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Executive Producer Tania: [00:00:00] The drive-through is our monthly news episode and is sponsored in 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 Motorsport, our podcast Break Fix, and all the other services we provide.

Crew Chief Eric: All right, let’s rock in Revs.

William Ross: There we go. Welcome to Drive through episode number 59. This is our monthly recap. Put together a menu of automotive motorsport and entertaining car adjacent news. Now, let’s pull up to the window number one for

Crew Chief Eric: some automotive news. You notice, Tanya, he puts the gun there just like Brad does.

French Anthem: Mm-hmm.

Crew Chief Eric: It’s something about the human mind. We just add that the, the window number one. Well, William, we are picking up where we left off. Welcome back to the studio. [00:01:00] Thanks for joining us tonight. Lots to talk about, but it starts with these really stupid hats. You don’t look good in that hat. You don’t like my hat Not worn.

That way it looks worse when I put it all the way on my head. Wait, wait. I’ll show you what it looks like.

Executive Producer Tania: It is better that way. It’s better. No,

Crew Chief Eric: it’s totally worse. This, no,

Executive Producer Tania: it’s better. It is better. That way.

Crew Chief Eric: I can’t get

Executive Producer Tania: my

Crew Chief Eric: headphones on. Oh, there you go. What the hell did you do to that thing? You sit on it.

It was my suitcase that took care of the hat. It does look like the lone ranger thing here. It’s all sorts of bent up and whatnot.

William Ross: Oh my God. My band already broke. I mean, it broke when I set it down on my stand over here. Just fell right off. I’m like, yeah, I’m not even bothering. Doesn’t fit my head anyway, so this is perfect.

I have no idea how they could get away. I, I should have stood there for about 10 minutes to see what sucker paid. $60 for one of those, right? I wouldn’t pay ’em six

Crew Chief Eric: bucks

William Ross: for this hat. No, I saw that price. Like that was sad.

Crew Chief Eric: So the audience is looking at this behind the scenes on Patreon going, [00:02:00] what the hell is up with this stupid hat?

So this is the infamous. Docents straw hat that you’re supposed to wear at events like Pebble and other concourses and, and so we have not the Professor John Summers to thank for the acquisition of these wonderful hats. As we were talking about on our last drive through, we were getting ready to embark upon this massive guy’s vacation.

You know, all this car stuff. And so it starts. In San Francisco at the Hillsborough Concourse

William Ross: basically for 30 days. A little break for a day here or two here then. But yeah, getting out there, I’d never been to San Francisco too. That was a first for me. I’ve always been Southern California, everything like that.

So that was awesome about that. But you know, it was well worked it because friend of mine hooked us up with a little shop visit. So we go to the old Riley, what is it? Restoration shop or, which was phenomenal. Can’t remember. What was the name of that shop we went to? Wasn’t it Bob Riley’s place? But then Brian, uh, what’s Brian’s last name?

More, whatever. But he took it over. But he moved it from where it was, it was, and this is a cool thing ’cause if you drive by, you think [00:03:00] it’s an abandoned building, a hundred percent. You, you not know what’s in, like there’s an old refrigerator sitting outside the building. This an old chicken farm or something.

The hatchery, I don’t know, something like that. But you go inside, it’s one of those. Old cool ass buildings, all brick. It’s got the big wood hand, Hoon, dormer, drafters. Awesome. And then, I mean, just BRM, dhe, what you saw in there was just incredible and respecting owners’ privacy and whatnot. You know, we really didn’t, we took some pictures, but we didn’t share because we just, you know, hey, you didn’t want, it was like, which is fine, which is cool, but I mean.

It was unbelievable the cars that were in there. And it was cool to see because you got stuff that was just starting. You had stuff that was basically just getting touched up or you know, a little fine tuned for some concourse and stuff like that.

Crew Chief Eric: Well, millions of dollars worth of cars. And you’d drive by it going, Jed Clampett lives there.

And you’d never pay attention to it ever again. You know?

William Ross: No, you wouldn’t at all. And it’s not like it’s got any shape or anything to it. Think Okay, there’s a bunch of carless or, I mean, just, it’s crazy. ’cause I mean, all the metal working equipment seeing, I mean it just, it’s got all the [00:04:00] stuff and they need to do the proper restoration of cars of that magnitude.

Basically, though it’s only three of ’em in essence doing it. And actually only two of ’em really are actually doing any of the work. Yeah. Brian Kind is almost, I would say retired, but basically retired. Just runs the shop. He’s got a married couple, which one of the individuals, that’d be an interesting conversation to have.

Crew Chief Eric: That’s an episode unto itself. Yeah.

William Ross: Yeah, because like, wait, what? Wait.

Crew Chief Eric: Oh,

William Ross: okay.

Crew Chief Eric: But her metalworking is just unbelievable. Especially that wanderer and redoing all that pieces that are missing from that car and all that stuff that was in the back was super cool. Yeah. But you wanna talk about a small world, Tanya.

We walk into this place and Brian walks out, older gentleman, these big glasses, and he’s wearing a T-shirt and it’s a blue t-shirt and all it says is Mirage. I just have this smile on my face, do the, you know, the whole Kojack point my finger like a gun. And I’m like, man, you’re wearing the right T-shirt.

He said, well, what do you mean? And I said, I just interviewed Harley k Clarkson like a week ago. And he goes, you won’t believe it. I used to work for Harley. And so suddenly this whole conversation, he worked at [00:05:00] Mirage, all these cars and how Harley got started and this and that, and so we got a really interesting backstory, which led us into the legend of Lamborghini and Bob Wallace.

And brought us back to camaraderie and the Corvette and it was like, who is this guy? What have we stumbled into? We’re in the nexus now. Right. You know, I, I, all

William Ross: those conversations were great because one, Eric was conversing with all these great stories and people he talked to and then he went into his stories and it just kind of kept going because when he would bring something up, it basically just got, oh yeah, I interviewed or I talk, you know, so it all just kind of, all of a sudden little web we weave, so to speak.

And he really opened up. ’cause he’s the kind of guy that throughout his years, you can tell he’s been like all these awesome places involved stuff. But you know, he’s the guy just kind of quiet, kept to himself, just did his work and stuff like that. But he was involved in all this stuff. So he, he has all the connections.

So we’re getting ready to leave. We’re outside. I know he had mentioned before over at Sonoma at the racetrack, they had another storage facility and the gentleman with Mark Addison, God bless him ’cause he’s the one that got this all set up for [00:06:00] us. Brian goes, well, hey, here, you guys wanna go? Here’s the key.

I mean, I’m like, I just look just like WTFI don’t know you from

Crew Chief Eric: Adam. I met you an

William Ross: hour ago, right? Yeah, exactly. Well here’s the key, you know, go. Yeah, just go over there and this unit, da da da. ’cause that was a whole nother thing, trying to find the unit once we got there and we look like Keystone cops running around.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah. Trying to find the shop. It was so bad. They

William Ross: had on track stuff going on too. So getting in, you had to do all this stuff. Well, mark just pulls right past the gate. These guys are, him and John, they’re in the rental car we had and they get stopped for like 20 minutes, get debriefed like by the Gestapo or something, trying to get in.

We just blew right through ’em and just went, and I’m like, all right. And trying to find the unit. ’cause the way it was explained to us and oh, it’s this one. It’s, I mean, just made no sense. But we’re like, it’s gotta be this one. Try the key. Try the key. It opens the door. You open the door and what do you find?

Another slice of heaven. Oh my God. And we got free roam. I mean, just free run of it. It was me. Eric, John and Mark

Crew Chief Eric: and whatever was living in that wall. ’cause there was something and [00:07:00] was

William Ross: in that wall. Yeah, there was something else overseeing, I think keeping an eye on everything. ’cause I mean it would make itself known every now and then you kinda just like, all right it it is what it is.

Oh god. Oh, the cars

Crew Chief Eric: let, let me list off some of the cars. Yes. As soon as you walked in, there’s two shadow formula one cars. When was the last time you saw a shadow in picture, let alone in person. So you got those two right up front and then you walk in and there was that Ferrari 1 66 under the covers.

Yeah. Then there was that Aston Martin

William Ross: bandage.

Crew Chief Eric: That Chevron, which looks like a McLaren P four, whatever it is. Behind that was not just any McLaren formula one car, James Hunt’s, McLaren Formula one car up on the rack. And then there was a bunch of other stuff. And the car that got me when we got to the back corner of the shop, you know we had been talking to Brian about the camaraderie, Corvette and Bob Wallace and all this stuff, and sitting there in its original livery, fully restored, whatever is the camaraderie, bird Cage, Maserati, that was at LAMA with the Corvette.

And I’m like. You gotta be kidding me. Like [00:08:00] what? Just the sheer chance of being in the presence of, you know, all these cars and all this stuff. Absolutely incredible.

William Ross: I mean, scene one,

Crew Chief Eric: if

William Ross: we walked into that shop and one of those would’ve been in there, it would’ve been God is great. Yeah. But just the magnitude of everything that was in there was just.

Insane. I still argue I would’ve taken that alpine home with me. That was like perfect. Yeah, that was a great little car. And that thing was ready to go. That thing was sweet. You know, not only just the cars though, ’cause then you start looking at all the stuff that’s kind of laying around and stacked up or whatever.

Oh yeah. Because it’s just shop parts everywhere. Yeah. It’s not like it’s some place you’re going into where they’re on display and it’s like, no, these are cars are running on the track. And so they got just all this stuff stacked up everywhere and posters on the wall that are. Probably not very appropriate.

You know, in this day and age in the eighties they were okay. In the eighties they were great, but not this day and age. Like, no, I might not wanna this. But I mean, just seeing the old trinkets and stuff was unbelievable too. ’cause it’s just like stuff you collect over the years, God, this is from this and you know, and you, it’s not like it’s repo.

I miss the legit stuff. It’s original. Yeah. And plus, you know, the cars on the track in the background, so you got this whole little vibe going [00:09:00] on. Yeah, that was crazy. We’ve been blessed how we’ve started our trips from that one to the next one, to the next one, all just kind of steamroll. It’s like, man, the a precedent was set right out of the gate.

You’re like, wow.

Crew Chief Eric: And we do have to apologize to Sonoma Raceway. You will sign the waiver the next time you come through there. Yes,

William Ross: yes. My apologies. My bad. Didn’t know. And I hope we weren’t supposed to do anything when we left either. ’cause he just went right through on the

Crew Chief Eric: way out too. Mark’s like, what, what?

And then we spent some time with John Summers, the motoring historian, and we got to see his motorcycle collection, which is extensive. Yeah. He’s got a problem. And he keeps acquiring more. And then it was like, how many cars does he have? Like, I can’t believe he fits that Pontiac down there. I don’t either.

With everything. It’s like, holy smokes.

William Ross: Yeah. I, I have no idea. I mean, I’m amazed he doesn’t have a shed out in his backyard with more stuff in it. I, that’s probably coming, but, well, he’s

Crew Chief Eric: got his other cars in the warehouse, so of course it’s not like

William Ross: he’s buying these beat up junk. He’s buying bikes, getting a great deal on him that either needing just maybe a little TLC or, you know, they’re a little scratched here or there.

But they [00:10:00] all run. He rides ’em all. And you know, he has his little post-it note on it. Last time it was starting, I mean everything. But I mean, I’m a big bike nuts. What he had in there was just, I mean, GS six R at the Ninja ZX six is all this stuff. Crazy, crazy stuff. Just all crammed in there. And I, I will say this, when you see John’s videos of where he is sitting, it gives it a whole new context of his little hovel that he has where he is sitting a hundred percent.

Changes your perspective completely.

Crew Chief Eric: You, you’re like, please turn the camera around so I can see all the bikes. There with you in that he just sit the other way and he says on his show all the time, he’s like, oh, I got all these bikes I gotta fix, you know, blah, blah, blah in the garage. And I’m like, they’re three feet from you, dude.

They’re like right behind you. It’s crazy. Yeah.

William Ross: It’s like just goes like this and touching ’em all. Yeah. He needs to spin it around because then not to mention all the stuff he’s got on the one wall, which the ta, I mean he just needs to do an episode. Just touring that thing, just

Crew Chief Eric: like everything else we’ve talked about.

Like Don talks about on garage tile, you drive past some of these houses, you have no idea what’s inside them, what people have been hoarding or storing or collecting or otherwise. And like his [00:11:00] neighbor, which leads us into the concord. Yeah.

William Ross: As we were point, what was it, 7:00 AM seven 30? Yeah. On the day we were going out to see this garage and stuff like that, we catched a gentleman’s garage was open and he had his two, three oh eights sitting there and we’re like, oh.

So we stopped as we get outta the car, walk towards the garage, the garage cut and I’m like, oh, maybe he thought we were gonna go rob him, but it turns out awesome guy. It’s John’s dear friend. John’s actually driven his cars and stuff like that. We met him following day at the Concor and had lengthy chats.

Him, great guy. Lots of photos and stuff like that. It’s interesting to the point, especially in San Francisco, ’cause I mean, yeah, you got basically a single car garage door. I mean if you got a double wide garage, you’re living large. I mean, ’cause they’re deep. They’re all like two car lengths deep at a

Crew Chief Eric: minimum.

Two cars as in like a 57 Thunderbird, two cars deep. They’re huge. Like you put three modern cars in those garages easily.

William Ross: Exactly. I mean, he’s got his four door Catalina, his Mustang 2002 Mustang bullet, one of the first series of bullets, and then 20 motorcycles. If not more. They’re deep. I mean, you’re fitting a lot of stuff in there and it’s just [00:12:00] basically garage space unless you redid it.

But yeah, they’re huge. It’s very surprising, you know? And then obviously on the hills and stuff like that. So yes, it started out that first day set precedent and was like, fantastic. Now we gotta talk about concor and the silly hats. Exactly the weather, you know, it was wasn’t too bad. But that’s a concern.

’cause not only you gotta wear the hat, you gotta wear the blue blazer. Oh my god. White collared shirt and khaki pants. Poor Eric had to go to, I don’t Did you go to Kohl’s? I bought everything. I bought everything. I had none of it. But

Executive Producer Tania: didn’t you know the wardrobe before? You didn’t bring the proper stuff or you did and it was wrong?

Crew Chief Eric: No, no, no. It was correct and I had to buy it ahead of time so we knew what the dress code was gonna be, but it’s worse when you put it all on my stuff. Still had the tags on it. Like if we don’t go through with this, I could return it. That’s where I was even the morning of. I was like, oh shit, I still got a tag on my, you know, my jacket kind of thing.

William Ross: Those of you who listen or watch the channels and stuff like that? No, I have an issue and a addiction to Diet Mountain Deuce. Oh my god, that was so funny. 7:00 AM I found a Walmart. No, I’m sorry, target. That was [00:13:00] about 10 minutes from the hotel I went. I bought a cooler so that way I could take my own beverages and I bought Diet Mountain.

Did it? ’cause you know I have a very serious problem.

Crew Chief Eric: It got worse when we got to France, but we’ll get to that point.

William Ross: Yeah, that was hor. Wow. Yeah, we’ll get to that. I was all right for two days ’cause I kind of strung some things out.

Crew Chief Eric: These Jones in after that. Yeah. So anyway, we get to the Concord. I didn’t know what to expect.

I don’t think you knew what to expect. No, I have no idea. The only thing we had gotten, and it was literally the night before, was this 200 car spreadsheet that we needed to somehow digest, memorize, understand what was on the field, and then link these random abbreviations to the groups and try to figure out where the cars were on the field.

And then I get there and I’m like, well the field’s not that big because he made it sound like it’s gonna take an hour and a half to get to one end of the field and then you’re not gonna be able to cover the other half. And like all this, I was like, what? The

William Ross: way it was presented, it was very daunting and it was like, oh crap.

Because then you get nervous. ’cause the position you’re being put into. Yeah. And how people are perceiving you. You don’t wanna look like an idiot. [00:14:00] But also to John. And you know, the concourse individuals themselves have put on the event because they put the trust in John to John, find the people and da da da.

So we come up. So it’s like, you know, it’s a big responsibility. But then to your point, we get there and it’s okay. This is very manageable, you know? Which is great. ’cause that was the one thing about it. It wasn’t like they had 500 cars or something like that, you know? Yeah. You could technically stopping to look at some and this and that.

Probably 45 minutes, an hour if you’re really kind of stopping some of the cars and scrutinize them. It wasn’t that overwhelming once we kind of got the lay of the land.

Crew Chief Eric: Well, your slice of the cake was a lot easier than mine too, because Yes, it was all the Ferraris were together. Yeah.

William Ross: That made it, I was, yeah, that did make it very, very simple.

They were all just in this one spot. Perfect. And basically almost in chronological order too, which was great.

Crew Chief Eric: I was like, which manic? A DD person put all the German cars where they did, they were all over the place. I was like, it felt like a bee buzzing around trying to like weave a story. And so you and I strategized quite a bit on how we wanted approach the field, but in the end.

What was it? [00:15:00] We had a couple financial groups, US Bank, there were a bunch of different groups that had gone out and these tours and all this kinda stuff. So one of the docents took the US Bank guys and kind of went off with them by themselves. And then we were with John. I never saw this side of John before.

I mean, he doesn’t like it when we call him the professor, but I called him the professor in an affectionate way, like Gilligan’s Island. Right. As

William Ross: a side note, in regards to. Mr. Professor, we kinda were told that he, we wished that we wouldn’t call him that or put that out there anymore due to some circumstances.

So, yeah. Yeah. We only can do that in private, I guess, from

Crew Chief Eric: now on. So we’re gonna continue to say it throughout this episode, right? Yeah.

William Ross: We’re gonna continue to say it. So to drive it home because you a request was made, but we’re like, sure. That’s like the worst thing to do is to ask that. ’cause then you’re just gonna double down.

Right? Right.

Crew Chief Eric: So he starts lecturing and he starts with like these cheaty chitty bang, bang, open top cars from like the 1920s and stuff. And I’m like, okay, where is this going? And then eventually he’s like, [00:16:00] all right, Eric, William, you take over. And we’re like, uh, excuse me.

William Ross: Yeah. Again then. And he wandered off too.

