Grills to an E36. He redid the whole front end. It looks ridiculous. Let me

Executive Producer Tania: guess. It’s taller than the height.

Crew Chief Eric: No, it’s literally the whole height of the front end

Executive Producer Tania: to the bottom of the balance.

Crew Chief Eric: It looks insane. I got to give him props for one thing. Massive cooling.

There is no excuse for getting air into that radiator at that point. Well, you know what guys here we are closing out season three. We have to just bask in the awesomeness. of this next segment, complete silence from Stellantis. Let’s take a moment.

Executive Producer Tania: I mean, that’s not true.

Crew Chief Brad: Not necessarily.

Executive Producer Tania: We had the electric boogie woogie.

[00:48:00] That doesn’t

Crew Chief Brad: count. We had the premature electrification. Doesn’t count. No, it does count.

Executive Producer Tania: You know what the recent news is though? Their stock price has gone up and they’ve had record profits most recently. So that is actually the latest. So they’re doing quite well.

Crew Chief Eric: Well, we can shift to what’s left of our domestic news, brought to us by AmericanMuscle.

com, your source for OEM performance parts for your Mopar, Ford, or Chevrolet product. Did you guys know that a Camaro is less expensive to lease right now than one of Tanya’s least favorite cars on the face of the earth? The Malibu. Would you do it?

Executive Producer Tania: If my choice is anything with a Camaro or Malibu, Camaro.

Crew Chief Eric: Are you sure? I

Executive Producer Tania: mean, if my choice is anything other than Impala versus Malibu, it’s going to be anything.

Crew Chief Eric: Brad, would you lease a Camaro?

Crew Chief Brad: I’m not really into leasing [00:49:00] period, but. To Tonya’s point, anything is greater than a Malibu. I would lease a Camaro versus renting a Malibu.

Crew Chief Eric: But when I read between the lines, what this says to me is the Camaro is not doing well.

Don’t they get

Crew Chief Brad: rid of it? Yeah. Isn’t this the last year?

Crew Chief Eric: Ding, ding, ding to try to get them out the door. Now we have to lease them because we can’t unload them quick enough. And also like we saw the DC auto show, they were really touting the Camaro convertible, which seemed. Not necessarily a first for that body style, but it just seemed like we hadn’t seen the Camaro convertible in a while.

And the same is true of the challenger, right? Dodge is putting out a convertible now in the last set of the production run, which sort of boggles my mind because it costs extra to get that through safety and the tooling for the convertible and all the extra stuff they had to come up with. And I’m like, this is craziness.

So what I lease Camaro, why wouldn’t lease anything? I’m with you, Brad. I mean that reasons and seasons for doing that. Right? [00:50:00] But if that was my only choice, maybe just maybe

Executive Producer Tania: is walking an option?

Crew Chief Brad: walking is always an option.

Crew Chief Eric: I mean, it seems to be the option at Ford. ’cause they just reported $2 billion.

That’s billion with a B. Like the show with Paul Giamatti. Billion dollar loss. Because chips.

Executive Producer Tania: That’s not a good thing. I did pass a lightning on the road today, but they do exist in the wild. Although I was wondering if something was wrong with it. Cause I swear it had like his hind legs were up. I was like, what is this thing doing?

Crew Chief Brad: It was raked.

Crew Chief Eric: My wife passed a Rivian today and she texted me and she goes, what is a Rivian? And then that led to an explanation, which ended with her going, huh.

Crew Chief Brad: That should have led to a question. Why do you not listen to the show?

Crew Chief Eric: Season three is full of Rivian. Full of Rivian.

Crew Chief Brad: It’s the Rivian season.

Crew Chief Eric: Because Chips, like we’ve been talking about for over a year now, there’s still supply chain [00:51:00] issues. There’s still this and that. But the Mach E, as cool as it can be, despite the name, it is a pretty cool car. Prices! Are the problem 50, 000 for an entry level vehicle is a hard pill to swallow for most people.

So I can understand why sales are down. And then if you’re not in the economy car market, you’re interested in buying the latest F one 50, you know, not even talking about the lightning. I mean, these trucks are out of control. Who’s got 70, to spend on these trucks.

Crew Chief Brad: You can’t think of it like that though.

You got to think of it more like who’s got 1, 200 to spend on it a month or 1, 500 a month, because you can get the financing for any of that stuff.

Crew Chief Eric: Well, that’s true. I mean, we got a letter in the mail, even today where Chrysler was like, if you trade in your car for a brand new one, your new payment is only 121 more than the last one.

And I’m like, are you out of your freaking mind? It’s already bad enough as it is.

Crew Chief Brad: I do like the way that the article [00:52:00] starts out by saying that General Motors and Tesla both recorded record profits in 2022. Well,

Crew Chief Eric: Tesla’s been reporting record profits for years now, and I still don’t understand how that math works, except for the carbon credit part that we’ve already covered several times.

Right, right, right.

Crew Chief Eric: Chevy’s on the up. Maybe it’s the truck divisions that are really where the numbers are coming to play, because other than the Camaro and the Malibu, As we saw at the auto show, they don’t have anything, right? So they’re not selling cars, the Corvette. I mean,

Crew Chief Brad: the Corvettes are 30 to 40, 000 more than they used to be.

Crew Chief Eric: So let’s talk about that for a second. I want to go back to our special DC auto show episode where we talked about this and we speculated about even last month, the Corvette SUV in the four So here we go. Cadillac Blackwing becomes the Corvette sedan. And the blazer SS becomes a Corvette SUV. Although you guys saw the latest spy pictures that lifted [00:53:00] Corvette SUV thing.

And I was, it

Crew Chief Brad: was a rendering. It wasn’t,

Crew Chief Eric: yeah, whatever. It wasn’t a real car, but still I was just like, it’s still a blazer with the Corvette nose and tail on it. What’d he do?

Crew Chief Brad: It looks like a bowler Bobcat or whatever. The

Crew Chief Eric: exact, exactly, exactly. Beat across. In reality, what General Motors is going to do is rebadge those other two cars, the blazer SS and the black wing.

And those will have Corvette badges and a Jake on the side and the whole nine yards. And that’s the end of that. Fine, whatever. But overall, I think the car market is just down. We’re in a weird transition period. New cars are what they are. Like Tanya said, the design language right now, when we look back 20 years from now, I don’t know what we’re going to think.

Executive Producer Tania: Well, the cost of everything’s up. You shouldn’t be out buying a car for the sake of buying a car unless you absolutely have to because your current car does no longer function or it’s irreparable, right? Like, to just willy nilly be like, I feel like a new car today. Sunny. Hey man,

Crew Chief Eric: that was the [00:54:00] 2000s when the stock market was strong.

Those days are gone.

Executive Producer Tania: That is not the days right now. So these EVs cost significantly more than a Kia, Toyota Corolla. And like, what are you getting for that? Fool to say you have an electric vehicle. If you’re going out to buy a car just for For no reason, but I’m going to just replace my car that still runs that I paid for blah, blah, blah.

I don’t know that you’re ever going to break back even spending 80, 000. I don’t care what the cost of the electric ferries is to fill the pixie dust in your car. That’s a huge chunk of money to break back even on. The price of gasoline has to go astronomical.

Crew Chief Eric: Well, the price of electricity has also like basically doubled because of everybody, you know, consuming more electricity and it costs more to generate more.

So it’s a lose lose situation the way I look at it, you know, without getting into all the details, it’s like, is it cheaper to produce fuel than it is to produce [00:55:00] electricity? But then obviously there’s the, you know, the environmental impact of all that. I mean, it’s just, it’s craziness. I still hold true.

And I’ve said it throughout the course of this season, hybrid is the way to go. Hopefully we’ll see more of that as we go along, you know, maybe the tides will turn synthetic fuels. You know, we talked about it earlier this season with Porsche, you know, things like that. So, you know, the sky is still the limit from a technology perspective, but what we’re still missing is standardization.

We don’t have that model T of EVs and maybe. Maybe Ford will come up with that car. You know, they can regain that title, but who knows? They

Crew Chief Brad: better want to stay in business. They better

Executive Producer Tania: you need a mixed bag. They say, if you’re doing your financial investments, it’s good to diversify. Right. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

Well,

Crew Chief Brad: first of all, my portfolio,

Executive Producer Tania: why we all have to. It’s either light switch, gasoline, diesel, or electric, one or the other, nothing in between. Well, it depends on different strokes for different folks. There’s times if you can afford an 80, [00:56:00] 000 EV and you live in the city and you go three mile commute or barely use your car, that might make perfect sense.

And you have charging stations everywhere. If you’re out in rural America and you’re driving 70 miles to go to work, it probably doesn’t make sense, but a hybrid or a traditional ICE. We’ll see how this all plays out. Maybe they, the powers that be have it right and there is only one to rule them all. I don’t think so.

Crew Chief Eric: I don’t think so either. There was another article that came across my desk that made me pose the question yet again. How is this still a thing? Honda? Is still dealing with Takata airbag recalls, and these aren’t on the old cars. These are a newer cars. How have they not nip this in the bud yet? It feels like this has been going on for

Crew Chief Brad: forever.

The problem is, so if this was GM, they wouldn’t have this problem because their cars don’t run that long. But this is Honda, where they made the mistake of making a vehicle that can run for longer than 20 years. So now the vehicles are [00:57:00] outliving the useful life of their components, AKA the, uh, the death airbags, the mortars, the claymores.

Yeah. The claymore mines. Yes.

Crew Chief Eric: What you said reminds me a hundred percent of that meme that was floating around about all the Camry owners from like 1996, how Toyota was recalling them because they’d been on the road for too long by something else. They’re unstoppable. And to your point, they’re just so under stress.

Not necessarily that they’re well built, it’s that they’re under stressed, those cars are. And so they just last forever. But there’s the neglect side of that, right? They run forever. Nobody takes care of them. You don’t have to. Yeah, because you don’t have to. It’s like a lawnmower. As long as it starts, it cuts your grass.

You even sharpen the blade. I mean, what the hell’s wrong with you? So that’s a waste of time. The grass is cut. In this instance, I mean, this Takata thing is just, Man, but they issued a do not drive warning to 8, 200 owners. I mean, that’s pretty severe. Now that seems to be the growing trend with recalls these days.

