Porsche is quoted as saying, "This wonder car with 7:29 could not have been a regular series production car." They are flat-out accusing Nissan of cheating. I do wonder why they didn't use in-house hotshoe Walter Röhrl to drive the cars though...
Some interesting tidbits:
7:29: Skyline GTR claimed by Nissan
7:38: 911 Turbo on Pilot Sport Cups from this test
7:56: Skyline GTR driven by Porsche
7:59: 2009 Cadillac CTS-V on whatever runflats it's got...
Garage419 joins John Heinricy, GM's in-house track junkie and director of high preformance vehicles, for a test drive of the new supercharged Cadillac CTS-V around Monticello Motor Club. I'll spare you the de rigeur fastest whatevercar ever catchphrase.
Watch below answers to titillating questions like these and more:
Why set a track record with an engineer and not a pro racecar driver?
How badass is the CTS-V really?
Does John Heinricy use stability control or traction control?
I'm a security guy. My first thoughts when I hear a new product announcement aren't how great it can be. I think of how it can be broken; what protections or features the maker might have forgotten to include. Yeah. I'm that guy. And actually, there's quite a few of us out there. We oftentimes rant and rave through various channels, including online and print media, blogging, and even bitchfests about the world shared with friends and family.
The security profession breeds a worst-case-scenario, quasi-pessimistic mindset that I'd like to open for discussion.
Is it bad to have this mindset?
On one hand, you could say that the worst-case-scenario mindset is a negative outlook that ultimately leads to an unhappy life. The security guy's mind (and/or mouth) is always going 10 picoparsecs per hour about what's wrong with the world and how stuff would be better in his orderly utopian world. The one with civil liberties and stuff.
On the other hand, some people just have a knack for breaking things, and processes. Some of these folks become NASCAR drivers. Others become lawyers. And some become security guys. We like breaking things. To us, it's not necessarily negativity. We just see a different problem than everybody else. We don't want to solve Rubik's cube. We want to figure out how to take it apart. We divide by zero when faced with people who can own a device and just use it without understanding every mode, menu, and function.
Furthermore, I'll posit that it takes people with this mindset to keep stuff evolving. Without the perennially dis-satisfied, who will drive things to improve rather than shrivel from complacency? I believe this dis-satisfaction is the core of the human spirit, and it's what drives capitalism and makes this country great. Maybe it's just a red pill vs blue pill question.
So... am I a disgruntled security guy? Nah. I'm actually quite gruntled. I just love breaking stuff. :-)
Am I a disgruntled civil liberties guy? Yes. That just has to do with being annoyed by morons who look at (or even design) a bug and then call it a feature. But I recognize that it could be a lot worse and I am thankful for the civil liberties we still have today.
Share your comments!
Cheers, Andi
Oh... I'm writing this on an airplane. For the safety of everybody onboard, I've just been instructed to shut down all my electronics in preparation for the landing coming up in half an hour. I'm surprised they haven't banned electronics since they're so dangerous. I'm sure it's in the pipeline.
Autoblog and Gizmodo gleefully report this morning that texting and driving has been terminated in the People's Republic of Kalifornia. This gives us a good insight into the knee-jerk psychology that causes even good people to take other people's freedoms away.
The law is retarded.
How can it be enforced? Autoblog has a great point--it's still legal to dial a number.
Why are we going after the distractions instead of making people personally responsible for their actions?
This is a slippery slope. What's next? Ban the radio? Ban the GPS? (Oh wait.. California already banned affixing anything to your windshield...). Ban every possible thing that could ever possibly distract a driver, and create a process to review the list of distractions on a quarterly basis to ensure that all possible distractions are consistently banned?
So all it took was one Florida attorney to cancel his Skyline GTR order and now everybody is suddenly aware of black boxes in cars?
They're called Event Data Recorders (EDRs), they're already in your car, and it's only getting worse. Perhaps the Skyline's is just the most sophisticated in use (yet). Wait till 2012.
There's an interesting analysis of the Skyline's Event Data Recorder over at The Truth About Cars. Actually they call it a Vehicle Status Data Recorder (VSDR) because they figured another acronym would sound cooler. After that, check out the following I just dug up for even more chills:
The iPhone lets you see what city and state a call came from in the call log after the fact. Why doesn't it display this information on the screen as it's ringing for numbers not in your contact list?
