B/F: The Drive Thru #61

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Executive Producer Tania: [00:00:00] Welcome to Break Fixes, drive-through News, your monthly recap for everything fast, fascinating, and usually four wheeled. We’re serving up a fresh batch of automotive headlines, motorsports madness, and car adjacent curiosities, all with zero wait time and maximum flavor from Formula One. Drama to concept car debuts with garage built legends to the quirkiest stories rolling out of the state of Florida.

We’ve got your fix. So grab your coffee, buckle up, and let’s cruise through the latest in the world of wheels with a side of entertainment and just a dash of tire smoke.

Crew Chief Brad: Welcome to drive through episode number 61. What do we have guys? What do we wanna talk about this time?

Crew Chief Eric: I mean, Halloween is right around the corner.

Crew Chief Brad: Oh yeah. Are you gonna dress up as the scariest thing ever? A Nissan Ultima?

Crew Chief Eric: I don’t know if I would do that. If I acted my age. That’d be pretty scary. That’s what my daughters keep telling me all the time.

Crew Chief Brad: They keep telling you to act your age.

Executive Producer Tania: 85.

Crew Chief Brad: Yes, exactly. It’s true, true, true.

Executive Producer Tania: Do they have those Spirit Halloween costume packs?

That’s for Nissan Ultima [00:01:00] drivers?

Crew Chief Brad: I think it comes with a restraining order.

Executive Producer Tania: That was

Crew Chief Eric: a thing a couple of years ago, right? You could dress up as Porsche Club members and then they’d be, they had BMW Club members.

Crew Chief Brad: You could always dress up as Corvette owners too. You got the new balance. The White Sox, the Jorts.

Crew Chief Eric: Halloween is right around the corner. Have you picked your costume? Are you gonna resurrect one of your previous costumes? Do you still have the unicorn onesie?

Crew Chief Brad: I do, but I upgraded.

Crew Chief Eric: Aren’t you cookie that stuff? She’s

Crew Chief Brad: for cookie. Yeah. I’m pulling to see Tanya’s Tomb Raider again. ’cause I thought that was pretty snappy.

You

Crew Chief Eric: know, it’s funny you bring that up because October seems to be the month where stuff has just broken or gone wrong. We have some issues on the clubhouse side of our website where we have to rebuild the vault because it’s gotten a little too big. And I was going through some photos and I just happened to hit upon our road Atlanta trip where we dressed up for Halloween for that Chin Track day.

It’s amazing. You look back at some of the stuff we did pre COVID, it’s really crazy. The antics that we got up to just almost week after week, not just month [00:02:00] after month. It was absolutely bonkers.

Executive Producer Tania: We tried to be pre COVID recently, and then the, the universe worked against us. I, I’m getting to that. You know, I, I wrote an article about it too.

I read it. There’s some typos. Of course there are.

Crew Chief Brad: It’s okay. Eric and Tanya, given the recent news that just came out that, you know, the average new car price has crept up to $50,000. Let’s talk about, do you want to spend $50,000 on a brand new car or nickel and dimming to keep your old car alive? Eric, what’s going on in your world? What would you do

Crew Chief Eric: When it rains, it pours, right?

So it’s like. Brad, your car, why is it what your stuff’s always super easy where you show up with a car that hasn’t run in six years. I throw a fuel pump in it and it runs no problem, no issues, no check engine lights, no nothing.

Crew Chief Brad: Wait. There’s no check engine lights

Crew Chief Eric: that I can tell at the moment.

Crew Chief Brad: It’s fantastic

breaking news. Pumpkin spice lives.

Crew Chief Eric: It does. That is, it was a miracle. We have video [00:03:00] proof that it lives.

Crew Chief Brad: Video proof. It’ll be on the website. No, it won’t.

Crew Chief Eric: I’m amazed. It runs on that turpentine That’s in the tank too. That tank is full, by the way,

Crew Chief Brad: the gas tank is full.

Crew Chief Eric: Yes.

Crew Chief Brad: Uh, so we need to drain it

Crew Chief Eric: nearly full, right?

Yeah, just burn it off. Just run it for a while. It’ll be fine. We’ll do the Ferris Bueller thing and put it up on stands in reverse and it’ll be perfect.

Crew Chief Brad: Yeah, we gotta run them clock back.

Crew Chief Eric: Maybe it’s like a communicative disease. You know, you bring another Volkswagen into the equation. So your car gave my car COVID, I think is what it did.

Another 14 day quarantine. Uh, now I’m plagued with all these issues. I had a radiator that started leaking. I had all this other stuff and then it just bad to worse throughout the entire weekend, just absolutely drove me nuts.

Crew Chief Brad: Did you ever get it figured out

Crew Chief Eric: where I stand at the moment? I got the Jeep situation figured out, which was also part of this mess.

Crew Chief Brad: The Jeep and the Volkswagen are different species. How did they contract the same diseases?

Crew Chief Eric: Avian, flu, all the birds can get it right. That’s what it is. [00:04:00] There’s so many moving parts to this equation. The Volkswagen I knew had a radiator problem, and I thought it was one of the fixtures on the radiator.

Either the sensor for the fans or the spigot at the bottom or whatever. Something was leaking because it’s a 20-year-old radiator, whatever. Turns out the radiator end caps were leaking on the driver’s side, and it literally dumped all its fluid in my driveway very slowly. So I ordered a new one. I was like, ah, it’s not a big deal.

Rip the front end of the car apart, change the radiator out, you know, da da da. Half a day’s work. Okay, fine. So while I’m doing all that, I run out of antifreeze. When I go to go refill it, it’s like I run into town. It’s like, oh. And then I get in the Jeep and the freaking service engine lights come on, oil change due, blah.

I was like, all right, well I’m headed to AutoZone anyway. I might as well get oil while I’m at it. You know, come back engine’s hot, drain the oil, do the fuel filters. I’m working on two cars simultaneously, right? There were a couple other things I needed to do to the Volkswagen a BS sensors, which as we know as Volkswagen owners, they [00:05:00] don’t come out unless you have a hammer and chisel.

So I beat all of them out. E even though they all didn’t need to be changed, they only needed to do two of them. I figured I’ll just do all four of them and they’re fresh. ‘

Crew Chief Brad: cause the, the other, the other two would’ve gone bad like a month later,

Crew Chief Eric: thousand percent because that’s just the way it works. Got rid of my a BS light and my brake light.

That would come on randomly because I had two a BS sensors that were bad, so, okay, fine. Took care of that. ’cause I did a system scan and it’s like, oh, you have a bad cam sensor on cam two. I’m like, okay, cool. I’ll order those too. They’re actually super easy to change. You know, you can actually get to them.

There’s not a ton of stuff in the way. This is where things started to get slightly pear shaped. So I put two new cam sensors in again, figuring, well if one’s gonna go, might as well do the other one too. And then the car did nothing but throw check engine lights constantly. Cam one was bad, cam one was bad, cam one was bad.

I’m like, it’s a brand new sensor. So unless I misordered them and they’re not the same, I ended up putting the [00:06:00] factory Bosch one back in that’s literally 20 years old and it runs fine. And so I’m like, okay, cool. I drove it around, ran grape, blah, blah, blah. So the next day, Tanya and I, we get a call from Porsche Al, we go over to his house ’cause he’s having a problem with his V.

It was like VW weekend. Everybody’s having an issue. Right? Get over to Porsche, Al’s house. He’s got this old Jetta. He’s complaining that fifth gear disappeared. Well, turns out the bushings inside the car, another known fail point on all Mark. Four Volkswagens. He never changed the bushings. He apparently ordered them and then lost them, and he’s gonna order them again.

It’s a whole kerfuffle. I told him, I said, there’s no amount adjusting on this planet that I can do to this shift. Linkage fifth is never gonna be found. ’cause there’s literally not enough material to get the cables over there. Like you need to replace all that.

Crew Chief Brad: Could you find

Crew Chief Eric: parts from Home Depot? I could have, but it wasn’t worth it.

There’s a kit from Diesel Geek in Texas for 50 bucks. Takes care of the problem for the rest of your life. Not Kerm and TDI? No, no, no, no. Diesel geek. Got it. Driving back with the Jeep, we [00:07:00] go to go merge on the highway. I made it, I don’t know, 25 yards. Down the off ramp and we heard this pop whoosh sound come from somewhere in the engine compartment.

And I’m like, man, we just totally lost all boost. And then big red lights on the center dash and it’s like service throttle control module. And I’m like, oh no. I went through this once before when the Jeep was newer and the, it was covered under warranty. It’s like a $4,000 replacement to do this thing.

’cause it’s a module on the transmission, it connects to the throttle position sensor and you can do all this stuff and it, it’s a nightmare. It was in, it was in the shop for like a week, right? For them to do this. And I’m like, I am not looking forward to this one bit. Luckily the Jeep has torques. It has a lot of torques.

SOUND FX: Yeah,

Crew Chief Eric: mind you, Sunday morning people are going to church, going to brunch, wherever they’re going. We’ve managed to keep up with traffic with no boost. I’m like fooling the transmission. I’m playing with the throttle to get it to shift and get it to downshift and like [00:08:00] all this kinda stuff. It locks out the manual controls.

So you can’t use the flappy paddles, you can’t put it in sport mode and God forbid you turn it off. So it’s like, let’s just get home. We limp all the way home and then I just park it. And we were supposed to go to a trunk or treat at the Carlisle Fairgrounds where they hold, you know, Corvettes of Carlisle and the GM Nationals and the Ford Nationals and all these big shows.

And we even did a swap meet there many, many years ago. Again, going through all these pictures in the fall. Do you remember when we did the Euro show and sold off all that stuff?

Crew Chief Brad: Yep.

Crew Chief Eric: So same place, right? Pack up the fam, we’re gonna go to the trunk or treat. I decided to take the Volkswagen because it’s ready to go.

Everything’s fixed. You know, the doctor cleared it for service. I make it, I don’t know, five, six miles from the house, not even. And we’re in a line of cars going up north towards Pennsylvania and suddenly it just starts bucking and lurching. And the EPC light on the dashboard is flashing, which is the equivalent to the service throttle control module that was on the Jeep.

[00:09:00] And I’m like, it’s been two hours. Did the cars talk to each other? Are they in cahoots? What the hell’s going on here?

Crew Chief Brad: Delusion.

Crew Chief Eric: So we’re on the side of the road. I pull off into this like little farm at, I don’t even know what to call it. Like dude shows up with a tractor. He is like, y’all all right, you need anything?

And I’m like, if you don’t have an OBD scanner, no. Uh, you know I can’t do anything for you. You wanna keep one in the car? I should. At this point I should. I’ve got like 12 different kinds too, which is the ironic part, realizing that it was the EPC and thinking back to last year, I had an issue where I was driving to meet up with Mountain Mandan and the car started doing some weird stuff on the highway, like bucking and lurching and whatever, but I was able to reset it by, you know, doing the old key trick.

You’re like 60 miles an hour, kill the ignition, pop the clutch, turn it back on, and just keep going. Right? And it, it cleared itself out and showed itself every now and again, just a weird hesitation when you’re going down the highway. Everything I read online, it’s like throttle body, throttle position sensor.

It’s all together, right? It’s all [00:10:00] electronic. It’s all also, again, 20 plus years old. So I’m like, oh man. It finally kicked the bucket. I popped the hood. I get out. I pulled both connectors from the cam sensors just in case something was weird with those because they were giving me issues before. And I also popped the connector to the throttle body and we let it sit for a minute.

Plugged everything back in. Bra fires up and we’re like, cool. We’re gonna get the heck outta here. Make it 50 yards. Buck, buck, buck. Car’s running like crap. Pull into the air park and then my wife has to come, bring me the scanner and you know, kind of help bail me out and all those kind of things. So to make a long story short, we kept doing this every couple miles and then the car would fail and I was trying to get it home in limp mode.

The Volkswagen though, it has torque two, the computer will not let it go above 20 mile an hour. It’s pathetic, right? At least the Jeep, I mean, we could get it up to 70. As long as you played with the transmission and you kept it within the power band where it would make torque, it was fine. You could keep up with traffic.

The Volkswagen was impossible. Finally, it just died right in [00:11:00] front of a restaurant. So we pulled in. We found an open parking spot, and then this other VW owner comes running over. He’s got an eos, you know, just starts helping us push the car. So we backed it into a spot. I called aaa, they towed me home.

Crew Chief Brad: What did you get to eat at the restaurant while you were waiting for aaa?

Crew Chief Eric: Nothing. Nothing.

Crew Chief Brad: Well, that sounds like a bad time then. You should have said, went inside and sat and ate. What was it? At least a good restaurant like what was it? Was it Denny’s? No, it was a diner. Perfect. You should have went in and got some pie.

I feel like you did yourself a disservice.

Crew Chief Eric: You’re not wrong about that. If AAA had done what they normally do, which is we’ll be there in 20 minutes and three hours later they show up instead. This guy, he was there, had us hooked up and delivered in less than an hour. Domino’s isn’t even that fast, right?

It’s like, boom, done. There was no time to get pie because we were in and out.

Crew Chief Brad: There’s always time for pie.

Crew Chief Eric: I’m tired, I’m defeated, I’m deflated. Both cars are down. I’m just like, you gotta be kidding me. To make matters worse than we decided to watch the Formula One race, which we’ll get [00:12:00] to. So jump ahead to Monday.

