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.

For serious road racing, you need a car with the engine in the middle: behind the driver but in front of the rear axle. While pretty in its physics on paper, the idea of mid-engined car construction was a difficult birth. In spite of its conception and very successful application by Ferdinand Porsche in the pre-war Benz Tropfenwagen (pictured left) and various Auto Unions, motor racing emerged from World War Two with front-engined cars.

But then physics came marching down on a racing establishment uncomfortable with the idea of horse-pushed carriages. 1958 would be the last season in Formula One won by a front-engined car, followed by Le Mans in 1962 and the Indianapolis 500 in 1964. Since these respective years, all of these races and championships have been won by mid-engined racing cars. Road cars soon followed, with the tiny fiberglass De Tomaso Vallelunga in 1964, then a year later the very car that gave birth to the word supercar: the Lamborghini Miura, with its transversely mid-mounted V12.

In Formula One and at the Indianapolis 500, it was pesky outsiders who convinced the ruling elite with their performances that mid-engined was the way to go. At Le Mans, a most unlikely development occured: reigning Ferrari replaced its front-engined 1962 330 TRI/LM Spyder (a derivative of a five-year-old design) with the radically new 250 P (pictured above at the Nürburgring) for 1963. The scuderia promptly won both at Sebring and at Le Mans.

It was all doom and gloom for the front engine as the Ferraris were followed by the Ford GT40 and decades of Porsches, beginning with the monstrous 917. But then in 1997, an American decided to give the mid-engine the finger. His name was Dr. Donald Panoz and he liked his six-liter V8’s up front, thank you very much.

The Panoz Esperante GTR-1 was a closed coupé with a Roush V8, named after the Panoz Esperante roadster with which it had little in common. In a sense, it was also mid-engined—but unlike every other mid-engined car, it had its engine between the front axle and the driver.

The GTR-1 had its share of teething problems in its debut year, but it returned for 1998 to take seventh place at Le Mans. One of the drivers was David Brabham, the son of triple Formula One world champion Jack "Black Jack” Brabham, who would go on to win last weekend’s race with Peugeot.

At the end of the 1998 racing season, the GT category that the GTR-1 raced in was eliminated. Panoz countered with a brand-new prototype for the next season: the open-top LMP-1. The car retained the GTR-1’s Batmobile proportions and its six-liter thunder-happy V8, presenting an even more Cyrano-esque nose.

The LMP-1 raced at the 1999 24 Hours of Le Mans, a race made famous by the flying CLR’s of Mercedes-Benz. Driven by Brabham and company, the car finished seventh, similar to its closed-top sibling at the previous year’s race. The LMP-1 would produce its best result in 2000 with a fifth overall finish—which it would repeat in 2003 behind the all-conquering Audis and Audi-derived Bentleys.

By then, the LMP-1 was an aging design, and it was replaced with the LMP07, which would prove disappointing. Panoz withdrew from prototype racing and returned to Le Mans in the GT2 class for 2005, to compete against Ferraris, Porsches and Spykers derived from road cars. Their first outing at the scorching 2005 race would produce no results, but a front-engined Panoz Esperante GT-LM driven by three Brits would beat both Ferrari and Porsche to win GT2 in 2006.

While Panoz’s front-mid-engined prototypes could never really hold up against mid-engined racing cars from major manufacturers, they proved that the front-mid engine construction was a viable concept. In the years that followed, a crop of supercars built on the same principle would emerge: the Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren and the Ferrari 599 GTB. The latter is now also available as a track-only version, for decades inconceivable in a front-engined Ferrari, showing perhaps that we have indeed come full circle since Enzo Ferrari first commissioned a mid-engined prototype for Le Mans in 1963.

All we need now is a team with the funding and the guts to follow through.