Yeah. Stayed there and kinda like oversaw him. Just be sure you know. Nope, I gotta go like, all right. Thank God we were together and we tag teamed it. Yeah, I think that was very helpful. Instead of just getting thrown into the very deep end, that helped a lot too, because then he played off each other and as you’re talking, someone can fill in a gap or what have you.

So that, that worked out very well. ’cause the other fact was the group we were taking around showing cars, you know, they’re not car, I mean they like cars. A couple guys had a Porsche snap, but it’s not like they’re hardcore, right? Like us. But it was interesting, you know, you pick up on the cues of things that are gonna interest them ’cause you wanna keep ’em, uh, attention, captivate ’em and get ’em.

So it’s kinda like you had to see what perked people up and stuff like that. And being money and stuff like that. I started touching on about avoiding taxes and Montana license plates and all this kind of stuff. And you

Crew Chief Eric: went into this whole investment thing and

William Ross: I

Crew Chief Eric: was like,

William Ross: that

Crew Chief Eric: gives me a break. I can collect my thought.

They seem to kind of grasp bond of that. I’m like, I thought you [00:17:00] guys’d be something they’d be interested in. Well, and they were, they were into the super fun facts. Right. And I think, yeah, we started off well talking about, you know, Porsche and 20% of the market for Porsche comes from California.

Everybody’s like, Ooh, ah, that’s really cool. And then, you know, we led into other things, you know, and there was a lot we talked, ’cause I think we had them for 45 minutes maybe to an hour, just to ourselves. It was nice to know that by the end, granted they’re there. It’s part of like a corporate outing for this investment group.

And you know, somebody paid for their lunch and all the thing, you know, to kind of wine and dine them. But we didn’t lose anybody. No. When we got to the end. And I think that’s a indication that we did an okay job.

William Ross: No, I agree. No one wandered off the herd, didn’t thin out or anything like that. And I think that’s a, hey that we’re, I guess we’re doing it right I guess, you know, so

Crew Chief Eric: I like the whole docent thing.

I think it’s cool. Would I do it again? Yes. Obviously this is the thing that leads to the next thing. So we’ll see when we get the call to go do pebble and all that. This was all part of building up to that. So your takeaway from being a concourse docent and, and I know your feelings on being a concourse [00:18:00] judge ’cause you did an entire episode about that leading

William Ross: up to this event.

I mean, no, I’d love to be a docent again. I mean, ’cause this weight’s not getting put on you in regards to objectifying something and putting points to it. I would do it again, a heartbeat. And I thought that the idea presented was like, hey. Go to Pebble this year and shadow some people and stuff like that.

I thought that was a great way to go about doing it. Then next year in 2026, then hey, you step in. Yeah. Instead of just like, okay, 2026, you step in. Okay, here you go. You’ve done a few more events or something like that. And I don’t know if, hey, maybe we gotta do a few more. I don’t know. But if we get asked, I mean, I’d do it in a second to be another docent again, because I thought that was great.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah, absolutely.

William Ross: You know, you get in for free, which is great, but hey, you know, you meet some nice people and stuff like that, you know, and it was a lot of fun. Definitely. It was a lot of fun.

Crew Chief Eric: So big thank you to John for inviting us. Yes. And making

William Ross: us

Crew Chief Eric: part of that. So yeah, for sure. Yeah. A huge thank Before we transition away from California and talk about Europe.

Gotta talk about our rental car for just a second.

William Ross: So fast. So fast.

Crew Chief Eric: We were chatting about this thing on Discord the other day [00:19:00] and you know, new Volkswagens and all this kinda stuff. So you, you ended up with a 2025 Jetta with a 1.5 turbo slush box automatic. Oh.

French Anthem: If

Crew Chief Eric: you remember on the, I think it was the trip back or two Sonoma John started without sort of starting.

He got under my. Skin because he’s talking about how nice it is, and I’m like, you obviously have not owned Volkswagens in your lifetime because this is, oh, I got on my soapbox and I was going off about, oh, how much I disliked it, and then I got a chance to drive it, disliked it even more. And you sat there quietly, sort of just smiling and not saying anything.

So I wanted to get your final opinion on our Jetta rental car because we’re gonna talk about rental cars more as we go along.

William Ross: You think to yourself, God, this is probably the worst rental car there is on the planet. But then you get to Europe into the 2008, it gets beat. You’re like, holy crap. It is possible to find something that’s even a bigger pile of shit.

Crew Chief Eric: To say that that Jetta was gutless is a [00:20:00] compliment to that car. Oh my god. It was bad. Yeah.

William Ross: If you’re a 16-year-old girl getting her first car, it’s perfect.

Crew Chief Eric: The Jetta’s always had that reputation, so it’s fantastic for that. No offense, Tanya.

William Ross: I don’t think that thing had more than 90 horsepower. I don’t know.

It was, it was awful. And everything was plastic inside. I mean, you can just tell It’s a mess. I mean, it’s built to be a rental car. Yeah. Now basically that’s all it is. Built and sell to all the rental car issues. That’s all that thing is for Yeah, you might have one here, two or there on a lot or something.

But I mean,

Crew Chief Eric: I’ve said it before. I’ll say it again. No one aspires to own a rental car. Hands down, right? No. So again, as we wrap out the California part of the trip, I wanna give another shout out to John Summers, the motoring historian. He’s got an episode that’s gonna air right behind this one, and he too talks about his rental car experience in Cape Cod.

And I gotta tell you, editing it, I was laughing my ass off like it was that Seinfeld moment. It’s gold, Jerry. It’s gold. [00:21:00] It’s really good. You gotta listen to it and it really goes with the whole theme of the rental car thing. So check out the motoring historian after this airs on Friday,

France. Do we start with your flight like you had

William Ross: some bad flights? Oh my God. Yeah. I mean, I was getting screwed by United Left, right and Center. Everything’s set. Everything’s good. Then get to the airport. Now mind you, I had bought extra leg room, all that stuff and everything because like I’m not gonna spend extra money, but I kept following the prices.

I checked every couple days to see what it is, and all of a sudden, bam, it was $950 to upgrade the first class. But I was like, done. So upgrade the first class. I’m like, great. Hey, eight hours I can sleep. Then that way when I get there, hey, we’re resting you. Get to the airport flight’s. Delayed weather in Dulles.

’cause that’s where I was supposed to fly in from Cleveland to Dulles. Dulles over, it’s delayed like six hours. So it’s [00:22:00] like, well I ain’t making that connection. That ain’t happening. I had like a two and a half hour later or so. It was like, okay, making it

Comedian Laura Ramoso: the flight to Paris. Paris. No, this is not the flight to Paris.

Okay, the flight to Paris. You need to go to terminal two. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Flight 3 0 9. Service to Paris. Paris.

William Ross: So, you know, my phone starts blowing up, trying to get things switched, whatnot. And I’m like going, I don’t know what I’m gonna do. And their first choice and response was, well, we can get you out tomorrow.

Ah,

Comedian Laura Ramoso: I can offer upgrade. I upgrade you to the flight tomorrow.

William Ross: I’m like, no. What would you do if you go into Europe and all you lose a whole day and everything like that. Oh, it’s just, oh, let’s go tomorrow. I go, there’s gotta be something better. I’m like, serious. It’s like, you know, and they think it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread.

Like, oh, we solved this problem, we’re the greatest. I’m like, you gotta be kidding me. I’m not the only one. ’cause all these other people too are, you know, in the same boat that we’re on this flight,

Comedian Laura Ramoso: we’re looking for passenger Marcos. Third for brown hold and iron glance.

William Ross: So then finally [00:23:00] after about 45 minutes, I didn’t get a phone call or nothing like that.

All I get is another text with the thing saying, oh, okay, now you’re flying to Chicago. Then Chicago, of course I might get in the person, but then I look at my seat, I’m like, all right, you

Comedian Laura Ramoso: are in the window seat. Okay, no problem. I changed the middle.

William Ross: It’s premium plus I ain’t gonna complain. It’s still, you got the nice seat, everything like that, but you know it’s not your own little cubicle, whatever.

So it is a downgrade. Yes. So I get to Chicago, which you fly enough, you get to learn to airports. They have Diet Mountain Dew Hopkins. There’s only two of the food places up Soon as you go through TSA that, so you gotta like buy ’em and walk all the way down. But anyways, it’s a different story.

Crew Chief Eric: He builds all his travel around where he can acquire Diet Mountain Dew.

Exactly.

William Ross: And it’s critical. It’s like, I’m gonna do a travel guide on it. They had it, so I you like, I bought a couple, so I’m waiting ’cause it was like two hours, whatever before the flight was going over. So I call United said, Hey, uh, you got me there, which is great. I go, but what are you gonna do about the downgrade?

Can you do something right? What are you gonna do? Nothing. And I just gave up. I mean I didn’t even bother after I got home to bother with any of that. I’m like, it’s just a waste of time. And

Crew Chief Eric: the best part is, [00:24:00] while this is all happening, you’re texting with me, I’m talking with David Middleton, I’m talking with David Lowe from the A CO, all this stuff.

And my flight had changed ’cause I was supposed to go to Boston and go over. Yeah. And I got redirected to Detroit and then went over and we were trying to figure out when are we gonna land? When are we gonna be there? Oh my God, you’re gonna have to wait for me. And then it turned out I was waiting for you and like it

William Ross: was a whole circus and no, almost basically it was a flip flop.

’cause it would’ve been, originally I was gonna get there 40 minutes for you and then now it just flipped. And you got there four minutes for me and I worked out big things just getting over there. But you get nervous ’cause you’re like, okay, is this kinda gonna set the tone and whatnot? It’s going over there.

It’s like. You know what got there. It was great. Now, of course, the one thing I will say is my partner for the trip stated that he’s at the enterprise, but there’s five different hubs and terminals over there at Charles de Golf, and each one has their own rental car thing. So I’m down in this parking garage, wandering around looking for, alright, where the frick is he?

And he is like, oh, I’m standing right in front of the thing. I’m like, no you’re not. He goes, no, there’s only the one. I’m over at [00:25:00] two. Like, well I’m in five so I’ll be there in a half hour ’cause I gotta take a train. Eventually found him. It only took an hour. I mean, you know, and walking forever, five

Crew Chief Eric: miles I think it was.

I, I was amazed ’cause the last time I went, I went with Dave Middleton, you know, I was texting him and all this kinda stuff. He was on his way back to Germany anyway, and I’m like, Hey, remember, and this and that. And it took him like two hours to get through customs. I blazed through customs in like two minutes.

I did too. Yeah. It was amazing. Yeah. So I go to the rental counter and I’m talking to the guy and he’s like, wait, wait,

William Ross: wait, wait, wait, wait. Tell him what you thought you were getting.

Crew Chief Eric: Well that’s, that’s what I’m getting at, right? So I’m talking to the rental guy. I said, please make sure I’m in France. I would like a French car.

The last time I was here I got an Italian car, doesn’t make any sense to me. Like I would like to rent a French car. And he’s like, oh, not a problem. I already have you booked in one. I have a EO 2 0 8. I said, oh, okay. 2 0 8. That’s awesome. I was like, is it a GTI? And he goes, oh yeah, GT series. Oh cool. ’cause I’m thinking Hot hatch 2 0 8, this is gonna be awesome.

There’s only the two of us. We can go bombing down some B roads with this thing. [00:26:00] ’cause I think the two eight is really good looking car. GTI sized it’s appropriate hot little engine and all this kind of thing. Even if it had a downgraded version of the motor, I still would’ve been happy with it. So I tell William, I’m all excited.

We’re getting to 2 0 8, this is gonna be great. This is gonna be fantastic. Hopefully it’s not that metallic mustard color that they come in. So they send us not to the normal parking lot that I’m used to where the cars are right there. ’cause I kept looking at it. Some really cool stuff in the lot, the brand new Ipson, some Audis, like other stuff was in the, I was like, okay, well I don’t see a 2 0 8 anywhere in the lot.

I’m like, oh no, no, no, no. You gotta go to the bowels of de gall. Yeah. Three levels down into this parking garage where they hide all the cars under the airport. It’s like subterranean, right? And we get down there and it looks like something out of black mirror and we’re just walking and walking and walking.

And there’s just row after tunnel after row after tunnel of just cars and cars And cars are like, where the hell are we? And we finally get, it’s like 24 out of 26 or something like that. And we get all the way down, the far end [00:27:00] end, we’re walking down the aisle and I’m like, I don’t see any two oh eights anywhere.

The key, when you blink the key, it wouldn’t make any noise. So it was like, where is it? So we found this one guy, he was this random guy sitting in a chair. I guess he’s the attendant.

William Ross: No booth, no nothing. Just in a chair.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah. He’s just sitting there in the garage underground all day long. That’s what he gets paid to do.

And I’m like, I’m looking for this car and I can’t find it. So he looks at the little tag and he walks us over and he goes, boop. And he blinks the lights and he goes, this is your car. I’ll look at William. And then I run to the back of the car and I’m like, 2008. What is this? I forgot to add a zero. Oh on that little description.

It was a manual, which is exactly what I wanted. But here’s the deal. And Tanya, you can sympathize. ’cause when we get to the Italy part of this, you could talk about your rental car. 2008 is the size of a Tiguan. The older Tiguan, about that size. C-U-V-S-U-V, whatever. Do you know the specs of a 2008 peo? How many cylinders?

How many

Executive Producer Tania: hears pers on a scale of [00:28:00] dog? Shit. Slow to

Crew Chief Eric: Pretty much. Yes.

William Ross: Yeah,

Crew Chief Eric: it’s a turbo. I’ll give you that. It is a turbo. It’s

William Ross: a, it’s an odd number of cylinders. We’ll tell you that. Is it really a three cylinder Yes. Three cylinder of turbo? Yes.

Crew Chief Eric: How many Hearst pers 115. 115. That’s generous. Oh man, that Jetta made 115 horsepower.

You kidding me? We looked it up. I don’t remember what the torque numbers were. ’cause it did feel torque. Year 75 horsepower for something that weighs 3,200 pounds with two adult. And their luggage in it. So you can imagine how fast it was. Well, he thought it was a diesel. When we were leaving. It sounded like a diesel.

I was like, oh, they gave us a diesel. We’re screwed.

Executive Producer Tania: So I would’ve scorched it off the line in my 40-year-old.

Crew Chief Eric: Yes, a thousand percent Audi. A thousand percent. It did have that diesel sound to it. It hummed kinda like a motorcycle at high RPM. It revved up pretty quick. It just didn’t do anything when it revved up.

No. [00:29:00] So it didn’t, it got horrible fuel economy too. We’re gonna talk about that. Yeah. So no, the fuel economy was amazing actually. Just enough. Just enough. Just enough. So it was toy, I think what saved it was the gearing was so tight and so short that it must have been like a four 11 final drive because it would spin up pretty quick.

That’s all it was, saving that car. ’cause otherwise it wouldn’t get out of its own way. So it took us an hour and a half to get out of Paris.

William Ross: Yeah. But yeah,

Crew Chief Eric: you have to cut through it. So it took forever. And then the two and a half hours to Lama, three hours after that on the highway to get to the middle of nowhere.

Driving through Indiana. That’s what he told me. He’s like, I flew all the way here to drive through Indiana. That part of France is like flat and just farmland and boring. And if you’ve driven on Route 70 going east or west in the middle of the country, it’s almost exactly the same. It’s like, all right, whatever.

So we show up finally in downtown Lamont. I had never been there because the last time I went I stayed at the track. So that’s what we did. [00:30:00] So we’re in downtown Lamont and I turned to you and I go, so we drove through Indiana to end up in Baltimore. Yeah, because that’s what it looks like, the trams and everything.

Oh yeah. All of it. Turns out Williams like, oh, my Airbnb is across the street from you. Well, across the street was under a bridge. Through a tunnel, but realistically, on the other side, on the other side of the block, I was directly out the front door of the downtown Lamont train station. So that was like right there.

And we’re like, oh, okay. This is cool. And it wasn’t far from the track. It was what, three, four miles? Yeah,

William Ross: it wasn’t that far. I mean, a little traffic in there, but yeah. Well, it depends on which route we went that day.

Crew Chief Eric: That was just it. So the GPS never took us the same way twice. No. And it would take like a half an hour to go three miles.

It was absolutely insane that one time we came back, we went down these roads. Where it’s like, if you’ve seen those episodes of Top Gear where they’re in Italy and they’re trying to fit the car between the walls, it was really tight. Cars just parked as tight as they could be. And I’m like, are these one way streets?

What if a car comes the other way? I mean, it was nuts. It wasn’t as stressful as it is to drive [00:31:00] in Paris, but it was really just kind of a obnoxious, the way Lama is laid out, it’s very industrial, it’s very tight, it’s very old. It’s cute, I guess you could say. Yeah, it’s a lot of

William Ross: one way stuff. ’cause of those trams, that’s what kinda screwed everything up.

’cause all of a sudden it’ll be one way. So you gotta go through these little enclaves or whatever and that’s the route. And they love a traffic circle. Geez, we But your hotel was remodeled, which was nice. I had a fiat in the lobby. It was awesome. Closet you had was a little tiny.

Crew Chief Eric: Oh my God. Oh yeah. I had initially booked the room thinking David Middleton was coming with us.

And I booked a room with two beds. And the pictures, everything looks bigger ’cause he’s a fish eye lens and whatever. William comes, I checked out his Airbnb, which was super nice. He had a ton of space. I go up to my room, which was the coldest place in all of Europe. Yeah. Below zero all the time in that room.

It was ridiculous. But I walk in and I’m like, oh my God. And he just looks at me, starts laughing. It’s not two king beds or two queen beds. No, no. Two twins that are basically next to each other. And I’m like, oh my God. That would’ve

William Ross: been hilarious [00:32:00] if Middleton did end up coming because you, I’m like, oh Lord, one of you would’ve been sleeping on my couch.

He wouldn’t have cared. He’ll tell you the story. We shared a room in fer. But we’ll leave that where it is. Yeah. But my r and b was nice. I had one bedroom. I mean it was ground for full kid. I mean it was nice to had this courtyard. The young couple above me, the kid worked at uh, he’s A BMW salesman, the dealership there and they just adopted this cute little spaniel puppy and Oh

Crew Chief Eric: yeah, it was great.