The Jeep’s fixed with a bunch of MacGyvering, a bunch of mistakes. I was able to come up with a solution and where the problem came from, I was right. What I heard was not incorrect. It was a boost leak, like something in the system blew apart. It’s not where I expected it to blow apart. And so, you know, the ECU says under boost, and I’m like, okay, it’s all turbo related.

Either I blew up the turbo or it’s something in the intercooler system broke. Not a problem. What was going on is it was separating mind you. After almost five years of being on the car, the silicone adapter for my inner cooler kit kept coming off the throttle body, and so it was just venting to atmosphere.

So the, the motor was literally pulling no air filter, no nothing. It was just pulling whatever air it could from under the hood.

Crew Chief Brad: Can you reenact that motion again for our viewers? What was that motion?

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah, yeah.

Crew Chief Brad: For those that don’t have that can’t see. It’s the shake weight motion.[00:13:00]

Crew Chief Eric: So anyway. Some MacGyvering, some trial and error, some test driving and whatnot. What I ended up doing was I went back to the factory part, cut it and made a hybrid solution. I basically forced their silicone to work with the metal and I made a piece that actually holds on, like you can put full Brad strength on it.

It’s not coming off of the throttle body now, which is nice. When I drove it, it feels peppier because now there’s not boost leak at the throttle body.

Crew Chief Brad: I feel like you did yourself a disservice. Again, not fixing it with Volkswagen parts ’cause that’s what we tend to do.

Crew Chief Eric: Well, I used the Volkswagen Band clamp because I needed something bigger.

Crew Chief Brad: That counts. Okay. Counts. That counts.

Crew Chief Eric: All right. That that works. You know, I’m waiting on a throttle body for the Volkswagen, but that’ll get fixed soon enough, so that should be pretty easy. My only fear is that these days, the quality of the parts is what scares me. The 20-year-old part lasted 20 years.

The new parts that are coming from [00:14:00] city of industry, China, if they last 20 minutes, I’ll be happy. You know, and it is sort of like Harbor Freight, you know what I mean? If it lasts 30 days. You’re doing pretty good.

Crew Chief Brad: Yeah, they’re like single use tools.

Executive Producer Tania: I have a similar problem experience, the similar Poltergeist on the beetle right now that I can’t get it to not have a check engine light or not have a failed readiness state.

And one of my codes was CAM position sensor. So I changed the cam position sensor. Still have the code, find out that maybe it’s the crankshaft position sensor change, crankshaft position sensor. Still have the code, wait, put the original 20 some odd year old camshaft position or sensor back on, oh, I don’t have a code anymore regarding.

I got a different code now for something else, but I don’t have that code anymore. But I bought a German part.

Crew Chief Brad: Yeah, I was gonna say Eric, how come you’re buying parts from China? Can you still get a OEM?

Executive Producer Tania: Well you can still buy, so like I could have bought Bosch OEM or genuine VW Audi [00:15:00] cam shop sensor for like $300, right?

Or then you look at the made in Germany, blah, blah, blah, one for 30.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah. How do you know what the difference is and how do you know that that other company didn’t make it for Bosch and they put, you know, I don’t know. So to your point, the throttle bodies for the 24 valve VR sixes, they are no longer available.

Nobody has them unless you buy them Chinese made or whatever it is, like finding a genuine Bosch or a genuine Volkswagen. One’s gonna come from a third party reseller from basically a salvage yard. Or you know, somebody like a, like a strip search or a Ola or one of those companies that just takes those cars apart and they got parts on the shelf.

You know, that kind of thing. New is not always the option. And I mean, I looked everywhere, whether it was ECS or FCP or Euro tuning or Rock Auto or O 34 Motorsport. I mean, you just go down the list of German man, the, even the obscure ones, Blauer, Newgen, and two Bennett, like, does anybody have this part from 20 years ago?

And the answer is no. You just kind of get what you get and you’re not gonna be [00:16:00] upset. Now the question is, do I need to buy another one? To have it on the shelf if and when this one fails. Right. That becomes the bigger problem.

Crew Chief Brad: Yes.

Crew Chief Eric: Or keep an eye out for one on eBay, which is where I also started looking and I have bought some parts and oddly enough parts from Eastern block countries like Latvia and whatnot.

It’s actually been really good quality stuff. I’ve ordered things for the Volkswagens and for the Jeep from that part of the world, and I’ve had zero issues even coming from like record yards and stuff out there where it’s like euro only parts kind of thing. No issues. Now granted, we’re in a new world now with tariffs and shipping and UPS throwing packages away because they don’t know how to charge you for the tariffs and all that kind of stuff.

Unfortunately, I, I’m in a position of if I wanna drive the car, I’m gonna have to get what I can get. And irony of ironies the place, I found parts that have actually been rather decent, I’m gonna use that word. I don’t wanna say they’re good, but they’re decent. So far I haven’t had a failure rate on anything I’ve ordered from Amazon.

Interesting. So I [00:17:00] ordered my throttle body from Amazon.

Crew Chief Brad: On the blue car before I sold it, I ordered an AC compressor from, it wasn’t Amazon, it was Walmart.

Crew Chief Eric: Really?

Crew Chief Brad: You got the AC compressor from Walmart? Yep.

Crew Chief Eric: I would’ve never thought to look there.

Crew Chief Brad: Uh, I didn’t. I did a Google search and Walmart came up and they had had it in stock and that was why I bought it from them.

It didn’t work, but I bought one from Walmart. It, it may have worked. I never got a chance to test it. Oh. Because I didn’t, I didn’t recharge the system or anything like that. So maybe it worked, maybe it didn’t. Uh, well, in my world, so you all have issues with your cars. Let me talk about the issues I’ve got with my, with my truck

Executive Producer Tania: please.

I hear silence.

Crew Chief Brad: What, what

Executive Producer Tania: issues do you, oh,

Crew Chief Brad: none. Ah.

Executive Producer Tania: Must be

Crew Chief Eric: nice. Must be nice.

Crew Chief Brad: I mean, granted karma, I’m probably gonna go out and it’s not gonna start, and I’m gonna have four flat tires and whatever. No, you should have bought a Toyota. That’s, that’s all I’m gonna say.

Executive Producer Tania: How many miles does your truck have on it these days?

Uh,

Crew Chief Brad: [00:18:00] 86,000.

Crew Chief Eric: That’s a baby. It’s just a baby.

Crew Chief Brad: It’s just a baby, but it’s eight years old. And the only issues I’ve had outside of normal maintenance is the first week I had it. There was a transmission sensor that was faulty from the factory. Yeah, they replaced it like immediately and then I had a battery die prematurely.

I put a new battery in and I haven’t had to do anything to it since regarding repairs,

Crew Chief Eric: so I have to kind of separate the thoughts. Right. The Volkswagen is old. It’s 23 years old this year. Yeah, yeah, of course. And stuff’s gonna go bad, right? Yes. It just is. Especially old electronics things with servos and gears and stuff gets gummed up.

You know, I was reading online, there’s guys that will take throttle bodies and those electronic throttle position sensors, you can send ’em off and have ’em rebuilt. There’s companies that do that might be worth it. Yeah, exactly. There’s companies that do that with dashboards and stuff from like the old days.

That I’m not, I’m not too worried about because I kind of feel like I got my money’s worth outta my throttle body, right? It is what it is. I am [00:19:00] curious to open it, see what’s wrong with it. Maybe it’s shear a tooth or or something like that. But the Jeep, as you know, 156,000 miles now 11 years old, it’s been knock on wood, reliable.

I’ve really had no issues with it. So my thing is the issue I had, which suddenly reared its ugly head after five years of having this intercooler kit on the car, it’s

Executive Producer Tania: old silicone. The silicone goes bad. I had the same problem with the factory charge hose or whatever the hose is called, into the throttle body on the TDI.

Something happens to the rubber and it just didn’t matter how tight you squeeze the band clamp on. It would pop off. It would pop off, and it would pop off, and it ended up buying a new one. And you could actually see when you put them side by side, it had like shrank slightly. So like with age and time, it just, and the same thing would happen.

You were driving down the road and it would go p and then suddenly you couldn’t get out of your own way. And I, there’s so many times like, let me pull over and I’m on the highway, pull over on the side of the road, tighten it back up, and then you’d go 10 minutes down the road and p and then [00:20:00] you weren’t accelerating anymore.

So there’s something with. The rubber and the silicone that Yeah, it ages out.

Crew Chief Eric: And I’m not blaming one side or the other with the Jeep. If you look at how that throttle body is designed, it’s dumb. Oh yeah. The way it’s made is specific to the connector that they developed. Yeah. Which is like nothing else had they made it, you know, like a standard rib slip a hose over in a turbo clamp, you could put anything you wanted on there, but it’s specifically designed for that piece.

Executive Producer Tania: But they all do it. ’cause even the Volkswagen was specifically designed with the, what do you call it? Not a pin, but it’s got the collar, yeah. Bracket that slips around it. And even that, like there’s play in it. So Kma sells kits or whatever, where basically they create a collar on it to clamp it and like force it that it, it can’t

SOUND FX: wear it over time where it wears

Executive Producer Tania: out their proprietary BS thing.

Keeps it all nice and tight so you’re not losing boost. But I don’t know why they all do that. Like what’s the reason? Proprietary, it’s like overcomplicating something.

Crew Chief Eric: [00:21:00] Exactly. And in my case people are probably going Well why did you even change those pipes to begin with? Well first of all, the inner cooler kit is metal and it doesn’t expand or contract, which is a problem with the factory one because they would swell and then the pipes would burst because they were thin.

The one in particular at the top, at the throttle body, the way they designed it, it sits up next to the fan housing and by engine vibration you could, I showed Tanya a picture of it. It starts to wear into the pipe. So it’s gonna end up eventually cutting it. Now the section that I salvaged to make my adapter piece is nowhere near that.

It’s up at the throttle body, so I only needed a couple of inches and I discarded the rest of it. Horror design or otherwise, whatever. I mean, it’s gone this long without an issue and hopefully it goes another 10, 20 years without an issue. Which circles back to your original point, Brad. I still think it’s cheaper to keep her.

Crew Chief Brad: Now I’ve got a question for you, you and me to an extent, and certainly Tanya are. More mechanically inclined than your average auto buyer.

Executive Producer Tania: [00:22:00] Well, and that’s the thing,

Crew Chief Brad: given the repairs that you just had to do and not knowing about Amazon Auto, right, and ECS or Euro tuning or whatever, your car breaks, AAA tos you to a shop In your estimation.

I know you don’t know for certain. Let’s start with the Volkswagen. How much would it have cost, labor and parts. To fix the Volkswagen at any reasonably priced independent shop?

Executive Producer Tania: $800. $800 to tell me they couldn’t find the parts for it. Let’s start there. Yeah. There’s that. Assuming the part was available.

Crew Chief Brad: Yeah, yeah,

Executive Producer Tania: yeah.

Crew Chief Brad: Assuming they got the part, they got it at whatever their cost is and they charge you 10% markup.

Executive Producer Tania: If they bought an OEM part, easily 300 bucks Probably for the part, yeah. Three, 400.

Crew Chief Brad: There are some shops that exclusively deal in OEM parts, right? They won buy aftermarket, so

Crew Chief Eric: No, no, no. A hundred percent.

Crew Chief Brad: What would you say it would cost you and then we’ll, we’ll turn to the Jeep.

Crew Chief Eric: The Jeep, because [00:23:00] the piping had been changed. If you took it to a shop. Like a regular shop, not like an auto fab or a machine shop or you know, any fabricator or whatever.

Crew Chief Brad: I would’ve told you to put the factory parts back on it.

Yeah,

Crew Chief Eric: exactly. And then you’re gonna buy them new. And at that point I’m like, well, I have ’em in a box, I’ll just put ’em back on myself. It is not an easy job because you got, again, you gotta take the front end to part to get to all that stuff.

Crew Chief Brad: Yeah. But Susie May with her, her own Jeep that. Takes it to the dealership for service and stuff.

She decides to go to an independent place, you know, to get it fixed.

Executive Producer Tania: We probably, for that issue that he had, you’re probably talking 200 bucks for the upper pipe and then the labor, how was it made stock? Because like that same elbow pipe, well, it’s not an elbow on the Jeep, but the elbow pipe and the Volkswagen, I think was like $75 or something.

It’s really

Crew Chief Eric: big. It’s like two and a half feet long.

Executive Producer Tania: Okay. So maybe one 50. And then even though it’s five minutes to change an hour of labor, so 300. Three 50.

Crew Chief Brad: Most shops charge what? A hundred? A [00:24:00] hundred? 125. Closer to one 50. Yeah. Okay. So, so one 50 labor. Let, let’s be on the, the, the high side, be a little more conservative.

So one 50 labor, you know, an hour to do it. And then an hour, 150, $200 in parts. So, okay, so three 50 like Tanya was saying, and then Tanya with your issue, and then the troubleshooting. ’cause you had to do some troubleshooting too, even when you got the parts.

Executive Producer Tania: Oh my God. With my issues and what they’re probably gonna end up being.

