These things are called “V8 Supercars,” and they’re sort of like the Australian version of NASCAR, only they aren’t piloted by Larry the Driving Guy and can turn both left and right. What you see here, specifically, is an exploding V8 Supercar and an Australian guy trying to escape a bunch of fire without dying. I guess “resistance to fire” isn’t one of your Supercar’s super powers. The last time I saw a car explode like that it had my beautiful teenage Italian bride inside.
The driver in question is Karl Reindler, Australian superdriver, and he managed to escape the explosion with only minor burns. If that’d been an American guy driving he would’ve hurt himself before the car blew up.
As Jim Tressel was booking his flight for a mandatory NCAA compliance seminar next month, more questions arose over the integrity of the Ohio State football coach’s program. The school announced over the weekend that they would be reviewing car sales from two Columbus-area dealerships to at least eight Ohio State football players and their families. More than 50 sales from 2004 to 2010 will be under investigation.
Public records show that in 2009, a 2-year-old Chrysler 300 with less than 20,000 miles was titled to then-sophomore linebacker Thaddeus Gibson. Documents show the purchase price as $0.
Mauk could not explain it. “I don’t give cars for free,” he said. Gibson said he was unaware the title on his car showed zero as the sales price. “I paid for the car, and I’m still paying for it,” he said, declining to answer further questions.
To be fair, that’s about as much as I would pay for an American car these days.
But the Buckeyes are giving us an argument to bring the NCAA’s death penalty–a one-year ban from competition–back to Division I football for the first time since Texas’s Southern Methodist got the chair in 1987.
If both this and the “Tat Five” investigations are determined by the NCAA to be major violations, Ohio State would be slapped with the “repeat violator” label, placing the football program within the proper criteria for such a ban. Of course, Jim Tressel probably knew all about this, but just wasn’t sure who to tell about it. Oh, quiet Jimmy. I bet when he was nine years old, he was a Catholic priest’s wet dream.
When a guy gets pulled over while being a passenger in his own car, that’s interesting. When it’s Allen Iverson, it’s almost an automatic post. Iverson’s 2007 Lamborghini Murcielago was pulled over almost two weeks ago, according to police report recently made public, after the car made a lane change without signaling. The cop on the scene saw that the vehicle’s tags were expired, and called for a tow truck.
You can imagine how well that went over with Iverson.
“Take the vehicle, I have 10 more,” he reportedly told [Officer S.J.] Durham. “Police don’t have anything else [expletive] to do except [expletive] with me. … Do you know who I am?”
For the next 20 minutes, according to the officer, Iverson “went on and on” about who he was.
“I stated to Mr. Iverson, it really doesn’t matter who you are,” Durham wrote. “You tried to conceal your vehicle with a fake drive-out tag due to you not paying for your tags.”
Iverson would later apologize to police. The registration on an ’07 Lamborghini runs about $10,000, which sounds like a lot, until you realize it’s for a Lamborghini. HE’S TOTALLY RICH AND SHOULD HAVE TO PAY HIS FAIR SHARE. At least now Iverson can give some attention to his ten other cars. After all, the best things in life are free, at least until you need a ride somewhere.
To call this anything short of a tragedy would be wrong, but when nine people on bikes were injured by an automobile in Brazil, one has to ask, critically, “How did this happen?” Fortunately, there were no fatalities.
It would take nine people getting plowed by a Volkswagen before I would ever hear of Critical Mass, the subversive worldwide bike network that organizes monthly rallies. But now I have, and I was surprised to learn that these were not “bikers,” but cyclists on bicycles. Their Wikipedia entry suggests that their intentions are more social than political, but even those participating in the monthly rides admit that the groups’ own social courtesies, such as sharing the road, become lost concepts.
Critical Mass has a different flavor from city to city — there’s a big variety in size, respect of traffic laws (or lack thereof), interaction with motorists, and intervention by police. So if you want to know more about Critical Mass, you’ll really need to find out what your local ride is like.
And if you give that site a gander, you can see that even the guy running it got tired of the tactics of some of their groups. The driver reportedly had his 15-year-old son in the car with him, and one would doubt that the father set out to teach his kid how to mow down a pack of Brazilian hippies. Richard Neis, 47, would abandon his vehicle before giving himself up to authorities.
But yeah, running over people is bad, but this is what cycling will have to do to get back into the news without Lance Armstrong. Am I right, America?
Cars make terrible obelisks, or so I thought before I saw this “pile-up” on I-93. Seriously, how the hell does a car stand up on its nose like that? The video after the jump only shows the aftermath of the incident. Not the…before-math. That’s not a word, but a car standing on its front license plate deserves its own nose.
It’s not a seal. So is this technically a “crash”? Or maybe even “performance art?” I only know two things. One: this really isn’t sports-related. Two: that car was almost certainly driven by a woman. Try driving with all four wheels on the ground, honey. You’ll like it, I promise.
The Tesla Roadster is an electric car powered by over 6,000 lithium-ion batteries. The California-manufactured coupe gets about 200 miles per charge, and will cost you just over $100,000 to take home, pricing out all but the wealthiest of treehuggers. Oh, and it will document your every move you make while driving it, a discovery made by a guy that had to hack into the computer on his own car.
Many vehicles record some brief bursts of data in their onboard computer systems, which can easily be accessed by owners with some auto store tools. But the all-electric Tesla Roadster keeps far more extensive track of itself, taking a snapshot of the vehicle’s driving and brake regeneration every second, minute and hour its driven, along with details of its charging cycles dating back to when it left the factory. –Jalopnik.
I’ll just come out and say it: electric cars, as they stand today, are a joke. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love nothing more than to never visit a gas pump again, but this recent surge of environmental awareness this prissy hipster vibe that makes me want to burn a giant pile of plastic. These “green” cars powered by coal-burning electricity aren’t cost-effective enough to be rational buys for the average consumer. Having Big Brother riding shotgun just makes it worse. At least this car doesn’t look like a Viagra pill on wheels. Nobody wants to see that.
These things are called “V8 Supercars,” and they’re sort of like the Australian version of NASCAR, only they aren’t piloted by Larry the Driving Guy and can turn both left and right. What you see here, specifically, is an exploding V8 Supercar and an Australian guy trying to escape a bunch of fire without dying. I guess “resistance to fire” isn’t one of your Supercar’s super powers. The last time I saw a car explode like that it had my beautiful teenage Italian bride inside.
