Yesterday, the VW Fox proved to be less than sly, going down in Crack Pipe flames with a decisive 77% vote. That left a bad taste in our mouths for Brazilian fare so we're bidding adieu to that South American nation for a Mediterranean clime and a car befitting such clement weather.

Mid-engined two plus twos were nothing new to Ferrari when the Mondial first debuted in 1980. The Bertone-styled Dino 308GT4 had been dressing up driveways with its angular shape and roarty V8 since 1973. The company also had experience with throwing espresso-sized seats in the backs of their V12 engined GT cars for decades prior. However, like the 2+2 Dino, the Mondial was not a handsome car. This was especially evident when compared to the two-seat 308 with which it shared its major mechanicals. That car, in either GTS Spyder, or GTB coupe form, was perfection incarnate, as imagined by Pininfarina. The 2+2, however, looked like an amalgamation of 30 or more designers, with cheese grater scoops, black rubber moldings and Alfa Spider door handles placed like so much shabby chic glitter.

By the time this '89 Mondial 3.2 was built, much of the egregious styling faux pas had been exorcised from the car and, especially in black, this edition looks almost sexy- sort of how your dad sees your mom. The 270-bhp 3.2-litre V8 is still transversely mounted, and backed by a racing-pattern 5-speed gearbox. The entire drivetrain is on a separate subframe, a first for Ferrari, and a design that makes major engine or transmission work slightly less astronomical in cost. The folding fabric roof checks another box on the pros list for the Mondial, and maintains the flying butress styling of the coupe while erect.

This generation was the culmination of development for the 308/328-based cars and was superseded by the longitudinal-engined 3.4-litre Mondial t the same year this 3.2 slipped out of Modena. With fewer than 3,300 total Mondials built, it remains one of the more rare mainstream Ferraris.

A major maintenance issue with the Ferrari V8s of this era is timing belt replacements, which should be undertaken every five years. Failure to do so can end tragically in a very pretty, but impotent paperweight, as it is an interference engine. This car has 44,000 on the clock, and the seller says that he has all the paperwork for the maintenance, making this a car you don't need to automatically walk away from.

The seller's also a little phobic about the selling price, asking $30,500 and stating flat out that he won't take a penny less, not a penny more! Hopefully he doesn't show up to the test drive wearing kleenex boxes for shoes and carrying bottles of his own urine.

So how's about $30,500 for a 2+2 V8 with a prancing horse on the nose? Is that too much to Mondial with? Or does that price make you want to hike up your mom jeans and buy it?

You decide!

Ventura Craigslist or go here if the ad disappears.

Help me out with NPOCP. Click here to send a me a tip, and remember to include your commenter handle.

After bowing out of the entire 2009 show season, Nissan will indeed return to the floor at the 2010 Detroit Auto Show, at least in some capacity. They'll at least be showing the Nissan Leaf in the dank basement which, for the second year, will be utilized as the Electric Avenue exhibit, a place for hybrids and EV's to show off their stuff with low-speed public ride and drives. The show is claiming a return to strength this year, with a roster of 54 manufacturers signed on the dotted line. That's all well and good, but there's some interesting show dynamics afoot, take for instance this passage from the Free Press:

...(Senior co-chair of the Detroit Auto Show, Doug) Fox is including several luxury automakers — including Aston Martin, Ferrari, Lamborghini and Rolls-Royce, in his total.

Those manufacturers will only be showing their cars at an exclusive event, the Gallery. Sponsored by American Express, the invitation-only event will be held Jan. 10 at MGM Grand Detroit for holders of the credit card company's exclusive Centurion card.

Considering this block of high-end automakers has taken up a primo real-estate right in the middle of the Detroit Auto Show floor for as long as memory serves, this seems like face-saving to us. Amex doesn't exactly hand out Centurion cards to the riff-raff. We're wondering if Jalopnik's motley crew will even be allowed in. [Detroit Free Press]

[Flickr via SaveTheEnzos]

(Hat tip to Dustin!)

