One of the greatest things about living in Southern California, is the access to so many cars.  Now some may see the cars as a bad thing, and don’t get me wrong…traffic sucks.  But the benefit of having a gazillion people jammed into one area…is that there are literally millions of people who are motorfanatics, and the diamond in this situation is that many of them have the money to act on it.
As members of the automotive press, there are also many perks, and this last weekend was a great example of that.  We where invited to tour 3 private car collections on Saturday, the catch was that we weren’t allowed to know where we where going until that morning.  Unfortunately for my partner in crime, he was in Michigan doing among other things, testing his dads DSG transmission, and  driving their project car.  But you’ll read about that later.  Anyway, Chris couldn’t make the tour and the friend I invited to go with me, had a late night on Friday as well.  So I struck out alone to the address I was given, not knowing what to expect. Read the rest of this entry »

So yesterday, Chris and I made a trip to the post office…great right? Well, yes, it turned out to be a gem of an outing.  As we pulled into the parking lot, we saw a sparkling 88 Ford Crown Victoria LTD.  No, its no supercar…and it doesn’t handle the canyons well…or really at all.  But it DOES have space…and plenty of it.  So after spending a few minutes talking to the old lady that owned it, we found out it only had 44K miles on it, and it had been driven to the gas station, the grocery store, and the car wash.  Thats it.
The little lady was so eager to tell us about her car, about how she could fit her mothers wheel chair in the trunk, no problem, and how she could still fit all her groceries in there as well.   Anyway, on the drive back to the office, Chris and I really starting thinking, that a car like that would be so fun to drive..because its not what everyone is doing.  Its not expensive, its not fast…and by commercial standards, its not cool.  But it totally is.
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There were actually three Pacers on the Power Tour in 2009. Ours, a somewhat beat-up 77 station wagon, and a built 76 coupe with a Mopar 440 under the hood.  We had actually met the 440 guys two years ago when we did our first Power Tour, and this year they came back with a fully rebuilt car.  From day one we knew that there was going to have to be a Pacer on Pacer showdown, and on the final day at Bristol Dragway in Bristol, TN it went down.

My dad had run a few passes in the Pacer before hand and after red lighting the first pass and spinning the tires half way down the track on the second, we knew we were in for a challenge.

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Today we set out for Detroit from South Bend.  I was looking forward to being somewhere familiar, but I soon remembered why I moved to Cali.  Crappy roads, horrible drivers (alright, SoCal’s no better there), and humidity.  I do miss all of the American iron, and boy was the meet at Metro Beach chock full of classic iron. Easily the biggest yet, it was nice to have the sun out over acres and acres of cars.

Today, unlike yesterday, was completely uneventful…which is a good thing.  We skipped the driver’s meeting again today as our hotel was on a street under construction and getting to the meeting would have been much more hassle than it was worth.  My dad reconnected with an old friend he hasn’t talked to in years driving solo in his 67 Nova Wagon, so we added one more to our crew.  A motley one at that with a 78 Pacer, 03 Mustang Mach 1, and 67 Nova Wagon.
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We woke up today to even more rain.  Great.  Cold and rainy, we made our way to Alliant Energy Center and as I mentioned yesterday, the weather did not deter ANYONE from making it out.  Once the rain let up, we walked around and checked out some of the other participants including a gorgeous Buick Riviera, a dialed in Cuda, and ANOTHER Pacer.  That makes three friggen Pacer’s on the Power Tour…but ours became the first to drag race!

We set out single file after the driver’s meeting and it was a parade as we left.  Police blocked off intersections for us and locals parked and waved as we drove by.  Our first stop was at NASCAR’s number 17 Matt Kenseth’s fan showroom just outside of Madison.  Here’s a little view of the traffic:

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Today was day 1 on the 2009 Hot Rod Power Tour.  A wet, cold, rainy day 1.  Yesterday, I putted through an hour and a half of warm beautiful LA traffic to make it to LAX on time to make my flight to Chicago where my dad was picking me up in the Pacer.  Upon waking up this morning, it was a complete 180 from LA, rainy and cold, but I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else in the world.  Check out all my pictures here and my top 10 from today below.

We stayed in Rockford last night and made the quick drive up to Madison this morning.  The drive was smooth and easy, and we found the Pacer cruises best around 85.  Autobahn much?  Unfortunately not.  We arrived in Madison, and soon started to see muscle cars and hot rods and followed the pack to Alliant Energy Center where we registered and started checking out the power shenanigans.
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From time-to-time, we come across some seriously epic fails.  The best fails are those that make you think “what the hell was that guy thinking”?!? While we haven’t posted any fails on MotorFantics yet, I found the fail of all fails today and I knew it just had to go in the blog.  Who knows, if I find enough of these things, maybe we’ll make it a regular occurrence.  So, what did I find that could possibly be this good?   Read the rest of this entry »

So starting the day out with a walk through one of the best car garages that I’ve ever been in was a pretty amazing thing.   When I saw that the next stop was going to be at the Vel’s Parnelli Jones Racing headquarters, I knew it was going to stay good.  So after lingering at Dave’s garage for as long as I could, I finally made my way over to the Vel’s Parnelli Jones Racing building.  Once again the parking lot was filled with collector cars, but the real treasures where inside the building and upstairs.  There where old race cars that had been piloted by Al Unser & Mario Andretti and there was a Bronco that had been raced and won multiple Baja events.  Its hard to imagine a vehicle that could withstand multiple races down in Mexico…let alone one that could win the 1000 2 years in a row, and then the third year win the 500….that’s pretty impressive.   The vintage race cars where also incredible (speaking of vintage racing….Chris and I have some future plans along those lines) which sparked a little browsing online yesterday for some used Indy cars….THAT’S WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT!
Anyway, after spending about a half an hour at Vel’s Parnelli Jones, I headed to the last and final stop of the day, the private collection at Honda.  Inside they had samples of most of their historic landmark vehicles… as well as some legendary Honda Racing cars and motorcycles.  Now, I realize that we probably wouldn’t put an 1985 Accord in our personal collections but for Honda, we get it.  These are the cars that made Honda what they are today.   So have fun cruising the gallery…there are some pretty legendary vehicles in there.

So over the last few months, Chris and I have had some pretty excited conversations about many things MotorFanatics….one of the things that we frequently talk about is if money was no object…what cars would we buy.  This conversation always includes the Carrera GT for both of us.  As well as an ever revolving stable of exotics, classics and everything in between.  One of the side topics that has been heavily discussed is paint colors, we typically agree on what would look good, but frequently disagree on the colors we would paint our own personal cars.  Red, Black, Silver, Orange, Green….you name it, we’ve talked about it.  Lately we’ve been talking matte, and we both agree that if done correctly, it is an amazingly aggressive look.  The problem is, would we really want to commit to that look?  One option is vinyl, covering a car in matte vinyl would give you that same look, and would also preserve the original paint, when we get tired of the matte look, we would just peel the vinyl off and go back to the gloss original.  Well, we haven’t pulled the trigger on this yet, but we have seen a few true matte paint jobs recently on an E93 M3 that had a complete matte paint job, and also an R8 that had matte side blades.  We may differ on opinions of many things…but we both agreed that these cars both look pretty awesome. Have a look for yourself here, and let us know what you think.