Everything is do not drive. [00:58:00] Park it in a target parking lot and run away. Throw a Molotov in the window and just bolt. No, just light a candle. Yeah. Like that Florida man. Whatever. Speaking of how is this still a thing? We’re going to talk about this freaking Hyundai again, for like the sixth or seventh month in a row.

The N 74 concept, they are playing the hokey pokey one minute. It’s in one minute. It’s out. It’s a rolling lab. No, it’s not. It’s a concept, you know, it isn’t here. We are. Again,

Executive Producer Tania: well, they didn’t say they’re going to make it. They just said that they’re not possibly going to

Crew Chief Eric: put a

Executive Producer Tania: price tag

Crew Chief Eric: on it.

Executive Producer Tania: They’ve estimated what they think this hydrogen hybrid electric, whatever this thing is,

Crew Chief Eric: nearly had an.

And your ISM, when I saw the price tag

Executive Producer Tania: and it will not be affordable by anybody.

Crew Chief Brad: Yeah. What, what they did is they threw out an FU number. So they’ve been listening to critics. The critics have been saying, Oh, you got to make it. You got to make it. You got [00:59:00] to make it. And they’re like, all right, all right.

We’re going to make it. And if we make it. This is the cost you MFers want this car. This is what it’s going to cost you.

Executive Producer Tania: You know what? This might be a bold strategy cotton. Cause I bet there’s going to be some rich people that are like, hell yeah. Sign me up. We’re in car pre order. And then, and then they should just be like, hell yeah, here, here’s three of them.

Crew Chief Eric: And then it’ll depreciate faster than a Veloster. So the rest of us can afford one.

Crew Chief Brad: Yeah. So, so what they’re doing is they’re doing the Tesla model where they take on what’s called. All these deposits. And then they’re like, then we’ll produce a car for you in five years. You can have it in five years.

Crew Chief Eric: 150 G’s is a big pill to swallow for anything, but I think it’s even harder to swallow on a Hyundai.

That would be the most expensive Hyundai.

Executive Producer Tania: Ever. All they have to do is just take the body and put it on like a Genesis Coop, a Genesis or something. It’s built on top of a stinger. The stinger’s on its way out. Who cares? Put that [01:00:00] body on a stinger and people will buy it. Okay. It doesn’t need to have NASA propulsion in it.

Crew Chief Eric: No, it doesn’t. It’s like Mr. Fusion in that thing, right? So,

Crew Chief Brad: uh, factory five, stop making replica cobra registers and start making replica in 75 cars.

Crew Chief Eric: If it was 50 G’s, not 150 G’s, if it was 50 grand. And out now with the Nissan, which we’re not sure if that’s out yet either. And the Supra and everything else, I would really consider it because it is so cool because everything’s so expensive, that 50 grand price point, you can kind of make it work for a sports car.

If you’re dedicated and you’re an enthusiast, but 150, 000, you’re in Porsche territory at that point, or low end Ferrari territory. I mean, you better have a killer car. It can’t be all looks. That’s all I’m saying that it looks damn good. Well, what about other. Evie’s and concepts, Tanya,

Executive Producer Tania: our friends at Volvo [01:01:00] Polestar.

Crew Chief Eric: Oh, okay. I was confused.

Executive Producer Tania: Yes. Well, you know, Polestar, Volvo, technically. Yeah. So Polestar is unveiling its next model for next year, the Polestar two, and they’re going to be adding even more power and 300 miles of range. And these things are cool.

Crew Chief Eric: Are they though?

Executive Producer Tania: I think so. Are they? Polestar one. Whoa. Eat you up.

That was the one that was at the DC Auto Show, and its numbers are just like ridiculous in terms of performance.

Crew Chief Eric: But it still looks like an S 60 though, right. Which I don’t have a problem

Executive Producer Tania: with. I don’t have a problem with that. I don’t have a problem. It’s, it’s always

Crew Chief Eric: the price tag. It’s always the price tag.

Executive Producer Tania: Well, and that’s the problem. Like I can’t afford a Polestar. You can’t afford the Polestar 1. 000. I think it’s up there in that neighborhood.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah, 150, 000 to 180, 000, I think you were saying.

Executive Producer Tania: I mean, it’s ridiculous.

Crew Chief Eric: But I have seen more regular, let’s call them entry model Polestars on the road lately, and they kind of catch me by [01:02:00] surprise because at first you’re like, Ah, this is a Volvo.

And then you see, That symbol right on the back. And you’re like, that’s, that’s a pole star. And at night they’re more obvious because of the way the lights are shaped. They’re kind of, they really do stick out, which is kind of cool. They’re not offensive looking because they do hark back to the Volvo that they’re based on.

But again, it’s like, uh, you know, maybe, maybe we could just got to drive one. The problem is where do you go to go check one of these cars out?

Executive Producer Tania: I don’t know. I’ve never looked into it. I. Were they the ones that basically like you do everything and they like show up with the car for you?

Crew Chief Eric: I think so. And that’s a growing trend now.

And actually segues into something I wanted to talk about, which is another article I read the other day. I believe it was from a grassroots motorsports or one of them. And they were talking about dealerships being a thing in the past. Why do you want to go to the dealership spend all day when you could just fill out the forms online, you can get the credit pre applications now for just about everything online.

And you could order the card the way you want it. So then the dealerships just become service centers, [01:03:00] which people choose not to go to, like we talked about with the Takata airbags. You have your choice. Do you want to take it there to get service? You want to go somewhere else, whatever. But I am personally done with dealing with dealerships and you know, no offense to the sales guys, everybody’s got to make a living.

I’ve said it before. I want what I want. And it would just be nice to use the configurator online. I want those wheels. I want that color. I want that trim. Send it. And it’s not necessarily here. Run my credit card like it was in the nineties. You know, people are putting houses on their credit cards because it’s getting the points and stuff.

It’s not that kind of thing, but all the loan application stuff can be done online now. I don’t get it. So if Polestar is in fact doing it that way, I don’t have a problem with it. Now I had a wha, wha. moment when I saw this next one.

Executive Producer Tania: Why? What do you mean?

Crew Chief Eric: Who’s Lightyear? Why do I care? And they’re suddenly out of business.

Executive Producer Tania: What? We’ve talked about them before on a previous episode.

Crew Chief Eric: Who?

Executive Producer Tania: Well

Crew Chief Eric: Buzz?

Executive Producer Tania: Lightyear? I mean, they’re like [01:04:00] a Dutch company that was trying to do the whole solar panel on the whole top of the car and all that stuff. And it was going to be the solar powered EV.

Crew Chief Eric: How did that work out for them again?

Executive Producer Tania: Apparently not very well, because I would imagine their cost of manufacture was way too high and unsustainable.

Crew Chief Eric: Ah, so the bigger question becomes who will absorb their technology, their patents and all the factory that they were using and all that kind of stuff. So that’s the thing I want to pay attention to.

It’s not necessarily the fact that light year is going out of business or.

Executive Producer Tania: Well, and there’s all the whole, that whole bankruptcy whole scene is all bright just because they’re bankrupt. Doesn’t mean the company closes and who knows how they restructure. And then suddenly they’re still there. And I don’t know, cause they talk about building cheaper solar EVs than like this Buick size, like limousine length, late year one, it looked like, so I don’t know.

I have no idea.

Crew Chief Eric: Well, since you brought up restructuring and bankruptcy, and we’re not sure how it all works, that leads us to Lotus. If you look into [01:05:00] the history of one of Britain’s finest engineering companies with a long racing pedigree, I mean, all jokes aside about Lotus, there’s some interesting stuff in their past, but now they made the announcement.

That they’re going to move to EVs as well, because I was sort of wondering what was going to happen to Lotus. Lotus has always sort of said, I kind of don’t care what everybody else is doing. We’re going to build sports cars or race cars or whatever. They’ve always been focused really on the enthusiasts and motor sports.

And here they come with the Electra. Because everything has to start with E at Lotus for some weird reason. It used to be numbers, you know, type this, you know, Lotus 7 and all that kind of stuff. Now we have all E names since, you know, the Eclat and the early cars and the Esprit and all that. So the Elettra.

It’s Elettra. Boogie

Executive Producer Tania: woogie.

Crew Chief Eric: Boogie woogie. I mean, it’s built in China.

Executive Producer Tania: It’s ugly.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah, that’s all I got to say. It looks like a really bad Urus.

Executive Producer Tania: I was going to say it looks like a Urus and that’s not a good thing.

Crew Chief Eric: No, it doesn’t look like a Lotus. It just. Doesn’t. It’s [01:06:00] probably a Geely or whatever they’re called underneath.

Executive Producer Tania: It is by the Geely group. Geely bought Lotus six years ago.

Crew Chief Eric: Wow. Has it been that long? This thing is awful. If somebody out there buys one, I’d be curious to take a ride in it, but not so much.

Executive Producer Tania: So speaking of other random EVs and going back to our Dawn project and self driving, maybe there’ll be a PSA on this too.

But however, Amazon and it’s been going on for several years that they’ve been trying to do small little robo taxis, full self driving yada yada, apparently in whichever this Sub branch of Amazon, Zoox, that it’s called. It’s developing these driverless taxis for use on the road. They have done it.

Crew Chief Eric: Done what?

Executive Producer Tania: They’re on the road. These things don’t have steering wheels, no controls, and they’ll drive you around. Right now they’re only driving you around like a mile back and forth on campus.

Crew Chief Brad: Are they utilizing a tunnel under the road?

Executive Producer Tania: No, [01:07:00] I don’t think so. It’s kind of like a moment where it’s like, Oh, cool. We did this, but it’s like, well, they’re getting closer.

Maybe they really just have like a beta test here with humans.

Crew Chief Eric: Johnny cab, Johnny cab. And if it. If it works anything like their streaming service, I’m not convinced.

Executive Producer Tania: I mean, that’s where the future is going. So, you know,

Crew Chief Eric: not my future.

Executive Producer Tania: The real question is, are they able to make the technology work? Cause if they could beat, you know, who, and actually have something that works reliably, it doesn’t mow down small children or animals.

Crew Chief Eric: There’s other variables at play at the other manufacturer. Cause there’s a whole tailspin going on there too, which we’ll cover here in a little bit.

Executive Producer Tania: Well, it’s an interesting, like these, like a little robo taxi. I don’t know, like how big this thing is. Cause there’s been some other ones that like Pizza Hut or Domino’s or like delivery services have been trying.

