B/F: The Drive Thru #54

• Mercedes reveals F1 2025 car launch date
• Russell sees 2025 as the start of a new career chapter as Mercedes’ experienced driver
• The attribute that makes Antonelli special to Mercedes
• Bottas to mark Mercedes return in build-up to Australian Grand Prix
• Wolff reveals message he sent to Hamilton after seeing former Mercedes man at Ferrari for first time

The Formula 1 2025 Season Reveal

• Revealed: Mercedes-AMG C63 four-cylinder hybrid sales in Australia
• BMW M division set sales records in 2024, in Australia and globally
• This 538-Mile 2016 BMW M4 GTS Is The Closest You’ll Get To A New One

• BMW debuts revised iX with up to 659hp
• Mercedes-Benz cuts costs, renews focus on combustion engine models in bid to revive earnings

• BMW Says Big Displays “Disconnect” Drivers From The Road
• This Rare V12 BMW Alpina Was Stupid Cheap Because Some Goob Swapped It to Propane
• Mercedes Spent Two Years Reproducing This Vintage Parking Brake Knob

• Mercedes believes it's solved torque sensor glitches
• BMWCCA HPDE Schedule
• MB Club of America HPDE 101 Webinar Series
• 2025 Rolex 24 Hours - Results

• 2026 Mercedes-Benz E-Class stretch limo in the works at Binz
• Here's Johnny Carson's 1988 Mercedes-Benz 560!
• Morgan Provides first look at new flagship coming in 2025

Executive Producer Tania: [00:00:00] The Drive Thru is our monthly news episode and is sponsored in part by organizations like CollectorCarGuide. net, Project Motoring, Garage Style Magazine, The Exotic Car Marketplace, and many others. If you are interested in becoming a sponsor of The Drive Thru, look no further than www. MotoringPodcast.

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

Crew Chief Eric: This is it. This is the end of season five. Can you believe it? The end of the season as we know it.

Crew Chief Brad: That’s a good REM pull there, Tanya.

Crew Chief Eric: Might be the end of Tanya’s voice before we get through this. We’ll see how long it lasts. All right. Well, let’s rock and roll. Bring us in, Brad.

Crew Chief Brad: Cue the intro music. Welcome to drive through episode number 54. This is our monthly recap where we put together a menu of automotive, motorsport, and entertaining.[00:01:00]

Quote unquote car Jason news. Now, let’s pull up to window number one for some automotive news Are you drinking the dew? Are you not feeling well?

Executive Producer Tania: I have been fighting a plague fire all week. Oh, I’m sorry

Crew Chief Brad: to hear that.

Executive Producer Tania: I don’t know whose bad air I breathed in. It was the bike expo that we went to. Maybe

Crew Chief Eric: it could have been the bike expo, yeah.

That was a dangerous thing. Tanya invited me to go with her to a bicycle expo. I’d never been, I figured that’s like a swap meet, right, like anything else. I’ve been to car swap meets before and other stuff, you know, craft fairs and whatnot, but bicycles? Sounds cool. I was a bad boy.

Crew Chief Brad: What did you buy?

Crew Chief Eric: I bought a French bike.

Crew Chief Brad: You bought a Peugeot?

Crew Chief Eric: I bought a 72 Peugeot. One owner, the guy’s son was selling it dirt cheap, all original with patina and everything, gorgeous bike. It’s all white. So I finally own a Peugeot. And then I bought a Bianchi as well. Frame. And it’s an 81. And I’m going to actually turn that into a street bike to pedal around on.

And I bought a frame for one of my daughters. It’s a [00:02:00] clone to my wife’s old bike. She had a cyclocross by giant. And so the guy was selling the frame for 40 bucks with the stem and the headpiece and everything. I was like, for 40 bucks, I mean, just in case the other one cracks, I’ll take it. You know what I mean?

I walked away with. Two frames and a complete bike for not a ton of money. And I’m like, Oh man, I guess I’m getting back into biking now a little bit. So this will be fun.

Crew Chief Brad: It’s good for your health. So, so at the, tell me about this bike expo. Was it literally just a swap meet or was there a combination of like new manufacturers, kind of like a SEMA meet swap meet kind of thing?

Crew Chief Eric: There was more carbon fiber there than there was probably in a formula one paddock. It was impressive.

Crew Chief Brad: Was there anything in, from like the BMX world?

Crew Chief Eric: There was everything you could think of. Absolutely. Tandems.

Crew Chief Brad: Cause I used to be really big in the, the BMX bikes and stuff like that. They’ve

Crew Chief Eric: got some bikes now that would look normal for you based on your size. They got these tires that are like six inches wide, like a motorcycle.

And they’re like the size of a horse.

Crew Chief Brad: When I bought my truck, I almost bought one of those [00:03:00] instead, but it was just, it looked like a beachcomber. Yeah, they’re crazy. It was not like a mountain bike or anything like that. It was just a cruiser with these big fat tires for like 2, 500 bucks. And I was like, no, not going to do it.

Not going to do it.

Crew Chief Eric: Although we’re rambling on about this bike expo, it is car related.

Crew Chief Brad: Car Jason.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah, the car manufacturer Peugeot made bicycles and sewing machines and a million other things. And then Bianchi. As in Alto Bianchi also related to Piaggio who makes the Vespas and the Apes and all that stuff.

So both of those bicycles come from car manufacturers. I think that’s pretty cool.

Crew Chief Brad: You realize none of our listeners could translate what you just said. We’re Americans.

Crew Chief Eric: I Americanized my pronunciation.

Crew Chief Brad: Yes, you’re going to be kicked out of the press conference if you don’t clean it up there, mister. Eric, I can’t talk about any of these articles right now because all I can do is see your hair and it looks like an early 2000s emo singer.

I swear. Are you a singer for the cult? Were you in the band The Cure? Do you have [00:04:00] black painted fingernails? What’s going on? What is up with your hair? You can’t see it, man. Because tonight’ll be the night that

Executive Producer Tania: I devour the night! I think it’s the sweep that’s happening.

Crew Chief Brad: It’s the sweep. Yes. It’s starting to sweep.

Sweep it back. Please. I cannot concentrate. I’m getting hot over here. I’m getting turned on. I want to go listen to Depeche Mode. Come on guys. Fix it for me. Please. All the stuff that’s

Crew Chief Eric: on my playlist. It’s all good. Yes. I know. I know. I know. Good Lord. Well, continuing with our banter here before we head into our normally scheduled ranting and raving.

As with tradition in the February episode, we got to talk about the Super Bowls. It’s plural Super Bowl as in football and the Rolex 24 hours. So let’s quickly talk about the extremely disappointing Super Bowl commercials this year.

Crew Chief Brad: Let’s not, I don’t care about those. Let’s talk about that GNX during the Kendrick Lamar concert.

Now that, that was a thing of beauty.

Crew Chief Eric: Was it real though? Or was it just a Monte Carlo with the grill painted [00:05:00] black because they came up. through the trap door. That couldn’t have been a real GNX. There’s only a handful of GNXs.

Crew Chief Brad: There’s videos of him doing interviews with like actors and stuff in a GNX like driving around.

I think that was his car. I think that was his car.

Executive Producer Tania: But I would imagine whatever was on stage in the Super Bowl. Obviously it was not his car, but probably a replica shell because people were coming up from underneath the stage and through the car.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah, it was like a clown car. That was a rep. That was a Monte Carlo with a grill.

I guess I missed that part that they were actually coming up through the car. I

Crew Chief Brad: was focused on him.

Crew Chief Eric: So it had the wheels that had the grill and they painted it black. I mean, you can buy any of those G bodies and make it look like a G and X.

Crew Chief Brad: Yeah, you can buy them like you can buy, like, Vitos.

Crew Chief Eric: Now, one of our neighbors has a GNX, and he was telling me at one of the block parties, you know, these car guys get together, and we don’t want to talk to anybody else.

So he said they only made a couple hundred of those cars, and these days, it’s a six figure plus car if you were to sell it, like, at Mecum, [00:06:00] or something like that, because they’re pretty rare.

Crew Chief Brad: So you’re trying to tell me that the Showcase performer at the Super Bowl can’t afford a six figure GNX car,

Executive Producer Tania: according to the interwebs.

Crew Chief Brad: Yes, Tonya, break it down for us.

Executive Producer Tania: He does in fact own a 1987 GNX and as one of our members pointed out, it is also the album name for his most recent album and it’s featured in the artwork and obviously it was featured in the Super Bowl performance. The reason he has the GNX, as the story goes, was because when he was born in 1987, his father brought him home from the hospital in the Buick Regal.

The base model.

Crew Chief Eric: Okay, yep.

Executive Producer Tania: So there’s some sort of homage thing going there. Who would want the Buick Regal if you could have a GNX and you can afford it? Of course.

Crew Chief Brad: Yep, yep, yep.

Crew Chief Eric: And then there’s the one in the middle. There’s the Grand National because they’re not the same thing, right? There’s the Grand National package.

Then there was the GNX, which was even [00:07:00] more. It was more. It was even more. It was more. Just more.

Executive Producer Tania: Would he really stand on the hood of his

Crew Chief Eric: Six figure car. It’s a rare car. I mean it might not seem like much but it is

Crew Chief Brad: I’ve seen tick tockers Stand on the front of their Rolls Royces and their Lambos.

Executive Producer Tania: I guess so people are dumb AF

Crew Chief Brad: It’s something tells me he’s probably got a couple of spare hoods and fenders, you know in his garage somewhere Maybe you can afford it.

He is a multi, you know million dollar multi platinum Grammy winning Rapper. Uh huh. And he hates Drake. Oh my God. And apparently everybody at the Super Bowl hates Drake. Including Samuel L. Jackson. Including Drake. Drake hates Drake. You know, this just

Crew Chief Eric: in.

Executive Producer Tania: He also is a Pulitzer Prize winner. What?

Crew Chief Eric: Oh yeah?

Executive Producer Tania: That’s awesome.

Crew Chief Eric: There were three commercials that stuck out to me in the Super Bowl. They redid the Bruce Springsteen America Jeep, Jeep is America commercial. It was Henry Ford or Harrison, it was [00:08:00] Harrison Ford who’s just as old driving a new Wrangler four XE. And so it was a pretty long commercial. I thought it was really funny at the end.

It was a little tongue in cheek. He said, you know, I really love Jeeps, even though my last name is. Ford, and he kind of whispers it. So I was like, that’s cute. It was a little too long, but basically it was a redo of the Springsteen commercial. The WeatherTech Grandmas, I got tired of seeing that commercial.

That just got old. Let the word go. There was WeatherTech Grandmas? In that old lowrider Buick that they were in, like a 50s, whatever the heck it was, and they were like, oh, yeah, it was like the party car. And then the only other one was, and it was so cringey. There’s two versions of it. Right now, they’re playing the short version, the edited, you know, for radio version on TV.

And it’s the, the Haagen Dazs, not fast, not furious with Michelle Rodriguez and Vin Diesel. And in the long version, the Super Bowl version, Ludacris shows up. He’s like, what are y’all doing? And it’s like, it’s so stupid. But, I got excited [00:09:00] because that means it’s sort of like, Hey, there’s another movie coming, Fast and Furious 27 or whatever’s coming out next, which I’m going to watch, regardless of the fact that it’s not going to be good, but I’m going to watch it anyway.

That’s trash.

Executive Producer Tania: Wait. So that, that’s it, that’s the Those were the big

Crew Chief Eric: three.