[Timothy Raines]

[Timothy Raines]

[Timothy Raines]

[Timothy Raines]

[Timothy Raines]

[Timothy Raines]

[Timothy Raines]

[Timothy Raines]

These patents, sketched on an Aston Martin DB7 to throw people off, were uncovered by Autocar and reveal a system that, to us, appears to hinge at the base of the windscreen, allowing almost the entire side of the car to hinge upwards for unprecedentedly good access. While the system will work on cars with any engine configuration it looks like it'd be best located on a mid-engined car, curing the difficulty typically involved with entering and exiting one. The patents say such a system will be "easy and cost-effective to make" compared to competitor's fancy doors. [via Autocar]

The Ferrari 250 GTO is revered amongst the Maranello faithful, meaning any 599 carrying the name needs power, style, and at least the illusion of exclusivity. Power should come in the form of the stock V12, which puts out a raucous 611 HP already, tuned to 700 HP. Style is said to be inspired by the wild 599xx Concept. And exclusivity? The GTO will probably be limited to just 500 units approaching $400K a piece.

Of course, all this is based on a report from autogespot saying Ferrari is taking pre-orders for a car named "Ferrari 599 GTO Limited Edition."

Considering mint GTOs go for over $5 million at auction, this is as close as your average millionaire may get.

[Autogespot via World Car Fans]

The rebirth of N.A.R.T. is a big undertaking, especially if you're going to create your own racer. Fortunately, big projects are Glick's forte. His post on FerrariChat below:

No Longer Red but a Flashing Green...
Things are starting to come together. It will take time but there is excitement and real interest.

Thanks to my Partners in this adventure!

This will be some trip and it has begun.

P 4/5 took on a life of her own.

May P 4/5 Competizione follow her example.

The laconic Finn’s premature exit was the talk of the sport for most of the year, especially after Ferrari’s 2009 car turned out to be quite a dud. Nowhere was Räikkönen’s indifference more stark than at the Malaysian Grand Prix, where during a break forced by torrential rain, he wandered about the pits with a bar of ice cream instead of remaining by his racing car:

Räikkönen was forced to leave Ferrari at the end of the season to make way for Fernando Alonso. There were talks with Toyota, hampered by Räikkönen’s high price and ultimately by Toyota’s exit from Formula One, then there were talks with his former team McLaren, which fell through. One has to wonder whether Räikkönen’s exorbitant salary demands—rumored to be close to $50 million, very much not in synch with his performance over the last two seasons—were a deliberate move on his part to ease his exit from the sport.

Going where many Finn have gone before, Räikkönen is set to continue his career in rallying. He has, in fact, already debuted in the World Rally Championship: Räikkönen drove a Super 2000 class Fiat Grande Punto Abarth for Tommi Mäkinen Racing at this year’s Rally Finland in August.

He leaves the sport after nine seasons, with occasional displays of devastating speed and a lucky world championship in 2007, when he exploited the rivalry between McLaren’s Fernando Alonso and Lewis Hamilton and the hubris of the latter to beat both at the 2007 Brazilian Grand Prix, claiming the title which had eluded him at McLaren.

Photo Credit: Mark Thompson/Getty Images, Massimo Bettiol/Getty Images

As you can see in the videos below, Massa and Alonso try to help their boss out to no avail. What's a chairman to do? Just have the team send another Ferrari and let the track workers deal with it.

[GT Spirit]

Photo Credit: JOSE JORDAN/AFP/Getty Images

[GT Spirit]

First a Bugatti Veyron. Now a Ferrari California? Maybe we need to expand "Save The Enzos" to "Save The Super Cars." What say you all?

(Hat tip to erzhik!)

[via EVO]

(Thanks for the tip Dave) (TwitPic)

The event was held at the Red Gate Gallery in Beijing and was attended by Ferrari owners and collectors (already sounds pretty obnoxious). The 599 China, which was created by artist Lu Hao, was won by an anonymous bidder from Shanghai with the proceeds going to Tsinghua University's Department of Automotive Engineering school with the intent to sponsor student and professor studies in Italy's Politecnico di Milano University or allow internships at Ferrari. At least they didn't get NIGO to paint it.

Car: Tata Nano
Place on the list: 49
Reason it's BS: The Tata Nano isn't ugly, it's simply space efficient. Given the constraints of price, footprint and upright packaging, it pulls off the microcar shape rather well actually. There are certainly uglier cars on the market in India and China right now.

