Button went to Japan with a 15-point lead on his teammate Barrichello as Sebastian Vettel—very fast but prone to the errors of the young—looked increasingly less of a credible challenger. Twenty-five points behind with thirty to grab in three races, Red Bull’s driver faced an uphill battle.

He began his working weekend by setting pole on Saturday with a time of 1:32.160, 60 milliseconds clear of Toyota’s Jarno Trulli, with McLaren’s incumbent champion Lewis Hamilton a further 175 milliseconds behind.

Photo Credit: Clive Mason/Getty Images

The legs you are looking at belong to Timo Glock, Jarno Trulli’s teammate at Toyota, who finished second at the previous race in Singapore. He injured his left calf in a crash during practice and couldn’t drive in the race.

Photo Credit: Mark Thompson/Getty Images

Vettel had the advantage of pole position, but could not afford to finish at anything worse than 4th to retain even a sliver of chance for this year’s title. Which would be no mean feat, as Vettel celebrated his 22nd birthday on July 3rd—if he became world champion, he would be by far the youngest champion the sport has ever seen.

Photo Credit: Mark Thompson/Getty Images

Because he knows Jay Leno has a great many fast cars which he likes to drive at speed, Vettel performed a ritual transformation into The Chin as he put on his fire-retardant mask.

Photo Credit: Mark Thompson/Getty Images

And the race is on! As you can see in the lower right corner, Lewis Hamilton, driving the KERS-powered McLaren, pulled in dangerously close to Vettel from his position of 3rd on the grid. Vettel can thank Jarno Trulli, seen in his red and white Toyota on the left, for holding Hamilton slightly back. While Hamilton was at one point nosing ahead of Vettel, he was on the outside line, allowing Vettel to turn first into the first corner. This was to be a position he would never relinquish, not even for a single pitstop.

Photo Credit: Mark Thompson/Getty Images

Proving how fast he is when he doesn’t have to deal with traffic, Vettel quickly built up an impressive lead as he was chased by Lewis Hamilton and Jarno Trulli.

Photo Credit: Clive Mason/Getty Images

Hamilton ran in second place for almost half of the race, having overtaking Trulli at the start, but he was never in a position to challenge for the lead.

Then came his first pitstop. McLaren threw down the gauntlet with a scorcher of a tire change and refueling at 6.7 seconds—with Jarno Trulli, running third, due for his own stop in the next lap.

Photo Credit: Mark Thompson/Getty Images

Toyota rose to the occasion: they swapped out Trulli’s slicks and refueled him in 6.6 seconds. Combined with the time he gained on Hamilton during his last, fast lap out, this was enough of a margin to allow Trulli to return in front of Hamilton. The Toyota pit crew was absolutely overjoyed. Trulli would manage to hold on to his position to take the 11th podium of his 12-year career.

Photo Credit: Mark Thompson/Getty Images

Here’s Jenson Button, driving out of the points after a lackluster qualifying session and a poor start. Pure luck would return him to 8th place, worth a single point: a fight ahead of him between Adrian Sutil of Force India and Heikki Kovalainen of McLaren culminated in a spin, allowing Button to slip by. He finished at 8th, one place behind teammate Rubens Barrichello, who thus gained a point on him. Brawn GP would end the race needing half a point to claim the constructor’s championship.

Photo Credit: Clive Mason/Getty Images

Poor Mark Webber, already out of the challenge for the world title, had to start from the pitlane after a botched qualification and was already on his second or third pitstop by lap five. Red Bull Racing used the opportunity to recall him to the pits a number of times during the race to test various aerodynamic bits: you’ll remember that in this season, testing is not allowed outside of race weekends.

Red Bull did a splendid job. Running dead last in 17th place with two laps down on the rest of the field, Webber set the race’s fastest lap on lap 50 with a time of 1:32.569.

Photo Credit: Clive Mason/Getty Images

Just as things were becoming a tad boring, Bernie Ecclestone—sitting in his supervillain mansion on the island of Thule in the Southern Ocean—pressed the ACCIDENT button on his control panel. Toro Rosso’s 19-year-old Jaime Alguersuari promptly disintegrated an advertising board and stuck his car nose first into the tire barrier. The Spanish kid emerged just fine, but as the track was now littered with carbon fiber, it was time to fire up the 6.3-liter V8 in the AMG Benz safety car.

Photo Credit: Clive Mason/Getty Images

The race stewards performed with clockwork Japanese precision, but it still took them five laps to clear the track, chilling everyone’s tires. Fun was provided by safety car driver Bernd Mayländer, who let the big Benz rip, sending big gargles of V8 down the trackside microphones.

Photo Credit: Clive Mason/Getty Images

Nothing remained for the last few laps: Robert Kubica threatened Button for a while but then backed off, allowing him to grab his single point—and Vettel his full ten for the 4th win of his career. He was manic with joy. The photo above was preceded by one hell of a chest bump, captured by the cameraman to the right. If you watch the race on tape, keep an eye out for it!

Photo Credit: Mark Thompson/Getty Images

One of these days, racing drivers will have to abandon Dan Gurney’s great invention if they don’t want to end up cross-posted to our sister site of smut, Fleshbot.

Photo Credit: Clive Mason/Getty Images

Come to think of it again: too late. Call the San Fernando Valley—or better yet, Budapest!

Photo Credit: Clive Mason/Getty Images

The saddest man on the entire island of Honshu! In a repeat of last weekend’s performance, Toyota inched ever closed to its first win in Formula One. But similarly to Timo Glock’s second, Jarno Trulli could not claim victory. He was full of praise for his team and his injured teammate, a stark contrast with the ever aloof Lewis Hamilton, who blamed nothing but his car for his third place.

Sebastian Vettel is now 16 points down on Jenson Button with two races to go and a maximum of twenty points to gain. Two years ago, Kimi Räikkönen was down 17 points as Formula One went to its penultimate race in Shanghai—but two flawless victories and Lewis Hamilton’s rookie shakes made him world champion by one point over Hamilton and teammate Fernando Alonso.

Let’s see if Vettel can do the same. He’s got his work cut out for him: the next race will be on Barrichello’s home turf in Brazil on October 18th.

Photo Credit: Clive Mason/Getty Images

It would even have held the all-time lap record until lap six of the race, when Dan Gurney in his Eagle broke it with a time of 8 minutes and 18.2 seconds.

The 1967 season was fast, wicked and violent even by the standards of early Formula 1. The cars had just come back into power the year before, when regulations increased maximum engine size from a sewing machine 1.5 liters to a healthy three, and this was the first year when the entire field was made up of 3-liter cars. Speeds were increasing race by race, the cars ran on hard rubber, had no wings, and the tracks they raced on were designed and built in the 1920s.

Add to this the utter madness of the most famous of those tracks: the old Nürburgring Nordschleife. Where trees lined a thin strip of tarmac and these slender aluminum tubes with no downforce skirted right up to the edge on every lap. One would imagine it was not only the Eagle’s exhaust manifolds which were made of titanium but Gurney’s balls as well.

The cars took an incredible beating and the Grand Prix turned into a race of attrition. Gurney, who would go on to break the lap record again with a time of 8:15.1, had to retire from first position with a broken halfshaft. Denny Hulme in the unremarkable but reliable Brabham-Repco won the race and went on to become World Champion.

And yes, the cars took to the air on every lap at the very appropriately named Flugplatz.

Dan Gurney's Eagle taking flight during the 1967 German Grand Prix at the Nurburgring. Who says us Americans are new to this place?
[source]

Now and then, I wonder if this malaise is not a thirtysomething crisis, and then I take a step back and realize that it really isn't. Age is merely a tipping point, where the enthusiasm of youth is finally allowed to a step back in the face of a broader historical perspective. There is a transitional moment where it's understood that while independence and DIY will always rule, they are not quite the all. There is a beauty to industry, but when industry becomes the be-all, end all, there's a spirit that gets lost. Lost yet? Let me extrapolate a bit.

I've been in a phase over the last year or so where the only things worth discovering seem old. As soon as something new happens that seems interesting but overrun with Gen-Y jackasses with eyebrow rings, I don't immediately want to know it. I want to know the history behind it. I was reading an article on the taste of human flesh today, and it raised some questions. One of the things that's noted in the piece is that while one's tongue is a limited sensory palate, the nose is capable discerning of thousands of permutations. Multiply that by the tongue's sensory receptors, and the results become a matter of splitting flagella.

Cars fall into the same gap. The NYT's recent piece on the collectibility of vintage Japanese iron is evidence enough. Sitting on the rear hatch of Bumbeck's Starion at a drift event, snacking on peppers and celery and having young kids walk up knowing exactly what the car was — and that it was a well-preserved example of the breed — was heartening. I want to know what those kids ate.

In the couple of years since we started touting the joy of the StarQuests, prices of the cars have gone up considerably, also undoubtedly helped by the infamous Clarkson Starion in the Top Gear "Fifteen-Hundred-Pound-Sports-Coup s-That-Aren't-Porsches" challenge.

A Boss 302 will always be an incredible car. As will a GS455, an LS6 El Camino or a Challenger T/A. But you can have a Ferrari 308 for less than many of those cars, or even a nice little Deuce Coupe if you do the work yourself. And why wouldn't you?

Why? Because of your taste in awesome. The other night I was engaged in a nightly ritual intellectual sumo match with Kasey from Dubspeed and mentioned The Awesome . He made a crack about "teh awesome." I pointed out that the "teh" meme is totally dead and "awesome" basically has about six months to live — at best. It's sad, because Awesome is entirely something worth keeping as a sacred totem to gearheads. And its permutations are as varied as the confluences of taste and smell that allow us to distinguish a dinner that induces a a slavering, eye-rolling foodgasm from a merely good meal.

If awesome wasn't important, we'd all be driving around in Model Ts with airbags, five-point belts, Libby Lights, improved brakes and hyperefficient electric powertrains miraculously powered by soybeans. But awesome is important. Sometimes it is accidental. Rarely, although fortunately, it comes from a deeply held passion that's allowed to be unleashed — like the GTO. And sometimes, like the Hachi, it's simply a weird confluence of history and dorkdom. Nobody walked up to my friend's sister 15 years ago and complimented her on her AE86. Now it would be a prime candidate for geek-outs.

But but here's the thing — the enthusiasts drive the pursuit of the inscrutable awesome. I'm not going to make a list of my current prime candidates — with the exception of the Evo — although they all tend to be rear-drivers. Some miss the missing list by one thick whisker, like the RS 4, which is astounding, but not exactly awesome.

Awesome often exists just out of one's grasp, but when stumbled upon, irrevocable proof of its existence is miraculously easily at hand. It's there in a Defender 110, a Bandit Trans Am, Honda Beat, Ed Roth's Beatnik Bandit, an OG Mini, a Jaguar XJS, a Ferrari GTO, the Tyrell P34, the Gurney F1 Eagle, a Barracuda Formula S, a KP61 Starlet, the Dodge Macho Power Wagon, the Benz 6.9, the Countach, pretty much any Voisin, the Polizei M5, the Tesla Roadster, the Traction Avant, Jim Hall's Sucker Car and the Ur-Quattro, to name a few.

No one should fly where eagles dare, but when they do, it uplifts the collective consciousness. Awesome knows no time or place. It only knows itself, and it is propagated through its practitioners, and news of it disseminated by its adherents. Awesome has driven the industry for over a century. Awesome drives the human race. We, as a society, eat the past and excrete it in new ways. We at Jalopnik encourage you to discover the awesome. Even if for gearheads it often tastes like aluminum, shteel und human flesh. In fact, especially if that's the case. Pubil sevis announcement over. Cue guitars.

