B/F: The Drive Thru #35

• Factory Corvette Racing Team Is Officially Dead After 2023
• LE MANS-BOUND GARAGE 56 CAMARO OFFICIALLY UNVEILED WITH FULL RACING LIVERY AND SPECS
• Ford unveils the Mustang GT3 at Le Mans

Garage 56

On-board footage of the Garage 56 Camaro

• All-Electric Project V Is Caterham's First New Car Ever: 268 HP, 2623 Pounds

• #8 Toyota received "big damage" from squirrel hit at Le Mans
• Toyota Is Right: We Need More Hybrid Cars and Fewer EVs. Here’s Why

• Tesla NACS Charger: All the Upcoming Compatible EVs and Charging Networks

• Raging Bull: Lamborghini Unveils GTP That Begins Racing in 2024

Porsche at Le Mans - narrated by Patrick Dempsey

[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Gran Touring Motorsports podcast Break Fix, where we’re always fixing the break into something motorsports related. The Drive-Throughs GTMs monthly news episode, and is sponsored in part by organizations like h hpde junkie.com, hooked on driving American muscle.com, collector car guide.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.gt motorsports.org. Click about and then advertising. Thank you again to everyone that supports Gran Touring Motorsports, our podcast Break Fix and all the other services we provide. Recording in progress. I mean, we’re back in the studio.

Can you believe it? It feels like it’s been forever. I feel like I never left the studio. It was a good vacation. I think our fans are happy to see us back. For our fans that have been living under a rock and may not know, did you know that Eric went to France? Ben Nu, right? Is that what they say in French?

Ben Nu [00:01:00] welcome to drive through episode number 35. This is our monthly recap where we’ve put together a menu of automotive motorsport and random car adjacent news. Now let’s pull up the window number one for some automotive news. His back streets back. Alright, well we are gonna talk about a little bit of world travel.

Not only did I go to France, I went to a couple other places. Well, and Tanya joined me on part of this epic adventure. I think you joined me on the epic adventure. That’s true. But we would be remiss if we didn’t talk about the great race, the hundredth anniversary of. Lamar, I thought you were gonna say the great race, the Canadian, you know, F1 race.

Well, we’re gonna get to that in a little bit. Yeah. So did you guys watch Lamar? What’s, what’s that? I watched Lamar, a significant portion of it. I did not stay up all night. I watched about two or three hours of the 24 hour race. But what I ha, I have a [00:02:00] toddler and I was very busy going to swim lessons and being a good father, he’s not old enough to understand the races yet, so I had to do other things.

Lamar is my annual Father’s Day gift from my family. I ask for two things, be able to watch the race. And to be able to watch Race in Peace and that’s it. My Father’s Day gift was to go to Baltimore for a concert. So ah, I chose music over cars, which music is my number one. Cars are my number two. So you did some traveling like you went to Baltimore.

That’s like a foreign country from where you live now it’s going to a third world country, not France. It’s like going to Somalia. Yeah, driven in Paris. That’s all I gotta say. Holy smokes. Can’t be as bad as driving through Baltimore. It’s worse. Actually. Picture it. Paris 2023. I’m doing my best to st still.

Getty here it is like Dante’s Inferno Paris itself is like nine inception rings of hell. And it’s like one beltway after the other. I guess they’re districts or rings or whatever they call them. And I’d [00:03:00] heard rumor about what it was like to drive in France and you guys have heard me rant about driving in the D M V before, but nothing.

Is like driving in Paris. Nothing is like driving in Paris in a fiat that you weren’t supposed to have in the first place. So it all sort of goes wrong from the very beginning when I showed up at the enterprise counter and they said, well, sir, Your car is not here. What was your original car? Was it a Chevy Impala?

No, no, no. I was supposed to get a Twingo and I was super excited about that. Even smaller. Wait, that’s the electric car, isn’t it? No, the Twingo is like this classic Reno. They kind of replaced the R four and some of the other people movers that have been around forever. It’s sort of like the new Beetle, right?

The size of your shoe, Brad. Yeah, I, I thought I saw them on top gear a lot. They’re small. They’re like a pf 500 size, you say Twingo. All I think is Oingo Boingo. My car wasn’t there when I was waiting to pick it up, so I had to wait like 45 minutes and then it finally showed up. I don’t know where they drudge this car out, but it was a Fiat [00:04:00] 500 E but hybrid, not electric.

So it was a, eh, it was a 500, eh? Yeah, and that’s sort of how it drove too. It was a manual, but it was a three cylinder non turbo high. I will say that 70 mile an hour happens. Eventually, and when you add two other full size adults in said vehicle plus luggage. Yeah, I got a little suspect. So was it any different driving a manual hybrid versus a manual dice car?

It was exactly the same. Basically what it did was it had this sort of like launch control type system. It really only worked under certain RPMs. It still had like the engine shutoff capabilities and all this kind of stuff. And so it was really designed for short stop and go, especially in the French traffic where it took us over an hour and a half just to get outta Paris onto the main highway to go to lama.

So at that point it was [00:05:00] consuming. Electricity instead of gas, stuff like that. What I learned though was with the manual transmission ev, unlike the Honda c r z hybrid and some, and this new super that we talked about last time we got together, the fiat, if you didn’t disengage the auto shutoff, the car would like freak out and stall, especially if you tried to do like a rolling second gear takeoff.

So I actually figured out how to disable the system partially, and so then it was a lot more drivable because otherwise it would sort of like buck. It was really annoying and I kept telling David from m i e racing, who was my travel companion over this trip, I was like, it’s not me. And he goes, no, I can tell it’s the car.

It’s doing something weird. And you know, it’s like I drive a manual every day. It’s, it’s a fiat, it’s easy. Once we got out of Paris, then it’s just country roads. It’s like any other highway, that sort of thing. And, and Lama is in the middle of nowhere. But I will say this, to sort of wrap up the thought about Paris and your comment about Baltimore, at least in Baltimore, when it rains, The water doesn’t [00:06:00] create a waterfall from one overpass to the other overpass and the third overpass underneath it, and then slam on the roof of your car where it’s nearly impossible to see.

And then when you get out from underneath the waterfall, your windshield is covered in cigarette butts and trash. Because Paris is filthy. So you’re saying you’ve never been under in the tunnel? You know, going into or out of Baltimore, the tunnel doesn’t leak, at least as far as I know. No, no. But I’ve been in situations where just that, yeah, you know, happens there was some sort of clog in the drainage system and you basically drove through a shower to get into the tunnel and out.

I am not one for driving in the city anymore anyway. Although I don’t mind the European driving etiquette, they still have one at least. You know, passing is very easy. Everybody’s moving at very good speeds. They’re situationally aware. You’re not looking over seeing somebody eating a bag of Doritos on their cell phone and not paying attention to driving hardly any Teslas I saw when I was there.

You know, the typical BMWs, renos, Volkswagens, all that kinda stuff. You [00:07:00] come to expect. The aggressiveness in Paris is unparalleled. They change lanes whether you’re there or not. They push against you. I mean, you could reach out and basically smack somebody in the face. That’s how close they are. They will just cut in wherever they feel like it.

Whether you’re going fast or going slow turn signals, might as well not even have them. Absolutely insane in the city. When you get back out on the highway, not a big deal. It it is what it is. It’s just typical European driving at that point. But in Paris proper, it’s nuts. Yeah, it sounds like driving in New York, basically, if they’re a hundred percent.

If they’re an inch ahead of you, they have right of way. A hundred percent. Yes, a hundred percent. It’s nuts. How many, how many eos were driving? You know, there were a lot. I gotta tell you, I got to spot the new 2 0 8 like all over the place. The new 2 0 8 GTI specifically is a really, Good looking car. Like if I lived over there, I’d be considering buying one of those right now.

It is really nice. Very well equipped, very well appointed. [00:08:00] I got to see one up close in the interior and stuff. I also got to see some rocco’s, including a Rocco R, so that is still at the top of my list of things to buy while I was playing car spotting over there. But there’s a lot of neat stuff. You get super jealous really quick driving around over there because you realize there’s so many cars that we’re just never gonna get.

Speaking of the Rocco, not to, you know, go off on a tangent. When did that first come out? The newest model? The one you liked? Mark five timeframe. So 2008, mid two thousands. Yeah. Okay. So 25 year rule. Sometime in the 2030s you can, that’s right. You should be able to import one. I just gotta wait a little bit longer.

Just a little bit. That 2 0 8 is pretty hot though. That is, that is a hot car. You get to Lamont, Leno and the way we came in, because we came in from Paris, we’re going east to west and we drop in right behind TEUs, like the famous restaurant that’s right there. At turn, I guess it’s like turn five. You don’t know, really know what to expect because you’re skirting the [00:09:00] outside of the track and the track is comprised mainly of country roads and so it’s chaos.

There’s no organization. The other thing I learned about France is they pretty much expect you to be an adult and they’ll give you pointers to a certain point, and then after that they’re like, well, you’re on your own. We got tired. We’re not putting up any more signs, and we must have run outta money because there aren’t any anymore signs to put up anyway.

You get lost really quickly because the level of caring kind of seems to stop and Lamar is huge. I never understood how grandiose it was. Until I got there. Like we look at tracks like v i r and the Glen and Laguna Seka and the ones in Texas, and even some of the biggest NASCAR tracks at Talladega or even Indianapolis.

You’re like, these are coliseums of greatness. And you get to Laman, you’re like, these are turns three and four and five. And that’s basically it. I mean, it’s just, it’s so big, just massive. And I was tracking all of our walking that we were doing and [00:10:00] regrettably my decision not to get a scooter or whatever, some other alternate form of transportation, because moving around by car was near impossible.

We ended up clocking, could you not? Almost 80. That’s eight zero miles of walking in five days. I mean, my calves look like your calves now, Brad. That’s what I’m saying. Well, they’d probably come down now. You know, the track is just massive. Right? Eight and a half miles and change. Bugatti, the inner circuit, the one we play on Forza sometimes is actually a lot smaller and we walked most of that too, and you’re like, oh, this is really cool.

Motorcycle track, H B D E, track go-karting. You can do a lot of stuff with it, but it seems bigger until you see it in context of everything else. At Lamont, it’s just, it’s huge. The other thing you don’t realize is the amount of elevation change there is at Lamar, like in all the video games, just like any other video game or simulator, it seems really flat and it’s not, not at all pretty interesting.

You know, it’s in the rolling countryside and all that kind of stuff. [00:11:00] Before I went, you know, we talked about different vantage points around the track. Where would you guys think would be probably the best place to watch on your TV in the tent?

I like the way Tanya thinks because then you get to see everything. I’ll put it this way, I had high hopes Tetra Rouge was a disappointment. It’s really tight back there. There’s not a lot of room for people to stand, but what you do get. Especially at night is this overwhelming sense of how fast those cars are because they’re coming down the hill already at full tilt and getting on the Mulan, prepare for launch speed at 200 miles an hour kind of deal.

And it’s just absolutely bonkers. And some people come through their flat out, some will set up the brakes just to nose the car in a little bit and away they go. Like just absolute warp drive. That was kind of cool. But to stand there all day with no grandstands, shoulder to shoulder with other people that don’t know the boundaries of personal space.

Yeah, I was like, we need [00:12:00] to move on from that. Another one that was super disappointing was actually the Porsche Curves and you see it on TV and it looks super cool with the Porsche thing written out and all this kind of stuff. You’re sitting on a hill and you can only sit on the inside of the turn and you gotta pike through two campgrounds to get there.

It’s not close, you know, like anything is around there. But the vantage point kind of sucked and the cars are just buzzing by and it’s sort of the same effect you get at Road Atlanta and turn six and seven where they just sort of come into the corner out of nowhere and then they disappear cuz they’re off at a million miles an hour.

Although I will say it was one of the best places to hear the cars other than the front straight, if you really wanted to be up close to them. And we’ll talk more about the Garage 56 car as we go along, but I mean, talk about a car beyond the level. Of any Corvette of the past that the sound just ripples right through you as it’s going through Porsche curves.

We went down to forge chicane, which is where the Ferris wheel is, and at three o’clock in the morning when you’re extremely tired after many days, [00:13:00] it is absolutely gorgeous up there. I highly recommend it. You do have to pay to go on the Ferris wheel. It’s a whole separate thing. It’s not too expensive.

Some of the video and the pictures we took were just absolutely unbelievable and you can see really far out, especially onto the backside of the track coming from a direction of like our noj when you’re up in the Ferris wheel. So that was totally worth it. The front straight is pretty awesome during non race time because otherwise you can’t get there.

It is so jampacked with people and security guards and like all this stuff. It’s really not a fun place to be. But what I learned through the process is lamonts is a week long thing. It’s a week of sleepless nights. There’s a lot of stuff going on and being at the front straight, especially during night practice, which I don’t think many of us knew was a thing because they don’t televise it.

So ACO 18, the Porsche boxes. That was a great place to watch off the main street, your high up, great pictures, all this kinda stuff. We went there at night during one of the [00:14:00] practice sessions, cause it was open, it’s called a Tribune, is what they call our grandstands. And you have to have special passes to get up there and you have to be part of the Porsche box and all this kinda stuff.

But because it wasn’t race day yet, we could get up there. So we went up there like late at night, David and I were chatting, we’re taking pictures down into Glic. Andhas and Toyota we’re kind of, you know, using the binoculars and seeing what they’re doing. And by the way, we found out there’s a curfew in the pit boxes.