I will confess: Many a time I've been sitting at the computer only to have the iPhone start cricket chirping away with a number I didn't recognize. I will confess I've actually googled the caller's phone number in time to make a decision whether to answer or not.
Which brings us to my real point. I'd like my phone to Google phone numbers not in my address book while it's still ringing. With the advent of wifi and 3g, this is certainly possible. It might take a ring or two to get the data, but it's better than nothing.
Breaking news to the story we brought you yesterday of the first new Corvette ZR1 dyno numbers: the previously-reported 548rwhp dyno numers were inflated using STD correction instead of using industry-standard SAE J1349 correction. Read all about SAE vs STD dynos here.
Alvin actually dyno tested two 2009 ZR1s yesterday. One übervette spun the hamster wheel to the tune of 548rwhp STD, the other to 542rwhp STD.
Now that the true SAE-corrected graphs have been published for both cars (535rwhp and 530rwhp), I'm a little disappointed. My "505hp" Z06 made 465rwhp. The car that is supposed to make 133hp more is making 70 more at the wheels. The extra ponies are experiencing a 47% drivetrain loss. :-o
Further analysis of the untuned graphs tell us the rev limiter is too low, making the car fall significantly off the horsepower peak at every upshift. ZR1s across the country will be taking advantage of rev limiter bumps very soon. ZR1s and Vipers will be a very close race indeed.
Oh, one last teaser: thanks to Tom Dolson at GM for the personal tour of the Wixom Performance Build Center. I can't tell you everything I know about the LS9, in fact I was asked not to post this picture for a few months. So, four and a half months later, here I am with ZR1/LS9 motor number 001. One thing I can say: there are definitely some passionate hot-rodders at GM. But there's a reason the bolt for the supercharger pulley is on the inside. ;-)
Oops, I meant satellite-enforced speed limits ;). Another brilliant idea from across the pond. Click here for commentary from the National Motorists Association.
Also, The Newspaper reports that Private companies in the US are hoping to use red light cameras and speed cameras as the basis for a nationwide surveillance network similar to one that will be active next year in the UK.
It's made its way across a few car forums (click here, here, and here), and the various viewpoints can be summarized to two polarized camps:
"Baritchi can't drive! The sawing at the wheel invalidates Baritchi's whole test. I could have done better than that!"
"Baritchi put his neck on the line and provided us with an honest, informative test. If you can do a better job, please, by all means..."
What amuses me is how the first camp totally missed the point. Let's analyze the first camp further. The first camp can actually sub-divited into two groups:
The clueless expert(TM). These the folks that will speak authoritatively on any subject whether they are cognitively equipped to or not. I'm mainly referring to those who've never lapped a fast car on racetrack outside a Playstation yet decied to critique my driving and/or test.
The professional. For example, American Le Mans Series professional road racer Lou Gigliotti, who critiqued my driving in the aforementioned Corvetteforum thread. Yet when it all is said and done, Lou's own testing agrees with mine. Hmm...
Some of these responders apparently hyperfocused on critiquing my driving but forgot the basic premise of my test.
To quote Road & Track again: Millen...drifting beautifully onto the main straight each lap. Allow me to spell it out more succinctly. R&T is quoted as saying their hired gun is drifting every lap. Drifting is slow. Drifting is even slower if you've got anti-drifting nannies turned on.
I was re-creating the R&T/Millen testing scenario, occasional slides and all, with one variable added: stability nannies toggled on and off. The goal was exactly what I stated: to see *if* the production Z06 nannies hurt your lap times or not. I successfully proved that they do. Lou himself said there is no such thing as a perfect lap. Since we all agree that every lap will have mistakes, and we also agree that the production car nannies hurt your ability to respond to such mistakes, the aggregate finding is they do slow you down. Q.E.D. Thank you drive through.
Finally, to Lou: nothin but love for ya too bro. If you do 21s in a totally stock Z and I'm at low 23s then I'd love to see what I could learn from you. I'll provide the car, video and timing equipment, if you'd like to join me at the MSR or TWS sometime and give me some pointers in real life. And see the difference in skill between a weekend track warrior like me and an accomplished pro racer. Maybe we could even get some telemetry.