Executive Producer Tania: Those

Crew Chief Eric: were, that was it. You’re forgetting one! What, the one where the lady drives backwards in the Kia down the off ramp? I mean, that was dumb. No,

Executive Producer Tania: but that had nothing to do with cars, actually. That was like a TurboTax commercial, I think.

Stupid! No! Did you not see the Ram truck one?

Crew Chief Brad: Which one was that one?

Executive Producer Tania: With Glenn Powell?

Crew Chief Brad: Oh, I see Goldilocks and the three trucks. Yeah,

Executive Producer Tania: he was like three different versions of himself and three different Ram trucks.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah, yeah, I remember that one, yeah. I mean, it was Glenn Powell. Yet another Stellantis.

Marketing effort,

Crew Chief Brad: at least it’s not imported from Detroit. That’s true.

Crew Chief Eric: But again, compared to previous years where the car commercials are usually pretty epic, like Audi does something or Nissan with a 400 Z all the ones that we’ve talked about in the past this year, it just felt kind of like wah, wah,

Crew Chief Brad: all Audi’s money is going into trying [00:10:00] to get a formula one.

Yeah. Well,

Executive Producer Tania: there weren’t even any like Kia commercials. I thought. There were some pretty big Kia ones last year, too, like going through the snow and the mountain and all this crap. Yeah. Like the Telluride and stuff like that. I mean, honestly, in general, car commercial or not, all of the commercials were pretty lame.

And to hear that, like, people were paid 8 million for the spots, I’m like, these weren’t 8 million worthy commercials. I’m like, y’all got Taken.

Crew Chief Brad: They spent all their money on the spots. They couldn’t afford to have a good commercial.

Crew Chief Eric: They could have funded a race team. There were no beer commercials, which was surprising.

Was there any? I didn’t see the Anheuser Busch horses and all that stuff that they normally do. There was one. Was there? You’re right.

Crew Chief Brad: There was one about the horse. It was a pony. It was a colt.

Executive Producer Tania: It showed up on its own or something.

Crew Chief Brad: Yeah, he was left behind when they were doing a delivery, but a keg fell off the wagon.

Yeah. He took the keg all the way across. It was like a

Executive Producer Tania: weird commercial where it was like, we’re not doing this. This, this time. And then it was, [00:11:00] it’s like we did and it was with the pony or something.

Crew Chief Eric: Whatever. All right. Let’s talk about the other Superbowl, the Superbowl of racing, the Rolex 24 hours, kicking off the racing season.

Always in style. Who won?

Executive Producer Tania: Couldn’t tell you. Didn’t watch a minute of it. I have no idea. Well, there you go. The

Crew Chief Brad: most entertaining part of that race was the point by Eric knows what I’m talking about. I know

Executive Producer Tania: exactly what you’re talking about. I have seen the photos of that. Please explain the genesis of that moment.

Crew Chief Brad: So there’s two BMWs in a Corvette. One of the BMWs in front happens to be a back marker and he pulls some like Fernando Alonso move blocking the Corvette so that the other BMW can get around them. And the Corvette, I think it was Tommy Milner. Was driving the Corvette. He was so mad at this BMW guy.

First of all, he ran into the other BMW when he was trying to pass. And then when he got up next to the guy who was blocking him, he gave him a nice, friendly wave, a [00:12:00] single finger salute, the way we all do point buys when we’re on track together. I mean, I’ve given Eric that point by before too. So we all, we all get it.

He was very upset and he gave the, he gave the salute. Then went about his way and blip shift, turned it into a t shirt. You know, there’s memes about it. It was awesome. It’s probably the most epic thing that’s happened at Rolex this year.

Crew Chief Eric: Are there no repercussions in the world? Oh, you got to find like 10 grand or something.

I’m sure

Crew Chief Brad: who cares if he gets any proceeds from the sales of anything. I mean, it’s worth it.

Crew Chief Eric: It’s Pratt and Miller. I mean, they’re running the Corvette program. I mean, they always have been. So, I mean, is anybody going to stand in their way, Matt?

Crew Chief Brad: It was awesome.

Crew Chief Eric: It was awesome.

Crew Chief Brad: But if it was Max Verstappen, he’d have been fine.

Crew Chief Eric: So to Tanya’s point, who won? Who cares? Why don’t we talk about torque sensors? Cause that’s all they talked about for the first like six hours of the race is these freaking torque sensors. And I’m like, ah, another nanny. Half baked, half [00:13:00] implemented, and then you got Mercedes coming late to the game, going torque centered?

Wait a minute. What’s that?

Crew Chief Brad: Mercedes? Who’s Mercedes? Did we talk about them on this show?

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah, yeah, yeah. We’ll get more into that as we go along here. But let me give you the rundown, alright? So, GTP, which is LMP1, if you’re of our generation. So the LMP cars, it was Porsche, Acura, Porsche. 1, 2, 3, boom, boom, boom.

That’s how it finished. LMP2. Who cares? It’s a spec race. Setboarding, one, yay. And then GTD Pro. This is where the action is. So despite the single finger salute and all the Corvette stuff, and now GM is backing Pratt Miller and the privateers, so there’s more Corvettes on track than there’s ever been, which is absolutely epic.

And Mustang comes out and says, Oh, my beer Corvette. They took them to town. And it was awesome that finally, I guess they got the balance of power, right? Because the Mustang in previous season was terrible. It was slow. And it was just, but you could tell the Mustang had the legs on the vet. [00:14:00] And I was like, that’s a front engine V8 going back at it.

Like the old school days and Corvette sitting here. I got space age, mid engine, blah, blah, blah. It’s like, yeah. Okay. Have a nice day.

Crew Chief Brad: And what is it? Flat plane, crank, flat plane, crank. Yeah, yeah,

Crew Chief Eric: yeah. All that nonsense. So I am super proud for Ford. And then that wasn’t enough. They got done kicking button GTD pro.

And then they said, it’s what we’re coming back to Lamar. With an LMP GTP car, the highest level of racing and the biggest race of the year boards coming out with a prototype. We’re going back GT 40 days. They haven’t done stuff like that. You know what I mean? Racing in the biggest class that’s out there.

Crew Chief Brad: I feel like they’re like a sleeping giant. A hundred percent. And like Ferrari has been on top the last couple of years, right? Didn’t they win last year or they won the year before. I feel like Ford just like sits in the wings and they got this shit developed already and they’re just ready to go.

They’re sitting there, they’re sleeping, you know, they’re making money over here and doing this and Ferrari, they do their own thing. Then Ferrari puts the car out and Ferrari starts winning [00:15:00] and Ford’s like, nah, not on my watch. They go out, they kick Ferrari’s ass and then they shut it down again. Yep.

Another 50 years will go by Ferrari. He’ll come out with a car for Ari. He’ll be on top again. I’m waiting for Ford to put out an F1 car. They’re waiting for Ferrari to win an F1 championship. I guarantee you Ferrari wins an F1 championship board, not Cadillac. Ford is going to be the American team and they’re going to wipe the floor with them.

Crew Chief Eric: A hundred percent. I agree with that wholeheartedly. That’s awesome. Well, I’m super proud of Ford. I’m really excited to have another brand that’s coming to the big stage to compete against Porsche and Ferrari and Peugeot and BMW and all the big cars that are now showing up year after year at Le Mans.

I’m like, this is great. And I said it two years ago now, Toyota. It was theirs to lose and they keep campaigning the same car. It’s like, guys, evolve or die. And at this point you’re dead. Like I’d be surprised if Toyota doesn’t pack it up because of their move to formula [00:16:00] one, they can’t run both WEC and formula one at the same time.

So they’re going to have to pick that battle. But it’s again, if Toyota stepping down and Ford can move in, that’s going to be pretty awesome. So pretty excited about that. And then obviously there’s one more class in the series and that’s GTD AM, which is the amateurs. And I’m like, Do these guys even count?

I didn’t even really pay attention.

Crew Chief Brad: There’s usually some good racing in there too. Especially when like in prior years where GTD pro got kind of boring. Yeah. Oh, because in GTDM that’s where like the iron dames run and like some of the other pretty cool, like small teams. If you go to an IMSA race, these are the people that are usually pretty outgoing and pretty like friendly with fans and taking pictures and just doing the marketing thing.

So there’s some cool people driving around in GTD AM. Speaking of, did

Crew Chief Eric: you guys catch this year’s pace car? Nope. No, I didn’t watch him into the race. Oh, well you can go look it up. 2025 Rolex pace car. I thought it was an SUV because seeing it amongst the race [00:17:00] cars, you’re like, what the hell is that? And so they kept saying, Oh, the Acura pace car, the Acura pace car.

It was exactly that. It was the new Integra. And it is huge. You know, it’s big. But then when you put it with the race cars, it is massive. Like I really thought it was the new MDX. It’s so big. And it was this really goofy gold Rolex color or whatever. So it made it look even bigger and reflective and all this kind of like, Oh man, Acura, what are you doing?

I think it must’ve been

Executive Producer Tania: an optical illusion. No, go look. It’s no, because I’ve been on the road with one of them and it. Doesn’t look like an SUV. I mean, it looks like a Honda, but it doesn’t seem like an SUV. With the race cars. It was

Crew Chief Eric: just like, it’s a school

Crew Chief Brad: bus. Everything looks

Crew Chief Eric: bigger next to a race car, especially the BMW M8s.

Remember those? I look

Crew Chief Brad: like an SUV when I’m standing next to a race car.

Crew Chief Eric: Well, that said, that was short, sweet, and to the point. So we need to get back to our regularly scheduled ranting and raving. And [00:18:00] Brad, you made a comment last month, threw some shade my way. You called me out

Crew Chief Brad: for good reason. For good reason

Crew Chief Eric: said we never ever talk about BMW and Mercedes.

It’s sort of like Ford 50 years goes by before we talk about them again, 50 years before they’re relevant. So since you threw the gauntlet down and challenged us to find something. Interesting to talk about with respect to Mercedes and or BMW. Guess what? LFGO baby. That’s all we’re going to talk about.

We are going to talk about Mercedes BMW for the next hour. That’s it. So get ready, buckle up, buddy. I’m here for it. Let’s do it. This is the wiener schnitzel celebration. This is the super bratwurst special. This is everything lower Saxony you can think of. Bimmers and bends. Here we go. You ready?

Crew Chief Brad: Before we start, you’ll have to make sure you tell me the metrics of this episode and how many people tune out at this point.

Exactly. Exactly.

Crew Chief Eric: So we’re going to go through our segments. So here we go. VW [00:19:00] Porsche Audi news. Nope. Bye Felicia. So meanwhile, get this. You know, I am a member of the Long Roof Society. I love me a good station wagon. And I have always said, and I will admit, BMW station wagons are notorious for being extremely good looking.

They know how to build a wagon. And this latest one The M3 CS Touring has been spied at the Nürburgring, as one does in Germany. That’s where you go to show off your wares. It’s sort of like the jewelry district in Florence, right? It’s the ultimate family hauler that we won’t get. You wonder why we don’t talk about BMW, they do shit like this.

Crew Chief Brad: I was just about to say it’s because they don’t sell the cool shit here in the, in the States. Yeah, we get the crap.

Crew Chief Eric: 550 hrsprs and tons and tons of carbon fiber and big wheels and flares. And it wants to be an Audi RS6 Avant and it’s not. And it’s got that little round bell on it. It’s a BMW. It does all the right things.

It [00:20:00] checks all the right boxes. And they’re only going to make 2000 of them that we’re never going to get. So who cares?

Crew Chief Brad: Is it coming in a manual?

Crew Chief Eric: BMW flip flops on that quite a bit.

