The Consulier is one of those ahead-of-its-time stories. Built between 1985 and 1993, the GTP had the specs, the street cred of a supercar.
The new Porsche Tequipment two-person roof tent comes in a sleek hard case that was developed at Porsche's performance-oriented Weissach Development Center to be more aerodynamic than your average overlanding setup.
Friend of Winding Road, Evan Frank, helps us to kick of the new Guest Blog series with this piece on his misadventures with tuning, Mustangs, and the shock of road-car realities. If you’re interested in becoming a WR guest blogger, check out the details, here, and then send us your best effort at [email protected].
Still, with all of the coverage of this weather system, and considering the hearty thumbs up already given to our long-term Mazda2 by John Beltz for its winter driving prowess, I thought I’d go out and take a little drive this morning.
A bit of time has passed since the Beast’s rallycross adventure. Truth is, winter has set in through these mid-Michigan parts, and the cold combined with the hustle and bustle of the holidays simply hasn’t left much time for neat-o things to do with the Roadmaster. And then last week the “other” car was sidelined by a disagreement between myself, a deer, and Sir Issac Newton. Yeah, the Beast is a daily driver just like the 1989 SHO was, but I leaned long ago to never fly solo when dabbling with older fixer-uppers. Well, while the insurance company decides what to do with car number one, the old Roadmaster is now well and truly the single vehicle in this household. If you’re curious how that makes me feel, let me sum it up in two words: Just fine.
We’ve got a lot of really smart readers out there. That’s the approximate conclusion we’ve reached after years of perusing your comments, responding to your emails, occasionally answering your phone calls, and generally interacting with the Winding Road faithful. And while our editorial team may be doing most of the driving, and car-reviewing, we appreciate that there’s a wealth of knowledge and opinion out there that you have to share with us.
Underground Racing has made a name for itself by twin-turbocharging cars that probably have no business being twin-turbocharged. We’re glad they do it, though.
As auto enthusiasts, we love to drive. Some of us like it more than others. And then there’s the third group, filled with fleeting thoughts of going pro, or at least semi-pro.
Not only is the Renault R25 engine well-tuned for Formula 1, it can carry a tune. In this video from the 2006 Goodwood Festival Of Speed, the car plays “God Save The Queen” through RPM variation.
Happy Friday, again. This week, we bring you one short video of a spectacular close call from onboard a rally car. According to the video’s description, the driver is Dražen Ćurić from Croatia, and the brave co-driver is Albert Horn from Hungary.
I was pretty lucky to have the Audi TTS as my test car for a weekend trip back to see my folks and extended family recently, as it gave me the opportunity to log a lot of miles in a car that I’ve been hugely fond of.
While you might be tucking-in to a nice breakfast on this fine Christmas morning, we thought you might enjoy a bit of audio/visual entertainment. This video features Aston Martin’s V12 Vantage road car and the DBR1-2 Gulf Oil LMP1 Le Mans racer assaulting a lonely piece of road.
Remember that Super Nintendo game Starfox? We dream about it most nights, still.
The Toyota Camry is a good car. There…we said it.
Actually, it is a good car, in much the same way that vanilla ice cream is a good dessert. It’s tasty, refreshing, and provided you don’t experience brain freeze resulting from unintended mass consumption, devouring a dish is generally a pleasurable experience. It’s also, well, rather dull. Especially if one commits to a steady diet of the stuff for more than a week. For the sake of our readers, we’ll spare the disgusting details by simply saying the ick factor hits quick—real quick. This is why we suspect ordering plain vanilla ice cream seldom happens, despite its abundance around the world. There are far more delectable dishes on the menu for pretty much the same price, and since this isn’t the latest issue of Calories Galore, you probably get the metaphor by now.
Here is another set of quality photos from photographer Chris Amos, featuring the Cadillac CTS-V Coupe we reviewed in Issue 62 of Winding Road.
In the last edition of Flip This Car, Chris Smith took his 1994 Buick Roadmaster (AKA The Beast, AKA Moby Dick) out racing. Apparently a master of both over and understeer, Chris may not have fared that well in the actual rallycross standings, but it’s hard not to count this a major moral victory for grandpa-wagons the world-over. Sure, a few orange cones had to give up their lives for the glory of the Buick, but we can live with that.
Entering the small dirt oval at the Calhoun County Fairgrounds, I was the subject of some attention. Situated among a host of Japanese runabouts and numerous other cars that could fit in the trunk of the Beast, I had no hope of being inconspicuous. In retrospect, signing this car up for a Sports Car Club of America (SCCA) Rallycross event likely wasn’t the best use of the Buick’s ability, but from the moment I spied this car sitting on gigantic truck tires, I knew it was destined for an off-road adventure. That adventure materialized on Saturday December 4, as the Beast and I made a 200 mile round trip to compete in Round 10 of the Detroit Region SCCA Rallycross—the season ender—in Marshall, Michigan. If you’ve already spied the destroyed orange cone in the photo gallery, you’ve likely deduced that things didn’t go so well. In that assessment, you would be correct.
Recently, in our Supercar Issue, we brought you our review of the Chevrolet Corvette Z06 Carbon, featuring photography by Chris Amos. As we have now done with the Ferrari 458 Italia and Porsche 911 Turbo, we thought we’d show you some more of the photos from that rainy shoot, since they didn’t all make it into the magazine.
The E-Class sedan is a classically handsome vehicle. The wagon, with its extended roofline, curved rear windows, and a bumper that blends more integrally into the whole rear landscape of the vehicle, looks great. Taking in the E350 wagon, I don’t get the feeling that this is the humble grocery-getter that wagons have come across as for many years. I think—and the E wagon supports my case—that this notion is obsolete.
Happy Friday, car freaks. While we’re playing loads of Gran Turismo 5 and snacking on leftovers, we thought we’d offer this video of Sebastian Vettel piloting the game’s virtual Red Bull X1 Prototype, a design study in pure speed.
I expected an old school feel from this 1994 Buick Roadmaster, but it actually is old school. For the folks who’ve never had the chance to drive domestic steel prior to 1978, let me make this live for you. Sit on your legs for a half hour while pounding 10 shots of Johnnie Walker Black on an empty stomach, then stand up, turn your head sideways and try to walk in the general direction of South America. This is what I encountered the first time I intentionally got the Beast a bit squirrelly, and it’s not like a $200 pair of track shoes will help. I’m not a contender for the next round of Formula Drift, but neither am I a stranger to opposite lock; let’s just say I won’t be doing that again outside of a controlled environment, where I can attempt to learn how to speak Beast.
We’ll be honest; we were rooting for the fugitive by the end of this one. We don’t want to spoil the video for those of you who haven’t seen it, but the driver of this Mustang looks like he’s had some practice.
After showing off the full complement of Ferrari 458 Italia pictures and getting a positive response, we thought we’d offer up another photo set that came out of our recent Supercar Issue. Another Chris Amos joint, the subject of this shoot was one extremely menacing Porsche 911 Turbo. Despite some rainy conditions later in the day, a good time was had by all during the driving and the photographing of Porsche’s turbocharged beast.