Thanks for listening. We'll see you next Wednesday. – Davey G. Johnson

"Fast as a Shark" is a weekly electronic broadside aimed at what has been historically right and terribly wrong with the autmotive industry and culture. And yes, we do put on a Dorf costume and perform metal karaoke for spare change, thanks for asking.

Related:
The Apocalypse Dudes: An Open Letter to Auto Designers [Internal]

In 1961, after witnessing Jack Brabham's 9th-place finish in the Indy 500 in a mid-engined Cooper, Dan Gurney hooked up Colin Chapman and the Ford Motor Company to build a car for the '63 Indy 500 that would truly change the face of American open-wheel motorsports. But it was hardly a cakewalk. While Gurney felt it was a good car, it was apparently very noisy to drive, so Chapman came up with an air scoop to divert wind over the driver's head.

The mag wheels were cracking during testing. Gurney and Jim Clark had to share a set of wheels during qualifying. Gurney started the race on 7 cylinders. Clark lost due to what's today still a controversial decision not to black flag an oil-leaking Parnelli Jones. Two years later, however, Clark would win, sealing the fate of the front-engined Offy-powered roadster.

Making History at Indy [All-American Racers]

Related:
More Dan Gurney [Internal]

Car and Driver teases us in its December issue by connecting several dots that lead all the way to a new version of the SCCA's Trans-Am series (which, surprisingly, is still limping along under license). Imagine the new Mustang FR500GT racer (pictured) alongside similar purpose-built offerings based on the coming Chevrolet Camaro and Dodge Challenger. All you'd need would be names like Titus, Penske, Gurney and Donohue — and a Sunoco sponsorship — to rehash the glory days of muscle-car road racing. The point man for such a revival, C&D says, would be Dan Davis of Ford Racing Technology, who's said he wants to launch a spec series for the new 550-hp Mustang racers. That series could give way to a broader one that includes Ford's competitors. Who says you can't go home again? – Mike Spinelli

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We're Not In Love With Saturday's Children; We're In Love With the Misfit Children: The Cars That Didn't Run in Saturday's Trans-Am Race at Laguna Seca [internal]

For Google's sake, that may well be the longest headline we've ever written. This blogging crap is ridiculously wordy work now and then. Regardless, here're a few shots of the Mopar/AMC contingent, who for reasons we do not know, didn't run in Saturday's Trans-Am session at the Monterey Historics. Which, frankly, was unfortunate, as Dan Gurney's legacy was left to be defended by a mere Cougar. We suspect foul play on the part of Ford and Chevrolet.

Related:
More from the Monterey Historics and Pebble Beach [Internal]

It's as simple as this: we need to make the pilgrimage to Goodwood. And oh to be there this year when Ford breaks out the 1966 Le Mans-winning GT40 with former 24 Heures du Mans winners Dan Gurney and Jackie Oliver behind the wheel for blasts up the hill. Ford's celebrating the 40th anniversary of a victory that set off a four-year winning streak for the Eric Broadley-designed sports car. A guy we know rides with Gurney, and apparently, even at 75 years old, he's impossible to keep up with. God, this should be good. [Thanks to Alex for the tip.]

Dan Gurney to Drive Le Mans-winning Ford GT40 at Goodwood [Classical Drive]

Related:
Weird French Supercar Concept Goes to Goodwood: Peugeot 907 to Attempt Hillclimb [Internal]

Any gearhead who's remotely familiar with our taste in cars knows that Dan Gurney's 1967 Eagle F1 is one of our absolute all-time favorite vehicles. It's simply one of the sexiest cars built in an era of incredibly sexy, sexy, sexy cars. Powered by a Weslake V-12 with hand-formed titanium headers (absolute works of art), the Eagle landed Gurney the title of "Only American to win a GP event in a car of his own construction." Now, Real Art Replicas has an excrutiatingly-detailed 1:8-scale replica; only 350 will be built, so if you're thinkin' about our birthday, buy it now and save it for us, will ya? The price? Only $1,499! C'mon, that's not even 1,500 bucks!

Real Art Replicas Gurney Eagle

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Yale Type Weighs in on Rallying [Internal]