ProSolo is an autocross event format where drivers compete on a course. It’s organized so multiple cars run on nearby courses and the event lasts more than one day.
Autocross is a competition where you drive through a cone-marked course against the clock. Your start and reaction time can make a noticeable difference in your final time.
This is a Porsche Cayman from the 987 generation. It’s a mid-engine sports car, and here it’s being used to show how autocross starts and timing affect your run.
The Porsche 911 GT3 is a performance version of the 911 made for track driving. In this clip, it’s the car shown during the practice start so the timing and staging behavior can be discussed.
Staging properly means you’re lined up and ready at the start so the timing system can start you correctly. They’re using the lights to show whether the car is in the right “ready” position.
Term
foot
Here, “foot” is part of a measurement of how quickly the car gets going right after the start. It’s used to compare launches between cars.
The Porsche Boxster is a small two-seat sports car made by Porsche. It’s designed to handle well and feel sporty when you drive it. People talk about it a lot because it’s a “real sports car” without being the biggest or most expensive Porsche.
A “hard launch” means starting the car very aggressively to get moving as fast as possible. It can make you quicker, but it can also put more strain on parts like the clutch and drivetrain.
“Dump the clutch” means letting the clutch out suddenly to make the car launch harder. It can help you accelerate faster, but it can also wear out the clutch and stress the drivetrain.
“Clutch slipping” means you let the clutch out more gradually instead of all at once. That can make launches smoother and less harsh on the drivetrain parts.
Here “axles” are the parts that send power from the transmission out to the wheels. If you launch really aggressively, those parts can take extra stress.
A “U-turn” here is a course maneuver where you turn around to face the other direction. It can be used to set up the car before the timed part so you don’t have to launch as harshly.
SCCA is a big U.S. organization that runs amateur car racing events. Here, it’s being used as the competition series where people show up with cars prepared for the rules of a given class.
The Toyota MR2 is a small sports car with the engine placed closer to the middle of the car. That layout can help it feel nimble in tight, twisty autocross courses.
Bracket racing is drag racing where you’re trying to hit a target time. You don’t just want to be fast—you want to be close to your target, and launching too early can get you disqualified.
Northwestern Stadium is where this driving course is set up. The track surface and how it’s tilted (like camber) can change how the car grips in the turns.
Camber is the angle of the tire—tilted in or out. In turns, that angle changes how much of the tire is actually gripping the road, so it can make a corner feel easier or harder.
A sweeper is a wide, flowing turn where you keep going fairly fast. It’s less about a sharp turn-in and more about staying smooth and stable through the bend.
The Porsche Carrera GT is a very rare, very high-performance Porsche supercar. It’s the kind of car people talk about because it’s special and not commonly seen. In the podcast, it sounds like it was part of a lineup of cars they encountered.
A front trunk is like a trunk at the front of the car. In this case, they’re saying it doesn’t really work as storage the way you’d expect—so you can’t use it like a normal trunk.
In this context, “service” means scheduled maintenance performed by a shop or dealer. The host explains that the compartment that looks like a trunk is only opened during servicing, not for everyday storage.
The host is contrasting a “Toyota motor” option with an AMG turbo option. In this context, it’s about which engine supplier/architecture the car uses, which can affect how it feels and how it’s maintained over time.
This means the engine has four cylinders and it uses a turbocharger to make more power. A turbo helps the engine breathe better by forcing extra air in, so you get stronger acceleration without needing a huge engine.
Colin Chapman was the founder of Lotus. The host is saying Chapman had a clever idea: focus on what Lotus does best and let other companies handle parts that need to be dependable.
They’re talking about a “best at what you do” approach. Lotus would focus on the suspension (how the car handles), while other companies would handle the parts that need to be extra reliable.
The drivetrain is everything that sends power from the engine to the wheels. It’s more than just the engine—it includes the parts that actually move the car.
The Lotus Esprit is a sports car made by Lotus. It’s known for being a bit different and for having a strong engineering focus. The podcast mentions a special V8 version because some Esprits had unusual engine projects.
The Porsche 914 is a small Porsche with the engine mounted toward the middle, which makes it feel quick and nimble. Drivers often say you have to be extra careful around other cars because it’s easy for people to miss you, so you drive very defensively.
Term
blinking bulbs
“Blinking bulbs” means lights that flash, like the turn signal. The idea is that other drivers react to those signals, and the host thinks some people get annoyed by them even though they’re there to communicate.
A third brake light is an extra brake light mounted higher up so drivers behind you can see when you’re slowing down. If a car doesn’t have one, people behind you may notice your braking later, so you have to be more careful.
The Porsche 356 is an old Porsche sports car that’s famous with collectors. People often restore them and get them ready for shows and drives. Here, the speaker is saying he wants to rebuild his 356 so he can take it on an upcoming trip.
Term
trailing it
In this context, “trailing it” means following another car on the road. It’s like keeping close behind while you drive together as a group.
Term
TENS
“TENS” sounds like a nickname for some engine parts the speaker is working on. They’re taking them off, having them refinished, and then putting them back on the engine.
Powder coating is a way of finishing parts with a tough, baked-on coating. It helps the part resist rust and wear, so it tends to last longer than regular spray paint.
A clutch cable is the mechanical linkage that transmits your pedal movement to the clutch release mechanism. On cable-actuated cars, replacing a worn clutch cable helps restore smooth engagement and prevents issues like inconsistent pedal feel or incomplete clutch disengagement.
The firewall is the wall between the engine area and the inside of the car. If it’s warped or the panel near it is damaged, it can let in moisture or heat and make things fit poorly.
Term
original
Here “original” means the engine is the one that originally came with the car from the factory. People care because it can make the car more authentic and more valuable to collectors.
They’re talking about which engine is in the car and whether it matches what the car originally had. They also mention whether the parts around the engine fit and bolt up correctly.
Term
tin
“Tin” here means the metal covers and shields around the engine bay. They help protect things and manage heat, and they also need to fit correctly.
Bolt holes are the holes in metal parts where bolts go through to hold things together. If the holes don’t line up, it usually means something is installed wrong or the wrong part is being used.
Heater boxes are parts that help send warm air into the car’s cabin. If something like a spring or mounting piece is missing, the heater system may not work correctly.
Aftermarket parts are replacement parts made by other companies, not the car’s original maker. They can be cheaper or easier to find, but sometimes they don’t match the original size perfectly, so they may not fit or work as expected.
“Porsche classics” means older Porsche cars. With older cars, replacement parts may not be made to the exact same shape as the originals, so they can sometimes fit poorly.
The air cleaner filter is the part that cleans the air coming into the engine. If the filter is shaped slightly differently, it can stop the airbox cover from closing, which can cause fitment problems.
Term
authentic one
“Authentic” here means the genuine-style part, not a generic replacement. The surprising part is that even the genuine one didn’t fit the way it should, likely due to a small spec difference.
“Quality control” means the process of checking that a product is made correctly. The speaker is saying that even with replica parts made overseas, there can be checks to help them match what you’re trying to replace.
Here, “replicas” means replacement parts that are made to copy an original part. The speaker is saying they can be made very close to the real thing, depending on how they’re ordered and checked.
Auto Atlanta is a shop the speaker says helped find parts they were looking for. It sounds like they were able to locate the specific items needed for the project.
“Shake it down” means doing an early test run after the car has been worked on. The goal is to find any issues quickly before you commit to a bigger trip or event.
“Test run on the bench” means starting and checking the engine while it’s still on a work stand, not in the car. It’s a way to confirm it works before you install it.
A fuel pump is what sends gas to the engine. An electric one uses electricity to push fuel, and “priming the carbs” means getting fuel into the carburetor so the car starts easier.
Carbs (carburetors) are the parts that mix fuel and air for the engine. Priming them means adding fuel ahead of time so the engine doesn’t struggle to start.
The starter relay is like a remote switch for the starter. Instead of running heavy current through the ignition key, the key just signals the relay, and the relay sends power to the starter.
The ignition key is the switch you turn to start the car. The point of the relay here is to keep the key from having to carry the big electrical load needed by the starter.
A lift table is a platform that can go up and down. For engine work, it helps you line the engine up so it’s easier to slide into place.
Term
Monti kit
A “Monti kit” is a specific add-on package (mostly aero/track-related) that changes how the car is set up for lap times. In this discussion, it’s important because it’s tied to how they compare cars fairly.
A “production car lap record” is a lap-time benchmark set by a car that’s intended to be street-legal/production rather than a one-off prototype. The hosts use it to frame how much faster the newer Porsche setup was compared to the prior record holder.
“Tech Tactics” here is the name they’re using for the safety car. A safety car helps control the pace on track so the testing can be done safely and consistently.
The Porsche GT2 RS is a very hardcore, track-oriented version of the 911. It’s known for being extremely fast, and the episode is basically saying people are excited because it sounds like the last one is coming.
“Aero” here means the car’s aerodynamic parts, like wings and spoilers. They’re designed to help the car stick to the road, especially at higher speeds.
Downforce is what the car’s shape and wings use to push it harder onto the road. More downforce usually means better grip at speed, which is why it matters most on highways and track straights—not at low speeds.
“Back to back” means you drive one car, then immediately drive the other, so you can compare them more fairly. They’re saying it’s hard to compare perfectly because their car has wear and has had suspension work.
A shock absorber helps control the car’s bounce over bumps. If you replace it, the car can feel tighter or smoother, so it changes how the car compares to another one.
“Layered panels” here refers to structural body construction changes—using multiple layers of sheet metal in the car’s bodywork. The speaker argues that the later 1974–1976 cars are stiffer because of these construction updates, which can improve how the car responds and feels under driving loads.
Rust is when metal starts corroding and breaking down. On older cars, it can spread into important areas and be expensive to repair. That’s why they’re saying to focus on the body condition first.
Factory seats are the original seats that came with the car from the factory. If they’re still there, it usually means the car hasn’t been changed much.
“Bumpers” are the front and rear parts of a car that help protect it if you bump something. In this conversation, they’re talking about how the later Porsche 914 bumpers look and why some people end up liking that style.
“Phoenix red” is a named paint color on Porsche cars. People who care about these cars often use the exact color name to talk about how the car looks when it’s clean or restored.
Topic
GT3C introduction
They’re talking about a Porsche-related event called the GT3C introduction. It’s basically the “we got invited to this” moment in their story.
“Lemons” is a kind of racing where people bring very cheap, sometimes sketchy cars and race them anyway. They’re mentioning they judged cars in one of those events before.
That phrase is about how big the engine is inside each cylinder. Bigger numbers usually mean more air/fuel space per cylinder, which can help power—though it depends on the whole engine design.
The Porsche 911 is Porsche’s most famous sports car model. It’s known for being sporty and for having a design that has stayed recognizable over many years. In the podcast, it’s brought up when talking about the most “pure” Porsche performance versions.
This is Porsche’s track-focused performance line. The “GT” label usually means the car is tuned to feel more like a sports car on a road course than a normal daily driver.
A “V8” is an engine with eight cylinders arranged in a V shape. It’s a common setup in many American performance cars and usually gives strong pulling power and a great sound.
The Ford Cougar is a Ford car model. In the podcast, it’s described as being well done and “settled,” meaning it felt properly put together. The discussion is about how good the car was overall.
“Brake systems” means all the parts that make the car slow down—like the pads and rotors and the parts that apply them. On performance cars, it’s not just about stopping, but also how well the brakes hold up under repeated use.
The Chevrolet Corvette is a sports car made by Chevrolet. It’s known for being fast and for having a strong performance reputation. The podcast mentions the C8 because that version has a different engine layout than older Corvettes.
The Cadillac Allante is a luxury car made by Cadillac. In the podcast, it’s mentioned because there’s an interesting story or something notable about it. It’s being used as an example of a unique model.