He was having a good old time. Oh yeah. Meanwhile, the first day there was nothing going on at the track. So we went to the museum and figured, knock that out, get that outta the way, go to the official boutique, which is the official merchandise store and all that kinda stuff. So William, your impressions on the museum seeing it now, outside of the pictures that I had showed you when I went the first time, it’s very

William Ross: car centric.

You can see where they’re getting to. But I mean, no, you go to some places, the settings all there, they really sell it on the ambiance, stuff like that. And obviously, you know, they’re doing a huge expansion. Probably two years it’d be done, but it’d be cool to see what they end up finishing with. It’s great because it’s about the cars, it’s [00:33:00] about to race, stuff like that.

And again, it’s not some massive thing where you can get lost in it and it’s like, well why do they have this here? You know, it’s Lamont Cars. Cars that race at Lamont. It was a great way to start the trip for sure. Membership has the privileges, an A CO. So if you ever go, be sure you are an A CO member ’cause you get ’em for free.

Yeah, that was awesome. And

Crew Chief Eric: the other thing I love about that museum is. It’s in chronological order. Yes. So you start with the earliest cars and you wind up with the newest winners and then they had their McLaren display and then they expanded and added the 24 hours of Motos display, which is pretty cool.

I’m hoping when they expand the museum in the next couple of years, maybe they’ll have some of the big trucks in there and some of the other stuff that they run. That would be really, really cool to see.

William Ross: You know, I didn’t ask and I don’t know if you had seen it but you know, ’cause you go to some of those ones kind of like when you go to an art museum, you get the headphones and you’re like, you just do your own walking tour.

I dunno if they had that, that’d be kind of cool if they did that. Yeah. But it was awesome to start from the beginning and you get all the way to wasn’t last year’s winning car was two years ago winning car, wasn’t it? Still all dirtied up, everything like that, which is cool like how they kinda do for Daytona and [00:34:00] stuff like that here.

But it’s really neat ’cause you can just see how things progress and were, and how things changed technologically, everything like that. And how went from street cars to full on race cars, kind of back to street cars, back to full on race car. I mean. So it’s really neat to see that progressive and seeing the jump in certain areas where you can see like what it was like a

huge

William Ross: jump in regards to aerodynamics and just the engineering thought that went into going something a totally different route in regards to just following the same old shit.

It’s really great. I mean it’s definitely something you need to go see when you’re there and

Crew Chief Eric: it’s right at the front gate. You can’t miss it right at the front. Yeah,

William Ross: it’s right there.

Crew Chief Eric: Did we go shopping after that or was that the next.

William Ross: Yeah, no, we went in because, yeah, ’cause we were looking at buying, I bought some books and I bought the remote control 4 9 9.

Yeah, yeah. Got it. And the guy was there at the classic autograph and I was like, oh crap, I could’ve brought it, had him sign ’em. But he does those really cool comic book type storybook that were really, yeah. And they’re cheat. There’s only like 10, 12 bucks thing know, it was like I bought a couple of them again is that scenario you can kind of go through and you could spend a crap load of money if you really wanted to.

But then you get into, which we [00:35:00] kind of had this discussion is we’ll get into the third day or second day we were at the track to, okay now space in my suitcase. Yeah, we mentioned at the museum too, it’s like, well let’s see if maybe it’s somewhere else you can find a better price on it. If not, you can come back in the museum and buy it.

But you know, I had a lot of cool stuff. I mean I could have went to town buying a lot of the books they had there. I bought the one. But like, just historical, everything like that. I mean just fantastic stuff there. It’s nice ’cause it’s, again, you can actually put your hands on everything like that. Yeah.

So, but it’s always gotta keep in mind if European sizes. To American sites. Oh boy. Because that is the dilemma you can run into. That can be a big problem.

Crew Chief Eric: So day two, a Lama classic, the track is still not hot, they’re still teching, they’re getting cars ready. So we end up doing some shopping at all the different pagodas that are there in the villages.

And then we do the paddock tour.

William Ross: Exactly. And I didn’t know this, you know, I’m thinking, oh this is great how they have this set up. No on tracks, just all tech and stuff like that. All the cars are in the paddock. Once you can try and figure out which paddock is which and where they’re all at, then you can go walking through ’em all.

But then obviously go through all the merchandise day and stuff like that. You can take [00:36:00] that time to do it. It’s not like you got a day where there’s all this on track stuff going on. Like, well I gotta watch what’s going on in the track. Well, but I wanna go see this. You know? So yeah, you can spend that time and get the lay of the land and it’s awesome to see.

I know how they everything set up, but I didn’t know previous tions of that. They didn’t have that on Thursday. They jumped right in on a Friday and went, oh wow. So you didn’t have that opportunity to do it. So I was like, oh this is great. It’s just really cool to see. ’cause everything’s there. You can get right up on the cars.

A couple of ’em here and there had kind of roped off and so they should have, because they were rather expensive vehicles. But 99% of ’em just walk right along the side, go talk to the crews, everything like that. So you can really get. Into it and looking at what they were doing and what the car was. And that was really cool.

And they had some very unique cars there too. Yeah, that was awesome. You know, I mean it’s, ’cause you, you had that access to get right up on ’em. I mean it was, it was awesome.

Crew Chief Eric: Well, we never made it to the group C Paddock because they must have put it at the airport. It was so far away. Yeah. From everything.

Yeah, exactly. They kept those cars hidden, but they were blocked off by eras. So you’d go into, you know, [00:37:00] 1923, which is the beginning of Lama, to like, I think 1933. And then the next one was like 34 to whatever. And then there was like all the heyday of the Ferrari were all together and then, you know, the hoopla, the sixties with the GT forties and all that stuff.

So they had all these like corrals just for the paddocks and you would move from one era to the next, which I thought was really, really cool. And then the legends of lama, those were up in a big pavilion, really pretty with the restaurants around it. That’s where like all the main stationary shops are and everything.

Yeah. So that was really cool. And then you had car clubs? Like everywhere. Oh,

William Ross: everywhere.

Crew Chief Eric: Oh my goodness.

William Ross: You know, obviously it’s a big place, the whole track itself. ’cause they weren’t using the Bugatti circuit, so that’s where they had a lot of these clubs and yeah, it was one of those deals where every day we all of a sudden figured out there was something new we stumbled on.

It was just like, oh geez, I didn’t know this was here. You know? ’cause you’re just kind of going around following stuff, trying to figure out. And that was neat too ’cause you always find something new but it just, the car clubs itself are awesome.

Crew Chief Eric: Well I read there was 8,000 cars on display, everything under the sun.

You saw how big that place is. It didn’t feel [00:38:00] like it, but there were cars everywhere

William Ross: on display in groupings. What? I mean, again, it was fantastic ’cause it was kinda like get your cars and coffee almost in essence. Well I mean the Shelby Village alone was the size of the normal

Crew Chief Eric: car shows. Huge.

William Ross: Yeah. And we find, didn’t find that till the last day when it was raining too.

That was the other thing too. Trying to find John Pierre and, and going there. And we met Mr. Aaron Shelby as well. But yeah, so it’s like that alone, I mean, God now kicking ourselves that we didn’t find that the day before because they must have had at least a hundred different variations of Shelby. GT 40, GT three.

Oh it’s insane. Cobras everything. It was just nuts. Well

Crew Chief Eric: that and the original Shelby car carriers and the trucks. Yeah. And

William Ross: like all, oh, it was nuts. That was really cool to see. But the one thing I will say is I still can’t understand why they call the different groupings plateaus. You know, I don’t, I don’t know why Plateau.

And that was what the class they call Plateau two. Plateau One Plateau. What? And so the first day, though, I mean, that opens up a can of worms when you start going shopping because they have anything in everything under the sun that you could want, that you desperately want, that you desperately [00:39:00] need in your mind.

I need none of it, but I want all of it. Exactly. And it’s kinda like the other place you go, a lot of them clustered up. A lot of ’em had the same things, so you kinda like could chop it, but 90% of ’em all had different things. You know, you had all your models, stuff like that. But there were different types of models these places and just, I ended up buying some models.

Eric’s ended up buying some models because it’s like, uh, you twisted my

Crew Chief Eric: arm though and I’m, I am glad it is sitting here. I’ll, I’ll do a little show and show and tell. I had to buy a backpack to bring this home. This is sick wide body, second generation Audi Quatra coup. This is number 7 99 out of 2,500 that were produced.

It was well worth it. Again, I had to buy a backpack. Just to bring it home, but

William Ross: it was priced good too. That

Crew Chief Eric: was another thing too. It wasn’t like it was obscenely priced, 119 Euros, so I paid more for model cars before.

William Ross: It was super cool. Yeah, and clothing wise, that was really cool too because there’s a lot of stuff that you don’t see over here, and when you go to any races here in the States, you know, you don’t see any of this type of stuff that they’re selling.

You

Crew Chief Eric: remember that Golf Mirage polo shirt that I bought? Yeah. My wife absolutely loves that. She’s like, that was a super good pick. [00:40:00] She’s like, I really like it. Looks good on you. Nice colors. Yeah. Oh sure. I like the way it’s made and that wasn’t that expensive. We bought that from one of my favorite vendors.

That I found the last time I was there, which is RS selection. They got some really nice stuff at really reasonable prices.

William Ross: If you’re going in there to look for something special, you will definitely find something special there. A thousand percent. It’s awesome. Great stuff. A tip. If you go take a really big suitcase and only pack it half full a thousand percent because you will leave with a lot of stuff.

And again, it’s not price bad either, so it’s not that you’re gonna spend thousands of dollars.

Crew Chief Eric: The only thing you’ll leave with less with is the money you started with.

William Ross: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Your light wallet’s gonna be a little bit lighter. But other than that,

Crew Chief Eric: so we get to the first day of track time, which is practice and qualifying.

Shout out to Ty and to Tebow. Are we allowed to use his real name? I’m not sure some secret squirrel stuff going on there, but shout out to them. I hung out with them when we were at the hundredth Lamont. Great guys. A lot of fun. Very knowledgeable about their area of the car world, especially Porsches and Renos and stuff like that.

So we hung out with them for a while and then unfortunately I got called away. I had [00:41:00] some a CO obligations that I had to take care of. And then you went off venturing and wandering and filming and being our roving reporter. So that kind of sucked up that whole day. But we gotta talk about some of the VIP experiences that we had.

Yeah. Throughout the two days of racing that we got

William Ross: you going off to do what you had to do was very beneficial. For you. What ended up coming about with that? Fantastic. And it needed to happen too, but that was great. But yeah, we kind of stumbled onto some things that were like, it didn’t seem like it was gonna be real.

Our first thing we ended up in the BMW hospitality boost. Yeah. ’cause we had found out, and it was very hush hush. It wasn’t like they were shouting out to the world you could do this, that you could purchase a hot lap of the track now just like putting around in a bus with 50 other people. It was out the gate smoking the tires.

It was 400 bucks. So you could split it if you want. So two people, I mean, you weren’t driving, someone drove you, but it was a racer that drove you. It was in an M three touring. You guys were an M three. Yeah. But it was a hell of a deal and still not, [00:42:00] you know, there was us three yourself and Mr. Withers.

You go, you guys split it. And then I’m like, I go, I would spend $800 to do this myself. Yeah. Well worth the price of admission to do this. ’cause it was unbelievable to be able to do, ’cause one, get the sense of the track. It’s not as wise as it looks in TV at all. No at all. You know, and like he’s, Eric said these guys, as soon as you got past that pit lane line.

Boom. Floored. We’re doing a buck 80 down the straightaway. Yeah. Bonkers guys. Were not messing around. I mean, having fun. I just, oh, it was great. But the cool thing was is Bill’s, uh, wife Simone joined us that day. We tried to finagle it at first when we first went in to, to do the hot lab, ’cause you had to get your helmet and stuff like that.

And the first, they kinda like being a little standoff, well no, she needed to sign it, da da da. It’s like, well, it’s paid for. So we’re like, all right, we gave, it ain’t gonna happen. Literally a minute before we’re about to go. They’re like, well, does she wanna go? Yeah, she wants to go. So she was able to jump in the car with me, which was awesome because she probably has never gone more than 65 miles an hour in her life, even on the highway.

So it was hilarious. Listen to her giggle [00:43:00] in the backseat when he’s clicking off how fast we were going. ’cause he’s clicking off in kilometers, so he is like 2 80, 2 9, and it’s like you’re trying to calculate it out. You know, she’s just laughing. That is alone. Like I said, that’s worth $800 to do it.

Crew Chief Eric: It gives you such perspective on the track that you cannot get from tv.

We argue all the time as armchair quarterbacks going, why aren’t they passing there? Just get around them, just go blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then you realize it’s a two lane road that they’re doing 200 miles an hour on no shoulder and it’s super narrow. Yeah. There is no room to pass. There’s certain places where they’ve widened it a little bit, but realistically, when you’re going down the mo sun, you get tunnel vision because you don’t realize on tv, like all the trees, like how close everything is.

Yeah. And then the two slowest corners going through, let’s say Indian arage combination and then mosan corner, you need anti-gravity breaks to get through there. And then Yeah, it’s like turning into somebody’s driveway. It’s a 90 degree corner. Yeah. And it’s super narrow at that pace you’re going through there like 40 miles an [00:44:00] hour.

It’s insane. But what was really cool was Indianapolis Corner, and the Porsche curves obviously, but Indianapolis. Is banked. Yes. There’s a ton of negative camra there that hooks the car and they come in just screaming with the tires on fire and it’s just like, tap the brakes, let the turn, suck ’em in. And then they gotta lose all the speed going into Arage because that’s a 90 degree righthander.

Yeah. And it’s just like, holy crud. But even there in that short stretch from Bolson to Indianapolis, they’re back up to full speed again. You know? And then there’s that kink. And again, on tv or even in a video game, you don’t get the same perspective you do in the car and it becomes suddenly very real and Oh yeah.

It’s the shortest eight and a half mile lap you’ve ever done. Like it goes by in the blink of an eye, it’s so fast. Oh yeah.

William Ross: But it’s justifi because you’re getting one lap, so they, they gotta cool down so you don’t get a full lap, so you’re not blasting through everything and then going back down the front straight.

But to your point, that was eight and a half miles. Wow. Granted the [00:45:00] cars we were in, yes, they were fast. But from what we are doing, you’re probably take another 30 seconds off. Yeah. Wouldn’t you think?

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah, a hundred percent. And when the tires are warm and the cars actually warmed up and the brake, I mean, they just come out of the gate, the cars have been sitting there for hours, fire ’em up and just.

Full bore out the door. And I’m like, yeah. Like I told my coach, you’ll listen to it on the video that goes along with this. And I’m like, dude, the tires are cold. And he’s like, yeah, yeah. And then he just steps on it even more. And I’m like, dude, yeah, let’s warm them up. Yeah. And he’s like, four wheel drifting outta one of the corners.

I’m like, Bravo. We didn’t die.

William Ross: Yeah. I mean, they did not hold back one bit. And again, that’s what for the whole spirit is you would think in your mind like, okay, they’re taking people out on the track. Yeah. You sign your life away, in essence when you sign your forms and stuff. Hit that line man foot to the floor and just gone.

Yeah. They were not whole and going around all the court, I mean as fast as that thing could take it, they were going at it nose the tail. It was pretty awesome. Awesome. And

Crew Chief Eric: to your point, the BMW booth was probably one of the coolest VIP experiences because we got to be over top [00:46:00] of the pit box during the Group C run when they were qualifying and their pit change and all that stuff.

And then obviously a pit fire broke out. You can check out the video. It’s actually really comical. Yeah. But it was such a awesome view, such a great place to be. You’re sort of in the middle of pit row too, so you could see from one way to the other. I mean it was, oh, that was awesome. That was, oh yeah. I mean the view and watch that was pheno food

William Ross: sucked.

No Diet Mountain Dew beverages sucked. But the view was phenomenal. I mean, you’re leaning right over and you check out the channels and the video, stuff like that. Everything’s right there. And I mean, you get the sounds, the smell and everything like that. I mean, it just, and it was awesome when, and you wanted to use that adage of like a monkey to a football uhhuh and one of the stops and they’re during one of the rings because it was just mass chaos from the perspective of, you know, these are historic cars, so normally you have a shop that’s doing it, so that shop’s doing other cars too as well.

Yeah. So they were serving some other ones. So. You like had one guy that was by himself with about 20 people. Then he had five guys. With the five people working on all five cars. [00:47:00] It seemed to be so, it was, it was really cool to see. But the sound, it’s Clarkson says, gives you the fizz. It just, it warms you.

Crew Chief Eric: I mean it just like, yes. I mean it just, it gets to your soul. It’s so awesome. I still think the EO 9 0 5 B, the 19 92 1 with the V 10. Oh with the Jordan Formula one engine was the best sounding group C card there was by far. It just rips your ears out and it also kind of brings a tear to your eye. ’cause you’re like, that’s when motors were motors in Formula One.

Yes. Like they’re pretty awesome. Yes. Talk about the pit stop. I still think those Porsche guys during the Porsche race heard you, because you want to talk about guys clowning around. They put this car in the air on the Jack with no Jacks stand. The dude slides underneath it and Williams’s like leaning out and he’s like, you think they should put a Jacks stand under there?

William Ross: Oh, OSHA’s not involved over there one bit or anything. ’cause in all I’m doing is just waiting for that thing to drop on this dude because I wouldn’t trust that floor jack keeping

Crew Chief Eric: that thing up. So from there I went with the A-C-O-U-S-A pre to the [00:48:00] administrator’s lounge, which is pretty cool. It’s all a bunch of a CO people.

They’re even higher up. They’ve got a higher vantage point. It kind of sits almost directly above the BM BMW box. We went there for a little bit and then you and I went to the club to ot, which was pretty cool. Yeah, that’s a different experience. That’s like the exclusive driver’s club. They have their own private box.