They’re only allowed to work to a certain point. They gotta shut it down. So we’re just sitting there chatting, you know, taking it in, talking about the experience of that point. And there were security guards like looming up there. Right. We had asked him, is it okay if we come up here? Yeah, yeah, sure.

We’re gonna take some pictures. We’re gonna hang out. Yeah, yeah, no problem. We’re we’re open all night. Okay, cool. It got really quiet. It’s like two in the morning, I guess at this point. And David’s like, man, I gotta pee. And so he disappears and he comes like right back and I’m like, what happened? He goes, they’re locking us in.

What? He goes, they’re leaving. They weren’t gonna say a damn thing. I pack up all, you know, my stuff, my camera, whatever. And we run out and they’re like, oh yes we were, we were going. And I’m like, we were still out [00:15:00] there. Like, it’s okay. Not our problem. Like, you’ve gotta be kidding me. How would you have gotten out?

Like is there a way to have gotten out? I think we would’ve set off a bunch of alarms and stuff. They were locking us in and I’m like, were we gonna go over the front of the balcony and like repel down like splunking? That’s the other thing. The track is live all week for almost all day every day.

There’s only a few hours where it gets quiet and it gets disturbing cuz you’re like, there’s all that ambient white noise of the car. There’s constantly something going on and so that’s a little strange. Dunlop’s pretty awesome. Not going to deny it. It’s probably one of the most fun places to watch.

There are grandstands there, but it gets packed very, very quickly. It’s hard to get in and out. The bridge is really narrow. There is an advantage if you’re an ACO member, which we’ll talk about in a little bit, where you can be on the backside of Dunlop where I took a lot of pictures from and, and so did some of our other guys and that’s a great place to be.

The downhill S’S are also awesome, but. Hard to get to. You have to [00:16:00] climb these really tall banks to get up there to be able to see, and it’s jam packed and, and people are getting these spots during the race on average three to five hours before the race even started. So if you didn’t pick where you wanted to be, it was already packed.

So absolutely insane. The only part of the track where we really didn’t get to go was ar noj and Indie, which are the two slowest corners, you know, after you come off the Mulan. It’s the hard left and then the hard right? And then they make their way back. The French guys from Bosch that we were hanging out with Te Tebow and that whole team, max and all those guys.

Hey, if you’re listening. They made the trek to ar, nj and indie. And would you guys like to guess how long it took to walk there a year? Well, this is like our, what should I buy? Guess it’s like two hours, three and a half hours one way because it is the furthest point away from everything and you have to walk through like the town of Arina to get there.

It’s super far and I regret not going, but I’ll do that next time because that takes a lot of [00:17:00] planning and I would love to have a scooter or something to be able to do that cuz it, it’s just too much. At that point was there room for you to be scootering or Yes. Or something else? Yes. Bikes and scooters were all over the place and every time I saw one buzz by me, I’m like, I’m super jealous right now.

I’m my feet hurt and yeah, I thought you were gonna buy a scooter and do the whole I was. And so you know what? I there and my inner cheapness as a racer came out and you know what I did? I ended up buying a really nice pair. Did you get Hees? You got a pair of Helix? No, I got hokas. These European like three sizes too big for your feet.

Running shoes. And I will say that saved me because of all this walking I did. But yeah, it would’ve been nice to be mobile and be able to get around a lot faster. You should have taken roller blades. They sell hokas here. Oh, I bought them here. Oh, okay. You know what I like to talk about? I know everywhere I go, we hungry.

We hungry. We always hungry. Wasn’t gonna bring up food. I wasn’t gonna bring up the guests. So let’s talk about the food situation. Brad’s a [00:18:00] foodie, as in I like food. That’s about it. Hanging out with gentleman named Ty White. Hey Tai, if you’re listening, by the way, fun fact, he is the White House. You see in every video game at the Berg Ring.

That’s where he lives. He lives at the track there. So that’s actually super cool. So he’s been to Lamonts many, many times and he was very much our yogi on this trip because he gotta go here, go here, do these things, whatever. And he told me years ago, in the not too recent past, Lamont was like a food desert.

There was nothing you had to fend for yourself. Can you imagine being there camping for a week? Right. And you didn’t plan ahead. Well, you starved. So now they have these, especially for the hundredth, they built a lot more facilities. There’s a lot more like food trucks. There’s this really cool Bruss RI that we ate at twice because it was actually a really good deal and there weren’t a lot of lines cuz people were like, I don’t wanna sit down dinner, I just want a hotdog.

Or you know, whatever they could find. But since we were, as the French guys liked to make fun of us repeatedly, we were [00:19:00] lumping, food was provided in the morning, at least breakfast, and they had a lounge and stuff like that near where our campsite was. Which by the way, If you’re gonna do Lama, do the glamping, it is totally worth it, considering how close we were to the track and all that kind of stuff.

You get to breakfast, especially the first day and I walk, I’m starving, I don’t even know what time zone I’m in. I’m like, I just want to eat something. And I’m thinking crepes and I’m thinking fresh fruit and brew. And, and I, all this stuff is running through my head and I walk in and you left all that stuff in Paris apparently.

Cuz when I walked in, I looked at the table, I looked at Tai. I look back at the table and he said, oh, I guess there’s bread for breakfast. There was literally piles of baguettes, a couple croissants, more piles of baguettes, and I kid you not a three gallon bucket of Nutella, which I was like, I’m not really sure what to do with all this.

You put the Nutella on the bread, it puts the Nutella on the bread, but you don’t double dip. You don’t double dip. What? You don’t double dip your chip. This would’ve been easy to accomplish had [00:20:00] the baguette not been a weapon of mass destruction. It was a guillotine. It was made outta concrete. I could have beat it on the table and it’s still wouldn’t have broke.

It was so hard, you know, afterwards it was like, oh, maybe they, you know, it’s the stale baguettes. You can make a cafe ole or something like that, but no. If you ordered coffee, what did you get? A little teeny. Know with your three fingers out, not even your pinky espresso. And I’m like, give me a freaking cup of coffee.

You American. I know. Not in America. You glamp. You know, such a, such a gist. A I don’t know. So what’s better that food or the lunch at Watkins Glen for aland driving event, man, you know, don’t make me, don’t make me make that decision. Cause it’s a tough one. Shout out to hod. And then the second day I watched the guy make eggs for people that were there waiting, hungry again, staring at bread in a walk.

And burn them cuz there’s nothing like waking up in the morning to the smell of burnt eggs. Burnt [00:21:00] eggs, still baguette and Nutella. In a country where they invented the crepe and the omelets and all this stuff. You think they would know how to do this? You know, somebody told me afterwards it’s because they don’t know how to cook in mass like we do here in America, like for armies and stuff.

You know, they cook in small quantities. I’m like, okay, because they use our army. Even here, they cook a crepe, one crepe at a time. Could you imagine cooking crepes for a crowd of people at a race? It would take longer than the race to cook the crepes. And there were crepe places and you could get crepes and they looked super good.

But I was like, you know what? I’m lip lumping. I would like my breakfast right now. I will say the ice cream was super good, as it always is in Europe because it’s gelato based and you know, all that kind of thing. They had fast food pasta, which was actually really good and I saw how they made it and that was pretty cool.

But what got me is one of the e evenings, and I don’t remember which one it was cuz it all blurs together. We were joking about how Mexican food would be this atrocity. You’ll like never find it in [00:22:00] France. It’s like complete sacrilege and whatever. And we’re walking down by the go-kart track to head towards where David’s camp was, which by the way was a 45 minute walk.

From my campsite. Okay, so we’re walking down there and we see these two young guys sitting on a scaffolding and they got these burritos in their hand and we literally stop dead and turn. First words were German outta David’s mouth, wondering if they spoke German. Don’t ask me why he did that quite a bit.

And they’re like, no, no, no. We’re like English. They’re like, yes. Where did you get the burrito? They’re like, not burrito. Kebab. And by the time the word kebab got out of his mouth, David was in a full sprint. Like I was like, what? I’m looking around going, what the hell just happened? And there’s this food truck and it’s a kebab truck.

And then I meet up with him and he’s like, dude, you don’t understand. European kebabs. This is like legit da da da. I’m buying like six of ’em or whatever. I’m like, uh, okay. They were unbelievably good. It was probably the best meal I had at the track. I mean, I [00:23:00] can still taste them in my mouth right now. I thought of you, Brad.

So better than New York Street meat. Dude, it was so good. So good. But thinking about the food situation, Lamas, it’s a, it’s a small French town. Do they have markets and grocery stores and stuff where you can leave, where they’re running the race to? Can you as a camper or agler, can you take a cooler, fill it with some ice or something and get your own provisions and do it yourself?

Yes and no. So we met these very nice Canadians that were team Corvette all the way. I’m sorry for Team Corvette. We’ll talk about that more in a minute. They were going into like Arash or going into Lamar and then there’s these tiny little grocery stores. You have to imagine though, that these grocery stores are selling out quickly.

Yeah. They’re only really designed to sustain the people that live there during the off season, during the non race season, because Lamar is built around the French countryside. There’s not a lot out there. There’s a lot of farms. There are like two little markets. You know, none of the, the little farm mets or the [00:24:00] farmer’s markets are open.

There’s like a couple restaurants. The Tetra Rouge was closed as far as we could tell. That’s poor planning of all those business owners. They can’t support it. Right. And so that’s why Lamar Proper had to do something on campus cuz otherwise how do you feed all these people? How long did it take you to get from Paris to Lamont?

Three hours. Okay. So you could technically get your provisions in a surrounding city. There was a grocery store between Paris and Lamont. Yes. Yeah. You can get your provisions. Well and I’m just, there’s a lot of nothing. Between Paris and Lamar. When you get on that highway, and I don’t remember the highway number right now, it looks like those wonderful Fellini films where it’s just someone on a train looking at farmland, and there’s one little house.

It’s like Chateau Picard, and then you pass Chateau Picard, and then there’s nothing for another. 30 minutes and then there’s another vineyard, right? It’s like zero. And when we came back from Lama, we went off the highway, we took these back [00:25:00] roads zipping through, and the fiat was great, right? Narrow little farm roads and you’re just blasting through there.

And I’m watching Mark, like grabbing the door handle. And David’s in the back laughing. The wheat was as tall as the fiat was, there was nothing. So you’re just like, okay. And typical of European highways too, if you miss your exit, you’re gonna go another 20 minutes before you can turn around. So it’s one of those situations too, things are really spread apart.

There’s not that like road Atlanta where you’re like, well, we’re gonna drive to, you know, Buford or whatever and come back and it’s like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. So basically what you’re saying is the reason the French people are so thin is because all they do is drink wine and smoke cigarettes and eat stale breasts.

Stale baguettes. Yes. When I go on a diet, I’m gonna go to France. French diet. Yeah, it’s French diet. Well, on the other side of the race, you know, things you don’t get to see on TV checkpoints everywhere is the hundredth lemons. A were on full alert, constantly scanning your badge and your wristbands, and you had to have different color [00:26:00] things, you know, depending on what you had access to and all this kind of stuff.

Because apparently the eco-friendly protestors. Wanted to stop the race and they had attempted to actually during practice before we even got there. So they were all on high alert and all this kind of stuff. And apparently they’d done this at other races too because they’re protesting motor sport and all this kind of thing.

Luckily, none of that happened. As you guys know, the race went off without a hitch. No, no issues, no protesters or anything like that, but they were definitely concerned something was gonna happen. Didn’t really affect us considering, we’re like, well, if we go to this quarter of the track, we’re, you know, three hours from whatever’s happening at the start finish line, so it doesn’t really matter.

The big debate was who was gonna win? I asked you guys before you saw the race, you know how it ended. Who did you think was gonna win? The number 56 car. The Toyota, the The Garage. 56. Oh, the Garage 56 car. Okay. I don’t know, it could have been anyone I went in with. Low expectations, lowered, expect expectations.

Expectations, expectation. The Ferrari looked like it was gonna be the fastest, although I always root for Jackie [00:27:00] Chan, but I don’t think the Jackie Chan cars were in the, no. Jackie Chan. No, Jackie. I was hoping that Poeo would win. You know, secretly they were my dark horse. They were my underdog because the cart.

Is legit hot. It is a sexy car. It has no arrow like the rest of ’em. It’s designed specifically for that track. Like I wanted Ferrari to win, but I also wasn’t gonna be upset if Puja won. Well, there’s a lot of politics people wanna see Toyota D Throne, Porsche’s back. Ferrari hadn’t won in 50 years. What looks better on the cover of the magazine?

Right. And in some respects, we all know the last few years with Toyota, it’s been a joke. They’ll sacrifice a lamb from LMP two, like Rebellion or somebody else, or even the Glick, inhouse cars, you know, whatever. And they’ll put them up against Toyota and they don’t stand a chance. This year, Toyota had real competition.

I mean, I literally had this debate for an entire week with people about who was gonna win listening to them. And I, and my final word was always basically the same. I think it’s gonna be Ferrari and you [00:28:00] guys can’t count out Cadillac. And they’re like, oh, what does Cadillac know? And I’m like, Cadillac’s been the Lamont before.

But the car they’re running has been proven. Time and time again at Rolex and other races. It’s an older car, but it doesn’t matter. It can do it. And in the same way, they were laughing at the garage, 56 Camaro, like, oh, it’s never going to make it. It’s gonna run out of tires, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And we got really close to that reality.