Photo Credit: Matt Turner/ALLSPORT, Speedhunters, Lokis_world/Flickr, Mike Hewitt /Allsport, Ferrari, Ker Robertson /Allsport

This aluminum V8 started life as a Buick in 1961, was shared with Pontiac and Oldsmobile (where it benefited from Turbo Rocket Fluid), then crossed the Atlantic and was installed in the MGB-GT V8, the Triumph TR8, and countless Land Rovers. Along the way, it powered Mickey Thompson's Dan Gurney-driven 1962 Indianapolis 500 car and (in Repco-modified SOHC form) drove Brabhams to Formula One victory in 1966 and 1967. GM discontinued the aluminum engine after the 1963 model year (due to various production headaches surrounding the aluminum casting process, hassles with aluminum-corroding antifreezes, and the suspicions of patriotic Americans who felt that a V8 with just 215 cubes must be some sort of subversive Red plot), but Rover kept it going all the way until 2006. The British V8 article on this engine is quite entertaining; it's a reprint of a 1976 Autocar article, with editorial responses to the virulent Anti-American sentiments of the original writer.
[British V8, Wikipedia]

That's right, Jalopnik Book Reviews are in the house, and I'll do my best to make this a regular weekend feature. If it's printed and has something to do with cars, we might be reviewing it here- shop manuals to NASCAR romance novels!

We're going to start off this series with a book about a subject that had damn well better be dear to the hearts of all our readers: Mickey Thompson. Thompson's 1964 memoir, Challenger, should be considered a 27-alarm must-read (well worth the crazy high price tag for a used copy; that's my read-50-times thrift-store copy on the left), with its accounts of the 1953 and 1954 Carrera Panamerica races alone being worth the cost. However, Challenger was written only halfway through MT's career, and he was too sharp a businessman not to make his memoir a masterpiece of promotional spin for his various endeavors. Especially maddening is the lack of detail concerning Thompson's revolutionary Indy 500 cars, which were still works-in-progress during the writing of Challenger.

Erik Arneson's Mickey Thompson: The Fast Life And Tragic Death Of A Racing Legend tells the whole MT story, from his early days of salt-flat madness and drag racing innovation, through the speed-parts and indoor off-road-racing businesses, to his murder and 20-year pursuit of the former business partner who was convicted of the hit in 2007.

This book gets an excellent Jalopnik Four Rod Rating™, thanks to the clarity of Arneson's writing style and the fascinating subject matter, but that rating comes with a caveat: the serious MT fan will emerge from the book wanting more. This book is attempting to be two books in one: biography of an innovative genius who revolutionized just about every field he entered, and true-crime/pursuit-of-justice account. Unfortunately for geeked-out gearheads like me, the focus on the kind of man MT was and the trial of Mike Goodwin comes at the expense of the mechanical stuff we want to know about.



For example, check out this photo showing a detail of the 406-MPH, quadra-Pontiac-engined Challenger's drivetrain. The chains! The gears! How did this setup work? What was it like to build? Now multiply that by ten thousand and you can sense the dilemma of trying to do justice to the engineering and fabrication übergod that was Mickey Thompson. The main sources for the book were Thompson's relatives, particularly his son, Danny, and thus it tends to heavy on the "Mickey was a great guy" and "Goodwin is pure pond scum" stuff while being light on the engineering and business-of-motorsports innovation Thompson accomplished. That's not to say that the story of the hunt for the killers of Mickey and Trudy Thompson doesn't make for fascinating reading, of course, but elsewhere… well, I'd be willing to swap the three pages of description of Thompson's house on the Palos Verdes Peninsula for another three pages on the building of the Carrera Panamerica cars, for example.


Fortunately, there's ample material on MT's Indianapolis 500 efforts of the mid-1960s. While bad luck kept his mid-engined, Buick aluminum 215-powered cars from serious contention, they marked the beginning of the end for the old front-engined Offenhauser-powered Indy cars, and Thompson designed everything from the chassis to the tires themselves. Later on, Thompson managed to find a way to turn Baja-style off-road racing into a profitable indoor spectator sport, and the twists and turns of the SCORE series make for interesting reading for students of the business of racing. Like I said, a Four-Rod Rating™. Murilee says check it out!

[Motorbooks]

Apparently Michigan attorney Alan Miller has also represented or currently represents such racing stars as Jimmie Johnson, Kyle Busch, Casey Mears, Dale Earnhardt Jr., Jeff Gordon, Ward Burton and Clint Bowyer. There's no evidence that Miller conspired with any other drivers for tax-evasion purposes, but his indictment in connection with Helio Castroneves likely has a number of famous names checking the books with their lawyers and accountants. [Miami Herald, USA Today] Thanks to everyone who tipped us!

"Could you do me a favor? In our motor home, in the bedroom, go to my closet. All the way in the back of the closet, there's a blue dress. Maybe you should wear it next time you qualify!"