It’s all glassed in, got food, a whole bunch, good food, wine. They had the best food by far. Yes. So shout out to Charlotte Verne for doing that. And no air

William Ross: conditioning though. They

Crew Chief Eric: don’t believe in that. In Europe,

William Ross: they don’t believe in that over

Crew Chief Eric: there. Bit stuffy. It was. It was. And then if you opened the door, you got yelled at.

William Ross: Oh yeah. I mean you had some very pretentious people sitting in that thing. And it’s like you look at it, so when you’re in there, it’s enclosed and, and when you’re sitting in the thing, looking on the track, in the thing off to the right, there’s a small little deck here, there’s a door, you go out and right, there’s deck.

But then to the left, same thing, but it’s much larger and it’s got the grandstand seating over by the stairs. There’s security, everything like that, keeping people from entering. So you’re like, oh, it’s part of it. So, and it was stuffy. So we went out there to someone inside decided to lock the door [00:49:00] on us,

Crew Chief Eric: like, oops.

But on the other hand, you get to sit down and you get to talk with Jurgen Barth and you get to talk with Gerard Lause and you get to talk with all these pro drivers that are in there. So that was sort of cool. Yeah. And, and the club de Palat was our refuge when we got rained out on. Sunday. So that worked out really well ’cause it’s the only place that is closed.

So at that point I was like, well it’s a little stuffy but I’m not wet.

William Ross: Yeah, it worked out well. I mean it’s again, for experience wise, it’s, you know, you’re sitting there going, how in the hell did we end up here? Yeah. I mean it’s one of those things like you’re thinking to yourself, the people you mentioned are just hanging out in there, stuff like that.

And again, it just adds to this experience that just seemed to get better and better and better.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah. And I kept collecting more and more armbands as time went on too. You need an armband to go everywhere, right? Yeah.

William Ross: And you need to scan your ticket to enter, you need to scan a ticket to leave or your armband or whatever.

I mean, so they were gathering data left, right, and center. And

Crew Chief Eric: then obviously we did all the A CO stuff like La Chappelle and the Our Tribune and that was all the Tribune was great for breakfast the morning. Yeah, it rained and all that stuff. But there’s two [00:50:00] more things that we did I think that are super cool.

We had to split up in order to do them. So you went to the grid walk and I’ll let you talk about that. And I went to the SPORTIF mode, which is the famous building you see on tv. The round one that has the panorama. It sits over top of start finish and you can see down the Porsche Chicanes down in, you know, where the Ferris wheel is and all that.

And I will tell you the view from there, and I took pictures and stuff is absolutely incredible. Now granted, there weren’t a lot of people up there. We could hear a pin drop. It was like a library up there. Club de OT had the best food. Hands down. We can agree on that. But the Sportif model, it’s one of those places when you go up to that fifth level, you gotta have the special access and the handshake and the colored band and the whole nine yards.

And you’re just like, I am in a place. I think maybe this is where the Pope watches Lamonts. You know what I mean? Yeah. Like it’s, it’s super special. It’s super exclusive. So that was really neat. Now could I have spent the whole weekend there? Not unless all my friends were with me because there wasn’t enough atmosphere at classic versus what I was told is at the 24, [00:51:00] that place is bumping.

It’s like a club and it’s like a whole thing and there’s music and you’re watching the race. And so with a different group of people, different atmosphere, that would be a lot of fun. That would be holy cow. Sees so much from there it’s got a 270 degree view. So it’s like you can see all around you, which is awesome.

William Ross: That’s a neat thing. Yeah. Been on cron ’cause right where that thing’s located. I mean you’re seeing down the one way you’re seeing down the other way. I’m sure that was spectacular. And again, that was the cool thing too, is you got to be able to go do that stuff. I got the opportunity to go do some other things too.

So I mean we got these experiences Yeah. That we can share. Yeah, we did a lot together and knew it but then we got to do these separate things that really kind of just took it to the moon in regards to what the experience was regarding. The grid walk was unbelievable and a huge thank you to Bill Withers ’cause he had gotten a band to do it as a thank you for getting his wife to go on the, a hot lap, whatever.

He gave it to me and I was unbelievably humbled that he actually, you know, gave that to me. ’cause you can pay to get to do it but it ain’t cheap. Probably the most expensive upgrade. Yes. It was like [00:52:00] 1500 bucks or something, wasn’t it? So it was insane. Yeah, it was crazy amount. So I mean that was like huge on his part.

I mean I just like, I could not believe it. So yeah, that was really cool to go out there and there might’ve been, I don’t know, 500 people, 300 people that probably got out there to do it out of the 200,000 that were in attendance. Uh, you wanna talk about humbling thing? ’cause you know, so we go in and as you start going down the line, ’cause you’re at the tail end, things start thinning out where people start stopping to talk all this stuff.

So, you know, you’re not in such a crowd. But I got all the way down and was filming stuff that night. Stopped, got separated, like went out in the middle of the track up front as far as I almost could go. And I had to change my battery. So I’m down on the ground all of a sudden, you know, I stand up and I look at the crowd.

You wanna talk about holy shit moment because I mean, right there alone’s gotta be about 80, 90,000 people standing there and you know, they’re looking at you going, how’s this jackass get down there? It’s very humbling to see that crowd like that. I mean, it’s really puts things again into perspective for what these guys see.

It’s. Unbelievable seeing that [00:53:00] and seeing what the lineup was. The cars talking to the guys. ’cause they started out, I think it was Plateau four, I think it was.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah. It’s all like the cobras and the GT forties. Yeah. All the stuff from the sixties.

William Ross: Yeah. That did the start. They did the running Laman start, which

Crew Chief Eric: was epic.

Yeah.

William Ross: They did the actual one and it’s like, I’m amazed at a couple of the guys didn’t fall over from heart attacks. That guy in that Cobra late elevens for quite a long time. There was a some sketchy moments, some of those guys pulling out going, Ooh, that’s gonna be expensive, but that one’s cool too.

Bringing that back. They have done such an awesome job putting that together and just creating the experience and how and how you can partake in it. Yes, granted some of the stuff’s gonna be a bit pricey, but you know, somehow some way if you can do it, I highly recommend trying to get all these experiences and especially when you buy your ticket, don’t go buy the base thing.

You gotta go buy the ones where you got the paddock access, everything like that. Become an ACL member. You get even more stuff that pays for itself tenfold. I’m telling you right now, thousand percent. It pays for itself tenfold. But it was just, again, the experience again, you know, you see Lifetime, [00:54:00] it’s gonna stick with lifetime.

But that’s something that’s gonna stick at the forefront of your mind because it’s just unbelievable. And

Crew Chief Eric: the racing too. Yeah. Seeing those cars in picture, seeing them in a museum is one thing, but seeing a nine 17, seeing an Audi R eight, seeing a Ferrari 3 33 SP a PEO 9 0 5 B at full tilt. Yeah.

Lamont’s Classic isn’t a race, it’s a freaking time machine. Like it’s taking you back to that era of racing and suddenly you’re like, it’s as if you were there for real. And these guys aren’t messing around. It’s like Goodwood when they do the revival, not the Hill Climb, which is the festival of speed.

Yeah. They’re going at it. I mean, they’re driving nine tenths. They’re not messing around. And it’s like, you guys okay, you’re going home. First of all, I heard every driver pays like 10 grand or 40 grand or whatever the heck it is, and they’re going home with a plastic trophy, but they’re running the crap outta these cars that are in some ways priceless.

Some of them are Oh yeah, one of one, right? And you’re just like, what? Yeah.

William Ross: You’re talking, this is

Crew Chief Eric: high stakes poker right here.

William Ross: Seven Figure Cars, and some of ’em starting with the five to eight. Yeah, I mean, it’s just. And God bless [00:55:00] ’em too. And the cool thing is it’s not like you’re just hearing this engine just blip the throttle and just sitting there.

I mean, you’re hearing that thing coming out, full chat going, I mean it just singing unreal. And it makes you sit there going, why are they getting away from this? Yeah, you get it ’cause environment, this kind of stuff. But I mean there’s gotta be some way to bring that back. ’cause I mean it’s, I wanna say majority of the conversations where when you kind of hear other people eavesdrop and whatnot, everything kept pointing out was about just how.

Glorious those things sounded. Yeah, I mean just, oh, fantastic. And for those just, Hey, I dropped a 20 minute video and all it is is just all on track stuff. I’m not even talking, it’s just hearing the cars go so awesome. Let them do the work. ’cause I mean, that’s all you need to hear.

Crew Chief Eric: And Tanya, they beat us too at, we’ve joked about this before, like on the rich people, thanks where, you know, we should get the go-karts together that look like the replica cars and go racing.

They do that at Lamont Classic with the kids and it is. Hilarious. Yeah, the cars look good. I mean, they’re really cool. Yeah, definitely got the corner marketed on that too. Some of them couldn’t even make it up the hill in that

William Ross: first straight ’cause that is a hill that goes up. It is. It’s deceptive. [00:56:00] It’s steep.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean it’s, you don’t realize how steep that is. And it was ones that had two kids in it, so I think they pushing maximum weight limit on that. But it’s really cool to watch. ’cause I mean, God, they had to have close to 80.

Crew Chief Eric: There was so many, I mean they had to grid ’em up going way back. I mean it was, it was really cool.

Yeah. And they do qualifying for that too. Yeah. It’s just

William Ross: hilarious. Yeah, I mean they take that stuff serious. That was really cool. See, ’cause it gets the kids involved, it gets them to doing something. A little side story. This is a point when I was kinda wandering around myself and I was walking past the one paddock.

Sure enough, as it’s trying to come out outta the paddock to go down to wherever this lister Kny was sitting there rumbling away and they’re trying to turn right and you know, obviously, you know, these cars don’t have any turn radius. Behind it was the bread van. But these three kids and those little carts were coming up.

There’s a car parked and they’re trying to come, they stopped him right next to that car and they told the guy and the lister, Hey, alright, come out. So the guy’s doing a 10 point turn to try and get around him side pipes right there. Blast these little kids right there at ear level. This guy going by.

I’m like, just move those kids. [00:57:00] Get ’em outta the way. Tell ’em to go. I’m just watching this take place going. That kid’s gonna be deaf now.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah.

William Ross: But seeing those things go like that, and again, it was just those little things that all of a sudden it’s like, oh my god. Elicit. But then the bread van infamous of Bread Van Ferrari right there, pulling out everything like that.

I mean, again, talk about value of a car and everything like that. And she’s like, great deal. Pulling on out, driving away. That

Crew Chief Eric: was so cool. It was great because we talked last time I went to Lama two years ago, like how much walking David and I did and obviously mm-hmm. You know, we’re recounting this, some of it for him because he’s gonna listen to this.

He’s gonna get Yeah. More jealous than he was when we were texting him the whole time. Yeah.

William Ross: I was Florida. Yeah,

Crew Chief Eric: I was Florida. Exactly. So we went from Tetra Rouge to the four Chicanes where the Ferris wheel and the Porsche Experience Center is. That’s sort of like our area outside of the hot lap where we got to see the rest of the track.

That’s where we walked. I recalculated, we were just shy of 40 miles of walking in those four days. So that’s not too long. Well now that was

William Ross: you. Yes. By yes. I had a few extra things in there [00:58:00] because yeah, you’re

Crew Chief Eric: like a busy bee, so

William Ross: going around, but two of the days, because I have some ailments in my body that I reach maximum, I’m gonna go lay down because my body can’t take anymore.

Luckily, the tram goes out there, but it’s not close. And found it the first day. And it was funny enough ’cause I was walking out and uh, Ty was walking there. I ran his, so I walked with him to it and I walked down the one street right there. He went past the K one cart. It wasn’t bad. It was maybe a mile and a half at most, maybe a mile.

So jump on and go. Well. Next day kind of saying I gotta go. They decide to close that stop for whatever reason. That’s the coast to the track. They rock

Crew Chief Eric: strike.

William Ross: Yeah. There’s three other people. There’s two girls standing there and then there’s an Indian fellow standing there and we’re sitting waiting at time’s up there.

I don’t read French. I have no clue. They just goes right past us. Then guy’s talking and we going basically, I could tell what he’s saying. He is like, what the hell? I could make out that and look it up and think whatnot. And he points down. So I go, I guess this one’s closed. We gotta go to the next one. So I’m hustling down the street to the next stop because I don’t wanna get [00:59:00] passed again by the train.

It was nice. ’cause the fact is where we were staying, it basically dropped you off right at where we were at. So, which was great. Didn’t have do much walking out, but it was a hike just to get to that tram to take it back. And I don’t, I never paid, I think, to buy the ticket I just hopped on. And if someone asked, I figured out.

Crew Chief Eric: It’s sort of like the Sonoma thing. You apologize now, next time you’ll pay, right?

William Ross: Yeah. Well they, but I didn’t feel bad because Wither’s wife, Simone, she’s the same thing. She just gets on and she goes, if someone asked, then I’ll pay. Okay. I’m not the only one. So they asked,

Crew Chief Eric: asks good it it’s a lot of walking.

We did a lot of walking. We did a lot of walking. Even when we got back, ’cause we walked everywhere even to go to dinner and we finally found what like the hot spots are for the restaurants and that was at Republic Square or whatever they call it, downtown Lamont. We finally found some good places to eat.

We had dinner with some folks, so that was all good. We did a lot of car spotting while we were roaming around. Yeah, that was neat. All sorts of weird stuff that was out there. Like the sunburst 3 0 8 and you know, some of the other stuff that’s just randomly parked like here and there and everywhere. I mean there’s cars from all over, from [01:00:00] Switzerland, from Italy, from France, from Jersey.

People are coming in. Obviously 200,000 people coming in for this event. So you got cars all over the place and you start to recognize, oh those guys are at our hotel and they’ve got the triumph and you know, that’s the guy with the three 30 Ferrari that was driving downtown or whatever. Yeah, I gotta do my hot car picks.

I came in with two cars, I would’ve taken home from France Street cars are on the track. No, no street cars. Like I would take these cars home with me. They are a little bit more modern. So here, here are my hot picks for cars. I would take home from France. I already know which one is I? Yeah, yeah, yeah. The first one is that EO 5 0 8 Sport Wagon.

Remember that one? The really wide low? That thing was cool. Super aggressive. It looks kind of like a Audi RS six. That was hot. Yeah, that was sweet. Yeah. That’s my number one pick. Yeah, that thing was killer, followed by the hotness of all hotness. That Alpine A one 10 R al team? Yeah, or whatever they

William Ross: pronounce that dude.

That’s what I would take too. I agree with you on that thousand, that thing was gorgeous that that car’s gotta come here somehow, some way. I [01:01:00] mean that thing was phenomenal

Crew Chief Eric: at that level, that old team level. I mean that’s basically a GT three specked car. I mean it’s all gutted out and caged and there’s carbon fiber every time you turn around on that thing.

I mean, the only thing, it doesn’t have sort of like the alpha male four C ’cause of the tub and everything. It doesn’t have a manual transmission. No. So it It’s all computerized flappy paddle. But you know what? Because of all the other cool stuff it comes with, I’m totally okay with it.

William Ross: Oh yeah, I agree with you on that.

I mean, Matt, fair Smoking Tire channel, they got their hands on one, some has it here for a year. I know it was show display or something, but did what he had to do and they made the same exact comment in saying, you know what, you know you can’t get AEM manager, but the way the gearbox, everything works, you don’t miss it.

Yeah. You know, it just. Unbelievable. But the other car I would’ve taken this F told TDF that was there. Oh yeah, that’d been the other one. But again, they were just parked up in the parking lot where we were parked, you know, underneath the car yet. But it just tells you the level of cars that were just out and about.

I think that’s one of the cool things about over there. Granted for us, it’s driving for me, like Ohio to Indiana, to Michigan, whatever [01:02:00] that, but you know, they’re driving from France to Italy, you know, for UK and stuff like that. They take their cars and drive ’em on these road trips, which is awesome to see.

It’s a lot more prevalent over there than it is over here. I think it’s really cool to see. But that’s a cool thing going over there, just seeing the stuff that we can’t get here. Stuff you can drool over, man. We should have that. And just, and, and not just the newer stuff, the older stuff as well. I mean, just stuff that like you know about, you’ve read about, especially like the hot hatches and stuff like that.

It’s like, man, these things are just so cool. I will say the one cool thing if you go there, when you go to the square area, when you figure out where the square’s at, there is the coolest merry-go-round I’ve ever seen Two stories. Unbelievably beautiful. Really cool. Especially if you’ve got kids or little kids.

I mean, is that the one next to the Kentucky Fried Chicken? Yeah, it’s right next to the Kentucky Fried Chicken. You can’t miss it. It adds a little ambiance. You can smell the wave of the fried chicken

Crew Chief Eric: made no sense. So bizarre. Yeah, and they got the drive through window that nobody can drive up to. You walk up to the drive to it.

So bizarre.

William Ross: Yeah, exactly. There’s a lot of [01:03:00] contrasting things. ’cause you know, you’re walking in cobblestones, you have this beautiful old square and then all of a sudden there’s Kentucky

Crew Chief Eric: Fried Chicken. It was so bizarre. And, and that’s the one thing, France food was super eclectic. I know if Brad was here with us, he’d be wanting to know about the food.

Lots of Persian stuff and Indian and curries and like there was a good blend. It wasn’t like the typical like, oh my God, we’re gonna eat escargo. Or you know, something like that. It would, there was a really interesting mix of cuisine in France, so I wasn’t disappointed with that. I don’t know that we had a bad meal.

Well, once we got found to a place that would serve

William Ross: Americans. Yeah. It wasn’t bad at all. Well, there was that

Crew Chief Eric: problem too. Yeah. You don’t have a reservation. We’ll let 20 other people in because you don’t have a reservation. Exactly. Yeah. Whatever.

William Ross: As we said, you got French. Oh, that other place

Crew Chief Eric: is better anyway.

William Ross: Yeah, well it turned out and you’re eating three courses. God, and they look at you very strangely. If you don’t eat one of the courses, they’re like, look at you like you have a third head or something. Because man, you gotta have your app, your Maine, your dessert everyth like that. So it’s like starve yourself a little bit to the day.

