I'll give you five solid reasons to be ashamed to buy a Japanese car:

5. The Japanese have knowingly manipulated our government, our trade regulations, and our good will for decades. Their entry to the market was bought with a devalued currency and their continued presence depends on nothing more exotic than the fact that they've been able to keep the unions out and therefore use temp labor to assemble the cars. That's not something of which they should be proud.

4. Their entire industrial base was paid for by the United States government, which means YOU. MacArthur built them from rubble and helped them acquire the steel plants and sleek manufacturing facilities which enabled them to enter the market in the first place.

3. Gaijin perimeter and the associated racism. You think Americans are racist? Ha.

2. The money you spend with them leaves the country and never comes back, even when you purchase an "American" Japanese car.

1. The Bataan death march, the rape of Manuchuria, and so on. Nobody has perpetrated more vicious atrocities than the Japanese. They make My Lai look like a holiday picnic.

Five reasons not to buy German:

5. They destroyed Chrysler for their own amusement.

4. They used our Marshall Plan help to manipulate their currency and enter our market, as Japan did.

3. We paid in blood to liberate their country and the countries around them from their own terrible mistake and have been treated like a bunch of mentally disabled hicks ever since.

2. They stole Patrick Long. (kind of kidding here)

1. They put six million people in an oven and closed the door, and I'd bet a lot of us are related to those six million. (Not kidding at all)

How's that stack up to the "five reasons to be ashamed to buy American", which as far as I can tell boil down to "I don't like the look of the 2008 Focus"?

For the record, I own a LOT of German cars and I have had a couple of Japanese cars... but the idea that anybody should be "ashamed" to buy an American car gets me pretty fired up. If you really think there's much of a difference between a Camry, Fusion, Accord, Malibu, or Mazda6 - well, that would be something of which one should be ashamed.

We're supposed to be enthusiasts here, right? Who makes the majority of affordable enthusiast cars? It isn't Germany or Japan. Toyota doesn't make a single performance car. Ford's lineup alone contains more enthusiasm than all of Japan's NAR lineup.

It's a lot tougher than it looks, at every level. There's much more room for error in road racing than there is on the oval.

I wish I could get Jalops to show a little more love for traditional American racing. The world may be "us" v "them", but "us" isn't sophisticated Euro-racers and "them" aren't hillbillies; "us" is automotive enthusiasm and "them" is the hundreds of millions of people in the Western Hemisphere who hate, despise, or barely tolerate cars.

I spent the first three months of 2006 lowballing Phaeton dealers to pick up my second one. The deal I got was pretty amazing - $54,000 for a car stickering at $68,000 - but that was after calling pretty much every dealer with remaining stock in the country.

You're right about the execution, though: it's been proven that "What the people want" is an offshored E-class for less money. It's worked before with the original LS, it will work again with the Genesis, and it will work one final time when the Dongfeng Luxury Dong Dragon arrives in 2021.

If the Large Hadron Collider ends the world in October, that doesn't mean the guy standing on a streetcorner in 1972 with a sandwich board stating "THE WORLD IS COMING TO AN END" knew anything you didn't.

The economic conditions have been lining up for an increase in oil prices, but that would only lead to a gradual run-up in accordance with supply and demand. The price per barrel has increased by a factor of more than ten. Has supply been cut by nine-tenths? Has demand increased by a factor of ten? Of course not.

What's happened has been a change in mindset, and that's something which is difficult to predict. At that point, you're in the realm of baseball-card pricing, where commodities trade based on a reflection of perceived value.

If the speculative bottom drops out of oil prices tomorrow morning, it will be years before the Honda Civic troubles the #1 seller spot in this country again.

How many of us are "hedged" in our jobs against a sudden perceptual shift like that? What if everybody wakes up tomorrow scared to death of your product? If somebody can successfully and repeatedly compromise the Jalopnik site to deliver malware and rootkits, the traffic to this site will drop to zero in a matter of days. Does this mean that Ray should work on his "Blue Steel" just in case he has to return to modeling?

Look at it this way. Everybody knows somebody who spends all their time thinking about surviving a nuclear holocaust, and you think that guy's nuts... until the day a nuclear holocaust arrives, and all of his ignorant, hidebound, reality-ignoring activity makes him eminently fitted to survive.