Crew Chief Brad: They do! They say, We’re

Crew Chief Eric: never making manuals again. And then they say, Oh, just

Crew Chief Brad: kidding.

Crew Chief Eric: And then they say, We’re going to be the last ones with a manual on the planet.

Everybody else is going to stop making. We’re still going to have them. And then they brought manuals back for a while. And then I think they’re gone again. They’re doing the hokey pokey on the manual thing. I would assume a car like this. If they want to beat Audi, the RS6 Avant is freaking amazing, but that’s flappy paddle gearbox and all that crazy stuff that it’s got going on.

This should, I’m not going to say is, it should come with a six speed manual because then everybody’s going to go in that direction. And to add to that, since we skipped over Porsche, Porsche has said the 911 will continue to come with a manual transmission. They’ve seen the light. Aha! Enthusiasts want manuals!

They don’t care if the car shifts in 2 milliseconds! It’s useless on the street. You want to have that connection to your [00:21:00] car, that visceral experience. You want to be part of the fun. If the computer does everything, it’s a freaking Johnny Cab. Like, who cares?

Crew Chief Brad: So, further down in the article, they do say that the next M3 Touring might make it to America.

But what they’re trying to do is see how well the M5 Touring does first. Why does that matter? So tell me about the M5 Touring. That’s what I want to know. And so the M3 Touring is out of my grasp. The M5 Touring is so far out of my grasp. I shouldn’t even be talking about it, but yet here we are.

Crew Chief Eric: Well, not only that.

And in the old days, like when the E36 E39 platform was out, what’s the difference between 39 about three inches outside of the outward sheet metal looking different. But realistically in terms of like leg room, it wasn’t any much of a bigger car. Yeah,

Crew Chief Brad: it was a bigger motor.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah, bigger motor. That’s for sure.

A

Crew Chief Brad: lot bigger motor.

Crew Chief Eric: Comes with some whiz bang stuff. But yeah, to your point, this is going to be a hundred thousand dollar car

Crew Chief Brad: on a three series. Easily. It’s going to be 120. Or so I think [00:22:00] nowadays you can get a BMW CS like an M3 CS non touring. Obviously here in the States, they’re like upwards of a hundred, hundred and 510 optioned out because they’ve got 15 million different option packages for BMWs.

Crew Chief Eric: Do they include different size kidney grills or we’ll get into that too, but

Crew Chief Brad: different size wheels. They’ve got the cold weather package. Start package, the tickle your butthole package. I mean, they’ve got all that. That

Crew Chief Eric: only comes in the Teslas, but we’re not talking about them this month. You know,

Crew Chief Brad: sure.

Yeah. We’re not Tesla doesn’t exist in this episode.

Crew Chief Eric: So Mercedes, oh, Mercedes. I want to remind our audience. They literally invented the car. Mercedes Benz is the oldest car company

Crew Chief Brad: in the

Crew Chief Eric: world. And they build some of the most boring stuff you have ever put your eyes on. Right. It’s just like. So hot news this month, 2026, the E class is going to get a stretch version, be a limousine, because limousines are cool.

No one said [00:23:00] ever. Limousines stopped being cool in the 80s. Why do we still make limos?

Executive Producer Tania: Because there’s a lot of rich people. That’s still riding them.

Crew Chief Brad: Well, don’t they ride in my box though?

Executive Producer Tania: That’s just it. Like what’s the point?

Crew Chief Brad: Well, this isn’t Mercedes making it though. Oh, it’s awful. This is an aftermarket company though.

That’s making this still

Executive Producer Tania: Mercedes related.

Crew Chief Brad: It is.

Executive Producer Tania: Yeah, but it’s not Mercedes themself doing it. They’re not choosing it. Yeah. But look at the E class that it starts with. It’s a boring, ugly saloon.

Crew Chief Brad: It is. It’s a taxi cab. It’s a German taxi cab. It’s

Crew Chief Eric: awful. That’s supposed to get me excited

Executive Producer Tania: about Mercedes? No, but this isn’t sanctioned by Mercedes.

No, I’m talking about

Crew Chief Eric: the E Class. Just look at the E Class that it’s based on. That is a boring car.

Crew Chief Brad: It’s a Crown Vic.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah, who buys that?

Crew Chief Brad: People that think they’re getting something special when they buy a Mercedes, but they can’t afford an S Class. That’s enough of that.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah, exactly. That’s all we need to say about that.

Next hotness. The BMW iX has gotten a facelift. I’ve never seen one on the road to begin with, so I didn’t know what it looked like. I think I’ve seen a [00:24:00] couple of these. I see a lot of weird shit down here. This is why we don’t talk about BMWs. Did Black and Decker design this? Like, this should have like a handle on it and just be an appliance.

You know, what kills me about these designs? I noticed the other day, I was looking at an older car on the road. And you remember how, when we were younger, you used to salivate over, man, I’m going to get fenders on my car. I’m going to stretch my fenders. And you know, even the cars in the two thousands, like the Mark four Volkswagen, you had those lips that went over the wheels, those lip fenders.

Now all the cars look like they were cut with a putty knife. Somebody was doing joint compound on the wall. All the fenders are like squared off. It looks weird and it’s really obvious and it’s become really annoying that every car is sort of the same now. And there’s no definition to it. And that’s where that M3 Touring and the RS6 Six because they actually have hips and they have a shape to them, jackknife flares and all.

And you’re like, Oh, that looks really cool because it’s so different than all this other Tamagotchi stuff we’re looking at.

Crew Chief Brad: Those flattened off [00:25:00] fenders are the basic white girl of the car industry.

Crew Chief Eric: This is so vanilla latte at Starbucks. These

Crew Chief Brad: are all

Crew Chief Eric: pumpkin spice, pumpkin spice and hugs. And that grill.

Is that the biggest one yet? That might be bigger than the X7. The

Executive Producer Tania: problem I have

Crew Chief Eric: Oh, here we go.

Executive Producer Tania: is with the new BMWs, or what they’re doing now, what they’ve done over the last, I don’t know, however many years, there is something iconic about the way the front of a BMW looks. Notably, their headlights. The double round headlights.

are quintessentially BMW recognized easily if all you saw were the headlights you go BMW. Whatever the hell is on that thing, whose headlights are those? And they’ve slowly been morphing away in terms of, they’ve made them a little bit more geometric, but they have kept the double. So there’s still that, but there’s some newer models that are going to this, just this like light bar.

The kidney grill is the other well known BMW trait, right, when they’ve [00:26:00] ruined that, and now they’re ruining the headlights, and it’s like, well, what do you have anymore?

Crew Chief Brad: I think it’s a perfect metaphor, talking about the weird shape of the kidneys now, and the headlights, like BMW, it’s like they’re losing their identity.

BMW has lost its identity of what it used to be. Like even back to like the early two thousands, the Bengal period. Yeah, it was, they have lost their way.

Crew Chief Eric: They’ve lost their identity. I think the turning point for BMW was after the Bengal period when Chris Bengal left, and then we got all the like proliferation of BMW models where it was.

Like an ask for every seat, basically there was a design for everybody. You want the four, you want the four GT, you want the four long. Oh, you want the three, the five, the seven, the 10, like they had all these variants and then the sport back and then the hatchback and then the X one. And it’s like, ah, they

Crew Chief Brad: were at their best when they had the three series, like in the U S I know they had other series.

They had other series over in Europe, I get it, but in the U. S. when they had the 3 series, the 5 series, and the [00:27:00] 7 series, to a smaller degree when they came out with the first X5, I think that was their perfect period. That was, I wanted a BMW so bad then. And then they came out with the weird,

Crew Chief Eric: let’s talk about the six 50, right?

With that rear end. It looks like a badger.

Crew Chief Brad: Yeah, that originally came on the seven series, like the seven 45 before they brought the six series out. Now I know like before my time, they had the six series before they had the eight series. I used to want an eight 50 CSI. So bad scoured the internet trying to buy.

You know, I never had the money, of course, because I was poor, but I know that those cars came out. But like when I was growing up and I was becoming an enthusiast, three series, five series, seven series and the X, that was it. And that was all they needed. They were killing it. I feel then. And they lost their way.

And Mercedes did the exact same thing. And Audi too. All three of them like started doing the same shit. They went full GM. Like you never go full GM. And Ford lurking in the

Crew Chief Eric: background, waiting to [00:28:00] pounce.

Crew Chief Brad: Ford is waiting for Ferrari to win something so they can come and kick their ass again.

Crew Chief Eric: You know, to Tanya’s point about the designs are morphing, and you mentioned it, the new M5 is coming.

Look at these spy photos of the new M5. This is the ugliest BMW to date. This is even uglier than the 7 Series. With the triple headlights. Remember that one? If you slapped a Dacia badge on this, I’d believe you. Or a Skoda badge. Sure. It looks like something that is from Eurasia that we would never get here in the States.

I don’t know what that is. It’s a Honda, I think. All right. Let’s move on to our next alien, which would normally be Stellantis. And in the old days. Before it was Stellantis, it was Daimler Benz, Chrysler, right? Well, all that stuff was 20 years ago, so we got nothing to talk about there. So we’re going to move on to domestic news.

And the reason it’s domestic news is the headline reads,

Crew Chief Brad: BMW will keep the V8 engine. Because Americans love it. Yeah, love a good VA.

Crew Chief Eric: [00:29:00] Yeah.

Crew Chief Brad: I

Crew Chief Eric: mean, I have no problem with this. That’s perfectly fine. Give

Crew Chief Brad: me all the V8, all the power. Give me all the sounds. Just amazing.

Crew Chief Eric: Since we’re talking about BMW and Mercedes, which sounds better?

BMW V8 or AMG

Crew Chief Brad: V8? Oh, AMG. 1 million percent, hands down. Not even a contest.

Crew Chief Eric: Yes,

just the

Crew Chief Brad: AMG sounds like it’s literally trying to destroy the world. It’s trying to rip the pavement apart underneath it. That’s how AMG V8 sounds.

Crew Chief Eric: I will never forget that Rolex where you and I stayed up all night and you could just feel the bends coming around the bowl in your chest.

It was awesome. There awesome. Oh God, that was absolute ground pounder.

Crew Chief Brad: That’s the way the

Crew Chief Eric: C7R sounded too. I

Crew Chief Brad: mean, it was just. Earth shattering. It’s trying to rip the world apart. I love it.

Crew Chief Eric: Let’s put a turbo four in the next M3. I think that’s the way to go. Oh god. Tanya gave us some news here. It looks like BMW is not the only one that’s going to be focusing on keeping big motors around.

Executive Producer Tania: You know, apparently [00:30:00] Mercedes AMG Is cooking up a next gen V8 engine. And we don’t fully know what that means yet. Cause they say an electrified V8 is that a plug in hybrid? Is that self charging hybrid? What are we talking about here? But there’s going to be some sort of new V8 coming.

Crew Chief Brad: I’m guessing hybrid, like a performance hybrid.

Cause didn’t Porsche come out with like a performance hybrid or something.

Crew Chief Eric: But both Honda and Audi. Developed an electric turbo as well. So that’s an option too.

Crew Chief Brad: Yeah, I don’t think they’re just going to slap a tornado on it. That’s what they’re going to say.

Crew Chief Eric: Compressor with the K on the

Crew Chief Brad: compressor. Yes.

Crew Chief Eric: All right. Well, good on Mercedes. I think Mercedes is going to be one of those. Sort of like Chrysler where the V8 will never really go away for them because it is a staple for both of those brands.

Crew Chief Brad: Yeah, but so is the diesel. The Mercedes and diesel was like, you know, didn’t

Crew Chief Eric: Rudolph diesel work for Mercedes or something like that at one point?