’cause you will a hundred percent. We had this discussion over there too. It’s how they’re making money [01:04:00] because it’s not like here, the states where they’re turning tables, turning tables like, Hey, we need four turns to this dinner service. They’re basic. Like one turn. I mean that’s just you. That’s it. Then they’re done.

They close up shop, they go home. Bizarre. It’s unbelievable. It’s all baffling, but tweak their own. So God bless ’em.

Crew Chief Eric: My number one top tip, if you go to Lama now that I’ve actually had to drive there and do that part of it, ’cause I didn’t have to do that the first time. I would say the expo parking outside of the main gate across the museum, right by the T 22 Tribunes and all that stuff, which isn’t far from the A CO Tribune and the Porsche box and the Club de Piot and all that stuff.

That is choice. Like that is prime parking. It was quarter full. Yeah. It cost me 40 bucks to park there for four days. Undercover too. That’s other nice. They have the solar panels everywhere. So I’m like, top tip, if you can buy expo parking, doesn’t matter what event you’re there for, buy those parking passes because it’s a short walk to everything.

That’s the best spot to park,

William Ross: period. Five minute walk to that main gate right there. Done. I mean [01:05:00] museums, right? Yeah. I mean 40 bucks. That’s the deal. That’s make a note of that because that was perfect.

So

Crew Chief Eric: let’s talk about our return trip. We kind of alluded to this earlier on the way out to Lamont, it was sort of like, eh, typical traffic, blah, blah blah.

Nothing really to write home about the way back though, because it was Sunday. Now

William Ross: remember back into our earlier discussion regarding gas mileage.

Crew Chief Eric: Go ahead. Yes, yes. Yeah, we’re gonna, Tanya wants to know about this. So they filled the car for me at Daal. We drove all the way to Lama. We run around, we get lost, we miss an exit or two a couple of times.

That one we backtracked like 20 minutes lost all that time. So anyway, on our way back to the airport to Paris, we are rained out of the race. Like they red flagged a bunch of the plateaus, the sessions, whatever you wanna call them. So we hung out at the Club de Palat, and then you finally were like, man, let’s get the hell outta here.

Let’s just beat the traffic of anybody leaving the track, and let’s get out of the area and head back to Paris. What did we have, like maybe half a tank left or something like that on this. Little three cylinder corn popper.

William Ross: It was below half. Yeah, [01:06:00] I mean, it was right there,

Crew Chief Eric: but I was like, uh, if I do the math, it’s this far away.

We should be okay. It’s mostly highway. It should have been fine. Yeah. Yeah. Should have been key work. So I prepaid the fuel and I was like, I’m not spending any money on this car if I don’t have to. We’re doing okay until we basically get to the edge of what I call Dante’s nine circles of hell, which is all those circles of Paris.

And we have to cut across Paris to get to De Gaul because it’s on the north eastern corner or whatever. So you gotta go through all this mess to get there, and the traffic’s getting worse and the rain’s coming. And it’s just like the last time I drove in Paris. And the drivers are super aggressive cutting people off, and the trucks just get over when they feel like it.

And you’re quietly sitting there and I’m like, gnashing my teeth the entire time. Well, I had a pee real bad. There was that too. And I’m like, we’re not gonna make it. No, we’re not gonna make, and then it was like the mileage was just plummeting. And I’m like, we’re gonna have to stop. There’s nowhere to stop.

There’s nowhere to get off. There’s no fuel. Even the GP PS says there’s no gas around. And then the car starts [01:07:00] making weird. Bing, bing, bing. You’re like, what was that? Ignore it. Making some big noises now like, okay, go a little further. Bing, bing, bing. And then a little light turns on. But one point it shot back up like, oh look, it did.

And the mileage, because we started moving it, so it was like, oh, we’re, we’re in the home stretch. We’re clear. And then the traffic doubled down on us and it got worse. And then more lights started turning on the dashboard. So I kid you not Tonya, we get to desal. Dugal is massive. I mean it’s its own city and you’re driving around and we’re trying to get to the rental place.

And so again, they love their roundabouts. It’s like circling a toilet bowl to get to the rental car place and terminal too. So you gotta go all the way and go here and go there and this and that and the other thing. And we finally get there and it’s all these lights are on the dash. I don’t know if you saw ’em or not, William.

Oh. But I’ve told them, I said We are gonna coast in, there’s nothing left. So we get in there and I just, I put it in neutral and we roll in. According to the gauge, there was 10 miles left in the tank. Yeah. Which I don’t know was the truth because it was on zero. It was red. It was like that top gear episode where [01:08:00] they sealed the gas tank and they kept driving and kept driving and they’re like, when is it gonna run outta fuel?

I think it was whatever was circulating in the fuel rail, it’s what we were running on. Yeah. ’cause there there was nothing left.

William Ross: Good luck getting that to the station of, fill it back up by. That’s gonna be one of the fucking Americans. Hope they had a Jerry can somewhere with some gas. ’cause that wasn’t making it to the gas station.

Crew Chief Eric: We got every penny out of that gas tank. The three cylinder turbo, all 75 horsepower got us to Lamont back on fumes. That’s the

William Ross: only

Crew Chief Eric: impressive part

William Ross: about that car was that Otherwise it was wholly

Crew Chief Eric: unimpressive.

William Ross: Yeah. Ugh. I will say that the hotel, the Hilton, whatever’s right there. Yeah, stay there. And another little tidbit, if you’re coming back out and you got a flat stay at the Hilton, that’s right there because you can get up in the morning, just walk right over to the airport.

Crew Chief Eric: You roll out of bed and you’re at your terminal. It’s like done. Super

William Ross: easy. Nice hotel too. Good food restaurant’s. Really good. Another recommendation for you guys, stay there ’cause it was awesome.

Crew Chief Eric: So shout out again David Milton, we miss you next time. We are gonna shame you into going with us. So your trip ended, you went [01:09:00] home.

Other things going on? I continued the voyage and I met up with my family in Italy and my sister and my mom were already there. This is where Tanya picks up the story ’cause we’re gonna talk about driving adventures in Italy.

Tanya, you got there like a couple days before he went over, right? Yeah, yeah. It’s been a while since I’ve driven in Italy. So I have these not necessarily romantic fantasies about what it’s like driving in Italy, but I began to realize about 20 minutes in to picking up the car at Maza. That driving in Italy has changed a lot.

Remember I was telling you in the car, oh, just, you know, the French, they’re aggressive, but when you get to Italy, it’s like they’re off the chain, they’re unleashed. Everything’s like a Grand Prix. And that might be true in Naples from what I understand, but the rest of Italy is,

Executive Producer Tania: I don’t know. ’cause I guess you hadn’t driven there in a hundred years.

’cause the only thing I found different was I felt like there was more people taking [01:10:00] too long to leave the left lane right to camp for passing. But otherwise. In the types of roads I would drive on. It wasn’t like Autobahn in Germany, people were always normal.

Crew Chief Eric: Is that because of the cameras and the systems that they use over there?

The

Executive Producer Tania: cameras have always been there. I’m like, what was it that you drove that they didn’t exist?

Crew Chief Eric: They were there when I drove 10 years ago. Right. I mean, the tele camera system tutor or whatever they call it that they have over there has been around a while, but now it feels like it’s every 10 feet.

Executive Producer Tania: So there’s two different systems.

Okay. The Tudor system on the large highways, and it’s only on the big alto stratas, which is like our equivalent of 95 up and down the East coast or whatever. The Tudor system is an average speed camera, so it’s actually not a point specific speed camera. So when you cross it the first time, couple miles later.

You cross it again and it’s supposed to calculate your average speed in that, cross the two, and then give you a ticket if you exceeded whatever the hell the average limit is. I’m so screwed [01:11:00] because they’re trying to not have somebody slam on the brakes two seconds before the speed camera and then do a million miles an hour and then slam on the brakes again, right?

So if you kept an average speed, you’re fine. Then they have the auto veloc system everywhere else, like in America where you have stationary cameras that are on the side of the road in various shapes, forms and sizes. Those are taking in point specific reading, but unlike hours which only work in the direction that the cameras pointed, apparently some of those doesn’t matter which side of the road you’re on, it can catch you in either direction.

I’m so screwed.

William Ross: So

Executive Producer Tania: if you thought you were safe, ’cause the camera’s on the other side of the road so I can just keep going. Ooh, might not be the case. I’ve never gotten, knock on wood, I don’t think I’ve ever gotten a speed ticket. I got a weird parking violation ticket one time, not even parking. It was apparently I drove down a street that it was in the two hour window of [01:12:00] which you should not have been driving down the street, and I literally went like three cars deep on this street.

U turned because I realized it wasn’t even the street I needed to be on. U turned left and then six months later got this ticket about how like I was on an uh, unauthorized. Street or something. I’m like, whatever. How do you pay that? Hey man, it’s modern times. Just go online and pay it. They

William Ross: hunt you down.

Don’t, you should see yours about December.

Crew Chief Eric: That’ll be my Christmas gift from Enterprise. Yeah. Basically they’ll Merry Christmas, they’ll

Executive Producer Tania: send it to them and then they’ll forward it along. I mean, hopefully not, they’re really hard because the speed limits tend to fluctuate like a a lot. Wildly, wildly. Like suddenly you’re like, oh, well first of all, you don’t know what the speed limit is.

Like I think I drove for half an hour at one point and I was like, I haven’t seen the speed limit sign. I don’t know how. And I’m like passing under the tutor thing. I’m like, I don’t know how fast I should be going. But I was feeling rest assured by the quote locals who aren’t slowing [01:13:00] down at all. So I’m like, well, if I’m not going any faster than all these other people that are blowing by every form of camera, I guess hopefully I’m okay.

Crew Chief Eric: Could you really go that fast in your rental car?

Executive Producer Tania: I mean, what’d you have? I had a Citroen C3 Air Cross. Compact. SUV. It was slightly larger than what I was supposed to have gotten. I should have gotten probably something the size of a golf. However, when I booked the reservation that I made, you had to set the time you were picking it up and in the US you set a time and it really doesn’t matter.

It’s Yeah, like an indication of when they start billing you. Right. But apparently in Europe, in Italy, when you show up at the rental counter and it’s 1115 and you said you were picking up at noon, they go, we don’t have your car yet.

Comedian Laura Ramoso: You reserve a car. Okay, we have a problem. Your car is not available. We can do a bicycle.

Okay. Or a 7 47.

Crew Chief Eric: She got French in Italy.

Executive Producer Tania: We can [01:14:00] upgrade you for 10 extra euros a day if you don’t wanna wait. And I’m like, okay, I’ve already been up. I left America, I didn’t sleep on the plane. I really wanna stand here for 45 minutes. I

Comedian Laura Ramoso: can offer a discount. It is a special discount because it is a discount of.

Uh, more money you need to pay.

Executive Producer Tania: Screw it. I’ll pay 10 extra dollars. So I don’t know what I should have gotten or what I would’ve gotten, but this is, I got this Citroen compact SUV thing.

Crew Chief Eric: It’s okay because I landed at the same airport as you

Comedian Laura Ramoso: and

Crew Chief Eric: they didn’t have any golfs anywhere, so we got the upgrade as well.

So I ended up with a Nissan Qua. Oh

William Ross: geez. Yeah. Oh. How you pronounce that. Yeah, yeah,

Crew Chief Eric: yeah. Qua don’t know why they call it that in America. That would be the equivalent to the rogue, more or less. It’s in that size range. It’s a Renault like anything else. How many horsepowers did you have, Tanya?

Executive Producer Tania: I think it only had like a hundred or something, I think.

I think. I [01:15:00] think that’s what I saw when I looked it up. It wasn’t a lot.

Crew Chief Eric: I had 158. Yeah. Woo. Race car. Chasing her in the mountains was like, no problem. And Jess was like, you need to back off. ’cause I think she’s got it floored. So driving in Italy to Tanya’s point, it’s not like the old days. That’s what I noticed.

They do drive slower. Although they were making fun when I was talking to some of the locals, like you were talking to some of the locals, they were like, don’t you guys drive fast in America? I’m like,

French Anthem: no.

Crew Chief Eric: National speed limit is 65 miles an hour. Which is like what, one 10? They’re all doing 80 on the highway.

Yeah.

Executive Producer Tania: The speed limit there is basically 80 on the The large highway. Yeah.

William Ross: Kilometers or miles per hour. There’s

Executive Producer Tania: 130 kilometers an hour, which is more or less 80 miles an hour.

William Ross: Yeah.

Executive Producer Tania: Which our speed limit is 65 miles an hour and everybody’s doing 90. So we do drive fast. Yeah. Yeah.

Crew Chief Eric: They don’t drive as aggressive as they used to.

That’s for sure. The one thing I did notice is France. Didn’t have nearly as many trucks as Italy did. The [01:16:00] right lane in Italy is truck after truck, after semi after semi. And they’re all limited to like they can do 65 miles an hour, like tops 55 miles. I mean, they’re really slow so they stay in the right lane.

But the problem is usually on the raa it’s three lanes, sometimes four, but it’s three lanes. Generally they’ll get over. And then you got this slow mule train of semis trying to pass another slow mule train of semis. And so now you’re down to the left lane and then everybody tries to shift over. And then you got some 87-year-old guy in a Fiat 600 that can’t get out of its own way and he’s just parked in the left lane and it’s like, what

Executive Producer Tania: are we doing?

I did flash my lights at some people, it worked at the left lane

Crew Chief Eric: and it worked. They moved over, dude, I came up on somebody ’cause I was trying to clear some traffic and we were booking, so I flashed the lights at this dude in a Mercedes suddenly just boom outta the way. Goodbye parted this red sea. And I was through and I backed off and then I got over ’cause I was like, I felt bad ’cause I was [01:17:00] holding somebody up.

I saw like a Porsche coming and I’m like, I gotta get here. I gotta get outta the way. I’m already in the left lane so I gotta dump it and go. But yeah, it was like flashlights. That still works. I was happy about that.

Executive Producer Tania: Maybe they drive a little bit slower now, blah, blah, blah. But they still respect, maybe there’s a lot of tractor trailers on the road.

I don’t know. I didn’t think it was any more than I’ve seen before. But they still respect the rules of the road for the most part. Yeah. You get this ass wipe that I’m like, am I in America right now? Like why are you in the left lane? But they will get over on the above average scale. Everybody gets over, they get out of the way.

They don’t just sit there doing stupid stuff in the left lane,

Crew Chief Eric: but they don’t know how to merge. I realized they don’t know how to merge. Every traffic jam we ended up in was because they were closing a lane. It was like, you guys have forgotten the zipper. Like that used to be the thing. I didn’t have any of those experiences.

We did, and it was horrendous. Every time there was a traffic backup,

Executive Producer Tania: what I experienced, which I could not understand ’cause we did hit traffic at one point. [01:18:00] It was the most bizarre thing. I couldn’t understand. There were no ramps and we were dead. Stop not moving. And I’m like, oh, this is gonna be fun.

We’re gonna be here for a while. Not moving, not moving, not moving. And then we’d move a little bit, not moving, not moving. Move a little bit and then suddenly you’re

Crew Chief Eric: doing 80 again. It

Executive Producer Tania: was like a green light and all of a sudden we were moving and we were flowing, and then we’d stop again. But then like five minutes later, suddenly we stopped again.

And I’m like, but there was no ramp, there was no shoulder. Why were we stopped? I couldn’t understand it. Yeah. We had that problem too, this weird flow that I’ve

Crew Chief Eric: never seen before. Despite the fact that the GPS that I was used in France got us lost a whole bunch for whatever reason in Italy, it was actually a godsend because it would tell me what the speed limit was, despite the fact that it was rapidly changing and it identified where the speed cameras were.

Yeah. And on which side of the road it was on. So that was awesome. So that’s why I jokingly, I probably got away with quite a bit because the GPS told us where everything was. So that was pretty awesome. So where it [01:19:00] failed me in France. It worked out really, really well in Italy. So no problems there. The other thing I noticed about Italy, despite all the big trucks on the road, is the amount of trucks.

I put air quotes rather, that people are driving now in Italy, there are more SUVs per capita in Italy than there’s ever been before. Like, I mean, granted I’m in an SUV myself. I mean, that is not a fact check number. I’m telling you. It was like nine out of 10 were SUVs. There’s always the Fiat 500 and the golf and all the little cars.

But it was like I was constantly surrounded by, if it wasn’t the Nissan, it was a EO or it was uh, you know, the Mercedes SU BMWs, I felt like I was in America. I was like, your roads and your towns weren’t built for these size vehicles. Like when did you supersize, when did you get the Big Mac, you know, of cars in Italy.

It

William Ross: just

Crew Chief Eric: doesn’t make sense.

William Ross: Well, did they force it down their throats with cross platform, you know, uh, manufacturing, all that stuff. You have to buy these now. Well,

Crew Chief Eric: they might’ve, because you know, the other thing is. There’s not a lot of old cars on the road. [01:20:00] There’s always the guy with the fiat multiple.

There’s always somebody with the Chiquito, you know, from the nineties or something like that. But they’re fewer and far between because I think the way I understand it is Italy heavily taxes, keeping old cars. And so people are constantly sort of getting new stuff. If you looked around, it was all within the last five years, it was all really, really new cars, the way they drive.

Executive Producer Tania: So transmission mechanics must make a lot of money. Right. Especially the older people when you see them a little bit sometimes, and it’s just like, Ooh, my thought was in France, body shop, my heart hurts for this transmission. The clutch is

Crew Chief Eric: alone, right? I mean, you’re just like, man, ugh. You can’t find it.

Grind it. But you bring up a really valid point ’cause William and I noted that in France it was like nine out of every 10 cars, maybe eight out of every 10 cars was still a stick shift, unless it was super new or a hybrid where they don’t come with manuals. But Italy the same. There was a surprising number of cars you’re like, I didn’t know that was offered in a manual.

Like those Jeeps that we saw, like [01:21:00] all of them were stick shift like the Cherokee and not in gear when parked always with the hand brakes. That was weird about France. Like they don’t leave them in gear.

Executive Producer Tania: None of them. No. That’s even a thing. I think that’s sort of a universal thing they recommend not doing.