It was really close there for a moment with Ferrari first, Cadillac second. Toyota and the squirrel and all that stuff, whatever, you know. But I think at the end, the bigger disappointment was Porsche. There were a lot of Porsche people there. I’m a Porsche fan myself, but I was also playing devil’s advocate.

During this whole debate to say, well, it’s not really a Porsche, and that would get under people’s skin. Sorry, Ty. I’m still telling you it’s not a Porsche. Why? It’s a Delore chassis. It’s an Audi engine. It’s all this other stuff. It’s sort of like the Formula One car. They’re gonna slap their badge on it and we’ll call it a Porsche.

I was telling people I think the 9 63 is [00:29:00] short-lived, especially with that debut of the nine x that came out during lama, which looks a lot like the Lambo. Looks a lot like the Bugatti that has been previewed. They’re moving in that direction of car. This 9 63 isn’t gonna make it to the next lamonts.

They’re gonna have something else. The only reason it would be on the roster next year is if the new car isn’t ready, which is a pure Porsche. Maybe this was just to get their foot in the door. I think so. I really do. It’s just to to get the, because they had to be at the hundredth. They did not want to miss the party.

So they brought whatever they could slap together knowing they’re still working on something better. My sentiments exactly. So again, I am proud for Ferrari. That 4 99 is an amazing car. It sounds good. It looks good. It’s hella fast, it’s qualifying times for the hyper pole. Were just unbelievably good. And you know people, you should have heard that, oh, it’s gonna burn up like the Formula One car, they’re gonna bad.

And then at the end, all the [00:30:00] memes suddenly changed. It’s too bad. The Formula One cars can’t be like the 4 99. Why can’t they Formula One, get their shit together, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I’m like, come on guys, talking outta both sides of your mouth. But that’s, that’s racing, right? I mean, we get it. We have our loyalties, we have our fans.

I was really happy to see Ferrari Win and Toyota finally get beaten by a legitimate manufacturer. But I do have some rich people. Thanks. If you are a true hardcore Ferrari fan, you could still get v I p access to the Ferrari boxes. I mean, Porsche was like giving them away after two hours. They were like, y’all could just come on in here.

Have a good time. It’s all good. Would you like to guess how much? Too much more than $50 more than you can afford, pal? $8,000. What do I get for my 8,000 stale baguettes? I don’t know. Yeah, I stopped when they said $8,000. I was like, Nope. Don’t need to know anything more. Too rich for my blood. A hundred percent.

Do I get a baby Bugatti? [00:31:00] Yeah, baby Enzo. Yeah. Do I get a baby Enzo for a whopping 50 Euros? You could have become a member of the automobile club of the West. The ACO has started their own U US region. Pretty awesome. They have lounges all over the track, especially behind Dunlap. There’s one at ACO 18, which are the Porsche grand stands are, and a couple other places of the track.

You get a 40% discount on schwag and other things, and food was discounted if you’re an ACO member got 50 bureaus, 60 bucks or whatever came out to us. Actually worked to our advantage. Now, I will say the schwag at Lamont’s was kind of w w. I was getting all the emails from the ACO before the race, and a lot of the stuff I wanted either wasn’t available, it was cheaper originally online, or what I wanted didn’t look the same when I saw it in person.

So what I ended up doing was ordering the stuff either while I was there where I really wanted, or I ordered it when I got back, and they’re still actually running clearance sales on selected sizes and stuff that’s leftover from lamont. You can actually save a [00:32:00] boatload, especially if you’re an A C O member on any of the schwag.

So that being said, I got an opportunity to, spoiler alert, meet with the new president, ambassador of the A C O U S A, David Lowe, and he’s coming on the show in a little while to talk about the new club, why you should become a member, what the benefits are gonna be to the American audience, things like that, including access to the race commercial free for those of us here in the US instead of having to wonder how the heck we can watch it.

I did have breakfast with one of the Lamont’s legends, Margie Smith Haas. She was the first American woman to run at Lamont’s about four years prior to Lynn St. James, and she did that in a Porsche 9 35. So we hope to have her on the show as well. I got some lowered expectations as well. So I posted two memes on social media.

You can find it at Grand Turner Motorsports on Instagram and everywhere else that we have social media. And people were saying, well, where’d you get that picture of the guy in the hat? And I’m like, I took that [00:33:00] picture. I have the original. I zoomed in on him. He didn’t see me taking his picture, but I could not pass up the opportunity to have a Bert Reynolds s n l Jeopardy moment.

But it looks like, what’s his name from top here? James May. Yes, it does look like James May. But that hat was Bert Reynolds big hat, like it was so funny. And he had an all red Ferrari suit. He’s a British guy. We actually talked to him very nice, but I could not pass up the opportunity to post that meme.

And the second one came by way of Mark Shank, who caught this guy while he was taking photographs. Apparently on your checklist of things for Laman, you need to remember your hat. Your radio headset and your radar gun. He’s got like a hundred tattoos. And they’re all Lamont. They’re all Christopher Walkin?

No, he’s got like the Dunlap Tire arch across his back. It’s like Jackie Icks and Tom Christensen on there. It’s like all of them. He’s got Porsche and the Porsche symbol. He’s got so many men’s [00:34:00] heads. I thought it was Christopher Walken, the one on the right shoulder. No, it looks like Christopher Walken.

So when Mark showed me this picture, we had this whole discussion about apparently he was down by pit out and he’s radar gunning the car’s on pit exit and we’re like, Is he gonna radio the officials? Is he like the clandestine, undercover pit Marshall? Like what’s the point of bringing a radar gun to Lamont and how did he get it through security?

I mean, there’s so many que this is like a French Florida man. He hid it in his butt crack. Uh, was there actually security? Were they checking stuff? Yes, they were looking through your bags. Maybe he is an authorized radar gun. He definitely didn’t hide it in his wife beater. Cause that is, Hey, it’s tie dye though.

Okay. That makes it classy. Is that tie dye or He’s just, he had a, a bick that blew off. He murdered a smurf. I’m not sure I, I’d say this guy was from America, but unfortunately, I don’t think that’s the case. Nope. I think he’s [00:35:00] German. I was gonna say the same thing. He’s definitely German. He SREs the Deutsche, he ENSs Zero radar gun.

We’re gonna do a little, uh, here, because one of the, my biggest pet peeves about being at Laal. Tell us what really grinds your gears. Oh boy. Oh, Boyette. The baguettes. No, she’s never gonna let live that down. The baguettes were terrible. What really hardened your baguette?

Oh, man. Well, you know, it’s a, it’s a cultural thing, right? So it was like, I don’t know, a red nose on a clown. You could tell the Kiwis, the Canadians, the Aussies, the Americans, Germans from everybody else, because you know why? We know how to queue up in a line when we wanna wait for something. I mean, we might not be the most pleasant people.

We might not be the most patient people, but we know how to get in the line to wait for something. The French and some of the others, I mean, no offense, we love ’em all. They’re our brothers [00:36:00] in arms, especially in motorsport. But this first come, first serve, I’m at a bar trying to get the bartenders attention while I’m smoking a cigarette, three inches from your ear and shouting in French as obnoxiously as you possibly can.

Just got on my nerves. Like you wouldn’t believe. And I couldn’t believe that smoking was still as openly public and rampant as it was over there. It’s just we’re so used to now, you know, people change the vaping, which is, you know, neither here nor there. Yeah. They’ve been to Europe in a while. Jesus Christ.

I, I guess, I don’t know, but it was evident from the cigarette butts and everything everywhere. But it was just like, I never realized, and maybe even it’s a post covid thing where it’s like, I need my elbows worth of space. Please back off, get in the line. I was here before you. It was super irritating and it’s cultural.

Right? And you’re like, oh, okay. Uh, all right. The other thing I learned, thanks David, was you don’t tip in France. And if you do, it’s like super low. It’s like a dollar or two because apparently everybody over there is salary and tipping [00:37:00] is very taboo and all this kind of thing. And tipping is like an American thing.

You don’t really tip in Europe in general. Yeah. Yeah. It was, it was weird. Yeah. I don’t know. It, it was a culture shock that I was pleasant to learn and I will remember that. But the whole, the way you fight to the front to get the attention of somebody, and it’s just like, ugh, whatever. And don’t lie to me.

Y’all know how to speak English. I feel like I would’ve gotten into a lot of fights. You know, I, I needed a bodyguard, that’s for sure. Freedom fries. That’s all I’m gonna say. So after I left France, I went to Denmark and I joined my family because we decided we were gonna take the kids to, of all places.

The home of Lago, which is Denmark. I won’t go into all the details of Denmark, but I will say this, it’s sort of like Hawaii. It’s a chain of islands, you know, they get bigger, all this kind of thing. Copenhagen, the capital is on the smallest, and it’s within an hour of Oslo, Norway. End of Stockholm, Sweden.

It’s beautiful. It’s super clean. It’s very modern. I kept joking that that’s where all the German hippies were exiled to, you know, stuff like [00:38:00] that. It’s amazing. It was very different. It was a stark contrast to being in France and really enjoyed it. Had a great time and one of the things I learned while I was over there is by 2025 mass transit vehicles, especially taxis and buses and things like that, will be all EVs in Denmark.

It’s the law. We didn’t rent a car while we were there, so no more Fiat 500 stories, but we did take the trains, which were amazing, and then we took some cabs, which in our case were mostly Mercedes, and so I got to ride in some of these new Mercedes EVs that we talk about on the show. Fit and finish was nothing less than exquisite, even though we’ve always joked that Mercedes are just European taxi cabs.

They are in fact, but. The interior was plush, it was luxurious, it was German. It was what you expected from my Mercedes. But if you had blindfolded me and threw me in the trunk, other than having no noise, would I have known that it wasn’t an ice powered car? Probably not. It was very nice. It [00:39:00] was just interesting to even talk to the cabbies.

Everybody in Denmark’s very friendly. It’s known as one of the happiest places in the world to live and work and things like that. And so people are very friendly and, and they all do speak English in Denmark, admittedly. They do. It was great. It was good to learn from all those folks. We actually went and visited some car dealerships while we were there, and then we got a guided tour of the new ID seven and the ID three at City Volkswagen in Copenhagen, which is just outside of Tivoli.

And I know Tanya got to see these cars while she was at the c e s show. We reported about that on an earlier drive-through, but I actually spotted and. Xang dealership across the street from the Volkswagen dealership. So I thought that was interesting cause we joked about like, who’s this bro? Where are these guys?

These Chinese EV manufacturer? Where’d they come from? Well, they got a dealership in Copenhagen of all places. Right now I do wanna quickly talk about the Lego land experience and I don’t wanna talk about amusement parks and things like that, but I want to mention that Legos are not just for kids. All right?

Our generation is in charge at [00:40:00] Lego. There is a lot of car stuff going on as evidenced by the speed champions, the technic stuff, all the things you can buy on the shelf here in the US There’s some really cool stuff overseas that we won’t get. But I will say the Ferrari Experience Center at Legoland, all petrolheads we’re I’ll just, just doing the church nod right now.

It was like the Holy Church of Ferrari. You just walked in there. It was amazing bunch of stuff on display, all these activities. My girls were into it. We did it for a while. Took some pictures by a life size 5 99 that they built completely outta Lagos other than the wheels. Absolutely gorgeous. You know, stuff like that.

But I will say, there’s a video you guys gotta check out if you haven’t seen it. We captured the infamous. Legendary long running Lego Land Traffic School and it is the cutest and most hilarious thing you have ever seen. So cannot recommend that enough. I got deeper into the world of Lego upon returning home and I learned some new things, some new techniques while I was there.

Lots of really interesting stuff while we were in Denmark. And I learned about a website maybe in more detail than I knew before, and [00:41:00] that’s redirectable.com and that allows you to take some Lego sets and turn ’em into some other really cool things without having to buy new parts. And I mentioned before that you know, under some rich people things, there was some kits that you could get from like the block zone to build, you know, different kinds of automotive models that are out.

I found the best of the best, at least in my opinion. You take Dom Totos charger from Fast and Furious. Did you know you can turn it into the 1989 Batmobile, the Michael Keaton Batmobile. It is the hotness. And so I went ahead and did it. I have some pictures on doing the conversion. Just a lot of fun. And so that kind of reignited some stuff for me where it’s just like good way to spend time with the kids.

They’re interested in, you know, building their little towns, but also in the engineering side with the cars and stuff. So that’s been a lot of fun. So if you’re out there looking for maybe a different hobby, something new, don’t discount Lego, that’s for sure. And then to round out our showcase here of world travel, Tanya and I, I guess she was right, I went with her [00:42:00] the great French colony of Quebec in Canada to the city of Montreal.

So I couldn’t get away from the French this summer if I tried. But we had a better baguette. We did, and we had poutine and we had some brisket. We had all sorts of fun food. Brad, the food in Quebec, It’s better than the food in France. Well, it’s better than the food. And Lamar, my dinner in Paris wasn’t that great either, but I did sit down for a moment with Jensen Button and Jordan Taylor.

It was a great conversation, especially after them completing the race with the garage 56 car. So that was pretty cool. Wait, how did, wait, how did you end up having dinner with them? We were at the hotel and I’m sitting there chatting with David from m i e racing and I wasn’t even paying attention. He then he kind of looks over his shoulder and he goes, you know who those two are, right?