Car: Ferrari Enzo
Place on the list: 42
Reason it's BS: Save the Enzo's! The Ferrari Enzo wasn't built to win beauty contests, it was designed to showcase Ferrari's F1 racing pedigree and tie those techniques and technologies to their road cars. Form follows function and while it's not classically beautiful it's fast and unique. In any case compared to the Mondial, it's a supermodel.

Car: Plymouth Prowler
Place on the list: 31
Reason it's BS: When the Prowler was introduced in 1997, it was the coolest car on the planet, bar none. Unfortunately it was packed with an engine from an Intrepid, and suspension tuning best described as one-of-a-kind. Despite its glaring flaws and how you might feel about the retro-mod style, it was certainly a car that got people looking. When you spot them today, you turn and look longer than you should, admit it.

Car: Lamborghini LM002
Place on the list: 25
Reason it's BS: BusnessWeek complains about "geometric doors, angular fenders, and a busy hood." Perhaps they forgot it was introduced in 1986 when everything cool was geometric, angular and busy. They don't even mention the fire-breathing (for the 80's) 5.0 liter V12 from the Countach under the hood and the take-no-prisoners attitude. You don't get a moniker like "Rambo Lambo" by being lame.

Car: DeLorean DMC-12
Place on the list: 20
Reason it's BS: Are they joking? The DMC-12? Of any car from the 80's this one still plays well on public streets. The stainless steel body is unique, the ridiculously heavy gullwing doors draw crowds and the fastback style screams 80's coke dealer, and nobody was more up on all things stylish in the 80's than coke dealers.

Car:Subaru Brat
Place on the list: 18
Reason it's BS: Apparently BusinessWeek's too busy adjusting its top hat and monocle to enjoy the finer things in life, like riding in the jump seats in the Subaru Brat's cargo bed. It's even got decent capability for an early soft-roader.

Car: Aston Martin Lagonda
Place on the list: 16
Reason it's BS: Oh come on? Really? The Lagonda? It pushed the limit of longer, lower, wider to absurdity and mixed in out of control braggadocio. By all account it was admittedly every bit British reliable, but who cares? Hire a team of mules to pull it around town as you look out upon the unwashed masses from your obnoxious 80's chariot.

Car:Volvo 240
Place on the list: 13
Reason it's BS: Don't you go messing with the 240 BusinessWeek. You have no idea the depths of Volvo love out there, especially by the boxy-but-trusty 240. We dare you, dare you to find a more dedicated owner base. Fine, it's a bit boring, but so is the Camry and that's not on the list. We actually find it handsome, especially with the quad headlight design. You best watch your back BusinessWeek.

Car: Bricklin SV1
Place on the list: 11
Reason it's BS: Okay, this one's a bit on the ugly side, if you look only at the outside, but it was one of the first cars to push the idea of safety in a sports car, even though because of its heavy construction it wasn't particularly sporty. It's got a logical shape, and the nose is designed to prevent expensive damage repairs. Sure it's a bit cluttered in places, but come on, gull-wing doors.

Car:Chevy El Camino
Place on the list: 1
Reason it's BS: Number one. They've got to be kidding. Two words on this one: Screw. Off. First of all, lumping the entire series into one big pile is just plain ignorant. Secondly, it's rude. The El Camino from the outset was a looker and stayed a dynamite design all the way until the fall in the 70s. But then again, everything was pretty fug in the 70s. If they even try to say the 1960 and 1972 were ugly, they might get a Jalopnik-shaped shoe to the butt.

Photo credit: SuperChevy

The conflagration which enveloped Ferrari’s Ice Cream Man was fuelled by racing fuel from his fellow Finn Heikki Kovalainen’s McLaren.

Kovalainen left the pits prematurely, dragging a piece of refuelling hose behind his car, which sprayed fuel as he made his way down the pitlane. The spray flashed up for an instant when it touched Räikkönen’s hot Ferrari. With his characteristic cool, he drove on immediately after the flames had died down.

After the race, McLaren was fined $50,000 for dangerous conduct, while Kovalainen received a 25-second penatly, which dropped him from 9th to 12th position in the final classification (both outside the points).

Speaking of weird Fiats, there's nothing wrong with an X1/9 that a supercharger can't fix!

And just to show that the 24 Hours Of LeMons is taking over the universe (or at least the portion of the universe comprised of Northern California car shows), here's a shot of the Italian Stallions X1/9 LeMons car. We'll be seeing this quad-carbed monster at the Arse Freeze-a-Palooza next month!