Crew Chief Eric: You’ve got the canoe and the postal service is using Oshkosh, my gosh.

Executive Producer Tania: So canoe is still coming out. They haven’t gone under, unlike some of the [01:08:00] other ones. You see, there’s a place for everything. If you’re at like a large. Distribution center, maybe like an Amazon or any other big manufacturing plant that would require people to like move from one end to the other.

At any point, if you had like this little robo taxi, one, two seater, three seater, I mean, that’s a pretty efficient means of transporting your people around without having a lot of downtime and waste. I don’t know if it would work in the city streets of New York City yet, which is. Likely the end goal for people, but there could be applications where it could make sense.

Crew Chief Eric: I sometimes think moving sidewalks in New York City would be faster than taking a cab.

Executive Producer Tania: Well, there is a company that has moonwalkers, I think they’re called, something like that. It’s like these bizarre roller skate bases that you step into and it speeds up your walking.

Crew Chief Eric: Why can’t we just have the hoverboards like they promised us in Back to the Future?

Executive Producer Tania: Get this. It senses like your body motion. So like, if you pull back a little bit, it like, it’ll slow down. Like that’s how you stop. But then I was like, how the hell do you go up like stairs [01:09:00] or downstairs with these things? Right.

Crew Chief Eric: You just bounce your way up.

Executive Producer Tania: No. So what you do is when you approach the step and I forget which way is which, but you click your heel out to like lock them and then you click your heel in to unlock them.

So imagine bicycles where you have clip ons. I’m just thinking, like, the number of people that are gonna, like, fall over at the top of a staircase with this. But we digress.

Crew Chief Eric: They can’t all be Crocs, that’s for sure.

Executive Producer Tania: Don’t give him any ideas. Healy

Crew Chief Eric: Crocs. It’s time to move on to Brad’s favorite section, Lost and Found.

Executive Producer Tania: Mm hmm.

Crew Chief Eric: Did you tally up how many Dodge Dart we found over the course of Season 3? That’s an important statistic for our listeners.

Crew Chief Brad: I believe it’s zero, but if there is a joke in there for the longest running car, not sold, there is a 1988 Cadillac DeVille base still for sale, a gray Chevrolet.

Crew Chief Eric: Oh my God.

Crew Chief Brad: Somebody buy this thing, please. And report back. We would love to have you on the show. The Ford GT is [01:10:00] still out there and then there’s a brand new 2008 Scion XB. Scion is not a company anymore, but you can still buy a brand new Scion XB for 4, 800 at VW of Clarksville.

Crew Chief Eric: You can buy a Toyota at a Volkswagen dealer.

It’s brilliant.

Crew Chief Brad: And obviously the joke is that these dealers, they put so many cars on these websites, they don’t pay attention, new use, whatever, so. It’s definitely not a new vehicle, but also I was looking at bring a trailer. Oh, trying to see what’s going on. Our

Crew Chief Eric: favorite outrageously priced shopping place.

Yes.

Crew Chief Brad: Right now, current bid ends in 15 hours, a 37 mile 2021 McLaren Elva, which is a car I didn’t even know existed. Right. Current bid is 1. 6 million.

Crew Chief Eric: Ooh. I’ll get two,

Crew Chief Brad: but if that doesn’t tickle your fancy also closing in 15 hours, a 1993 Volkswagen Corrado SLC VR six five speed

Crew Chief Eric: that just went up in value because [01:11:00] no more VR sixes exist.

The current

Crew Chief Brad: bid is 7, 600.

Crew Chief Eric: You know, if it’s in really good shape, Actually not bad for a Corrado.

Crew Chief Brad: It has to be in really good shape to be on bring a trailer. So now the

Crew Chief Eric: disappointing part about the Corrado is, and believe me, I’m a fan. So I can throw shade and we’ve owned one of these cars is everything that isn’t the body because it’s a Mark two underneath it’s a 12 LVR six gear boxes, whatever, with the stupid seat belts, very nineties interior.

I mean, it is a cool car for a period. I wouldn’t. Throw one away if somebody gave one to me, but you’re faced with all those early 90s Volkswagen stuff. The other problem with the Corrado is it’s super specific. Everything about that car is for that car. There is some interchangeability with other stuff, but whatever.

The bigger point here, 7, 600. I actually feel like the values come down because Corrado’s were almost untouchable at one point for less than five figures. And to see one under that low mileage and great [01:12:00] condition, that’s a steal. Grab that thing.

Crew Chief Brad: Get your checkbook ready. 2004 Volkswagen R32 bidding ends in 15 hours.

Current bid is 11, 000. That’s really low. Well, it’s, it’s not stock mod and it’s got a Magnaflow exhaust, the aftermarket intake, Alcantara headliner, KW variant, three coil overs, 18 inch BBS wheels, so it’s got some tasteful mods done.

Crew Chief Eric: We have a barn find in the mix too, right?

Crew Chief Brad: For our resident car enthusiast, car flipper, Andrew Bank, have we got a car for you?

1967 Chevrolet Corvette, 67 custom Stingray. That is the title.

Crew Chief Eric: No, that is not the title of this car. It literally says, quote, The Boomer special .

Crew Chief Brad: That’s what the meme says. But the Craigslist ad says 67 Chevrolet Corvette 67, custom Stingray 67. 67 67.

Crew Chief Eric: It, it has 6,700 miles,

Crew Chief Brad: 6,700 miles on a 67 body on a [01:13:00] 2010 chassis.

Crew Chief Eric: This thing looks terrible.

Crew Chief Brad: It looks disgusting.

Crew Chief Eric: I mean, it’s supposed to be a C two, but the roof line is completely wrong. The roof line is C six, right? And the worst part is. Despite the way it looks is the cost. I mean, I get it. It’s modded, it’s custom. It’s this, it’s that, blah, blah, blah. If it suits your fancy fine, but 125, 000, no low balls.

Crew Chief Brad: I know what I have,

Crew Chief Eric: but on the other side of that, there was a 79 Firebird Trans Am that showed up in a barn find. It only has 37 original miles on it. It’s up for auction.

Crew Chief Brad: Yep. That is a production. Beautiful car.

Crew Chief Eric: Mountain Man Dan found for you this month. Your next race car, Brad.

Crew Chief Brad: What’s that?

Crew Chief Eric: Danica Patrick’s old Arca car.

Crew Chief Brad: You know, if I ever get back into tracking, like I used to, maybe when the kid gets older, I could see picking up something like this. Although I wouldn’t do a car. I’d probably do one of those craftsmen series pickup trucks. Yeah,

Crew Chief Eric: those are pretty slick.

Crew Chief Brad: Wow. This thing’s sold for 5, 000.

Crew Chief Eric: That’s cheap, right?

Crew Chief Brad: This is back in her go daddy days. Well, there’s [01:14:00] no motor. It’s just a chassis.

Crew Chief Eric: I mean, you can pick up a motor for like 200 bucks. Come on. It’s just a 350

Crew Chief Brad: trans. Yeah.

Crew Chief Eric: I mean, that’s cheap stuff though. Still now, like we’ve done throughout various drive through episodes this season, we have yet another candidate for our uncool wall.

Executive Producer Tania: I don’t know. Is that actually how it came or someone just Retrofitted, uh, tarp on the back of it.

Crew Chief Eric: No, Don Wieberg sent us this one as a candidate this month. It is a 1978 Pontiac Phoenix with the camping package.

Going

Crew Chief Eric: back to our friends in the Aztec community, it looks like the Aztec was not the first Pontiac with a add on camping package for their vehicle.

But what boggles my mind is how you access this.

Executive Producer Tania: It’s considered. A hatchback lift back that this thing is like 150 feet long. It

Crew Chief Eric: used to be a four door and they turned it into a two door hatchback. So it’s [01:15:00] 11 million feet long.

Executive Producer Tania: The Phoenix was available as a two door coupe, a four door sedan with a three door hatchback that was available in 1978.

Crew Chief Eric: All in the same chassis. So there you go. It’s huge.

Executive Producer Tania: So they literally just. Took the rear doors off and then put a tent on the trunk lid.

Crew Chief Eric: This is Aztec level engineering.

Executive Producer Tania: And the tent is secured by pulling the bungee cord into the door and shutting the door on it, apparently.

Crew Chief Eric: I mean, how do you think the Aztec one works?

It’s the same stuff.

Crew Chief Brad: It’s actually not terrible. Look, it’s terrible in that color.

Crew Chief Eric: It’s like a bigger version of that citation X 11 and all those cars from that era. They all sort of looked the same before we move on from

Crew Chief Brad: lost and found. I don’t know if you all saw Doug DeMuro started his own trading site, his own auction site called cars and bids.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah. That’s been for a while now.

Crew Chief Brad: Yeah. Well, he just got a multimillion dollar [01:16:00] cash investment from some firm that I saw on his post on Instagram. What are we doing wrong? We’re not selling cars. That’s it. No, you

Crew Chief Eric: had to have started on YouTube when you were like five years old. And then, you know, just We would be remiss.

Executive Producer Tania: Oh, is it that time again?

Crew Chief Eric: It is that time again. Do we have any Tesla news? Or is it just Elon Musk news? Do we have to separate now after 31 episodes? Yeah, Tesla doesn’t exist anymore. It’s just Elon Musk. It’s just the Elon Musk circus.

Executive Producer Tania: Twitter still sucks. There’s no Cybertruck. Those are the highlights, yeah.

Next. In seriousness though. Didn’t use Twitter before. I’m sure as hell not going to use it now. Well,

Crew Chief Eric: even less people are going to be using Twitter soon because now they’re going to start charging for API integration, which means everybody that was, let’s say, orchestrating or automating anything with Twitter dead.

All that stuff’s gone.

Executive Producer Tania: Really?

Crew Chief Eric: Yep.

Executive Producer Tania: Oh, I hadn’t heard that. [01:17:00] Yeah. I don’t know what he’s going to do when he fires. Everybody keeps firing the engineers and the people doing the work.

Crew Chief Eric: Is he Willy Wonka? Like he just comes down to the door.

Executive Producer Tania: Fire!

Crew Chief Eric: And out you go.