I think that’s where he might’ve invented it or something. Now

Crew Chief Brad: you’re [00:31:00] above my pay grade. I

Crew Chief Eric: gotta go back in my history books to remember that because like Porsche old man, Ferdinand Porsche, not fairy, his son. He worked for Mercedes as well. Back in the days of like the silver arrows, he was part of that whole racing pedigree that they started 120 years ago in Germany.

I want to, I want to say it’s a small country. It’s, it’s sort of a incestuous world in the auto making space. So there’s a lot of crossover there.

Crew Chief Brad: Not that we’re talking about these brands, but kind of the same in Italy too, but it’s like the opposite, the inverse. Ferrari didn’t want to hire a tractor maker.

So Lamborghini made his own car and then Lamborghini didn’t want to hire somebody. So Pagani made his own car. And it’s like, it’s like the opposite of what you’re describing, where they all worked together in Germany for the greater good, you know, for those that we won’t talk about in, in Italy, it’s the opposite.

They’re like, no, no, no, no. You’re not good enough for us. You can’t come work with me. To

Crew Chief Eric: hell with you. I’ll prove

Crew Chief Brad: you wrong. I make my own car.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah. And then at the end of the day, Fiat owns everything. So it’s like, whatever.

Crew Chief Brad: Yeah, exactly. Fiat owns them all.

Crew Chief Eric: Well, moving along to Japanese domestic and Asian car news.

What the [00:32:00] hell does that have to do with BMW and Mercedes? Two things. As a matter of fact, BYD is beating out Mercedes in Chinese sales because Mercedes was one of those brands that had always had a strong foothold in East Asia. And so now BYD is taking sales away from them and from BMW as well. So that’s pretty interesting because that’s a hot new brand.

Taken down the big dogs.

Crew Chief Brad: I’ve actually never heard of BYD. I mean, I’m not surprised. I’m a stupid American.

Crew Chief Eric: Where have you been? Oh, we’ve talked about them before. Yeah.

Crew Chief Brad: We probably have. I go to sleep during the episodes. I take micro naps.

Crew Chief Eric: With his eyes open. It’s like clockwork orange.

Crew Chief Brad: God, your hair. That should be the podcast cover.

It’s just you and your hair, some eye makeup. We need Jess to help you out with some eye makeup. If

Executive Producer Tania: I recall correctly, he was recently offered

Crew Chief Eric: a haircut, but declined. Did, I’m growing it out. It’s all good. I cut it in April.

Crew Chief Brad: You’re so dreamy.

Crew Chief Eric: Meanwhile, we thought the Supra was going to [00:33:00] be the only crossover.

Between BMW and Toyota. Well, guess what? You were

Crew Chief Brad: wrong. No, I don’t think we ever thought it was. I thought they were like establishing a relationship, like a long term relationship.

Crew Chief Eric: It’s like this weird on again, off again, dating thing that BMW and Toyota have, but they’re getting together again, because they’re really the only two auto manufacturers outside of like Ligier that is doing any sort of research into hydrogen for the commercial market.

So BMW a SUV, a new next generation X5 together that it’s going to be hydrogen powered or whatever it is. So I thought that was kind of interesting.

Crew Chief Brad: Didn’t Chevy do a lot with hydrogen power back in like the early 2000s? Weren’t they trying to do that too?

Crew Chief Eric: They tried propane. They had that weird flex fuel Tahoe thing that didn’t work out.

Crew Chief Brad: Remember that? They tried coal in the back of a pickup truck. Steam engine. And

Crew Chief Eric: then they bought into Nikola and that went under. No, that’s going under now, right? Isn’t that what the news is? Yes, apparently they’re

Executive Producer Tania: filing for [00:34:00] bankruptcy. However, I thought they already were filed for bankruptcy, so I’m slightly confused by this headline.

Crew Chief Eric: That’s like, whatever, moving on.

Executive Producer Tania: Interesting though, BMW and Toyota are not the only hydrogen developers because Hyundai has been quietly sort of a big player in the hydrogen fuel cell arena for some time now. So it’s interesting, I guess, that there’s no partnership with them. I will say

Crew Chief Eric: Hyundai is the dark horse that everybody should be paying attention to.

Because I think. They are going to slowly eclipse a lot of other brands that we’re used to being enthusiastic about. I’ve said it before, you’re looking for that GTI experience. Where do you go? You don’t go to Volkswagen anymore because the new mark, whatever the hell it is. Golf is the size of a Tiguan.

You go to Hyundai.

Executive Producer Tania: And remember that our gorgeous never to see the light of day. Envision 74. Oh my. God is actually hydrogen. Now that’s

Crew Chief Eric: right. You’re right. They did do that. I thought it was electric. It’s boogie. Okay. [00:35:00]

Crew Chief Brad: My only grape or my only criticism of what you’re saying about Hyundai kind of eclipsing, and especially in the enthusiast side of the house.

Any Hyundai I’ve ever driven, they put up great numbers on paper, but they do not feel good to drive. And I’ve driven a few. I’ve never had a good experience driving a Hyundai. I was

Executive Producer Tania: not impressed by my rental Sonata.

Crew Chief Eric: They have to have an N badge.

Executive Producer Tania: I recall it had this Allegedly weird eco mode. I think I was in Arizona and I swear to God that I got worse mileage in the eco mode than just leaving it in regular.

Crew Chief Brad: Was it 120 degrees?

Executive Producer Tania: No, it was actually quite chilly where I, where I was, but.

Crew Chief Brad: 95.

Crew Chief Eric: All right, we have another section and I wanted to see if we could fill that. Sometimes, sometimes. We talk about two wheeled vehicles. We talk about bikes and BMW to make a bikes since bikes were new. [00:36:00] And I couldn’t find anything.

There is nothing exciting going on on that side of the world. So that was pretty sad. One of their motorcycles

Crew Chief Brad: is like one of the fastest bikes out right now,

Crew Chief Eric: but it didn’t hit the news. It didn’t make the news because

Crew Chief Brad: it’s been around for a couple of years now. So you’re, I guess you’re right.

Crew Chief Eric: It’s got to be newsworthy, really newsworthy.

Now we need to step into EVs and concepts, which is Tanya’s territory. And I’m going to take this one, Tanya, because van life and Mercedes. So we all know how exciting the mattress is. You know, we’re all going to really miss. It’s that bread box and it’s not to be confused with the Ram van, right? That we have here, this printer, all of these really, really exciting Mercedes products.

No, no. You remember the R class? Do you remember that abomination that Mercedes made that was like a truck slash SUV slash station wagon? Thing that nobody understood.

Crew Chief Brad: You mean the minivan?

Crew Chief Eric: That thing was ugly. It was like a routine. It was horrible.

Crew Chief Brad: They put a V8 in it. You could get an AMG version.

Crew Chief Eric: That doesn’t make it better.

Crew Chief Brad: Yes, it does. That [00:37:00] wakes a hundred cent better. It’s like a Hellcat. It’s like a Hellcat minivan. A Hellcat town and country. It’s

Crew Chief Eric: more like a cat that you stepped on its tail.

Crew Chief Brad: That’s what it is.

Crew Chief Eric: Hey, this is

Crew Chief Brad: not a Hellcat. It’s a screamy cat.

Crew Chief Eric: All right. So Mercedes decided get rid of the mattress. You’re not the R class anymore.

We need a van. Introducing. The V Class! It’s an all electric minivan that’s just like the ID Buzz, but doesn’t have any fun at all. This has to be the most boring thing I’ve ever seen.

Crew Chief Brad: Oh, before you move on, I actually saw an ID Buzz. I know we’re not talking about Volkswagen. I saw an ID buzz on the road the other day in my area with the white roof.

Did you like it? It was bigger than I expected it to be. So everybody says it did not look like 60, 000 though. It looked like 35, 000. That’s what I keep saying, but Hey, whatever. But this one wrapped in, in wrapping paper looks pretty cool though.

Crew Chief Eric: That reminded me of the Plymouth truck.

Crew Chief Brad: It’s missing a big red bow.

Crew Chief Eric: This is the kind of crap that Mercedes [00:38:00] is making to your point. German taxi cabs. Because where are we going to see this? It’s going to have a lot of tons of livery on it and it’s going to be moving people around Frankfurt airport because what else would you use this for?

Crew Chief Brad: I swear if it was a different color, I’m seeing the vans from demolition man, murder, death, kill, murder, death, kill.

Crew Chief Eric: All right, Tanya. Well, we’ve got some other exciting EV and concept news. Exciting? It’s Tesla related. We can’t talk about Tesla in this episode, but it’s sort of Tesla adjacent. I love that. What are we talking about? Well, it says here that the new BMW i5 that we were talking about earlier, it has been spotted with a native NAX port.

This could be the first brand to adopt the Maxport, which is the Tesla charging thing.

Executive Producer Tania: That’s not true. I thought somebody else already did. That’s

Crew Chief Eric: right. Lucid was first to market on that one, which I think is interesting because Lucid, to Brad’s point about the Italians earlier, was literally people defecting from Tesla.

Saying we can do better and go build our own tractor over there. And we’ll call [00:39:00] it lucid more than even lucid uses it because I thought Ford had already switched. No, I think they were all selling little adapters to go from the 1752 to the Max Porter or whatever, but Tesla’s proprietary, not proprietary anymore, charging network, more brands are adopting so that you can use the charging network.

Now there’s no description in this. Well, okay, great. It’s got the port. Now, how do I, as a BMW owner sign up for the Tesla charging network? It doesn’t make any sense to me, or maybe they got a back convert. They’ll go to a charge point, America, do a Tesla. And then like, you stupid,

Crew Chief Brad: like trying to put diesel on your unleaded.

Crew Chief Eric: Meanwhile, there’s more dev and hydrogen options coming from BMW. This one’s even uglier than the last one. I think this is a render. What is

Crew Chief Brad: it? So they went from the giant, giant kidney grills.

Executive Producer Tania: To the smallest grills possible. Jelly beans.

Crew Chief Brad: They took these grills apparently from a one series and slapped them on the front of this big ol SUV.

That has to be photoshopped. It

Crew Chief Eric: looks fake.

Executive Producer Tania: And hey, you [00:40:00] know, I was complaining about double headlights and, you know, there are two X’s here. This looks like

Crew Chief Eric: Skeletor. Like I’m waiting for He Man to rush out and kill this thing any minute. It

Crew Chief Brad: looks like the masks from the movie The Purge. The light up masks that the killers wear, that’s, that’s what this is trying to be.

Executive Producer Tania: Now that you say it’s Skeletor’s car, I like it a little bit better. If it was the blue

Crew Chief Eric: of Skeletor, I think I would enjoy it much more. Like, and it’s got a match, you know what I mean? Isn’t Skeletor like purple and gray? Whatever.

Crew Chief Brad: Is the dress black and blue or is it white and gold?

Executive Producer Tania: That

That

Crew Chief Eric: about sums that up. All

Executive Producer Tania: right. That debate is still raging. I don’t

Crew Chief Eric: know why. Raging debate. Speaking of raging debates, Brad, I found you a do doy moment. Just read the headline for us, please.

Executive Producer Tania: BMW says big displays, quote, disconnect drivers from the road. No shit, [00:41:00] who would have thought a TV screen in the middle of your dashboard would be anything but distracting.

Crew Chief Brad: Watching Netflix, chilling while you’re going down the road. Tesla’s you can play video games on your screen. Yeah, cup man.