Well, if they were gonna buy me OEM parts, I’d have to go back and look. But I think it was a couple hundred dollars for a crankshaft position sensor and even that camshaft position sensor. So since the codes were confusing to me ’cause it threw different codes and probably there’s nothing actually wrong with the CAM and it’s actually is the crank one.

If they did change both, you’re already banging on $400 or $500 just in parts. Right. It’s not hard to change. ’cause the cam is very easy. You gotta charge you minimum of an an hour. Yeah. The crankshafts a little more tricky to get to easily another hour there. So you’re knocking on, what do we add up to [00:25:00] four or five?

You’re like 600 bucks maybe. And don’t forget markup on parts

Crew Chief Eric: and then all the shop fees because the environmental, this and the Yeah, we

Crew Chief Brad: used the fingers worth of grease. The previous part disposal fee to Right. All

Crew Chief Eric: the BS that is just cash in their pocket. I mean, I get it. They gotta pay the bills and they gotta keep the lights on.

Executive Producer Tania: So to the original question. If these parts go another 20 years, that’s $600 divided out. Over 20 cost of ownership there is still

Crew Chief Brad: low. To pull that thread a little further, you’ve got a car that you own outright. It’s completely paid off. So you’re not putting seven, eight, $900 a month into a car payment.

You’re putting that into a savings account to absorb issues like this. Right. So to Eric’s point, you know, as we come full circle, I’m gonna say something that they say about marriages and stuff, it’s just a joke, but it’s, it’s cheaper to keep her, it’s cheaper to keep your old car on the road. Yeah.

Running always a hundred percent. Unless you’re driving something that just [00:26:00] like is super niche, like a, an old Maserati or something that just

Crew Chief Eric: by turbo is immediately a money fit. Exactly. You

Crew Chief Brad: just run it off a cliff. You put the track insurance on it. Then you take it to the track and you purposefully run it into the wall and total it so you get your money back.

It

Crew Chief Eric: declared value

Crew Chief Brad: anyway, the point is it’s still cheaper to keep your old car on the road than it is to go buy, especially if your car’s only like 10 years old. Yeah. It’s already got the updated safety stuff that the old, old cars don’t have. So you’re, it’s still safer and cheaper.

Crew Chief Eric: There’s a lot of points here that you guys have made.

Tanya’s talking about amortizing, the total cost of ownership and all that kind of stuff. And I think Brad, you hit on something without saying something, which was, there’s also hidden costs when you go buy a new car because the insurance on your old car is probably cheaper than the insurance on your new car.

You know, things like that. And

Crew Chief Brad: just because you buy a new car, just like if you buy a new construction house, for example, doesn’t mean it’s not gonna have its own problems and it’s program. Right. Right. And so now on top of that, you’ve got your $900 car payment [00:27:00] plus. The service cost and the maintenance and stuff like that.

Executive Producer Tania: Let’s talk about something there, because this is something we talked about in the last, I don’t know if it was the last episode or one of the last episodes. The question was, in 20 years, what will my kids be driving kind of thing. What car am I holding onto given the maybe possible electronics gremlins We’re seeing in cars we already own 20, 25 years old, that we could arguably say maybe build quality was better 25 years ago.

Where do we think a car with 10,000 times more electronics? In them. Do we really think in 20 years, how do you fix them at that point? When all of the gremlins start going bad,

Crew Chief Brad: I think my kids and Eric’s kids are probably gonna end up driving Mark four Volkswagens. We just need to resurrect them all now and save them and just park them somewhere and then fix them.

Crew Chief Eric: But I think Tanya’s steering this conversation in, in a really interesting direction because the cars of today that I deem in a similar category to the [00:28:00] cars of yesteryear, of our yesteryear. I’m not talking about Grand Pappy’s Packard and you know, the 1957 Chevy Bel Air, and yeah, those things, you could fix ’em with the screwdriver and a dull knife,

Crew Chief Brad: the hammer of the Clarks.

Crew Chief Eric: The cars of today that my kids will be driving 20 years from now. ’cause I did think about this after we talked about that on that last episode, is you have to lean Japanese because the Japanese have brought creature comforts into their vehicles, but they didn’t overcomplicate them the way the Germans did.

Right. I don’t wanna talk about the Italians. I don’t wanna talk about the rest of whatever. The Americans are still sort of experimenting, like they’re trying to be cool and we’re gonna put gadgets and gizmos and it’s all kind of half baked at the end of the day. But the Germans went full space programs, star Wars, everything has its own processor, its own module, its own subdivided, subprocesses.

It’s like Tron inside of every car. Absolutely bonkers. And you need a degree in not being a mechanic, being a computer [00:29:00] scientist to work on a Mercedes or an Audi, or even the lowliest of lowly Volkswagens these days. And so I think the Japanese, when you open the hood of a Mazda, or you look at the Koreans and you open the hood of a Hyundai, like I’ve said, you still look at it and go, Hey, there’s a motor.

You open the hood of A BMW, or you open the hood of an Audi and you’re like, um, where’s the engine? Like everything’s covered. Everything’s shrouded. Everything’s shielded. You gotta spend half a day just to get to a coil pack, let alone to anything major. And that’s where I’m starting to lose my loyalty.

Unfortunately, I’ve been exiting this stage for quite a long time. I’ve said it before, but it’s been a long, very slow and painful road to say goodbye to Volkswagen just because it’s what you know, what you imprinted on, what you grew up with. Now, I’m still a huge fan of the old cars, but the new ones, you look at the price tag of a brand new GTI today, I’ve said it before, you guys scoffed at me.

If you go price out the cars that we want as an enthusiast,

Executive Producer Tania: the auto bond top edition, [00:30:00] it starts at like 41. It’s insane. It’s insane. So by the time you’re out tags, title insurance, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you’re, you’re banging on fifties door on a

Crew Chief Eric: front wheel drive, no manual transmission.

GTI called it. It only gets worse from there. So my point is, if you’re thinking about the car of tomorrow for your kid that you can help them work on, the list is gonna be really short. I still think the Jeeps, even though I gotta talk about a Wrangler experience I had here in a little bit.

Crew Chief Brad: Oh, wranglers are terrible for kids.

Crew Chief Eric: They are, but from a workability perspective, they’re still kind of dirt simple, right? Like any pickup truck is kind of dirt simple from a certain age. And again, I think the Japanese cars are on the simpler side and the cor, some of the Korean cars. But German cars, I would not recommend them for first time drivers.

Crew Chief Brad: It was funny you said Italian. Anybody that buys their kid like a, a Maserati, even like the, the, the Ghibli Ghibli the giblets, anybody buys their kid one of those, or [00:31:00] the, the Alpha Romeos.

Crew Chief Eric: I was thinking the 500. They’re not worried about the maintenance cost. No, not at all.

Crew Chief Brad: True, true, true. Yeah. You shouldn’t be driving.

Crew Chief Eric: No. I mean I think our showcase kind of went everywhere or nowhere at the same time.

Crew Chief Brad: Well, no, I mean it started with a good point with the car prices. Consistently going up given what’s going on in your neck of the woods. With the government shutdown? Yeah. And the reduction in federal workforce. Lots of people looking for jobs.

Lots of people. Penny pinching now yet still like something’s gotta give. ’cause people are losing their jobs. Their incomes are shrinking. But car prices and prices in general for everything are going up. But people are still buying cars. Why? I don’t know. Look at your 2005 Honda Accord that’s sitting in your driveway.

Ask yourself, do I really need a new car or can I just put a new alternator in it and just drive it for another 50 years? ’cause I guarantee you that car you’ll get another 50 years out of it.

Crew Chief Eric: I think that’s just it too. Like you have to ask yourself. I know the bills can be shocking sometimes, especially if you’re not doing the work yourself.

[00:32:00] To Tanya’s point earlier, how long did you go, unless this is like a recurring problem. Did you go before that alternator quit? Yeah, well you went 20 years before it quit, so put another one in it. Cross your fingers. It goes another at least 10. Yeah, and I will say a lot of people did shy away from turning their own wrenches for quite a long time, but I am still amazed by the number of YouTube videos.

Where you can get help and people will walk you through step-by-step how to change even the most complicated things. And I, myself sometimes are like, man, how do I do that again? And I don’t wanna go to the Bentley manual because that drives me crazy. It’s written by, I don’t know who writes those.

They’re insane. They’re not written well and the, and they’re not documented. Well, it’s like 5,000 pages of nonsense. And so I go to YouTube and then five minutes later I’m like, oh yeah, that’s how you do it. That’s right. Turn it this way. And spin on your head and tap your belly three times. And that’s how you do the shift linkage, right?

I mean,

Crew Chief Brad: and to your point, here’s where I gotta give major props. To, at least in the Volkswagen community, and I’m [00:33:00] sure there are others in the, the other manufacturer communities, uh, but I gotta give major props to ECS tuning and FCP Euro, mainly FCP Euro because they have YouTube tutorial videos. Yeah.

For many, many jobs. When I had to do the PCV valve and the intake, uh, manifold gasket on my, my R 32, there was a step-by-step video how to take it apart, how to do it, all the pitfalls, all the advice and everything the tools needed. FCP Euro put it out and it a job that I never in a million years would’ve attempted myself.

I tried it and I was able to do it, and I did it successfully. It was because of that YouTube video that I was able to do so,

Crew Chief Eric: and you brought up two companies that are at the forefront in the German space, right. They carry parts for BMWs and Audis and Porsches and Mercedes, and you name it. Interestingly enough, because they’re at each other’s throats from a competition perspective, both now have that lifetime warranty.

So it’s like if you buy the part and it [00:34:00] fails, they’ll send you another one. And if you buy the part and it wears out in five years and they send you another one, as long as you send the original one back. I don’t understand how they make any money off of that or how it works. I mean, you could do used motor oil.

We’ve done brake pads for the race cars using their lifetime warranty, stuff like that. It works. I’m not gonna question it. As long as they keep doing it, I’m happy. But that also factors in if you are a German car owner, a German car enthusiast, to do the work yourself, it gets a lot cheaper. When you have companies providing those types of warranties long term, ’cause Tanya, that cam sensor, she’s gonna send it back or they’ll send her another one and she only paid for the one the first time and then that’s it.

Right? She can replace it as many times as she needs to. And that’s actually pretty cool. You don’t see that anymore. I’m sure there’s other companies, but at least in, in the German car space, those two are the ones that are gonna do it.

Crew Chief Brad: If you’ve got a Japanese car, an Italian car, or God forbid, like a Swedish car, which FCP Euro covers Swedish cars too, they, well, they check with whatever aftermarket sites you’re using and see if [00:35:00] they offer something like that because that could definitely help you limit your costs.

The independent shops you go to, you know, as we’re giving advice now, before you go in there and have them do work for you, make sure if you want to supply your own parts, that they allow you to do that. Some shops do not allow you to bring your own parts, right? So I think Tanya ran into that in Texas.

The shop I use here in, in Virginia, the one shop will not let me bring my own parts. That’s the one that only uses OEM parts. Mm-hmm. Uh, I did find another shop that will, if I need to go there, but. It’s cheaper to keep your old car on the road, stop buying new cars. It’s not doing anybody any good except for the car makers and the dealers.

So keep your old cars on the road.

Crew Chief Eric: Well, that’s probably a good segue to talk about the craziness happening in the new car world. So maybe we’ll switch back to our regularly scheduled ranting and raving, shall we? Sure. And since we tend to lean a little bit heavy in the world of Volkswagen, we’ll just continue in pulling that thread.

To your point, Brad, times are tough decisions were made, the people have spoken. We don’t want your stinking EVs. So [00:36:00] facilities that are home to cars like the Q4 E tron and the ID four and the ID seven are seeing reduced output and are in the brink of closure.

SOUND FX: Mm

Crew Chief Eric: mm What a shame. I think it is a reminder that the industry giants need to adjust their strategy and listen to what people actually want.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, Toyota, we weren’t sure what they were doing, but when Toyota does something, people should pay attention. Toyota said, we’re sticking with hybrid. Hybrid is the answer, and everybody else should have been, you know, maybe we shouldn’t follow Tesla down this path.

Crew Chief Brad: I’m just gonna leave that where it is. Toyota’s not without their own issues. I mean the, all the recalls and stuff on the new Tundra with the twin Turbo V six and everything, I mean, they make missteps, but they make good decisions much more often than they do the missteps. And they correct the missteps very quickly.

Crew Chief Eric: I bet if that same truck had not had a twin turbo V [00:37:00] six and had a V eight normally aspirated like has been around for a million years, thanks to Toyota’s debut into nascar, they probably have no issues.

Crew Chief Brad: There’s a reason, there’s all kinds of memes about the people and the owners of the truck with the motor that I have and how they look down on all other Toyota owners.

Uh, yeah.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah, a hundred percent. It might not be the fastest V eight in the world, but it is reliable, that’s for sure.

Crew Chief Brad: It, it scoots. Um, okay. So yeah, they’re shutting down. I guess. Are they gonna re, can they repurpose those facilities to make things that people might actually wanna buy? See, I think it’s all about.

Crew Chief Eric: Reducing their loss leaders. See, it’s all about the bean counters because they gotta pay for Formula One. I just keep bringing this up. Volkswagen has to figure out how to pay for Audi to go to Formula One next year. So anywhere they can cut the fat, they’re gonna cut it.