Alvin at PCM for Less brings us what we believe to be the first new Corvette ZR1 dyno run in the wild. 548 rwhp. Read more at CorvetteForum.
The 2008 Viper puts down roughly the same power as the ZR1. Yes, it weighs 100lbs more, but that's the same weight as a full tank of gas. Viper foks: run it close to empty if you're planning to race a ZR1.
*600hp Viper vs 638hp ZR1: why do they dyno the same? It's too early to tell. I still want to see Alvin post the ZR1 graph, and for others to add more data points to the mix. I'm also eager to see the results of the first ZR1 vs Viper street race. If this one ZR1 dyno is any indication, however, perhaps the times of underrated high-po Corvettes are over.
For the first time in almost thirty years, the Bowling Green, Kentucky plant where all Corvettes are built is taking a week off to let the econonmy catch up. First the Viper, now the Vette. Tragic.
The European Union has some prety strict privacy laws. One look at the U.K. will convince you it's not all so dandy across the pond. There are only just fourteen people per CCTV surveillance camera in the UK. These 4.2 million surveillance cameras monitor things such as roadways, city centres, and so forth to keep the peace. (snuff films? ugh...).
I won't go into their questionable legality - you can read all about that here.
Today's buzz is regarding CCTVs that watch the motorways automatically scanning license plates as cars drive by. This technology lets the police automatically identify the owner of any vehicle, in real time, and log its location. But the cameras are just for crimes, not to track everything you do right?
Wrong. The cameras are ready and set to record every vehicle's whereabouts in The Database. Just in case you and/your car commit a crime, there will be a log of where your car was. In The Database. For Five Years.
They drive on the wrong side over there anyway, so who cares? ;-)
F1 and MotoGP both love and benefit from computer aids (notwithstanding the fact that they created a super-boring show for us fans when in place). Perhaps it is for this reason that some people have fallen for the fallacy that this übertechnology has trickled down unmolested from the racing heavens down to production vehicles.
Case in point: Road & Track's recent supercar test. No, not the blatant conflict-of-interest Spanks issue. The other one. In the September 2008 issue, R&T did what looked to be a promising comparo using a trio of pro drivers on four track configurations. And I'll be the first to give them credit for the oval test - it looks legit.
But after a nice sit down and read, things got, ahem, interesting. In the Streets of Willow road course test, they said the following about the Z06: ...its neck-snapping torque means the traction control and stability control are your new best friends. Really. Millen lapped in Competitive Mode, which allows the Z06 to slide quite a lot without intervening, especially if the driver smoothly breaks the limits of adhesion. This Millen did, drifting beautifully onto the main straight each lap.
What? Steve Millen, two-time IMSA GTS champion, first in class in the 24 Hours of LeMans, yadda yadda yadda, drove a production Z06 with the stability control turned on?! I guess I've been doing it wrong all these years turning that stuff off. Interestingly, Millen had complained about the Aston Martin's stability control slowing him down just a couple paragraphs earlier.
Rather than bench race on the internet, I decided to find out for myself. Thanks to Jack Farr, owner of Motorsport Ranch in Cresson, TX, I took a test mule Z06 out to MSR to do my own testing of this theory.
The C6 Z06 in this test is stock except for a Corsa cat-back, and is eqiupped with aggressive street tires that, although not R compounds, do not fade or get greasy . I wasn't sure at first in what order to do the laps: some factors improve through the session (i.e. driving), others degrade (the car). These tend to cancel out, and my lap times are usually very consistent throughout the session. To be as fair and objective as possible, I decided to start the session in everything off mode, then switch to competitive mode mid-session, then switch back and see what happens. There was no lap-timer in the car to distract me. Jack Farr would tell me the lap times at the end from the official timing equipment.
Without further ado, in-car video and the results:
Fore Sale: Dodge Viper. Handle with care: very temperamental and venom can be deadly! GM is still working on the anecdote.
Contact Jim Press at Chrysler for details.