And I said, yeah. And he goes, let’s go over and talk to him. Okay. That’s literally how it went down. But then you had a whole meal with them or you just No, we, we chatted with them for like five or seven minutes. Oh, okay. They were just kind of hanging out. They were done eating, they were just kind of sitting and [00:43:00] drinking and then we went back to our table.

So we sort of abandoned our meal. Went and talked to them before they disappeared. So yeah, it was great. I mean, got to meet ’em. We didn’t do the whole, can I take a selfie with you? Can I get your autograph? I’m not that type of guy. Neither is David. It was really great to have that memory to be able to talk to them.

So you didn’t invite them on the show? Cause I’ve been trying to get Jordan Taylor on the show. I mean, I think Jensen button would be pretty cool too. So anyway, I, we, we’ve gone off the rails somehow. Did, did you know I went to France? Oh wait, Canada, we’re talking about Canada. That’s right. You went to France and then Little France.

Little France. Exactly. Quebec, petite France, petite LA France. In preparation for this trip, I decided, you know what, I should probably, I. Do a service on my Jeep. And I looked at my records and I realized I hadn’t changed oil in a year, but I also hadn’t done 10,000 miles yet. I was very close though, so I was like, oh, crud.

So I went through, did all the service, and at this point I decided, you know what? Now is the time we’re gonna go on into this long journey to Montreal from the DC area and back. I’m gonna put it evolve in the diesel and see how [00:44:00] it does. Does it match the hype? Does it match everything we talked about on the episode?

Granted, I had already put it in the Pacifica, and we already noticed the change. It runs cooler, you know, this kinda stuff. But the hybrid’s different because the engine doesn’t run all the time. Right? It wants to be an EV where there wants to be ice powered. So the one thing I noticed right away, and I think Tanya probably noticed it too, the engine is noticeably quieter immediately.

Like as soon as I put the oil in and fired it up, it was definitely quieter. I was like, huh. And, and diesels are loud, right? So you’re just like, oh, okay. The telltale sign here is, and this is where the numbers are sort of interesting, right? They talk about MPGs being higher, they talk about horsepower being greater, all this kind of stuff.

And it has to do with the composition of the oil and all these things you can learn about. On the Evolve Lubricants episode, what I boiled it down to is the oil itself runs significantly cooler than what I had in it before. And on average it was six to 12 degrees cooler, depending on load than the oil I was running previously.

So if your [00:45:00] engine is running cooler, it’s gonna be more efficient, you’re gonna waste less fuel, you know, all these kinds of things, blah, blah, blah. So it all sort of adds up in that way. What I didn’t see was the four to five more miles per gallon or anything like that, but dot, dot, dot. What I got out of this was overall higher cumulative average.

So with mixed city driving my maximum of 33 miles per gallon, which we already proved at the Green Grand Prix using my near year old oil, I was getting 32 point whatever miles to the gallon during that event, and so I didn’t get better than 33, but I was able to hold it there longer. I was able to keep my average higher, so maybe my MPG is higher, but I don’t see a huge spike when I do the math at the end of the day, right?

It’s like, okay, well I’m getting 32, but I’m getting 32 much longer than I was getting it before. What, I guess what I’m trying to say is the numbers sort of add up. Now the bigger question comes in return on investment. Is it worth [00:46:00] the cost because it is significantly more expensive. I’ve sent my oil off to Blackstone to have it tested.

I’m gonna go maybe a service interval and a half, so I’m gonna try to put 15,000 miles on the oil. That’ll take me like two years. Obviously. Test it again and see where we’re at. Did the turbo torch it? Did it break down? How did it hold up? If it comes out as clean as it went in? To use that phrasing, then it’s probably worth it if you can go two x the oil change with these higher results, the engine’s running cooler, you’re seeing a higher cumulative average, all that kind of stuff.

So for me, going to Montreal was this really awesome experiment, real life testing with this new technology, this new oil by evolve. So I, I think I’m satisfied so far and we’ll check back in as we go along. So other cool things we saw in Montreal, right? Tanya? Oh my gosh. We saw a Vin fasts dealer in the mall.

Another oddball what? Vietnamese EV company or something like that. We also saw they were [00:47:00] building a VIN fast dealer and service, well, I guess maybe more service center. Uh, somewhere out kind of in the middle of nowhere off the highway. So it looks like Vin Fasts is making a move to be in Montreal of all places.

So that was kind of cool. Like again, we read about these and sometimes maybe we chuckle like, who is this brand? But Xang, VIN Fasts and others showing up in some of these other countries if and when they’ll ever come to the us we don’t know. Right. They were at ces, they had a huge display there. So there were some annoying things about being in Montreal, like the traffic laws.

I, I admittedly, some of their traffic signals made no sense, like the stoplights didn’t make sense. As weird as that is to say there would be like double colors sometimes. Yes. Which you could interpret to be like, no turn on red kind of thing. But then there’d be like double green I think at one point.

And like, what does that mean? And then there was a delay, like part [00:48:00] one of the greens would come, but then the other wouldn’t. It was a green arrow pointing forward. Yeah. And you’re like, I’ve never seen that before. And then so people wouldn’t move and you’re like the light green. And then the other light would turn green and then they would go, it’s like, I don’t understand.

I’ve never seen, we only have three choices and you couldn’t tell when you were in the city limits or outta the city limits because apparently there’s no right turn on red any anywhere in the city limits of Montreal. But then one of the times we went out, we thought we were still, and then I’m sitting at the light trying to be nice.

I even changed my speedometer over to kilometers, you know, stuff like that. I’m trying to follow their rules and this lady’s behind me hawking at me and I’m like, I didn’t think I was supposed to turn, but it was one of those stupid lights where it had a straight arrow and a right arrow, and I’m like, I don’t know what to do anymore.

Like a diagonal arrow and a back arrow. And it was like 18. Symbols so confusing. It was weird. Unlike Canada, Denmark, the traffic lights, they did something really, really [00:49:00] interesting. When it’s about to switch from green to red, they flash the yellow in both directions so you know that it’s about to change, and so you get this anticipation like, oh, the light’s gonna change.

That’s pretty cool. I found that to be like delightfully refreshing. It’s like, oh look, the light’s gonna change. Pay attention, sucker. Oh look, the light’s gonna change. Floor it. What’s your reaction time? Do you go on the yellow? They do drive slower in Canada, although they are situationally aware, like they are in Europe, like passing is easy.

People stay in the right lane. Zipper merging all the things you expect when you’re over there. It’s just some of the stuff is just, I don’t know, it’s just a little bizarre and you’re like, okay, zero parking in the city too. That was finding a, you know, a white fly. But in France, All the cars are obviously small.

Every once in a while there’s like an X five or a Cayenne or something like that. We saw one guy with a pickup truck, American like Dodge Ram. You’re like, uh, he’s gotta me military cuz there’s no other reason for that to be here. But when I went to Canada, I was like the [00:50:00] Jeep in Montreal. I was like the biggest thing on the road.

It was really weird because I am the largest thing here. And parking, it was fun. This is interesting. But I also found that a lot of their cars were older up there too. Not a ton of new stuff. New new stuff. Like in the last couple of years on the roads. Maybe that has to do with the fact that the Canadian dollar is like, you know, weaker than ours.

It’s like a 25% discount, hashtag chips. But we did get to do something really cool. Tanya’s suggestion. What was that? We went to the circuit Hillsville live. The F1 track in Montreal because apparently the entire island is basically a public park and the track is just open all the time to anyone. They put cones down and they split the track lane.

The right side gets to be public traffic that can just at a slow speed and they got lots of stop signs up, so you really can’t do anything crazy. You just made laughs as you want, I guess. I don’t think they’ll ever kick you out. You could go all day. The place is open, like literally from sun up to sun down, and then on the left hand side, Bicyclists, [00:51:00] joggers, walkers, bladers, anything you can do outside of your vehicle, you get the lane next to it.

And we measured, it’s about two and a half miles, just under something like that, which I will say the speed limit was suggested. At some points we were going a little quicker than the speed limit. We did take video of it. It’s available on our club, YouTube channel. I’ve always joked that they’re driving around a potato because you know it’s on an island.

I can understand why it’s so difficult to get on and off of that track as a spectator. There’s very little grandstand because there’s just not a lot of, what’s the word, Tanya, talking about space. The track itself, like, I don’t know. I didn’t appreciate it When you watch the races, but that sucker is narrow af.

There is no space and no runoff. You have no room for error. If it’s three abreast at its widest, it’s wide. That’s it. But it is super narrow. The turns are really tight. It feels like when you [00:52:00] drive it, you’re just doing like what we would call an autocross two one cone turnarounds. It’s like a really narrow, oval track almost.

It’s just, I would love to drive a MI out of there full bore or something small. You know, like a little car I think would be a lot of fun there. Something high horsepower, like, you know, Corvette or nine 11 and you screw up. It’s gonna be a bad day for you. But we did it. We can say we do like four laps, something like that.

I was like that. Yeah. Yeah. We just we’re like, oh, just keep going. Just keep going. Just keep going. If I live there, I would be biking that all the time. The problem is it takes forever to get there. Yeah. It’s not easy and I don’t know where you’d park. How do you get to it? Is there a ferry? Is there a bridge?

No, there’s a bridge, two bridges. There’s like one on one end corner of the island and one that comes in the middle of the potato. And because at the top of the island is Six Flags. Montreal? Yeah. Oh God, that’s a terrible design. You have to get to the island to go to Six Flags. Can you bike or walk across the bridge?

Like is it safe for that? I [00:53:00] didn’t pay attention when we were driving across it. There were people walking, there’s a sidewalk. I mean, Montreal as a city is generally pretty walkable. The problem is the area right before you get to the track is like being at the wharf in Baltimore where all the sea containers are and stuff.

Or like Long Beach, you know where all the boats come in. So it’s sort of the same thing and you’re like, I don’t know that I wanna be hanging out down there as a pedestrian. I didn’t see too many hotels. There is a casino on the island, which is in sort of the middle of the track. It looks like a giant aviary.

So there’s a lot of stuff packed into a small space when you get there. And again, this is why they have to shuttle you in and out of that place. If you go to spectate. Now that I’ve been there, my want to go to the Canadian Grand Prix in person, I’m sort of like Tanya. I’m like, I’ll watch this from the comfort of my couch.

It would be hectic to go like that would be I. Frustrating. I think you would probably have to park on the other side, but where, because there’s no parking like anywhere next to the shipping containers, you’re a [00:54:00] mile away or more at that point. For sure. Somehow they figured it out. They, they know what they’re doing out there, but that’s also why there’s a limited number of seats and tickets and everything to get that sells out so fast, because again, you don’t realize how small it is until you see it in person.

So it, it was a neat experience. Summer’s not over yet. We do have some other travel in store and we’ll talk about that as we go along here, but that sort of wraps up our showcase. Brad, what did you learn? Do you think you wanna go on a European vacation? Actually, I’m gonna turn your question to me into another question for you.

Oh boy. It’s inception time. You’ve been to several different professional races now. One, would you do it again? And two, is this now your favorite experience at a professional race? I’ve heard that the Nering 24 is also a spectacle and it’s pretty awesome to go to. So I, I got a reserve judgment, but I think this race and the Mering 24 are sort of in a category unto themselves.

It’s hard to compare the experience [00:55:00] that you would get at Petite or at Salans or any of the other races. Even the Indy 500 for that matter. And those are great races. Don’t get me wrong. LeMans is just so over the top. It’s so different. 330,000 people spread across, you know, it doesn’t seem like it’s that many people, but it’s packed.

It’s the history, all the extra things that were going on. Even when they pulled all the cars outta the museum, ran them on track, all the stuff that just. It was unbelievable. Part of it was because it was the hundredth, and I don’t know that every LeMans is like that. It’s all that, you know, pomp and circumstance that was going on For this one, I think the hundred and first is gonna be a big deal because of all the cars that didn’t come for this one are gonna be there next year.

So I think next year is gonna be really exciting. Would I go back? Yes. I’ve already planned to in nine years. For the second hundredth, which is the hundredth running of Lamont’s, not the hundredth anniversary of Lamont. So I’m really curious to see how obviously things evolve over the next decade. I’m gonna be a fan for life for sure.

It was an unforgettable [00:56:00] experience. It was completely surreal. It’s still even thinking about it, looking back, it’s like, wow, we did all these things and there’s so many things I even forgot because you’re operating on very little sleep and only baguettes. I needed Denmark just to decompress from Lama and then come home from that.

It is just a whirlwind kind of thing. So in answer to your question, yes, I mean, I have always loved Lama and I think I will continue to do so until the day they don’t race there anymore. Well, we do have some light fair for our drive-through fans out there. So we are gonna talk about Porsche, Audi and Volkswagen News really quick.

There’s a video link we wanna share with you guys, narrated by Patrick McDreamy. Dempsey himself about Porsche at Lamont’s. Uh, it probably ends with him crying. We all know how this story ended. Okay, guys. Right. Tie, we know, we know how it ended. One of the things that happened during Lamar, people asked me, were there support races?

Was there this was there that, and there are some support races. There’s a Ferrari Challenge race, which you know, I took [00:57:00] videos of they wrecked in the first corner, which is fantastic on the first lap, you know, because cold tires and there’s a Porsche Challenge race and that’s super cool and all that kind of stuff.