Crew Chief Brad: So Volkswagen obviously hasn’t heard the saying, how do you make a small fortune in racing?

Start with a large fortune? They haven’t heard that before because now they’ve got a small fortune and they’re going racing

Crew Chief Eric: at Dieselgate too. Right? [00:38:00] So we talked last month about how Volkswagen pulled the plug on the Lambo program in Hypercar, right? For Weck and for imsa. You said yourself, Brad, you were like, I didn’t even know they had a Lambo running in the upper classes in endurance racing.

Fine. Fine. Well, we pulled the plug on that. Well, guess what? Surprise, but maybe not a surprise. ’cause I said it from the beginning and people are like, no, you’ll see. It’s gonna be the greatest comeback since the 9 62 and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. This is Porsche’s new halo car and yada yada. The 9 63. The 9 63, the 9 63 is gonna win.

Lama four years later, still hasn’t won anything. Uh, yes. Okay. It got constructor championship or whatever it is in fine. Great. But it didn’t win Lama. It didn’t win anything of significance. So the factory, again, because I think they need to put their money to Formula One, is pulling the plug on the Porsche 9 63 Hypercar.

It is done as of Petite Lama. That’s it. That was its final race. Do you think [00:39:00] they would’ve continued on with it had it been more successful? I think Porsche’s got this three strike strategy. They either win three times and stop, or they lose three times and stop. I think that’s what it is. But the 9 63 was kind of a loser from the beginning, right?

I mean, you could argue, oh, well balance of powers in the favor, Ferrari, blah, blah, but Ferrari doesn’t compete stateside. They compete at Lama and then they go home, or they do some other big race. They go back to Ello and they ignore everybody for another year. The 9 63 comes over here and competes against Cadillac in Acura, or Aston in the Valkyrie, you know, or whatever it is, and gets its butt handed to it.

It’s just been hit or miss. And granted, yeah, you got the power of Penske and all these other independent privateers and all this kinda stuff. It hasn’t come together for this car. And so I said after the first year, I’ll be amazed if the 9 63 makes it three years. And here we are at the end of the third year going into the fourth season and they said, no, that’s it.

It’s done. Sad, but not sad. I don’t care about that car. [00:40:00] To round up this conversation. I got two Porsche tests while I was at Petite Lama this month. Do tell, I forgot you went to that. I can’t wait to talk about that. Yeah, yeah, we’ll talk about that a little bit too. So I got to ride in a Macan GTS, and as I sat in it and I looked around, I said, is it more than just a Tiguan?

Is it, I don’t wanna offend the owner because let’s face it, with the new unified universal platform, mq, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. There’s a lot of shared DNA between tiguans tox and all this kind of stuff. It’s a very nice car. It’s a very quick car. I don’t like the interior. The center console looks like something out of the Starship Enterprise.

It has literally like 50 buttons because it has no multifunction interface. So things that should be soft buttons are hard buttons on either side of the console, like down the passenger side, up the driver’s side. It’s craziness. So I, I was sort of not a fan. There’s all these design cues, the nine, you know, the clock in the center.

Could you guys have [00:41:00] just done your own thing and not made it all look the same?

Crew Chief Brad: I feel like the little clock in the center, like the ones Infinity used to have, and, and the, the Volkswagen Fayton, I think had one. It’s so bougie, right? It is bougie. Look, I’ve got a Rolex on my dash. It’s not a Rolex, whatever, but it’s a jox.

It’s just like, look, look at what time it is. Can you read that? Only the sophisticated eye can read what that says, Uhhuh. So, okay, so you drove a expensive take one. No,

Crew Chief Eric: no, no. I got, I got the ride in the T one. So it was not the turbo more closely related to its cousin Volkswagen. This was actually the six cylinder God knew who makes the six cylinders probably punched out Audi six cylinder or something like that, right?

So, I mean, it, it sounded good. It, it boogied. You know, all that kind of stuff. It felt very planted on the road, but I was just kind of kept looking at it going, I like it. I do like the way the Macan looks. I like the way it looks over the Cayenne, but I’m like, mm-hmm could I own one of these? You know? And that’s where I kind of went.

Uh, and if it was [00:42:00] just me driving every day, I wouldn’t want a Macon. Right. I would want something else.

Crew Chief Brad: It’s interesting to hear you say that. ’cause when I was up there, you know, I was talking to Tanya and we were talking, I was like, every once in a while I think about getting rid of the truck and on the short list of things that I would potentially replace the truck with.

It’s a Macon or a Cayenne, you know, something stupid like that. Or even a Volvo vaccine 90 or whatever. But then I, I think. The problem with the truck is it’s never, I can’t say never, but it’s more than likely never going to give me a reason to need to sell it. Right. And it’s been dead reliable. It hopefully will continue to be dead reliable if I got rid of it and got something like this.

I’m just asking for trouble.

Crew Chief Eric: No, no, no. You’re absolutely right. You’re absolutely right. So I did get to test drive a Porsche while I was in Atlanta.

Crew Chief Brad: Let me guess you test drove a. Boxter s

Crew Chief Eric: Boxter,

Crew Chief Brad: a 9 44 turbo.

Crew Chief Eric: I think I threw up in the back of my throat a little bit to know how to fend the car that I drove.

This is the [00:43:00] pinnacle of Pinnacles. It wasn’t a GT 3, 9 11 or anything, but it was a 2023 Cayman GT four.

Crew Chief Brad: Oh, those are very nice.

Crew Chief Eric: It is vetted. Nice. This is, the price tag is not very nice, but they’re very nice. No, no,

Crew Chief Brad: no. So did it live up to the hype?

Crew Chief Eric: So it wasn’t an rs, it was just a regular GT four. I didn’t know they had an RS version of the Oh, the GT four Rs now.

Right. You know how Porsche is, right?

Crew Chief Brad: Yeah. They took parts off of it. It made it more expensive.

Crew Chief Eric: Well, they put the ugliest wing you could find from JC Whitney on the rs. It looks horrendous. I don’t like it at all. It just looks like a bolt on you would put on an E 36. It’s just, ugh, horrible. Sort of like that goofy wing that’s on the, the Mustang GTD, like it literally looked like they glued it in the middle of the witch.

It’s awful. Anyway, the Cayman. Is a car that’s always been on my radar. You can kind of almost pick just about any year of Cayman, you know, starting from the very first ones to the very current ones. Looks aside. Uh, well, the.one and the dot two I, I hate that, by [00:44:00] the way. And the, the whole community of, we refer to them as like software packages, service pack one and service back two.

Ugh. It’s just a Cayman like get over it. Right? This one had been massaged a little bit, it had an exhaust, some other stuff, whatever. I don’t, it’s cool. Like I liked it. I did, you know, but again, it’s, you sit there and you ask yourself, am I that kind of poser? Would I drive one every day? I don’t think I could do either.

I’d love to have one.

Crew Chief Brad: My problem with the Cayman is the same problem I have with the boxer is at the end of the day, it’s not a nine 11.

Crew Chief Eric: That’s all the reason I need to like it more. Having driven nine elevens, I don’t like the nine 11. I don’t like the way it handles, I don’t like the way it feels. I don’t like that constant sense of

Crew Chief Brad: it’s gonna kill you

Crew Chief Eric: of nervousness that it has.

Like the Cayman super planted. You could throw it in a turn and it could care less. It’s like driving anything else. Now I prefer mid-engine cars. You know, I’ve driven a a million of them. So for me it’s like, okay, great, but the nine 11, ugh. I don’t know. That’s a whole nother [00:45:00] culture that I’m sort of over it because I, I’d rather be with the air cooled guys, you know?

But even there, I gotta be careful ’cause it’s like I’m old school eighties where I’m like, Alala, yeah, let’s go. Like, I don’t, I’m not a purist.

Crew Chief Brad: This is just me being bougie as someone who’s never technically owned a nine 11 or, or, or a Porsche. Period. I see it from the outside and I’m like, well, oh, I gotta have the top of the line model.

Oh well you gotta have the nine 11 like it, it ain’t cool if it ain’t a nine 11 kind of thing. And that’s just me. I need to get over myself and like say, yes horse makes other cool cars. It doesn’t have to be a nine 11

Crew Chief Eric: came in GT four. I didn’t get to drive it on track. That’d be a lot of fun too. I mean, you could definitely tell it’s very well sorted.

It’s fast, it’s everything you want. It checks all the boxes. I mean, it’s the only box that doesn’t check is anything practical because it’s not, it’s very small inside and it’s like a little jet fighter and you know, it’s a modern nine 14 really what it is at the end of the day. So it’s really cool.

Crew Chief Brad: So let’s play a little game.

How much is a [00:46:00] 2023 Cayman GT? Four. Rough ballpark. I know it’s six figures.

Crew Chief Eric: I know what was paid for the one I drove

Crew Chief Brad: to protect the innocent. Just throw a number out, but not the exact number that that person paid. One 30. One 30, okay. What else would you get for one 30? I’d get a lot of things for one 30. I know what Tanya would get at least.

I think I know what Tanya would get. I think she would get an A-M-G-G-T.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah, for sure. The she

Crew Chief Brad: and judging by her smile, I think I’m right. Can

Executive Producer Tania: I get one for one 30?

Crew Chief Brad: I’m sure you could find a used one for one 30. Eric, you would probably get a newer R eight. That’s my guess.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah. An R eight and I’d have money left over R eight versus Cayman R eight all day long.

And I’m not even talking V 10, I’m talking V eight with the six speed. Right. Like why wouldn’t I do that? It’s, it’s better looking, it’s more interesting. It’s still mid-engine. It handles really awesome, all that kind of stuff. The Porsches are nice, but I feel like I’ve outgrown them actually. Oh, well you’ve matured.

If I was going to [00:47:00] buy a Porsche and if I had 130 grand to spend, I actually really like the 89 speedster, the nine 11 Cabrio le with that hard clamshell thing in the little short windshield. I’ve always loved those. That’s a car. Okay. If I have 130 grand to piss away, that’s what I’m buying in the Porsche catalog.

I’m not buying anything new. I want something vintage. Now I, I’m a hypocrite ’cause I just said, oh nine 11, blah, blah, blah. But that’s always been like my nine 11. Right. That’s the one I I love. I mean, I would take a Cabrio and not the speedster. It’s the same. Same but different, but you know what I mean?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I hear you. Moving on. We have a little bit of St News headlines today. Reed, the former CEO of Stellantis is saying things like, stellantis is gonna break up and all this. I’m like, whatever. We’ll wait and see when, when that happens. And they just get together. Feels like just yesterday

Crew Chief Brad: they merged.

They talked about it for a while and it took them forever to come up with that stupid name. They were together for a [00:48:00] while.

Crew Chief Eric: And if you think about it, the most profitable part of Stellantis stateside is Jeep ’cause do they make anything else anymore? That electric charger is a failure. There’s no more muscle cars.

Chrysler makes the Pacifica sort of, maybe not because they’re built in Canada and all that stuff is still happening. That isn’t in the news anymore. So what’s left? That’s it. Beats me. Right? But I did find this interesting ’cause Brad, you know more about this stuff than I do. Oh, you, you’re crazy. The hurricane inline six.

Mm-hmm. Got dropped into a Viper and it makes 400 more horsepower than the V 10 did

Crew Chief Brad: guessing the original V 10 blue, and that’s why they needed to put a new motor in it.

Crew Chief Eric: I mean, why would you do that to a Viper other than that reason?

Crew Chief Brad: Why would you put a VR six in the back of a nine 11 that we saw at H2O that one time?

I never understood that swap. I think this is just as weird. WI don’t understand. Unless they, one, maybe they just couldn’t [00:49:00] source another V 10 or it was gonna take too long, or were these YouTubers that were just looking for something to do something different. They look

Crew Chief Eric: like drag racers looking to go fast.

Going to go real fast. Oh, so

Crew Chief Brad: it’s a roadkill build. So they’re doing it for views. That’s why. What about the Hellcat Prowler though? Yes. So Casey, now you got my attention. That has been one of the prowler biggest criticisms ever since it came out is the motor was anemic. Why did they do that?

Crew Chief Eric: Should have been a six cylinder.

Crew Chief Brad: Why not a hurricane in the prowler? That makes a ton of sense.

Crew Chief Eric: Actually. As an inline six, it would’ve fit better in the front of the prowler than the

Crew Chief Brad: B eight. Yeah. 850 horsepower prowler. Now you’re cooking with gas.

Crew Chief Eric: But does it make it any less weird when it has more power?

Crew Chief Brad: No. See, my problem with this whole situation, if we talk about the Viper, is like I’m all for like doing engine swaps and stuff like that, but not too iconic cars, right?

Like the Viper has the V 10. It should always have the V 10. The nine 11 should always have Porsche six in the back. Like the people like Renegade Motor Sports that does the LS [00:50:00] swap nine elevens and stuff. The boxers, yeah, I can see it like the Caymans boxers, sure, but not the nine 11 for whatever reason.

In my little mind, I feel like it’s just, it doesn’t work. I wouldn’t do it. Doesn’t make sense to me. Does not compute

Crew Chief Eric: well. All of this STIs talk is really. Just bluff and bluster to cover the fact that I wanna talk about the rental car I had at Road Atlanta,

Crew Chief Brad: the four xe? Yes. Let’s talk about the four xe.