Executive Producer Tania: I don’t know, because the latest firing was like, employee mentions how the polling results say that you’re unfavorable, and he’s like, you’re fired!

Don’t know if that’s how it really went down, but

Crew Chief Eric: Sounds like a Simpsons Mr. Burns thing. Oh, get it

Executive Producer Tania: in that vein. They’ve literally like just announced engineering headquarters is moving from Austin.

Crew Chief Eric: Wait, wait, hold on. Didn’t pump the brakes a second. Didn’t they just get there? They just displaced like tens of thousands of people.

Crew Chief Brad: Yeah. Well, isn’t, isn’t it kind of expensive to move your headquarters?

Executive Producer Tania: Not only did he just displace a bunch of people in 2021, in the middle of the pandemic, they also gave. People in Ultimatum, after they went to fully remote work, where it was like, you’re going to show up in Austin in the next two days or you’re [01:18:00] fired.

Crew Chief Eric: So there’s a theme.

Executive Producer Tania: And now they’re moving the engineering headquarters back to Palo Alto, California. California. Yes,

Crew Chief Eric: and people say this guy is a business mastermind. Tesla is going to be the company to rule them all with stuff like this.

Executive Producer Tania: Seriously. It makes you scratch your head. I don’t think the true answer of why this is happening has been revealed.

Crew Chief Eric: Is it all part of the

Executive Producer Tania: Well, here’s the thing. One source or whatever is questioning, is it because we’re moving it? So he’s now closer to Twitter, but then this whole Twitter thing, he’s like, I’m going to find a new CEO by the end of 2023. Like, blah, blah, blah. Like, are you really? You said that two weeks after you joined the company.

Hook it over that you were going to replace yourself and you still haven’t. So I don’t know, like, why are you moving back and forth, back and forth? You just built this whole giga Austin corporate headquarters, I think is still going to stay there, but everyone in engineering is going to go to Palo Alto, which, cause we want to be back in [01:19:00] the.

Tech Silicon Valley, California version.

Crew Chief Eric: Womp womp. about that. Womp womp. But

Executive Producer Tania: maybe we’ll learn more about the reasoning and the rationale on March 1st at the Tesla Investors Day, where he will unveil his part three to his master plan.

Crew Chief Brad: Is he going to do it with like a mini version of himself next to him?

Crew Chief Eric: Well, the way he’s spending money, it’s like who needs billions? When you could have millions. Who is the CEO

Crew Chief Brad: of WeatherTech? Who is the CEO of any number of successful companies? We have no idea who these people’s names are, yet their companies are still massively and wildly successful. Can he just go to Mars, please?

Just hop on one of his stupid little SpaceX penis missiles and go to Mars. I’m so sick of this tool. Give me back my hundred dollars for my Cybertruck.

Executive Producer Tania: That’s what you’re really bitter about. There it is. There it is. The promises, the bait, the bait and switch. [01:20:00] All that

Crew Chief Eric: dogecoin.

Executive Producer Tania: At the earliest, we might see, reports are saying, the Cybertruck at the end of this year.

At the earliest, but probably not. I love those headlines.

Crew Chief Eric: Haslam will be out of business and they’ll still be promising people that Cybertrucks are coming. I mean, come on.

Crew Chief Brad: The Cybertruck is becoming the new Chinese democracy album from Guns N Roses. It’s coming. It’s coming. Didn’t it come out like 20 years later?

It did

Executive Producer Tania: eventually come.

Crew Chief Brad: Yeah, you’re right. It

Executive Producer Tania: did. It did. Because everyone’s speculating that the production level model will unveil. And well, there’s one really crappy video that someone took. Of I guess a Cybertruck running through Austin. Is it the one with the

Crew Chief Eric: mirrors or without the mirrors?

Executive Producer Tania: Got the mirrors on it, baby.

Does it have

Crew Chief Brad: the lasers?

Executive Producer Tania: Big sad mirrors. And I also noticed something as this person was filming on like freaking Nokia flip phone from I don’t know when.

Crew Chief Eric: It’s like the NASA videos, right? We have these high intensity. High [01:21:00] definition cameras. And every picture of the moon is grainy as all get out. Like it was taken in 1986.

Executive Producer Tania: I don’t know what camera this was

Crew Chief Brad: really bad. They were taken in 86. They just are just now getting back to us.

Executive Producer Tania: But what struck me as it was like. Cybertruck was passing in front of this person, the reflections in the side panel, I was like, what kind of glare blinding in your eyes is this thing gonna do on the road on a sunny day?

Crew Chief Brad: Were the panels straight? No. The sheet metal from Home Depot is not very straight. You gotta like really bang it out and everything to get it nice and perfect.

Crew Chief Eric: So I’ll say this, to its credit, if it’s stainless, Like the DeLoreans were back in the day. It’s actually not that bad in the sun. It won’t completely blind you.

It is very noticeable, but yeah, I don’t know.

Crew Chief Brad: The DeLoreans didn’t have giant sides for the sun to reflect off of. It was very angular and kind of more, it makes sense [01:22:00] that the DeLorean wouldn’t. This thing is just a giant. And if anybody’s driven through a city on a nice sunny day, all those windows and everything, you’re blinded.

You can’t drive through the city. You’re going to hit the pedestrians with your fully autonomous car or not because you can’t see. And the cyber truck is the size of the empire state building. It’s going to do the same thing. It is very, very, but with lasers,

Executive Producer Tania: let me lower your expectation fully. And I haven’t even gotten there yet.

So they’re expecting to see the latest version rolled out at the investors day, March 1st. The thoughts are there’ll be several tweaks to it. Don’t know yet about if a windshield wiper is getting put on there or not, or if it’s lasers, but the sides will be How is that even possible? Thank you. That was my first reaction.

I was like, how do you make a box more square?

Crew Chief Brad: Cardboard.

Crew Chief Eric: Ikea proves that every week with everything they make. So I guess it’s doable.

Crew Chief Brad: You know, it’s going to have so many changes. They’re going to roll it out and it’s going to be a [01:23:00] Silverado with a Tesla badge.

Executive Producer Tania: It’s going to roll out. It’s going to look like an F 150 lightning.

Crew Chief Brad: It was the, here it is. Here’s the cyber truck. Thank you, Ford, for doing all the work for.

Executive Producer Tania: You’re going to have a Model Y front end, and this is going to be a pickup truck.

Crew Chief Brad: Yeah, it’s going to have that platypus front end. It’s going to be duct taped on, because you can get the duct tape pretty cheap at Home Depot.

Quack, quack.

Executive Producer Tania: Buy two, get one free rolls.

Crew Chief Eric: That’s terrible. I mean, that Thoroughly lowered my expectations. Lowered expectations. We’ve gotten there. And you know what? I’m going to finally grind this one into the ground. Thank you. Thank you. Last month, there was all this speculation about Jeremy Clarkson’s latest.

Childish temper tantrum. And we said, well, it’s about time that we close the chapter on this. And you know, all the excuses aside, I feel like the drama it’s sort of played out similarly to the way it did on top gear, it got old. And so we had to create this thing. And then Jeremy [01:24:00] Clarkson and team left top gear and did the grand tour and the grand tour, a bunch of drama, and we punched people in the face and then we canceled the show and we went to the long format movies and now, because the movies are sucking.

We’re going to create some more drama and we’re finally canceled for real. This time, Amazon has said we’re done. It’s it it’s over. We are now in the post top gear era, which whatever. I thought we were already there like 10 years ago,

Crew Chief Brad: but did it say anything about some of the offshoots, some of the other shows, not related to top gear, like Clarkson’s farm and stuff like that, because season two just came out.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah, but that was already filmed a while ago. And I think with his latest just idiocy, there’s been threats about canceling Clarkson’s farm as well. So we’ll see how that goes. I mean, he’s doing nothing but pissing off his neighbors. That’s for sure. If you watch the show, I mean, it’s entertaining enough.

Crew Chief Brad: Well, the first season was really good, but it wasn’t about. Him just making his neighbors mad. It was him actually trying to learn how to farm. I guess now that he’s done that,

Crew Chief Eric: I don’t see that lasting very long, long term. [01:25:00] not like a top of your thing. It’s like, all right, cool. Two seasons, max. So season two is done a third, but you’re stretching it.

What’s he going to do? Right. True. He’s going to retire. Credit where credit’s due, he’s getting up there in age. They all are. It’s like, fine, bow out gracefully. You could have gone out on a high note when they exited top gear. Cause I think some of that whole publicity stunt was staged to bring in a new crew and all that kind of stuff.

I mean, whatever, maybe he is a megalomaniac. I don’t know, but I’d like to believe maybe not maybe a little bit. There’s a little bit of a human in there. I don’t know. My point is. Okay, I’m just glad. I don’t have to hear about it again.

Crew Chief Brad: So who’s a worse human at this point? Jeremy Clarkson or Elon Musk?

Both of them are basically

Crew Chief Eric: man children.

Crew Chief Brad: So Jeremy Clarkson just has a big mouth and doesn’t know when to shut up, but Elon Musk actually believes the shit that he says. I

Crew Chief Eric: feel like we’re watching Boiler Room every time we talk about Tesla news.

Crew Chief Brad: We’re watching Wolf of Wall Street. [01:26:00]

Crew Chief Eric: Moving on. This next one speaks to also why I think the days of dealerships are over with.

Apparently a dealership made a woman right in front of them. That was, you know, buying a car, filling out paperwork, basically prove that she was a human.

Crew Chief Brad: Can confirm this happened to me when I bought my Tundra. No, swear to God. They had the little electronic things. Like we have to make everybody do this.

Just sign. You are not a robot. I’m right here in front of you. I am not a robot. I can’t even do the robot. I am not a robot.

Executive Producer Tania: They’re just preparing us. For the future of androids

Crew Chief Eric: or the cyber crime that will ensue when you can order your car online and somebody has your identity and your credit card and suddenly, yeah,

Executive Producer Tania: they just bought it.

150, 000 Hyundai.

Crew Chief Eric: I mean, if that showed up and I didn’t have to pay for it and I’m just kidding.

Executive Producer Tania: Drive it around the block once or twice and then

Crew Chief Brad: how many different screens the capture you would have to go through to buy a car on. [01:27:00] Oh, I just

Crew Chief Eric: realized something. What if it was like Amazon’s return policy and it showed up and you said you didn’t actually order this.

