I love the fact that anyone can get a pretty decent camera for not much these days. It means I get to sit here and watch some dudes in America having some fun on what looks like one of the coolest roads I’ve seen in a while. I’m totally jealous of their cars and their little play area.
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In my car at the moment I have a very limited array of gadgets and by very limited I mean the phone in my pocket and a CD player is all I have in the realm of ‘in-car entertainment’. The CD player isn’t even in my car most of the time as it is currently being swapped between my car and my housemates Golf because we’re too poor to buy one each!
My interior consists of a proper rubbishly made speakerbox/rear boot firewall, two recaro seats with blankets, half of a dash and the interchangeable CD player. It’s a bit empty to say the least. However new cars these days seem to come with more gadgets and comfort than my whole house has in it.
Have you been inside some of the newer people carriers and especially the big American SUV’s? They make my house look tiny and cramped! I’m fairly sure most of the seats in them are more comfortable and better made than most peoples sofas and the amount of pull out tables, cup trays and creature comforts make them more like a front room with plenty of nice furniture than a moving vehicle.
Obviously this quest for the ultimate comfort for drivers and passengers extends to in-car entertainment as well. Most well specced cars now come with some kind of built in computer that works as the CD player, sat nav and DVD player but with the success of tablet based computing thanks to the massively trendy iPad it wasn’t going to be long before car companies started offering special iPad ready cars with factory OEM docking stations and plug and play usability.
BMW turned up at the Paris Motor Show with two cars stuffed full of the latest Apple technology showing off what options they will have for the 2011 range. Now obviously you can just get a laptop out and use that instead but everyone loves perfectly integrating devices so I can see this becoming quite a big thing and obviously a massive bonus for Apple if it is all designed to fit and work perfectly with their devices.
Just think how much better long journeys to go on holiday with your parents would have been if you were just sat in the back playing on an iPad! I had to make do with a cassette player, headphones and a whole stack of spare batteries!
Phew I managed to get through the whole post without saying anything about the whole Apple/everything else fighting or the fact it is stupid to make it only work with one brand and not be compatible with everything…
Oh…
For some reason I can’t seem to get away from Datsuns at the moment, the amount of 240z‘s around at the moment that look insanely cool is just ridiculous. They have kind of become the new scene car like mk1 Escorts and Mk1 Golfs have been for such a long time, this does mean though that the prices get pushed up and so people start looking at later models/lower spec versions to do stuff to instead.
Enter the 280 ZX!
It had potential but was a bit of a rust bucket, fix it up a bit, slam and get it driving nicely…
Then have a bit of an accident…
But no worries, its just a chance to change some more bits on and get it as low as possible…
However now it needs some new wheels and I think its a nice job done! For now…
You can see his thread on the Japanese Nostalgic Car Forums
It looks like the Electric sports car scene has its first proper big hitter coming into play soon with Porsche announcing its intentions to build an all electric car based on the Boxster. Porsche is still currently doing research and tests on battery systems and electric drive components but President and CEO Michael Macht has said that Porsche will “definitely be offering electric sports cars in the future”. They are taking their time over it because they want the performance and range to be comparable to their existing range before releasing anything.
It is thought that electric Boxster prototypes will be field tested early next year but it will still be a fair while before the new climate change friendly cars get released to the public. Mercedes have also been saying they will be making an electric car so between them and Audi’s E-tron concept it could be very exciting times for electric cars.
At the moment however the only real and accessible electric sporstcar is the brilliant Tesla but sadly I still haven’t ever actually seen one! With climate change being an unstoppable force in making the government crack down on the motorist having alternatives isn’t really a bad thing and I’m sure at some point somebody will make an electric engine that makes fake V8 noises anyway…
As some of you may have noticed I’ve been tinkering with a new layout because my old one wasn’t letting me do some things I wanted to. I haven’t quite finished yet and some more changes may still come so if you arrive here and something’s a bit broken just give it a bit and come back again, I should have it sorted quite quickly.
If you see something thats a bit broken leave me a little comment and I’ll try and sort it. Also drop a comment to tell me if you like the new site or if you think its rubbish 
The guy who got Ken Block into rallying and seems to be a complete master of all he turns to, Travis Pastrana, recently beat the record for the Mt. Washington rally hillclimb turning in an impressive 6 minute 20.47 second run on his first attempt, more than twenty seconds faster than the previous record.
Not bad for a Moto X rider really! Travis Pastrana turned his hands to rallying a few years ago and Ken Block and the DC team got him started with it and decided it looked like so much fun, Ken Block decided he would have a go in a car himself. These two guys coming into the sport has definitely done some good for the rallying and car scene and no matter what you think about them you have to admit they certainly have got a lot more younger people into the scene, which can never be a bad thing.
So Ken Block is back.
This time he is in L’Autodrome de Linas in France chucking his brand new car around their 1.58 mile oval bank track. The banking in this place is pretty insane going as steep as 51 degrees, which is apparently twice as steep as a Nascar oval track! That must be a bit of a challenge compared to the usual flat surface drifting…
His new car is a 2011 Ford Fiesta that is putting out a rather mental 641bhp and takes under two seconds to reach 60mph! Fully liveried up in the usual Monster/DC graphics it should be just as fun as his previous Impreza and he definitely proves that point in the new video.
It would seem the video is a step back to basics for the DC team and looks more like the raw and fun first video they released onto an unsuspecting world back in 2008 that was an amazing and slick cut together of a simple practice day in his Scooby. This video quickly ramped up over 7 million views and gained the love of almost any car fan who has ever dreamed of hooning a car sideways.
Then he released his second video “Gymkhana Two The Informercial” and the raw driving footage of the first video was dropped in favour of a more Hollywood style short film, with crane shots, epic slow mo’s, explosions and guns… This obviously caught the attention of non car people more than the first video and so it got over twice as many views and has been watched over 17 million times on YouTube alone! However in pleasing the mainstream some of the car people weren’t as happy.
It’s easy then to see why for Gymkhana Three, Ken decided to split it into two parts, part one below is the commercial, money making DC advert part and is a rap video interestingly and part two (the top, main video) is the back to basics raw footage of a car being pushed to its limits on a cool bit of track. This was done so you can easily ignore what part you don’t really like. After watching part two about 50 times already, I know which part I prefer!
Of course being head of DC and a friend to some pretty cool people he has also been getting up to quite a lot of things in between Gymkhana videos such as going to hang out with Travis Pastrana and the Nitro Circus team to play a bit of Killer, getting some practice in a proper car like a MK2 Escort, meeting up with Rob Dyrdek to create Gymkhana 2.1, which is a bit of a mickey take of himself and of course the epic appearance on Top Gear with James May
So overall the dude is a very lucky guy hanging out with some of action sports coolest guys, driving awesome cars and getting paid to do what everyone else would kill for!
Everyone loves 240Z’s right? I think thats a pretty safe thing to say. They look absolutely stunning when they are slammed but now I have absolute proof that they also look perfect with a race car vibe to them as well.
Enter Big Sam!
And I’m spent! For more pictures and a pretty awesome write up about driving it check out Octane here
1972 Ford Capri RS 2600
Compton
(via Hot Rods Barn fresh A…)