A VIN is like a car’s serial number. It can sometimes hint at where the car was made, depending on the VIN format.
Concept
reset that
They’re talking about how to keep your opinions from one car from affecting your thoughts about the next one. It’s like taking a mental pause so you judge each car fresh.
A “target market” is the specific type of person a company is trying to sell a car to. The host is saying he reviewed the car by imagining what that kind of buyer would think.
The BMW 3 Series is BMW’s popular compact car line that’s built to feel sporty to drive. Here it’s mentioned as the comparison car for the Subaru WRX STI.
xDrive is BMW’s all-wheel-drive system, designed to send power to the wheels with the most traction. It’s especially relevant when comparing cars like the BMW 3 Series and Subaru WRX STI because AWD changes how they launch, accelerate, and handle in low-grip conditions.
The BMW 335 is a sporty BMW 3 Series model. It’s the kind of car people compare in tests to see how it drives and performs. In the podcast, it’s mentioned as part of a comparison involving different versions of the 3 Series.
The Ford F-150 is a large pickup truck. It’s made for everyday driving but also for tasks like hauling and towing. People mention it a lot because it’s widely available and comes in many versions.
“Drive-by-wire” means the car uses electronics to translate what you do with the pedals into commands for the engine and drivetrain. Instead of a purely mechanical connection, computers and sensors handle the control.
“Steer-by-wire” means the steering wheel doesn’t connect to the wheels with a direct mechanical system. Instead, electronics send commands to control the steering, which can enable different steering behaviors—but it has to be very dependable.
A “48-volt electrical system” means the car uses 48 volts for some of its electrical power instead of the usual 12 volts. That can make it easier to run more power-hungry electrical features efficiently.
Tesla is a car company famous for making electric cars. The point here is that Tesla’s new tech doesn’t stay limited to one model—it can influence other cars too.
Chris Bangley is a person involved with car design/styling. The host first heard people criticize him, but then listened to him explain his ideas and felt they made sense.
They’re saying your car can act like a “stand-in” for you. It’s a way of showing your personality to other people, and it can even affect how you feel about other drivers.
The Toyota Corolla is a small, everyday car from Toyota. It’s known for being efficient and easy to live with. People bring it up because it’s a common choice for daily driving.
This is a BMW 7 Series from the E65/E66 generation. The hosts are basically saying that BMW’s design looked really controversial back then—and still does to them.
The Ford Taurus is a very influential Ford sedan. The hosts are talking about how the early version looked weird and futuristic, but now it seems normal because people got used to it.
The BMW M3 is one of BMW’s most famous “sport” models. Enthusiasts bring it up because it’s supposed to be exciting to drive, not just a comfortable car.
“Luxurification” means a car brand starts focusing more on luxury and comfort. The speaker is saying that can make the cars feel less like serious driver-focused machines.
The Porsche 911 is Porsche’s most famous sports car. It’s known for a special engine layout and a very recognizable shape. Here, the host is saying some versions are more exciting to him than others.
It means the car doesn’t stay exactly where you want it to go. The host is contrasting unwanted wandering with the kind of movement you actually want from a sports car.
This is the host’s way of describing the little wiggles or motions a car makes when you’re going straight. He likes that feeling because it makes the car feel more connected and alive.
The Autobahn is Germany’s highway system, and it’s famous for very high-speed driving. People use it as a real-world test of how calm and stable a car feels at extreme speeds.
Term
rear sort of circular motion
The host is describing the way the car seems to “rotate” and shift its weight when you’re driving hard. They’re trying to explain how the rear-engine balance shows up as a distinct feel through the steering and body movement.
Term
high fruit frequency front bounce
“Front bounce” is how the front suspension moves up and down. “High frequency” means it’s happening fast, so the car can feel more twitchy or more informative over rough surfaces.
The Toyota Prius is a hybrid car, which means it uses both a gas engine and an electric motor. The goal is to use less fuel than a typical gas-only car. People talk about it a lot because it’s one of the best-known hybrid models.
The Tesla Model Y is an electric SUV/crossover. It’s made to be practical for daily driving while still being fully electric. People mention it often because it’s a popular Tesla model.
A “feedback loop” is when one reaction causes another reaction, and it keeps going. The host is saying the online arguments about EVs keep feeding themselves.
The Subaru BRZ is a small sports car that’s built to feel fun and balanced when you drive. People often modify it because it’s a popular, easy-to-work-on car for upgrades.
A manual swap means converting a car that originally had an automatic transmission so it can be driven with a clutch and stick shift. It’s a big project because the car needs more than just a new gearbox—it has to be set up to work with it.
ZF 8-speed automatics are eight-speed automatic transmissions made by ZF, a major automotive supplier. They’re popular because they shift quickly and efficiently, but converting them to behave like a manual (with custom control logic) is complex because the transmission’s electronics and shift strategy must be reworked.
Term
internet connection
Here, “internet connection” is just the part of a survey question that the host is using to compare digital life versus car interest. The point is how people choose between the two.
The Acura Integra is a compact car made by Acura. In the podcast, it’s mentioned while the speaker talks about what the name means and how it fits among other car models. It’s basically being used as an example of a specific Acura model.
The Acura MDX is a family SUV. Here it’s mentioned because the son looked up a problem online and fixed it himself. It’s an example of a normal daily vehicle being worked on like a hobby car.
A brake pedal sensor is a small electronic part that tells the car when you’re pressing the brake. If it’s wrong or broken, the car may not know you’re braking, so things like the brake lights can act weird. That’s what the host is describing here.
The Gordon Murray Automotive T.50 is a very high-end supercar. It’s made to be extremely fast and exciting to drive. In the podcast, it’s mentioned as a standout option when talking about the best cars to buy.
Carburetors are older-style parts that mix fuel with air so the engine can burn it. Many newer cars don’t use them anymore because they use fuel injection.
Dirk Timbscott is the person the host is talking about here. He’s presented as a car enthusiast—especially into Porsche and older cars.
LIVE
Welcome to the Porsche Club Insider, your one stop for all things Porsche and PCA.
Here's your host, Vu Gwin, and the Insider crew.
Greetings everyone from PCA's national office.
At the table I have Manny Alvin to my right, Damon's at the controls, and today we're
going to catch up a little bit on things that we've done in the past week or so, but
then we'll get into a very fun interview that I had inside a GT3 with Jason Camisa.
But before we get into that, I want to thank our presenting sponsor, Pirelli.
Pirelli tires have to achieve the highest levels of performance, safety, noiselessness, and
grip on the road surface.
Innovative tires that can satisfy even the most specific mobility needs of the end consumer.
Thank you all for listening.
If you aren't currently a PCA member and own a Porsche, what are you waiting for?
Grab that VIN, head over to PCA.org and make yourself a PCA member.
For those of you that are looking for your Porsche, we have the Test Drive program where
you can join and unlock resources to help you find that special Porsche for your driveway
and our garage.
Damon, let's start with you.
Adventures with ProSolo and your Cayman.
Yes, so ProSolo, second year doing it.
It's a sports car club of America, autocross event basically, and there's a little bit
of something extra thrown in where it's not just you autocrossing all alone on an autocross course.
There is also another car on a separate course, a second course right next to you.
And you are autocrossing on the left side, then the right side, and it takes place over
two days of competition.
Friday is usually a setup day.
So a really long event, but I love it because it's just something different.
And throwing in the starts and reaction times with autocross creates something where there's
another variable that can either add or take away your time.
So I had my 987 Cayman and I'm going to try and coordinate some things here on the computer.
So what I'm about to show you is a practice start and it is with a PCA member.
I know he's in Pennsylvania.
We had the license plates out and it's in a 911 GT3 and you also see that there's a spider there.
So not only are there tons of different types of cars, but there's also
tons of Porsches that show up to these and they're very competitive especially.
So here we go.
You'll see the drag light tree right there.
And on the other side, there's a car right over here, which I've blurred out because
there are license plates everywhere.
And just a reminder, if you're sharing images with PCA of autocross,
no license plates allowed, and here you go.
Real short video.
You'll see this guy's pulled up.
See these lights there?
If one light is on, you're not staged properly.
If two lights are on, you're staged correctly.
And then as the counter goes down, it's at three.
Now it'll go to zero and you'll hear a sound and here you go.
Take a watch.
.360 foot.
Steven with an 892 reaction time of the 214.60 foot in the Boxster on the left.
There we go.
Duck got the GT3 to hook up that time on the right.
Oh, yeah.
So that's what you're doing.
That's a pretty hard launch.
Yeah, it's a pretty hard launch.
It's one of those things where I never just dumped the clutch in the game.
And maybe I should because what do people think?
Does slipping the clutch a little bit better to save the axles?
Or do you just dump the clutch, get a little slip, and everything's a little bit more?
The funny is, most autocrossers I've done, I know Persello does it this way,
but most autocrossers I've done, they will intentionally even take you through a U-turn
first before you cross the B. So you're nice to your clutch and your axles.
Your equipment is not torn up because you're tempted to do a launch.
Every millisecond an autocross counts, so you don't want to come off the gate.
You're right.
And like the local WDCR, SCCA regions, or the PCA ones oftentimes,
you don't necessarily have to dump the clutch or have the absolute fastest start.
Especially SCCA, they put the start around a corner before the time even starts.
Intentionally, yeah.
Intentionally for that.
With Persello, it's all about reaction time.
There's none of that.
So you think you're going in there saying, I'm going to be gentle to my clutch.
I'm not going to dump it.
You end up just getting caught up and you dump your clutch and trying to get that
appropriate amount of time.
Persello is like the best of the best.
I mean, that's the way I always looked at it.
If you're grading your local PCA series, if you want to see your Tissier metal,
you go to SCCA.
And yeah, these guys have their cars set up for that particular SCCA class.
And a lot of them travel around the country following this Persello tour.
And they're setting up, I think most of us set up for the generalization of how your car would
do at an autocross.
But I think these folks dial it into that particular course, that particular surface,
that particular day.
Yep.
And there's all sorts of stuff as well.
And I do have to say, normally I'm pretty happy with my times.
I'm pretty sure I was near the bottom of the barrel, even compared to last year.
It was a rough competition in the sense that I didn't feel great about any of my runs.
I felt pretty good.
But man, you need a great run to do anything at SCCA.
But you know what, that's how you learn and that's how you get better.
And if you start, if you run with them and get sort of in the lead pack,
if you were to go to other autocrosses, you would be the superstar.
Yeah.
And I'm just sort of cycling through some photos.
You know, you have all sorts of stuff, MR2s.
Here is, so I have 265, 3518s.
These people with their 987 have 295, 30, 18s front and rear.
So whether...
Does that mean you're going to go wider or...?
No, no, no.
I think I'm good with 265.
As I look at that, I'm like, can he get the heat?
How quickly can he get heat?
And it was that wide rubber.
Yeah.
That's where you start worrying about that, I guess.
But they seem pretty good out there.
I don't remember what their times are.
But yeah, Northwestern Stadium, pretty cool.
Set up there.
And I know I don't have a ton of time to just talk about pro solo,
because we've got a bunch of other stuff.
But I do want to also show one of my runs that we can talk about a little bit.
Okay.
So I'm going to start this here.
We have our left sixth run.
This is on Sunday.
So I've already done...
Left six means this is my 11th run of the whole weekend.
And so I start off here.
I had a pretty good reaction time, which in pro solo,
and I guess drag racing or bracket racing,
anything under 0.5 is a red light disqualified.
So you want to get ideally like a 0.50 something.
But when you do that, you run the risk of running,
getting a red light on that run because you jumped the gun.
So the courses aren't super technical usually,
because there are two of them.
There's a lot to remember.
That one on the left was a little bit faster,
kind of a lot like last year's.
The right course, which you're seeing now on YouTube,
was a lot more technical,
but it wasn't necessarily because it was super tight
and technical in how the course was designed.
But because, which it was to an extent,
there were some tricky corners,
but at Northwestern Stadium, the camber there
is pretty crazy, as you'll see if you're watching YouTube.
So we have some slaloms here,
a big sweeper that I'm coming up into.
And on this run, I was pushing harder than before,
and I did a sort of two steps forward, one step back,
where I was going faster because I pushed harder.
But as you can see on YouTube here,
it got a little bit sloppy.
So I couldn't put it all together.
And this was my fastest run.
Are pros solo, are pros solo courses more higher speed
than say slow technical and loop dubious?
Yeah, I would say at least the two that I've done
at Northwestern Stadium, they were definitely higher speed.
And, but tricky corners doesn't look all that technical,
but stringing it all together can be tough,
partly because of the speeds,
partly just if the course designers are good at what they do.
So now is it just you having more seat time,
or are you going to further be tweaking your car?
More seat time.
I don't think I need to be tweaking my car all that much anymore.
I've got to focus on the driver.
And yeah, you know, I think that pros solo this weekend
kind of pointed that out to me,
that I've got a lot that I can do
before I modify the car anymore.
Yeah, that's the case for I think any Porsche out there.
If you haven't autocross before,
like don't sweat and try to do tons of stuff to your car,
learn how to drive it.
Because it's, you know, how many times have we been embarrassed
by some really good drivers that have a bone stock car,
even not even on our compound tires,
just because they can drive.
Sure.
Yeah, that's how it usually happens.
But yeah, highly recommended if a pro solo is coming near you.
Unfortunately, PCA doesn't do prosolos.
I understand why, man, it is what an undertaking
just to put those on.
But one can hope, right? Cross fingers.
A PCA pro solo one of the things.
I don't think so.
That's sort of their lane and we stay in our lane.
Yeah, I see what you mean.
Especially if you're new to autocrossing,
PCAs, where you want to be at.
Because it has a wider, I guess, I don't want to say,
the drivers that, you know.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Do PCA or the single mark car club autocrosses
when you're starting?
They're a little bit smaller, more relaxed,
and I wouldn't say laid back.
And the best part is you get instructors.
Yeah, exactly.
And you do, but not at a pro solo, though.
Exactly, that's what I'm saying.
That's what I'm saying.
Pro solo is when you've taken it to the level
where you're constantly top five or whatever
at your single mark car club and you just want to do.
Or you just lucked out like me and got a registration
at the very tail end of it.
Anyway.
All right, Manny, you're hanging out at the dealership.
Yeah, the local dealer had cards and coffee.
I drove to 914 down there.
It's always amazing how people think,
are surprised that 914 can easily keep up with traffic.
Yeah.
Of course.
I'm like, because you're not hitting
an accelerator pedal all the way down.
In fact, I think there's some people,
some of our friends that have much higher horsepower cars
and you that can't keep up with you.
For those who are watching on YouTube,
is this your 914, Manny?
Pretty sure.
Very nice.
I got to see, I didn't, I wasn't at that event,
but I got to see your car later that day.
And man, I don't know what you've done,
or if the cloud coverage was perfect,
but your paint looked incredible.
It popped.
Yeah, I haven't washed it in like five years.
That's because I wipe it down.
I don't let it get dirty to the point
where I have to wash it.
So that's like Tim McNair taught me,
if you don't have to induce water
into an old car like that, you shouldn't.
So I just wipe it down and keep it clean.
It's not a daily, obviously.
I just take it out on days when I know
it's not going to be raining.
But yeah, so the Annapolis Porsche of Annapolis dealer
had their cars and coffee.
Well, it was interesting.
So they bought the lot next door,
which I think used to be a Harley-Davidson dealer,
and that's where they had the cars and coffee.
But they can't store it.
They had a lot of Porsches in the showroom,
but none of them were new.
And the way it was explained to me was,
because there's new Porsche branding outside the building,
they're not allowed to put any new Porsches in the showroom.
Oh, is that right?
Yeah, that was interesting.
Next door is their actual showroom,
and that's where they had all the new cars.
So there's CPO cars or whatever.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, it seemed more like a storage area right now.
But yeah, they got a coffee shop out there,
and they were giving complimentary coffee.
It was, I don't know, 40, 50 cars maybe.
They came through, including a Carrera GT.
Nice.
Yeah, a fun time for people to show off their cars.
I see a couple other different models as well.
I think the discussion is the lotuses that have crept up in our club.
To me, it's very interesting.
They remind me of the Alphys when, was it the 2C when it came out?
4C.
No, I think it was the 2C was the one that was a Cayman competitor.
And you compared it to the Cayman.
No, no, no, 4C for sure.
The mid-engine one.
Was that the 4C?
Yeah, the 4C.
The 8C was the front-engine one.
The 4C was the car.
So anyways, it had no storage.
The front trunk didn't open up.
Stuff that you take for granted with Porsche.
You mean practicality?
The best thing about those 4Cs, and I guess the low-tie,
is it looks like there's a front trunk.
It's a service.
When you're getting the car serviced, they open it up.
But it's not a place to store anything.
You can't use it for anything.
Well, there's no place to put anything.
It's like for equipment underneath of it.
Radiator, I think, coolers and whatnot.
But to give it the impression, like David said,
it has the lines and everything that looks like it would open up automatically.
That's funny.
I mean, Porsche doesn't offer anything right now in this segment.
So hopefully other manufacturers are taking advantage.
And filling in that missing slot of,
I think they're like 120-some thousand, they were saying for the car.
They're so manual, I think that ends in a year or two.
And what kind of motors in that?
I think they come with two options.
There's still a Toyota motor?
Toyota or an AMG four-cylinder turbo.
Yeah, yeah, I think you're right there.
I think you're right.
I think I'm right there.
It's a three and a half.
That might be automatic at the AMG, I think.
And the Toyota is...
I've only heard about it.
I haven't looked too deeply into the AMG four-cylinder.
I just heard the guys talking about it in the chat.
So up until that point, I didn't knew nothing about the cars
other than the used Toyota engines.
So from what I have heard, though,
is that the Toyota engine is still the one and a half.
Yeah, I think that's the...
I can understand that.
Had Colin Chapman thought of that back in the 60s.
That's the most genius thing is let,
let Lotus take care of suspension.
And let someone else make something a little bit more reliable,
take care of the drivetrain.
And I think they would have done wonders in the US
because it was always reliability was a big concern.
Remember that custom bespoke V8 for the Esprit V8 back in the day?
Oh, yeah.
It was Lotus built just with that car.
I'm pretty sure it wasn't all that reliable in the end.
Yeah, you don't see many of them.
They're great looking cars.
You know, there's four of them at the cars and coffee, I think.
No original Lotus made it down.
But it was about a great time driving the 914.
Which for those of you who have 914s know,
you drive almost like a motorcycle,
which means you stay in everyone's mirrors.
And when tractor trailers go by you,
you're looking at their hubs and their wheels.
And then when you're braking,
you're making sure the people that are behind you see you, right?
Yeah, you have to drive very defensively, absolutely.
And you don't have a third brake light
or a blinking bulbs or anything.
Oh, no.
Yeah, I have blinking bulbs.
I think it just pisses people off to blinking light.
I hope it does.
So then they know I'm there.
As they punch you to the next county.
All right, well, the time is sort of clicking off pretty quickly
as we get closer to Porsche Parade, which means
I should try to put my 356 back together
because I have dreams of trailing it up to Lake Placid.
And for the most part, I've been collecting parts and such
to get ready for the new engine to go back in.
But before it goes back in, Mr. Miller came over
and I was going to just simply spray bomb the old TENS
and strap it onto the new engine and put it all back in.
And I got all my TENS put in a box and Mr. Miller came and visited
and he said, these TENS need to look nice.
And so he swapped them away and he had them powder coated.
And I do, I have to say it does look beautiful.
The TENS look great.
They're back on the motor.
Before I put the motor back in, there's a couple of things I still need to do,
which is I'm going to replace the clutch cable.
The heater cables.
And then on the back wall, there's a panel, an interior panel
that sits along the firewall that after so many years
and I guess water and humidity, it kind of got all warped.
It's a very flat panel when new,
but mine is mine is almost like a wafer board.
It's like completely all warped.
So I pulled that out thinking that I could just put some new hardware
and kind of pull it in.
But the board is just so incredibly.
So when is the drop date date?
Did you say either I am taking it parade or I'm not taking it to parade?
The motor has to be.
Because this podcast comes out on June 1st, I think.
So the motor needs to go in that week.
First week of June.
First week of June.
Exactly.
So I am, I'm going to spend this weekend.
But for those listening, we're recording this on May 21st.
Yeah.
So I'm going to spend this weekend really trying to get knocked out
all the stuff, the surrounding stuff to the motor.
And so the listeners, your car is a 15-9.
And the engine is original to the car,
which means the tin and everything is a truthy 6A.
Correct.
Your engine is from a B.
Yes.
Which they look identical.
It's from a 60B and the tins bolted right up.
So it looked like the holes weren't matching.
Well, they weren't matching.
You know why?
Why?
Because people say, oh, the tins will go back exactly where they came off.
And you won't, you won't.
Sure.
You won't.
Well, you think they make sense.
I mean, they're metal.
They're not cloth.
I will tell you that two tin pieces can be interchanged.
And the bolt holes that don't line up are the telltale signs.
But if you put them in the right place, yes, the bolt, the bolt is all in.
I walked away with you had the rubber mallet in your hand.
I could see a lot of holes that weren't matching up.
Nope.
They now.
I figured it was because one was a B, one was an A.
Nope.
They all matched up.
So all the parts are pretty much in.
I think I'm missing one spring, long spring for my heater boxes.
The heater boxes look gorgeous.
They're all new powder coated, new looking.
All the parts are in.
Here's the thing.
Have you heard about how some people are kind of down on newer parts?
And it could be Porsche parts or aftermarket parts about them not necessarily being copied
from the original correctly and not fitting well.
I've seen that with Porsche classics.
Yeah.
So, you know, whatever brands and I've, I've had this instance.
I bought some air cleaner filters and they look, especially when you take them out the
box, looks the right height, the right diameter.
That's the kind of thing you want to buy new.
You don't want to buy used ones.
You don't want to use a used filter.
Yeah.
And so you took a look at it at first look, Manny.
I mean, you probably couldn't tell, right?
However, that indentation and the indentation on the top of that new filter is just small
enough where the lid of my air filter won't go into it.
So I can't close the lid.
And so I reached back out to the supplier and they're going to send me one that's an
aftermarket version and hopefully it does fit.
But I was, I mean, I bought the authentic one thinking everything would fit nicely,
but it doesn't.
I know Dave is looking at, he's going, they look exactly the same.
You think they look the same, but they're not.
So if we're on YouTube here, we have a few photos.
This is from sort of the side.
Here's from on top.
And it looks like I believe this is the indentation you're talking about, right?
It needs to sit inside, inside that, that of the filter.
Then tell them it's smaller on the new one.
I know people will say, oh, this is what happened to my stuff made in China.
I will say this about stuff made in China.
If you're willing to spend the money, they will make exact replicas of whatever you're
trying to have a make, but there's some kind of quality control too.
When whoever's buying them to make sure that it's exactly the way you do.
I will say that I'm very happy that everything that I've needed for my 1959, 356 has been available.
Everything that I've needed, all the little rods, and it might be from Classic or it might be from
some third-party company, but everything has been available.
I'm going to give a shout out to Charles and Rod at Ellen Engineering.
They've been sending them sort of my wish list and they've been helping me source
everything.
And then also Alex down at Auto Atlanta, I was looking for some things and yeah,
everything was found.
This weekend is sort of the rush to get all the ancillary stuff done.
And then next week, we'll be kind of prepping the motor.
And then when we come back from our site visit out in Orange County, motor will go in.
Motor goes in.
Hopefully, shake it down for a couple of days before we head to Lake Plastic.
Yeah, because that new motor was test run on the bench already.
It was.
But I'm doing a lot of nice little upgrades.
I'm putting a little electric fuel pump to kind of prime the carbs, which the car
didn't have before.
All new cables.
The back wall is going to be fixed.
All the little boots that for some reason, when people redid or reinstalled the motor
back in the day, they just kind of left them out and kind of jerry-rigged things.
I'm doing the relay for the starter so that the current doesn't have to pass through
the ignition key.
The ignition key just kicks off a relay, and then the starter will get
direct power from the battery.
So all these little tips and tricks that all Mr. Bill and David Ducart,
no tricks that they've shared with me, I'm going to be able to do.
I did also get to practice putting in the motor.
David Ducart took his perfectly running C motor out, and he was upgrading it or doing
whatever he had to do.
But we put it in the old-fashioned way.
He had his car on jack stands, and we had a floor jack, and we're still able to get it
done, but I'll certainly say that I prefer our method with the lift and the lift table
and having everything perfectly parallel and perpendicular, and things slid in much easier.
Mr. Ducart was cursing a few times because he was fighting gravity and fighting angles
and stuff like that.
I don't think I've ever heard him say a single curse word.
Well, he was thinking them.
He didn't say them, but I could tell he was thinking them.
But yeah.
All right.
Let's head into reminding people about signing up for PCA's newsletters, performance news,
e-brake news, and Mark Fresh all free.
And then a quick congratulations to Porsche was setting some benchmark times.
Did you read his article?
I did.
And they took that.
It was an older, it was the 991 GT2 RS, right?
Yes, seven years old, I think.
And kicked the new record.
Does have the Monti kit, which we got to tell Peter to have put on his car,
because he won't have to vest his GT2 RS until you have the Monti kit.
Oh, that would be awesome.
But it did beat the production car lap record by .2 seconds.
Was that the new Z06?
I think that's what it was.
I think it was the Z06.
I don't think Porsche never press release said exactly who it was.
I think it's the new Z06 that was holding the record.
But Jörg Bergmeister was the driver.
They also had out the car that was the Tech Tactics, which is the safety car,
the new 992.2 GT3 at the Monti kit.
It was a 1.8 seconds faster than the 2022 911 GT3.
And that video will be on YouTube by the time you are listening to this.
So go check out the Tech Tactics video on that exact car.
That's pretty cool to see that Porsche that old can still take the record.
I'm sure that's probably why everyone's so excited to see maybe the last GT2 RS to come out.
What Porsche comes out with.
It's incredible what suspension an Aero can do.
Then you know when you buy this car that there's a Monti edition coming out soon after.
But it's a kit, so if you do buy whatever car they come out with,
you can always add the kit on afterwards.
Well, they say it's like 2,000 pounds worth of downforce.
2,200 pounds.
Yeah, that's insane.
That's usually at the hot top speed.
So not at 60 miles an hour.
We'll try to replicate that and then say you can feel it on the on ramp on the way to work.
Usually only at top speed.
Congratulations to Porsche.
Want to remind folks that of course Works Reunion Monterey August 14th registration is open.
Treffenet C Pacific Wine Country September 19th through 25th.
As state rooms are still available.
We dropped Georgia's five favorite 914 videos, which is doing really well.
I think people are appreciating that 914 level that we're putting out there.
Yeah, some of the comments were why do you drive them?
I answered that today.
I answered all of them.
Well, in the video, Damon's inside the showroom, she wouldn't call it, although it's
not open to the public showroom.
You can look from the outside.
Obviously, George wants to keep these cars in the same state they were.
And I can respect that.
I mean, totally.
Everyone says, oh, go out and drive these cars.
But if it wasn't for the people that kept them at low mile, we wouldn't have examples
of what they looked like when they were new.
And let's face it, that is so cool to see how cars looked when they were originally built.
Yeah.
And there's plenty of 914s that you can drive and whatnot.
Anyways, a lot of these cars are, I'm going to say, behind glass.
Literally.
Because they are literally behind glass.
He does take them out for a special occasion.
But for the video, it was all static.
But very interesting to hear the stories behind some of these cars.
I still am surprised of how much love he has for the 76.
Not that I don't like 76, but he clearly loves the 76.
Yes.
I mean, I think 914, like I love driving my 73.
That's the only one I have.
But it's such a fun car to drive.
Once again, so lightweight.
Take the top off.
I would be interested to have you in a well-sorted 76 and drive them back to back
and see how it compares to your car.
It probably wouldn't be weight difference maybe a little bit.
Do you think he was talking about the nose of the 76 adds stability?
I mean, you cruise at 90 without any concern.
I cruise within the speed limit.
I'd be interested to do your take to it.
Because like I said, I've never heard that.
There's so many variables because my car now has 72,000 miles on it.
And I've changed the shock.
So it's really hard sometimes to give it a true back to back.
As somebody who grew up in Southern California and at one point, I probably wanted every
classic Porsche at one point or another.
And a 914 was definitely something that I wanted at one point, never bought.
And I was always looking at the early ones.
And I knew some of the things about the 74 to 76 models that might be better.
I don't think I realized quite how much stiffer and better the car is with those
not double panels, but sort of layered panels that the later cars got.
But kind of like the 996 and some other cars, you put a few years or decades
in between what maybe was popular 15, 20 years ago and now, I kind of get it.
A 76, you don't need that.
That's not a car you buy if you want to go fast and to have a powerful car.
A 76 isn't, a 73 isn't, a 914, 6 isn't either, right?
So which one are you going to buy?
Are you going to buy the earliest one or the latest one, the last of the models with all
the upgrades?
And it doesn't really matter how fast it is or if the two liters detune slightly in the newer ones.
Yeah, well, it makes sense to go with the later cars.
I can see where you're going with that.
But probably what he was saying too was as much as he loved the 76,
like if you're looking for a 914, condition, condition, condition.
Body, body is.
And you can be fixed.
Everything else can be fixed.
Body is rust.
It will cost you so much money to get a body.
And it's hate to use this analogy.
It's like cancer.
It never goes away.
Okay.
It's always there.
So it's why'd you go there, man?
It's something that...
Are we allowed to laugh?
Sure.
If you can find a...
I always joke, I'd say a 914 is of a rust spray.
You just don't know where to rust this yet.
But one that's...
You don't have to take it right to the body shop is the one you're going to be the happiest with.
To Damon's point, the engine at this point doesn't really matter.
I mean, let's face it.
But unfortunately, it's one of these cars that people never took care of.
So if you say, you know, I always dreamt about having one of these cars.
You're going to pay a lot if you can find one.
It's like MR2s or CRXs.
They were pretty cheap cars for what they were back then.
Try to find a stock one now.
Right.
There hasn't been all mess with.
Right.
You had the last nice stock one for cheap I bought before it was re-entered.
And it's impossible to find.
Imagine if you still had that car today, right?
It would be even worth it.
I'm talking about when the engine hasn't been swapped.
It's like factory seats.
Grandma never drove this except on a Sunday type thing.
Even like a regular CRX, not even an SI, just an HF.
It's impossible.
Impossible to find.
Impossible to find.
And to me, that would have loved to have daily driven, find one in daily driving.
But it's and the people who have them know what they have now.
So it's.
And the bumpers, which I mean, I'm just going to say,
because I think there's not many people who would disagree.
The bumpers are ugly on the later cars.
Yeah, I mean.
But that's kind of the charm now with those later cars.
I see what you're talking about.
I see what you're talking about.
I don't know.
Things kind of come around, right?
Yeah.
And at that point, you're just talking about a classic 914.
You're not dividing them up so much.
The ones who like 914s are kids.
Because I remember my wife's, I guess, younger cousins,
when they first saw the 914, they thought that I had taken a carnival ride car.
Kind of run in a circle and taken it home.
That's hilarious.
They thought it was so tiny that it was like.
Well, it kind of looks like the Disney Autotopia car, right?
Yeah.
So it's so small that they and I see that cars in coffee with those kids,
you know, because they can look peer inside the car very easily with the doors.
You know, they're not like having to pull themselves up to look inside.
Especially your car with that Phoenix red, the paint and how clean it is.
It's such a gorgeous car.
Oh, bees.
Being around George 914, seeing your car, man.
Let's work on getting the engine.
So you're not flinstuning it at that parade.
Okay.
Yes.
Let's let's do that.
Remind folks, if you want to race up fellow PCA members online,
check out PCASimracing.com.
And if you're looking for insider swag, you can go to PCA's webstore.org for bugs,
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send us your physical address information to podcast.
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Let me introduce the video with Jason Camisa.
This was when we got invited for the GT3C introduction out in California.
But before we did that, we had the opportunity to drive some GT3s.
And I was paired with him.
I've been paired with him for some judging duties at Lemons years ago.
So it's nice to be back with him.
Super cool guy, a well-known accredited automotive journalist.
He's got his own podcast, the curmudgeon.
You've probably seen his videos, icons, and revelation.
Funny, funny dude.
And I will tell you his personality online.
Absolutely matches what he is like in person.
He's very down to earth.
He's very vibrant.
He's someone that you certainly would want to go hang out and just talk cars.
And it was just very cool to see.
Oh, and I'll add, because Manny knows I'm somewhat of a
lightweight buttercup fragile flower in the right seat.
Even though we were tackling Angela's crest he was driving.
He's a fantastic driver.
Any patches did you have one?
I didn't wear any patches.
I just wore my wrist thingies and that's it.
I would say he's a very...
I thought he clutched in a rosary there.
He's a very smooth driver, very good driver.
He really, sometimes you worry about getting in a car with somebody that
they're going to quote unquote try to impress you.
He was so cool.
It was very cool.
And I hope you enjoy this interview.
I had him for about an hour.
I don't think we were able to capture the entire interview.
But the chunk of it, the masses of it, you'll get to listen to here.
So enjoy.
All right.
I feel a little bit like Russesoul, Steve Irwin,
where I've been able to capture this beast that does not like to be behind the wheel
of modern cars.
I've got him strapped in for at least an hour to talk to us.
So I'll get you in here.
And he's not going to make it possible by just shifting here and all.
Or he's just going to make me sick and I'm not going to be able to ask him questions.
Jason Camisa, thank you for joining PC Insider and speaking some time with us.
You're welcome here.
I mean, we're going to be sitting in traffic anyway.
We might as well be saying all terrible things.
Be productive.
Productive.
You know, you've restrained yourself a bit this morning.
I saw the amount, no complaints that you put out there were quite minimal.
So here's your opportunity to get things off your chest.
I remember when we first met, we were judging lemons and Monterey.
And I had no idea who you are, but really to hang out with you that I like.
This is the type of journalist that I can hang out with.
He totally gets it.
And when we sit at the table last night, we went out with the other journalists in.
Some would think you're coming here for a Porsche event and you find yourself talking
things Porsche all day long.
No, we spent very...
I mean, we did.
We mentioned Porsche.
We talked a little about Porsche, but we were talking about some cool projects at hand.
So anyways, welcome to the show and how you been?
I'm good.
I mean, you do this all the time.
But this is a treat for me, not only because it's you, but to be able to see the GT3 CS.
But you do this all the time.
Does it get old?
It, of course, gets old.
And here's why it gets old.
Most cars, and I use the technical term here, suck.
Just, you know, I just saw a thing of...
Oh, dear God, we're going to lose our front end.
I just saw a thing with an interview with Jeremy Clarkson and he was like, you know,
20 years ago, I could identify the tail lights of any car from, you know,
a half kilometer away and I just don't care anymore.
And, you know, my initial feeling is that's a very sort of like old man thing.
Like Clarkson's been around a while.
He's driven everything.
You know, he's the man, the myth.
But I feel the same way.
And the reason why is that you have very few automotive products left.
Is it because they're designing to a standard?
It's because they're designing to be able to everyone, right?
The fat part of the bell curve is the boring part of the bell curve.
And when you have corporate and private car companies that are panicked,
and most car companies are panicked,
this is a lot of uncertainty in the market right now,
what everyone does is go for the least common denominator,
like the least chance to offend,
which gives you the biggest chance of success.
So the stupid bean counters thing, sure.
And so you get this homogeneity of cars, homogeneity, whatever.
You get all cars of the same.
And so everything is a 500 cc per cylinder, turbocharged, blah, blah.
The formula is the minimal investment and the maximum potential return.
And so I really did stop getting press cars a bunch of years ago
and stopped paying attention to new cars.
To my detriment, it's probably something I shouldn't have done,
but I just couldn't bring myself to pay this much attention to new cars
because they all, let's use that technician's arm, kind of suck.
The reason I'm here, and the reason I'm thrilled to be here,
is not only here meeting a Porsche, a Prestrip,
with no real deliverables for me.
I'm not coming out of a video when I'm giving you a video,
and you're probably in my competition.
But I can't say the shirt.
But the reason I'm here, I'm happy to take a day out of my schedule
to hang out is because, A, I think Porsche GT products are the purest,
they have the most clarity of purpose of almost any car in the road today.
And all of that comes from one man in Andrea's pointing out,
as you guys know, Andy pointing her, sorry, we have squeaky brakes, and Andy's here.
It is a true honor to be in the presence of someone who has for 26 years
made car after, or 26, yeah, he's 25 years, whatever it is, car after car,
that have never failed to hit their mark.
And that's because he is the customer, guy,
he is the person in charge, and he understands what we as drivers want.
Absolutely.
So I wasn't going to turn down an opportunity to hang out with.
Yeah, what a treat, and seeing him kind of work the crowd up at Newcombe's Ranch
and the Good vibes breakfast club.
Of course, all the Porsche fanboys and such naturally gravitated to him,
and he took the time to talk to every single one of them.
But then he also gravitated to the non-Porsche drivers to get their opinions on
why they like the cars that they drove, and you know, what did they think of his car?
Right, and he was my favorite part of the whole thing,
there was a guy there with a 1978 Pontiac Transil.
Are you kidding me, like that was, this car was just white trash, start to finish,
absolute wet dream material, and I'm sorry.
Well executed.
Right, but beautifully executed, the car is gorgeous.
And so this guy, I've never met the guy before, I don't know who he is.
He hands me the keys, it's like, would you drive my car?
And I normally say no, but the car is so badass looking that I said,
all right, I'll just take it for like a mile drive.
Drove it, it absolutely, I couldn't stop laughing.
Not at it, with it, right, it was experience.
And so I said to him as we're getting back, I said, would you do me a favor,
do you think you'd let Andy drive the car?
And he said, who's Andy?
I said, well, Andy is from Andreas Pointing, I remember his GT car.
He's like, oh, yeah, no, I've heard of him.
And I said, I think he'll enjoy it.
So I pointed at the car, I said, Andy, would you like to take it for a ride?
And he sort of looked nervous and I'm like, you want to drive this.
And he was like, oh, yeah, cool.
And he had already taken pictures of the car or whatever.
He went and did quite a, quite a drive.
I think it was the highlight of his morning, like he's around GT cars all the time,
with the V8 to American iron that was well executed.
I was like, who's on a Cougars?
I mean, oh, it was a well-settled car.
And he came back with the biggest smile.
And he and I both said same thing.
I don't own it in a second.
But that is the difference between a corporate executive paper pusher engineer
who's like, I will now make a brake systems that weighs 4.2 kilos less than whatever
and a car guy.
Yeah.
He wanted this big, dumb American V8 car because it's experience.
And that's why I thought he would enjoy it because his cars are experience.
They're fast, but they're equal parts, fast and experience.
He's a legend.
He's, I think, the single coolest guy in the business and the guy who gets it the most.
Yeah.
Well, what I also found is the people that were invited this weekend,
and again, I don't get to do this very often.
You do, but hopefully you can shed some light on.
You know, I feel like the people that were with us were true enthusiasts
because I've been at other car launches that some of the people may have, I guess,
more clout, but I could definitely tell they weren't really into the cars.
And that's kind of sad, especially if you're going to a GT launch.
But this one here, it was a very small group of people, but they were all car people.
We were talking, cars like well after we were done eating.
And by the way, so we're at dinner last night and Andy wasn't there, but it was
the Porsche PR guy who put this whole thing together and four journalists, right?
We talked about, if you think about it, we mentioned Porsche.
But even the PR guy is an ex journalist, German guy who speaks perfect English.
I'd call him 55% American, 45% German at this point.
It is like cultural references and philosophy.
We're talking about Mercedes, we're talking about BMWs, car people.
We're car people.
I actually don't do any of these press launches anymore.
I probably do one a year.
Is that right?
Well, you are so busy with all of your content creation.
What I do, the videos that I do, they're not compatible with press launches, right?
I need a lot of time, everything I do is scripted.
So I need to drive the car, go home, go away, lock myself in front of a computer,
write a script, then work out a shop plan.
And we sort of produce the whole thing.
And by the time the first camera is turned on, the whole thing is done,
which is the opposite of what you do when you're writing for a magazine,
which is you go have an experience and then you put pen to paper.
So it's the flip side of that.
And press launches just aren't set up for that.
Like I can go and experience a car, but then I have to go home,
write it and then get the car again.
And so I just don't do that.
Right.
That's what I'll be doing on the plane.
So it's fresh in my head.
Right.
You're writing the story.
How we're writing the story.
Right. And so if I were, let's say I were to write something on this part, right?
I would have this experience, everything with Andy,
I would go and do the same thing, write it, and then I got to come back.
So what I'd rather do is just wait until I can get the car at home, right?
Drive it for a week, just in normal transportation or do whatever I need to do,
then take a couple of weeks, write a script and then go execute it.
It's so it doesn't really work.
So I don't get to do the press trips anymore.
Let's talk about writing a script and insert that area.
Because we're car people, I think the problem that I have is oftentimes I get distracted
with so many things.
I'm so excited about different models, makes things you do with the cars that sat in the other.
And when you put out videos and you drop it, they're fun to watch.
But I knew you had to pick and choose.
Like you can't do everything.
So how do you prioritize or do you have a wish list that you're kind of checking off
down the line that you built a while ago?
Yeah, and yes, and a change in so it depends on the show.
So we do three main shows.
I call them the sort of small, medium, and large buckets in terms of how difficult they are to do.
The small lift show is called Revelations that we shoot entirely in a studio that I built.
And that's the idea of the tagline on that show is the backstory of like amazing cars.
And so it's never really about how it drives.
It's not a review of the car.
It's what this meant to the world or how it came about or some of the crazy
stuff that went on in the background and creating the cool stories, the cool backstories.
We have, those are evergreen.
I was going to say I watched those and I think of them as reference material for the next generation.
Thank you.
That's my hope.
You do the research, you'd have the stories, the little behind the scenes.
At some point that's going to be lost if we don't capture it all.
That's the way I see it.
I mean, I think of, I had a debate years and ago with my editor-in-chief at
RuddTrack and they were, oh no, I'm sorry, this was editor-in-chief of Motor Trend.
And I said, you know, I wanted a fact checker at Motor Trend the way we had at Automobile.
And he was like, nah, you can just do your own.
I'm like, you can't, you can't find your own mistakes.
And we got into a debate about this and he's like literally the first person I would fire
at Automobile because I had come from Automobile was your fact checker.
And I said, funny, that's the last person.
And I said, and here's why.
What we write is in print.
It's permanent.
It goes into the library of Congress, right?
This is a permanent record.
Remember the term when you were a kid and you got in trouble?
This is going to go on your permanent record.
Well, there was no permanent record.
That was a lie that the principal told us.
Well, this is.
This is.
Yeah, and I'm not going to be the one that makes a mistake.
That's, you know, not fixable.
And he was like, you put way too much pressure on yourself.
And I'm like, and you put too far, far too little.
But that's the difference.
That is the difference.
He thought of it as like a bubble gum reading thing.
You know, like, oh, someone's going to read this, put the magazine down, throw it out.
And I thought of it as a permanent record.
And so revelations is a ton of research.
And I do my best to get the cool story that I haven't heard before.
And I do my best to get it all right.
I'm not always, I don't have a factor.
I don't obviously get it all right.
But I want this to live in perpetuity on the YouTubes.
And so people can go and see, can learn about these cars.
And they do.
They plug away in the background.
And so for that, we have a long list of cars that we've identified that are great.
Some of them I really want to do, but I can't find the story.
Spiker, for example.
Yeah.
Spiker C8.
We have access to the cars.
That's the other part.
I got to find the cars.
We have access to the cars.
I have access to Victor Miller, who's the CEO of Spiker and the creator.
But I just can't find the, where's the drama?
Where's the backstory?
It's like, he's Dutch.
So I'll do my stupid terrible Dutch accent.
We want to make a cool car.
We make a cool car.
Right?
That's no story.
So there are times that cars get added to that list.
But that I could do, I've done 52 of those episodes so far.
I could easily do another 100.
Yeah.
Sorry.
Don't look confused.
I'm following ways of where we are.
Drive through our neighborhood and hope that not get shot.
The, I could probably do another 100 of them, but new cars appear all the time.
And by the time I got done with those 100, there'll be another 20 or 30 cars that have
come online since that we can find cool stuff about.
Do you lean towards getting or doing cars that are somewhat approaching classic time?
I mean, I've done everything from like 50s cars through the Grumman.
One of my favorite episodes ever was the Grumman LLV,
which is the mail truck that we all see driving around.
And then I also, one of the first revelations I did was actually on Andy Pornier.
It was, you know, Porsche had gathered a bunch of GT cars from the VZM and I said,
Jake, and I just put them all in a studio and just do the sort of progression of GT3
in two, I guess.
And so that's a modern car.
I've done super BRC, but I tend to try to find cars where there's an interesting story.
Perfect example, Cadillac Alante.
Yes.
And it's on my list because it was with no insult to GM, idiotic.
The way they built the car in Italy at a parts that they would fly over and
specially prepared 747s just so that it could have a VIN number that started with a Z,
which tells me it's Italian.
It has an Italian passport.
And they got it kind of all wrong.
They missed the fars for the trees.
So like, that's a great story.
So it's those kind of cars that I look for.
Plus, I want to make sure people care about it because there's no point in me putting
those work into it if no one watches it.
Do you find yourself, is it hard to, you know, when you go in between courses,
right, you have to cleanse your palate because you've driven so much,
how can you, how do you approach a car and go, okay,
I can't think of this one because if I do think of that one, it's going to,
it's going to color how I'm going to think of this car.
So reset that.
That is more in the sort of reviews.
And I always thought of myself, especially when I was doing a lot of like print reviews,
I'm a bit actor.
You know, you'll get a product presentation from the car company about who the intended
market is, or we know, and they will, they will tell you where their intended audience is.
And so I just put myself in the shoes of those people, right?
So I'll never forget Subaru WRX STI came out and I was in the product presentation.
And at the time they gave this character, his name was Jason, my name is Jason.
And they went down the list of all of this guy's characteristics.
And it like age, profession, education level, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And it was a hundred percent me.
It was you.
It was me.
It was wild.
And this did not happen on purpose.
This was just a coincidence.
But it was, it described me to a T.
And so when I came time to review that car, I did it as a comparison test with an E90,
BMW 3 Series, 335, XDrive.
And the question was, what would Jason do?
Like the WJD.
Because I was the target market.
Anything else?
You're saying, okay, this is a 52 year old real estate agent who, you know, is five years from
retirement, married to a spouse with a lot of money, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Like they'll have these ridiculous situations.
And then you say, what is that person going to think of this car?
I don't like cars that understeer.
But I don't think that's relevant when Sally Q.
Safe Driver is the target market for this minivan.
Right.
So it's built in safety.
Yeah.
So you, but you build, you, you have to evaluate it from the perspective of what's important
to the end user consumer.
I don't really care about vacuums built into a minivan.
Yeah.
But someone knows.
But somebody with kids and a dog who yaks up with a whole stomach full of kibble, probably will.
And so you're a bit player.
It's not, it doesn't really matter what I like.
It's a matter, it really matters.
Do I think this car is successful at its intended purpose?
I'm sure there's been times, but what's memorable for you where you driven something that you
absolutely no turn left.
Hate it.
You don't have to say the specific car.
San Francisco.
No, San Francisco.
I love that episode.
I mean, I love the episode too.
Yeah.
It was a really great opportunity that Tesla came to me with.
Hey, we want to, we'll give you an engineering background.
Yeah.
We turned it into a, well, I'm not going to tell people how fast it is if I can show them.
Yeah.
And I'm not going to tell them what it could be.
I'm going to show them.
Yeah.
And it was an engineering background assignment that I perhaps mistakenly, or in retrospect,
was a mistake to sort of package it as a full review.
Yeah.
Even though it really wasn't.
It was a joy when they watched.
It was fun to do.
I mean, it's a race, Randy Pope's around a go-kart track.
And how did they take it?
Tesla loved it.
Of course, the sort of wider audience were a faulty.
Mostly, I think, because at Faro's, or friendly, he sort of attacked me.
And like, Jason got it all wrong and he was a shill and he was paid and whatever.
And he should have done better.
And he should have just called me.
But the reality was, I gave the car a positive, it was all positive for me.
Because the engineering they landed was brilliant.
I don't like the Cybertruck.
And I've written my one over, first of all, I've written it over a T.
But an F-150.
Like, there's no way.
But A, it doesn't matter what I like.
And B, that's the intended audience for that car anyway.
And C, I was there to talk about the engineering behind it.
So, but that's when we're like, I see it at Cybertruck.
And I'm like, I don't like how heavy it is.
And I like the shape.
I don't like the usability.
I don't like the lack of arm-proofing mirror.
Because a lot of stuff I just don't like about it, I would never own one.
But to some people where that stuff doesn't bother to them.
Right.
Right, it was the world's first truly fully drive by wire or steer by wire car.
First 48 volts electrical system.
Like, it had a number of firsts and not I respect that.
But I don't like that car.
And so people still like social media, people love to be vicious.
And on the high side, you always have to give respect to the disrupters.
Right.
At the time, no one loved in whenever it may grow into something.
It may not be done at the end of the day.
They were bold enough to do it.
Either way, and you can bet that a lot of the technology that debuted in that car
will now trickle down to not only other Tesla's, but the rest of the car industry.
And so I'm going to get predatory.
And I'm going to pull politics out of it.
You know, there's so many, there's sure, of course,
a folk so much anguishing, right?
It's not just the driving experience and the noise.
There's political implications.
The state, my economic, yeah, it's an outfit.
It's an attitude.
Chris Bangley used the term.
You're going to be like, I hated that man.
He ruined BMW styling.
And then I sat through a panel that he gave on styling and he's brilliant.
He's brilliant.
I'm so annoyed because I wanted to hate him.
But he said something that really resonated with me.
He said, your car's an avatar.
It's an outfit that you put on to broadcast the world to the world who you are.
And I'm like, oh, he's totally right.
When I'm road-raging at the Subaru in front of me,
I don't care who the person is.
I hate them because of their car.
Because I've decided, there's one, because I've decided in my infinite stupidity
that Subaru drivers are the worst on the road and they're always in my way.
You've chosen that vehicle that you match it.
Yeah, you are just automatically scum of the earth.
Please don't send the hate mail to us.
We're just using that.
An example, right?
And so we do judge people based on the car.
Look at that.
Look at that so-and-so in that such a situation.
If we didn't, we'd all be driving that 05 Corolla.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I mean, some of us have owned Corolla.
Oh, and we own a Corolla.
That's awesome.
It's one of the greatest cars we own.
But yeah, you definitely are judged by that.
And so that's the tough part when it's politicized over electric power steering.
Or like drive a wire, whatever it is.
So with that, when, because I know you're also a huge BMW and VW fan,
when the new grills, the kidney grills came out for the BMWs.
Were you like, did you, did you, I know you're what your initial reaction was,
but did you hold it back because it's thinking back to Mr. Bangal and you're like,
let me, let me see if this sits.
Well, let me, let me be very clear about one thing.
Bangal's designs have not age.
That, so certainly the original, which was the E65, E66, 7 series.
Pre-Face Lift is, for the record, hideous.
It was hideous back then.
It's hideous now.
It's unresolved.
It's horrible that five series is still slapsided and ugly.
I'm sorry if you like it great.
Everyone's allowed to have bad taste.
Yeah.
This is the Porsche Club of America's podcast.
So I think we can crap all over.
So it was less that because I know some things tend to be less offensive over time.
But it doesn't make them good design.
Right, right.
We don't notice some of the crazy stuff.
Once you've seen 200,000 of these cars on the road, right?
So wild features like the original Ford Taurus, right?
That 86 Ford Taurus changed the world.
But it looked like a futuristic jelly bean.
Now it's just a normal looking car.
I have to say though, if I had an opportunity to buy a Ford Taurus right now,
that was 100% stock and low mileage and clean.
I'd rock it.
It wouldn't, if it was an SHO.
Oh, of course.
Okay.
That's a new radio service on this.
Yeah, they're cool cars now.
But they really upset people.
Yeah.
But my softness is it doesn't matter whether I like it or not.
What I did do was the first review I did of it was an icon's episode of
Mont in Laverne 3.
And on the chest bought fake teeth off of Amazon.
Just like a caustic thing with these big enormous buck teeth.
And I just looked right at the camera and smiled buck teeth.
And that was my way of saying it looks like a fever.
It's ugly.
I hate it.
And I can get that little dig in.
Yeah.
Of course, BMW is upset with me.
But I didn't go on a 30 minute rant about how ugly it is when I wanted to.
You made your statement that you want.
Now everyone knows where I stand at the issue.
You decide for yourself.
I'm not going to tell you what to buy.
You're very independent with your thought, obviously.
But these different manufacturers are hosting you.
So how do you balance between being authentic?
Of course, you're a professional.
But that's somewhat of a dance.
It is a dance.
And what I learned is you can get away with almost anything.
So long as it's not a cheap shop.
You know, the cheap shots that like that tooth.
Yeah, I did.
The cheap shots that make the man.
If I come at it, it's easy to write a good review.
It's slightly difficult to write a glowing review, right?
But it's really difficult to write a bad review.
And I have written reviews that I have held for weeks and gone over and over.
And let's sit for five days and came back because I needed to make sure
that my argument was bulletproof.
And it wasn't my opinion.
It was a this is not going to work because of these reasons.
And then like I went to law school out of law degree.
And it's just you need to make a bulletproof argument without any chance
for somebody to poke the smallest hole because when you have a dam,
smallest hole becomes a bigger hole and then it is over.
And so there are a lot of things I don't say because it's I can't defend it.
But if I, I can brutalize the car, hit a review.
So long as I back it up with facts or perspective.
And it turns out the car companies that I have been historically the hardest
modern called me when I left briefly left this world at the sexual world,
the journalism world.
So I quit motor training in 2017 and I got a bunch of fun laws from car companies
to ask me to consult for them.
And it was the ones that I was hardest to because they wanted to hear that criticism.
If we want because they respected that where it came from the respect.
And that was a huge compliment to me.
Like you guys want to pay me to yell at your chassis engineers?
No problem.
So let me out of it.
I can pay you to do that.
Oh my God.
It was, there was one car company in particular as initials are definitely not BMWs
where they did pay me to come in and I was told make them cry.
And I was like, and it was if the German car could be there.
So German culture is like I would high school in Germany spent my first,
the first eight years of my career.
I was running the U.S. presence for a Germany based startup that I go from.
I realized that Germany's Germans are very follow the rules.
Rick if you want to make a fan.
And if BMW in a would have told them the things that I wanted to tell them they would have
been fired now so that but they could hire someone in as an independent consultant and
then make him cry was a joke.
Right.
But that was a way of saying, please don't be honest for being paying you to give your
real feedback and you back it up.
But let him have it if you disagree with it.
And I did actually make one of the two chassis guys are there and one of them was in tears.
And he said, if you I am listening to you,
you would say we make the best of the worst cause in the business.
And I just immediately fired right back.
You do.
And he was like starting and they said me in terms of the delta between customer expect.
This is in the F 30 days.
So now that the bad generation through skills and then the golf between what the customer
expectation is and what you're delivering is so enormous that by that standard,
you do make the worst cars in the business and you need to stop with your arrogance and
listen.
Listen to what you're considering customers are saying.
Well, so they're the media is saying and let's see what be it.
They'll be worth America to say to you.
You can't just flow through the U.S. market with German based logic.
You're German car company.
And I understand what works in Germany.
No cup holders, no air conditioning.
You know, I'm talking 25 years ago doesn't work here.
If you want to be successful here, you do with the Japanese companies have done.
They listen to the U.S.
Can't be arrogant about it and have them mold your ways.
And I understand that philosophy.
We're a German car company.
If you do things that the German way, otherwise we would become an American car company.
Yes.
But understand that your people on the ground know how to sell cars and you don't listen to them.
So it's car industry is so fascinating.
You talked about the bell curve and building something that the mass is because you want
the volume and such.
I obviously kind of hang most of my head for sure.
We appreciate them kind of being on the outside of him, the belcher.
Do you do you think a true enthusiast company can do both or they have to pick and choose?
Because I feel like BMW has committed more to the belcher.
My friends that are at the ends of that are kind of left behind.
BMW doesn't make a single car for an enthusiast right now.
M2 would be the only thing clear.
And let me say M3 is brilliant also.
Cars are dynamically great.
They just don't appeal to me.
They've gone down a road of luxurification and they've lost authority.
And all genuinely all it takes is go drive an E387 series or an E93 series, E463 series.
V395 series.
They peaked.
The cars were better luxury cars and better sports than they are today.
But Porsche has done a really admirable job at keeping a lot of its brand identity
attacked while expanding out.
But I will say Porsche wouldn't exist today in the way that it did were it not for the GT
car division.
Because when I close my eyes at night and I dream about one day owning a 911,
this is what it drives like.
That base Carrera is of zero interest.
And I'm sorry to anyone who owns them.
Like buys them or less after them.
To me, and I fully understand them all the way to one extreme in terms of
enthusiasts driving that drive nut bag and all the other things that I am.
A base Carrera has zero interest.
A four-cylinder, 70-team, zero interest.
And both the GT cars?
Ten.
Yeah.
And so GT has kept Porsche's sports cars alive.
The trickle down effect has been huge.
The 991, for example, drove like a Buick and I'm sorry to anyone who owns one.
They just they were numb.
They were just not.
Should I have put a warning in the front of this podcast?
Remember?
But I think that everybody knows you.
The warning is under respect.
Right.
I mean, I could filter, but I'd rather you be honest.
Absolutely.
And I was honest with Porsche about that.
And I was honest with you and love you about it.
And what they did was they took that and feedback.
It wasn't just me, but they took some of the feedback
and incorporated some of the changes.
And so Ben and Wood Dot 2 made a big leap in their correct direction.
In terms of engagement, lost a little bit with the turbo,
gained a lot of speed, lost the trade-off.
But Porsche was listening.
Look at that.
That's impressive.
These are great cars overall, even 991.
I'm not going to write that the engine was brand.
This car did a bunch of things brilliantly.
Steering was not one of them, but they just missed the mark on that
because they misunderstood what the bucket wanted.
And that comes from the guy who was responsible for the steering system.
Did not understand why you wouldn't want it,
as he called it, unintended deviations in the vehicle's path,
which I call on-center feet.
And I said, yeah, you drive around at 62 miles an hour in the United States
in your sports car that you can never get out of second gear.
And you tell me you're having fun when you feel nothing.
I want to feel that caged monster in the back moving around.
I want to feel like old intended deviations in the vehicle's path.
I want the car to be like, oh, there's a leaf.
Oh my god, there's a little dip.
There's got to just have some.
Because if it's over technologically compensated, you lose the fun.
You lose the fun.
And I understand a 997 at 280 kilometers an hour on the Autobahn is terrifying.
Genuinely.
Like they're scary.
To call it not stable would be probably an insult and that would be too far.
But they are, you're sweating.
You get into a 991 and 300.
You don't even notice it.
That's what's under a civic odder drink.
So I know what I did that.
But they had just gotten done telling us the U.S.
that was the largest market for 911s.
And I'm like, then you can.
You can't take every one of the defining characteristics of the driving experience
of a 911, which is, from my perspective, what I explained at the time,
the high fruit frequency front bounce with a with a rear sort of circular motion
where you're feeling the weight in the back.
And then you feel all of it through the steering.
That's what I'm looking for when I get a 911.
That's the rust.
That's how I know it's a rear engine.
And you fixed it and now on board.
And I want the flows back.
So back to you.
What these I respect about you is fresh music.
Respect.
I use that term.
Is your respect here?
Yeah.
I can't hear.
I think it's honorable.
But your your ability to connect with a wide reach with generations.
Because I see you do this, especially when we were walking around in Monterey.
I see you did it here.
People that are not on the brand that we're particularly talking about.
But you're able to connect with them and they feel as though they can approach you.
Has that always been the case?
Or is that something that you weren't?
I really do hate everyone equally.
I knew that was going to be the answer.
I mean, I knew that.
So therefore it's very easy for me.
I just hate everyone.
Agnostic in my hatred for all human beings and dogs and puppy dogs and sunshine and lollipops.
I hate everything.
Look, I was to call me shy as when I was younger would be a massive understatement.
Phobic, socially anxious, agoraphobic, all of these things.
And so the idea that I would be a public figure of any size, shape, or form
if you had told me 20 years ago, I would have just laughed in your face and said no way.
When I started in the business, you know, I started an automobile magazine and I asked
officially to write under a pseudonym because I wanted my anonymity and I wanted to be able
to hide away from people.
I wasn't allowed to.
Ah, Jean Jennings, my editor-in-chief.
No, may she rest a piece.
She was like, no one gives a f*** about you.
Sorry about my language.
Bleep.
That was a quote.
No one gives a bleep about you.
And it was a slow burn because there was 10 years of magazine work before the video
stuff really started.
There was the one aberrations, 130 million view video that I did while I was there.
And that got me a little bit of notoriety and I was like, okay, but I can definitely see how
actual celebrities lose their mind.
It breaks them because too much of a loss of your personality too quickly will really mess
with your mind.
So I'm a zealist celebrity, right?
I mean, in the car world, people know me.
That's awesome.
It's a thorn that goes along with the rows of getting to do with what I get to do.
Yeah.
All right.
I'm fine.
But at the end of the day, when I'm liking our cars and coffee, I want to hang out with
my friends.
I want to go look at cars, but I realize I can't anymore.
I am now, this is the time of the people.
And so if someone wants to come and talk to me, if they're a car person, I actually will
get along with them just fine.
Yeah.
Like I can hate them outside.
Once we step off this lot, I'm going to hate you.
I'm going to hate you.
Certainly if you're in a Subaru in my way, in the left lane or this,
numb nuts and a ram.
We all, we hate all the car users, right?
That's a pro master.
That's, no.
I mean, I can really bond with all kinds of car people and it's not just the ones that
like the things that I like.
In fact, one of the reasons I live in the Bay Area is the first time I went to go visit
San Francisco.
I'd been living in the Midwest for 10 years at that point.
And I was like, this is weird.
These people are weird.
They're crazy, right?
And I was sitting in a red light and I saw somebody come flying down a hill on a fixie
bike and it was a guy in a white wedding dress with a cigarette in his mouth.
What?
And I just, he flew by it like 30 miles an hour across the thing.
And my initial reaction was, what is that insert 15 expletive names of like, you know,
whatever.
And then I just giggled and I was like, you know what, I love about this place.
It's inclusive in that when something weird happens, something different happens,
everyone here says, that's cool.
Tell me about it.
You're a different culture.
Tell me about your culture.
Rather than when I felt like when I was in the Midwest, it was the default was an exclusive
and exclusive.
You are different.
Stay away from me.
I don't trust you.
There was a natural, maybe a fear, but an apprehensiveness towards different.
And San Francisco was this love and celebration of what was different.
And I'm like, I'm a freak show.
Like, let's, let's be real about this.
Maybe I'll be accepted here and I wasn't as, you know, I was deeply, deeply unpopular
school.
I was bullied.
Everyone hated me.
I had no friends.
And maybe that's why I wound up there.
But all of that has fed into this world where now people are nice to me and they like what
I do and they recognize what I do.
And it feels really good.
It's a, it's a validation of the fact that there's a way for somebody, for us to all
celebrate our common ground rather than look for and amplify our differences.
And that sounds so heavy.
And I'm, I really do hate everyone.
And it's a truth.
We're fortunate to be doing what we get to do every day.
But then when you meet the people where it's moved them because they watched what you've
done or they were able to fix something because you published an article on it.
I love it.
You love it.
I get to make a positive impact on someone else's life.
Or I encouraged, I recruited another one.
I got some poor guy to sell his Prius and buy some leaking miserable German car that's 40
years old and it hates him.
Perfect.
Yeah.
I mean, it really is, we're lucky.
You saw also the transition between just print and now print plus social media.
Was that, was that more of a, let's see how it goes.
Did you have a plan?
Did you have a mentor that said, okay, there's this new communication format.
Here's how I want to make an impact.
No, I never have a plan.
I mean, I have a long-term goal often, but I don't have a plan.
My, so I started at automobile magazine running, the position they hired me for was a business
position to run the website.
That was because my first career was internet e-commerce, right?
So it was, if I sort of knew how the web worked.
But I really didn't want that.
I wanted to write for the print magazine because that was the prestige and that was
where you got the best access to the engineers and the cars and stuff.
And it just so happened that we did video because we were on the web.
And when I was involved with the videos, they kind of did better.
And it wasn't necessarily me hosting them, right?
It was just, I sort of understood how the video medium works,
even though I don't really watch TV.
And I just, it was a natural storytelling ability that worked on video.
And did you like the almost immediacy of impact?
Once you published it, you get to start seeing the numbers that,
if you print something, you put it out there.
You start hearing stories and might write about it.
But when you publish you to Instagram, it's like...
That was the same even for the website.
I mean, yeah.
So, I mean, the print staff, it was very much two different...
Besides the castle, right?
You had the print staff and the web staff.
And the print staff were largely up their own cranial rectal inversion, I think it's called.
Thank you for keeping me that.
Sure.
I'm trying.
I'm trying, of course, yeah.
It's tough.
They didn't, it's not their fault.
They didn't have a feedback loop other than letters to the editor,
which would come in, you know, at small numbers.
And so they didn't understand what the audience was really looking for and liked it.
And when you're on the web, not only is the feedback swift, but it's brutal.
Everyone hiding behind a keyboard is mean.
Yeah, I know.
I was used to that from high school and middle school.
Like, I have a really thick skin.
Partially because I'm a Brooklyn, New York Italian and my family's crazy.
Love them all.
But also because it was abused by everyone as a kid.
And so I could take that feedback and then it would help shape either what we do
or, you know, what we did or how we did it.
And like a perfect example is I just did recently a Tesla Model S
Revelations episode, which is that show that we're talking about.
And my boss was mortified.
He's like, have you not had enough of the Tesla hate, the Cybertruck hate?
And we also did.
I want to go ahead into it.
But because I'm aware of the feedback loop, because it's so clear, right?
It's unavoidable.
I knew I can only do this if my arguments are bulletproof.
And I comment this and I literally started the episode out with slapping a bumper sticker
onto the 2012 Model S saying, I know.
And it was one of the vintage Tesla pre-madness editions.
It wasn't one of the ones that were insulting against Elon.
I wasn't going to mention Elon's hate.
But I think we can all agree things are a bit mad right now.
So I chose that to start the episode to say, I'm self-aware guys.
I understand that this is everyone's upset right now.
And so rest assured, I hear you.
This is not going to be about a person or politics or EVs or blah, blah, blah, blah.
It's about a car that changed the industry.
And the video went live yesterday.
And we were ready for, I mean, I love how, by the way, we were using Waze.
And it had me get off like 15 minutes ago to get on these side streets.
And we just merged the back four cars in front of the cars.
Yeah, that we were just.
So now you know, scientific test, Waze saves you four car leads.
We were ready for mutiny.
Like we were ready for the pitchforks to come out and they didn't.
And I largely believe it was because I made it really clear.
I'm like, this is, I don't want to get discussed.
Like I don't want to be in a political conversation.
Let's talk about the car.
Right. We're going to talk about the car.
I want to talk about what it did.
And it's not going to be my opinion.
So I use quotes from other people and clips from other people,
you know, to just aggregate the sentiment of the time.
And that's a sort of feedback loop that didn't exist.
Little print, right?
It would just be like the David E. Davis.
Well, I think everyone should have a V12 in their life.
Well, not everyone in, you know, has million dollar jobs and blah, blah.
Like, you know, some of that was a bit tone deaf.
But they're the feedback was cut.
So say I'll talk to anyone about cars.
I'll talk to anyone about anything else.
They'd be a lot.
I hate you.
I hate your puppy dog.
I hate your kid.
So when you disconnect from the car world, are you just silent?
Yeah, I mean, I'll tell you cars, I really don't know what to say.
Yeah.
I mean, it's so sad, but that's not entirely true.
I mean, we could have a techie nerd.
I'm definitely like, I love a good house project.
You know, there's all that stuff, but cars are almost all item.
Yeah, we have to say it defines us and we're good with it.
That's what we do.
It's fine.
Yeah.
I think you think the saddest thing in the world is that to not have a homie,
to not have something you're passionate about.
I mean, don't let it rule your life.
Don't let it ruin your life.
Certainly financially, right?
We're in the, I'm in the business, I was for the longest time,
of doing new car reviews, which is to try to encourage people to get new cars,
which were often financially ruinous to people, right?
But I had to acknowledge that and say like, I'm not telling you to buy a car.
I'm going to tell you if you're going to buy a car and this is important to you,
then buy this car.
If that's not, then buy that one.
But it's always not financially ruinous.
My God, like we should all have toys.
Who said to toys have to be put away when we have puberty?
That's not cool.
My family will tell you I've never put away my toys.
Good.
I'm still accumulating toys.
That's, I'm not, not having them, you know, drink water and,
you know, day old bread, but we have the opportunity.
We have to enjoy it because tomorrow's the guarantee.
Right.
And the way I see cars is I tend to play in the old car space, right?
Not just because I work for Agrity, which is a plastic or insurance company,
but I've always been this way.
I don't like losing money in cars.
And I have a very...
By the way, that was very smooth.
I worked that in.
Oh.
Hey, they pay me a lot of little...
