Rich Mahrle paid less than $10,000 for his bright red Italian roadster. Martin Gruss got his by bidding nearly $5 million at a major international collector car auction on California’s Monterey Peninsula.
But the point of the 19th annual Copperstate 1,000 vintage sports car rally wasn’t the price of your car but the enjoyment it provided on a 1,000-mile (well, actually a 1,010-mile) four-day tour of a good portion of Arizona.
The Copperstate 1,000 is staged by the Men’s Arts Council of the Phoenix Art Museum. The men’s council was organized in 1968 to provide volunteer night guards for the museum. It has grown to become the largest annual financial contributor to the museum…Â Details
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Apr
Automobile Drifting – All Show, More Go: Sliding With Rhys Millen in the Genesis Coupe Drift Car
Earlier this week, Hyundai Motors, one of drifter extraordinare Rhys Millen’s primary backers in the 2009 Formula DRIFT racing series, invited us out to experience first hand the Genesis coupe-based race car Millen will campaign in this year’s Formula D. The tire-smoking fun starts this weekend in Long Beach at the site of next week’s Grand Prix of Long Beach IndyCar season opener.
As we previously highlighted here on MT’s WOT blog, Millen’s RMR Racing team metamorphosed the Hyundai Genesis Coupe into a full-blown drift combatant. Based on the automaker’s “Art of Speed†concept shown at last year’s SEMA Show, the car is powered by a fully-tuned, 560-hp, turbocharged 4.1L version of Hyundai’s Lambda V-6… Details & Pictures
If Formula One is to follow the familiar habit of shooting itself spectacularly in the foot then the sport’s appeal court, sitting in Paris on Tuesday, will declare the winning car from the first two grands prix to be illegal. Brawn, along with Williams and Toyota, have been challenged by rival teams who did not appear to be so crafty when reading the 2009 technical regulations and failed to spot a design loophole exploited by, it is no coincidence, the three teams that have set the early pace. Since the defendants have already received tacit approval of the controversial but clever diffusers at the rear of their cars, it would be a surprise if the FIA went against their own officials.
If they did, it would be another disaster heaped upon a sport in danger of suffocating from a surfeit of drama and nonsense that has little to do with the actual racing. But, while Jenson Button’s wins in Australia and Malaysia are likely to stand, there is every chance that the FIA World Motor Sport Council may emerge from a subsequent meeting on 29 April with smoke curling from both barrels after splattering McLaren’s reputation around the governing body’s grand surroundings in Place de la Concorde…Â Details