I can barely convince my friends to go see a movie. The Rolling Death Van Club in Portland, by contrast, is able to coordinate meet up after meet up, helping each other buy, fix up and run the coolest old vans in the country. Looking at all of these tattoo’d, pierced survivor van owners, suddenly I feel like the piece…
The Pacific Northwest is home to Dirtfish Rally School, the hub for rallycross (and to some extent, rally) in America. There are a few interesting reasons why.
Silicon Valley is a beautiful capitalistic nirvana at the moment, where NOTHING IS NEFARIOUS OR WEIRD AT ALL WHY DO YOU ASK. But to get in on all that sweet, sweet venture capital cash, first you need ideas. We’ve got ideas alright.
The Tatra T87 was one of the great streamliners, built to cruise Europe’s first highways, a smooth, high-speed luxury express. What it was not built for is gridlocked Los Angeles traffic, something that was eminently clear as we all started to smell the car wildly overheat.
We’ve called H2Oi the most ticketed car show in America, but you don’t understand just how many cars there get pulled over until you show up. Which we did. And we got got, too.
A Toyota Corolla is a safe choice for a car. A boring choice. Reliable, bland, cheap and basic transportation. There is no shame in this. But it makes the Corolla an extremely unlikely contender to be one of the stars of the fastest growing motorsport in America—drifting.
“We’ve been working for 20 years now with different...kind of elements of government personnel,” former two-wheel drive national rally champion Wyatt Knox explains, “that I’ve signed a lot of things and I would disappear if I told you who they were.”
When Ford finally phased out the Crown Victoria, police departments stockpiled as many of these cars as they could. At first, it’s difficult to see why: at the end of its life, the Crown Vic was as creaky, old, and as obsolete as cars got. But there were a few reasons why these sedans were (and still are) so beloved.
I always thought that early race cars were kind of quaint, slowly belching their way down roads at speeds you’d get on a merry-go-round today. Fuck no. These things were fucking fast and everyone who raced anything like this was a goddamn lunatic.
Before the Indy 500, there was the Vanderbilt Cup, the first car race in America to pull in major international competitors. Around the turn of the century, it was one of the most prestigious races in the world. What’s more, it took place on public roads in Long Island, New York, roads that are still open today.
Tonight on Car vs. America (still not canceled yet!) our boys go to rural Pennsylvania, aka Pennsyltucky, and their local guide is a car expert we all know and love: Mr. Regular, host of Regular Car Reviews. We put him on TV!
Jalopnik’s TV show hasn’t been canceled yet! Dreams DO come true. And this week, our TV boys head out to rural Pennsylvania to experience the magic of off-roading.
Tonight on Car vs. America, we’re talking about cars in New York City. There’s the good, like our friend Phil who says if you’re gonna own a car in the Big Apple you may as well own something cool—which is why he has two classic Lancias and a BMW M1. Then there’s the bad, which is everything else.
Anyone can be a car enthusiast. It doesn’t matter who you are or what you drive. But it takes a special kind of maniac to own and love a car in New York City. If you’re gonna do it, you better do it in something interesting.
Here at Jalopnik we spent years crapping on car television for being generally awful. That’s because deep down, we always thought we could maybe do it better. Strap yourself in, because you’re about to watch our first attempt at doing exactly that: Car vs. America.
In a moment it was all silenced. The screaming of the fans packing the stadium. The 14 cars all tearing into a collision course with me. The passenger airbag blew as another skidplate car made contact and it finally snapped me into realizing what I’d gotten myself into.
A reminder! Car vs. America, the TV show that we worked so very hard to make good for you, premieres tomorrow night!
Ask Jalopnik editors Michael Ballaban and Raphael Orlove to drop some hot blog fire and they’ll do it in an instant. With gusto. But ask them to become skid-plate racers in one day? They’ll need some experts to coax (or kick) them in the right direction. You’ll be able to see how it turns out this week on Car vs.…
Jalopnik editors Michael Ballaban and Raphael Orlove: you won’t find tougher, more skilled, more experienced Real Car-Driving Men® than these guys. But one thing they’ve never done is put skid plates on old family sedans to go up against the toughest locals at Winston-Salem’s Bowman Gray Stadium. You get to see it go…
