Love is...?

Fluffy car mats? I doubt it. Jewellery? Not likely. If you live in America, apparently it's a car. Yes, for the last couple of weeks, the car companies have been touting the valentine's day events - give your loved one a Mercedes, or a Lexus. That's not really a gift is it? It's more of a statement of how outrageously wealthy and/or materialistic you are. There's no real thought goes into buying your wife a car.
Here's my suggestion : grab her some roses on the way home, and a nice box of chocolates. Cook her dinner, take her out to the theatre or a movie. These are all better ways of demonstrating your affection than saying "honey, check out the blown head, dual overhead cams and six pot Brembo's on this little beauty!"

Unless your wife is a gearhead, in which case, go crazy.

Happy Valentine's day :-)

Taking the piss

If you competed in Formula 1, you'd expect to be highly paid, right? I mean 19 events all over the world, racing at 170mph, putting yourself at risk, doing publicity etc etc. And you would be right. Lewis Hamilton earned $16.5M last year. Not too shabby. Now let's put that in perspective: adulterer and alleged golfer Tiger Woods earned $90.5M last year. That's taking the piss. He hits a ball with a stick and gets 8 times as much as the world's top paid racing driver? It does seem a little unbalanced especially when you compare the workload. Methinks Tiger Woods needs to be taken down a peg or two. He's not worth $90,000 let alone $90M, not by any stretch of the imagination.

Checking for alignment problems with your hands

Here's a tip from a reader this week. How to detect alignment problems early using a simple hand rub test on your tyres. Specifically feathering due to improper toe-in alignment. What's neat about this test is that it requires no tools other than perhaps a damp rag.
This test will detect feathered tires long before you can spot any feathering visually and takes about a minute to check all four tyres.
- Take the damp rag, and clean mud, debris, etc from the top area of the tyre's tread portion that you will test. (You don't have to wait for the tyre to dry.) If the tyre is already clean, you can skip this step.
- Stand with the tyre directly in front of you. Using your preferred hand, open your hand so it is flat. Place your hand on top of the tyre.
- Now rub the tyre applying moderate pressure. First push your hand away from you, moving it across the tyre tread, then draw your hand back towards you. Do this a few times so have a good "feel" of the tyre's surface.
- Repeat with the three other tyres.
An UNFEATHERED tire will feel pretty much the same in both directions of your hand's travel. You will be able to feel the edge of each tread as your hand slides over it, so it won't feel perfectly smooth, but it won't feel like you are rubbing over a knife blade either. The key point is the tyre tread surface will feel the same in both directions.
A tyre that is feathered due to excessive toe-out will have a sharp outside edge on each tread block, and the inside edge of each tread block will be excessively worn down, thus you will feel the sharp edge as you push your hand away, and the tread will feel smooth as you draw your hand towards you. The tyre surface will will different on the push stroke than it does on the pull stroke. Push = sharp. Pull = smooth.
A tyre that is feathered due to excessive toe-in will have a sharp inside edge on each tread block, and the outside edge of each tread block will be excessively worn down, thus you will feel the sharp edge as you pull your hand towards you, and the tread will feel smooth as you push your hand away from you. The tyre surface will will different on the push stroke than it does on the pull stroke. Push = smooth. Pull = sharp.
If a pair of tyres become toe misaligned by say 3 millimeters after a tyre hits an object, you will be able to detect the resulting feathering using this method within a few hundred miles after the event, long before any serious damage to the tread occurs.

New hosting plan

A mid-week blog post this week to ask the regular readers to lend a helping hand. I've recently had to migrate my site to a dedicated host because of the traffic levels it was receiving. This is a lot of work and there are dozens of paths, variables and other things that I've had to check and check again. Everything on my site does seem to work but I'm concerned I might have missed something. Sort of like when you get done putting a transmission back together and discover one M13 bolt lying on the ground.
So I would appreciate a quick comment here or email contact if you find anything on the site which is obviously broken.
Thanks !

Driving in Korea

Recently I was on a business trip in Korea and it was quite the experience when driving over there. Red traffic lights don't mean anything, neither do kerbs, road markings or stop signs for that matter. It was like driving in London but without rules. On top of that, of course, we had a Korean GPS which was hugely entertaining but completely useless to us. And to compound matters one step further, the rental company gave us a car with a mere 8km on it and told us to bring it back with no damage. So no pressure then.
Fortunately, most of our commute was between a hotel on the outskirts of Daejeon and a manufacturing plant out near the suburbs. We were able to use the outer ring road most of the time but even that was quite the experience. It's difficult to say this, but Korean drivers make people in Utah look like highly trained police drivers.

The Dakar Rally 2011

To the average American, this blog post might as well be written in Greek.In a country where NASCAR is considered track racing, and the Baja is considered to be an off-road race, the annual Dakar rally is almost unheard of, which is a shame because it's the longest, toughest off-road race staged anywhere. Part of the reason is the abominable TV coverage. It should of course be covered by Speed channel, but instead it's covered by Versus - predominantly a golfing channel. It's a half-hour program each night, which because of the adverts means it's 22 minutes. They spend 5 minutes doing filler pieces with some woman who thinks we're interested in "local flavour" and 5 minutes insulting a Eurosport presenter by consistently mispronouncing his name (they call him "gerr-nott" when it's pronounced "zher-no"). You'd never know there were more than 5 cars and 5 bikes racing to see the Versus coverage. No mention of the quad bikes, the independent entries, or the 400-plus other vehicles. And barely any mention of the trucks. For the Dakar fans, you know what the trucks are. For the Americans, we're not talking those silly little trophy truck things you drive across Baja. In the Dakar rally, they race derivatives of the team support trucks - arguably the most spectacular vehicle segment of the rally and yet Versus must have spent a full 2 minutes of airtime over the last 14 days talking about them. If you love the Dakar rally, petition Speed channel to cover it next year. We'll all thank you.
Dakar truck racing at its best: