Happy New Year From Jalopnik

Another year gone, and the Lamborghini Countach we pledged at age 15 would be in our possession by the mid-1990s has yet to turn up. Many years on from that flubbed deadline, we're still content just to wake up each day thinking about cars — like that Lambo, its flaws excused as character development — and retire many hours later wondering if we'd done enough for those like-minded souls who keep our awkward address prominent among bookmarks. (Maybe next year.)

It was an amazing collection of months, 2006, a year of corporate calamity and engineering triumph. We stood gape-mouthed as the spirit of competition recast 500 horsepower as modest and reduced 200 mph to a running start. We wondered aloud whether a diesel engine could win Le Mans, and were amazed by the extent to which it did. We watched rich men unveil custom-built machines costing untold millions, and garage tinkerers spend pocket change to fit tiny cars with tiny, menacingly powerful engines, leading us — in one case — to rethink the BMW Isetta's place in history. We obsessed over cars with pickup beds, cars with six wheels, cars from the former Eastern Bloc, cars from Holland. We watched a beloved TV character from a distant land nearly meet his end in a jet-powered dragster and mourned the loss of ever more Ferraris by ever less-qualified drivers.

I started writing this site in 2004, leaving behind an administrative career notable mainly for its looming cul de sac. Since then, Jalopnik has picked up a handful of equally unstable and vaguely pathological writers, reflecting the vague pathologies of its founding editor. Nonetheless, in our diversity of viewpoints, we share a singularity of vision for the automotive universe, that is, its boundless potential for obsession, derision and rhapsodizing. All of that, we pledge to continue during 2007.

Thanks for reading.