Fast Cars

The Women's Sports Foundation, founded by tennis phenomenon Billie Jean King, announced yesterday that NHRA Top Fuel driver Melanie Troxel was selected as Sportswoman of the Year, the first honoree from the world of motorsports.

For her part, Marianne Donahue spent this morning fighting vicious rumors that she had become visibly anorexic since the Herald piece catapulted her into the limelight. And when it rains it pours: she and her husband Andrew began to feud over her lavish new tastes in sports cars and fitness trainers, and they separated, divorced, remarried, and are now — at a little before lunch time — again deliriously happy.

I really don’t know if these cars are for real they’re so tiny. Fun to look at and I’m sure they’re even more fun to drive except for the fact that I would probably choke on the steering wheel. Other than that it would be a good time zipping around in one of these tiny cars. What do you think…real or not?

This is one of the msot important factors, cos if you’re in a car you hate, say your dad’s 98 Nissan Sunny(which is actually my dad’s car), you will never enjoy getting stuck anywhere. But say you egt stuck in a tuned Nissan Skyline, rumbling away slowly and letting those wastegates dump loudly, then you would definitely enjoy the experience. you don’t even need a tuned car, a nice luxury car(anything luxury except a luxobarge) would do. A nice X-Type, a sleek CLS, it’s all good.

If seems like every few days you can read about a new "world's fastest this" or a "world's fastest that" but if you are into that kind of thing this Hemi 'Cuda sounds and looks quite impressive. The 1971 Plymouth -- or at least what's left of it -- was built by Alan Johnson at Johnson's Hot Rod Shop. From the looks of things there does not appear to be much of the original car left, which is pretty much par for the course on these high-tech high-dollar builds.

Which championship fight is more exciting - Alonso vs Schumacher in Formula 1, Force vs Capps in NHRA's Funny Car or The Chase for the Nextel Cup Championship in NASCAR.

Today, after a horrific car accident on the race track at Mt Panorama (the accident I think was yesterday), racing car driver Mark Porter died. I haven’t seen footage of the accident (which is probably a good thing) but the way the article I read described it is still locked vividly in my mind. He lost control of his car coming around a tight corner, slid and stalled, and wound up sideways across the track, driver’s side facing the oncoming cars who were approaching at over 180 KM per hour but could not see him there around the bend. There he sat helpless; helpless too the drivers who crashed into him, powerless to stop their cars before impact.

VW’s Electronics Research Lab built “Stanley”, the defending world champion in the DARPA Grand Challenge for autonomous cars.

OK, this morning I decided to do something productive for a change. There was a previous post where I complained at length about my problem with commercials during NASCAR races, as well as their prostitution in the form of trash movies and romance novels. It occurred to me this morning that there’s a good solution for this: rather than complaining, I could actually do something productive and pray for the leadership of NASCAR: praying for godly people to rise to positions of influence within its ranks–people who are grieved over this organizations’ moral shortcomings and neglect of its true fan base.

I wasn’t freaking out about the fact that we were completely perpendicular to the direction that the street was going. Or about the fact that we might be jumping a median curb. Or the fact that we might hit another vehicle on the street. I was more freaked out about the SUV cop that was flying sideways in my field of vision.

Well, it’s been an interesting first week back, and I havn’t really done much work to be honest. I have been sorting out other things as I am getting involved with Formula Student (designing and building a race car) and also with the uni poker soceity. It’s going to be a brilliant year I feel!

It’s as though Peugeot looked at every luxury car in the medium size segment, and said, we’ll have one of each of those, thanks, and put it all into the 407.