They're a big, they're a great supporter of PCAs.
So it works out just fine.
Look, I've been a customer for 20 years and they've been so amazing to me on the
insurance side, which I have nothing to do with.
So I'm happy.
I was always happy to combine my name with theirs because it was so good.
But, but I don't like, I have a really clear sense of distinction between spending money
and investing money.
And I have no problem staring out a bank account so that I can drive that bank
account out in the form of a car, which could lose 20% of value, but it could also make 20.
It could also.
But so good that money in the...
You must think about the cars that we should have bought.
Great.
But I mean, I'd never, ever approach a car as a investment, but I, but I'm very
honest with myself about whether I'm going to spend or whether I'm going to invest.
So could I buy a hundred, a 100000 dollar car?
Yeah.
Would I?
Ooh, not a new one.
Definitely not because I'm signing myself for 60, 70, 80,
thousand dollars in losses or directs on it.
Yeah.
But I could, I could justify buying a one with 2000 or spending a hundred
thousand dollars on the car if I thought it was going to be worth the same or more.
Or if I said that hundred's going to turn it to 80, but the 20 that I've spent
towards is that would do that I invest will, will provide 20,000 dollars with the joy.
Go for it.
Doing.
You know, and that's why I have $1,200 folks back in.
Same here.
So I, I love older cars.
It's a great way to tinker and learn how things work.
And so maybe we'll let me approach this because I was going to ask you about the
younger generation.
Wow.
I, I hear this a lot from the older folks in the club.
Older car friends and all the younger folks are as into cars.
And I have to tell, and I have to tell them actually, I think it's the opposite because
when I, in high school, there was a group of us, all of us had to drive because that was your
way to socially get out there, right?
You'd escape.
You had to drive to escape.
But I think about the number of true people that were car enthusiasts.
Back then I couldn't go to a car show every week.
I couldn't go to a car show during the middle of the week.
I didn't have all this access to information, car information, and forums at that.
Like I tell them, I said, actually, I think the younger generation is even more engaged
in the automotive world.
And they're doing things that, man, I would have never jumped off of.
You know, the people that drive the BRZs or the WRXs or the kids who are manual swapping
old Mercedes or they're doing these, they're doing crazy computer stuff to put
manual transmission controls on ZF 8-speed automatics.
Like this is, all right, so my feeling on this whole thing is all of this stems from one
genuinely stupid study that somebody did.
I remember who it did.
It was 17, 18 years ago at this point where they asked a bunch of kids, if you had to choose
between your internet connection and your car, which would you choose?
I think something like 80s and whatever it was, the vast majority set car.
The world would answer that way.
Right, there was based on a fundamental misunderstanding that internet connection
is at this point in the modern world.
It's oxygen.
It's, thank you.
It's power.
So if I have to ask you between, what would you choose between power, electricity in your
house, or water, what are you choosing?
What a dumb question.
And so the result was young people don't care about cars.
So wrong.
I think there was, the second part of that was young people don't care about the bad cars
that are in the mass market today.
We had, think about it, we were roughly the same age.
We had sports coupes coming out of our ears.
Like everything from probes to shawakos, obviously, to CRX.
Accurate tags.
So Integra is like, I could draw Nissan-Centra S-E-R, which is a dream car.
So many things that we could get excited about.
We did a whole new episode, another episode on what happened to Nissan.
Right.
That's for sure.
You're always good at it.
But yeah.
But they, kids don't have those options.
What is your choice?
BRZ, a Civic.
End of story.
That's it.
I mean, there may be a couple more than that.
That's not a really.
And so, so you combine that with this idiotic survey that says what you like to do without
oxygen or water.
Had people thought that, that kids that care about cars, I would say right now, if anything,
because it pushed towards in-person real experiences, moving the way for young people,
moving the way for digital interactions.
But people are gravitating more towards being together.
Especially those poor kids whose lives were ruined by COVID and the lockdowns and everything else.
Had no probes and had no socialization for the last couple years of high school.
Well, those kids are now 20 years old, 21 and 22.
They're buying cars and they're showing up big time.
To call the office.
They're buying Sacco Era Mercedes.
They're buying old 986s and 997s.
They're buying E30s.
When I go to car shows, everyone who's an E30 is a fetus.
Yeah.
A fetus.
They're kids.
I love it.
And they have almost an unlimited supply of resources, which is why we do this.
Like if they buy a 986, there's a video for everything.
Whatever is broken on that car, there's a video on it, right?
And they are not.
They don't hesitate at all.
They're very good with this.
My son's the same.
What are you working on?
His computers or even the other day he was working on his MDX.
He wanted to figure something out.
I thought he was calling me for advice.
He's like, Dad, I already fixed it.
I went online and this was this.
It was a brake pedals sensor, which messed up the tail lights and legs.
That was my proud dad moment.
But they have access.
We didn't have any of that.
We had to hopefully knew somebody or knew an older gentleman that would walk us through them.
How to tie them.
At least to a children's book.
Exactly.
You know, the children didn't help anything.
Yeah.
No, I'm really excited for the young car enthusiasts there.
At least where I live in my little bubble.
We all really, it's everywhere right now.
I think so too.
It makes me very excited to see a lot, especially the ones that are buying the older cars.
Yeah, 3D pretty things that they needed.
Yep.
You know, putting a manual swap in a car that they've never even had of it.
I figured it all out.
And they're not going to digital age cars.
They're not going to gravitate towards that.
Okay.
There's obviously a certain subset of kids who are right.
So G80 had to be living up threes.
The new one, they're everywhere.
The young buyer, they're all crashing them because the cars are just too powerful.
But those sort of background aside, these kids are going to older.
It's a really dark time in the automotive industry from Microsoft because it's dying.
Right?
Cars are going to go away.
We're going to have a new wave of transportation solutions.
And if you live in a city where there's Weibo, you'll know it's better to leave your car.
It's cheaper, better, and easier.
Nice to meet you.
Weibo everywhere.
The answer is, I love Weibo for what I need it for.
Yeah.
I love Weibo for what I need right.
I experienced it the first time in Phoenix.
I just need to get to the airport from the hotel.
So convenient.
Super clean.
And it doesn't have to talk to anybody.
It's so interesting.
It's so well.
Yeah.
Better cheaper.
Better than any.
I'm paying a prenup because it's better than anything.
But imagine you take all the people that don't want to drive,
which probably means they're not great at driving.
Dig, dig.
And put them in a car that just glides them along.
That leaves free space for the rest of us to enjoy.
Yep.
100%.
And it's so easy to poo this and say it doesn't happen, it does work.
Well, hello, it's Francisco.
And at any given point, you look around in that city,
a third of the cars in your field division are Weibo's.
Yeah.
And they're better.
I don't know.
When I've been at 22 and a pound, a little old tin can,
they're scared of everyone and their Rivians and everything else.
And I don't worry about the Weimos.
They have sensors.
They're not drunk.
They're not texting.
They're paying attention.
They have sensors that premiere.
And I will be in a flotilla of Weimos.
And I can be alive.
Yeah.
A follow.
And yes, that's a fundamental change.
That's scary and change is always scary.
But we've seen a glimpse of it.
It's better for transportation purposes.
And hopefully what that allows is leave the roads at the front cars
for those of us who are enjoying the act of combusting gas.
Because for whatever reason, just for timing,
autonomy and electric vehicles are up together, right?
But we sort of knew that we sort of know the future is no to be electric.
And he told us this.
Breed, more gas for me to put.
We're going to get a sound shift because I can't.
Exactly.
We're living here right now.
I would say 90% of the people that are on this highway right now,
they aren't on this because they want to drive it.
We happen to be in a car that we want to drive.
I don't even want to drive that car here.
Yeah.
I mean, we're doing 71 and a 65 in a row of.
We're not even engaged.
We're doing a podcast.
Right.
And I don't need to pay attention.
We're in a row of people who are checked out all on with a cruise control lot.
It's just there are times when driving isn't pleasurable,
even in the best cars in the world.
Well, this is the best Ford's car you can buy short of a GMA T50,
which I haven't figured yet.
So I can't make up extermination for it.
But it even still, it's a wonderful experience.
I just did a three-year downshift and enjoyed it acoustically.
But don't need to be enjoying it.
We could just as easily be in the back of a taxi.
Yeah.
We could have done this in a Wayba.
Which I did a podcast at Wayba,
which was fun as anything.
My podcast calls like Porsche Weedy, that I have to call him.
Porsche guy, sports car guy, old car guy, loves his carburetors.
You know, great.
His name is Dirk Timbscott.
He's an amazing interest in cars all over the map.
I just made a wrong turn.
But he refused to get it to a Wayba.
And he's like, oh, so good trick.
Did those some autonomous car here?
I'm like, no, no, you're confusing.
Cruise, which we had at the time, with Wayba.
And I finally got him to agree.
And I got permission from Wayba to put cameras in the car
and record a podcast.
And it was the coolest journey, not the trip.
The journey of watching you can go from, you know, FDs cars.
It's never going to work, blah, too.
I guess it's an ideal world where everyone is in one of these.
And that FPQM in front of us is in the back of a car
where they belong, because they clearly
don't know what they're doing.
In, of course, a 45 minutes, he went from, like, never
to I will never get it in Uber again.
45 minutes on ride.
It was so cool.
But I understand we're all hesitant of it.
OK, I live in a city.
This is not going to be a solution right now.
Not for everyone.
Not for everyone.
Let them stop everywhere.
Exactly.
But it gives me hope that though we gas left for me to burn
at the 7000rpm.
But the EV stuff gives me gives you perspective
of just how interactive and fun combustion could be
and why steakships are sober.
I think in the dance between the driver and the car,
it just we're about to be passed by a Tesla, literally,
and figure it out.
They're probably not even driving.
God, I think.
He's probably on autopilot.
FXT is supervising.
Fine.
I don't have a problem with that.
It's good for him.
Right.
We just came out from a Canyon road, where we did things
that were enjoyable.
Yes.
Right?
The Duke will exist.
And I think where as long as kids are still interested
in cars and they've all 100% are, used old combustion cars
have a long shelf life.
And we're going to be around to join.
I hope so.
Have a deep breath.
You never know.
All right, Jason.
Thank you so much.
Thanks for taking the time.
I hope you enjoyed it.
I had to probably wait too much for you.
I don't know how we'll cut it up, but that whole 63.
60 was really dense.
It was 60 to breath?
63, 31.
We'll end with a blast.
The minute you're on.
That's what it's about.
Well, I hope you enjoyed that.
I want to thank you all for listening.
Be sure to like, comment and subscribe.
Consider sharing our show with fellow Porsche enthusiasts.
Until next time, stay safe and we'll catch you down the road.
About this episode
Pro Solo autocross gets unpacked with a Porsche Cayman, including how it runs “over two days of competition” with “a second course right next to you.” The hosts then zoom into bracket-style starts—staging lights, reaction-time targets, and why “anything under 0.5 is a red light disqualified.” Pro Solo setup details follow, from tire warm-up questions to course layout like “a big sweeper.” The conversation broadens into what “Pro solo” really means competitively, plus advice on learning to drive before tweaking cars.
First up, we are catching up on our latest garage updates and track days. Damon fills us in on the adrenaline-fueled adventures of running his Cayman at the SCCA Pro Solo event. Then, we look back at the incredible turnout at our local Porsche dealer's recent Cars and Coffee. Plus, Vu breaks down the intense preparation and greasy fingernails required to swap out his stock engine for a high-performance version.In the second half, Vu hits the road for an exclusive interview. He sits down with legendary automotive journalist Jason Cammisa. The twist? They are doing the entire interview from the cockpit of the thrilling new Porsche GT3 S/C. Trust us, you do not want to miss Jason's raw, unfiltered thoughts on this machine.