Why? I mean, I’ve heard that even here, you should never leave your car in gear. It’s bad. Yeah. It’s easier to steal it if it’s not in gear. Yeah, I totally, but yeah, I don’t know. Like I’ve never had a transmission promise as a result of leaving it parked in gear. So I don’t know what bad thing I’ve been doing.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah. I trust leaving my transmission in gear, then relying on my handbrake to hold the car. You know what I mean?

William Ross: Seeing some of these hand brakes on cars, that’s not the most beefiest brake.

Executive Producer Tania: And I accidentally the other day went to pull my handbrake and weld the cables. Came off again. So that’s, guess I’m leaving it in gear

Crew Chief Eric: to William’s Point about France and seeing some cool cars.

Executive Producer Tania: Well, what I didn’t see a lot of, which I was surprised, I hardly saw any alphas in Italy. Yes. Yes. And normally there’s tons. [01:22:00] I think I saw

Crew Chief Eric: two, there were not many. There were some Stelvio’s every now and again. But that was pretty much it, the what we saw. But to your point, William was saying earlier, cool cars that we saw on the roads, there’s a lot of stuff that isn’t cool that you’ve seen in pictures and magazines.

You’re like, yeah. But I will say there’s still a lot of VWs in Italy, which is totally cool and totally fine. But you know, we talked a lot on previous drive-throughs about like the ID two, the ID three, and you know, oh, that’d be kind of cool if they brought it here. Now that I’ve seen them in person, you can keep all of ’em.

They look horrendous. They actually photograph better than they look in person, which is odd because usually cars don’t photograph as well as they look in person. But these new VWs are just, ugh, I don’t like ’em.

William Ross: They’re getting out there in regards to styling and how, what they’re doing. And it’s almost like they don’t do any type of focus group or let’s do something or let’s just go out into the public and talk to people in general.

Get a consensus or get a little feedback. But it sounds like, nope, this is what we’re doing.

Executive Producer Tania: So I will say there was an ID buzz on the highway that’s massive next to the things it was [01:23:00] next to. At that time it did not look massive. Um, ’cause to your point, it was surrounded by a bunch of tractor trailers, but it was like a worker van of some sort.

So it was white, but they had paneled out the back glass and the side glass. You only had glass at the front doors. It looked really cool actually. It didn’t seem like it was like, see-through that, it was just like white, but the driver maybe could still see out. It seemed more like how sometimes we have those worker vans where they’ve closed off all the windows.

It was like all white. The taillights were like blacked out and all this stuff, so maybe it wasn’t a worker van, but um, it looked really good.

Crew Chief Eric: That trim. See the car. I like the car I would take home, the car I would buy if I was in Italy was the Fiat Tepo wagon. I actually really liked that. It was reminiscent of older VWs.

It had a very German look to it. At first I was like, what is that? And then I was like, that’s a fiat no way. I really liked the look of that. I just saw the sedan version, but I think the wagon, something about the long roof, it just looks better. So that was my pick. You know, nothing to write home [01:24:00] about in the performance department, but if you’re looking for a family wagon with a manual transmission, like yeah, that’s not bad.

Looking at all outside of that, my number one pick for Italy was the Alpha 1 47 GTA that we saw at Lamont’s Classic. So that thing was awesome.

William Ross: Yeah, that day was nice.

Crew Chief Eric: Let’s talk a little bit more about our rental cars and driving in the mountains. How was that with your alleged a hundred horsepower and my legendary three spoke steering wheel, three spoke steering wheel.

Executive Producer Tania: So where I was staying, I had a 20 minute ride up the mountain to get to where I was in a 20 minute ride down the mountain.

Crew Chief Eric: She says ride, she means rally stage. Yes.

Executive Producer Tania: I mean, it’s hairpins and lefts and turns and all that. Is

William Ross: this the roads you were explaining to me, Eric, when you’re talking about when you were younger going there and Yes.

Yes. Following the car Uhhuh? Yes. Yes. Okay. It

Crew Chief Eric: hasn’t changed. It’s more paved now than it used to be. That’s the only difference.

William Ross: Except for the spots. It’s

Executive Producer Tania: not. Well,

William Ross: it’s like Pikes

Executive Producer Tania: Peak used to be gravel. I was pavement, so I I going up the mountain, I had to do a lot of shifting.

William Ross: You don’t say [01:25:00] a lot downshifting constantly.

I’d say downshift. Yeah. Only one direction down. It won’t go any lower,

Executive Producer Tania: but you know, like honestly, the car wasn’t anything, you know what, it got me where I needed to go. It took the bumps, it took everything like a champ. You were rowing the boat. If you needed to get around somebody, you had to plan it. Be strategic.

You’re constantly down shifting

William Ross: to, to get the curves and go up the hills on the mountain. You were riding with your mom, right? Uhhuh and a lot of this. How was she as a passenger? Did she critique? Is she quiet? She didn’t say anything.

Executive Producer Tania: The only time she got nervous was there are, so we, we ended up crossing through the mountains.

We took sort of a back way to go visit some family. There were certain parts that got extremely tight, like I can only fit, I hope nobody’s coming and there’s a hairpin turn and I can’t see and we’re gonna have a head on collision. Then she was getting nervous, but otherwise she didn’t really [01:26:00] say much as long as there was kind of room

Crew Chief Eric: for two.

Let’s fast forward to us going lead follow down the mountain, us behind Tanya and what was my wife saying the whole time?

Executive Producer Tania: So I don’t know if you realized, because again we came back through on part of a section where there was a lot of more turns that were tended to be blind and some corners that got narrow and like cliffs on one side.

So, and I was in the front and I don’t know if you noticed, I wasn’t just driving like an ass, but as soon as I could see nobody was coming, I would cut onto the other side. Yes. Be like signaling, you can take the turn however you want. Nobody’s coming.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah, yeah.

William Ross: I’ve

Executive Producer Tania: taken the

William Ross: opposite side of the road.

Crew Chief Eric: No, no, no.

I picked up that, that, so I want, I wanted to ask you because we didn’t talk about it then figuring we talk about it now. I don’t think we were driving overly aggressive whether we were coming down from the castle or we were going up, whatever we were doing. I don’t think we were really pushing the cars because I think both of us agreed that they were giant pieces of crap and they weren’t going to give us very much, even if we wanted it.

I would like [01:27:00] to think we were pretty well behaved.

Executive Producer Tania: Other people might have. So I, so going up the mountain. I had people that would pull over and let me go right there.

William Ross: So it’s obvious. They can tell that’s, oh, that’s an American. They’re like, that’s Tio right there. Just,

Executive Producer Tania: they gotta tell that I was going to go at a little bit faster clip, like they were going, some people were going like, painfully slow.

I’m like, dude. Seriously. I know I’m a gutless wonder, but we can go faster than this. According

William Ross: to Eric, he says that everyone has to stop at every house. Someone’s car’s in the driveways, they gotta stop and chat. Hundred

Crew Chief Eric: percent. We got stuck behind a tractor. I was making a joke. I said, somewhere up here, we’re gonna get stuck behind a tractor whip around the corner.

Boom, tractor got stuck by him.

Executive Producer Tania: I got stuck twice behind the final destination Tractors.

French Anthem: Ah.

Executive Producer Tania: Or trailers with like these wood piles. And it wasn’t like final destination with the big long beams. No, this was, they had chopped it up in the nice little pieces and then somehow, as we had plenty of time [01:28:00] to watch this and I’m sitting and going, my God, don’t let a piece come off bounce and come through the windshield because I don’t wanna pay for this.

They had somehow strategically stacked all these in this beautiful stack that like mounded, like a pyramid up out of the back of the, of the tractor trailer, nothing securing anything down. I’m like, how the hell are these pieces of wood? Just, they weren’t tied down. No gravity. Gravity holding. No, they were just sitting there magically not, and I was, and I was like hyperfocused.

I was just staring at the wood waiting for one to wobble. You were on a hill too. I was far back and not a single one move. I was like, okay.

Crew Chief Eric: The tree sap was holding them together. That’s what was going on there.

Executive Producer Tania: Back to your passengers.

Crew Chief Eric: Okay, so I gotta put this in reference. We’ve talked about this before.

The roads over there are narrow, you know, you talk about mountain roads in the us you’re gonna drive up into the Rockies or the Appalachians or something like that. It’s a two lane road. Like you drive tail of the dragon. It’s a two lane road. Yeah. You go to Italy, you cut that in half, and then in some places you cut it.

And half again. [01:29:00] So you’re driving on a one lane road basically at one point, I’m following you. I think it was when we were going down the mountain to go to that pizza place or whatever, which by the way, my kids got totally sick of pasta pizza pane, which is bread and prosciutto by the end of it, they don’t wanna, they don’t wanna hear, eat, or see any of it.

At this point. It’s gonna be a while, but, so anyway, we go to this pizzeria and I’m following Tanya down and I’m doing everything I can to like not be on top of her. As you probably noticed. I’m literally riding the brakes and my wife’s like, why are you being so aggressive? And I’m like, I’m not.

Executive Producer Tania: I was

Crew Chief Eric: just going.

Normal for my car. Literally the weight of this behemoth is pulling it down the mountain. Like I’m just doing everything I can to just maintain any sort of distance.

Executive Producer Tania: And I wasn’t going. I had gone down faster on other trips with just me and mom and not anything super fast. But I definitely driven faster than that.

Crew Chief Eric: But here’s the deal, you got a big heavy car with teeny little breaks. Yeah. Coming down a mountain, you know what you’re gonna do If you ride ’em all the way down, you’re not gonna have [01:30:00] any by the time you’re done. So you gotta play this game of, I gotta take this corner, I gotta scrub off some speed, I gotta let it kind of just do its thing or, or whatever.

And the roads are not smooth. They’re not bumpy, but they’re literally like if there was a boulder, they paved over the boulder and now that is, it’s like a, a mogul when you’re skiing, right? So it’s just part of the landscape of the road. So the whole car is like jostling as you’re coming down. And it’s like being in Baja, right?

My girls are used to taking off ramp, whatever it is, you know, they don’t really care. But 200 turns later down the mountain, ’cause that’s what it ends up being, they’re turning green in the back. And even my wife is like, Jesus, is this roller coaster ever going to end? Because you know, it’s been a long time and we’d only gone up and down that road one time 10 years ago, her and I.

So she’s forgotten what it’s like. And I’m like, for me, I’m like, oh. Paradise, right? This is autocross, there’s heaven. But it was just everything I could do to keep people from getting the barf bags out in the car. But again, I didn’t think we were driving that hard, you know? Anyway, the Nissan, [01:31:00] that one stretch of highway that we did, or that section there, that’s from like Bartos back to the mountains or whatever.

I got around that one guy. I lost you. It was like, I could tell we both pulled out and I had the torque. I was gone. It was,

William Ross: yeah, I was unprepared to make a pass.

Crew Chief Eric: I was like, oh, I got double the horsepower. I’ll see you later. That being said, somewhere along the trip though, in our quash qua legendary Nissan product related to the R 32, in some way or another, we picked up a rock on the windshield.

Oh, oh, yeah. And it continued to grow. It continued to get worse. I mean, we broke the windshield. I mean, it wasn’t my fault. It came from something. So during the trip, the midway point, we were somewhere in Sienna. My wife finds. Loctite super glue. So we glued the windshield to try to keep it from cracking.

And the only time it did it it, you remember when we were all there together, Tanya, I told you the windshield was busted or whatever. So it stopped. The only other time it expanded was when the car sat in direct sun and then suddenly like it just kept cracking and then we would glue [01:32:00] it some more and it would stop and we’d try to park it in the shade.

But even going down the mountain, all that stuff, I was figuring, man, it’s gonna twist because this thing is a flexible flyer and it’s just gonna break the windshield the rest of the way. But it didn’t do anything. I mean the super glue held up I guess. So we’ll see if Enterprise sends me a bill. I did buy the insurance, so I think we’re okay

Executive Producer Tania: man.

I was so went, we drove down to CNA and for me that was a three hour one way drive. It was 30 minutes. So this is like the midpoint of the trip almost for me, I guess. So I’ve already had the car for five days or something, 30 minutes from arriving at the destination. I notice all the sudden like there’s a little light on in the dashboard and it’s this.

Orange wrench, symbol. And I was like, I don’t know the F. That means that can’t be good. I’m like, well, I’m not gonna say anything. Just gonna keep going. Just gonna keep going.

William Ross: Well, all this talk now going on in regards about rental cars. You’re saying about getting a bill, is it Hertz? They’re installing those AI scanners now.

[01:33:00] That’s

Executive Producer Tania: who I rented with. Yeah.

William Ross: People are getting clipped big time. They’re creating a lot of headaches.

Executive Producer Tania: Speaking of that, ’cause I did rent with Hertz and my orange. I looked it up on the wonderful interweb, so the orange wrench symbol, which I was hoping can’t be the check engine light. This must be like a service symbol and, and according to the internets, that’s what it was.

I guess it was due for an oil change and they didn’t say anything to me, anything to me when I returned it. You

Crew Chief Eric: exceeded the maximum number of shifts in a particular period.

Executive Producer Tania: Transmission fluid needs flushing. No, so when I picked it up from the rental, I did the walk around and all that stuff and then did little bullshit piece of paper they gave me with some chicken scratch on it.

Like I couldn’t tell. The car actually had like a big scrape on the front bumper and then it had a couple other nicks here and there. And I’m like, well I couldn’t tell that they had it marked, it took me like 45 minutes to get the freaking car out of the parking lot and get all the, anyway, whatever. To your point, it’s not quite the AI that does it to themselves, but, and they’re like, oh, well we emailed you all the pictures of the car.

I’m like, oh shit. Did you, okay, lemme look at [01:34:00] that. So they have the little scanner thing and they go and it goes and it’s like this little price checker thing and they take like a photo of it. And so then they upload all the photos and then they mark it on the paper and then they give it to you when you pick up the car or whatever.

So you have that record. If you found something else, they could add it to that. So they give you all the photo documentation. Oh, that’s from the start. And then when I returned it, I purposely, I, I was like, I’m returning the car and you know, the light came on the wrench symbol, I think it’s the maintenance for the oil or whatever.

And he is like, okay, that’s fine. He’s like, do you want me to email the receipt? I was like, do you wanna check the card? I, I can, do you wanna wait? I’m like, yeah, I’ll wait. So then he got his little scanner around and he starts walking around it. And I made a big deal before I left because based on the scratches they had indicated on the car.

They were like little things. I was like, well, here’s a little scratch and you didn’t write it down. And I like made the guy come out and I was like, well, there’s this and this. And he’s like, well, these are too small. We’re not gonna count ’em. It’s fine. So he didn’t record ’em. I’m like, okay. So then when I returned it, same [01:35:00] guy sitting there walking around the car and he’s like, oh geez.

Literally doing stuff on something. I’m like, there’s nothing there. What? There’s like dirt on the car. I’m like sitting here going, man, are you gonna find these same scratches I pointed out to you before that you didn’t record down. He’s got a little scanner thing. Do you

Crew Chief Eric: know how many times he’s charged people for the scratches on that citra one?

Executive Producer Tania: That’s the racket of all the car rental agencies, but the bigger racket outside of the us I think so. At the end of the day, they marked it all off. It was all good. Nothing was wrong with it. I’d returned it completely full, blah, blah, blah. Everything was fine. So paid the bill, got the receipt. Hopefully you shouldn’t receive any notification from them.

That is the most frustrating thing outside of the United States to rent a car because they don’t hold us strapped like they do in Europe, in the United States. It’s very clear. They’re like, oh, if it’s smaller than a quarter, we don’t care. Don’t about it. No big deal. Don’t worry. But it’s much more loose.

But over there it’s like, oh, there’s like an eyelash length scratch there. I’m gonna bark you down and charge you $200, but I’m not gonna fix it. So I’m just collecting [01:36:00] money to your point, like every time there’s a new thing,

Crew Chief Eric: I’ve heard horror stories about that and at least you got some customer service.

’cause we run it through enterprise. So I took the quash quoi back with its broken windshield and we show up it. It was a whole thing to figure out where to take the car. ’cause we picked it up in one terminal. We were supposed to drop it off another terminal, no big deal. So we do that whole thing and then we get there and the guy had warned us when we picked it up.

The guys that were there when we picked up the car were super nice, very just accommodating, whatever. And as we know, you know, customer service isn’t usually the priority in, in Europe as William and I discovered even in France. So we get back in the morning, we drop the car off. 10 minutes before Enterprise is supposed to be open.

And the guy had told us, look, if there’s nobody there, put the keys in the Dropbox and go about your business and don’t worry about it. I said, okay, cool. I’m looking around where the hell’s the Dropbox? ’cause in America the Dropbox is at the little toll booth thing where the people usually sit with their scanners, like Tanya’s talking about you put the keys in the box and you drag your luggage and you go about your merry way.

Instead, we had to wander all around terminal to [01:37:00] uh, Mel Paya to go figure out where the hell enterprise was. And it was like way out of our way and we’re like, we gotta go catch this flight, but I gotta return the keys. I could have possibly waited in the garage for the guy that was gonna show up at nine o’clock in the morning.

’cause just ’cause they say they’re open at seven doesn’t mean they’re actually open. So I finally get there. There is a woman at the enterprise counter and I walk up and she goes, we’re not open,

Comedian Laura Ramoso: we are open. 11 2, 11

Crew Chief Eric: 10. God bless it. It’s like two minutes before you open. What time was that? This is like, I don’t know, seven in the morning or something like, okay.

Or eight in the morning or whatever it was. And I’m like, I’m getting flashbacks of like the post office and the DMV. Like it immediately my blood pressure is starting to build, right? And I’m holding up the keys and I’m like, I need to return the keys. And she’s like, oh. And I’m like, hand her the keys. And then she kinda looks at me like a deer in the headlights.

And I said, I also want to report damage to the vehicle.

Comedian Laura Ramoso: If you have a problem, you can telephone four zero seven. Go. Ah, fun. Cool. You want to speak to the manager? Okay.

Crew Chief Eric: No, you don’t [01:38:00] understand. I bought the insurance. I’m letting you know the windshield is broken. It got hit by a rock.

Comedian Laura Ramoso: We have three levels of insurance.

