Ode to the Truck - or America F#*K Yeah!

Trucks are to young Americans what hot-hatches and GTIs are to young Europeans and that is why I've grown to love and respect THE TRUCK.

You can pick up an old beater truck for under two grand and with a few hundred bucks here and there on maintenance you can have yourself a world of motorized independence. Which is after all, what America is all about.

These colors don't run...even in the rain

I love the arrogance of this truck...compacts only F NO!

Life gives you a hatch back...your American ingenuity and a welder gives you a TRUCK

Try doing this with a Gti

Truck, beer, sleeveless shirt with strip club logo...check, check and double check

And where else are you going to put all your stickers?

BMW Art Car on 39th Street

This car started out life as an E36 318is and Artist Ryan has turned it into what he calls "Half-Art Car, Half-Rat." He uses it as his daily driver and puts different pieces on the roof rack to keep the art alive.

BMW art cars have a long history and the current marketing campaign for the new Z4 is tapping into it, so it's good to see such a young BMW enthusiast pumping out his own work. Some of his smaller pieces were amazing too, especially the re-imagined 3.0 CSL etched on the rusty slab of metal. Might have to save up a few bucks and get one of these.

The artist had a whole wall of ideas, inspirations, rough sketches, media-collages and random thoughts on the world of art and the automobile. They also had another 3 series BMW in the show room being worked on connecting everyday mechanics to the aesthetic in life.

To contact the artist about his work, email Ryan Lawrence at nosamind@gmail.com

You Can Fix It...no one's gonna help

Our old truck, dubbed The Great White Hope affectionately by friends, sits around for weeks at a time gathering snow, bird poop, pollen, honey suckle flowers, wind-blown seeds, until someone calls and inevitable says "Hey, I was wondering, but could I borrow your truck." The call every truck owner learns by heart.

When I bought the truck I let all my friends know that the truck was there to be used, just put some gas in it and go. So when someone does give me a call it also gives me an excuse to lash a bit of sideways TLC on the G DUB H.

Today, I washed it and waxed between the rust spots, vacuumed the bench seat, Rain-Xed all the glass and polished the dash. Then I got carried away and started to clean inside the engine bay too, which is like the old phrase "polishing a turd."

A few months back my hood was sticking open and I asked some of my mechanically minded friends to see if they could fix it and brought it to Jiffy Lube, after all they do open a lot of hoods. Everyone offered their advice from "You need a new hood" to "Your hood needs readjusting, just need to take her off and bla, bla, bla..." Needless to say I did none of these things and drove around all Winter and Spring with it popped up an inch or two playing hell with my already shitty gas mileage. 

Then today I sprayed a dab of DW 40 into the locking mechanism and jiggled it about and slammed it down once or twice and then had the genius idea to tug on the inside hood catch. It clicked and I thought "Just maybe" and I slammed the hood down once more. Eu-fucking-reka it worked.

Fixing the hood gave me a great, smug sense of satisfaction, knowing that I let the Great White Hope survive for at least another round.

The Great White Hope...you know you want some

Fiat's New Marketing Strategy

With Fiat merging with Chrysler to form a company destined to produce some serious ugly duckling joint-venture cars, it's nice to see they are sparing no expense to make their presence known in the US market.

 Well, I'll take '86 Croma, a new Panda 100hp and a '97 Bravo please and thank you

Can't wait to see the new Alfa-Romeo marketing campaign: Buy two, get one free and a yard of mulch.

Porche 944 - The German Siren

The Porsche 944 is like a mildly good looking girl. When its all cleaned up, splash of makeup on, looks amazing and you say to yourself "That's a nice car, I should get one."

Then you see it looking like this running an afternoon errand to the hardware store and you're like "Jaysus, would you look at that, she's looking rough" and you're glad you didn't leave your current car after all.

If the Porsche 944 was launched today, we might be tempted to call it a Hatchback or if we were being very generous a Liftback. Maybe at a great, big, giant stretch of the imagination the 944 could be reinvented as a Shooting-Brake. For now we'll leave this sports car on our 80s excess of desire list like Kim Wilde or Olivia Newton-John.

