We live a few blocks from one of those auto rows — a string of car dealerships including Pontiac, Saturn and Hummer. My husband goes by them on his daily walk, and he came home the other day and told me one of the dealers had moved, leaving an empty storefront with 2 interesting-looking cars inside. They sort of looked like Corvettes but weren’t. Yesterday I walked over with him to check them out…
The back said “SV” and “9 Campetizione,” so we took a picture and headed home to look it up in Google. This blog says it’s a “a re-skinned C6 Corvette with a touch of Italian flair” and it’s set to debut here in San Francisco this weekend, then have an unveiling at the Concorso Italiano in Monterey in mid-August.
It’s not often you get to see a car before it’s been debuted — even if it is behind a dirty store front window! More pictures and info here. And click on our “spy photo” above to see a bigger version.

While the story was bland, we had fun picking up on the car trivia and references in the animated movie Cars. It was weird to imagine a world with no other lifeform but automobiles — not just a lack of humans but no squirrels or deer to hit on the road — especially when one of the cars had a bumper sticker that reads “I brake for Jackalopes.” While I liked all the old & vintage car characters, it does seem odd that there were no SUVs or hybrids among them. I liked that the exhaust noise from Sally the Porsche seemed authentic, and that the hills around the town of Radiator Springs resembled hoods ornaments of old cars. After writing this post, I looked for more trivia about the movie — there’s a lot here!

Toyota has a new micro-car for Japan and Europe called the iQ. As part of their ad campaign, they hired an agency based in Belgium to design a new font that “demonstrates the small car’s agility.” The agency decided to let the car design the font itself. Using two typographers, a motion capture programmer, and a racing driver, they filmed the car driving around in a warehouse and the movements were translated digitally into each corresponding letter…

(From here)

Since the last movie I picked (The World’s Fastest Indian) was a big success, I decided to try another underdog motorsports movie: Heart Like a Wheel. It’s about Shirley Muldowney, the drag racer who became the only female top fuel champion in National Hot Rod Association history. She comes across as quite tenacious and driven — in an article about Muldowney I found, “one observer suggested that the 1983 Hollywood movie that was made about her life, Heart Like a Wheel, should have been titled Heart Like a Bulldog.” The film is quite a period piece — feels like the 1970s — and made me want to find out more about Muldowney… and this interview from Hot Rod magazine did the trick.

At my house, our cars include both Porsches and Volkswagens. So it was amusing to find this hybrid on Ebay. According to the listing, it’s a “1966 porsche body kit vw bug….it runs and drives nice, feels like a go cart! this car draws mega attention going down the road or at shows, people love it….ive driven it several 50 mile trips with no issues. its getting around 27 mpg too! the car may look like it will hit the ground,it has a 3 inch rubber guard so you have good clearance anywhere with it. looking at it coming down the road it looks like its about a inch off the ground. ”

On our first date, my husband gave me several choices for activities we could do, and I opted for a drive in his 1957 chopped and lowered bug. I picked the route — some favorite roads that I bike on, with a stop at the beach. We started in Redwood City, California, drove west on Woodside Road, left on Pescadero Creek Rd (which winds through the redwoods), right on Stage to Hwy 1 (we stopped at San Gregorio State Beach), then north along 1 to Hwy 92, right on Skyline (Hwy 84) back to Woodside Rd. Click on the map below to get directions. (A good place to stop for lunch is Duarte’s on Stage Rd.) If you have a favorite drive, let me know in the comments.

I have a few mini wind-up car toys, but nothing like the tin toys being shown at the Japan Society in NYC this summer. Coupling traditional metalworking skills with imported machinery, Japanese tin toys established a worldwide reputation after World War II for their quality and detailed workmanship. The exhibit showcases 70 examples of faithful mini models of Cadillacs, Buicks, Chryslers, Pontiacs, Chevrolets, Studebakers, and Fords. You can see pictures of some of the cars here and read some trivia about the heyday of Japanese tin toys here.

General Motors Cadillac 62 Four-Door Sedan, 1950; with friction motor. 9 1/2 x 3 7/8 x 3 1/8 in. (24 x 10 x 8 cm). Suzuki Gangu, about 1953–54. Yoku Tanaka Collection. Photo: Tadaaki Nakagawa.

Looking for date night movies, I ran across a documentary about the 1,000-mile Mille Miglia endurance races held between 1927 and 1957 in Italy. Too bad it’s not available through Netflix (although here’s the trailer). But I was reminded about a wonderful interview I heard on This American Life — Dan Neil, automotive critic for the Los Angeles Times talks to Stirling Moss, the race car driver who holds the speed record for completing the race. Neil takes a drive with Moss in the famous winning car — that’s the car in the photo, a Mercedes Benz 300 SLR. If you take a look at the podcast, it’s the last piece — “Act Five. End of the Road”.
By the way, Moss is still going strong, and even has a website worth checking out!

Instead of a yearly vacation to the beach, my husband & I spread ours out over 5 or 6 track weekends a year, some with our local Porsche club and some with the Northern California NASA. In May, we were at Buttonwillow Raceway in the hot center of California. Several friends were commisserating about their bad backs, and John, in particular had some unorthadox advice — he tapes medicinal magnets to his back to reduce his pain. He also was emphatic that his back didn’t hurt when strapped into his GT-3 raceseat. Well, I didn’t think of it again until I found this office furntiure made from car seats (fancy ones, too — not just Porsche but Ferrarri and Maserati).

This past March Bertoia Auctions sold part of a collection of antique toy cars — 1,400 pieces from a collection of over 7,000! I’m a collector too, but nothing on that scale! The video below shows off the collection, and some of the prices they fetched are listed on the auction houses’ website. There’s also a nice story about how the Kaufmanns collected their stash at the NY Times here.