All the three levels they cover nothing.

Crew Chief Eric: But I don’t have your ticket in front of me, so I don’t know that you bought the insurance. I, I’m telling you, I bought the insurance.

Comedian Laura Ramoso: Why you want the contract? Okay. I go get to the contract

Crew Chief Eric: now, but I wanna let you know that the windshield is broken so you can put a note in and blah, blah.

And she was just like,

Comedian Laura Ramoso: if you don’t know, it is not my problem. It’s lunch. Ah,

Crew Chief Eric: ah. The whole thing was irritating. Yeah, you’re trying to do the right thing. Yeah. By

Executive Producer Tania: let

Crew Chief Eric: them

Executive Producer Tania: know.

Crew Chief Eric: So, but then, well I will say the people it hurts. Were quite nice. The people in enterprise were great until I returned the car. I

William Ross: went back into their office like literally three or four times and every time they were like super.

Okay,

Crew Chief Eric: well anyway, the Italy trip isn’t all about rental cars. There was some car stuff in this. Yeah, you gotta see some really

William Ross: cool stuff

Crew Chief Eric: for you William. I went on your behalf. You visited the Ferrari museum. [01:39:00] Am Ello vicariously through me.

French Anthem: Yes.

Crew Chief Eric: I will say if you get a chance to go, go, I would also say go to the other one.

’cause there’s two. Yes. The other one is more motorsports focused. The only problem I have with going to the Ferrari Museum of Ello is it Ello is a hellhole. There’s no parking people everywhere. There’s the Ferrari experience thing where they’re driving off to Fiorano, like you can rent a 2 96 or a F eight or whatever.

Like they all have different cars. And then you go with a driver and you’re driving the car and you go off to Fiorano and you can go do laps of the track and it’s just chaos. It’s Italy in a nutshell, right? But you drive down there and you think you’re driving through Hollywood where there’s just buildings.

It’s very industrial, there’s a lot of factories. It’s not that nice. Lots of cool stuff once you get there. So inside the museum, again, one of the few places that has air conditioning in Italy, you get in there, you know it’s hot outside. They kind of gate keep you in terms of coming in. But once you come in, the experience is cool.

I expected slightly more cars than there were. There are not many. Yeah, no, but it’s kind of cool. It’s like a whole [01:40:00] evolution thing, right? Obviously there’s the superstars that are in there. You’ve got the 2 88 GTO, you got an F 40, you got a LA Ferrari, everything you expect to be there, Schumacher’s, formula one car, all this kind of stuff.

So it’s cheap. It’s worth going. You can actually buy a pass. I don’t think it matters which of the two museums you go to first, but you can actually buy a pass that lets you go to both of them. So you just drive to the other one and then go check out what’s over there. It’s one museum split into two locations and then Fiorano ISS right there, and you can go check out the track and all that kinda stuff.

So I posted a bunch of pictures on your website, kind of did a photo dump of a lot of the things that were in the museum. Again, really cool stuff, totally worth seeing. We did a coast to coast sort of trip. We drove all the way out to the Adriatic and then we drove all the way out to the Mediterranean of this whole loop of North central Italy.

So along the way we’re kind of strategizing. My wife was like, oh, we should go to San Marino and check it out, because it’s one of the little provincial kingdoms into itself. You know, sovereign kingdoms that live inside of Italy, sort of like the Vatican is its own thing and it’s not really Italy. And I said, oh, San Marino, that’s cool.

We should go to Amela. And she’s like, yeah, you wanna go to the track. Like last time [01:41:00] we went to Italy, we drove past Magie and she was like, we should stop. But it was like the middle of winter. There’s no reason to stop in Magie. The track’s closed. It’s wintertime like, what are we gonna do? I’m like, well go to Amala.

Right? So we go there and secretly with all the work that we’ve done with the professor about Sena and yeah, commemorating his death after 30 years, I was like, this is an opportunity to go. See the Senate memorial and to go see the track. So my girls were sort of dragging their heels a little bit, right?

And they’re like, oh my God, we’re gonna go to a racetrack and blah, blah, blah. Unlike Mar, which was in the middle of just an industrial park, Mila’s sort of off the beaten path, it’s almost like going to an American race track. You get there and there’s a fast food joint and a gas station and a couple of houses, and there’s nobody around.

But they built the track around this town or the town of Imus. Sits in the, it’s really bizarre. Yeah. Like the way it’s laid out. But when you get there, you realize sort of like Montreal, the track is open. You can’t get on the track like you can in Montreal, but you can walk around it, you can go [01:42:00] everywhere.

And then once you cross under the tunnel, which goes under like start, finish, like that area, the track where the grandstands are, you can cut into the inside and there’s all these parks and like sporting complexes and like all this stuff that belongs to the track. So there’s all these signs that say, you know, Nu Memorial and this memorial and that memorial and then the SNA one and like the SNA one’s like way out there because you walk all the way to Ello, right?

So you go out there, you go out there, you go out there and you keep walking, keep walking. I actually had walked past it and I didn’t realize, I saw all these banners and flags and I’m like, I’m close. Like I can see there’s a sign that says Sena and it’s on the opposite wall on the other side of the track.

And I said, this is the Ella Chicane, I’m here, but like, where’s the memorial? Right? This is really strange. So I walk past it, I walk all the way to the gates and there’s this guy there, and I don’t know if he worked at the track or not, but he was super nice older guy. And I said, Hey, excuse me, I don’t know if I missed it or what, but I said, where is.

The Senate memorial and he’s like, oh, if you’re looking for the point of impact, like where the plaque is and whatever, [01:43:00] I’ll show you. It’s actually kind of hard to find. So he walks me back and inside of all that mess of t-shirts and flags and flowers and just all this stuff that’s maintained there, there’s this little plaque and it looks directly at the point of impact when you look across the track where he hit.

And so at that moment now you realize you’re kind of like in the trees. You’re up against the guardrail, you’re looking at this plaque, you’re looking out over the track, you’re surrounded by all this memorabilia and all this stuff. And then there’s this statue like in bronze of Sena, sort of almost looking like the thinking man, I don’t know.

Maybe it’s just me, but there’s this overwhelming sense of like, I don’t know what to call it. Like John tried to even explain it in his article that he wrote about when he went to go visit and all that, and it just. It’s weird, it’s very emotional and it’s very quiet. And then you sort of realize in the distance there’s a park with kids and stuff.

You know, Sena was big with kids and helping kids and giving money and the foundations and all, and it’s sort of like, it’s just this juxtaposition that you’re just like, okay, I get it now. Like it becomes suddenly becomes very real, his [01:44:00] whole legacy and everything. And so for me, I don’t know, emotional, spiritual moment, but it was very worth going.

And I would say if I had to pick a European track to go watch an F1 race at, I don’t know, you know, I’ve never been to Monza, but I think Monza would be cool, but I think MLO would be on my list of top places to go check out a Formula One race. I just, I like the whole atmosphere. I like the whole vibe. I like the way it’s laid out.

I, I like the vantage points and everything. I think it was pretty cool.

William Ross: Yeah, no, definitely. I think Italy is one of the, if you go for an F1 race, it’s one of the places to go. Just, I mean it’s de fci. I really like that. I mean, just, it’s supposed to be unbelievable. Well,

Crew Chief Eric: and I tried to do one more thing ’cause on our last day we went to go visit my uncle.

He invited us over for lunch and the day before we were supposed to leave. And so he lives. Eight miles from the Dara Academy. And so they got their whole museum thing there too. And I know Tanya’s been before and she wrote an article about it and took pictures of everything. I said, oh, this is my chance.

I didn’t go the last time I was here. I wanna check it out. We’ve literally driven by it 16 times. ’cause it was on the road where our [01:45:00] Airbnb was or whatever. So I’m like, okay, you know, I want to go check this place out and we’re looking online and you know, okay, it’s open Mondays from this time to this time and you know, blah blah, all this kind of stuff.

And so we get there parking lot’s full. We’re like, that’s a good sign. You know, find a parking spot, walk around close due to like renovations or whatever. Like, ah, you gotta be kidding me. I took a picture in front of the de la you know, the same way Tanya did. I stood behind it instead of in front of it.

And, and now I realize, I was like, how far back were you to take that picture? Because it’s right up against the road. I mean, you know, that kind of thing. Tanya, if you want, because you’ve been there, you wanna describe what the De La Academy Museum is sort of like,

Executive Producer Tania: I mean, when you first walk in, there’s like all these placards that kind of take you through the history of De La and it’s all the chassis work with the, the Indy cars and even Formula cars and all that stuff.

Are they still building those road cars? They’re, I know they don’t sell ’em here. Are they still building those for Europe? I think so, yeah. But then they have a bunch of other race cars that they were involved with. They’re all on display basically. And it’s, it’s a weird building [01:46:00] inside that kind of, almost has this like circular ramp.

And then there’s, I think there different rooms and there’s Lamborghinis and there’s. Barons and you know, a whole bunch of stuff.

Crew Chief Eric: Well, the one thing I saw in the window that I thought was pretty cool, kind of ogling from the outside. Not that I didn’t see it in person. The garage 56 car is in the Delara Academy.

Executive Producer Tania: Well, that’s new.

Crew Chief Eric: It’s sitting up in the Oh, interesting. In the glass. It’s the car furthest back.

Executive Producer Tania: I mean, honestly, I’d have to go back and even read my own article to see what was there. It’s been a decade.

Crew Chief Eric: The adventures didn’t stop there. William, you set off for Miami. What was going on in Miami?

William Ross: I land and my flight’s coming back from Chicago is delayed two and a half hours.

Lovely. United again. So when I finally get back here, phone turns on and I get a text message. From our good friend Mr. David Beatie from Slot Mod. He goes, well what are you doing next week? I, I don’t have anything. He goes, he goes, I’m going to Miami, can you come with me? Yeah, sure. And I’m like, what’s going on?

And he tells me that he’s, you know, hooked up to go to Barry Konik collection ’cause Barry’s interested in buying a track from him. Barry’s [01:47:00] very public in regards to his collection. Like that. Super nice guy. Unbelievable cars, unbelievable artwork. You know, we were with him for a couple hours, you know, he’s got a real keen eye for art and it’s really cool stuff.

It’s not kinda your basic, just boring stuff. And he finds these guys like on Instagram or street artists, stuff like that. So it’s really cool stuff. So I was really neat to see. ’cause I mean he just got a crazy collection of cars and when he first started getting into car stuff, he was into the muscle cars, you know, the chopped cars like 49 Mercks and that kind of stuff.

Which he has some there. But then obviously grew into what he has now is Daytona sp threes, you know, he is got his A MG ones coming, he’s got a cones, a lot of high class stuff. But that was neat. But in talking with Dave before we left, he wanted to try and fill in some more time. One was about going to Curated.

I know those guys well. So I said, well that’s not a problem you forever I go. But I don’t know if Herschel or John would be there. ’cause you know, Dave just kind of wanted to meet him, networking, stuff like that. But the other one was garage 26. I had never heard of them. He sent me their Instagram page.

But there’s a few things on there. You do a little research, find out father [01:48:00] son duo real estate and everything. The son, Tommy, he runs in Ferrari Challenge, that kind stuff. So he’s trying to get a hold of someone to find out how we go in there. He’s not have much luck and he knows Adrian Fernandez very well.

I he’s, so Eric, you just interviewed Adrian. When’s listening? Go listen to that episode. Awesome. I was, I was digging around. I noticed there’s a little blurb in there about Adrian’s office and that is in the same building as his garage 26 and it kind of throws you off ’cause you’re like, you know, Adrian’s on the fourth floor and hey, they’re on the fifth, blah, blah.

I’m like, okay. He reaches out to Adrian. Lo and behold, Adrian’s part of that whole thing. So it’s like boom, there’s our entry. And so after we go to Skolnik, we go over there and we meet Adrian’s nephew, jp. Awesome dude. Super nice. He does these cool things. I was trying to get some more details outta my, anyways, we go to the building five stories high, right then.

Tesla dealership First street forwards. Well, you go into where the parking lot’s at, so you got your service doors and like that. Well, then there’s these little, maybe I’d say six foot wide red door entryway [01:49:00] and it’s for Gable’s Auto Vault as it that was being called. And you look through there, you can see this bank door and like that.

And to the right of it, maybe about 15 feet, there’s these two double glass garage doors that you look through when they open up. Then there’s two car elevator doors. They’re like, okay, this has gotta be it. Initially this whole building was supposed to be like a private garage type deal for owners and stuff like that.

Display the cars. Well, when they did it, Tesla approached ’em. I guess, you know, obviously the dollar talks. So Tesla’s got the first three floors. So we go up to the fifth floor. That’s the first one. This is garage 26. There’s the whole floor doors open up. As soon as it opens up, you step out. There’s a hallway, there’s a mannequin right here that’s a cop.

Whatever that looks so realistic, you swear it’s a person, it kind of throws you off. The elevator door opens, you look straight ahead. There is a 2003 Ferrari F1 Michael Schumacher a Ferrari 3 33 SP F 40 LM a pi. So I mean, just those four cars there you see alone the lms. 9 million, 10 million, maybe 3, 3, 3 sps probably five, 6 million.

Now [01:50:00] maybe even a little bit more. God knows what you’re gonna put a price on uh, X shoe marker, F1 car. But then you step out and it’s a hallway. ’cause these are all glass doors and these things are behind the garage doors. They’re all glass, real nice marble floors and that. So you gotta a real wide hallways going down.

You know, as you scan on there, you know, there’s this model sitting here. They got a wire frame of an F1 car’s hanging a wall, but all you see is Ferrari. Ferrari, Ferrari. You go, then you pan ’em the other way. Just Ferrari, Ferrari, Ferrari. Everywhere that I can see. You wanna talk about me being in heaven, open up the doors, everything like that.

And so that was the plan was, is you could buy these units depending on size and whatnot, you know, you stash your collection there. So like I said, SP one, sp two sp threes F 42 8 8 GTO La Ferrari a 12 comps, the creme de la creme. The cars that are impossible to get. People want, like there’s multiples. And then you go down little other side, there’s a 9 6 2 Porsche, you know, you got some Porsches and stuff.

Unbelievable stuff. JP is like opening the doors. Oh, let’s go in here. I mean, wide open, you can check everything out. It’s got, it’s hanging out there. It’s got a bar, two story [01:51:00] area, nice glass, I mean gorgeous. You go around, it’s got your little seating area and stuff like that. But another thing, you go up the flight of stairs to the roof, there’s still an indoor area there where there’s a, a loft.

The simulator that they have is an actual tub from a 4 8 8 race car. Wow. So they took off the front, they took off the back end. It’s the actual tub is the air jacks, I mean. Unbelievable. Then it’s got a beautiful outside deck, everything like that. So then we go down to the fourth floor and that’s where Adrian’s office is at.

But then you have smaller units, you know, still all the glass doors, everyth like that. But these are ones where some owners got smaller space. Like one guy’s just got two cars in there. He is got a 12 company, a 12 TDF. Other side guys have got a rough CTR, all this. I mean just again mind-bending stuff.

But Adrian’s unit was super cool ’cause it’s his office and everything. So you go in there at the end, he is got a new 3 5 6 that he bought. He’s got one of his old Indy cars that’s on display engine lids off everyth like that. I mean fully functional, the whole thing. He’s, he’s got one hanging on the wall too, right?

Yeah. And he’s got one that does over here hanging on the wall. And then he is got [01:52:00] all his trophies, race suits, all his old helmets. And then on the one end he’s got the track he bought from Dave. It’s very minimalistic, I guess you could say. You know, it’s not like the, some of the ones where he is got all the trees and all this stuff.

It’s very sleek and fits in perfectly with the decor. I mean, it’s just dead nuts on. Then you know, you go up, he’s got a little office area, he is got a seating area, he is got a track, he’s got a couple, you know, simulators. I mean you wanna talk about presentation and just mind blowing way to have your vehicle stored, displayed.

I mean, this is like another level. Unbelievable. The quality of the cars that were in this, not just in the garage 26. ’cause that was just unbelievable. But the other units too is, and then the elevators, I posted a quick video of it ’cause it’s like you’re going in the bat cave, like, oh my God. Check out those cars.

You, it’s going. Then when it goes down, it opens back up. You’re like, oh my God, look at these cars. Me and Dave were both just absolutely blown away. The cars that were in these collections, and again, JP was. Awesome. I mean, just Awesome, awesome dude. I can’t say enough about him

Crew Chief Eric: when you finally get through the [01:53:00] backlog of editing all your videos and stuff, I look forward to seeing ’em up on YouTube, but also, you know, maybe we’ll see some of these garages and private collections showing up on Garage Top Magazine as well.

Some of the photos that you took. So we’ll keep everybody up to speed on where you are with all your travels and everything. But I mean, I can’t wait to look at all the pictures. It’s pretty awesome.

William Ross: I, I still have one more video to, I gotta do all the paddock one or the grid walk for Lamont, then I’m gonna do those ones.

But it’s some really cool stuff and I, and again, to Barry as well, and I mean, oh, do whatever you want. Take as many video, you know, I mean, just have at it. And I was trying to get a Barry’s getting fo of some of the stuff that you really don’t see. ’cause you know, a lot of people just take this stuff that everyone sees.

Very rare that someone gets that access to Garage 26. So I think people should definitely see that because it’s not something that, oh, everyone can go in or just say, give a call or something like the Stars aligned and days of relationship with Adrian and Goddess in and everything like that. ’cause again, and Adrian was the same way.

I mean, I didn’t get to meet him. He was out of town or something, but he was like very a comedy, you know, telling David, well get ahold of my nephew. Oh he’ll get, you know, and everyth like that. So great people [01:54:00] definitely check him out. You’ll be amazed at what you see.

Crew Chief Eric: William, it’s been an adventure. It’s been a lot of fun.

I know by the time this airs, you’ll have already closed out rocks and revs and all that kind of, the merry ground is coming to an end here. Any projections, things you want to take off the bucket list for maybe next year, the year after? What are you thinking?

William Ross: Goodwood,

Crew Chief Eric: that was the one thing too, is like

William Ross: if I was able to figure it out.