The things you would expect that you’ve seen at s a Race before. As I mentioned, they pulled all the cars outta the museum driven by a lot of the legends of LeMans, and that was like 20, 30 minutes of just pure awesomeness to see cars from the early 1920s all the way through up to the cars of last year, out on track at Full Song Nine seventeens, Audis, bozos, BMWs, Bugatti’s, or Bentley’s, you name it, right?

Amazing. But Bugatti, that was the name that was missing from the roster this year. I mean, it’s the great race. It’s the hundredth. Where’s the pinnacle of French automotive engineering? Where’s Bugatti? Bojo was there. That’s St. Lantis. Let’s be serious now. They brought out the new Bali day during one of the lunch breaks, and they had it out on track for like 20 minutes doing hot laps.

And I tell you what, You’re looking at the lineup for 2024 with the new Lambo and the [00:58:00] Porsche nine X and everything else. The Bully Day is like the Batmobile, absolutely amazing. Ballistically quick, and it was quiet too, so you weren’t sure what was going on. You thought the track was cold, and then there’s just this blue and black blur that just whoa rockets by.

Right? And you’re like, Whoa, I can’t wait to see a Bugatti back on track, especially at Lamas. So I am super hopeful for this and I’m hoping that that test session was really to get everybody revved up and tease us for the 2024 entry. As I stated before, Lambeau has unveiled their G T P prototype for next year and it also looks fantastic if that car’s coming out.

I’m telling you, there’s gonna be a Porsche that’s very similar to it. I still think the Ferrari looks better. 4 99 is gorgeous. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s awesome. The Lambo looks like what you would think a Lambo would look like, the angles and all that. The, yeah, I’m still the Ferrari guy. The 4 99 that paint livery throws back all the way to the the three 30 P four from [00:59:00] the late sixties, which was basically the last time they won at Lamar, especially overall, I got to see that car in the museum.

I was out on track, all that stuff. I mean, just absolutely amazing. And those old Ferraris are just. Absolutely fantastic. Since we mentioned the Poeo and just a little bit of news, not only did Poeo come out with their new car, which we’ve been talking about for basically a year now, the nine x eight. Like I said before, it is fire.

Aesthetically, it is a beautiful car at the Poeo booth. Which we were at several times for multiple reasons. They had this big Lego box sitting next to one of the cars and I’m like, what is this all about? David jokingly said, ah, they’re probably gonna bring out like a life-sized one or something like that at some point.

Cause there’s like this countdown timer. And I said, what are they gonna build it here while we’re waiting? Like all the parts can’t be in that box. So at one point they shut the whole thing down, you know, put up the curtains, whatever. And then they unveiled a full size replica Lego technic version of the nine x eight, which is an upscaled version of the Lego NIC that you can buy [01:00:00] today in the Lego store.

And it is absolutely awesome. The stuff that the guys at Lego can do is just brilliant. I got all sorts of pictures of the car from different angles and stuff like that, but there was something else that came up. So we’re in the booth and we’re actually talking to the founder, c e o of play seat, like having a good time.

We’re trying out their simulator, all this kind of thing. I see all these people working. The booth got their poeo swag on and on the back they have this Lego Technic Poeo T-shirt thing. I’m like, I want one of those. So I go into the store and I’m looking at some stuff. I was like, oh, you know, they got this really nice looking hoodie.

I love me, some black hoodies, and they got this lime green and silver accents. I wanna get one and I wanna get this Lego shirt, right? Because I think it’s really cool. It’s a good way to kind of bridge the two worlds. So I go up to the counter, sort of in French. Do you speak English? Like Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

English. I told the guy, I said, I would like this hoodie in American X, Excel, and he’d never been so offput in my life. He goes, yes, you are xl. I’m like, oh, oh, oh. Okay. All right. Fine. So he comes back and goes, we don’t have it in that color. We only have it in gray. Well, I’m like, I don’t [01:01:00] wear gray, so that’s fine.

So I said, what about this Lego Technic T-shirt that your guys are wearing over on the floor? He goes, we do not sell this here. You must go to Lego and there’s a Lego store at Lama. So I was like, okay, cool. I tell David, after we wrap up, we go over there, the Lego store, and I said, I took a picture of it just because I thought it was cool anyway, and I showed the lady and she goes, I don’t know what you’re talking about.

You need to go to Poeo and get it from them. I’m like, all right, I’ve had enough. We’ve been through this already. It’s not happening. So I gave up. I’m still looking for that T-shirt, so if anybody sees it, I want it. You didn’t take your XL as ass back over to Poeo and say, where’s my fucking T-shirt? Yeah, right.

You are xl. Oh, okay. Thanks. I wonder what he would’ve said to me. Oh, now it’s time for a little bit of domestic news brought to us by American muscle.com, your source for OEM and performance parts for your Chevy Ford or Mopar vehicle. We heard the bad news, right, Brad? I mean, you had to been crying in your weedies this whole time.

It’s sad, but I, I haven’t been excited about team Corvette since c7 R So it’s been what, two or three years now? Yeah, that I’ve just been kind of [01:02:00] mad on them. It’s sad, but Ford did the same thing with the four GT not too long ago. What was that? Two years ago? They dropped it and opted for private tier instead.

So for those of you trying to figure out what Brad’s talking about, GM’s team, Corvette racing is no longer a thing. They have announced Corvette’s retirement this year. They announced it at LAMA and they’re moving to a private tier model, which is what Ferrari and Porsche have done for many years now.

So this is not uncommon. So they’re gonna supply the teams with the cars and the parts and everything else, but it’s up to the teams to figure out what they’re gonna do with those cars and how they’re gonna campaign them, who’s gonna drive them, and all that kinda stuff. So after. Didn’t it start with Dale Earnhardt?

With the c5? Yeah, with the c5. Yeah. So that was early two thousands. Late nineties. Yeah, so let’s say almost nineties, early 25 years for sure. It’s sad to see Team Corvette go. Yes. We mentioned it before, garage 56. People were laughing. They were laughing hard. They were making fun of the NASCAR special, oh, this and that.

That car’s never gonna make it, as I mentioned, but [01:03:00] against all odds. They kicked ass, blew past the prototype cars. I tell you what, seeing it in person, their closing speeds and their ability to walk away from other cars was unbelievable. It didn’t click until we were on the Ferris wheel and we could see in the distance as they would get on the straightaways and you would just watch the garage 56 car, not walk, but run away from an LMP two car unbelievably fast.

It’s trap speeds were ridiculous too. I mean, it’s just unbelievable. I gotta hand it to the team though. I mean, you look at it and you go, how much of this is really nascar? How much of it is modified? It’s really a Camaro GT three, you know, stuff like that, blah, blah, blah. All the elements are there. We don’t really see NASCAR’s go for that length of time.

Yeah, they do 500 laps at Daytona or Talladega or whatever, and that’s what, four hours with 24 hours plus Imagine. They only ran one car and they had to do all the [01:04:00] practice sessions, all the qualifying sessions, they did more than 24 hours. Those cars, that’s the other thing people don’t realize. They don’t run for just 24 hours.

They run for like nearly two weeks by the time they’re done because of all the different things that they’re doing with them. Unbelievable accomplishment by that team and buy the car itself. So I’m excited to see where that goes if they do anything with it next time. Yeah, I’d love to see it back next year.

Every time it went by though, I was like, that’s dollar bills and Eagles and freedom coming out that exhaust pipe. I mean, it was just unreal. That’s the sound of America. America, right? I mean, It was just like if you wanted to wave a flag E every time it went by it was unreal. It was just like, wow. And I will say this, the crowds at LAMA were different than they are.

Like in an American race, you go to the Indy 500 people doing the wave and you think you’re at a baseball game, and it’s like a whole thing over there. It was like being at a golf match and there was like light clapping and then you would hear people get excited. Like if a car, like let’s say it spun and went in the gravel trap or you [01:05:00] get this big like just like a golfing match.

Ooh. Like if somebody went off track. It was really bizarre. But I tell you what, when the garage 56 car finished the race and crossed the checker, people exploded. It was just like, ah. You know, it was, that was cool to see the appreciation for that car when it finished. So can you explain, The garage. 56.

Isn’t that like a the LAMA thing? It is. It is specific to Lama. It is a one car class. It is designed for experimental like super prototype cars. It’s garage number 56 cuz there’s 55 other garages. Some of the other garage 56 cars you might remember. Let’s say the front wheel drive Nissan Turd. That is the worst lamont’s car ever.

It’ll go down to the history as such. The Delta wing car, do you remember that one turd? Yeah. So they’ve been all weird stuff like that. And so the garage 56 car, that’s where they stuck it. It’s an unlimited class. They can do whatever they want. As long as they didn’t [01:06:00] break, they were gonna win their class.

So the only car in it, is there always a garage 56 car? No. Okay. It is hit or miss. So this is the first garage, 56 car I think since that Nissan, probably since the front wheel drive. And then has a garage 56 car ever won outright? No. Okay. Not in my recollection. Cause they’ve always broken. So is this the first one in a long time to actually finish the race?

Yeah. Cause I don’t think the Nissan finished. No, the Nissan didn’t make it but like, I don’t know the first three hours or something like that. Yeah. Fun wheel drive. Not very fun That day they have that car on display at the museum. It’s outside in a glass box next to the E B one 10 Bugatti. For some weird reason.

But yeah, they don’t even want it in the museum. It’s like it thinks so terrible. We’ll put it out there. Yeah. And they don’t drive it around anymore cause it’s got broken axles. God, what a bad design that was. I would say out of everything that you’ve experienced and explained about going to Lamar, the garage 56 car is what I have FOMO about.

Yeah. Like missing that. We got to see it up close in person. All that stuff I really kind [01:07:00] of take a look at and everything. I mean sort of once in a lifetime, I mean, unless they go back. But I don’t see that happening again. Although I would like to see it spawn a Camaro, GT three to go against Ford because that’s the other big reveal at Lamar was Ford unveiled the GT three Mustang while we were there and the only thing I heard from people was it’s huge.

The S six 50 is big. It’s bigger than the S five 50 Mustang, but I mean, it just looked aggressive. It looked mean it’s wide body. Yeah. To fit the bigger tires and everything. You know it’s gonna sound amazing. It’s gonna be fast because the NA Mustang up until this point, the GT four Mustangs, as we learn following around World Challenge, they’re pretty limited.

They were pretty neutered compared to a lot of the other cars in GT four. So I think moving up to GT three allows them to really stretch out that Shelby motor and, and everything else, and go for gold. There Again, the hundred first lamonts, next year’s Lamonts is gonna be awesome [01:08:00] too. We’ll see how it plays out.

Lot of representation from America. America, Merck. Here. As I mentioned before, T Toyota’s number two car was taken out by a squirrel. Squirrel. It was funny and sad at the same time, and it was really stressful there for a while because there was a big battle back and forth between Ferrari and Toyota. It all came down to pitch strategy.

You know, who was using less fuel and all this kind of stuff to cut tire management, all these kinds of things. I know that Ferrari was like doubling down on their tires to try to stretch out and all this kind of thing. If you looked at race speeds versus qualifying speeds, they were way down. Lap times were significantly down.

You could tell the strategy was totally different during the race, but when that squirrel took up to Toyota, oh my God, and then that Cadillac on like the first lap coming into the Mosan Chacan, oh, what a disaster. I mean, how do you cause a wreck like 90 seconds into the race? You know, they still had two other cars.

The odds were in their favor. They had one more [01:09:00] car than everybody else. You don’t count the Joda 9 63 for Porsche. And those last couple hours there for Toyota, once they had that big screw up where he missed the breaking zone, that was it. It was Ferrari’s race to lose. And you could tell they were backing way off to conserve the car.

Toyota, almost LA behind at that point. There’s no way they were gonna make that up in an hour. Not without potentially breaking the car. I feel bad for them, but I don’t at the same time. Well, let’s move on to random new EVs and concept cars. A name I never thought I would hear associated with an ev, right?

Cerro famous for taking over production of the Lotus Super seven in 1962. If someone just showed you a picture of this, you would never associate it with a Crum. It looks similar to the Alpine, which I’m glad you brought that car up. The A one 10. Those things are all over the place in France. That’s another car I would buy no questions asked.

And they have that new electric R [01:10:00] five looking thing that Tanya has talked about before, talking about EVs and concepts. Mm-hmm. That’s gonna be the hotness. Two cars. We’re never gonna get wwa. That is wwa. Enjoy the single seater bank seat with the split headrest that’s built into the back wall of the car.

Continuing from the last drive-through. We mentioned how Toyota leadership has said that they are not interested in building pure EVs. They’re sticking to the hybrid model. And you know what? I got confirmation of that while I was at the race. Combustible hydrogen is the new tech of choice. While we were at Lamar, Bosch and JE unveiled their new, one of the first combustible hydrogen powered race cars that they developed in house.

Sort of looks like a Ferrari five 50 or 5 75 lm, if you look at it in pictures. We recorded that whole session. Really interesting information from their vice president about it. That is the way of the future. We’ve been hearing that from some other people, and Toyota is. Also moving in that direction, moving away [01:11:00] from their fuel cell technology to combustible hydrogen.

And the advantage to combustible hydrogen is, and this is information I understand from some folks at Bosch that I talked to, is they need to figure out how to store the hydrogen in the vehicle safely. The rest of the motors stays the same. The injection system basically stays the same except for the nozzles, the fuel injectors that they’re using and ecu, all that stuff gets reflash.