Crew Chief Eric: Butt man. So when you look at the picture of this dashboard, please. Tell me that that steering wheel is not mounted upside down, you know, it looks like it’s upside down. I don’t understand any of this interior really ugly.

And then it’s got the Honda prelude. If you remember like Brian’s prelude, the second gen, it’s got the whole dash all the way across the windshield.

Crew Chief Brad: Well, the next article, like if you read hyperlink BMW’s panoramic eye drive brings pillar to pillar display to future models. But it eliminates knob,

Executive Producer Tania: which everyone says they want to bring back.

Yes.

Crew Chief Brad: Well, the knob is the person behind the wheel. That person’s a knob. They’re talking

Crew Chief Eric: physical knobs.

Crew Chief Brad: I know.

Crew Chief Eric: Did you notice there’s an actual picture of what we think is the Photoshop Skeletor car it’s further down in this article that [00:42:00] looks like a real picture of this thing,

Crew Chief Brad: but there are no X’s,

Crew Chief Eric: but yeah, there’s no X.

Crew Chief Brad: It looks like that Nissan Oh,

Crew Chief Eric: yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Crew Chief Brad: You know what I’m talking about? The one from like Gran Turismo or something? The Nismo. It was like the Nismo something or other.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah, it was supposed to be the ID something or other. It had an ID name because it was supposed to be like the new Dotson 510 or whatever, they never made it, but again, it looks like Skeletor.

Is this a half steering wheel? Something is wrong with this.

Executive Producer Tania: Okay, so if you click the pillar to pillar future models thing, it shows you the steering wheel sitting on a table. It’s a half steering wheel. It’s horrible. You are right. If you flipped it upside down, it looks like the bottom half of the steering wheel.

Crew Chief Eric: Awful. All right, Brad, it’s time we moved to your favorite section of the drive thru lost and found.

Crew Chief Brad: Now, before we get into, cause we’re having such an enlightening, uplifting.

Crew Chief Eric: You wanted this. That’s all I’m saying is you wanted this.

Crew Chief Brad: You know, and I am thoroughly enjoying it. I’m having a lot of fun.

[00:43:00] Regretting it

Crew Chief Eric: is what you mean.

Crew Chief Brad: It was amazing. Website cars and bids that was founded by Doug DeMuro, the writer and journalist from what was it? Jalopnik layoffs, hit cars and bids is the enthusiast car market comes back down to earth. And because DeMuro cashed out, right? They took a significant investment, 37 million, but that’s at the worst end of the market for car sales.

I mean, used cars were going through the roof and now everything’s kind of come back down to earth and people that have these cars. Are trying not to sell them. Fewer cars are selling for what they were selling were no reserve and they weren’t meeting their reserve. It’s, it’s just tons of issues. Not a good look for the industry.

Not a good look for cars and bids.

Crew Chief Eric: Well, it should have never gone off the rails the way it did. Covid is what made the used car market go nuts because people were bored and we all had

Crew Chief Brad: that stimulus money. We all had that stimulus money. That stimulus money. We couldn’t go

Crew Chief Eric: out and drink anymore. We were all spending our money on cards.

Yeah, we’re getting stimuli for all of 11 bucks. [00:44:00] That we got from that after taxes

Crew Chief Brad: stimulated stimulus. But this brings up a question, is something similar in the cards for sites like bring a trailer?

Crew Chief Eric: I think so. I really do. I’ve been saying that for a while.

Crew Chief Brad: Will we finally be able to see. And air cooled nine 11 sell for less than 50 gajillion dollars.

Crew Chief Eric: I mean, if that happens, I might buy one. I thought about it actually, like a 76 to 85, like in the period where nobody really wants them three liter or 3. 2. And you’re just sort of like, yeah, I’ll do that. That wouldn’t be too horrible.

Crew Chief Brad: I’d love a cabrio. 9

Crew Chief Eric: 11 without the top might be a lot of fun. I mean, it doesn’t really lose a lot of structural rigidity.

So that’d be kind of cool.

Crew Chief Brad: I don’t know if you saw California occasion. Yeah, I would go. I would go. Full just the black, dusty, dirty, broken headlight, nine 11 cabriolet. I would totally rock one, but

Crew Chief Eric: we can’t, we have to buy BMWs. We’re talking about BMWs and Mercedes doesn’t make any, well, if you bought a Mercedes convertible, it’d be that SL 55 from like 1988, the V 12 [00:45:00] monstrosity.

That is a money pit to maintain. Although they’re gorgeous.

Crew Chief Brad: No, you get the AMG SL 55, the V8 from like 2000,

Crew Chief Eric: the later ones. Yeah.

Crew Chief Brad: Were 2005. The one that they used to always put up against the Terminator Mustangs.

Crew Chief Eric: Tanya would buy the Mercedes that they used in Magnum PI that Rick drove.

Executive Producer Tania: Yeah, he had that silver one.

The same one that the lady in Once Upon a Time had, right? Yes, that’s right. Yes,

Crew Chief Eric: I would totally buy one of those. Yeah, late 70s SL, that screams Tanya right there. Like 460 SL, like one of those, that’d be good. So circle back to what you were talking about, about how the market has softened. I found this.

Particular 2016 M4 that we’re about to talk about. It was on bring a trailer and it was picked up by car scoops because they were like, Oh my God, M4 GTS competition, blah, blah, blah. It only has 500 miles on it. Okay, great. I don’t care. Here’s the point. Brand new MSRP sticker off the lot before destination taxes, tags, fees, and all the other nonsense that [00:46:00] goes with that 134, 000 for this BMW.

It sold on bring a trailer. This is how soft the market is right now. Okay. It’s still expensive, but it’s sold on bring a trailer 95 grand. So whoever sold this car dealership privateer, they lost money. 50 grand in the shorts easily. That’s a sign of the times right there, folks. That’s actually good. If the market softens enough, the depreciation is real.

It always has been. You can get into some of these cars. Now, granted, am I going to run out and spend a hundred grand on a BMW. No, I’m not going to do that,

Crew Chief Brad: but it’s got scaffolding.

Crew Chief Eric: It’s got a lot of things

Crew Chief Brad: Clarkson would call it scaffolding in the back.

Crew Chief Eric: And I like these and I coached one of these at VIR.

It was amazing. It is a very smart vehicle. It can do a lot of really cool things and it’s very fast. It’s not a hundred thousand dollars for me. There’s

Executive Producer Tania: a competition version, right? Yeah. I had one, I mean, granted, what I was driving, but when it passed me on Koda, it came out of the final turn at Koda onto the back [00:47:00] straight.

Holy crap. Oh yeah, afterburners. I already saw he was coming. I had my arm out the window before I even went to turn.

Crew Chief Eric: Which way was your finger pointing? Up.

Executive Producer Tania: I was just like, go around, like, I know you’re coming. Just go. I don’t care. He came up to me after when we were done the session. He was like, wow, thanks for like giving me the point so early.

I was like, how was I going to slow you up?

Crew Chief Eric: He was doing warp seven. He

Executive Producer Tania: closed on me so fast.

Crew Chief Eric: It was ridiculous. And that’s part of the problem with some of these new cars. You know, we could devolve this into a conversation about coaching, which is not worth it, but The new cars are so good. They are so fast, but there’s nothing quite like driving an old car fast.

You know what I mean? That’s just whatever it is. What’s interesting is there to me are even more shocking

Crew Chief Brad: is because this was a special edition car. They only made 700 worldwide

Crew Chief Eric: and he still lost money on it.

Crew Chief Brad: Like I would have expected him to sell it for double.

Crew Chief Eric: Exactly. That’s the shocking part. Since we’re talking [00:48:00] about markets and trends and buying and you know, where BMW and Mercedes are kicking butt.

Maybe it’s because this continent slash country, I joke and have joked that they’re 20 years behind the time. And so they’re just now crossing into the 2000s. And BMW and AMG are kicking ass in Australia right now. The sales are just ridiculous. That also could be a result of the fact that Holden is no more.

So you can’t buy a Commodore HSV plus GT, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Chevy SS, whatever you want to call it. Or a Holden Monaro, which is a GTO, all that kind of stuff. So what do you have left? If you want a ground pounding V8 sports saloon sedan, then I guess you buy an AMG or you buy a BMW. Cause you can’t buy a Ford or a Holden anymore.

Crew Chief Brad: C 63. I know

Crew Chief Eric: I was trying to avoid that.

Crew Chief Brad: So basically if you want a ground pounding V8 move to America,

Crew Chief Eric: cause we like them V8s. Yeah.

Crew Chief Brad: We like them [00:49:00] V8s and BMW. You’re going to keep bringing them here.

Crew Chief Eric: Hoping you wouldn’t pick up on the fact that that was the fact

Crew Chief Brad: that spelled out the title of the article.

Nope. I would, I would have missed it. I wouldn’t have seen it.

Crew Chief Eric: Mr. Ben’s must be rolling over in his grave, like a drill at full tilt because four cylinder. AMG. I mean, seriously, I don’t want to say those words in the sentence and I just did. And now I need to go wash my mouth out. It’s like disgusting.

Crew Chief Brad: I mean, we’ve talked about it before in other cars.

I think it makes sense in the C Class.

Crew Chief Eric: No!

Crew Chief Brad: Because you can get a ton of power out of

Crew Chief Eric: No, it’s a bullshit cop out because everybody else went four cylinder turbo. So somehow Mercedes decided that they needed to do that too. That AMG should have had a 3. 2 liter naturally aspirated motor that they had in the earlier cars, which made close to 300 horsepower.

And probably gets the same gas mileage as this stupid four cylinder. So

Crew Chief Brad: here is where AMG and Mercedes screwed [00:50:00] themselves for a while. They did have the 3. 2 liter compressor. Yes. The early two thousands. They screwed themselves when they put the V8 in those little cars, because it was not sustainable.

And now they’ve got to go back to something that personally if that V8 never existed in those cars, this would be totally acceptable. But because that V8 existed in those cars, everybody’s like, no, go back to the V8, go back to the V8. Where’s the V8? Had it never been in those cars, you wouldn’t care about this.

You’d be like, okay, cool. How much power does it make? 400 some odd horsepower?

Crew Chief Eric: Great. Sounds awesome. Sign me up. I have said this before, after driving a CLK Black, It’s really hard to say you want a Mercedes that doesn’t come with a V8. I

Crew Chief Brad: understand.

Crew Chief Eric: And the 3. 2 is a compromise, but the 3. 2 was a good motor.

They put it in a lot of stuff and including, ugh, the Chrysler Crossfire and some other garbage because they owned Chrysler at that point. Realistically, that 3. 2 is a good engine and I feel that it’s a better solution than this [00:51:00] four cylinder turbo. Like it’s just ugh. And I’ve seen some of these A series.

Mercedes as well. And it’s like, you hear it before you see it. And you’re like, Oh my God, is that a GTI? You know, it’s got that, like all the four cylinders have now because they dump a little extra fuel and you get the little backfire. And if you like that, that’s fine. The boy racer in me graduated a long time ago.

And so there’s no replacement for displacement sometimes, especially in some of these cars where you’re paying this kind of money. Like that’s the other thing. AMG C 63, you’re going to pay 60, 70, 000. And you get a four cylinder like really, but it’s got a turbo

Crew Chief Brad: and it’s hybrid.

Crew Chief Eric: Keep all that crap. I don’t care.

Crew Chief Brad: So here’s my problem. It’s 190, 000

Crew Chief Eric: and it’s got a four cylinder.

Crew Chief Brad: Well, it’s a, it’s 190, 000 Australian. I don’t know what that translates to. I mean,

Crew Chief Eric: it’s

Crew Chief Brad: like rupees

Crew Chief Eric: and pesos.

I don’t think the conversion’s that

Crew Chief Brad: bad.

Crew Chief Eric: [00:52:00] Let me look, let’s consult the, you Googly 190, 000, wait, I put 1. 9 million. That’s too many. All right. 122, 000 us dollars. That’s still a lot of money. That

Crew Chief Brad: is a lot of money

Crew Chief Eric: for a four cylinder.

Crew Chief Brad: And this is what we had. We discussed on the last episode, or maybe it was two episodes ago when they were going to bring out the AMG GT with the four cylinder.

That is stupid. In a C class it makes sense to me, even in, maybe even in an E class to a lower degree. In an AMG GT, no, that’s dumb.

Crew Chief Eric: This next one, this is a fine Brad, dirt cheap. This wins the title, titles.

Executive Producer Tania: Who has used the word goob recently? Thank you. When was the last time someone A

Crew Chief Eric: goob for goober.

That’s what I wanted to talk about. Everything else here really doesn’t matter because to your point, what was the last time you saw the word goob in print, let alone used. So I chuckled when I saw this on my newsfeed and [00:53:00] I was like, all right, whatever. So what are we on about what it’s time to talk about?

Super rare V12 BMW Alpina. And the rest of the headline goes was stupid cheap because some goob swapped it to propane.

Crew Chief Brad: Anybody realize the license plate on the car too?

Crew Chief Eric: We can’t say that on air. Just thought I would point that out there. That’s one of Carlin’s like seven words. You can’t say on the air. That’s for sure. Gorgeous. E 30. 8, 7 series. This is like the transporter. I mean, this is the car we all salivate over with a V12, which is even better than the 740.

Obviously it’s a 750 base car, but

Crew Chief Brad: what a goob.

Crew Chief Eric: It looks like a goob.

Crew Chief Brad: Well, this is the guy that bought it, isn’t it? Isn’t this the guy that bought it to

Crew Chief Eric: fix it?

Executive Producer Tania: So that’s not

Crew Chief Eric: the goob.

Crew Chief Brad: No,

Crew Chief Eric: there’s a lot of goob in this.

Crew Chief Brad: There’s so much goob. But the license plate is my favorite part of the

Crew Chief Eric: thing. It’s just, the whole thing is delicious.

Crew Chief Brad: Sticking with Alpena, I did actually see a newer Mangle [00:54:00] era, Alpena 7 series on the road the other day. There’s a lot of like interesting shit in my like area.

Crew Chief Eric: Well, there’s nothing interesting in this news, so we’ll just keep going. So we got nothing for the uncool wall and we could probably nominate a lot of really ugly BMWs.

Same

Crew Chief Brad: with Mercedes. I think

Crew Chief Eric: we have already. Like, how about the iX? Oh my god. The new

Crew Chief Brad: M5. I mean, they all go on the uncool wall. Everything this

Crew Chief Eric: month could go on the uncool wall. So, I guess, Tanya, you’re not remiss. Because New Year’s resolution achieved. We’re not gonna talk about Tesla. You know, this could start a precedent.

Maybe we’re done with those jokers. I don’t know. We’ll see. We have to move on, though.

Crew Chief Brad: Lowered expectations.

Crew Chief Eric: This whole thing has lowered my expectations at this point, but Brad, this one, this one is for you because this is the kind of stuff that I associate with Mercedes and Mercedes ownership and just the whole ethos.

Executive Producer Tania: Hey, this is the car and I would appreciate a new knob if [00:55:00] that was my car, because I bet the original one would be falling apart.

Crew Chief Brad: This is a very James May article, I

Crew Chief Eric: gotta say. I saw this and I just started laughing because I was like, This is Mercedes stuff. So it’s an R107 SL, you know, W116 S class late seventies.

Like we’re talking about Magnum PI, you know, the mayor from once upon a time, all that kind of stuff, drove one of these, you know, on TV, gorgeous car. I’ve always liked these. My dad’s boss had one of these. It was a light blue, really nice car. All I have to do is read the headline Mercedes. Spent two years, two years, reproducing a vintage parking brake knob.

Seriously? Oops. You’ve been in business for this long, you just, you’re on top of the world, you’re like, nobody’s going to take it away from us. So we’ll spend two years building a part that was made in 1975. Because it probably took them

Executive Producer Tania: 18 months to find

Crew Chief Eric: a blueprint, a

Executive Producer Tania: schematic of it. It’s a freaking knob!

Maybe [00:56:00] they had to source the same materials from 1975.

Crew Chief Brad: First, they built a time machine. Then they got a knob from their normal production process and then brought it back.

Crew Chief Eric: This also sheds interesting light on this particular car. Why is this so funny, though, outside of the word knob followed by the license plate that we saw earlier that you’ll see in the show notes?

This is the parking brake! You pull this lever out of the dashboard with this knob that looks like it came from a kitchen cabinet out of my grandmother’s house. Like, what is this? Who thought this was a good idea?

Crew Chief Brad: It’s like a choke.

Crew Chief Eric: It’s got all the little ribs on the outside. Yes, there’s so much detail.

It’s even got chrome inlay. I can understand why it took two years to make something out of ABS plastic. Brad, this is the news. This is Mercedes news. We got the V class. We got this. We got four cylinders in Australia going for 125 grand. That’s what they’ve got going on. This is why we don’t talk about them.

But

Crew Chief Brad: look at how much fun we’re having. Making

Crew Chief Eric: fun

Crew Chief Brad: of them. Exactly. That’s what we do. Do we not make fun of [00:57:00] all the car manufacturers that we talk about on this show? That is the show. That’s what we do.

Crew Chief Eric: All right. Well, we got to talk about rich people thing. Sponsored by Garage Stop Magazine. Because after all, what doesn’t belong in your garage?

Well, this should belong in your garage. I do like. These, this one’s a little extra special because here’s Johnny’s 1988 Mercedes Benz 560 2 door up for grabs. What do we think? How much? Why don’t you guys guess? How much do you think it’s sold for? I always liked this game. Too much?

Crew Chief Brad: With the people who can appreciate this.

Are they still alive? I mean, Johnny Carson, who the hell cares about Johnny Carson these days?

Executive Producer Tania: We need two prices then. We need the Johnny Carson associated price uplift. And then if this was just. Johnny

Crew Chief Eric: Randoson’s car. The obscure reference to the gray one that was on the Raven spin off series of Highlander, because she drove one of these, a beautiful pewter color.

No one knows what you’re talking about. I know, but it was a gray 560 SEC, gorgeous car. But anyway, moving on. This

Executive Producer Tania: thing should be like 30 grand. Oh. Oh. [00:58:00] Oh. The non Carson version.

Crew Chief Brad: I can’t guess because I’ve clicked further through and saw the price. And Tanya, you. Hit it on the money.

Crew Chief Eric: 32, five.

Crew Chief Brad: Because the person that bought it doesn’t give a crap about Johnny

Crew Chief Eric: Carson.

This is the German equivalent to John Boyce LeBaron. It’s just like that Seinfeld episode.

Crew Chief Brad: Oh my God. Can you get ass man on the license plate?

Executive Producer Tania: That was the goob. Why would you want that when you could have

Crew Chief Brad: a GR Corolla,

Executive Producer Tania: a variety of other better two door Mercedes that came. Later than that or earlier than that if we go back to the SL

Crew Chief Eric: because it’s Johnny Carson’s so it smells like cheap cologne and cigars.

I mean, that’s what you want, right?

Crew Chief Brad: Probably hookers.

Crew Chief Eric: You hit the radio. It’s Ed McMahon. He’s like, Man, look at that car phone. That was 500 bucks extra for that.

Crew Chief Brad: But is Mercedes going to need to make extra knobs for it? It’s going to take them two years if you need one of them. True, true. It’s super [00:59:00] clean though.

Crew Chief Eric: I mean for 32 grand, that’s a super clean car.

Crew Chief Brad: It’s just not very good looking.

Crew Chief Eric: No, the white is not nice. I would repeat that. No, I would get an

Crew Chief Brad: early 2000 CL.

Crew Chief Eric: So moving on with rich people thangs. Did everybody forget that BMW bought up some British auto manufacturers? You know, BMW owns Mini, BMW owns Rolls Royce.

A bunch of other stuff.

Crew Chief Brad: I didn’t know they own Morgan.

Crew Chief Eric: Well, they run BMW power plants in the Morgans and there’s a new one coming. I don’t hate it. I don’t hate it either. It’s kind of cool actually. It’s probably still got a wooden frame too. So it’s their plus six models running a straight BMW six cylinder, making 335 horsepower in a turbocharged three liter.

Here’s the clincher. I know we weren’t going to talk about Tesla, but you know how the Cybertruck has like one wiper blade? This has no wiper blades.

Crew Chief Brad: Did they perfect the lasers?

Crew Chief Eric: No, it has three wipers. In the front! Three? Three! How does that work? Look at it! It has three wiper blades. Oh, you’re right. I didn’t pay attention.

Three little teeny wiper blades. Look at that. The

Crew Chief Brad: question is, with BMW involved, how many turn signals does it have? [01:00:00]

Crew Chief Eric: Zero! Look at it! There are none to be found.

Executive Producer Tania: You know what? They had to do it that way because the height of the

Crew Chief Eric: glass is too short. Yes, but you see, they figured it out, and then the opposite end of the spectrum, when the glass is too big

Crew Chief Brad: One white us who ruled them all.

Crew Chief Eric: We all know that this is gonna be a $200,000 card that we can’t afford, but Morgans are cool. They’re very boutique, they’re very niche. I love

Crew Chief Brad: the three wheeler, the Morgan three wheeler,

Crew Chief Eric: they’re super cool, but if you ever been around one or getting a chance to ride in one, they’re quirky and they. And it’s that old school, nostalgic British roadster stuff.

And it’s like, if that’s what you’re into, I’ll never forget that episode of Top Gear where they slid out the Arrow 8 from underneath of that 4 bus that they were transporting it in. I mean, that’s so cool. And that’s to talk to the scale of the Morgans too. They’re really small. So again, if you like that British roadster and you want that bit of classic driving and you want something very modern at the same time, it’s definitely something to look at going back to what [01:01:00] we talked about last month with like Hamilton talking about, you know, hyper cars are dumb.

You should buy a classic car. I honestly think this checks the box in both cases, you’re getting a new car that is fast and reliable. I’m going to put air quotes around that. But you get that classic feel, right? So you don’t have to put up with the classic car maintenance if you don’t want to.

Crew Chief Brad: I love the Morgan three wheeler, uh, just cause I think it’s like very unique and the motorcycle motor up front and everything’s really super cool.

These remind me too much of like Cruella de Vil or League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. It’s just, it’s not my style.

Crew Chief Eric: Little bit, yeah. It looks like the Nautilus in a way. Yeah, I feel you there. Well, that wraps that up. So what’s next? Oh! Have they come out of hibernation? Do we have anything going on down south?

Down in Florida? We got some alligators and beer?[01:02:00]

Executive Producer Tania: I have not only procured you some Florida men out of hibernation. I have also added a Mercedes man to the mix. So we have both a BMW man, a Mercedes man, and a delightful side order of Florida man. Let’s go.

Crew Chief Eric: I

Executive Producer Tania: always

Crew Chief Eric: look forward to this.

Executive Producer Tania: We will start with BMW man. This could have very easily been Cars and Coffee Mustang man.

Very expensive M850i BMW man who decided he was going to do some sort of launch mode stunt in his 523 horsepower luxury vehicle in a shopping parking lot in California. Suffice it to say he ends up nearly taking out what looked like to be a transformer, some greenery, and three other vehicles that were parked in the parking lot.

