Mad Mike has just unveiled the latest incarnation of his mental RX7 drift car and by gosh it looks insane! It looks like the kind of car you draw as a child, all big wings, big wheels and big bits of engine sticking outside of the bay.
Apart from the most obvious change, which is the paint and graphics, you can also see the big filters and trumpets hanging out of one side of the engine bay. This hints at the monster 4 rotor concoction that is fitted into the engine bay. The engine isn’t brand new as we saw a video from it a while back as it was testing in the old style shell but it is now more ‘complete’. The noise and look of the car now is just amazing. The video below shows the engine in the old livery, but is worth watching just to check out the flames!
Red Bull have released a short shake down video of Mad Mike in the car and he talks about a few of the things he had to do to get it ready and shows how he has tried to make the backwards entry more of a possibility.
He has also done a more comprehensive write up on Speedhunters, which shows just how much work has gone into this 5th gen version of the Madbul. Once back in his shop after the last drift season he proceeded to chop the front and back completely off the car and make up a spaceframe from scratch. Wall taps this year shouldn’t be so much of a problem now!
Everyone knows that company cars are the best car you can ever drive along with rental cars because you don’t ever have to fix them yourself but I would happily treat the Sibs Hot Rods company car with respect! One of the best things about working for a company that makes awesome Hot Rods for a living is the company car is going to be something slight different to the normal Prius or Mundano. While big companies have to struggle with their fleet management and sorting out who is driving what on certain days, the only thing Sibs Hot Rod employees will be doing is fighting over who is going to take the T for a coffee run in the morning!
Sibs Hot Rods will take on most Hot Rodding projects a customer would want and what better way to prove their skills than to have the company car as a very cool, period correct (to the 50′s) Model T with a proper 1951 Flathead. The Rod gets used every day (weather allowing – it has no bonnet or roof!) and gets taken to find lunch, run errands, take customers for a ride and was built to be as reliable as possible with it getting many miles put on it every year; just how any Hot Rod should be.
It may not be the flashiest of rods around but I love the simple working look of it and it must be great fun to drive and it looks like they had a fun build with it!
A while back the annual gathering of the best old blue ovals happened at Santa Pod with the 2011 Classic Ford Show. I didn’t manage to get along to it this year but luckily Lee Ratcliffe did and he took some awesome photos. This is just a few of the many pictures he took, visit his Flick page for the whole set and check out Lee Ratcliffe Photography as well.
This looks like a rather huge event that happens in May at Santa Maria in California. Some absolutely stunning machines, I was going to put up some of the pictures from the speedhunters reports on the LLE Tumblr but there were just too many awesome cars so instead I will just photodump them here!
For the rest of the pics and write up visit Speedhunters.
I just got a comment from the owner of the amazing garage build, I wrote about back in March, he said he has now completed the upstairs and the Cobra kit is on the ground and evidently from the pictures he included, it is also drivable!
The pictures won’t come up in the comments so I thought I would just do a quick update post and put them on here. I’d like to thank the man who comments by the name of HIRISC (sorry I don’t know your actual name!) for updating us all on his amazing garage and ace Cobra build. It is looking fantastic and my jealousy is hitting an all time high!
I watched the excellent Dazed and Confused again the other day and once again with any film set in the past I just stare at all the cars and get very jealous that high school kids can run around in such awesome muscle cars!
If you haven’t seen the film, you should check it out, it is about a load of high school kids on their last day of school before summer, set in 1976. They party, drive around, haze freshman and generally just get into a bit of trouble. Imagine a 70s version of American Graffiti. It also has one of the best soundtracks in any film, with the likes of Foghat, Alice Cooper, Deep Purple and KISS all blasting from the various characters car stereos.
Of course what you want to see is all the cars used in the film! Thanks to my favourite car and film geek site IMCDB You can see almost every car used, there are about 5 or 6 main cars in the film owned by the main characters with the most famous being David ‘Woody’ Wooderson’s 1970 Chevrolet Chevelle SS 454 called ‘Melba Toast’. Woody is the sleezy but cool guy brilliantly played by Matthew McConaughey, who hangs around with the kids even though he left school and now works for ‘the city’. He also says the famous line “That’s what I love about these high school girls, man. I get older, they stay the same age.”
He is one of the only main characters who expresses an interest in modifying cars when he is talking at one point about his engine with another guy and says “Let me tell you what Melba Toast is packin’ right here, all right. We got 4:11 Positrac outback, 750 double pumper, Edelbrock intake, bored over 30, 11 to 1 pop-up pistons, turbo-jet 390 horsepower. We’re talkin’ some fuckin’ muscle”
The opening of the film features Kevin Pickford’s bright orange 1970 Pontiac GTO ‘The Judge’ cruise into the school parking lot with Aerosmith’s ‘Sweet Emotion’ and it is from that moment on you know this will be a great movie.
Ben Affleck appears in the film as a relative newbie and plays the token jock douche and drives around in what looks like a primer grey ’72 Plymouth Duster.
My personal favourite vehicle of the film though is Benny O’Donnel’s 1972 Chevrolet Cheyenne that they pile into to go out hunting for Freshman to ‘paddle’.
Of course they are just the most used cars, they also have lots more driven by minor characters…
Randall ‘Pink’ Floyd’s ’77 Chevy El Camino.
Coach Conrad’s 1969 Ford Bronco.
The 1964 Buick Electra 225 driven by freshman, Pentico, who borrowed it off his brother so they could get away from the seniors. Was used in a car chase with O’Donnells Chevelle pick up.
A background 1972 Corvette C3.
Chevy C-10 being driven around by seniors looking for freshman.
1937 Oldsmobike Six hot rod cruising the strip.
Chevy 1/2 Ton pick up driven by Darla Marks as she hazes the female freshman.
There are loads more as well, to see every car in the film check them out here at IMCDB
Audi have just unveiled their latest concept car in the shape of a fire breathing all wheel drive monster of an A1, the companies smallest car. It is always sad when a company makes an amazing car but then says it is just a concept because being able to buy this car would be amazing!
It has 500bhp and 487lb ft of torque and weighs 1390kg so can hit 100 kmh in 3.7 seconds thanks to a turbo charged 2.5 litre 5 cylinder and can get the mammoth power down thanks to the same quattro AWD system as the Audi TT RS.
I absolutely love the interior with the flocked dash, carbon door cards and pull straps for the door handles and glove box. The little details like that really make the car, check out the red rev counter!
The wheels are absolutely stunning and come in a pretty huge 19″ with 255/30 rubber on them, so to get that to fit on the normally quite small A1 they had to widen the body by 60mm each side!
The VAG group (Audi, VW cars and vans, Skoda, Seat and to a lesser extent Bugatti, Bentley and Lamborghini) have a fun past with making fully drivable concept cars, you might remember the insane W12-650 Golf they made that had 641 bhp going to the rear wheels and was test driven on Top Gear by Jeremy Clarkson. Hopefully this means we might get to see this little A1 out on a track being given a good thrashing as well!
So I got a comment on my post about that slammed 240z and it after I answered it I realised I haven’t put up any pictures of the car since I first saw it and it has actually changed quite a bit now! New wheels and an ever changing paint/graphics situation. It is also nice to see it getting used on the track as well, from what I understand and have read on his blog it looks like he has moved to Japan as well, I wonder how hard it was to get the car shipped over at the same time?!
