Category: Car Photo Of The Day

The above Maserati was seen at the 2008 New England 1000, being driven by the Rallymaster Rich Taylor.

In other news there will be no Jaguar pics tonight… I found out late last night that the JCNA slalom in Canada I intended to drive to this morning is actually going to be happening tomorrow. So today I’ll be doing all those things I planned to do Sunday. Namely make a batch of BioDiesel, fix our damn lawnmower (never. buy. Craftsman. ever. again.) Maybe cut the grass if successful.

At least it has cooled off. 61°F right now where as it was 90°F here yesterday.

I’m headed north to Vancouver tomorrow for a JCNA Slalom event, my first of the year. Wish me luck.

I’ll post photos as soon as I can, but meanwhile enjoy the image above.

Yesterday I spoke about prominent things on car’s bodies that make aesthetic and functional sense, and the big center-mounted gas cap on the C2 Corvette is certainly Truth in Engineering.

We ran with two Corvettes in the 2006 GTTSR as they were driven by friends of my father/co-driver. These guys could never pass by a gas station. Thirstiest cars I’ve ever been around. Their tanks are bigger than the E-type’s yet they stopped twice as often for gas. The Jaguar is NOT a miser by any stretch but these plastic machines suck down the go-juice like there’s no tomorrow!

There is something aesthetic to purposeful variations to otherwise clean lines of a machine. The intake scoop of the C-type Jaguar. The twin bonnet ribs of the Mercedes-Benz 300sl (meant to provide clearance for the intake manifold and cam cover.) The big brake cooling ducts of the Ferrari 250P. The tidy little bump pictured above. Their purpose gives them reason for being. Form following function. Vorsprung Durch Technik. Ja?

There is something equally ugly to purposeless doo-dads applied onto a car made to make it appear sporty. The stuck-on ducts and bulges of the Pontiac Trans-Am from the “screaming chicken” era. Big wings on the rear of FWD “rice rockets”. The fake cloth tops on 80s luxury cars. These are out of place affectations. Automotive poseurs. These sorts of insults to our intelligence and aesthetics have appeared on some major-league players as well (Ferrari comes to mind) so I’m not just picking on low-hanging fruit here.

Here are some raindrops on an old Dino 308. The Dino belongs to Doug Breithaupt, the Rallymaster (who’s also running for Port Commissioner in Port Townsend) of the Classic Motorcar Rally, which is happening in just a few weeks. I didn’t choose this photo because of that impending rally though… but really because I have been thinking about rain. It has been about two and half weeks since we’ve seen any rain around here, which is truly an odd thing.

Of course, it seems to be raining everywhere else in the country at the moment, so I won’t complain.

I usually have stuffed queued up to post here and have at least one thing going live per day. Unfortunately it did not work out that way over the past 24 hours. On Saturday I did the driveway scraping, then yesterday I wrestled with our weedeater (always a persnickety little beast!) and after I successfully got it started proceeded to go after our out-of-control grass all over the edges of our yard. Primarily focussed on the damn machine I neglected the operator, and it came back to haunt me not long after I finished the job: massive allergy attack. Grand Mal Sneezure.

I loaded up on antihistamines and did my usual pass-out and sleep routine when in this state. I missed work, and could not really work from home anyway, as my VOIP phone went tango uniform over the weekend. By mid-afternoon I was feeling a lot better. Hopefully I’ll be able to start generating content for you again very soon.

This one is either going to be real easy, or real hard.

This car is fairly unique. I saw it at a museum, and there’s a tiny bit of detail here that is a key to its identity. Do you know what car this is?

Continue reading “Car Photo of the Day: Weekend Stumper.”