Perfect. ’cause Goodwood is the following weekend after head up North and do it. I mean, that would be outstanding to that. I mean, it wouldn’t be a cheap trip, but you’re already over in Europe. Might as well just, hey, just spend a few more days and go up north. But Goodwood would be the one to go to. But I would definitely do the revival.

I wouldn’t do the hill climb. Yeah. ’cause I mean, they’re just driving up this driveway that wouldn’t always, I kind of scratched my head it as like, I mean, yeah, they do a lot of, you know, launches and that kind of cool stuff, but, eh, I, I wanna see ’em go on the track. So I, I’d go, I’d love to go to the revival.

Crew Chief Eric: I think we might be tainted though, because if we go to the revival Yeah. And we’re gonna be comparing it to Lama Classic Disappointed and then it’s like, well why do we do this? We’ll just do classic again. Which is nice [01:55:00] because classic they’ve announced starting this year, it’s gonna be every year instead of like whenever they feel like it kind of thing or what they were doing.

So it’s cool to see. Classic has got some legs underneath of it, so there’ll be an opportunity to go back and I kind of like that. Right. Go to the big lama like the next. Hundredth.

William Ross: Yeah, the actual hundredth.

Crew Chief Eric: Hundredth running, you know, is the next big one, but the rest of the Lamont 24 hours. You watch it on TV and that’s great, but classic, again, it’s just got that vibe.

It’s got that feel. It’s a time machine. There’s something awesome about it. Well,

William Ross: especially now going to it once, getting the lay of the land, understand things get, okay, this is how they’re doing stuff now. You can really attack it in regards to what you’d wanna accomplish. Kind of know the ins and outs.

That would definitely be something to go back to, would be that. I mean, it’s well worth it. Everyone I’ve talked to, I said, buckle this thing. If you ever get the chance, you have to go do it. You have to figure out some way to go do it.

Crew Chief Eric: Well, it looks like we took over the whole episode with our adventures.

William Ross: Seems like it.

Crew Chief Eric: Since Brad isn’t here. We’ll kind of reconvene our normal news next month. We got all the lots of cool [01:56:00] stuff that in essence of time we will cover next time. But there’s a couple things I do want to add that are part of our European adventures. I did, I found a lost and found for you, Tanya, when we were at Lamont.

Do you remember this one? William? You can buy an R 18 Audi l and p one car. Yes you can. It’s for sale. Don’t ask. With the low, low prices though, low, low price of a million dollars somewhere in that neighborhood. Yeah. They were making sure it was in tip top shape. I love the for sale sign official Audi for sale sign on that R 18.

I mean, it is diesel powered. It can’t be worth that much, that clean diesel,

William Ross: you know, that kind of thing. Okay. What you gonna pay for it then? You’re gonna pay 10 times that much every year trying to operate it again. It is just a situation where, okay, you actually will have the car in your possession then do you They fly the text in or no audio.

Keep it. You own it, but it’s gonna stay at Audi then whenever you wanna drive with it.

Crew Chief Eric: Uh, no. That’s a Ferrari thing. Don’t be confused.

William Ross: Yeah. If I own something, I want it in my possession.

Crew Chief Eric: So, jumping ahead. We do have an uncool wall nominee this month and this comes straight outta Italy, but it’s French.

Mind you, I saw plenty of ugly cars while I was over there, [01:57:00] but this one took the cake. We were walking down the one of the roads. In S Mione, which is on the lakes up in Italy. My whole family stopped and was like, what the heck is this thing? So I present for your consideration, the EO 1007 and it’s sliding doors.

Oh wow.

William Ross: That’s interesting. They don’t ride the brakes much. Look at the there, this little bit of brake dust on those front wheels.

Crew Chief Eric: Ah, I mean, can you imagine having a two-door car and the doors slide

William Ross: and obviously that tells you the parking over there in regards to how people probably park next to each other.

Executive Producer Tania: Right? There’s not a car without a door done.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah, the interior looked like a handicap shower, so you know, you can imagine. But the whole thing, it just was like, I don’t know, it was so bizarre. It’s the most bizarre car I’ve seen in a long time. But like what possesses a designer to say, you know what?

We’re gonna make it two doors and it’s gonna be the shape of a box and we’re gonna make the door slide quintessentially French.

William Ross: The person colorblind that bought this, I mean, why would you buy that colored boot? This is

Crew Chief Eric: that [01:58:00] metallic mustard copper stuff that they like. I don’t, Ugh. It’s awful. Since you’re here, William, and I know you made it part of your summer vacation and I’m sure we’ll talk more about Formula One in our next episode.

But I’ve gotta ask because we joked we made fun of your $10 movie theater. Did you go see the F1 movie?

William Ross: Hell yes. It’s awesome. Is it, I think it’s a, I think it was a fantastic movie. I thought it was really good. And again, though I can asking, I said this like with Ford verse fire and stuff, this is for entertainment.

It’s not trying to nail it down, but they did a hell of a job capturing like the speed, the sound, everything. I mean, some of the shots that they got were ly. ’cause I mean you saw when they were filming how immersed they were with the actual F1 after races and everything like that. Obviously you can clearly tell lots the CGI stuff, this and that.

Like, oh, that’ll never happen. So there’s a lot of stuff you go like, uh, but you gotta take with a grain of salt. It’s pure entertainment [01:59:00] purposes.

Executive Producer Tania: Most of the racing footage was. Literally real racing footage that they went and CGI didn’t change the colors of the car, so there wasn’t, you know, an Alpine or a Red Bull and stuff like that.

William Ross: Well, the one cool thing is they go back to, in the eighties when he like got into it, they used Martin Donnelly’s actual crash video and footage of him crashing, lying in the middle of the track, the whole nine yards. Wow. So it’s like that, it’s the actual video of it. So they used some real stuff in it.

They kind of cji to make, you know, so it was him in the car driving that lotus, but they used a lot of old footage back then, kind of having flashbacks and kinda how like he was supposed to be the next big thing just, and it’s kind of based Martin do never got back into an F1 car, but no spoilers.

Crew Chief Eric: All right, so let me ask this.

Lemme ask again. Brad Pitt, blah, blah, blah. It’s like Tom Cruise and the rest of ’em, and you talk about the CGI and all this cool stuff in my mind, I think that the storyline, the plot, the acting, the, oh, it’s crap. Okay, so it’s like Grand Smo then, right? Yeah.

William Ross: I mean, come on, you go look at the thing. Go. This would never happen.[02:00:00]

It’s a complete joke. Oh, come on this guy. You’re trying to do the math in your head. Okay. If he was. Even 18 or 19 when they’re saying he would have to be in the eighties when he break, and then what the years now would be, he’d be in his sixties.

Crew Chief Eric: I would never, ever freaking happen. It’s Alonzo. It’s just the story of Alonzo.

That’s,

William Ross: it’s Brad Pitts. All right. He’s made some good movies, but I mean, every movie he is in he, he is the same demeanor, same. It’s just plug and play and doing it how he acts. But I enjoyed it. I think it’s definitely worth it to go see it. We didn’t stay for it, but we actually went to the drive-in the other night and it was the second movie.

We went and saw Superman and it was supposed to be the second one, but I was like, yeah, I don’t feel like staying. That’s when I’ll wait till it comes back out on Apple TV and I’ll watch it, you know, on my TV again. But I thought it was good.

Crew Chief Eric: Speaking of Apple tv, I heard that Apple is bidding for Formula One coverage for next year.

William Ross: I think they got it.

Crew Chief Eric: Did they really? No, I thought Disney did. What is the deal with Disney and Formula One?

William Ross: Everyone’s trying to get on the bandwagon and depending on how long they buy the rice for to [02:01:00] do it, if they buy it for any more than five years, they’re gonna be effed because I guarantee in five years the.

Popularity here in the States is gonna start waning big time. It’s gonna do that NASCAR thing where NASCAR was boom, boom, boom. Yeah. You know, same thing’s gonna happen here with that. What? Because everyone’s gonna just like, nah, it’s the same to your weekend

Crew Chief Eric: to point. We heard a lot of that when we were at Lamont Classic and we were talking to other people about other racing disciplines and you know, people were surprised.

200,000 people showing for a vintage event is just ridiculous numbers. But you heard the same thing from a lot of people. I’m really tired of Formula One. The racing’s really boring. The drama is really fake, blah, blah, you know, the same thing. And it, and I know I’ve been saying this, hearing it from other people, unsolicited, you’re sort of like, well, I guess I’m not alone on Survivor Island.

Okay. First of all, formula one TV has always been boring. I mean, it just doesn’t matter what era you pick. Kind of like you’ve always said. You watch the beginning, you snooze in the middle. You watch the end and it’s over. But now it’s to me more spec racing than it’s ever been, at least during the S days.

And [02:02:00] Schumacher, the cars were sort of different, you know, especially during the Sena days. You had the flat 12 Ferraris and the V eight Judds and you know, the turbo this and the that. And so it was a mixed bag of stuff. And then the V 10 era was obviously amazing, but now, I don’t know, it’s just hard. And I think the whole COVID is over for a long time now.

People have gone back to, let’s say, quote unquote normal, and Formula One doesn’t have the same draw because we’re not all. Stuck at home with nothing else to watch.

William Ross: I agree. I mean that’s why I say, you know, the shine will come off of that diamond or everyone I call it, it’ll

Crew Chief Eric: be Shinola when it’s done.

William Ross: Yeah. I especially like the Vegas race of Miamis. I’ll be amazed at that Miami races last another three or four seasons because it’s just crap. You know, Austin’s always gonna be there ’cause you’re gonna have that one Austin, you know, great tracker like that. But, and in Vegas too, I think it’s just,

Crew Chief Eric: I’d rather watch the WEC race at Austin than the Formula One race at Austin.

William Ross: I, I agree with you on that. A thousand percent. So, yeah, I mean, and the obscene amount of money that either Disney or Apple, whoever ends with is gonna have to pay. I mean, Liberty Media is just cash cashing and it would not surprise me within the next five years, Liberty [02:03:00] Media ends up selling up to the oil rich nations of Saudi Arabia, one of those DAE funds, whatever, and just walks away making their billions and billions of dollars.

’cause it’s at that point, saturation 24 races. I mean, that’s just too many. I mean that’s, and it’s total cash grab

Crew Chief Eric: To close out this thought on Formula One, as we sort of wrap out this impromptu bitter sports news. I gotta give props to Hulk burg. It’s taking like 25 years to podium. Yes.

Executive Producer Tania: You know, I’m sad to miss that race ’cause that actually looked like it was a really good race at Silverstone.

I watched the highlights,

William Ross: you know, that’s why they always wish for rain at every race because it evens things out. I make everything interesting when it’s rain. I’ll watch the whole race. I’m be like, okay, this will be interesting. Yeah, I’ll watch whole thing if it rains.

Crew Chief Eric: That’s it for Motorsport News, but we are gonna rejoin the conversation next month with more F1 more of everything because [02:04:00] July is an exciting month, so we look forward to more Motorsports news in the next drive through. And remember folks that our Motors Sports News is brought to us in partnership with the International Motor Racing Research Center.

Their sweepstakes is back in full swing, and as we’ve said before, it’s your chance to win a 2025 Porsche nine 11 T. With a six speed manual or take a $75,000 cash option. Details on how you could enter to win that Porsche are@racingarchives.org, and then click on sweepstakes from the upper right corner.

And with that, Tanya, it’s time for our GTM Trackside Report sponsored by the northeast region of the Audi Club of America. Are you ready to

Executive Producer Tania: 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 A CNA events. You might want to check out Watkins Glen on a Wednesday and Thursday, August 13th and 14th. And [02:05:00] if you are in the Mid-Atlantic region, you can go to NJ MP’s Thunderbolt for a Monday, Tuesday event, September 15th and 16th.

And also there is an HBDE Solo Day at Lime Rock Park on Friday, October 10th, along with FCP Euros. October Fest. Challenge your position 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.

And

Crew Chief Eric: for more Audi Club events outside of just track time, please visit www.nqclub.org to discover more events like this. You can also visit our motorsports calendar@club.gt motorsports.org and then click on events. All right, Brad, it’s time to take us home.

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 [02:06:00] catalog and check out other programs we offer like screen to speed, the Ferrari marketplace, the motoring historian evening with a legend, the logbook break fix, and of course, the drive-through. And remember, for everything we talked about on this episode and more, be sure to check out follow on article and show notes available@gtmotorsports.org.

Crew Chief Brad: And if you enjoy our various podcasts, there’s a great way for you to support our creators on the MPN. We’ve got lots of great extras and bonuses to explore on our expanded Patreon page. So if you’d like to learn more about our bonus and behind the scenes content and get early access to upcoming episodes, consider becoming a break fix VIP by clicking the blue join for free button in the middle of the page when you visit patreon.com/gigi motorsports.

And a thank you to our co-host and executive producer Tanya, and a big shout out to William, big Money Ross for joining us tonight. William,

Crew Chief Eric: I appreciate you filling in for Brad this month. I know he’s down with the flu and we miss him. We’re looking forward to next month’s drive through where we [02:07:00] can catch back up with him and do the news and all that kind of stuff.

Again, shout out to you. Thank you for coming on and it was a pleasure traveling with you. It’s been a hell of a ride. And let’s see what comes next.

William Ross: Yeah. Oh, same here, man. It’s uh, awesome and more things to come, more great fun things to come, I’m sure.

Crew Chief Eric: And we got a promo for the Ferrari marketplace too.

Exotic Car Marketplace Promo: For everything from Ferrari and Porsche, Lamborghini and Konig seg, visit exotic car marketplace.com. If you’re into anything with wheels in a Motor, log onto the Motoring Podcast network and check out our family of podcasts@motoringpodcast.net. This is the place to find your favorite new show. Next up a shout out to David Beatie and his team at Slot Mods who custom build some of the coolest slot car tracks in the world@slotmods.com.

Let your imagination run wild and finally, grand touring motorsports covering all aspects of auto racing and motorsports history. Check out their ine@gtmotorsports.org. All the links for our sponsors are in the description.

Crew Chief Eric: Well on that, another quick [02:08:00] shout out, I just wanna throw out there for folks.

July is generally our anniversary episode, and obviously we got to celebrate by doing this gigantic car centric vacation here over the last month between drive through episodes. So shout out to Break Fix fifth anniversary on the air. And then obviously we picked up all the other shows and all the other creators along the way when we founded the Motoring Podcast over a year ago at this point.

And then 11 years of grand touring motor sports in its current form. So we’ve crossed that decade threshold. So happy anniversary to us.

William Ross: Yeah, congrats. That’s a big milestone in this statement. That’s huge. A lot of come and go, you know, a lot of these things come and go and, but you take it, you grow with it, make things happen and, and it’s going in the right direction.

So, I mean, it’s, it’s gonna be cool to see what the next 10 years brings.

Crew Chief Eric: Well, I’m glad you’re along for the ride.

William Ross: Yeah. So, yeah, I’m excited. Besides more gray hairs, but you know,

Crew Chief Brad: and all the fans, friends and family who support Grand Touring Motor sports and the Motoring Podcast network. Without you, none of this would be possible.[02:09:00]

Tro

Crew Chief Eric: and we’re out. Did William freeze? William froze. Do looks like it. He was a little choppy there for a second. I thought it was me. I thought it was me too. Well, I guess we’ll have to wait till he comes back. This is like when Brad was frozen back like episode. I remember drive through 13 or something like that.

He’s like B Tanya. Anything you wanted to add?

William Ross: It’s man, it’s like you guys listen to these stories baiting so fast

when here we are in the drive through line. Me and her cars in front of us, cars in back of us all just waiting to order. There’s some idiot in a Volvo with us. Brights on behind me. I lean out the window and scream, Hey, what ya trying to do? Blind me. My

French Anthem: wife

says maybe we should park.

Crew Chief Eric: We hope you enjoyed another awesome episode [02:10:00] of Break Fix Podcasts, brought to you by Grand Tour Motorsports. If you’d like to be a guest on the show or get involved, be sure to follow us on all social media platforms at Grand Touring Motorsports. And if you’d like to learn more about the content of this episode, be sure to check out the follow on article@gtmotorsports.org.

We remain a commercial free and no annual fees organization through our sponsors, but also through the generous support of our fans, families, and friends through Patreon. For as little as $2 and 50 cents a month, you can get access to more behind the scenes action, additional Pit Stop Minisodes and other VIP goodies, as well as keeping our team of creators fed on their strict diet of Fig Newton’s, Gumby Bears, and Monster.

So consider signing up for Patreon today at www.patreon.com/gt motorsports. And remember, without you, none of this would be [02:11:00] possible.

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

• 00:00:00 Kicking Off Episode 59 with Studio Banter & Silly Hats!
• 00:02:23 San Francisco Car Adventures
• 00:03:07 Exploring the Riley Restoration Shop
• 00:05:50 Sonoma Raceway
• 00:09:25 John Summers’ Motorcycle Collection
• 00:10:59 Hillsborough Concours d’Elegance
• 00:21:19 Travel Troubles and The Journey to Le Mans Classic
• 00:32:27 First Day at the Track: Museum Visit and Impressions
• 00:34:33 Shopping Adventures, Paddock Tour and Car Clubs
• 00:40:35 VIP Experiences: Hot Laps, Grid Walk & Racing Highlights
• 01:00:13 Hot Car Picks from France
• 01:09:07 Driving in Italy & Rental Car Woes
• 01:38:49 Visiting the Ferrari Museum at Maranello
• 01:40:56 Exploring Imola and the Senna Memorial
• 01:46:30 Miami Car Collection Adventures
• 01:58:24 Formula One Movie Review
• 02:03:52 Future Motorsports Adventures
• 02:08:02 Shoutouts, Anniversaries and Wrap-Up!

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:

• 2-Day HPDE @ Watkins Glen International on Wednesday & Thursday, August 13-14
• 2-Day HPDE @ NJMP Thunderbolt Circuit on Monday & Tuesday, September 15-16
• And just added to the roster is an HPDE Solo Day, at Lime Rock Park on Friday October 10th, along with FCP Euro’s Autoberfest event (also at LimeRock) on Sunday October 26th. 

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