I’ve been very curious about these.

Crew Chief Eric: We had a bunch of other options, so I went with William from the Ferrari marketplace and so I met him in Atlanta. We go down the aisle and they said, pick whatever you want out of this row. And so it’s, you know, the typical fair Nissan Murano,

Crew Chief Brad: cross Cale,

Crew Chief Eric: no cross cabs, you know, Impala, garbage can.

What ended up happening was there were two Jeeps. As we walked down this aisle, the one I wanted to rent was the new Grand Cherokee. ’cause I was thinking, oh, I get a, basically a, a short term test drive to compare it to my Grand Cherokee. But he spotted the Wrangler and said, yeah, yeah, let’s take the [00:51:00] Jeep.

And I’m like, uh, no.

Crew Chief Brad: Two guys in our Jeep. Did you put the top down? No, it was a hard top. Oh. So you can take the hard top off. Did it have the soft center to where you could, the soft center where you could fold it back?

Crew Chief Eric: No, it had everything hard.

Crew Chief Brad: Oh, two guys in a hard Jeep. Got it. Okay. Good. Understood.

Crew Chief Eric: The only saving grace that it had, it was like, Ooh, it’s a hybrid.

Problem is they didn’t plug it in and charge it. Oh, great. Yeah. So it was basically flat. It’s okay, fine. Everything you know, to be true about a wrangler is still true to this day. They’re noisy. They ride rough. The doors don’t close properly. They have a lot of wind noise. They have a lot of road noise.

They meander around the road. They tram line going down the highway. They’re a little bit sketch above 65. It’s like a broken oxcart. I don’t know why people drive them, and the worst part is the hybrid has a four cylinder turbo attached to it. So you got this [00:52:00] big, heavy 5,200 pound Jeep. We looked up the weight of the thing with a four cylinder turbo.

Now it’ll scoot. What reserve electricity has, it uses like an additional buy turbo. One of them’s electric and one of them’s air. The gas mileage was horrendous. 17 miles to the gallon, that’s what it was getting. I’m sure with the hybrid working, maybe 30. But if it’s anything like my wife Pacifica, you get 30 miles or 40 miles out of the battery and then is depleted and you’re back to making 17 miles to the gallon again.

So what good is that? You can’t put anything in it. You definitely can’t haul any mulch with it. It’s got a ton of ground clearance. I’m sure it’s great off road. The interior is pretty spartan for what it is. It’s not bad, but it’s not luxurious. It’s comparing a grand and a wrangler’s like apples and chainsaws.

I mean, they have nothing to do with one another. All in all, it was an epic fail and I couldn’t wait to get rid of it.

Crew Chief Brad: Not surprised by any of your points.

Crew Chief Eric: No. And I remember when you had your orange one,

Crew Chief Brad: it was red,

Crew Chief Eric: it was orangey red.

Crew Chief Brad: It was like pumpkin spice. It was maroon or like a dark, [00:53:00] dark road. Hey, you’re right.

It wasn’t

Crew Chief Eric: maroon. That’s right. But you had the stick shift in that.

Crew Chief Brad: I had the six speed in that, and I had the five speed in my. Tj

Crew Chief Eric: the Wrangler is off my list. I would not wish that upon my enemy.

Crew Chief Brad: Yeah. The people that go out and buy a Wrangler as a family vehicle are absolutely insane.

Crew Chief Eric: I

Crew Chief Brad: mean, I was hoping

Crew Chief Eric: that I would get a duck.

I was thinking maybe in the next two days I’ll get a duck so I can get something positive outta the experience. Nobody would’ve known it was a rental. There can have been like, oh, look at you, you get a duck. You don’t have a duck on your dashboard. Here, here have a duck. You own a

Crew Chief Brad: Jeep. You, you can still get a duck.

You get a

Crew Chief Eric: Duckie and you get a duckie. I was thinking parked at Road Atlanta with all those hundreds of thousands of people, I would’ve gotten at least one duck. I got nothing.

Crew Chief Brad: The, the, the whole duck thing like skipped me, like I missed that part. Uh, I guess that was after my time.

Crew Chief Eric: Part of the ethos. Now

Crew Chief Brad: do Jeep people walk around with ducks in their pocket and then just randomly placing them on people’s Jeeps?

Crew Chief Eric: I wonder that. What do the Bronco people give each other?[00:54:00]

Executive Producer Tania: They give them each other oranges. Oh, nice. Very nice. Very nice.

Crew Chief Eric: All right, well speaking of infinite new car wisdom, just the other day my inbox was exploding with emails from all over, from LinkedIn, from here, from everywhere. I’m gonna summarize it. The headline reads, GM takes 1.6 billion with the B billion dollar hit on EVs.

And I said to myself, is anybody surprised? Reminds me of that drive-through. We did a while back, Brad. Remember we showcased General Motors if you were like yesterday’s technology tomorrow, there it is. There it is.

Crew Chief Brad: The ongoing joke in that episode was what moves faster? GM or anything else? Very slow moving object.

Crew Chief Eric: Well, and it’s hilarious because we reported for months and months and months now companies are getting out. Trying to ramp back up production of petrol engines or hybrids or whatever. And here’s gm, the caboose of the train. Did you guys [00:55:00] not see the warning signs? Did you not learn anything from your acquisition of Nicola?

Hello? Do what Toyota does? At least look over their shoulder. I mean, try to get ahead of everybody.

Crew Chief Brad: Once unrelated, they’ve got those apps that are advertised all over Instagram about we follow and make the stock market trades that the, the politicians make. Like I, I feel like GM needs something like that, but they need to follow Toyota and whatever things Toyota does.

Like your, to your point, GM needs to just start doing. Yeah. They’ll be a much better company.

Crew Chief Eric: Well, speaking of General Motors products, this isn’t a recall, but this is really funny, so I’ll just read the headline. C seven Corvette ZR one averages 173 miles an hour in a Texas road race, but melts its butt.

Mm-hmm. Oh, look at this thing.

Executive Producer Tania: How’s that happen? I mean, that’s a lot of heat, right? No wonder they were lighting on fire. When the fuel spills and you’re filling it,

Crew Chief Eric: this is the [00:56:00] previous generation.

Executive Producer Tania: Oh, that’s true. Yes.

Crew Chief Eric: Right. The engine’s in the front. That’s right. That’s right. The fuel thing’s, the new ones.

That also shows you the aerodynamics of the back of that car being flat. Heat gets trapped there because you would think moving at 170 miles an hour that that heat would escape just by sheer force of the air flowing over the car. But it gets trapped there and it melted the back end of it, vortex or something.

It also doesn’t help that the exhaust is all right there in the center too. But still, I mean, it melted the taillights too. It’s. Just nuts. That’s hot.

Crew Chief Brad: Speaking of expensive repairs, true. What is a shop gonna charge to fix that?

Executive Producer Tania: Aren’t the rear these like all one piece? Not like there’s a bumper you actually pull off, isn’t it All part of the back end.

Yikes.

Crew Chief Brad: Wow. That is terrible design.

Executive Producer Tania: But Jake from State Farm will take

Crew Chief Eric: care of it, so it’s all good. Don’t worry about it.

Crew Chief Brad: Exactly. And then our rates will go up.

Crew Chief Eric: Asian and domestic news. I have a note here that says Toyota and Mazda teaming up for the next Miata and GR 86. Who put that in there? I

Executive Producer Tania: did.

What’s that all

Crew Chief Eric: [00:57:00] about?

Executive Producer Tania: Well, apparently, which we already knew. They’re ditching BMW as a partner and now they’re teaming up with Mazda and they’re going to make the next great. Miata. The NE Miata, right? The next generation Miata.

Crew Chief Brad: Do you want a Miata? Yeah, I want a Miata. What Miata do you want? Uh, any Miata,

Executive Producer Tania: I guess I will tell.

It’s all

Crew Chief Eric: pretty new reporting. We did some independent researching that Toyota owns 10% of Mazda and Mazda owns like 0.0001% of Toyota or something. Like there’s a weird partnership

Crew Chief Brad: there between the two. That just means Toyota owns 0.0001% of themself.

Crew Chief Eric: Uh, yes. If they own

Crew Chief Brad: Mazda

Crew Chief Eric: self-fulfilling prophecy, you know what I mean?

But I, I’d rather see them get together than the Mazda Ford thing from, you know, 15, 20 years ago. That made no sense to me whatsoever. But I’m sure there was a reason at the time. But as a, as an outsider, it didn’t seem clear as to why those two would team up. We’ve wondered for a while, what’s the next generation Miata gonna look like, or what’s it gonna be?

Here’s the [00:58:00] question. Is the Miata

Crew Chief Brad: going

Crew Chief Eric: to get bigger or is the GR 86 gonna get smaller? The GR 86 doesn’t need to get any

Crew Chief Brad: smaller, so the Miata is probably gonna get a little bit bigger then.

Crew Chief Eric: I hope so, because I personally like the NC for the fact that it is a little bit bigger. The third generation Miata was more comfortable to drive.

Yes, it didn’t perform as well, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I get it. But as a driver it was more comfortable. Right. We mentioned last time the A 86, not the GR 86. The 80 86, you could get new crate motors from Toyota. Right. Have you guys seen the video going around Instagram of a guy that built the 80 86.

With the electric motor and the six speed manual, it is bonkers. Awesome. That’s the kind of stuff we need now. Apparently that build was partially done by Toyota because they supplied the battery pack from Lexus and like a bunch of other stuff to make it work. It’s super clean, it’s really neat. And then he’s got this awesome setup where we joked about this before, but he pipes the sound of an [00:59:00] original 80, 86 twin cam into the car.

So it sort of fools you while you’re driving it. And I was like, okay, I get it now because it all makes sense. It all works together as a system and it’s actually pretty cool.

Crew Chief Brad: It sounds like something to compete with that Hyundai concept that they’re going to make, that’s gonna be six figures and no one can afford,

Crew Chief Eric: or no, no.

You mean the N 74, whatever that thing is.

Crew Chief Brad: Yeah, the N 70, whatever it was, the N 70, the Normandy, something. Yeah,

Crew Chief Eric: I was told at the track, ’cause I kept saying ion when we were at the Hyundai booth.

Crew Chief Brad: You’re not pronouncing it correctly.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah, yeah. Why do you call? It’s the ion. No. Well, how come Cadillac calls it the, the Celeste

Crew Chief Brad: de derelict Dele.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah. Right. So I’m like, well then it’s ion, you have to say it, right? Yes. I, I am I all Brad. Well, we’re gonna move on to lost and found your favorite section of the drive through where we find out what Chuck led Duck and Gray Chevrolet have to offer us this month. And this next one just melts my brain

Crew Chief Brad: like that Corvets rear end.

Crew Chief Eric: I can’t believe [01:00:00] there’s still more of these out there. You can’t

Executive Producer Tania: believe it’s Solanis. Third quarter sales result included six Dodge Darts. How is this possible not only six Dodge Darts, but also Dodge Grand Caravan and a Dodge Journey? This

Crew Chief Eric: car has been out of production for almost 10 years.

Crew Chief Brad: 10 years.

This is so fascinating.

Executive Producer Tania: Long game, baby.

Crew Chief Brad: Yes. They’re playing the long game. Exactly. They make such terrible cars now that they have to go back and drum up all these old cars that they couldn’t sell before because what’s old is new again. Clearly what’s old is new. You didn’t wanna buy those cars then.

Maybe you wanna buy ’em now, but sure enough, six new 2016 Dodge Darts were sold nine years later.

Crew Chief Eric: See, this answers your question from before. What do you buy your kid today that’s gonna last them 20 years? You buy ’em a Dodge Dart, you can get ’em in a manual transmission. You get brand new today at your local Dodge dealer because they’re still out there.

Where do they keep finding them though? They gotta be in like a [01:01:00] subterranean warehouse in Detroit somewhere that people just forgot that they’ve got 30,000 Dodge Darts sitting there.

Crew Chief Brad: You think Dodge just kind of pulls ’em out every once in a while. Is this kind of like a trickle.

Crew Chief Eric: If they were smart, they would package ’em as some heritage model or some special paint jobs or something, or wrap ’em, you know, Shelby additions or something, I don’t know.

Whatever you wanna call it.

Crew Chief Brad: So my kids are four and two, so I’ve got 12 years and 14 years respectfully before I need to buy a car. At that point, I’m guessing I’ll be able to go to a dealer and buy a brand new 2025 Dodge Hornet, because that’s the new Dodge Dart. Right? So it

Crew Chief Eric: is. Ah, well, this next one was brought to us by Mr.

Mark Hewitt. Mark Hewitt. He’s still alive. He still listens. Every month we still get comments back. Thank you, mark, for being a loyal drive-through Listener 61 episodes later. Headline reads, Nebraska on Earth’s 1975 Chevy Vega from World’s [01:02:00] largest time capsule. Can we put it back, come again? Yeah. They put a Vega.

Underground 50 years ago. Did you notice the plate on it?

Crew Chief Brad: Oh, there it is. 25 vanity

Crew Chief Eric: plate. Nebraska reads 2025. Almost like they planned ahead. They were thinking

Executive Producer Tania: it’s in good condition. It’s in good condition. They put it underground, brand new, but still whatever. They put it underground in.

Crew Chief Brad: Is this the same place they get the Dodge Darts?