Do it quick before Smolenski beats you to it. Perhaps Roush or Saleen are more likely suitors according to Car & Driver... (My money is on Saleen; you can quote me on that).
iPhone hacker and forensics guru Jonathan Zdziarski has been busy. In his new book, iPhone Forensics, he shows us how to break passcode locks on new and old iPhones, recover deleted voicemail, images, email, and other personal data, discover Google map lookups, inspect the typing cache [!!], and more.
But wait! There's more! Brian Chen of Wired explains that in a recent webcast, Zdziarski gave us a deeper look into the iPhone's internal workings. Apparently, the Mac Nano, err I mean iPhone takes a screenshot every time the home button is depressed for caching / performance enhancement. And, of course, forensics tools can grab these stray screenshots later.
At least they need a warrant to get the location data now... (collective sarcastic sigh).
As a victory for civil rights and privacy rights everywhere, a federal judge in Pennsylvania just ruled that warrants are required before the government can snoop on you via your cellphone. Full story at Mobileburn, Engadget, and EFF. How this translates to GPS devices not attached to phones, such as navigation systems/etc, remains TBD.
Jalopnik reports on the new $200 mini-GPS remote tracking key coming soon to a NAPA auto parts near you. Oh, the outcry! How dare they possibly build such a thing! [rolleyes]
What worries me more is that in 2005, a federal judge in New York ruled that since you have no expectation of privacy while on a public roadway, police can plant a GPS device on your car without a warrant as it simply makes their job of tracking you easier - a job they could already do from a far. This argument has potentially far reaching ramifications to our privacy and civil liberties. As Mike Masnick points out, by this very same fallacious logic, could you and I GPS-snoop somebody just as legally without a warrant as the police can?
As a followup to the Lamborghini brothers in Bucharest... They pay €2,000 per month for full coverage car insurance ($2,850 US at the time of this writing). Per car. I told them my Z06 is $110/mo to insure because of my perfect record, and Razvan said if it was that cheap I'd insure it twice just to be extra safe!
Insurance is handled very differently in Romania (and most of the rest of the world). The companies handling these services don't know as much about you. The obligatory credit report, stool sample, semen sample, blood sample, first born, personality test, etc. we're faced with here are simply unheard of. Privacy is actually expected in other countries. I was discussing credit reports, insurance reports, and how it works here to get us different prices for the same services with a Romanian. Her response: So you're totally monitored over there...? Where's the liberty in that?
An example from engadgnet of Microsoft giving away competitive intel on the next Zune through an internal job posting is shown here. (The second link probably won't work for very long...)
Looks like Nissan is taking a page from Chevy's Z06 playbook with the Skyline and raising the price by a whopping $7K, to $77K-79K depending on equipment level. Do the math, that's a 10% price hike, not even a full quarter after the debut. I guess all those Millen'd* magazine tests paid off.
Autoblog has the full story including the official press release. Thanks for the tip Markr.
* Millen (verb): analagous to Bangle (verb). Whereas to Bangle means to style your cars like catfish with frog's asses, to Millen means to repeatedly and obviously rig magazine tests in favour of your preferred marque.
Josh L over at corner-carvers.com teased us a couple weeks ago his good buddy [that] bit the bullet and got the car. He says it's awesome. We've been patiently awaiting his unbiased review ever since...
Fresh from a 6-hour test drive of his friend's new Nissan Sklyine GTR through the twisty Angeles Crest Highway, Josh just posted a detailed review.
He seems to dig the car, and mentioned that even the non-Dunlop-equipped example he drove had hella grip. (The Dunlops are noted to be the be by far the grippier of the two tire choices). He raved about the great acceleration, sweet paddle shifing transmission, and yet didn't take quite so highly to the car's ride and NVH characteristics.
Josh's final thoughts: It got a lot of attention. And 95% of it came from men 40 years and younger. No big surprise, there. So if you want to pick up dudes, I guess this is the car for you.Overall, I really liked it. It's fast in a straight line, especially from a stop. But it's not Z06 fast.
Alvin at 
The European Union has some prety strict privacy laws. One look at the U.K. will convince you it's not all so dandy across the pond. There are only just fourteen people per CCTV surveillance camera in the UK. These 
Josh L over at 