Friday, February 25, 2005

Noble M12 GTO-3R

Last fall we were breaking in a new road warrior and testing the Noble M12 at the same time. The car was very quick, and as we were at the staging area checking out the acceleration results, the 20-something new guy got a look. “Damn—that thing’s stupid fast!” he blurted.

What was funny was how well that summed up the Noble. On one hand, it is a little, well, silly, since it’s a South African–built $76,400 car of questionable lineage that doesn’t pass U.S. emissions or crash regulations and gets registered for road use as a home-built kit. But on the other, it is one of the most satisfying cars we’ve ever driven, and it is ferociously fast, snapping to 60 in a minuscule 3.3 seconds, the same as a Ford GT.

“Actually, it’s a component car,” clarified Dean Rosen, the president of 1G Racing and importer of the Noble kit. “The car comes in two crates—one with the completely assembled car, and the other with the powertrain. You can join the two in about 40 hours.” Maybe we were being a little harsh, since a lot of kit cars we’ve driven feel pretty good. But still, here in the U.S., the Noble is an obscure machine.

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Thursday, Feb 24, 2005

It’s-All-About-Me Roadsters

The jury deliberates over four new convertibles on our most-selfish list.

We haven’t officially put Ayn Rand on our must-read list, but we have been lately mulling a few of her principles, particularly the one about the virtue of selfishness. Should you suddenly be handed a fistful of dollars, for example, would you buy a new bus for the church or head straight to the nearest Porsche dealer?

No hands, please, it’s a secret ballot. Those of you in the latter category—and you know who you are—may want to divert some of your overtaxed attention to the following pages. Upon them we have lashed down and dissected four of the newest, fleetest, it’s-all-about-me convertibles in the $45,000 to $60,000 range, a group we regularly check in on for reasons that are, of course, selfish.

Featured in This Comparo
Chevrolet Corvette
Chrysler Crossfire SRT-6
Mercedes-Benz SLK350
Porsche Boxster S

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Wednesday, Feb 23, 2005

Driving Porsche's Supercar

Along with Ferrari's Enzo, the long-awaited Porsche Carrera GT is an amazing start to a new era of supercars. The Enzo may have beaten the Carrera GT to market--the Porsche only went on sale this past January--but Porsche clearly wanted to take enough time to develop the $440,000 GT and show the other car makers how it's done. Called Project S1 internally, the new Carrera GT was to be Porsche's next factory effort for Le Mans in 2000. Then race plans were dropped, but S1 went forward as a street car. The Carrera GT production version was unveiled at last in March 2003 in Geneva.

Cut to the Gross Dölln, an ex-Russian Army base in the German hinterlands along the Polish border. Runway No. 1--the one I am to use for high-speed runs--is two miles long. Russian Tu-95 bombers and MiG fighters used these runways up to and for a while after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. Today, here on the tarmac are parked three shimmering, $440,000 Porsche Carrera GTs--one red, one black and one silver.

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Monday, Feb 21, 2005

The High-Efficiency Jetcar

The Jetcar isn’t jet-powered, but it is a freaky-looking, high efficiency concept with a mandate to achieve 100km per liter of fuel (around 285mpg). The latest prototype, Jetcar 2.5, sports a light steel frame, a body fashioned from epoxy glass resin and a three-cylinder common-rail diesel engine, chosen after electric-battery and hydrogen powered versions had proven uneconomical. It also employs an aerodynamically efficient design only an engineer could love. More pics ahead.







Jetcar 2.5