Executive Producer Tania: That’s good. It didn’t like a bunker. It was in a bunker underground. Well, that bunker had very good

Crew Chief Eric: climate control. Uh, it doesn’t look like it from the pictures. Did you see the pictures of the bunker? It looks like literally just a hole in the ground. Yeah, it looks like where that guy built that Lamborghini in, like Slovenia or something.

Wherever that was. I mean,

Executive Producer Tania: once it’s underground there’s pretty much Okay. And they had it in plastic wrap. Wait, why does it look like there’s rust off the hood?

Crew Chief Brad: This is an advertisement for plastic wrap. That’s what it’s,

Executive Producer Tania: they put it brand new and it already has scratches on the hood. Well, they probably had crap on top of it.

Crew Chief Brad: Yeah, it looks like it rusted.

Executive Producer Tania: It was [01:03:00] underground in a bunker. Of course, it wasn’t climate controlled, so it

Crew Chief Eric: rusted

Executive Producer Tania: sitting there. What is all this other trash they threw in this time capsule? Like,

Crew Chief Brad: yeah, I wanna hear more about that.

Crew Chief Eric: I’m sure it’s everything they could find from 1975 newspapers and magazines and baseball cards, or a little

Executive Producer Tania: vega all alone in the dark hole.

This whole time, nobody was missing it. Okay. I’m just gonna point

Crew Chief Eric: that out.

Crew Chief Brad: This is its villain origin story. You

Crew Chief Eric: know what’s gonna happen to it? Somebody’s gonna buy it, strip it, and turn it into a dragster. ’cause that’s what happened with Las Vegas. That’s

Crew Chief Brad: exactly what’s gonna happen in this car. The race number will be 1975.

Crew Chief Eric: So I think we’re gonna try to start something new here. And it’s Tanya’s goal as a result of last month’s mental gymnastics, trying to figure out Jonathan Price and the Infinity commercials and whoever this British guy is that eats the apple that we still don’t. It’s like the sin bad movie. We tried, oh, you should have gone through the exercise with us.

We were asking like chat GPT and we asked Steven, Izzy and all these other people, do you [01:04:00] know about the British guy eating the apple and the white suit and the commercial, blah blah. I know

Executive Producer Tania: he was somewhere, there’s some sitcom where he’s gonna show up one day, some old TV show where he was in an episode.

Also, one day this mystery will be solved probably on Fraser. Oh.

SOUND FX: It

Executive Producer Tania: was he. I gotta go back and watch Frazier.

Crew Chief Brad: I’m just giving her an excuse to watch Frazier at this point. I don’t think you need to give her an excuse to watch Frazier. Yeah,

Executive Producer Tania: I mean it’s been like five minutes since I’ve watched the whole thing, so I gotta start again.

Crew Chief Eric: So

Executive Producer Tania: this

Crew Chief Eric: little gem that Tanya found, I think we’re gonna try to do this every month. It’s fine. Wacky car commercials that maybe have like celebrities in them. Brad, have you seen this one yet?

Crew Chief Brad: I think I saw it when, when Tanya posted it. Yes.

Executive Producer Tania: I would also just like to say that this gem is in the vein of the mystery British guy biting the apple at the end commercial.

And what is this commercial for? God knows Canon Pixel jet printers starring Don’t Ansel this [01:05:00] commercial. It’s like a Japanese commercial only aired in Japan.

Crew Chief Eric: Good. But the ending is what gets me, what is with

Executive Producer Tania: the strawberry, what I don’t know in his creepy face, what is happening. Yummy.

Crew Chief Brad: That’s a very Japanese thing to do, I think.

Crew Chief Eric: Yes. Did you also notice that his eyebrows are his bushy as his mustache?

Crew Chief Brad: Wonder what else is,

Crew Chief Eric: I mean, I could just watch those last five seconds on repeat where he’s like, Hmm.

Good. Yeah, and eating the summer, it’s, it’s very creepy, but very satisfying at the same time, like I have a whole new respect for Nagel mantle as a result of this commercial. This is amazing stuff. Amazing stuff. Good. Unbelievable. So, Tanya, I’m looking forward to your collection. I wanna see what you come up with next.

[01:06:00] For Lost and Found car commercials. That’d be a good one. I mean, we’ve already done the Ridley Scott. You remember that one where it’s like, and then the turbo kicks in, like there’s some

Crew Chief Brad: terrible car commercials. One of my favorite ones that I’ll, I’ll give you guys when I can find it, but it was the, the Pontiac Firebird, the Trans Am, the fourth gen from the early two thousands, late nineties, early two thousands.

It was sitting behind a car at a traffic light. It’s like pitch black or whatever. It’s revving, its motor. The car won’t move, so it swallows the car.

Crew Chief Eric: It’s like the Ford car.

Crew Chief Brad: Yeah. Yeah. Like the sport car. The evil car that kills the cats.

Crew Chief Eric: Do you guys remember the Trunk Monkey?

SOUND FX: Mm,

Crew Chief Eric: vaguely. Go search the Trunk Monkey commercials.

Those are definitely not PC anymore. Perfect. Right up my alley. Definitely not kosher. Alright. We said we weren’t gonna talk about them, but they just seemed to never leave the news and that’s Tesla. But now

Crew Chief Brad: what those [01:07:00] idiots do this time,

Crew Chief Eric: headline reads, Tesla is urging drowsy drivers to use full self-driving.

We know how this ends, folks

Crew Chief Brad: with a lawsuit,

Crew Chief Eric: I mean, what could go wrong? What could possibly go wrong? How many countless floor demand stories suspect pulled over sleeping while Tesla drives itself, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Everywhere around the world, right? I mean, come on.

Executive Producer Tania: I’m sorry. I thought the rules of even the full self-driving was you still had to maintain awareness and whatnot and.

It’s not really full self-driving.

Crew Chief Eric: Continue. Maybe it’s like initial D. You remember when he taped his hand to the steering wheel? That’s how you defeat that part so you can fall asleep and still be connected. Oh,

Executive Producer Tania: this is like when cell phones were becoming more popular and it was decided that, you know, rightfully you should be hands free.

And so people were taping the cell phone to their head.

Crew Chief Eric: I am still baffled by the amount of people that go [01:08:00] down the road holding the phone to their chin and I look at their car and go, it’s like two years old. It’s not that hard to figure out how to make the Bluetooth work. Hello?

Crew Chief Brad: When I see that, I think one or two things. One, they’re either borrowing a car from a friend or two, it’s a rental, or three, they’re just an idiot.

That’s probably the more likely one.

Crew Chief Eric: It’s number

Crew Chief Brad: three.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah. Ah, well, speaking of what could go wrong, let’s switch over to lowered expectations.

What is

Executive Producer Tania: this? Oh, of course. You know, there’s the annual pumpkin regatta. This is racing. This is racing in pumpkins. We’ve covered this before. Well, they do it every year I guess, in Oregon and this year’s Pumpkin regatta winner was this dude in a 936 pound pumpkin dressed like elf.

Crew Chief Brad: And the winner of this year’s trip is this guy.

Executive Producer Tania: Look how happy he was. Look at that face. Victory. Winning winner.

Crew Chief Eric: I’m gonna quote Mark Shank from like the last, what should [01:09:00] I buy? This is so Oregon and I love it. And second Brad, speaking of commercials, does this remind you of those cuckoo bird German dudes, cuckoo bird, German dudes?

Crew Chief Brad: Remember those guys?

That’s not a commercial though. That was a live performance. Yes, that’s exactly. Oh my God. Now I gotta watch that again. Why did you do that to me? It’s like carbon income sale away. Now I gotta go watch it. So funny. When are we going to commission a pumpkin? For this.

Executive Producer Tania: How do you grow a 900 plus pound pumpkin?

You mean how do you row a boat? No, I said, how do you grow? Oh, how do you get, how do you obtain a 900 pound pumpkin to begin with? A lot of miracle grow. I think this guy’s been competing in the regattas since 2013 with the same pumpkin,

SOUND FX: the same pumpkin.

Crew Chief Brad: It’s just gotten bigger over time. It started out as like a 300 pound pumpkin,

Crew Chief Eric: you know, like genetics, right?

If you [01:10:00] take the seeds from your first big pumpkin and replant them, does that mean you will get big pumpkins again? I don’t

Crew Chief Brad: know.

Crew Chief Eric: Oh my God.

Crew Chief Brad: He bio-engineered a 900 pound pumpkin. I mean, that’s the only way, right? It’s a clone of the smaller of the other pumpkins.

Crew Chief Eric: What, what? What is this Florida man doing in lowered expectations?

What’s this all about?

Executive Producer Tania: The moral of this story is the next time you’re pulled over because you’re speeding, and this guy was doing 73 in 55, he is response to the police officers, was his driving at DSP was a FU. To the other drivers that were going slow.

Wow. Wow. I don’t think that went well. His mugshot, my

SOUND FX: goodness. Looks like

Executive Producer Tania: he was on something.

Crew Chief Eric: Also, I didn’t know a Kia Soul could do 73 miles an hour. Was it being pushed by a Silverado? Like it was downhill? Oh, there it goes. Well, Florida, there are no hills, so. Mm. I don’t know. That’s what I’m saying. Flat line [01:11:00] speed of a Kia soul.

You’re asking a lot. Those hamsters were Were rolling.

Crew Chief Brad: Yeah, they were.

Executive Producer Tania: And how fitting. We had this Florida man with a Kia Soul and the Kia Soul is no longer going to be produced, end of an era.

Crew Chief Brad: Unlike the Dodge Dart, which you can still buy new,

Crew Chief Eric: you know the only thing people are gonna miss about the Kia Soul.

Are those hamster commercials from the Super Bowl? That is

Crew Chief Brad: it. They’ll have to come up in Tanya’s research. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. We didn’t hear if Tanya watched the F1 movie yet. I have not. WW There’s your update everybody. Tanya has not watched the F1 movie. Okay, moving on Book club.

Crew Chief Eric: Well, sticking with Formula One.

I finished another one this month by our friend of the show. Was she been on twice now? Multi-time guest, Elizabeth Blackstock finally got around to reading Racing With Rich Energy. This has to be one of the most incredible Ponzi schemes of the modern era. This story literally unfolds like something out of Hollywood.

It is definitely a catch me if you can [01:12:00] scenario. It’s a definite read for any Formula One fan out there,

Crew Chief Brad: or anybody that’s spanning a Ponzi schemes.

Crew Chief Eric: Well, that too. This might be the manifesto for a lot of ’em out there. The one thing that’s interesting is. There’s a lot of excerpts from like Twitter posts.

It’s kind of strange. The first book I’ve ever read, hashtags. But it’s part of the story, right? Is, is those hashtags and all this other kind of stuff. And so you’re reading these, these little experts and these Twitter posts and there’s a lot of like bullet pointed lists and this and that. I mean, it’s much more journalism than it is a novel, but it’s still captivating and some of the stuff that they report on just absolutely bonkers and like how it all came together.

And I was left with the same question I started with, which I think we all said when we tried Rich Energy, which Brad, you still have a case of rich energy. And I took photographs of it with the book to prove that hey, you know, it’s sort of like a newspaper, you know, ransom. Like this is the date, here we go.

So we still have this case of rich energy after all these [01:13:00] years. It tastes like Red Bull. It smells like Red Bull. It looks like Red Bull. It’s made in Austria where Red Bull is made. How do we know it wasn’t just Red Bull at the end of the day and this guy was their patsy. They were adding another team without adding another team, or they were secretly funding Gene Haas without telling everybody that they were funding Gene.

You know what I mean? How do we know? Like that’s the part of the story. I was still left at the end going, well, how do we know it’s not Red Bull?

Crew Chief Brad: That’s an interesting tinfoil hat theory you have there, bud. I mean, what else could it be? I mean, energy drink Tastes like energy drink. Tastes like energy drink.

I mean they’re all made from pretty much the same formulas of gross. Yeah. Except for White Monster. Yeah, white Monster is quite good. Bigger free Monster with Yeager is Deliso.

Crew Chief Eric: The Yeager monster is quite good. Yeah. Rich energy, I mean, I don’t know. Whatever. I mean, it’s a good book. I mean, don’t get me wrong, kudos to Elizabeth and Alanis King.

They did a great job. The book is available through the McFarland Press. It is now [01:14:00] available also as an audio book. You can get that on Spotify and through your library through Hoopla. So you can listen to racing with Rich Energy that way if you don’t wanna read it. But it’s always nice to have the analog version and it makes a good stocking stuffer too.

It’s not a very long book. It’s 200 and if you take away all the citations, it’s maybe 250 pages or so, maybe less, you know, support independent writers and pick up a cool book about Formula One.

Crew Chief Brad: To be fully transparent, I bought the book, but I did not actually read it. But next time we go to a professional race, I need to make sure I take it with me.

’cause we may run into Elizabeth, she goes to a ton of races so I can get it autographed. But I’ll probably do the audio book now that I know that it’s available via audio book. ’cause that’s how I like to digest your

Crew Chief Eric: literature.

Crew Chief Brad: Yep.