What could be better than a Maserati straight six engine? A Maserati straight six engine with Lucas fuel injection, of course! I can't see a single weak point in that plan! OK, here's a gallery for you. We'll be seeing more of that orange Fiat 128 Sport a little later; very interesting story there.

This particular shot was taken at the 1970 race, where local boy Nino Vaccarella is on his way to third place in the big Ferrari 512 prototype.

And who beat him? Two of John Wyer’s nimble Porsche 908’s:

Vaccarella would be back the next year in the much more suitable 3-liter Alfa Romeo T33 and take the title. This was the car with the center-mounted rearview mirror sticking out like the love child of a periscope and a Martian fighting machine from The War of the Worlds:

There isn't much we could add to the owners statement regarding the car below, but if you want nothing more than the best chariot from which to display the flowing chest hair peeking from behind your open Hawaiian shirt, there's probably no finer example of this car available. At least not at the reserve price.

[eBay Listing]

Of course, by the time you add any features and include taxes, fees, guzzler tax, and the like, it climbs to over $250K, which is about where the current F430 tops out. For all that dough you'll get the cache of Ferrari ownership as well as a rocking 4.5-liter direct-injection V8 pumping out 562 HP with a top speed of 202 MPH and a 0-to-60 MPH run under 3.4 seconds. It's like shopping at Big Lots! Here's the full price list in both untranslated and forum-translated form:

Look on the bright side, at least we don't have to pay VAT here, right? What's got us curious is the "Racing livery" option. What the hell is that?

[FerrariChat via AutoCar]

The poster was taking his Alfa Romeo 8C Spider in for service when he spotted what he described as

"a new Pininfarina one-off, it looked to me like a modern version of the 410 Superamerica, and had Pininfarina "crossed flags" badges in the back. [with coloring] a medium shade of metallic grey... it might be Grigio Titanio. Definitely not Argento Nurburgring and lighter than both Ferrari's Grigio Silverstone and Maserati's Grigio Nuvolari..."

Jim Glickenhaus, who commissioned the one-off Ferrari P4/5 and is working on the P4/5 Competizione, knows about the car but is staying mum on the subject because he isn't the owner. If there's information forthcoming, it'll come from the person holding the title — or someone with a camera who catches it on the streets.

Apparently it's somewhere in the neighborhood of Torino, Italy, so if there are any readers in the area with skills in automotive photographic espionage, please check out the Ferrari dealers for anything you don't recognize. [FerrariChat]

Photo credit: Sports Car Digest

Massa lost last year’s title fight in perhaps the most frustrating way imaginable, when on the very last lap of the season’s last race, Lewis Hamilton passed a struggling Timo Glock to finish fifth, gaining the single point he beat Massa with.

Three races earlier, Massa had been in the lead when his fellow Brazilian Nelsinho Piquet’s now-infamous staged accident bunched up the field behind the safety car, resulting in a dramatically reshuffled race from which Fernando Alonso emerged victorious while Massa came in at 13th, out of the points. Realizing that these were his only points lost due to conscious scheming, he’s lashed out at the lenient treatment Renault has received:

All of what happened was robbery. Regarding the race nothing has happened, the result stays the same. That’s not right. It changed the championship. I lost by one point…they just sent Briatore home. I don’t understand it and I don’t think it was right.

Historical revisionism, perhaps, as a Formula One season is by default laden with what-ifs. Still, it’s easy to understand his frustration. A year ago, Massa was driving a highly competitive car, fighting for the championship until the last corner of the last grand prix.

Since then, Formula One has become a mad shuffle, Ferrari’s 2009 car has proven to be a huge disappointment, new teams and young guns have emerged and matured and Massa himself took a giant spring to the head from Rubens Barrichello’s car, which nearly killed him and removed him from competition for the rest of this season.

While he is still a young driver at 28 and with a team that will surely bounce back, he is certainly no closer to winning his world championship than on that November day in São Paulo, where it slipped from his hands so cruelly, right in front of his home crowd.

Source: BBC, Photo Credit: Paul Gilham/Getty Images, Clive Mason/Getty Images

A year after this photo was taken, Lauda went on to win his first of three world titles. This was before he became an owner of airlines under both his names: first Lauda Air, then Niki.