Obliterating one of them in the rear. That is epic. I’m not even sure how you do that much damage. Did he hit an Ultima? Is that what that is? Thought maybe it was a Lexus. It’s got turn signals at work. It can’t be a BMW. But it’s [01:03:00] really unrecognizable. Oh, that’s really bad. That one clearly took the brunt of it, and then he must have ricocheted off and then hit the other two poor unsuspecting vehicles.

Public service announcement. Don’t do stupid crap like this. Durability test in the parking lot. I would love to see what the front of the BMW looks like.

Crew Chief Brad: It’s giant grills. Ain’t two pedestrians.

Executive Producer Tania: Now, this next one, I have to warn people. There’s graphic content here. Uh oh. It’s disturbing and it’s uncalled for.

And I think this man needs to have his Mercedes tested. So this is British man whose dash cam, while he left his car at whatever the service shop, they took it into what is a very disgusting looking car wash that looks like it’s a urinal from a bad gas station. Needless to say, the dash cam, and there’s video of this, thankfully it’s blurred.

You should watch it because it’s horrific when it gets to the end. The mechanic, or whoever this technician person was, decided to urinate [01:04:00] on this man’s A35 Mercedes.

What possessed these people? Who does this? Apparently this guy

Crew Chief Eric: does.

Crew Chief Brad: You gotta go, you gotta go. I mean, come on.

Crew Chief Eric: Obviously he’s been pissing on these walls the whole time and he went, Oh

Executive Producer Tania: look, something new to be on. I mean, it looks like the walls have been pissed on. I know it’s green algae, but still.

Crew Chief Brad: Working his territory.

Executive Producer Tania: I think the car needs to have some testing done on it to make sure it’s clean. Ha ha ha

Crew Chief Eric: ha ha ha ha! That’s unreal!

Executive Producer Tania: Alright, then we’ll come back across the pond and we’re gonna go to Florida. Yeah! Cause the Florida men Have woken. Oh boy. And we got Florida man drive bizarre chop car for no good reason.

Crew Chief Eric: This looks like something Daniel would make.

Crew Chief Brad: This is, this is nothing new. This is what the Volkswagen people did with their diesel gig cars. This isn’t new. Is this a neon?

Executive Producer Tania: No, it’s a Chevy [01:05:00] Aveo.

Crew Chief Brad: This is bad.

Executive Producer Tania: The genesis of this was it’s involved in some sort of side collision and I guess you can kind of see that from the passenger side because it does look damaged there.

The handrail? Hey man, you can’t fall out of the, it’s probably there to keep you from falling out of the car. That’s probably makes it legal. I mean, look, he put that, he put that half cage in there too. The half cage that’s below his neck. What does that even serve the purpose? This is bad. Apparently, allegedly, the guy had some thought that, you know, he was going to turn this thing.

Don’t say a race car. It’d be lightweight. It’d be a game changer. Unfortunately, sadly, it tops out at 95 miles an hour. Regardless of what it weighs. That’s it. Whoopsies.

Crew Chief Brad: You need to tune. Wake those ponies up.

Crew Chief Eric: I think I’ve seen less bars in a handicapped shower. This thing is so bad.

Executive Producer Tania: To your

Crew Chief Brad: point, I think I’ve seen this parked on Daniel’s property.

Executive Producer Tania: All [01:06:00] right, don’t click the next link.

Crew Chief Brad: Oh boy.

Executive Producer Tania: Okay. Cause we’re gonna play a guessing game, but you can’t, you can’t flick the link before you guess.

Okay.

Executive Producer Tania: So we got a Florida man arrested after a 100 mile an hour chase through Kennedy Space Center. But we haven’t had a good 100 mile an hour chase in a while.

Now the real question is.

Crew Chief Eric: What was he driving?

Executive Producer Tania: I will give you a hit.

Crew Chief Eric: It wasn’t a BMW or

Executive Producer Tania: Mercedes. When we do the lost and found section, who’s the guy that Brad’s always looking for the new old car? Uh, Chuck LaDuck. Chuck LaDuck. That’s your hit. Car was this guy driving over a hundred miles an hour in Florida

Crew Chief Brad: chocolate duck sold jeeps and rams

Executive Producer Tania: No, but that’s not the car you’re usually looking for.

No Is he driving a dart click the link baby and tell me what that car

Crew Chief Eric: is That’s awesome, that’s awesome

Executive Producer Tania: That was your first mistake, boy. Second mistake was doing cocaine and getting in the car, but hey, whatever.

Crew Chief Brad: Yes, [01:07:00] obviously. Where are his shoes?

Executive Producer Tania: Cocaine, do we need to say anymore? Not at all.

Crew Chief Brad: I love this from the sheriff’s office.

If you try to run from us in Brevard County, we promise you’ll only go to jail tired.

Executive Producer Tania: All right. I saved the best for last. Here we go. There’s a video. Oh no. Because we haven’t had one of these in a while either. But caught on camera, Florida man riding a lawnmower, crashes into mailboxes. And he’s good.

He’s good.

Crew Chief Brad: There’s a lot, there’s a lot of mowing lawn in Florida. I gotta say.

How did he flip over the front of it?

Ice over tea kettle! I watch that all day! Oh my god,

Crew Chief Eric: that’s so good! [01:08:00] I love how the sea comes up and just whacks him. Like, make sure he goes all the way over. And then he’s stumbling down through that gullet. This is so awesome! You know, it’s an awesome day. I know we all were like, Ugh, everybody’s got ring cameras.

But this is great. This is the reason why you should have a ring camera on your house. It’s to capture

Executive Producer Tania: stuff like this. He flipped over the lawnmower, stumbled through the drain ditch, and then got back on the lawnmower like nothing happened. Did you see what he hit? The mailbox was encased in stone. And that’s why people do it.

That’s so good.

Crew Chief Brad: Whew. Oh, I needed that. Florida man’s

Executive Producer Tania: back, baby.

Crew Chief Brad: With a vengeance.

Crew Chief Eric: Stop, bless. Woohoohoo! Only in Florida. All right, well, it’s time we go behind the pit wall, talk about motorsports news. And all there is to talk about is Formula One, because BMW, ah. We [01:09:00] talked about BMW and Rolex. We did. Well, we’ll kind of close that loop to say that BMW did qualify on the pole at Rolex with Vanthor behind the wheel.

But then he, the same driver that put BMW on the pole, threw it all away in the last hour of the race. By being too aggressive. So goodbye, BMW that gave Porsche the win and everything else. So all there is left to really talk about is torque sensors and formula one. Formula

one season hasn’t started yet. Russell is the senior driver at Mercedes now. Yep. Yeah. Is there anything else

Executive Producer Tania: to say? He thinks it’s going to launch a new era for himself or a new chapter or whatever, but he has no team support because he’s got forget who now is the dude, but he’s a complete rookie [01:10:00] green, green, green and F1.

Oh, that’s Antonelli.

Crew Chief Brad: Antonelli.

Executive Producer Tania: So that’s great, but it’s also helpful when you have a teammate that at least is marginally competitive alongside you that can do things like. Help block or fend off the approach of everyone else. But I, I see him being mostly alone and he’s probably going to struggle.

Antonelli

Crew Chief Eric: is what, how old is he now? Well, I don’t know what he’s 19. I think he’s like the youngest formula one driver on the grid. I don’t think he’s the youngest to start a formula one race. But he’s the youngest in Formula One and right now. And it’s just like, apparently Mercedes hand picked him when he was 11 back when he was go karting and stuff.

And so I don’t know, they, I guess they’ve invested a lot of money in him and time and resources over the last eight years. So they’re hoping he’s going to be the next prodigy. Didn’t he have like a big, massive, unnecessary wreck one of his first races? I believe so. Yeah. I don’t see good things for Mercedes this year.

Yeah. But there is rumor that your [01:11:00] boy Botas.

Executive Producer Tania: He’s a reserve driver again for them. Yeah, which honestly would mean if Antonelli doesn’t deliver maybe there’s a chance they kick him out and put Botas back in the seat. But then Botas would be the senior driver. Would he though? Or does he got to take team orders from Russell?

I guess it would

Crew Chief Eric: depend on uh, what the performance looks like. Botas is faster than Russell. We already know that, right? So what is he going to do? Just sandbag the whole time?

Crew Chief Brad: And are we just saying senior driver as like, as a product of their age, or do we mean like their seniority, the lead driver, like the driver one and driver two

Executive Producer Tania: by senior, we’d mean the lead for the team, which generally should be dictated by experience

Crew Chief Brad: or it should be dictated by wins, whoever’s performing the best,

Executive Producer Tania: which would then be Botas.

Crew Chief Eric: I was going to say, because Russell has none and Antonelli has none.

Executive Producer Tania: No, Russell’s won, I don’t know, three,

Crew Chief Brad: four. There’s more that goes into it, obviously, than wins and stuff like that and experience and everything, but it’s who they’re hanging their future on.

Executive Producer Tania: Which probably [01:12:00] wouldn’t be

Crew Chief Brad: Botas. Because Botas is towards the end of his career.

But Russell is still very much in the middle of his career. He’s like reaching his peak or his prime. Antonelli is starting, you know, what they’re hoping is a really good career. But. To talk about something Mercedes adjacent, who is the quote unquote senior driver now at Ferrari? Is it Hamilton or is Leclerc still driver one?

Executive Producer Tania: It’s

Crew Chief Eric: gotta be Hamilton.

Executive Producer Tania: That is something I’ve been wondering because that is a very ugly political drama that they are now in.

Crew Chief Brad: Because Leclerc was driver one when Sainz was there, right?

Executive Producer Tania: Correct. Supposed to be.

Crew Chief Brad: Yeah.

Executive Producer Tania: But how do you bring the seven time world champion onto your team and say you are number two?

Crew Chief Eric: And this goes back to what I said last time about Lewis Hamilton, not being able to do jack of all at Ferrari, because if they play Ferrari politics, like they always have. Just like the opportunities when Barrichello had to win over Shumi. And they said, get out of the [01:13:00] way, Rubens. Michael’s coming through.

If LeClaire is senior driver, Hamilton has to follow team orders. Cause that’s the way it works. And he’s not going to amount to Jack at the end of the year, because he’s always going to be in second place to LeClaire.

Executive Producer Tania: Unless he’s outperforming LeClaire,

Crew Chief Eric: then they’re going to tell him. Depends on how his contract is written.

If his contract is written, that he is the number two driver. He’s done.

Executive Producer Tania: There is no way his contract is written. He’s a number two driver. He is going for eighth world champion. There’s so there’s no way he’s going to sign something that’s going to prevent him from being an eight time champion. Then that answers your question.

Crew Chief Brad: Yeah, I guess it does.

Executive Producer Tania: But if he’s not performing, I don’t think they’re just going to be like LeClair sandbag and make sure, you know, you let Lewis win. Right. But if he actually is a contender, there’s no way they’re going to tell LeClair. Yeah,

Crew Chief Brad: that’s true. And to Eric’s point in previous episodes, They have to actually be in a position to win a race before any of this comes in question anyway.

So they’ve still got a lot of work to do. This

Crew Chief Eric: is all posturing [01:14:00] now because we don’t know what’s going to happen. The only thing we do know is they revealed the new cars, which to me look exactly like the cars from last year.

Crew Chief Brad: They always do like a couple of years ago, I got super excited about all the car reveals and I looked at them and like, sometimes they release them in like really cool colors or something really unique and then comes race day.