Crew Chief Eric: It’s time we switch to fan favorite. Are you faster than an interceptor?[01:15:00]

I found this one this month. I found one Florida man story and this to me took the cake. So somebody, please explain this to me. Woman sues Volvo claims hands-free tailgate caused brain injury. Her, your expressions say it all. She whacked her head when the tailgate opened. No, apparently, and this is where it becomes Florida, man.

The tailgates closed on her head.

Executive Producer Tania: But those, those kind of tailgates have like a safety feature in them, so they. This was a Volvo. This was a Volvo.

Crew Chief Eric: Apparently she was in the trunk. I don’t know if she was resting her head on the sill. Is she being kidnapped? Her dog ran under the sensor. Volvo must have the fastest closing hatch in all of the automotive industry.

And then it repeatedly like, like a cartoon, like the more I read this, the [01:16:00] more confused I was and the more I started laughing and I’m like, this has gotta be nap April Fool’s joke. Because there’s, there’s no way, oh,

Executive Producer Tania: the light bulb just went off. No, I’m still confused because tailgates don’t close that violently or that quickly.

So the first time it happens,

Crew Chief Brad: you move your head. They usually stop whenever they feel some sort of resistance.

Crew Chief Eric: The court filing summarizes that a malfunction in the defendant’s automated tailgate system caused serious injuries when it struck the plaintiff in the head.

Crew Chief Brad: My question is, can they replicate the incident?

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah. On

Crew Chief Brad: Loony Tunes.

Crew Chief Eric: I mean,

Crew Chief Brad: I would love to see this on the next Law and order.

Crew Chief Eric: This baffles me like I just don’t understand. Do you not hear the hatch cl Normally mine beeps. Mine’s 11 years old. It goes beep, beep, beep, beep to get your attention that it’s closing. It’s also not that fast. If you hit it, it usually stops or goes back up.

It’s not like a guillotine, like, I don’t understand what’s

Executive Producer Tania: going on

Crew Chief Eric: here.

Executive Producer Tania: I could see like not realizing it was [01:17:00] closing and you got up and you banged your head real hard. But like if your head was laying there, head was out of the car.

Crew Chief Eric: If you watch the YouTube video that accompanies this, they literally show you the demo of the person using the foot thing and like how fast or slow it opens.

It’s not that fast.

Crew Chief Brad: So not only is Volvo apparently liable based on this court filing, they’re trying to find the. Quote unquote acquaintance. ’cause she’s no longer a friend. The acquaintance is liable because of her dog activating. Uh,

Crew Chief Eric: yeah, yeah. Uhhuh. Yeah.

Crew Chief Brad: Something tells me there’s gonna be a movie about this.

Jennifer Henry attempted to kill her friend Megan Kur using the Volvo’s door. I’m telling you, this is like, oh yeah, I hate that bitch. Tries to trigger it. This is like, oh, we’re gonna, we’re gonna blame Volvo. We’re gonna blame Volvo, but I’m gonna get that

Executive Producer Tania: woman

Crew Chief Brad: outta here.

Executive Producer Tania: I mean, there’s a Volvo. They’re known for [01:18:00] safety.

Crew Chief Brad: Yes,

Executive Producer Tania: exactly. I don’t know. I mean, it’s unfortunate if she has a brain injury, but it’s hard to believe anything these days.

Crew Chief Brad: Judging by the court case. I think she had the brain injury before the incident.

Executive Producer Tania: I was thinking that you said it. Somebody

Crew Chief Brad: had to,

Executive Producer Tania: I don’t know that it’s clickbait, but I don’t know that she’s maybe being.

Truthful with the circumstances that actually took

Crew Chief Eric: place. I think Brad’s right attempted murder is probably closer to what was really going on here. This is a little less Jersey shore and a little bit more law and order. Boom. Boom. Exactly. Well, it’s time we quickly go behind the fit wall and talk about murder sports news.

So you guys asked me how petite was. Petite was awesome. It was wonderful. The weather was great. Wish I could have been there. Friday practice in qualifying. I spent a lot of time running around talking to people, networking, going to booths, you know, hi to former guests. I stopped by the A CO booth for a while.

There’s test driving Caymans, you know, stuff like that. Just a lot of stuff going on. Race day Saturday, [01:19:00] it took forever to get to the track. We got there in time for the race to start the wreck that happened literally 30 seconds into the race, which caused a yellow forever. The original obligations that I had on Saturday sort of changed on me, sort of vaporized so that it freed up my whole day.

And I was able to take William around the track to every corner of the track. We spectated from literally everywhere. ’cause he wanted to take pictures and he wanted to see and experience and all that. And it is a long race, right? It’s 10 hours and change or whatever. So petite was great at the end. The only thing I cared about was how Aston finished, which they finished an overall second, which was absolutely incredible in the Valkyrie.

I mean, they pulled it off at the last minute. The heart of racing team, I mean, they just did a fantastic job. I was super stoked for that. By the way, the Valkyrie sounds amazing.

The only V 12 in the field. You can hear it everywhere. Sort of like the Garage [01:20:00] 56 car. Like you could tell it from the rest of the pack and you could hear it from far away and it’s just absolutely awesome. So looking forward to more Aston Martin racing next year, but I felt like it was sort of anticlimactic except for the race at the beginning.

Nothing really sort of happened of any, you know, any real note or any real significance. It was just a nice weekend. It was nice to be at the track and it was nice to be amongst the Seppa yet again. Especially the race where the LMP cars are versus VIR where, you know, they unfortunately run the smaller cars.

Right. You know, petite’s not the important bit of news. We need to catch up and find out about Franz Herman and how he did at the Berg. He did

Executive Producer Tania: fantastic. Oh yeah. He has a racing team for staffing.com racing, and so his co-driver is a sim racer and verse Tappen did a ver stoppen and he was so far ahead of everybody else.

The gap was ridiculous. And when his co-driver came in for his stint, that gap closed down so much that he’s lucky that Max was his [01:21:00] teammate or he wouldn’t have, uh, finished in anything. So Max is gonna max and he debuts on the Nors life and dominates. ‘

Crew Chief Eric: cause he’s one of the best apparently. So Franz Herman we’re, we’re gonna watch out for more Franz Herman action.

Didn’t he also exit stage? Right? Like he did his stint and then he pieced out. So he left his teammate there to like sort of finish the race and he didn’t care how it ended.

Executive Producer Tania: So it looked like that. But in the end, no. He actually was, I think on the podium with him, but it definitely looked like he might, he was gonna just leave.

That’s awesome. Which is also Max maxing.

Crew Chief Eric: Well, that sort of leads us into a conversation about Formula One.

We have what, five, six more races to go. It seems like it’s unending. I mean, we still have Mexico and we’ve got Las Vegas and we got this and we got that. We got so many races to watch before the end of the season. That comes to its crescendo at Yas Marina in [01:22:00] Abu Dhabi, which I’m super looking forward to that race ’cause I really do enjoy that track on the Sims.

So let’s just talk about Coda,

Executive Producer Tania: shall we?

Crew Chief Eric: The US Grand Prix one of three. ’cause we got Miami, we’ve got Texas, and we’ve got Las Vegas. But Coda’s the most interesting of the three. I don’t know about you, Tanya, but I think the sprint race was more exciting than the actual race.

Executive Producer Tania: I mean, the sprint race was Forza turn one chaos, absolute

Crew Chief Eric: chaos.

I love the whole Zack Brown blames hulking berg, and then he retracts it, and then everybody’s blaming Kinberg. But it’s not Hulk Berg’s fault. Is it really Land’s fault or is it Oscar’s fault? Nobody knew whose fault it was, but all I know there was a pile of rubble in that turn and it was exciting.

Which Gold’s fault. It’s always strolls. No, no. Stroll had his own moment, which was absolutely hilarious. Who did he wipe out? Ocon. Yeah. Yeah. And he, he did a hit and run. He tried to drive off. His front wheel is like [01:23:00] bouncing, barely connected and he’s driving as he goes around Ocon, he waves at him like, oh, so sorry.

And he tries to drive away. Like, what? Dude, I was dying. It was the funniest thing I’d seen in Formula One all year. I was like, stroll, what is going on, bro? Wow. Unreal. No, the sprint race was absolutely amazing, but it was good for stopping. Right. He took an extra eight points home, which leans into his first place win.

So it’s 25 points for the win. Yep. So now he’s got 31 extra points towards the championship. And I, I turned to Tanya and I said, is he going to make the ultimate comeback in Formula one? ’cause nobody’s ever done this before. Even in the, the modern times and the old times, the Senate days Schumacher before, nobody’s done over a hundred point swing to come back and win the championship, but I think he can pull it off.

He can’t do it alone, though.

Executive Producer Tania: There is a chance mathematically he can do this as [01:24:00] long as the Oscar screws

Crew Chief Eric: up and he wins everything, including the sprint

Executive Producer Tania: races, max wins everything. So just running some simple scenarios. If he wins the last two remaining sprint races and the last five races, Oscar can come in second every time except one time.

And Max will win. But if Oscar comes in second every time in the races and the sprint races and Max comes in first, there’s a three point difference.

Crew Chief Eric: You know what I’m gonna tell you that’s gonna make sure that Oscar doesn’t achieve that. Okay? It’s two things. Stroll. The first one is Lando, and the second one is Norris.

Okay? Lando is not gonna let it happen, right? He’s either gonna take him out or he is gonna call up Big Papa Papaya, Zach Brown. He is gonna say, team orders. You need to put Oscar behind me because I’m the primary driver this week. Remember, that’s what’s gonna happen

Executive Producer Tania: mathematically. If Max wins the next five races and the next two Sprint races, even if Lando comes in second in all those races, he cannot beat Max.

Crew Chief Eric: [01:25:00] Oscar can’t beat Max. Lando

Executive Producer Tania: can’t beat Max. That’s

Crew Chief Eric: what I’m saying. Burins got it in the bag because McLaren’s gonna take themselves out

Executive Producer Tania: if that happens. If they are not podium or they take each other out completely. If Max can win, every is done. He’s, he is a five time champion

Crew Chief Eric: telling you it’s gonna happen.

The crystal ball, it’s gonna happen. It’s gonna happen. We’re not gonna see the stupidity that we saw earlier this year where Max is taking people out and coming in like 13th and like whatever he was doing in the middle of the year.

Crew Chief Brad: Well, he was doing that for Christian Horner.

Crew Chief Eric: Well, yeah. Yeah. Right. But I’m also wondering if some of that was like, to get to this point, right?

Like, all right Max, you gotta throw these races away because then

Executive Producer Tania: No, no, no. Max max. In the little that he lets you know about himself. ’cause he is a very private person and although he is having his own documentary coming out, I forget on what service

Crew Chief Eric: would be as exciting as that Scott Dixon thing we reviewed.

Executive Producer Tania: Yes. Because he’s that kind of [01:26:00] person. But to my point, he is not the kind of person he would give a big middle finger to you. If someone came to him and said throw a race. He is never going to do that. He is always going to want to win. Just like how can he race at Nors life in the middle of his F1 season?

How can he go do GT three racing and all this other stuff? Has any other driver ever gone and done another series? Usually it’s like, oh my god, you can’t even go fart in the corner. ’cause God forbid you get injured and you can’t race. Right. And yet he’s out here doing whatever the f he wants because he can and he will.

He doesn’t care, so I, no way. I believe that he was throwing anything. His car was crap and he dealt with it the best way he could.

Crew Chief Brad: Eric just wrote the next script for Drive to Survive that he’s not gonna watch.

Executive Producer Tania: I’m

Crew Chief Eric: never gonna watch.

Crew Chief Brad: I think also like Max didn’t start racing in in GT three, you know, sport car racing until Christian Horner left.

Am I correct in saying that

Crew Chief Eric: it all happened last time? I don’t know. I thought

Crew Chief Brad: he was doing a ton of sim racing, but he never actually competed in a rule. I thought he did

Crew Chief Eric: that test with [01:27:00] the Acura like last year and some other stuff.

Crew Chief Brad: Well, was it an

Crew Chief Eric: actual official race? The Franz Herman is new for this year.

Executive Producer Tania: Well, even the sim racing, he’s been told not to do it, and he’s basically said. F you because he’ll do sim racing where he is racing all through the night, right. Especially like these endurance sim racings. And then the next day, you know, he is getting a couple hours of sleep next day getting the Formula One car to race.

And basically his answer was, I just won the race. What’s the problem? Yeah.

Crew Chief Brad: And I think that is a valid answer.

Executive Producer Tania: Touche like yeah,

Crew Chief Brad: where’s my number two?

Executive Producer Tania: Yeah. I stayed up all night playing my sim racing, but I just came out here qualified on pole and then won the race. So

Crew Chief Eric: because he downs like a six pack of Red Bull, I mean, come on, it’s gotta be in his veins.

He’s racing with rich energy. Oh man. That’s the secret formula right there. I didn’t realize until I was going through all this stuff with the clubhouse and going through the vault and the pictures. When we went to Coda in 2018, been a minute pre COVID, max was already running at Red Bull. I mean, he’s been in Formula One for quite a long time.

To, [01:28:00] to your point, Tanya, he doesn’t care anymore. He was basically

Executive Producer Tania: one of the youngest people. He was like 17 or something. He was like controversial too of him getting his license. Like at the age that he did.

Crew Chief Eric: I’m telling you, he’s gonna be up there. People are gonna be talking about him like Schumacher and Fangio and Senna.

