My thoughts on the future of LMP1-H, after the 2017 24 Hours of Le Mans

It’s been a day since the 24 Hours of Le Mans, and I’ve finally put my thoughts together on it. It was something else, nothing like I’ve ever seen before.

Before the 24 Hours of Le Mans, predictions were that Toyota would walk away with the race on both pace and reliability. Predictions were that the all-new and huge LMP2 field would have failures en masse, having shown mediocre reliability in the lead-up to Le Mans. And, fears were that the GTE-Pro field would have poor balance of performance, allowing someone to run away with it. Continue reading “My thoughts on the future of LMP1-H, after the 2017 24 Hours of Le Mans”



This is a bunch of bullshift. 10 “speeds” of bullshift.

This post was originally written for Oppositelock, but with the impending death of Kinja user blogs, I’m reposting it here.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=utGCUzH52R0

So, last time I posted here, I said I’d think about doing a piece on the Toyota/Lexus Multi-Stage THS-II. This is that piece, but I thought I was basically going to do a technical overview, not a rant.

Continue reading “This is a bunch of bullshift. 10 “speeds” of bullshift.”

Holy shit, 41% thermal efficiency out of a gasoline engine

This post was originally written for Oppositelock, but with the impending death of Kinja user blogs, I’m reposting it here.

Last week, Toyota detailed their next-generation powertrains for vehicles on their new architecture. In addition to several new transmissions, they announced a new modular engine family supporting varying cylinder displacements (much like Mazda’s SkyActiv-G family) and cylinder count, and detailed the first variant of that, the 2.5 liter Dynamic Force (what an awful marketing name) engine, which is almost certainly destined for the new Camry.

Continue reading “Holy shit, 41% thermal efficiency out of a gasoline engine”


The next trend in performance cars, in three cars

This post was originally written for Oppositelock, but with the potentially impending death of Kinja user blogs, I’m reposting it here.

Right now, we’re in a golden age of accessible high performance motoring. Hot hatches are everywhere, regular sedans from compact to full-size are available in hot versions, and there’s several affordable performance coupes of very different flavors.

Continue reading “The next trend in performance cars, in three cars”