And so they said, keep it and they refunded you the money.

Executive Producer Tania: No, they would never do it on that. Such a big purchase.

Crew Chief Eric: Seen weirder things happen with Amazon. And then some of the cheapest thing, you’re like, got to go through hoops to return it. Another thing that I don’t understand, and we know it’s become sort of an epidemic in the car community.

And maybe this is why we need to move to EVs, which is catalytic converters being stolen from vehicles. You know, you hear these stories about guys sliding underneath trucks, cutting them off with the sawzall. They’re in and out of there and, you know, 90 seconds. And the end of their time. Turn it in catalytic converters for, you know, whatever they’re worth in precious metals.

But I gotta say, you gotta be pretty ballsy to steal the catalytic converter off the Oscar Meyer Wienermobile.

Executive Producer Tania: I mean, who does that?

Crew Chief Eric: A delinquent.

Executive Producer Tania: Who does that?

Crew Chief Eric: It was Vegas. And what happens in Vegas, [01:28:00] apparently gets sold on the black market.

Executive Producer Tania: Apparently, if it’s a catalytic converter, it doesn’t stay in Vegas.

Crew Chief Eric: I want to know how big the catalytic converter is on the Oscar Mayer Wiener Buffalo because that thing is huge. I

Executive Producer Tania: think

Crew Chief Brad: it’s just like a school bus or something. So it’s whatever the catalytic converter would look like on a school bus. Big. It’s worth a lot of money. They fitted the truck or the wiener with a temporary cat.

Executive Producer Tania: So in November, the FBI in Las Vegas arrested two men on charges of conspiracy. commit interstate transportation of stolen property in the resale of 71 catalytic converters for more than 16, 000. That’s

Crew Chief Brad: good money. I think I found my new side job.

Executive Producer Tania: 225 a catalytic converter. Is that good money? Is that a good use of your time?

Crew Chief Eric: It is for 90 seconds with a sawzall. I mean, the blades don’t cost a whole lot. I guess. I mean, if you’re highly sophisticated, you got a creeper so you can roll out. Yeah. Under the car, roll out the other side with your catalytic converter. Who are you, [01:29:00] Slender Man? Or are we rolling under,

Executive Producer Tania: like, a

Crew Chief Eric: Haven’t you seen these trucks?

They’re stealing them from pickups. You can get under there and do all sorts of stuff without getting them off the ground.

Executive Producer Tania: All right, if it’s a truck, sure. But there’s been plenty, like, Hondas that have had their catalytic converters taken out.

Crew Chief Brad: Somebody come take the catalytic converters out of my car, please.

So I can So I can get insurance to pay the 5, 000 or whatever

Crew Chief Eric: it

Crew Chief Brad: costs to put in

Crew Chief Eric: new ones. Straight pipe it. Well, you know what else is crazy? Our favorite rental company hurts. Well, maybe not our favorite because it usually hurts my wallet to rent from them. They have to pay false arrest claims.

Executive Producer Tania: So this is them renting a car to someone and then thinking that that person stole it.

Crew Chief Eric: Top quality service.

Executive Producer Tania: So they were using the same computer system the Southwest uses.

Crew Chief Eric: Yes.

Crew Chief Brad: Yes. I was going to say, when did Elon Musk become CEO of Hertz?

Crew Chief Eric: Well, didn’t they have a relationship with Tesla?

Executive Producer Tania: They are buying a bunch of Teslas.

Crew Chief Brad: So he clearly has a hand in [01:30:00] this. And you’re

Crew Chief Eric: fired. You’re fired.

Crew Chief Brad: And you’re fired.

You brought the car back. You’re fired.

Crew Chief Eric: It’s like an episode of The Apprentice.

Executive Producer Tania: NASA employees operating government rented vehicles were some of the victims by Hertz.

Crew Chief Eric: See? I’m telling you, collusion! SpaceX conspiracy. You can’t get to work. Yes. You’re fired. You’re fired. Telling you, Elon Musk is the devil.

Executive Producer Tania: Well, there you have it.

Crew Chief Eric: Well, you know what? They say the devil goes down to Georgia, but in our case, we’re going a little further south and talk about alligators and bear.

Executive Producer Tania: You know what? We’re going to start up north. We’re gonna start in Michigan. This is a cute one. It’s called Holy Cow, Michigan Man Rides Cow Across Woodward, meaning like a street. Oh, not

Crew Chief Brad: Dave Woodward?

Executive Producer Tania: No, no. No, Will the Cowboy and his pet heifer [01:31:00] Hope were caught crossing the intersection together. On

Crew Chief Brad: cowback.

Who was riding who?

Crew Chief Eric: Why did the cow cross the

Crew Chief Brad: road? To get away from his owner.

Executive Producer Tania: In fairness, I believe he works for like a farm that does sort of like petting zoo type stuff. So he was actually trying to train the cow.

Heavy petting.

Executive Producer Tania: To be rideable. I’m, you know, I, I don’t know. Maybe that’s what he was doing. To be what? I missed it.

Crew Chief Brad: I love hearing the headlines before I click into the article. This is my new favorite game.

Executive Producer Tania: So that was a little bit of light hearted humor. So now we can take a trip down south to Florida, man, where this one is This one’s a public safety announcement. You know, don’t do drugs.

Crew Chief Eric: We’ve been fighting that war since the Bush administration.

Executive Producer Tania: You know, don’t drink and drive. Don’t do drugs and drive. And don’t do so many drugs that you drive through a [01:32:00] cemetery mowing down all the tombstones and headstones and then exit the cemetery and drive into somebody’s house.

Crew Chief Eric: Wasn’t that a scene in like Evil Dead? Like, I feel like this is like a Bruce Campbell film.

Driving a Delta 88 through a cemetery knocking over tombstones. So what?

Executive Producer Tania: Florida man drove through cemetery, damaged headstones. Crashed into house.

Crew Chief Eric: Oh, that’s the best part. Was it the undertaker’s house? ?

Executive Producer Tania: I don’t know. But he cleared the cemetery, crossed the street, went through a fence, and then into somebody’s house

Crew Chief Brad: you hear the owner of the house thought the neighbors were quiet.

Executive Producer Tania: I wanna know what he was driving. He mowed down some cement blocks.

Crew Chief Eric: It was a 78 Pontiac Phoenix, lit back,

Executive Producer Tania: went through a fence, and wasn’t stopped till he went into a house.

Crew Chief Brad: It was a Kia Telluride, AX4 Pro. You know what it

Crew Chief Eric: was? That person’s driveway was on his GPS and they say it was a road through the [01:33:00] cemetery.

Meanwhile, the NecroComicon was on his back seat, but we’ll leave that for another episode.

Executive Producer Tania: Meanwhile, he stole that car so it wasn’t even his. So we’re going to stay in Florida. I couldn’t decide who was better, Florida man or the Washington woman.

Crew Chief Eric: Oh boy.

Executive Producer Tania: But since we’re in Florida, let’s stay in Florida.

This

Crew Chief Eric: reminds me of our early drive thru episodes and the lady that set her boyfriend’s Jeep on fire.

Executive Producer Tania: With the Wiccans. Yeah, I’m having,

Crew Chief Eric: I’m having flashbacks.

Executive Producer Tania: So Florida man doing donuts at intersection allegedly hits patrol car before crashing his own car.

Crew Chief Eric: Two questions, cars and coffee. Tesla must Mustang.

Executive Producer Tania: No, this appears at least by the photo to have been late at night. He was found driving recklessly ahead of this drove over a raised median went into a slide. I don’t know at some point then I guess said, Let’s do donuts

Crew Chief Eric: in his Chrysler Sebring. [01:34:00]

Executive Producer Tania: It actually says he, he got stopped and then he reversed backed into the police car.

So he knew it was there

Crew Chief Eric: while he yells out the window.

Executive Producer Tania: I drive a Dodge Stratus. I don’t know. I’m thinking he was driving this pickup truck.

Crew Chief Brad: It’s a Dodge Ram.

Executive Producer Tania: He rammed it.

Crew Chief Brad: Yeah. So he hits a patrol car before crashing his own.

Executive Producer Tania: It’s a little confusing the order of operations.

Crew Chief Brad: Wouldn’t hitting the patrol car constitute a crash?

It was rubbing. Because he was driven was

Executive Producer Tania: racing. I didn’t even think they said he was under the influence of anything. So go figure.

Crew Chief Brad: He was under the influence of Florida. He was hooning. It’s called

Executive Producer Tania: So I don’t know what to do with this last one. I think it takes the cake. It’s not I don’t know if it’s as good as is casting a spell on your boyfriend’s car and lighting it on fire with candles, but passenger suspected DUI driver calls 911 On the Washington State Patrol.

Crew Chief Eric: Wait, what?

Executive Producer Tania: The [01:35:00] driver argued her constitutional rights were being violated by the pursuit. So a drunk driver is driving a car, and they’re being pursued by the state patrol, and they call the police, on the police, that their constitutional rights were being violated.

Crew Chief Brad: That’s a bold

Crew Chief Eric: strategy. Like they’re, they’re calling to say they’re being harassed by the police.

Crew Chief Brad: You’re driving illegally. How do you know that? You don’t know that I’m drunk. I may be driving on the wrong side of the road sideways with a kid hanging out the back, but you don’t know that I’m drunk.

Crew Chief Eric: It’s like that tater salad joke, right? I wasn’t drunk. In public until you put me there.

I want to hear the 911 recording of that. Like, it’s gotta be absolutely insane.

Executive Producer Tania: It’s got to be because the person was in an F 150 doing like over a hundred miles an hour.

Crew Chief Eric: They can go that fast?

Executive Producer Tania: Apparently. We’ve been in and out [01:36:00] and stuff. And this is like at midnight 30. And then the other passengers. Call the cops on the cops because they thought the law had changed that the cops can’t pursue you anymore in high speed

Crew Chief Brad: 911.

What’s your emergency? Yes, I’m being followed

Executive Producer Tania: my drivers. Uh, under the influence. He’s had a couple of 10 beers and the cops are after us.

Crew Chief Eric: But it’s just like the sound rules, you can’t make noise after 10 o’clock and the cops can’t chase you after 80 miles an hour. Like, what the hell is that?

Executive Producer Tania: Well, there has been some of that,

Crew Chief Brad: right?