Di Montezemolo managed the Scuderia for only a year before he ascended in the Fiat hierarchy, then returned to Ferrari after Enzo Ferrari’s death, only to ascend yet again and take over the entirety of Fiat after Umberto Agnelli’s death in 2004. He is also the founding president of the Formula One Teams Association.

Regazzoni’s best year in F1 was the very year this photo was taken, when he finished the world championship only three points behind winner Emerson Fittipaldi. Six years later, he was paralyzed from the waist down in a grievous accident, when he hit a wall at the 1980 United States Grand Prix West at 150 MPH.

Nothing, however, would stop the mustachioed Swiss from grabbing a minigun to play the character of Blain Cooper in Predator:

Photo Credit: Igor/Picasa

The NSX, launched in 1990, was remarkable for its low roofline of only 46": a bare six inches taller than the Ford GT40 race car. The GT–R, on the other hand, is a full eight inches taller than the NSX.

Under the aluminum, the difference is even bigger. The GT–R is 850 pounds heavier than the NSX, which weighs in at 2,950 lb: an increase of 22 percent. There is, of course, an even greater increase in power, with the Nissan’s twin-turbo V6 producing almost twice the horsepower of the Honda’s V6 VTEC, with a resulting climb in power to weight from 216 bhp/ton to 277 bhp/ton.

But while the NSX our Wes Siler reviewed for Jalopnik is the balls-out Spoon version with 420 HP, his words about lightness and simplicity are probably true of the original as well:

[The] NSX-R GT doesn’t just feel as good as I expected, but better than I could ever have hoped. Unlike other classic super cars, the passing of time has been kind to the NSX. It suffers from neither high weight nor over complication of modern super cars, but adapts their up-to-date running gear, brakes and tires to give itself modern performance.

The trend is much the same with sporty roadsters. Witness the 1964 Honda S600 versus the 1999 Honda S2000:

Relentless growth in size is not limited to the Japanese car industry. If you were to compare Ferrari’s entry-level car from 1968 to its successor 31 years on, this is what you’d see:

The rather lithe and low Ferrari 360 Modena is practically a battleship when compared to the little Dino 246 GT.

And so on.

Photo Credit: Honda fórum (NSX’s and GT–R), VWvortex Forums (Honda S600 and S2000) and the author (Ferraris)

One more to add to our galleries of Automotive FAIL!(Hat tip to Alexhohio!)

Defending champion Senna arrived in Japan needing a win to keep his title chances alive against teammate Alain Prost, with whom he had developed a fierce rivalry over the previous two years, driving McLaren’s dominant MP4/4 and MP4/5.

Photo Credit: Pascal Rondeau /Allsport

This is Senna’s qualifying lap, which would earn him pole with a time of 1:38.041. There is perhaps no better footage of Formula One racing to demonstrate the sheer speed involved. Television cameras distort and slow down the cars, while modern in-car video—recorded with a wide-angle lens from a vantage point high above the driver—renders the scene with a surreality more in common with videogames than racing.

Here, however, the speed is monstrous, staggering, our perception aided by a regular lens shoved right up against the driver and by a manic Senna, driving his V10-powered McLaren-Honda with fury. You get the sense that there is no single millisecond on his lap where you could control the jittery racer, driven absolutely at the limit.

For a comparison, here’s Alain Prost’s (left) qualifying lap side-by-side with Senna’s (right). Prost was no slouch, but he is simply demolished by Senna here. The finish line would see them 1.730 seconds apart—a difference of 1.8 percent, a huge margin at this level. Over the course of a grand prix, a difference like that will add up to almost a full lap.

In the race, Senna’s advantage would not hold up: Prost beat him off the line and developed a lead. Five laps before the end of the race—which, with Prost in the lead, would have meant Senna losing the world title—Senna made his move, but Prost cut him off. Neither of them would back down and their tangled McLarens came to a stop.

Photo Credit: TOSHIFUMI KITAMURA/AFP/Getty Images

While Prost got out of his car, Senna was push-started to rejoin the race, which he promptly won—only to get disqualified, handing the world championship for 1989 to Alain Prost, who left the team to join Ferrari for 1990.

A year later, they’re back in Suzuka for the 1990 Japanese Grand Prix. At the drivers’ press conference, Senna is still upset. He leaves the room after a barely veiled comment by Nelson Piquet.

