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It seems that Audi has finally decided to announce a TDI TT, including a Roadster!
I guess now it is a footrace to win my next car purchase, Alfa Romeo vs. Audi, with California acting as the spoiler trying to trip them both.
Who do you think will win?
Those Europeans get all the good toys. See that car up there? That is an Alfa Romeo Spider. Not only is it cool, and awesome, and worthy of lust, it is also available with a 2 liter “JTDM” TurboDiesel engine. That’s right, an open-topped, two seater, oil-burning, sports car.
If Alfa brought this to America I’d be their first customer.
I’ve been thinking of an essay about Diesel, and sports cars. Stay tuned for more.
OK, it is not quite spring here yet, but there is something in the air (well… OK it is thick fog, but a guy can hope, right?)
The above photo was taken on the New England 1000 a few years back. We were chasing an Alfa in northern Vermont, just after crossing the Canada-US border on a transit stage.
Sorry about the lack of posts of late… getting back from vacation of course just means more work. I also just now upgraded my WP installation after somebody managed to create an admin-level user in WP through some flaw at 7:26 this morning. I was notified instantly and disabled their account… but still. grrr.
I wrote a lengthy bit about communications as a key to surviving an IT disaster, which in many ways was a written version of the session I delivered at the MacIT conference at Macworld Expo last month. I tackle the stereotype of geeks as poor communicators, and lay out a strategy for getting IT departments into the communication habit. The stunning revelation that lead me down this road is a conclusion I came to when discussing an outage with a “layperson”… that is a user of technology rather than a maintainer of it. To him awareness was more important than downtime. Downtime didn’t bother him so much, so long as he was kept informed of what was going on, why, and when things would be back up. Forewarning would be even better. His downtime came about during a datacenter migration. A light bulb went off over my head, as I had successfully pulled off more than one datacenter migration within the past few years. Did everything go perfectly? Of course not, but the difference was that I put a huge emphasis on communication with our customers way before, before, during, and after the moves. I’m not some IT genius by any stretch of the imagination, and I’m not the first to use this tool effectively. It just seems that most IT professionals forget this critical part of their management strategy.
Anyway, for the terminally curious, the series is linked below. My editor wisely split it into two parts.
I’m on vacation this week, so now you know why I haven’t written or posted much lately… nor should you expect much for a few more days. 🙂
My parents had the good sense to retire to a ski town in Colorado, so every year we try to make time in the winter to visit them. We’re there now and though we have Internet access here (finally!) I’m too busy having fun to post daily as usual.
Things should be back to normal again next week.
I’ve seen cars lowered. I’ve seen cars widened.
This is the first one I’ve ever seen condensed.
Anyone know what it is? Or was?
Well, it has become something of a tradition for me to spend my Super Bowl Sunday wrenching on my car. I’m not really a football fan, and to be perfectly honest if New York City & Boston somehow vanished tomorrow I wouldn’t miss them, or their sports teams. So I work on my car, or go skiing on this day every year. The weather in the mountains here has been crappy, so car work it is.
I finally decided to tackle the task of removing the exhaust from the old Jaguar. Since summer they’ve been rattling and loud. The driver’s side muffler has actually been leaking a bit for a couple of years. It was very mild at first… a slight puffing. At some point last summer it transformed into a dull roar with a rattling accompaniment. No longer was this Sir William’s 6th Symphony, it was as if Keith Moon was conducting the Coventry Philharmonic with his drum set with John Entwistle laying down the bass. Not the usual purring Coventry Cat to say the least.
Armed with a few wrenches, a pad to lie on the cold barn floor, some ramps & jack stands, a dead blow hammer, some moth balls, and a bad attitude, I went at the ratty old stainless steel pipes on and off over the course of the afternoon. In reality the bolts all came off with ease. The c-clamps as well. The driver’s side pipe came right out of the header as soon as it was unbolted. The passenger side however became a day-long test of will between me and the metal. I had to support the whole system with wood dunnage to prevent things from getting bent out of shape since the supports were removed, but damn… that pipe was STUCK!
I didn’t have any handy heat sources to help it along so it just required persistence. I am nothing, if not persistent. Eventually it popped off and I dragged the bodies out from under the car to find what you see above. In knew the straps were broken. I knew the mufflers were cracked a bit. I had no clue they were THAT BAD. Ugh.
The headers and resonators look great, though the latter are in dire need of polishing. The mufflers are quite obviously shot to hell. Another fine “TeamCJ” performance part dies a premature death. Speaking of CJ, all the sycophants tell me all the time that Dan stands behind his product. I recalled that Dan Mooney of Classic Jaguar did tell me that he WOULD have considered honoring a warranty if I had given him first crack at the engine when it failed, so I figured what the hell, I’ve got nothing to lose… and sent him an email Monday with a link to these pictures and a note telling him that no other shop had touched this exhaust but his. He replied:
As a point of order, you are not now and have never been a customer of Classic Jaguar. To the best of my knowledge, you have never spent a single penny with Classic Jaguar. Furthermore, given your inaccurate, insulting and grossly misleading Internet rants about Classic Jaguar, I hardly feel inclined to assit [sic] you with any problems you may have with your car.
Hrmmmm… I seem to recall reading this on their website:
“Team CJ components are the highest quality, most thoroughly engineered performance upgrades available for your Jaguar. We have invested thousands of hours of research and real world testing to ensure that our components are safe, practical, durable and easy to install. Your satisfaction is 100% guaranteed. Such is the confidence that we have in our products, many Team CJ components are guaranteed for life!”
I guess there is sales speak, then there are weasel words.
Oh well. Now I’m off to find a 2″ SS muffler set somewhere.
By the way, I might cop to insulting. But I’ve never been inaccurate or misleading in any way. All I’ve done is lay out the photographs and text exactly as they’ve happened. Grossly under spec parts, shoddy workmanship, cut valve stems, cheesy “uprated” parts that have failed far sooner than factory originals. These are just facts.
Classic Jaguar charging many, many thousands of dollars to rebuild an engine and then finding this inside? That is insulting Mr. Mooney.
You see, I am nothing, if not persistent.