So they’re basically keeping the. Ice cars the way they were always built, making a few modifications and solving the hydrogen delivery problem. And now we can breathe a whole new life into our ice powered cars. And funny that we’re talking about that this week as we’re recording, Goodwood is going on and Rowan Atkinson, you know, famous Mr.

Bean, who also happens to be a Petrolhead, was interviewed at Goodwood because he was showcasing the new combustible hydrogen H two Toyota g Yaris at the Hill Cline. And he gives a really long. Talk about [01:12:00] it and the technology and what it’s like to drive and all this kind of thing. And he says right then and there, it’s direct injection, you know, da da da.

All this stuff that even Bosch and Lee Jay were talking about. So that now is making me excited for the future that’s gonna breathe new life in, into old cars if we can figure out how to retrofit that stuff. Sounds no different than people retrofitting their diesels to run off biofuel. Exactly. Very similar thought.

It’s a similar concept. Yeah. And it’s, it actually, it’s a kind of a genius idea to not scrap in concept. Yeah. Well, yes, of course. Again, the same thing they haven’t solved yet is how you’ve onboard it. And how do you have a hydrogen fuel station with these prototypes? They’re handling that in-house.

They’re able to construct their hydrogen containment unit, all that. But the proof of concept is now been basically satisfied to say it can be done. Can you imagine? All I see is the early scene in Zoolander where everyone’s [01:13:00] flinging the gasoline on each other to whams, wake me up before you go, go, and then somebody goes to light their cigarette and the whole place blows up.

They need to solve that problem because you can’t have somebody willy-nilly hydrogen into the air while they’re fucking smoking their cigarette at the fuel station. Since we’re talking about breathing life into new cars, Brad, it’s time for lost and found. What have you got for us? Oh, the usual. Nobody wants this turd of a Cadillac Deville at Gray Chevrolet.

Is it still for sale? It is still for sale. I’m starting to think there’s no actual car. They just want you to call and then come in and then there’s a couple Volkswagen. There’s a 2000 Volkswagen Jetta, 2000 Volkswagen Jetta, G Lsv R six price not listed. Then that four GT is still out there. 2008 Jetta.

See blah, blah blah. 2012 Fiat 500. You sure your browser isn’t cashed from two months ago? I mean, nope. I literally just did a [01:14:00] search. They’re saying people are holding onto their cars longer. Maybe that’s why there’s nothing good for sale right now. The whole point of this. Segment right here is to find the turds.

There are plenty of turds out there, but the turds are all the same. No, no new turds, although you, you can get a 2016 Dodge Viper ACR for $800,000. Hey, that’s a bargain. Let’s get two. Andrew Bank, this is calling your name. He needs a second one though. You know how it works. He needs to rob a bank, is what he used to do to do that.

Speaking of old cars and things for sale and whatnot, I went to my first auction. I have interviewed plenty of auctioneers and auction companies on this show. If you haven’t caught those episodes, just go back into our 200 million episodes that we have online. But I’d never attended one before. I was gonna say, were you on sale?

Was this someone who was bidding for your, like for a date with Eric, or what was this? No, no, no. This was a motor sports legends auction at Lamont. My original question stands. Yeah, yeah. Actually, if you weren’t paying [01:15:00] attention, you would’ve missed the Sotheby’s building altogether because they had. Not a ton of signage and they kept, they closed most of the time.

Cause obviously you don’t wanna get any of these cars dirty. But in the lineup you had things like Ferrari, Daytona, GTB four s. You had things like XJ two 20 s, you had a rolling chassis of a Porsche nine 19. You had the silk cut JAG launch, a lc two, like all sorts of stuff from back in the day that were for sale.

We’re not talking $50,000 car, we’re not talking $500,000 car, we’re talking 5 million, 50 million car, you know, kind of situation. And so as I’ve referred to it before, it was like quiet chaos and it was everything you expected it to be. Like you’ve seen in like the movie, the Red Violin, you know the guys with their paddles and the guys on the phone and the brokers and the internet and it’s getting outta control and.

We stayed for the Ferrari bid because that was the car we wanted to see and when we unfortunately had to go away because we had somewhere else we had to be [01:16:00] and we left and it was at 4.2 million Euros, which is substantially more than that car is generally worth. But because that was a legitimate Lamont’s race car and like all this kind of stuff, it ended up closing at 5.2 million euro.

Unbelievable. It was an experience. Like nothing else because again, I’ve never been to an auction before, so I’m hoping it doesn’t sour me to some of the other events that I, I might be going to in the near future. If you’ve never been to a car auction, and I’m not talking about like going to Manheim auction in Pennsylvania, like going to a Mecu or a Sotheby’s or a Broad Arrow or you know, the events that happen at like Pebble and things like that, do it.

Just go in, pay the a hundred bucks or whatever and just sit and soak it all in. It is unbelievably stressful. But you also feel like you’re sitting in the dentist’s office. It’s bizarre, and I write about it in an article that’s linked in show notes, so you can get more of my take on all of that. Other things, historical, as I mentioned before, the Lamonts Museum is right [01:17:00] there on campus.

It’s at the main gate of the track. If you get the opportunity to go, and a few people that I had spoken to before going, recommended that I check it out, if I had missed it, that would’ve been my fomo, Brad, because the, as you probably saw from the pictures, which we have links to the whole vault of pictures, unbelievable vehicles.

In the museum cars that you’ve only heard about, rumored about that are legend are in this museum. Not all of them are there. Some of the lamont’s winners are at UNE as an example, like the 57 G, the nine 17 hippie car, you know, things like that. So not all of them there. So there were as many as they could muster up for the hundredth and other cars of significance from the hundred years of Lamonts.

So super cool. And then, like I said, they pulled them all outta the museum and took ’em out on track for some parade laps and whatnot. But just absolutely incredible to see those cars in person. Cars that, you know, I had only seen on television or you know, dreamed about drooled over. So just absolutely awesome, totally worth [01:18:00] it.

And during race weekend enters, the museum is free, so why not go. A little bit of Vintage Motorsports. The V R G or Vintage Racers Group is pushing really hard on social media to attract Miata drivers to their series. For those that don’t remember, the Miata celebrates its 33rd birthday this year and qualifies for the famed vintage racing series.

I guess they’re getting tired of seeing 16 year olds drive in stance out and Amy Miatas all over the place. No, it’s because there’s probably not enough MG or Triumph guys anymore. You know what I mean? So they gotta open that up. Well, that’s true, because that’s part of their social media thing is they class the Miatas to be able to run with some of those older British Roadsters and stuff.

So I actually think that would be some exciting racing to see that. So maybe we’ll find ourselves at a V R G event later this year. Yeah, anybody that’s seen a spec me outer race would know that. That’d be pretty exciting. Although, I don’t know if I want, if I was, uh, an MG. Driver, I don’t know that I’d want a bunch of wreck pinata cars [01:19:00] out there with me on track.

At the same time, if you wanna learn more about what you should be doing with your retired spec Miata, and if maybe you wanna do something different than run SCCA with it, check out the Vintage Racers group@www.vg online.org. It’s that time again. What time is that? We would be remiss, wouldn’t we? Because it’s time to talk about Tesla Gate.

I don’t follow this kinda stuff. I don’t even know. I had to look up what threads was the war with. Elon continues. It’s Zuck versus Musk in Twitter versus Threads. Did they ever fight yet? Not yet, dude, I wanna see it. It’s on pay-per-view. I heard. Yeah. I’m not paying for that trash. Elon’s mom said no. So Elon’s mom said, no, that’s true.

It’s true. I’m not making that up. God, I feel like it would be less celebrity death match and more pillow fight. No, it’s like when we would make the paper football since school, that’s like, no, I feel like it would be [01:20:00] Slapboxing. It would be. But Zuckerberg is actually technically legitimate, says people.

He’s paid to say that. Well, wait a minute. Are you trying to say that Elon is illegitimate? Like he’s John Snow or something? No, she, she, she’s saying that Zuckerberg actually trains in like jiujitsu and mixed martial art and stuff like that. Oh, okay. Which I, I’ve seen pictures and stuff. I’m, I’m joking.

I’m sure he’s, he’s good at it. He actually competes, I believe. Yeah. So like, he’s not like Elon. It’s that picture of him on the yacht in flabby pale, never seen the light of day skin where he’s just like that, that blob standing there on the yacht. Have you seen that meme where they redid his body as the cyber truck?

Is that what I’m getting for my a hundred bucks? Isn’t there a meme where he’s like crying? Yeah, that’s another good one. Oh, there’s so many good ones. But in all seriousness, I. Talking to so many people. If Twitter isn’t dead yet and just gets absorbed into the Tesla operating system, I would be surprised.

Threads [01:21:00] is here. If you haven’t converted over. It’s as easy as opening Instagram and clicking a button. It says import your profile and then you’re on Threads. Threads. Looks like Twitter. It sort of acts like Twitter. I think it’s everything people wanted Instagram to continue to be, but it’s not anymore because Instagram is sort of turning into TikTok, all this to say, guess what?

We’re on Threads two at Grand Tour Motorsports. Follow us. Let’s get more followers on threads than we have on Instagram. Let’s make that our goal for the remainder of 2023 A. Shall we? Yes. And our loyal listeners can help us get there. Mark Hewitt, join us on Threads and Patreon. Can’t remember his Facebook password.

There’s a nifty, little forgot password button. Goes to an email that he doesn’t have access to either. Stop using aol. He’s on Prodigy. He’s got a, uh, a Hotmail account. Hey, those still work? No, I know my dad has one. My dad, mark, my [01:22:00] dad has one. He is almost seven.

That’s awesome. What are we talking about now? Tesla Charger. Everyone is adopting a Tesla charger. Basically that’s, that’s all the news. Is this like adopt a highway where you just, you tell ’em, I went to adopt a Tesla charger. So wait a minute. I thought there was like the J 1792 protocol that everybody was using except for Tesla.

Because Tesla is the equivalent of Apple, the lightning charger and all that stuff. Now all of a sudden we’re gonna go all Tesla chargers. So whatever their charging standard connector is, everyone’s jumping on board to basically be able to connect to it. Oh, okay. So you’re gonna be able to buy something to plug into Tesla’s charging station then, because they have the network now, the charging network.

So how are we gonna pay for that? Well, they say they’re expected to adopt the Tesla plug, so I don’t know if it’s more. The plug will be the same. Or if it’s an adapter. Well, what about all the other [01:23:00] EVs got like two different gas pumps. I guess it’s diesel and gasoline, right? And here we go again. I would think they would probably start retrofitting or, or start using the plug now.

But for the older EVs probably create an adapter that allows use books. I mean, because also like ChargePoint is gonna now have this Tesla Nax plug, but they say they’ll also have the other types of chargers. So to that end, it’s like having the two different style plum. I just realized what this is. You guys watch Black Mirror.

No, I haven’t seen past the first like four or five episodes. Okay. In the first four or five episodes of season one. Do you remember the episode with the Meow, Meow Beans? That’s a reference to community by the way. Were there like rating other people and it’s like, boop, five stars. You gotta keep your five star rating.

It’s all like social media and all this stuff. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. There’s a scene in there and she drives up and because her rating is so low, she ends up with the piece of crap ev that there’s only one charger on, like this random lot that she can only go there with that car to like and get another one or whatever it is.

That’s what’s gonna happen there. It’s gonna be [01:24:00] like that episode of Black Mirror. This sounds like the guy in Canada who bought the slow charging ionic or whatever it was. Yeah, right. My expectations are once again lowered. No word expectation, none. There’s all sorts of new car related shows on Televis.

You’ve listed a number under lower expectations and no one’s watched any of them, so we don’t know that they’re bad. I actually spent the time and I watched today the first episode of TexMex and the first episode of Downey’s Dream Machines. I didn’t have that kinda time in my day. Ditto, ditto. We we don’t have to go into an office.

I did. You can put it up in the background. What’s up? I get my office life. I live vicariously through Tanya and everything she posts in our private water coolers, Chad, because she posts some wild shit in there. I will tell you. Shut up Shaggy Lord. You doing? I’m my shirt? Shirt and changed it. In the middle of the room, but there’s a conference going on.

Doesn’t matter. [01:25:00] See? Nah. Hot dog got the busted up shirt. You can’t see me because I can’t see you. My back is to you.

That guy pulled on my new iod. Oh. So anyway, Netflix, TexMex Motors, this show is exactly the same as all the other shows. It is a hundred percent a ripoff of car masters, which is a hundred percent a ripoff of fast and loud and, but it’s to the point where the cast is almost the same. They almost look the same.

They rearranged them a little bit. I only saw the trailer for it and I had kinda watched of the episodes, but I was getting strong Car master vibe. They even use the same animations, like when they’re building the car. You know how they do those sketches and the, the parts like fly in and it’s all goofy, cartoony, the same, like the music’s the same.

They have guys named Scooter and Rabbit. Like it’s like whatever. And it’s $250,000 payday. Right? It’s the same [01:26:00] basic principle and I’m wondering if it’s because Car Masters got canned. It is. I haven’t seen it come back. It’s been like a year. Car Masters is the one where they were bartering upgrade and trade.