He’s gonna be the next one. Crystal Ball says so. Well, since you brought up SIM racing this weekend, EA Sports gave F1 2025 a way for free through Steam from Friday night through Monday afternoon, and we got our hands on it. What do we think? What do we think about the Formula One simulator? It was a lot better than I was expecting

Executive Producer Tania: it to be ’cause I still remember, I haven’t played a Formula One race game since, I don’t know, formula one, 2002 or something.

I don’t know, like 1998.

Crew Chief Brad: The last time it was free

Executive Producer Tania: and it was horrible. They were like unplayable. As soon as you try to accelerate, you know, spin like a top. And it’s like every time you try to accelerate out of a corner, they’re sideways and spinning and they were unbearable, but I was expecting [01:29:00] something similar to this and instead it was not at all like that and it felt very smooth.

And I mean you could tell it was different than like a Forza or you know, some other, if you wanna call it sim, some other racing game, if you will. But I was pleased with it,

Crew Chief Eric: man. You played a lot newer Formula one game than I did. The last Formula One game I played was the Nigel Mantle World Championship on Super Nintendo.

That’s like a step above pole position.

Executive Producer Tania: No, I’m sorry. It was the, the last formula one game I played was the Tiger handheld. Oh man, you’re going way back.

SOUND FX: That was the

Crew Chief Eric: only sound effect. Yeah, no, to your point, I tried it out too, and. I liked it. Now the question is, do I wanna spend the 80 or a hundred dollars or whatever it costs? Yeah, that’s the problem, the buy-in. And the problem is here we are at the tail end of the formula one season and EA iss like, oh, we’ll give it to you for free because 2026 is coming out.

And [01:30:00] unlike EAs, other products where like WRC, they just keep adding to it. All you had to do was buy it in 2023, and they’ve continued to just add onto it and add onto it and add onto it. Formula One is like Madden, it was like, oh, Madden 22 and 23 and 24 and 25. So they’re following that model and that’s what sucks.

It’s like, well, I’m gonna pay full price, or maybe the discounted price because of this promotional weekend. But it’s like the new ones around the corner again. Do you wait for 2026 to come out? But you’re gonna pay a hundred bucks or do you buy 2025 and look at Dohan, you know, and other drivers that aren’t in the field anymore, you know, on the 2025 roster.

I don’t know.

Crew Chief Brad: My problem with those games is like how much improvement is actually made other than the roster changes, how much do they improve the game itself, the gameplay, the graphics and everything year over year? Like you

Crew Chief Eric: probably played Madden or NBA back in the day, so you know, a lot of the times it was like reskinning, new boxing.

Crew Chief Brad: It never really felt any different.

Crew Chief Eric: And every so [01:31:00] many years they would change the mechanics or they would change the ui or technology would advance and it would force them to change and they couldn’t just kind of lather, rinse, repeat. And I think the same is a Formula One. It’s like, okay, well we use the ego engine and it’s tuned for Formula One and blah, blah, blah.

And so none of that stuff really changes because if you think about it, the way the cars are shaped don’t mean a hill of beans. In the digital world because there’s no airflow, so the cars run at a prescribed speed and all those kinds of things. To your point, I think there’s a little bit more of that regurgitation going on on the formula one side than there would be maybe in any other game or franchise, you know?

Yeah. Now, I will say, just to add that it is, and it’s unrelated to Formula One, but related to what we’re talking about with this Sim Aceto, Corsa, you know, they came out with Evo and Evos been sort of ah, because they released it pre-Alpha and every month you get an update and all this kind of thing behind the scenes.

And unbeknownst to a lot of people, probably one of the best kept secrets in gaming right now is Aceto Corsa [01:32:00] Rally, which has been under development for the last not one. But four years and they have their own skunkworks division specifically dedicated to it, and it is coming out mid-November. And I am so stoked.

And if you haven’t seen the previews for it, where it’s absolutely gorgeous, they are not releasing the full game on day one, which is a little bit disappointing, but there’s gonna be some cool stuff. Come day one in November. Super excited for that. And there is one more racing game on the radar and that is Project Motor Racing, which looks like it might be some of the guys from Bin slash Slightly Mad Studios, all those guys that used to do project cars.

’cause you know the name project, they didn’t fall too far from the oak tree. It looks really good. They’ve got licensing from Porsche, which means there’s some money behind that. ’cause you can’t just willy-nilly throw the Porsche Crest and the cars around without getting into some serious trouble.

Executive Producer Tania: Apparently they’re gonna have IMSA GTO racing in that game.

Crew Chief Eric: Exactly. And that is super exciting. [01:33:00] So that’s another one that’s on my radar here for the fall winter, whenever they finally release it. November 25th, two weeks after a Seto rally. So there we go, Brad, spend your money on Formula 1 20 25 or buy two games for the same price.

Executive Producer Tania: You know what’s kind of hard to get into with the Formula One game, which I found a little bit of a struggle as I sat there, you know, playing it is. I enjoyed going to Coda. Because I know Coda from literal firsthand experience. And then you look at the rest of the roster and you’re like, oh, well I don’t know any of these tracks.

Like other than a Yeah, spa. No spa. ’cause you’ve played spa on other racing games. But then it’s like Miami. What a trash heap. That’s a terrible track. Horrible, terrible course, right? Like at least. You go to something like Forza or whatever and it’s like Watkins Glen and VIR, and you have these other tracks that maybe a little bit more familiar, which makes it fun as well, right?

Because there’s a little bit of attachment there. I don’t know, go into some of the tracks that are in the [01:34:00] Formula One rock. It’s like this track sucks. Like I don’t even like watching it, let alone

Crew Chief Eric: playing it. Fictitiously definitely got a bunch of those on my list too. So those are all in the negative column in the con column of why I don’t wanna spend the $80 on, you know, the next title of Formula one.

I’d rather have something with a little bit more diversity, right?

Well, our Motor Sports News is brought to us in partnership with the International Motor Racing Research Center, so the sweepstakes is over. So congratulations to whoever won that nine 11 T. It has not been announced yet, but we’ll be keeping track of that. But I do wanna point out that the Argo Singer Symposium on Motorsports history is coming up in the month of November.

It is the Thursday, Friday, Saturday before Thanksgiving. So that’s the week of the 21st, 22nd. And so if you’re in the Watkins Glen area, you can come and [01:35:00] check it out, or you can stream it live on our Twitch. We’ll be carrying it directly from Watkins Glen to your screen, tv, laptop, whatever it is. So you can check out the Argo Singer Symposium for yourself for free.

Well, guys, I guess that sort of wraps things up. So let’s take it home with a Trackside report sponsored by the Northeast Region at the Audi Club of America.

Executive Producer Tania: Some sad news in the HPDE world. Let’s take a moment of silence here. For some very upsetting news to hear that pit race. Is closing. Ah, and there’s confirmation from various sources that this is indeed true, including directly from pit race’s own site.

That 2025 is the last season for any racing at the facility. They are going to be permanently shutting down.

Crew Chief Eric: I plan to include some of our highlights from Fit Race for those that have never seen a lap at Pittsburgh International Raceway. Check out the videos that we include with the show notes. I mean, one of the most [01:36:00] fun smiles per mile lap on the East Coast.

A heck of a lot of fun. And it’s, I’m just bummed. I don’t know what else to say. Yeah, it doesn’t have the same character. As Road Atlanta or Wacked Glen, but it was miles above a lot of other tracks. And it’s just a shame to see places like this close and there’s nothing near it. It’s in the middle of nowhere.

There’s no developments. There’s, they claim it’s gonna be turned into a data center or something like that. You know, there’s a lot of speculation, but the land has been sold and it’s just like, it’s really, really sad. And, and I put a, a slight article together about this too. Where are events like the Pittsburgh Vintage Grand Prix gonna go and all the, the carting tournaments and all the other stuff that was happening at pit raise.

It wasn’t like, it wasn’t busy, but it just got sold out from underneath everybody. And that’s. Sad and kind of tragic.

Executive Producer Tania: Everybody’s got a price,

Crew Chief Eric: money talks and you know what happens to the rest of it.

Executive Producer Tania: But just because pit race is closing doesn’t mean there aren’t still plenty of laughs out there for you to enjoy.

Clubs like H-O-D-S-C-D-A and Chin Track Days are running events through the fall [01:37:00] and winter months at tracks like Lyme Rock, Watkins Glen, Sebring, Daytona Coda, VIR, and many others. Check out club.gt motorsports.org for details

Crew Chief Brad: and if you’re not quite ready to hit the track, don’t forget that you can find tons of upcoming local shows and events at the ultimate reference for car enthusiasts.

Collector car guide.net.

Executive Producer Tania: Be sure to jump back into our podcast catalog and check out other programs we offer like screen to speed the Ferrari Marketplace, the Motoring historian Evening with a legend. The log book, break Fix, and of course the drive-through. Tune in starting this month for our newest program, the Racers round table.

Crew Chief Eric: That’s right, Tanya, that is sponsored by the Eastern Museum of Motor Racing, and it’s gonna focus on short track and dirt track racing. And so that’s gonna be like World of Outlaws, sprint cars, uh, late models, all that kinda stuff. Really interesting. We released our first episode this month, which coincides with our Sunday Niagara Re-released from Watkins Glen about the history of Niagara Dragway.

[01:38:00] This actually had to do with the Golden Age of Gassers, which is another class of drag racing. So we kind of kicked it off with something a little bit outside of their wheelhouse, but it was a really interesting conversation with both amateur and pro drag racers. So check those out. The Sunday Niagara and the Racers Roundtable, golden Age of Gassers.

And I do wanna mention, since we’re talking about podcast episodes, stay tuned for next month where we have our holiday shopping special. Then December. Normally we would do a best of, but since we’re not doing Tesla this year, as our New Year’s resolution continues, we’re going to do December as a Formula One recap and close out the year with whether or not Oscar’s the champion or max or what the heck happened.

So look forward to December as we look back over the year and see if our predictions were true by the very, very end.

Crew Chief Brad: And if you enjoy our various podcasts, there’s a great way for you to support our creators on the MPN. There’s tons of extras and bonuses [01:39:00] to explore on our updated Patreon page. Learn more about our bonus and behind the scenes content.

Get early access to upcoming episodes and consider becoming a break fix VIP when you visit patreon.com/gt Motorsports. And as always, thank you to our co-hosts and executive producer Tanya, and to all the fans, the friends and family who support Grand Touring motor sports, as well as the Motoring Podcast network.

Without you, none of this would be possible. You ready? You go ahead. Tro. Did we do it?

Crew Chief Eric: I think we did it. Did we miss anything? I don’t think so. Our regularly scheduled service returns in January.

Executive Producer Tania: The Drive-thru is our monthly news episode and is sponsored in [01:40:00] part by organizations like Collector Car guide.net Project, motoring Garage Style Magazine, the Exotic Car Marketplace, and many others. If you’re interested in becoming a sponsor of the drive-thru, look no further than www.motoringpodcast.net.

Click about, and then advertising. Thank you again to everyone that supports the Motoring Podcast Network, grand Touring Motorsports, our podcast Break Fix, and all the other services we provide.

Skip ahead if you must… Here’s the highlights from this episode you might be most interested in and their corresponding time stamps.

• 00:00 Halloween Humor and Costume Talk
• 02:16 Car Troubles and Repairs Discussion
• 25:43 The Cost of Car Repairs vs. Buying New
• 27:03 Future of Car Ownership and Maintenance
• 33:46 Lifetime Warranties on Car Parts
• 35:03 Independent Shops and DIY Repairs
• 37:32 Volkswagen’s Racing Investments
• 50:14 Jeep Wrangler Hybrid Review
• 54:06 GM’s Struggles with EVs
• 59:45 Lost and Found: Dodge Darts and Time Capsules
• 01:03:38 The Mystery of the British Guy in the White Suit
• 01:06:50 Tesla’s Latest Controversy
• 01:08:31 Pumpkin Regatta and Florida Man
• 01:11:36 Book Club – Racing With Rich Energy
• 01:14:45 Are You Faster Than an Interceptor?
• 01:18:34 Motorsports News and Petite Le Mans
• 01:21:33 Formula One Season Finale Predictions
• 01:28:18 Sim Racing and Upcoming Games
• 01:35:16 Trackside Report and Pit Race Closure

Are you ready to discover the exhilarating world of track driving? This season step into your driver’s seat and experience the thrill of pushing your car to its limits in a safe, controlled environment. Perfect for those who have always dreamt of getting on track … here are some upcoming ACNA events you might want to check out:

• Just because Pitt Race is closing doesn’t mean there aren’t still plenty of laps out there for you to enjoy, clubs like HOD, SCDA and CHIN Track Days are running events through the fall and winter months at tracks like Lime Rock, Watkins Glen, Sebring, Daytona, COTA, VIR and many others, check out club.gtmotorsports.org for details.

MORE DETAILS ON OUR MOTORSPORT CALENDAR

For experienced track enthusiasts, these events offer a fantastic opportunity to refine your techniques and challenge your precision on the track. Reconnect with the vibrant community of drivers and instructors who share your passion, and enjoy the friendly and supportive atmosphere. Push your limits, improve your handling skills, and take the opportunity to make every second on the track count. For more Audi Club events outside of just track time, please visit https://www.neqclub.org