Yeah, the police aren’t allowed in some cases, they’re not allowed to enter into a They should

Executive Producer Tania: really back off because all it does is endanger the officers and other people if they go on these crazy high speed pursuits. But there’s caveats to this. It’s like when we know you’re driving drunk, we follow you.

Crew Chief Eric: It’s like Need for Speed Hot Pursuit.

Executive Producer Tania: You don’t get a free pass. We deploy the spike strips on you.

Crew Chief Eric: You know what I learned from this article? When you said the truck [01:37:00] did a hundred miles an hour, it proves a very important point that sometimes. You need to haul lumber and haul ass truck life,

Crew Chief Brad: gas or grass.

Executive Producer Tania: Don’t be that person either. Public safety announcement.

Crew Chief Eric: Well, folks, it’s time we go behind the pit wall for some motor sports news. This next one is actually really interesting because we saw this car in person while we were at Rolex and that’s the Hendrick built and sponsored garage 56 LeMans. This car is going to do NASCAR and the 24 Hours of Le Mans.

I think this is super cool. And entering a Camaro in the GT class? Interesting to see how it all plays out in June.

Crew Chief Brad: I think it’s cool. I can’t wait to see it race at Le Mans.

Crew Chief Eric: And last month, we also spoke about Travis Pastrana returning to NASCAR. And I’m sure a lot of people were probably thinking who, what, where, I mean, you know, he’s took over doing tricks and whatnot for Subaru and, you know, Global Rallycross and [01:38:00] all that kind of stuff a while ago.

But. We have some results information for you. And I’m happy to report that Travis did a lot better than probably any of us expected. He ended up 14th in this month’s Daytona 500.

Executive Producer Tania: I guess he did better than Kimmy, right? Who didn’t finish.

Crew Chief Eric: He never made it to the 500.

Executive Producer Tania: That’s true. I meant just at a NASCAR race in general.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah, not so good. Kimmy, try again. Let’s talk about open wheel racing. So where are we at in Formula One?

Executive Producer Tania: We are just a few short days away from the season opener in Bahrain on March 5th. Pre season testing is about to start.

Crew Chief Eric: Formula One’s kicking off, but like every year we have to have the big reveal,

Executive Producer Tania: the

Crew Chief Eric: cars, oh my god, so many memes.

Crew Chief Brad: I have to agree with Eric. This year is a little different, but in years past, yes, the reveals. of the new liveries. I would get so excited [01:39:00] just to see the McLaren that looked exactly like the McLaren from other McLarens.

Crew Chief Eric: But stickers, brah. Stickers.

Crew Chief Brad: This year’s reveals were actually quite a bit dramatic.

The Mercedes car went back to black. You know, cue the Amy Winehouse song, you know, that everybody’s playing everywhere and on their memes. The Mercedes looks amazing though. I really like it. I’m team save. You know why they did

Executive Producer Tania: that?

Crew Chief Brad: Because that was the last time you won.

Executive Producer Tania: No, because apparently it saved them grams of weight.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah, I heard that too.

Executive Producer Tania: So they did it as a weight savings to just like flat black or whatever. Raw

Crew Chief Eric: carbon fiber or whatever. Yeah.

Executive Producer Tania: That’s fine.

Crew Chief Eric: So that’s some Mercedes trickery there. So they’ll get penalized for that.

Executive Producer Tania: I don’t think there’s a rule that says you have to paint your

Crew Chief Eric: car. But like, I watched the Ferrari reveal and I watched these two guys doing their podcasts.

So that told you

Executive Producer Tania: nothing. That was like fanboys salivating over the Ferrari, which honestly, I think I liked last year’s better. I think the red was nicer. I liked that it was all red. I don’t [01:40:00] know. A fan of how they like splotched black chunks, not even accents.

Crew Chief Eric: It looks more like the Alan Prost, Nigel Mansell era of Ferraris.

They were darker red. Oh, they put Ferrari on the spoiler and the spoiler is black. And I’m like, yeah, all that stuff existed like 40 years ago. Okay, big deal. To me, I couldn’t tell the difference between the previous car and this car. And

Executive Producer Tania: if you look at the two cars side by side, there’s a lot of differences.

Actually, the front nose. End cap is shaped differently. The wing on the front nose actually extends further from the nose itself. The side pods are very different how they’re channeling the air, how they’re venting the air, all that stuff. I think the wing looks slightly different. The louvers all on the sides are flowing the air differently.

So they made a lot of engineering changes. So hopefully. Make a better performing handling car.

Crew Chief Brad: Yeah, they appear very subtle. Uh, I guess if you

Executive Producer Tania: just saw it by itself, you go, okay, it’s a different paint job on the [01:41:00] same car. But if you look at them side by side in the same front view, side view, top view,

Crew Chief Brad: quite a bit different.

Executive Producer Tania: There’s a lot of changes.

Crew Chief Brad: Yeah, it looks like the wing is smaller too. It’s narrower

Crew Chief Eric: like they were on the old cars. In the old days, they had those skinny boxy wings. It’s so what’s old is new again in some respects. I mean, whatever. And next year it’ll be something else. The different, you know, shade of red or whatever.

Crew Chief Brad: Yeah, that’s what happens.

Crew Chief Eric: But there’s some other news. Lance Stroll is out.

Executive Producer Tania: Well, he’s out of preseason testing, apparently had a bicycling accident. He’s a reserve driver is now at the helm, Felipe

Crew Chief Eric: Drogovic. Do we have high expectations for him?

Executive Producer Tania: I have no idea, honestly. But he’s about to have a job interview, so he better do well.

Yeah, right.

Crew Chief Eric: So there’s been a lot of other rumors flying around the F1 paddock in the last month, and that has to do with A four letter word.

Executive Producer Tania: It’s not a rumor, it’s been announced.

Crew Chief Eric: I know, but there’s other rumors that go along with the announcement, because there [01:42:00] were rumors before, then they were announced, and there’s rumors again.

And we’re talking about Ford, F O R D, Ford. Returning to formula one. And the first question I have is they just lost 2 billion in passenger sales. How the hell are they going to afford to run in formula one? This is where it went. Ah, Oh, got it. Okay. So I’m seeing things like partnerships with Red Bull.

Ford is supplying the power plants like they used to do back in the, you know, the sixties and seventies for like Lotus and stuff like that. So it’s not the first time Ford has been in this level of racing in the past. Good to see them come back with everything else that’s going on. I’m just a little curious.

Crew Chief Brad: Maybe we’ll have another rich energy fiasco.

Crew Chief Eric: And

Crew Chief Brad: then it’ll give Elizabeth Blackstock and Alanis King opportunity to write another

Crew Chief Eric: book. The Ford saga.

Crew Chief Brad: Yes. Fixer repair daily.

Crew Chief Eric: Speaking of sagas, Hollywood is dipping their toe. [01:43:00] In the pool

Executive Producer Tania: talked about this before because I believe it is still untitled is Brad Pitt’s new venture of this formula one movie.

Nobody knows exactly what this is going to be. Then he’s working with Lewis Hamilton in terms of directing, producing. Apparently he’s been listening to the auditions of whoever is going to be Brad Pitt’s co star. Shooting is supposed to start later this year for whatever this Formula one drama movie is

Crew Chief Brad: it’s called drive to survive and it’ll be out on netflix.

Executive Producer Tania: Apparently they are going to be taking footage live at race weekend. So maybe it’s the traumatization.

Crew Chief Brad: It’s just driven. It’s just the movie driven again.

Executive Producer Tania: Probably

Crew Chief Eric: seems silly to take live footage at a race when live footage is already being recorded for. For you,

Executive Producer Tania: it depends what footage they’re trying to take, but also if you’re bringing your actors in to like stand in the garage while nothing’s going on kind of thing.

Right? It wouldn’t be the same [01:44:00] footage.

Crew Chief Brad: They also need to get footage of the cars shifting gears 15 times.

Crew Chief Eric: Yes, with a stick shift in this case, like all American drama movies, you have an obligatory toilet scene and that is not usually recorded during the live broadcast. So they’ll have that too, right?

Yes. You brought up drive to survive. And I swear to God, Netflix is taunting me every time I log on. It’s the first thing I see. Is a reminder for drive to survive, which kicks off February

Crew Chief Brad: 24th. I’m going to coordinate with your wife and you’re just going to walk into the room one day and it’s going to be on and you can’t do it.

We’re going to a clockwork orange. Yeah,

Crew Chief Eric: no, not going to do it. Not going to happen. Meanwhile, in open wheel news, our last little bit here, Tony Kanan. Is finally retiring from IndyCar. That’s great. Doesn’t mean he gives up his seat in any of the other racing series he’s in, like IMSA or WEC or anywhere else.

He’s got a seat.

Crew Chief Brad: Yeah. It’s like, okay,

Crew Chief Eric: [01:45:00] we’ll be due.

Crew Chief Brad: We’re, it’s not like we’re never going to see you again. He’s retiring from IndyCar so he can do more of the e sports that he’s been doing.

Crew Chief Eric: I racing champion, Tony Kanaan.

Crew Chief Brad: It pays better, I guess,

Crew Chief Eric: right? It’s that monster energy sponsorship there. But speaking of energy drink sponsorships, let’s switch over to Red Bull TV and talk about WRC news.

Now, if you want to skip all this, go right ahead. But here’s the brief, just like Rolex is the kickoff to the season and the Daytona 500 and all that rally Monte Carlo kicks off the 13 event schedule in the WRC series. And they’ve added two new races this year for anybody that’s really interested rally Chile, and they returned to Mexico as well, but they’ve also added rally EU, which will be held in Germany.

I enjoy watching the recaps on Red Bull because it’s an easy way to digest the race, because otherwise, if you try to watch it in real time, it would be absolutely [01:46:00] mental. It takes four days and you know, usually it’s like 18 to 20 stages. Rally Monte Carlo was won by Sebastian Ogier. This makes him the most winningest rally driver in Monte Carlo rally history.

He was so excited. He didn’t even show up for rally Sweden, which was the next event two weeks later. But overall the whole. Race was pretty interesting. There’s a lot of back and forth between some of the old timers. So I think might be on the edge of actually needing to get out of WRC and making way for folks like Elvin Evans and Oi Tanik, the end result of Rally Monte Carlo was that Toyota took a one, two right out of the gate, which was pretty awesome for the madman of Latvala, who is now a team owner.