$4/gallon was a nuclear holocaust, and nobody could have predicted it. It isn't supported by supply and demand, it isn't supported by realistic market conditions. It's artificial.

If an asteroid had hit the Midwest, making all the roads for thousands of miles around heavily cracked and impassable by anything smaller than an Expedition, would you people be on here crucifying Honda for "ignoring the upcoming asteroid crisis"? There was nothing inevitable about $4 gasoline in 2008.

As for the dope game, we're actually seeing a move to black tar across the board. Raw material's cheaper by far, it can be sourced within the NAFTA zone, which makes inbound transport oh, I don't know, a ZILLION TIMES EASIER, and it allows the price of the street hit to drop to the $15-20 zone. We've been waiting for a heroin-based product to compete directly with crack cocaine and black tar is definitely it. And most of the savings from the distribution end are transport-based. Believe it or not, higher transport costs even hit your friendly neighborhood dealer. If you can take plane tickets out of the equation and put it in a car to bring it out of Tepic, so much the better.

Naturally, I'm completely kidding about dealing dope. I have two Phaetons, three Porsches, and a race car team because I sit around and think positive thoughts, and that pays pretty well. :)

We'll all suffer for this eventually. Even my illicit heroin business will suffer, as users on the street turn to crystal meth.

Can you see mah gold chainz?

:)

I don't know what to say here. Does anybody really think the Corvette is "crude" any more? There's as much engineering in that car as there is in the GT-R, but instead of adding features, they removed weight and focused on perfecting the chassis, and that's why it weighs 3150lbs.

As for the Viper... it beats the living piss out of the GT-R. Think of it as a GT-R, only faster (particularly as an ACR) and, also, designed for men who aren't utter pansy-ass emokids.

[www.speedsportlife.com]

and I've set a pretty decent time at the Ring personally, albeit in a slower car.

That being said, I have some real concerns with the way Jalops (and others) just eat up these Ring times. The problem is that, until recently, the bulk of the times were set either by von Saurma or by Rohrl, both of them presumably driving at some relatively consistent percentage of each vehicle's capabilities, and with a fair amount of openness to the proceedings. If von Saurma put a number up, you could be pretty sure that the car was production-spec; if Rohrl put one up, you could be absolutely sure, because Porsche's pride didn't permit them to put ringers on the Ring.

Nissan came up with the idea of using a 'Ring time to promote the R33 (or R32, can't remember) GT-R, and since then we've had a remarkably ethics-and-sense-free scramble to post the best time no matter what.

Vehicle prep really matters. The difference in time between, say, a race-prepped Ford Focus with a stock motor and a regular street Focus is about ten seconds on a two-minute track; what do you think a little bit of surreptitious weight reduction and judicious tire choice does on an eight-minute track? How about a quick pulley swap or wastegate adjustment?

I agree with the poster who said that somebody's gonna get killed. Back when Lauda burned his ear off, F1 cars were running in the low sevens out there. How much longer are manufacturers going to run cars without cages or proper belts at 190mph for marketing purposes?

1) The shoes are Allen-Edmonds McClains:

[www.amazon.com]

2) "Piloti's" implies possession, not plurality.

Still, thanks for the read :)

Yes, the Ferrari was fastest... but should a car which is no faster than an R8, and slower than a Viper SRT-10, "beat" a car which comes close for $41,000? That's why we publish both the lap times and our subjective opinions - so you're also free to make the choice.

Last but not least... of course it's a silly comparison. It was something we were able to cook up on short notice, and we are one of VERY FEW sources to bring you accurate timing data on a street Ferrari. Ever seen a Ferrari Traqmate lap anywhere else? :)

You guys want to know who should host this show? Patrick Dempsey. I had the pleasure of chatting briefly with him at the Grand-Am race last week. He's just about capable of driving his Rolex GT car, which is to say he's miles ahead of Tanner Foust et al, he has a built-in female fanbase (what woman would tune in to watch any of the current three?) and, oh yeah, he's not a complete raging douchebag.

Of course, PD's wayyyyy too smart to touch thistrain wreck.

This is bad news for the dealers - while they want to move their '08 inventory, a significant percentage of truck buyers always want the newest truck and are willing to pay to get it. When I was selling Fords in '96, we sold the new F-150 at sticker for almost a year, and that same process was repeated when the current F-150 debuted.