Yeah, the upgrade and trade rust riches. The, you see they’re Gotham Garage. The Gotham Garage, correct. Car masters. They’re all the, yeah. TexMex Motors. Their differentiator is that they are trying to exclusively go into Mexico and buy cars for dirt cheap because apparently the people in Mexico don’t know anything about cars.

So they go down there, buy ’em for dirt cheap and then bring them to the US to try and flip ’em for big money. Surprise surprise. In the first episode they have a run in with the Mexican Feder because of the non numbers matching car. That was numbers matching after all, and it was, that seems a little stage two a little.

Just a little. And then the shady transporter who was gonna pick up the Mustang for free Uhhuh and [01:27:00] then stole the parts and dropped off the car on blocks. I mean, Jesus Christ, if that stuff was not staged, how fucking dumb are you at TexMex Motors? Yeah. Well that shit like that happen And the lady that they tried to sell that Opal gt, which by the way, that was a cool car.

I liked what they did with it though. I liked the paint job. I liked the seats. You know what I said when they put up the paint job, I was like, I did it first. Cuz my gti I has the same paint scheme. It does. It does. You don’t have the honeycomb though, looked awful. Actually, they should have left that off the car.

I liked it. I liked it. I, but anyway, and then the Baja bug that they turned into. Surprise, surprise. A Baja Bug, whatever the best part of that was when they wrecked that Polaris. Yeah, that was fun. That was good. Overall, I would probably watch the whole thing just to see how it all turns out, but it feels a little bit more contrived than Car Masters and Tanya, this is where it really crosses the line.

They have another female engine builder. Mm. [01:28:00] However, comma as parentheses, her backstory seems a lot more legit than Constance. She grew up, they showed pictures of her working with her dad in the shop and whatever, and she seemed to know legitimately what she was doing and doing that Mazda swap on the Opal.

You know, that was no small feat, that Ecotech and the Beetle, that was pretty complicated. So I’m like, okay. I mean, not this, my fingernails look like I’m in a Revlon commercial, but I work on motors, you know, kind of thing that’s going on with the other show. So it’s like whatever. I mean, again, I’m not trying to discount anybody’s experience, but it’s the exact same formula.

It. Yeah, it is the carbon copy. Exactly. Now, did you watch Downey’s Dream machines? I did not. I was too enamored by the stupidity of TexMex Motors. I’ll give you Downey’s dream machines really quick. Basically, Robert Downey Jr. Has more money now than he knows what to do with. He’s pairing down. Part of his collection.

And he’s taken on a conscience, I guess because of the whole footprint coalition thing that he started about, you know, [01:29:00] climate change and all this stuff making greener world. And what he wants to do is basically turn part of his collection of muscle cars and exotics and whatever he has and he wants to turn ’em into EVs.

And you’re like, okay, cool. The whole thing is sort of shot, like kiss, kiss, bang, bang in those scenes where they’re behind the camera and you know, talking through the fourth wall. And Robert Downey is very non-scripted and non-sequitur throughout the whole thing. And he’s a little crazy. But that’s what makes it entertaining.

And it makes him charming as as a person too, where you’re kind of like, well, what the hell is he gonna say next? I mean, it starts out literally with him in a Blackhawk helicopter, like, where the hell is it? Where’s this going? And he literally turns to the camera and he is like, This is a show about cars.

I assure you we’re gonna get there. And then it does this like, and we go backwards and like how we got to that point and you know, whatever it has, its cinematics with it. But the very first episode he takes a K 10 pickup truck square body that was. Beautiful. He called it the Thanos Thumper. It’s dark purple and all this kinda stuff.

Supercharged Ls making [01:30:00] ungodly horsepower, all this noise and whatever. He is like, I want to turn it into an ev. So he partners with electric garage up in New Hampshire. They retrofit a Tesla into it. They maintain the all-wheel drive, all this guy stuff, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And there’s sort of a gimmicky challenge at the end where they have to tow something with it and they wanna, you know, see how it all turns out.

Is it gonna blow up? Is it gonna work, et cetera. I’ll, I’ll leave it up to your guys’ imagination to check it out. I’m actually really curious to see where the rest of it goes. I’ve had a couple other people tell me that they’ve watched the whole thing. It’s only about eight episodes and they said it’s fantastic.

And they’re sort of like, yeah, that’d be really cool to retro an ev. And I know we’ve talked about this and some of the cars on his list, he’s got like a C2 Stingray, Corvette, he’s got some other stuff on there. We just like, ah, I don’t, would I really swap that car? It’s worth a mint as it is. You know, that kind of thing with what we talked about earlier with the H two E platforms coming out, you know, that combustible hydrogen.

I wonder if Robert Downey gets to the end of this journey of converting his collection to EVs and he goes, well, how [01:31:00] hard would it have been to convert him to hydrogen? Right, and leave them alone. I’m wondering if people are gonna have that regret as the manufacturers maybe move in that direction here in the near futures.

Well, that’s not gonna make him millions of dollars with a TV show. No. Changing some, uh, injectors. Did a few things. Not at all. How environmentally friendly is it flying around In a Blackhawk? Yeah, I know. But his truck is saving the world. One ev at a time. I’m not gonna get on that soapbox. On the complete other side of that.

Rutledge Wood is back famous for being on top Gear USA and doing one lap of America and a modified you go to Sienna. He’s got a new reality show, which a couple of our members have watched. That’s the Hot Wheels, build the Dream, or whatever the heck it’s called. It’s a reality show. Rest oad building life-sized hot wheel cars.

Oddly enough, the show debuted before I went to Lama. And a couple of these cars were at Lamar. I don’t know if they were the ones from the TV show, but they had a booth and they had three or four cars out front and they are life-size, hot wheels. And I gotta say, they’re pretty cool. [01:32:00] So that gave me at least a little bit of, I should probably watch this show.

And then a couple people have confirmed that it’s everything you don’t expect it to be. But it’s a lot of fun because it’s a creator show. It’s reality television, but it’s for car people. So unlike British Bake Off or the Repair Shop, or, what’s that one with Amy Poer that she’s got, you know, making it, this is for us, this is for car people.

So there you go. Hot Wheels. What’s funny about Hot Wheels, he’s building the Hot Wheels that I never wanna buy. I wanna buy the Hot Wheels that are like production cars. I don’t buy the ones that look like fucking clown shoes and, and shit that, that don’t actually exist. They already sell those, Brad.

Those are called production cars. Yes. You know what? I can’t afford production cars. I can afford $1 18 cent Hot Wheels. It gotten expensive. I will buy all the $1 18 cent Porsche nine elevens I can find. There you go. Well, Tanya’s got one that we should watch. I already came out last year, but I’m just reminding you of it.

If you’re now on a kick to watch all the reality car programs that are out there, [01:33:00] you have to go back and watch on Netflix Drive hard, the Malo way. I think I tried to watch this. I didn’t get past the first episode, much like I didn’t get past the first episode of fubar and I still need to watch the Schwarzenegger documentary because it’s all Shme.

The Schwarzenegger documentary is good. If you’re a fan of Schwarzenegger, you should watch his documentary cuz you get to see so much about his Mr. Universe days, all his training and all that and all, all that happened, how he actually came over here to this country, blah, blah, blah. So it’s very interesting.

He is one of my most favorite comedians. Never did I try and watch Drive Hard the Maloof way. I don’t, it’s the one about the dude and then his daughters and his daughters are stunt drivers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I couldn’t get past the first episode. It was hard a little bit, but I’ll stick to watching reruns of Deep Space Nine Quarks Bars is where I belong.

I started rewatching Seinfeld from the very beginning. Just wait till you get to the parking lot episode. Oh yeah, I know that one. You know, I [01:34:00] was watching that on whichever one it was on and it was like in the middle of the pandemic and I was like, I’ve never watched Seinfeld. Like I’d seen an episode here or too back in the day.

But like, I never a fan of it, right? So I was like, I’m gonna sit, I wanna watch Seinfeld. Cause what else is there? Do when you can do anything. How many episodes did you get through? Okay, so like, I was powering through, forcing myself through these things. Cuz I am clearly not a Seinfeld. No, she’s a Frazier fan.

Yes. Frazier me all day long. But like, Seinfeld, like, this is so effing dry. Like I don’t, I don’t know, like, and the characters are all obnoxious, most of them. Uh, I don’t know. Anyway, so I’m like powering through this thing and then suddenly it’s like, this show is exiting in two days. I’m like, shit. And I’m like calculating.

I’m like, I don’t have enough time to like finish. So, I don’t know, I didn’t watch, I fast forwarded basically to the final episode. And then I was like, what the F just happened? Oh, the Good Samaritan episode. Yeah, the final episode. What happened is exactly what happened throughout the [01:35:00] entire show. Nothing.

Nothing. Absolutely Fucking nothing happened. They are right back where they started. Pretty much, by the way, it’s on Netflix right now, the entire season. Yeah, so it’s back on Netflix and I was like, oh, I could go catch up the season or half whatever I miss. I’m like, no, I’m good. You watch Seinfeld for the jokes, but the jokes that other people know, like the inside jokes, not for the, because it’s really funny or anything.

Yeah, sure. Normally at this part of the episode, we would be going down south to talk about alligators, so.

But I think we need to talk about stale baguettes and Bree. Well, I put this one in just for you. Oh, did you? So this guy did, started this already like several years ago. He’s a carpenter. He was a cabinet maker and he [01:36:00] built a two CV out of wood. No. Is this like that other guy that builds and it runs the Ferraris?

No, it runs Cause he put the motor from another two CV in it. And he sold it for $224,000. How slow is it? It’s got way more than the real thing. It gets up to 50 miles an hour. Isn’t that what the real one does off a cliff? Like those cars in Alaska that they’ve been throwing off the side of the mountain every year?

No way. It gets to 50, allegedly. Honestly, this is how the original two CV should have been built. It should have been wood. Well, it would’ve been biodegradable that way. The termites would’ve gotten to it. It would been amazing. I don’t know. It alleges capable of hitting 50 lies. Now you can read into capable lies, lies, lies.

But he’s a very young looking 74 year old. I will give him that. Geez, listen to this. He looks like Charles Manson. What are you talking about? He whittled it. From one piece of wood. Yeah, he, he was in jail. You know, [01:37:00] he whittled it out of, the main body is made from apple and pear fruit trees. The front and back are walnut.

The base for the doors and trunk are cherry wood. Wow. That is an expensive vehicle. Does it run on mots? It took him 5,000 hours in over five years to build. Who’s gonna do the math? 5,000 hours divided by 250,000? Is that what you told? Two 24,224. What does that come out to? $44 an hour. $44 an hour? Well, 224,000 divided by 5,000.

Yeah. That does not seem hardly worth it. I feel like that’s not. Very profitable for the amount of time he put into it. He would’ve spent less time just restoring a two cv. It was a labor of love, I guess, of passion. He was putting his carpentry skills to use. I’m not gonna begin to try and understand why.

So the bigger question is, how many times did he piss in the corner of his garage? Probably many because he used it [01:38:00] to soften the wood.

It’s seasoned. Why is my car smell like piss? Cause it’s French. Apparently. This is the thing in France, and I was warned about this, that guys will just randomly pee while they’re on the street. I didn’t believe it until I saw it myself. And then you sort of like started to ignore it and you became desensitized to it.

Except for this personal French man story that I have to share with you guys. I’m walking down the road with Tai. We’re coming back from David’s campsite. So imagine we have a 45 minute walk ahead of us. We’re going down minding our own business, dimly lit sidewalks and whatever, and these two fine French gentlemen decide that they’re going to hide themselves.

By standing next to the only light pole on the street facing away from each other, cuz they didn’t wanna see each other peeing, but facing the people that were walking on the sidewalk as they urinated in public. And it’s like, are you, I [01:39:00] mean, I understand that there aren’t very many porta johns and stuff.

They were lacking in a lot of things, trash cans and other things around there. But I’m just like, This is unreal. And the worst part is there’s the streetlight right there. They’re obviously inebriated, but there was a fence like, I don’t know, 12 feet to the side of where they were standing. They could have gone to the fence, but nope, we’re gonna hide ourselves cuz nobody can see us.

If we stand. By the light bulb. Wow. And then in the article here, or in the little snippet, it says Public urination is a problem in most big cities. That’s why I will never live in a big city. So I didn’t actually post that as a Florida man type subject. It’s actually like an investigative news reporting on why this is so prevalent in France.

It’s for real. So is she telling you And they show you everywhere where there’s just urine running down a sidewalk and they’re interviewing people, they’re like so disgusting. And they’re talking about how they’ve been trying to like [01:40:00] fix this situation. It’s been going on since like 18 something. I don’t think it’s gonna change.

Nope. We do have a Florida man story though, don’t we? Well, this is just a kind of a cute one. This Polk County man called Sheriff’s Office to report a crime because he goes out to his black Jeep Cherokee that’s covered in all this white paint side of the door is covered in all this white paint. So Sheriff comes out to investigate.

And it was bird poop.

But I will say from the photo that the bird must have like downward dogged at the side of the car because the spray is quite extensive. Was it a terra dactyl? I don’t know. In Florida? Maybe it was like some sort of heron. I don’t know. Albatross. I mean, I mean that was a lot of bird poop or was a swarm of them and they all, maybe it was like a goose [01:41:00] or a swallow.

No goose. They had that little green poop. This one had diarrhea. Okay, it was an emu and bird poop is terrible for your paint. Can you imagine? Then you have this big stain on the side of your car that won’t come out. Uh, I’m gonna wash my car next time it rains. Obviously wasn’t there one minute and then it was there the next right to call the police, right?