Note: The video begins in Japanese but becomes English for the choice bits.

Senna would, of course, ram into Prost’s Ferrari right after the start of the 1990 race, taking them both out of the action yet again. This time, it was Senna who walked away with the championship.

Photo Credit: Allsport UK /Allsport

Ten years later, Senna’s scorching pole from 1989 remained an awesome feat. Watch this comparison with Michael Schumacher in 1999, who is driving Ferrari’s constructor’s champhionship-winning F399. Senna, five years dead at this point, is right up there with the German who would come to dominate Formula One in the coming years.

Felipe Massa, still recuperating from his head injury sustained at the Hungarian Grand Prix, will remain with Ferrari as Alonso’s teammate.

Giancarlo Fisichella, who joined Ferrari after a surprising second place finish for Force India at the Belgian Grand Prix, will remain for 2010 as the team’s reserve driver.

Räikkönen is rumored to return to his former team McLaren, where he will surely have a jolly time with Lewis Hamilton. You can just picture the Ice Cream Man being two driver to last year’s champion—well, to anybody.

Source: BBC, Photo Credit: Clive Mason/Getty Images

Human beings aren't strictly rational animals. Car enthusiasts, for all their emphasis on numbers and measurements, are roughly equal parts rational and rationalizing, and there's no end to the myths that have grown around car culture. We believe that many of those myths, while perhaps not strictly true, are beneficial and help make car culture a fun place to be. We therefore choose to live as if these myths are pure truth, and we fully support all those who do. Click Next to see some of our most cherished.

MYTH: Cars were just plain better in the old days.

WHAT'S WRONG WITH IT: Cars are safer, more reliable, more efficient, and perform better today than they were in any version of "the old days."

WHY WE BELIEVE IT ANYWAY: Because there are different versions of "better," and one definition has to include some sort of subjective measure of soul. As many have said, the rear end on that '59 Bel Air has enough soul for a Motown collection. And we believe that almost any older car, from AMCs to old Volvos, can have more soul, charisma, personality, or what have you have you than something modern designed to do nothing more than hold four sets of golf clubs and then crash. Plus, owning an older car almost invariably means you're working on it, and working on your own car makes your car more yours as well as making you a smarter and more capable person.

MYTH: Ferraris are the ultimate automobiles.

WHAT'S WRONG WITH IT: The overwhelming Ferrari mystique obscures the fact that these things are overpriced, overstyled, breakdown-prone pose-mobiles.

WHY WE BELIEVE IT ANYWAY: So who gives a damn? Frankly, the question of Ferrari ownership is probably never going to be one of our problems, and it's good to have someone at the epicenter of automotive lust. Even if you're not a Ferrari person, you probably have some equivalent ultra-car marque as the angel on top of your imaginary lottery-winning Christmas tree, and the same logic applies-someone has to be the ultimate, and the ideal of the ultimate will always be more important than the reality. At least this ideal comes with its own F1 team.

MYTH: The Indy 500 is one of the greatest races in the world.

WHAT'S WRONG WITH IT: It's been trading on its storied history as it slowly becomes a boring and expensive spec race.

WHY WE BELIEVE IT ANYWAY: Because we believe there's still a chance that it could return to its innovative, anything-goes, world's-best-drivers glory days. Exactly how this may happen is unclear to us, and it won't happen by next year if ever, but we hold out hope. And it's still much more fun and interesting to watch than the other Greatest Race traditionally held on the same day, the glitzier but far more past-its-prime Grand Prix of Monaco.

MYTH: Car dealers can't be trusted.

WHAT'S WRONG WITH IT: With contemporary consumer protection and access to information, you can probably trust them now more than ever before.

WHY WE BELIEVE IT ANYWAY: Because consumer skepticism, at least educated consumer skepticism, is a good thing, especially on major purchases. Trust must be earned, right? Now, this doesn't mean prospective car buyers should walk into dealerships and say "Prove to me you're not a crook!" because for one thing, you can't prove a negative. What it means is to do your research, don't let car lust carry you away, and always, always, always take a Jalopnik reader with you when buying a car.

MYTH: The Prius sucks.

WHAT'S WRONG WITH IT: The Prius is a perfectly competent automobile that delivers very good fuel economy and has thousands of satisfied owners.