You know, principal, as they call them in formula one for gazoo racing Toyota. So that’s pretty awesome. Not a lot of snow this year in Monte Carlo, because as we’ve seen, even here in the United States, it’s been a pretty mild winter. So Europe, the [01:47:00] same thing, a lot of tarmac that they were running on. So that made running Monte Carlo very different than usual.

And the other thing that was pretty cool is we saw the debut of the new Ford Puma put out there by teams like M sport and so on. They’re having issues with the car. The drivers are trying to learn it. It’s a different chassis, obviously than the Fiesta that it replaces. And Hyundai was also having problems with their new hybrid system.

All the rally cars this year are actually hybrids. And turbocharged makes for an interesting power delivery system in the race cars. If anybody watches Monte Carlo, I think Elvin Evans is hilarious to watch. He is so hyper focused on everything he does. He leans forward, like he’s playing a video game when he’s driving and he has this look of complete.

Terror and bewilderment all at the same time. It’s super comical when you watch the in car view. And unfortunately, the support races like WRC2 and WRC3, they don’t get as much airtime as the WRC1, the big guys, the pros [01:48:00] do. But in WRC2 right now, Skoda, AKA Volkswagen is kicking ass with their new car. And there are some American drivers in WRC too.

So I’ll be keeping an eye out for them and checking out their progress. Cause it’s been a long time since we’ve had Americans running in WRC. So that’s pretty cool to see. Now I know Brad, you took some time to engage in WRC in the last couple of weeks, so you caught up on Sweden, didn’t you? I did.

Crew Chief Brad: I don’t know exactly what I watched.

Um, it was a recap of some sort. I have to agree that if you’re a Rally fan and you want to know what happened, yes, the recaps are fantastic because they do condense Four days worth of racing and drama into a short, like one hour episode of drive to survive what I don’t like is I, I, sometimes I just want to log in.

I don’t care that I’m not going to see the whole thing. I just want to see a rally stage from start to finish. Like, I just want [01:49:00] to see the driver. Like, I just want to see the racing. I don’t know. I feel like you miss a lot.

Crew Chief Eric: Well, it’s sort of like watching an autocross though. Do you really want to watch every driver make a run?

Because they are offset. They are by themselves, you know, all that kind of stuff.

Crew Chief Brad: Yes. It’s something about just watching because how long are the stages?

Crew Chief Eric: They’re super long. Like it takes all day. They run from sunup to sundown. I mean,

Crew Chief Brad: for, I mean, for one driver, one run, how long is it? I didn’t pay attention to the times.

Crew Chief Eric: I got on the simulator after Sweden and ran some of the segments on my setup. And some of the stages are six minutes full bore because they’re short. Some of the other ones, like a 21 kilometer section, which is like a longer power stage, you’re on track for. Easily 10 to 15 minutes. If, depending if you have any mess ups or things like that.

So you’re out there for quite a while.

Crew Chief Brad: I would totally watch a couple people making a complete run of the stage or whatever, I don’t need to see the whole stage. I [01:50:00] don’t need to see four days of rally. Yes. The recap would help me there, but just to see some action. I feel like the recaps don’t show enough action.

Crew Chief Eric: We’re on different ends of the pendulum swing. I’m so used to watching it that I just want that bite size. Give me what I need so I can keep track of what’s going on versus watching Esa Pekka Lappie do his full power stage run. Like, I don’t need 12 minutes of him driving. Just show me what he did and we’ll kind of move on with life, right?

Crew Chief Brad: Well, yeah, because I’m a new to rally.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah, you’re learning.

Crew Chief Brad: We’ve been talking about this for three seasons. Now I’m trying to give it an actual legit chance. I would do the same thing for NASCAR, but I’m choosing to do it with rally right now. I want to give it a chance, but it’s just, I don’t see enough in the recaps to actually make me care.

Crew Chief Eric: So what I think would benefit you and maybe any of our listeners that are interested in exploring the world of rally is to check out another program they have on Red Bull TV. It’s [01:51:00] about an hour long and they call it the ABCs of rally and actually walks you through the different sub disciplines of rallies.

There’s WRC that, you know, we’re talking about now, which is like sports car racing, right? Versus T1 Raid, which is like all the big trucks. And then there’s Dakar and there’s all these different. Types of rally from the buggies up through the cars and whatnot. So it’s cool to like, start with that and get your one on one down.

And then once you’ve watched enough of how it works and you can always go back into the vault and watch the runs, but they’re a little bit more raw again, having watched this for years, I like the condensed version. When you get to that stage, you’re like, man, I watched all of Sunday. In 37 minutes, I’m good because I didn’t need to watch 18 hours of content to kind of figure out what was going on.

Crew Chief Brad: Right.

Crew Chief Eric: I do like that Red Bull this season has deliberately included content from the special stages, which are the two on two. Overlapping kind of road courses that they develop. You saw a lot of that in [01:52:00] Sweden. It was totally iced over. It was really, really cool to see the cars go head to head. And if you kind of want a mind bender is try to follow the track and how it, you know, runs over itself and how the cars don’t end up hitting each other.

They’re really running. The same lap, it’s a two part lap. It’s not like a, a pro solo where it’s mirror image courses. They’re on the same track at different points and they’re chasing each other, basically. So it’s pretty cool. And I’m glad they’re showing more of that because that used to be like bonus content that you had to go find versus now they’re including that in the recap.

So that was pretty cool. But so you watch Sweden. What’d you think?

Crew Chief Brad: I thought it was comical what was going on with Craig Breen and Derry Neuville. Yeah. I thought that the last stage, what was it, stage 18? Yeah. Where, where they, uh, Neuville, he was fighting for points, you know, in the standings. Because he’s what, he’s like second or third, isn’t

Crew Chief Eric: he?

Right. But it’s only the second round of racing anyway, I know,

Crew Chief Brad: but, but still, like, they made like all kinds of like strategic changes and then he still crashed [01:53:00] out. Like he finished the stage, but he still backed into the snow drift and slowed him down and up. And then his teammate beat him anyway.

Crew Chief Eric: Well, here’s the best part about all of that situation, which I love the fact that they actually brought this to light and they didn’t cover it up.

Formula one is not the only one with a bunch of politics kind of dictating the outcome of the race. It was all team orders, but the other thing is Tiri Nouvelle, the whole time was just complaining about how much his I 20 was understeering, understeering. It won’t turn. It won’t do this, blah, blah, blah, blah, all this stuff.

And he was just pitching a fit. Then I don’t know if you paid close attention, but they forced them to switch cars. That was the bigger thing that Craig Breen got screwed.

Crew Chief Brad: Yeah, so he did the same thing that Mazespin was trying to do to Schumacher. It was like, ah, you got the better car, let’s switch cars, I’ll beat you in your car.

Crew Chief Eric: Exactly, and then to your point, he still screwed it up. So was it the car or was it the driver? Because Craig Breen was [01:54:00] flying. And he got his first stage win like ever. I mean, he’s not a newbie either. He’s been around for a couple of years. I’ve been keeping eyes on him. All the new guys, Oytanik, Esa Pekka Lappi, Elvin Evans, Craig Breen, all those guys, I mean, they’re the up and comers in WRC right now, obviously they’re running at the higher ranks, Terry Neuville.

Multi time champion, whatever, not as many as Seb and some of those guys, but he’s sort of the old dog in this fight. And so when they did the car switch and the team where I was just like, this is ridiculous. And then when he couldn’t pull it off, I

Crew Chief Brad: mean, even, even in the last interview, Craig Green had just finished his run and the, and the reporter was there telling him what happened and he just kind of smirked and it was great.

I was loving it. It was so good. So, so that was fun. I could, you’re getting me. Interested, and I’m seeing on here on our notes a quote from Tanya, and it actually makes a ton of sense. So watching WRC is like watching the Olympics. I think that is 1000 percent true. You know, you [01:55:00] need the recaps because there’s just so much.

Content to digest. You need the recap, but still sometimes when I watch the Olympics, I just want to log in and see,

Crew Chief Eric: you want to watch the figure skating. Yeah. I know how, I guess

Crew Chief Brad: I want to see the speed skating.

Crew Chief Eric: There were two other things that came out of Sweden that I thought were pretty cool, and I hope you picked up on this, that rally is really volatile, like one minute.

A guy’s eight seconds ahead going into a stage and suddenly he’s 20 seconds behind. And the guy that was like in sixth place is suddenly first. It’s really, really crazy. And that’s why you got to hang on and sort of keep track until the end. And those last couple stages are important. Now the special stage versus the power stage, those are points games versus the overall time.

So it gets a little complicated. Kind of like IMSA and stuff. There’s multiple races going on, right? Are you racing for points? Is it for manufacturer? Is it for personal time? You know, all that kind of stuff. So it becomes interesting. But the other big thing about [01:56:00] Sweden was Takamoto’s rollover. That was bonkers.

And he’s in the Yaris, he catches the back end and the thing goes ass over teakettle like four times or whatever. And then they’re in the car and the snow comes in through the window. The, this, the navigator just gets nailed. Right. And then I love when he puts it in gear and he tries to take off and keep going, but he can’t see.

And the freaking car’s turtle, I was like, it couldn’t get more comical than that. That’s rally right there. You just never know what’s going to happen.

Crew Chief Brad: The stage is constantly changing, especially in, uh, on a snow stage or something like that. I mean, every car that goes through there is on a completely different track than the car coming behind them.

Crew Chief Eric: That bit Craig Breen and like stage 16 or whatever, because they did the reverse grid because he ended up winning the previous one. And then he was like at the back and he goes, I’m dealing with ruts that, you know, are up to the door. And it’s like, the car wouldn’t do anything for him. I mean, he did the best he could, but that one was a [01:57:00] stage they had already run.

He’s like, I got this and he had killed it. They ran it again. And it was just like, he couldn’t do anything with it. So you start taking those times and you averaging them out and it gets really complicated from a scoring perspective, but it’s what makes it exciting because it’s not. Well, he was a 10th of a second off of his last lap, right?

It’s super variable.

Crew Chief Brad: No, no, everything changes then. That’s why they need 18 stages.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I

Crew Chief Brad: can totally see why you like rally because of all the scoring. It’s super complex. You totally nerd out on that shit. I’m sure.