As for the performance of the Boxster... if you don't think it's fast enough, try driving it faster. Every time I do that with my Boxster, it works fine.

Porsche's Ring times are internally consistent, but they aren't necessarily a match for times recorded by other drivers under other conditions.

Until the day we have AIM transponders in these cars, they roll 'em through a tech shed for SCCA-style stock inspections, and the times are published live, there will not be any such thing as an "official" Ring time. There's only hype, marketing, and cheater runs tossed into the gaping maw of an impressionable group of X-Files-style "i want to believe" bloggers.

P.S. I ran a 9:15 BTG in an automatic-tranny SLK200, I have the video to prove it, and I have proof that the car was stock - the Avis rental papers ;)

What's your reasoning behind calling the launch of the 2009 Ram and F-150 "gas-price-induced train wrecks"? Sure, the '08 inventory isn't making quite as much room for the new trucks as had been hoped, but given that neither manufacturer appears to have delayed their new truck overmuch as a result, I don't see the issue. Surely you aren't arguing that either truck is a failure prior to launch?

Porsche is pronounced "Por-sha".

GT-R will continue to be pronounced "Sen-tra" by everybody outside the "World of Warcraft" community.

* actually, it was fourth place, but none of you have ever attended a stock car race yourselves, so if I didn't say anything, you wouldn't know!

Goodbye Kylie. We'll never really get you out of our heads.

Beemer == motorcycle
Bimmer == car

Thank you.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to graft the back half of a Ranchero onto a '78 Malibu, to create the El Caminochero.

INSTANT RANCHEROCHERO!

I have a 1984 no-sunroof 944; it's far from cheap to run but it's just as satisfying at my other Porsches.

A proper AI or AIX Mustang has half again as much power as a GT-R, handles better because it weighs a thousand pounds less and has proper corner-balancing, puts more rubber on the track, and so on, and so forth.

Real race cars can be had for a variety of budgets. A $20,000 old C Sports Racer is much, much faster than a GT-R, or any other road car for that matter.

Last but not least, NASCAR *is* real racing on an actual race course. I have a few hundred "real" race laps under my belt and trust me, I'd sweat blood to run in Craftsman Truck, to say nothing of Cup. So would every other road racer in this country - ask Ron Fellows.

Really, I just wanted to piss off the guys who have already made these jokes above, only to see them repeated further down the page!

Driving this car to a Porsche Club event would be like putting those stupid-ass metal "horns" under your skin, getting all tatted up, and visiting a gathering of decent people. And just as some folks don't feel like they're sticking it to the Man enough until they have some f-tarded Viking scene inked down both their arms complete with the names of their common-law wife and children, there's somebody out there who isn't satisfied with his crap-looking super-G35 until it's covered with a ten-thousand-dollar imitation of a rattlecan paint job.

While I would be happy to see that person fall into a woodchipper, as an American I support his right to make this ugly car uglier. It's a free world, and all that.

This is the same Michael Dell who was using prison labor to "recycle" systems?

As incompetent as the Big Three have occasionally been, the idea of them listening to this piece of shit makes me want to scream. The only proper response to any statement by Michael Dell is to take a whip and flay the very skin from his bones.

Oh yeah - around the time of the iMac's introduction, he wrote that "the best thing to do with Apple would be to break it up, sell the pieces, and reimburse the shareholders." Great idea, Mike!

The C5 is virtually dimensionally identical to, and considered to be a downmarket alternative to, the Passat wagon. It has nothing to do with the Flex. Citroen's Flex competitor is the C8.

We get it already. You don't like the fact that the Flex can be optioned up to $42,000. Guess what? You ain't gotta do it. When you go into the dealership to buy your $29,000 Flex, at no point will you be kidnapped and waterboarded into buying the Limited Super Duty Eddie Bauer model.

There's nothing wrong with having the freedom to piss away $42,000 on a Flex. In this country, you have that right. You're allowed to piss away $60K on a Chevy Silverado with a cap on it (the Slade), and you're allowed to spend $45K on a Camry with a vagina-esque center dash stack and a Lexus emblem glued to the hood. That's freedom for yo ass.