Nearly four years have passed since the first post I wrote for Jalopnik. It's been a good run, but I need a break.

I've got plenty of tales of the wretched heaps I've owned over the years, but I lack sufficient photographic evidence of my Free Beater Era. Now, however, I've unearthed this old shot of the legendary Free '68 Volvo 144.

While the penumbral financial backers of my DUI Telepresence Crown Victoria Figure Eight Racing series shovel rubles into briefcases, I'm moving on to an even bigger Greatest Racing Series Ever™: Last-man-standing road racing of the three great automotive Ambassadors!

So now that the phones at Murilee Martin Image Consulting, Inc., keep ringing with offers of vast sums from dealmakers who want a piece of this idea, I feel comfortable sharing the Next Big Thing In Racing with y'all.

Why did I leave the Island That Rust Forgot for Denver last weekend? Cherchez la femme!

Now before you all die from brain bubbles because one of the Greatest Symbols Of The American Way Of Life is a-gittin' blasphemed, take a deep breath and hear me out. Cool as the '64 Goat was, it poisoned GM.

After reading the tale of the science-geek kid whose innocuous Gatorade-bottle-based motion-detector project got the bomb squad on his ass and his life ruined forever, I was reminded of my own similar experience involving a '75 Ford LTD seatbelt buzzer.

Everyone does the "Greatest Hits" retrospective thing at the end of the year, right? Right! I'll admit that some of these posts weren't big hits, traffic-wise, but they were the ones that made me proudest. Enjoy.

There's a sequence in the 1991 movie Slacker in which a couple of Texas gearheads score a GM electronic-ignition distributor in the junkyard.

Here's a story I've been meaning to tell since I started writing for Jalopnik: how it came to be that I love junkyard-built, low-budget, primered-out heaps so much. You can blame this '58 Volkswagen!

Every family has its Legendary Car tales, whether it be the Amby that your parents drove from Uttar Pradesh to Bangalore or the ol' reliable Model T in which Great-Grampaw fled the Dust Bowl.