Ron Patrick has built a jet powered VW Beetle. He says “the car has two engines: the production gasoline engine in the front driving the front wheels and the jet engine in the back. The idea is that you drive around legally on the gasoline engine and when you want to have some fun, you spin up the jet and get on the burner (you can start the jet while driving along on the gasoline engine).” Read more about how he did it here. He also put jets on his wife’s Honda Metropolitan scooter so it could go faster than 40mph.

Recently our friend Hayden went from San Francisco to England to drive a London to Casablanca Rally. While he got to the start, the car didn’t make it in time. My husband and I sold a car several years ago to a guy in Europe, but the buyer made all the arrangements, we just drove the car to the dock in Oakland, California. So it was with interest that I’ve been reading John Glynn’s posts on shipping a car from the US to the UK. Here’s Part 1 and Part 2.

A.J. Baime’s Go Like Hell tells story of how the Ford Motor Co., spear-headed by a young Lee Iacocca, hired former racing-champion-turned-car-builder Carroll Shelby in the late ’60s to help reinvent a sagging company. The plan was to design, build, and race a car that could win at one of the most prestigious races in the world — the 24 Hours of Le Mans.
While the bulk of the book focuses on the rivalry between Ford & Ferrari, the story unfolds as the auto industry in America and racing in Europe are on the cusp of big changes — the shift from unregulated to safety-oriented has just begun in earnest with the publication of Ralph Nadar’s Unsafe at Any Speed. Baime discusses not only the racing and race prep but the changing automobile business as well.
It’s a quick easy read, written for both race fans and newcomers. Although I’m afraid I wasn’t enamored of his writing style — too many chapters start with big build-ups of suspense that don’t pan out to much.

A man blamed a low-flying pelican and a dropped cell phone for his veering his million-dollar sports car off a road and into a salt marsh near Galveston Texas…. Amazingly, a car driving by captured the entire mishap in the video below — their commentary is priceless. A friend commented that if that’s salt water, the car is a total write-off. You can read the entire story here.

According to Urban Outfitters, this is a “classic Volkswagen bus-style speaker with a port and cable for playing your iPod; USB plug for amplifying music from your computer and built-in AM/FM radio. Functional wheels; flashing head and taillights and horn sound option; volume control; radio pre-sets; digital clock at the rear window.” All for just $150!

At the track driving events we attend, the topic of drag and aerodynamics — how effective is that wing on the back of the car — often comes up. Our car is street legal, so there’s only so much lowering we can do. We do have a fairly modest wing and a splitter on the front to try to keep air from under the car and forcing it up.
So I enjoyed finding Mike Turner’s DIY Aero Civic project, where he’s used common-place materials from the local hardware store to lower his ‘92 Honda Civic’s drag coefficient and improve its gas mileage. That’s the result in the top picture. He’s based his design on German experiments with low coefficient of drag automobiles in the 1930’s (that’s one of the German cars, a 1939 Maybach Stromlinienkarosserie, in the second photo).