And for old time's sake let's get Physical with Olivia

NSX - Japanese Supercar

The Honda NSX (Acura in the US) seemingly came out of nowhere and shook-up the establishment in 1990. Ayrton Senna, honed it to perfection and being Japanese, it brought reliability to the Supercar world. 

The NSX is still a sexy looking car after 20 years, sure its name even sounds like SEX...NSX. Honda have a new one released, but currently only for GT racing. Rumors about a production ready model are beginning to surface and with the world wide fan base of the NSX, it should be a no-brainer.

I suppose there are a ton of arguments for and against the NSX being a Supercar, but as far as I'm concerned, anything that looks like this, sure is. Never mind being mid-engined, rear wheel drive, light weight, built by a world champion F1 team...etc...

I saw this NSX the other day when I was having lunch at Happy Gillis. I walked over to it and was a little surprised to see how dirty it was. Usually when you see a car of this caliber it practically blinds you from fresh-wax-shinyness. The wife's friends has a NSX and his looks like it should be in an auto concourse every time I see it, but not this NSX, it might as well have been a Honda Civic daily driver.

Then, the second surprising thing happened when we saw the owner get in and drive away. We supposed it belonged to some young fella with more money than sense and I looked around the restaurant and saw some likely suspects. But when two old guys about my grandfather's age got in and took off, I was blown away. You know what they say about books and their covers. I hope I'm driving a car like an NSX when I'm their age.

As Bono would say "It's a beautiful day"

Finally a beautiful day in KC, after the sudden snow storm at the weekend trailing on the end of the longest winter in living memory. Brought the M3 in for a quick wash and drove around all day with the top down. I love topless weather.

On the way home along SW BLVD I cam across this beauty of an old Mercedes. I love the color, especially since turquoise is the official color of 2010 (I learned that from the genius wife graphic designer). 

I didn't want to get too personal and take photos of the interior, but I can tell you that it was immaculate.

And here's the perfect song for driving on a day like this.

1991 Honda CRX

 

My car looked more like the first picture than the second one, but with Walmart hubcaps. 

With the CRX coming back, I could be tempted again...

My first real Japanese; slick, sexy and fast. This was the other woman I was checking out while the Colt was in getting her surgery. A used car lot down in Kansas City, Kansas had her into Bob's to get a full service. I asked Bob what he thought of it and he said it was sound.

It was way out of my price range at the time, but I got Dad back in Ireland to send me a small loan, one I'd pay-off during the summer.

Even though only three years younger than the Colt, it was light years ahead in power and refinement. Almost felt like a modern car. It's tuned 1.6 liter engine revved freely all the way to the red line every time. Reminded me of the AX Gti that I use to have.

The blue CRX was my first automatic car and my left leg didn't know what to do with itself for the first few hundred miles in that car. But at times traveling at over a hundred miles an hour on hwy 152 at three in the morning my brain-sensory more than made up for the loss in my left leg.

The CRX was a complete workhorse of a car. It would go anywhere, anytime, anyhow and even though it was a two-seater, it had a trunk that was enormous, you could have easily fit five dead bodies in there on a desert run if you found yourself in such a predicament; a Japanese mafia man's dream.

It made the weekly 183 mile run to North-East Missouri a breeze. A fill of gas went forever and back then when gas was practically been giving away for free, I could fill it for about twelve bucks.

Only problem I ever had was to change the water pump after a year or more of hard driving. However, since I was living out in the country I took her on a lot of dirt roads and into fields that should be the preserve of 4x4s. I could have opened a coffee shop with the amount of donuts I made in the fields. One night I tried to go up a little hill and the dart shaped nose of the CRX stuck into the side of the grass hill, like er, a dart. I had to back her out, pull a bunch of grass out from the front grill and learn to live with a split front splitter.

A few years later I posted her for sale in the KC Star and a young man in King City, MO desperately in want of a CRX answered the add and when I saw his sad little face and hundreds short of the asking price, I practically gave him the car. I felt a sweet car like that, needed a sweet driver like him. It was like giving a child up for adoption, my little Japanese orphan.

Can you believe "Extra Window" was a selling point?