Crew Chief Eric: You know what else I nerd out on and talking about things that are constantly changing alpha Romeo.

Part of Stellantis. If we haven’t forgotten.

Crew Chief Brad: It looks so good.

Crew Chief Eric: Well, they’re getting out of formula one, as we talked about throughout season three, how Audi is going to take over the Sauber team, which Alfa Romeo currently heads up. Now, the interview given with the race director at Alfa Romeo is saying that they’re going to take a gamble and head into endurance sports car racing.

So you [01:58:00] may see an Alfa Romeo at Le Mans. In 2024 and beyond.

Crew Chief Brad: I will totally root for this car.

Crew Chief Eric: It’s pretty sick looking.

Crew Chief Brad: Yeah. Alpha grill is just

Crew Chief Eric: something about it. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Maybe it’s the Ferrari that’s supposed to be out at Le Mans this year, rebadged and good for them. They get to keep the investment going in the car that they built because Alpha and Ferrari do share a lot, but I’m excited to see Alfa Romeo coming to the big stage.

That’d be really, really cool. It’s been a long time since there was an Alpha at Le Mans. Well, in other racing news from the virtual world.

Executive Producer Tania: There’s still no definitive release date for the latest installment of Forza Motorsport, which, I wish they would just call it Forza Motorsport 8, because whenever you search Forza Motorsport release date, you get the original Forza Motorsport.

So you still have to, like, Google search Forza Motorsport 8 to find anything related to this latest installment. It alleges sometime this year

Crew Chief Eric: before or after the cyber truck,

Executive Producer Tania: it’s a race. Which one? Well, that’s a, that’s a [01:59:00] good

Crew Chief Brad: one. What comes out first? Cyber truck or Forza Motorsport, whatever.

Crew Chief Eric: It’s becoming like Gran Turismo where it’s like, they promise a new one every year, and then it takes 10 years for it to release.

Meanwhile, somebody else has come along and, you know, usurped all the popularity of, That particular genre of game or whatever, you know,

Executive Producer Tania: they definitely have not been advertising Forza Motorsport eight until like the last two years, like Forza Motorsport seven didn’t come out and they weren’t like the next year, like eight’s coming.

There was silence.

Crew Chief Brad: We’re still seeing effects of the pandemic.

Crew Chief Eric: Well, the effect too, is that it’s going to cost a hundred dollars when it comes out and you’re going to have to buy a new system to run it, because it’s only going to be available in the series X or in your PC.

Crew Chief Brad: I have one. Oh, lucky you. It’s a hundred dollars anyway, because if you want to get the VIP pass or whatever, to get all the cars that come out in DLC months later.

You need to pay for the ultimate version, which is a hundred bucks anyway. So that’s nothing new.

Crew Chief Eric: As we close out the show, we need to [02:00:00] wrap up with all our local news and all that. So Brad, what’s on the docket?

Crew Chief Brad: So for upcoming local news and events brought to us by collector car guide. net, the ultimate reference for car enthusiasts.

So let’s see what’s coming up for March. Import Expo 23 is coming to the Washington Convention Center on March 12th. The Sugarloaf Mountain Region Swap Meet returns to the Westminster Maryland Ag Center on March 24th and 25th. BMW CCA kicks off a series of autocross schools on March 25th. And the Mid Atlantic Indoor Nationals, part of the Motorama Series of events, will be in Philadelphia on March 25th and 26th.

And tons more of events like this and all their details are available over at collector car guide. net.

Crew Chief Eric: That’s right. And it’s time for the HPD junkie. com trackside report. And as Dave promised, the database is full. It is the end of February. So you can figure out [02:01:00] where everybody is and wants to be this track season on tracks all across North America.

That’s the U S and Canada at HP junkie. com. So here’s some highlights and some interesting news from the track side. Summit point has brought back their off roading links on motorsportreg. com right now, where you can sign up for these off road events and off road courses, you know, run what you brung type of deal.

This is not to be confused with SCC rally cross or anything like that, which was brought back to summit point a couple of years ago now, pretty cool that they’re doing that. So now we have somewhere close to go off roading. Obviously there’s other facilities out there like Roush Creek, et cetera, where you can do this sort of thing as well.

But summit point. Joins them as a new facility to be able to go off roading with your Jeep or whatever. The SCCA WDCR region is hosting its first combined time trial and HPD event of the year, and that is set at summit point as well on March 4th, the 5th. The Audi club Potomac Chesapeake region has their [02:02:00] first event of the season.

Also at summit point. Hmm. I wonder that we got a theme here on March 11th and 12th. Meanwhile, Charlie striker, a spoiler alert for season four. He’s a guest on the show several times. He’s from max track time and they kick off their schedule with their first event at Carolina motor sports park on March 20th and 21st.

And you can get all the details about that at max track time. com and get a pre release of the episode we did with Charlie on their website. As well, the second annual death trap event, which is a free event for veterans and first responders. Saturday and Sunday, March the 5th is going to be held at Carolina motor sports park.

So come hang out at a great track with fellow veterans and first responders and enjoy an exciting session riding with veteran HPD drivers at speed. So those are always a lot of fun. That’s like what we have here, helmets off to heroes and other events through like that motor sports, et cetera, that you can check out throughout the season.

Also as a thank you to everyone for being a loyal supporters [02:03:00] of grand touring motor sports and fans of break, fix podcasts. And season three, Mike and Mona Arrigo from hooked on driving are offering a discount for the entire season of HPD events on their schedule. You can use code break, fix 23 to receive a discount on your event registration at checkout.

So thank you all again for being loyal supporters of all our efforts and tune out through the year for more promotions from our sponsors like this one.

Executive Producer Tania: In case you missed out, check out the other podcast episodes that aired this month. We closed out Season 3 with The Art of Chris Dunlop, a former Marylander who specialized in paint and body work for exotic and classic cars, now finds himself creating masterworks in the automotive and motorsports genre.

We went behind the scenes at DeLorean Next Generation and the DeLorean Legacy Project with Kat DeLorean to talk about her new initiatives and the supercar built from love. Everyone has a story, yes, but each of your vehicles has one too. Learn why you should tag all the [02:04:00] things with Katie and Paul from AutoBio.

Two more episodes launched from our IMRRC and SAH miniseries of motorsports history, both coinciding with the Daytona 500. The first is called Moonshine and Its Connection to the Automotive Industry by Buzz McKim. And the second, The Queen City and the NASCAR Hall of Fame by Hannah Thompson. There’s also a few pre release episodes out there such as The Green Grand Prix, Shipwrecked and Rescued, or Bob Garretson and the Apple 935.

Learn more about how you can access these through our Facebook group, Discord, or Patreon. Thank you to all the guests that came on the show this month. We hope you enjoyed Season 3 of Break Fix, and if you’re tuning in for the first time, you’ve only got 183 other episodes to catch up on. New episodes drop each week on Tuesday.

And don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter in the rear view or join us online to continue the conversation and share stories. We’ll see you again next month when we kick off Season 4 of The Drive Thru.

Crew Chief Eric: We don’t have [02:05:00] any new Patreons this month, but that doesn’t mean we don’t want more of them. So if you like what we’re doing, like we’ve mentioned before, sign up today, patreon.

com forward slash GT motor sports, every penny helps. We have all new plans and perks available. So check them out, review your current subscription, change tiers if you want to. And again, we want to thank you for all the support and all of it helps to keep us doing what we’re doing.

Crew Chief Brad: And for other shout outs, we’ve got a large list of anniversaries, or this is a big milestone anniversary for a few of us.

Crew Chiefs, Brad and Eric.

Crew Chief Eric: Hey, that’s us.

Crew Chief Brad: The Executive Producer, Tanya. Mountain Man, Dan, the guest that just keeps on coming back. And Portia Al are all celebrating nine years. With GTM, sadly to say there would be one other person on this list. Unfortunately, if he hadn’t passed away last year, Matthew Yip would have been celebrating nine years with GTM as well.

Crew Chief Eric: That is very, very true.

Crew Chief Brad: If you’d like to become a member of GTM, [02:06:00] be sure to check out the new clubhouse website at club. gtmotorsports. org to learn more. And special thanks to the guest host. We didn’t have a guest host this month, but if you would like to be a guest host, please reach out. We’re always looking for new voices to help make the conversation better.

Crew Chief Eric: And if you’re funnier than us, you definitely got to come on this show.

Crew Chief Brad: Well, that’s not hard for anybody. We’re not very funny at all. And of course our co host and executive producer, Tanya.

Crew Chief Eric: That’s right. And for everything we talked about on this episode and more, be sure to check out the follow on article and show notes available at gt motorsports.

org.

Crew Chief Brad: And all the members who support GTM without you, none of this would be possible.

Crew Chief Eric: Oh, true. That is a wrap. 82 episodes in the bag. Can you believe it? And we finished right on time. After 31 drive thrus, the tradition Remains the same. And what is that Tanya?

Executive Producer Tania: You’re never more [02:07:00] prepared than when you’re not prepared.

Perfect.

Crew Chief Eric: We’re getting better. Never better. Never worse.

Executive Producer Tania: After these messages, we’ll

Crew Chief Eric: be right

back.

Crew Chief Brad: If you like what you’ve heard and want to learn more about GTM, be sure to check us out on www. gtmotorsports. org. You can also find us on Motorsports. Also, if you want to get involved or have suggestions for future shows, You can call or text us at 202 630 1770, [02:08:00] or send us an email gtmotorsports. org.

We’d love to hear from you.

Crew Chief Eric: Hey everybody, Crew Chief Eric here. We really hope you enjoyed this episode of Break Fix, and we wanted to remind you that GTM remains a no annual fees organization. And our goal is to continue to bring you quality episodes like this one at no charge. As a loyal listener, please consider subscribing to our Patreon for bonus and behind the scenes content, extra goodies, and GTM swag.

For as little as 2. 50 a month, you can keep our developers, writers, editors, casters, and other volunteers fed on their strict diet of Fig Newtons, Gummy Bears, and Monster. Consider signing up for Patreon today at www. patreon. com. patreon. com forward slash GT Motorsports and remember without fans, supporters, and members like you, none of this would be [02:09:00] possible.

Skip ahead if you must… Here’s the highlights from this episode you might be most interested in and their corresponding time stamps.