WHY WE BELIEVE IT ANYWAY: In its quest to save precious energy resources it's created a shortage of material resources. It's hideous. For the first successful hybrid, it's remarkably uninteresting from a tech point of view-when our sister site Gizmodo featured one at their gallery and ran its 12-volt battery down showing off its flashy dashboard, we were a bit miffed to find that it couldn't jump-start itself. And seriously, we'd rather be taken out and shot out behind the storage shed than spend $28,000 on a perfectly competent automobile that delivers very good fuel economy.

MYTH: LeMans is a great movie.

WHAT'S WRONG WITH IT: LeMans is a collection of racing footage inside of a really terrible movie.

WHY WE BELIEVE IT ANYWAY: Because that's a really, really stupendous collection of racing footage in that terrible movie. Also, the terrible movie includes Steve McQueen, which softens the blow somewhat. It really seems like making LeMans was an excuse for the director, cast, and crew to hang around the Circuit De La Sarthe with race cars for a few days, and that's something we can all understand.

MYTH: Manual transmissions are better than automatic transmissions.

WHAT'S WRONG WITH IT: Automatics are catching up; the dual-clutch units can outperform manual boxes in many cases, and even their fuel-economy advantage may be disappearing.

WHY WE BELIEVE IT ANYWAY: Again, there's better and there's better. In this case, being in total control of your car is fun and interesting, and more fun and interest are better. To many, learning stick is still an achievement-although maybe it shouldn't be, heck, it isn't all THAT hard, but no matter-and being more capable is better than having everything done for you. We could really give a damn if the Porsche PDK systems are a tenth faster to sixty or whatever the numbers are; we didn't bother to look them up because we don't care. We would rather drive to
sixty a bit slower than ride there.

MYTH: Gaze upon my works, ye not worthy, and despair; for I am Bob motherfucking Lutz.

WHAT'S WRONG WITH IT: What, Bob Lutz? So-called Father of the Viper? He's just a marketing guy.

WHY WE BELIEVE IT ANYWAY: Listen, we need colorful figures in this world, and Bob Lutz is the most colorful person we have in the American car business. Perhaps in any business. His is a tradition going back as far as Barnum, or at least Don King. Are auto writers worried that Fritz Henderson will land a helicopter in their backyard, walk into their house, and yell at them? Is Alan Mulally or Scott Monty going to challenge us to a duel anytime soon? Nope. And seriously, without Lutz, we wouldn't have so much of modern car culture, from the phrase "The Ultimate Driving Machine" to the aforementioned Viper. Yes, there's way too much marketing in the world today, but that's not the problem. The problem is that Lutz isn't doing all of it.

What really happened was—well, nobody knows. This photo was posted on A Time To Get, along with a number of similar ones, and the only explanation is this:

A couple highlight pics from the trip just because. What better way to get down on a Monday than with some beat-up old hood badges of multi-million dollar rides and a little reckless driving on the Autostrada?

What’s beyond certain is that Nick Maggio had a killer time.

Photo Credit: A Time To Get

According to Glickenhaus in comments on the FerrariChat message board, the idea is to have it possibly race ready for 2010. Specifics, such as chassis/engine/gearbox, are "figured out" and will be announced soon. Although the above image, a rendering by Michiel Van Den Brink, based on the original, shows us what it may look like, Glickenhaus says it represents a "very rough" idea of what it'll look like when completed although "We're still working out the details and should have an image and specifications in a few weeks"

We're also waiting to hear what racing series it may be a part of, although in the spirit of the original N.A.R.T. they'll be looking at endurance racing and plan on hitting the 24 Hours Of Nürburgring.

"We're looking for one major sponsor. That race gets 250k spectators and a lot of TV. In addition we could do other races and when her racing days are over we'd keep her in that livery and she'd go to a lot of events. There'd be a lot exposure and it's not going to cost Crazy money," said Glickenhaus. It'll be interesting to see where Glickenhaus goes with this considering "Ferrari P 4/5 Competizione will not be sold." That'll limit the sponsorship opportunities. However, Glickenhaus claims he's willing to go it his own if necessary.

Glickenhaus also announced he won't be racing the vehicle stating "my driving in anger days are behind me. We have some interesting ideas for drivers."

All we know is we're excited as hell to see what he's got in mind and can't wait to see the first renderings when Glickenhaus releases them.