And it’s like, it’s the exact same cars before. What did you change? What is this? I don’t care.

Crew Chief Eric: I’ve been saying that and everybody makes fun of me, but whatever. It’s fine. And the Mercedes especially looks the same as it did the W 16, whatever the hell, whatever cares, same cars last year with suckier drivers.

Crew Chief Brad: When does your album come out?

Executive Producer Tania: What do we call my album? Bimmers and Benz. If I may digress for a moment, just tangentially, I finally started watching the Netflix docudrama Senna. Oh,

Crew Chief Eric: did you?

Executive Producer Tania: I am on the final episode. Of course, I know how it ends. It’s like Titanic. [01:15:00] No spoilers. Unfortunately, I know how it ends.

Wow. That’s interesting.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You got to listen to the podcast episode we did with John Summers and Will Ross.

Executive Producer Tania: And I have not because I’ve wanted to experience the series for myself. You’ll have to come back and tell us if we were right. Well, I will say, and you don’t have to confirm or deny anything, there is definitely a sense of, this is Jesus Christ.

Crew Chief Eric: So the word the motoring historian John Summers likes to use is beatification. That is the official word he uses to summarize that sentiment that Senna is God.

Executive Producer Tania: Yeah. Very interesting.

Crew Chief Eric: And Prost is Darth Vader, but you know, whatever, it’s all good.

Executive Producer Tania: Is that completely untrue?

Crew Chief Eric: Well, you need to listen to the episode for sure, because we get into all that.

So that being said, last little bit of Formula One stuff. Your boy, Toto, Mr. Mercedes, highest paid player in Formula One. This is why Mercedes can’t win anything. They’re too busy [01:16:00] paying Toto’s salary. He had a response to Hamilton’s iconic recreation of Schumacher’s photograph at Maranello. What do we think?

I don’t actually know what his response was. The article is clickbait.

Crew Chief Brad: No, they, they have it down there. It’s a little bit like you divorce amicably and it’s all good. Then you see your ex partner for the first time with a new friend. I’m really

Executive Producer Tania: happy for him. And I told him that those pictures were iconic.

that he made. It was so well curated and no surprise with Lewis. So it’s all good fun. He’s fine.

Crew Chief Eric: Do people not realize it is literally a copy of something that Schumacher did 30 years ago? Literally everybody realizes that, yes. It’s nothing new or iconic. It was already done and it was iconic then. It’s weird.

Am I wrong?

Crew Chief Brad: Well, he’s trying to tap into his inner Schumacher.

Crew Chief Eric: This is my problem with Hamilton. If you remember him when he was really young and he showed up on Top Gear and he was like the last one to drive the old piece of junk celebrity car that they had and he was like super fast and he blew everybody out of the water and he was just a young [01:17:00] guy.

That was the last time I think I saw Hamilton. Like. Be himself. He turned into this machine of the media kind of thing. And he’s like a little Ken doll that they dress up. I feel like he never gets to be who he was then when he was up and coming in racing. And he was fast and he was good and not saying he isn’t good today, but he’s older.

He’s more mature now. And I think he’s part of the machine rather than just being himself.

Crew Chief Brad: So that brings up a good point. You think this photo was put together by Ferrari and it wasn’t Hamilton’s idea.

Crew Chief Eric: I do think that yes, he’s like a little dress up toy. He’s a puppet.

Crew Chief Brad: See that Ferrari’s

Crew Chief Eric: trying to make a statement.

You got to remember Ferrari too. You don’t go to Ferrari and give them an idea. They tell you what needs to be done. That’s what they wanted. And maybe in their eyes, they see Hamilton as Schumacher’s replacement. Schumacher never got. The 8th, he left after his 7th, right? He went to Mercedes. Speaking of Mercedes, never accomplished anything there.

And then [01:18:00] obviously the tragedy of the accident and all that kind of stuff. And now they have Hamilton and they’re like, we can be part of the 8th that we never had with Shumi. So let’s sort of pick up where Schumacher left off. But it’s not just let him be who he’s going to be. And I guess, I don’t know.

That’s what turns me off about it versus like, I know that Alonzo is the elder statesman. I’m not a huge Alonzo fan, but Alonzo has always been Alonzo. When he was in WEC, when he was in Formula One, when he won the IndyCar, it’s like, Hey, you just kind of follow him around. You’re glad it’s Alonzo. You know, he is who he is.

But there’s been, for me, this transformation with Lewis that I. I don’t understand, but I’m glad to see Botas back. He’s the Finn that’s going to be an Australian soon, right? Like that’s, he’s making his own transformation, but in a good way.

Executive Producer Tania: We won’t belabor it, but I think he is being who he is and who he is, is a person that evolved from where he was when he was younger.

And whether we like what that evolution is, it’s an evolution for him. That’s fair.

Crew Chief Eric: That’s fair. Well, on that depressing bit of food for thought[01:19:00]

Our Motorsports News is brought to you in partnership with the International Motor Racing Research Center. Just to let everybody know, we’ve been on this Interesting campaign that is going to kick off publicly in the month of March. We’ve done a mini series of four virtual center conversations, panel episodes with celebrities from all over the motor sports world, and they all happen to be female drivers.

We got names. Like Amy Ruman, Erika Enders, Erin Everham, Tatiana Calderon. I mean, you’re talking names from all over the autosphere, all over motorsports that have been in Formula W and Trans Am and in sim racing, in drag racing, all over. And so we encourage you guys to tune in, in the month of March for some really, really exciting and in depth conversations with these celebrities of motorsports and in celebration of International Women’s Month.

Look forward to more. Center conversations live in person at Watkins Glen [01:20:00] and more virtual center conversations throughout the season. And so if you’re not familiar with those, they’re going to be run very similar to our evening with a legend. So you can actually sign up and be part of the live audience and get your questions answered while we’re there interviewing the guests in person.

So it’s going to be, it’s going to be a lot of fun. And with that, Brad, I think we got to wrap this thing up.

Crew Chief Brad: Yeah, as a reminder, you can find tons of upcoming local shows and events at the ultimate reference for car enthusiasts, collector car guide. net.

Crew Chief Eric: It’s time for the Grand Touring Motorsports Trackside report.

I went and looked at the BMW CCA, that’s the BMW Car Club of America website for any track events, since we’ve been talking about BMW and Benz. And I found a video and some words and no events. There is a link bmwcca. org slash events slash hbde and you’ll find plenty of bmws at your next track day so check out our motorsports calendar on club.

gtmotorsports. org or on motorsports reg because they don’t have anything listed on the bmw website meanwhile the mercedes benz club [01:21:00] of america is hosting a series of hbde 101 zoom sessions this month and then throughout the rest of the year So you can find those on the Mercedes Benz Club of America website.

Even there, they don’t have any track days listed. So again, if you want to run your Mercedes or your BMW on track, check out our calendar for upcoming events at your local track or check out Motorsports Reg for that updated information.

Crew Chief Brad: And don’t forget, if you’re looking for that special BMW or Mercedes automobilia to make your garage, office, den, or man cave just a little bit extra, be sure to check out garage style magazine.

com for a list of upcoming auctions and events, along with a curated list of items going up for sale all over the country, because after all, what doesn’t belong in your garage?

Executive Producer Tania: And this concludes our fifth season of 54 drive throughs and 485 episodes on the motoring podcast network. So if you’re just hearing us for the first time, be sure to check out other programs like Screen to Speed, The Ferrari Marketplace, The Motoring Historian, Evening with a [01:22:00] Legend, The Logbook, Brake Fix, and of course, The Drive

Crew Chief Eric: Thru.

And if you can’t get enough BMW Talk, be sure to queue up Brake Fix, Season 2, Episode 87, which aired in November of 2020. When we had James Clay, the founder of Bimmerworld on the show, co hosted by fellow BMW enthusiasts Donovan Lara from Garage Riot. We actually had a pretty serious conversation about BMWs during season two, so be sure to jump back into our catalog and check out that episode.

Executive Producer Tania: And we’ll be back in March, kicking off season six with a celebration of International Women’s Month programming, with all sorts of celebrities joining us from all kinds of different disciplines of racing. So stay tuned.

Crew Chief Brad: And we’ve also got lots of great extras and bonuses to explore on our expanded Patreon page.

So if you’d like to learn more about our bonus. And behind the scenes content and get early access to upcoming episodes. Consider becoming a brake fix VIP by clicking the blue join for free button in the middle of the page. When you visit patreon. com slash GT motor sports. [01:23:00]

Executive Producer Tania: And remember for everything we talked about on this episode and more, be sure to check out the follow on article and show notes available at gtmotorsports.

org.

Crew Chief Brad: And the thank you, of course, always to our cohost and executive producer, Tanya, and to all the fans, friends, and family who support grand touring and the motoring podcast network without you, none of this would be possible.

Crew Chief Eric: And on that guys, I have to thank you both. And I have to thank everybody out there for sticking with us after.

Five years of doing this and five very long seasons and almost 500 episodes. So we are getting geared up for an awesome 2025 season. So stay with us. We appreciate it. And we’ll see you soon. Thank you.

Crew Chief Brad: And we’re sorry, Mike Crutchfield. We ran out of time. We’ll have you on the next episode.

Crew Chief Eric: Is he a Florida man when he goes to Florida?

I thought

Crew Chief Brad: he was a New Zealand man.

Crew Chief Eric: Did you know he lived in Germany and he drove a BMW? I’m going to hit record because we always lose the good stuff if we don’t hit record.

Crew Chief Brad: Yeah. The rest of the, the rest of the discussion is crap. It’s the good stuff always [01:24:00] happens that 10 minutes before and that two minutes after that’s the bet that’s gold.

That’s gold, Jerry. It’s

Crew Chief Eric: gold. Well, that’s when the red lights off. That’s how the good stuff comes out.

Crew Chief Brad: Yeah, I don’t pay any attention to the red light.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah, they made it so small now you can’t even tell that it’s there.

Crew Chief Brad: Out there, you gotta, you gotta hover over something to see it come up. I know, I know.

Crew Chief Eric: And like we say in the Virtual Center Conversations, keep the wheels turning and the throttle wide open.

We hope you enjoyed another awesome episode of Brake Fix Podcast brought to you [01:25:00] by Grand Touring Motorsports. If you’d like to be a guest on the show or get involved, be sure to follow us on all social media platforms at GrandTouringMotorsports. And if you’d like to learn more about the content of this episode, be sure to check out the follow on article at GTMotorsports.

org. We remain a commercial free and no annual fees organization through our sponsors, but also through the generous support of our fans, families, and friends through Patreon. For as little as 2. 50 a month, you can get access to more behind the scenes action, additional Pit Stop minisodes, and other VIP goodies, as well as keeping our team of creators Fed on their strict diet of Fig Newtons, Gumby Bears, and Monster.

So consider signing up for Patreon today at www. patreon. com forward slash GT Motorsports. And remember, without you, none of this would be [01:26:00] possible.

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

• 00:00 Season Five Finale Kickoff
• 01:16 Bicycle Expo Adventures
• 04:34 Super Bowl Commercials Review
• 11:04 Rolex 24 Hours Recap
• 17:56 BMW and Mercedes Spotlight
• 31:55 Hydrogen and EV Innovations
• 40:04 Skeletor’s Car and Debating BMW’s Big Displays
• 43:02 The Rise and Fall of Cars & Bids
• 45:31 The Softening Car Market
• 49:09 Mercedes and the Four-Cylinder Controversy
• 01:01:37 Florida Man is out of Hibernation!
• 01:08:50 Motorsports News and Formula One
• 01:20:17 Wrapping Up and Looking Ahead