So Gallico says the culprit was Avion. I’ve been vandalized by an eagle. She ENT tasked me, oh, the substance was what birds tend to do or do get it. Oh, that’s a bad dad joke. But you know what? We’ve had Canadians in our Florida man stories before. We don’t have any this time, and that’s fine. I look, I tried, I couldn’t find, I tried to find better content, but actually it was very disturbing the content that was coming up.

There was a lot of road rage going on and other very negative things. So there wasn’t anything [01:42:00] good, unfortunately. But you know what? We’ve never seen in a Florida man segment. We never see Danish man. It doesn’t happen Denmark because I think the search would have to be Danish man, bicycling or something.

So many bicycles, so many bicycles, unbelievable amount more than Holland, I think. Woo. Well with that, it’s time we go behind the pit wall and quickly talk about motor sports news. And since we talked about Canada, we talked a lot about mama. What about the Canadian Grand Prix, which finished right before we went to Montreal.

What’s happening in Formula One? Land Max for Stepin is winning. You know, it’s getting so old like now. He started this thing like, I feel like after every race when they post-interview him, ARD down there interviewing him. And it’s like this was a really tough race. It was like the last race that they just did were you won by like how many seconds, Silverstone.

And it was just like, this was a really tough one for us, you know? It was really hard. We’re gonna have to go back and, and understand what happened. [01:43:00] I’m like, you jackass, you didn’t lead for five laps. Wow. That was really tough. Yeah. What happened is you fucked up the start. That’s what happened. Exactly.

You slipped on the start and he got ahead of you and then it took you five laps until d r s opened or whatever, and then you got around him and then you weren’t 45 second ahead of everybody. Woe is you get out of here. I think the big news. Formula One right now. No boy is Honey Badger’s back. Oh no, honey.

Danny Badger’s back the smile. The smile ist man on the grid is back in a Formula one car. Your heart rub. Danny, Rick, oh my man crush Danny, Rick. It’s hard to decide between Danny, Rick and Toto Wolf. Um, but it’s, that’s a hard decision day. It’s a stale baguette decision. But yes, Danny, Rick is back and Alpha tore cuz they got rid of Nick DeVries.

DeVry, [01:44:00] the small fry did not, not driving. F1 again is Dad’s money now. Nick. Nick denied is what it is. Nick denied, which is like, I don’t know, I guess. Sure. But at the same time it’s like been like two races, but, okay. Can I just say that I was seriously thinking it was gonna be Sergio and not Nick DeVry. I thought Danny was gonna take Sergio’s seat, especially the way he’s been performing the last couple weeks or the last couple races.

There’s still time, right? Because is isn’t his contract up for renewal still? Like he’s not locked in for future years, I don’t think. Know, or did they finally do that? Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised if this is a way to try and kind of snap Sergio out of his funk too. You know, sitting there with a former race winning driver waiting to take your seat has gotta put a lot of pressure on you.

Like now that Danny Rick has a seat, I would think it would free up Sergio to kind of, it takes some pressure off of him. I mean, he’s still gotta go out there and [01:45:00] perform, but it’s like having, you know, a starting quarterback or a starting pitcher or something and you’ve got an all-star starting pitcher sitting on the bench behind you.

He puts a lot of undue pressure on you. I think Sergio comes out and starts driving better for his sake, I hope. But I’m happy to see Danny Rick back. I’m happy for you. Unlike Formula One, there’s a bunch of W R C news that we’re not gonna cover this month. I’m gonna talk about it next time, and there’s some drama with Terry Newville, so I’m gonna leave you and suspend.

I don’t think anybody cares. Oh, but Tony has some NASCAR news. Well, I didn’t watch it, but the street race in Chicago did happen. NASCARs do street races now. Yes they did. Is it like RC cars that just put a body on top of the Indy car and we’re gonna make, pretend it’s a nascar No, it’s like the garage 56 car.

Well then maybe it’s possible. I I, I, you know, we gotta stop poking fun. These NASCARs have come a long way since the days of the Conestoga wagon suspension that they were based on. It was over the 4th of July weekend. So unfortunately the ability, nobody watched it was, [01:46:00] did not happen. So, but however it did happen.

And I don’t know any of the people in nascar. So the person who won means nothing to me. But I believe it was like, this guy’s a New Zealander who won Shane Ben Bergen. That does not sound like a NASCAR name. Wow. He was brought in just for the street race. I was gonna say anybody with a non-American sounding name for the street race.

Right? Yeah. We’ll get some guys from touring car. Come over here. We’re gonna try to keep it light, but I wanna remind people that our Motorsports News is brought to us in partnership with the International Motor Racing Research Center in Watkins Glen. They are running their promotion and their sweepstakes to win a 2024 Corvette Ray through April of 2024.

You can enter now by going to their website racing archives.org. Click on Corvette sweepstakes and enter the Code Ray launch for some bonus tickets there and entries when you sign up to try to win that Corvette. You can also take a cash option if you don’t want a new car. And the I M R R C also has some upcoming [01:47:00] events.

On August 18th, they are doing the Cameron r AKIs Singer Award for outstanding contributions to Motorsports dinner On September the 16th, they’re doing a center conversation titled Brumos, an American Racing Icon, with author Sean Cridland at 1:00 PM on September 30th. They’re holding the 25th anniversary party for the I M R R C.

More details on that are still to come November the second International Real Wheel film Festival celebrating historical racing documentaries at 5:00 PM which is on the eve of the Arge Singers Symposium on International Motor Racing History on November the third and the fourth. And we will be there for those November events at the Glen.

So we hope to see you there if you’re interested in checking out the symposium this year. And we want to thank our friends at the I M R R C for supporting us and working with us on various projects here at G T M and Break Fix throughout the year. Upcoming local news and events brought to us by collector car guide.net, the ultimate reference for car enthusiasts [01:48:00] coming up for end of July and August, July 26th through the 29th.

We’ve got the Mecu Auctions in Harrisburg. It’s at the Pennsylvania Farm Show Complex in Harris, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. August 5th, we’ve got the 17th Annual Pleasant Valley Car and Truck Show and put on by the Roar Roseville Volunteer Fire Department in Roar, Roseville, Maryland. On August 5th and sixth, the S C C A W D C R, Western Maryland Chapters hosting the Polish Mountain Hill Climb in Flintstone, Maryland on August 17th through August 19th, the Meka Monterey Auction, which I believe Eric is going to be out in Monte Monterey, California for Car Week out there.

This is held with the Hyatt Regency and Monterey Hotel in Spa. I am confirmed to be at this event, so I will see people there if they’re there for Car Week. There you go. Two events that I want to highlight just because I like these types of cars. Both of them are August 19th. The first one is the Rev up for Rotary event at Adventure Park in Monrovia, Maryland, and then the [01:49:00] VW meet at Mason Dixon Dragway in Boonsboro, Maryland.

August 24th, the Audi Club, north America Northeast Region is hosting a summer concert social Event at the train concert at Tanglewood in Lennox, Massachusetts in August 26th, the Maryland Auto Detailing Car Truck, Jeep and Motorcycle show that looks like it’s an all-inclusive show at the Mount Pleasant Riverton Club to support St.

Jude’s Children’s Hospital. And August 28th through August 30th, Ferrari Club of America is having their annual meet in Bend, Oregon, and tons more events like these and all their details. Are available over@collectorcarguide.net. Thanks, Brad. And now it’s time for the h hpde junkie.com Trackside report.

So what’s coming up for the rest of the summer? By the time this aired, we did a little bit more travel as we headed to V I R for our annual Summer Bash Track Track weekend with our friends from Hooked on Driving. If you’re listening to this on the car ride home or you missed it, [01:50:00] check out the rest of Hooked on driving schedule this summer.

And don’t forget, as a thank you to all of our loyal supporters, you can sign up for your next Hooked on Driving event using the Code Break FIXX 23, and receive a discount on your registration at checkout. So thank you again, and tune in for more promotions like this throughout the year. I mentioned the V R G, the Vintage Racers group earlier, and if you’re interested in checking out some of their events, here’s what’s left on the late summer fall schedule.

September 1st through the fourth. They’re at Limerock for the historic festival. September 22nd through the 24th, they’re at Watkins Glen and November 17th through the 19th, they’re at the infamous. Turkey bowl at Summit Point, our home track in West Virginia. Be sure to check out some of those V R G events if you’re interested in running your spec Miata somewhere else.

July the 31st through August, the first Audi Club Northeast Region has their H P D E at Watkins Glen International. So if you’re looking to turn some laps at the Glen, you’re still in time to register for that event. And as Brad mentioned, stay tuned next month on [01:51:00] our YouTube and Twitch feeds for coverage.

From Car Week in Monterey, California, we’re gonna be at places like the Quail Pebble Beach, the Garage Style Magazine, garage Tours, Mecham’s Auction in Monterey, and two days at the Monterey Historics at Laguna Seka, just to name a few of the events we’re gonna be at. So be sure to keep up with us on social on our websites and live streaming throughout Car Week in August.

In case you missed out, check out the other podcast episodes that aired during the summer break. We kicked off the summer with Rob Morgan from M P G and learned all about the GT Celebration Racing Series. We traveled back to the golden age of sports car racing with co-host Mike Carr. When we interviewed Bob Garretson and learned about his friendship with Bobby Rahal and Brian Redmond, along with how the infamous Apple 9 35 came to be.

Tony Viola taught us what it’s like to take stainless steel and turn it into a vehicle and how he’s using everything he’s learned to help build the new Gulling door. DeLorean next generation supercar author Jeff Willis [01:52:00] stopped by to tell us about his new book, human in the Machine, while John Summers talked about the influence of social media on racing.

Kevin McDonald from Positive Talk Radio in Seattle interviewed our very own crew, chief Eric about some of the lesser told parts of the G T M and Break Fixx origin story. We revisited with Bob Gillespie and learned more about the Green Grand Prix. While newsman, Larry Jorgensen told us about his new book, shipwrecked and Rescued, we went around the world with Elspeth beard on her epic adventure as the first British woman to circle the world on a motorcycle.

And finally, Danny Pilling from the Danny Peon Cars podcast crossed over with Break Fix to talk about car culture from all parts of the globe. Thanks again to everyone that came on the show over the summer, and we’ll see you in August. Thanks, Tanya. New Patreons for the month of July. We don’t have any.

If you’re interested in supporting us, keeping up all the things we do around here, helping us keep the lights on, be sure to check us out. patreon.com/gt motorsports, you can sign up for as [01:53:00] little as $2 and 50 cents a month. Every penny counts keeping things running smoothly around here. We have a couple anniversary shout outs.

Kerwin Webb and Mike Bowser are celebrating seven years with gtm and coming in a close second this month is one of the Latin lads, Steve Wade. He’s celebrating six years with us. And if you want to know more about the Latin lads, there were an episode with them and what was our first season? Mm-hmm. We had them on great story about their Cursed mini and just their fantastic lives.

So go check it out. And if you’d like to become a member of G tm, be sure to check out the new clubhouse website@club.gt motorsports.org to learn more. And remember, for everything that we talked about on this episode and more, be sure to check out the follow on article and show notes available@gtmotorsports.org.

You can also join us on Discord by clicking the link on our website. And don’t forget new ways to get ahold of us. You can follow us on Threads, the new social media platform from Meta, the Parent company of Instagram and Facebook. So let’s make [01:54:00] it a goal to get more followers on threads than we have on Instagram, and we can do that with your help.

Also a quick shout out to our co-host and executive producer Tanya, and coming up in October through probably January, I will be going out on paternity leave cuz we’ll be having our second child. Yay. We’ll have an opening for guest hosts that want to come on the show. If anybody’s interested, please do not hesitate to reach out and we can find something for you to talk about.

Or we’ll conscript you one way or the other. Yeah. Yeah. One way or the other you will imply resistance is futile Resistance. Yes. You will be indoctrinated like the Reapers did to shepherd and aspect. And all the members who support gtm. Without you, none of this would be possible. I’ve had all day thinking about this episode, like it’s gotta be like the Backstreet Boys be like, break, fix this back.

Alright. Exactly how that goes. That was studio quality right there. This is why I could never be on [01:55:00] America’s Got Talent. I have to go overseas to really show off my team. You have to have talent to be on America’s Got Talent never gonna happen. Your talent is the gift of Gab. We’re gonna do this, uh, well that way.

Tell why you are my father. My.

Tell me why Tony’s dying. That was very nice.

Otro

here we in the drive through line in front of us cars, in back of us all just waiting.[01:56:00]

If you like what you’ve heard and want to learn more about gtm, be sure to check us out on www.gt motorsports.org. You can also find us on Instagram at grantor Motorsports. Also, if you want to get involved or have suggestions for future shows. You can call or text us at (202) 630-1770 or send us an email at crew chief gt motorsports.org.

We’d love to hear from you. Hey everybody, crew Chief Eric here. We really hope you enjoyed this episode of Break Fix, and we wanted to remind you that G T M 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 and 50 cents a month, you can keep our developers, writers, editors, casters, and other [01:57:00] volunteers fed on their strict diet of fig Newton’s, gummy bears, and Monster. Consider signing up for Patreon today at www.patreon.com/gt motorsports. And remember, without fans, supporters, and members like you, none of this would be possible.