Driving Sports

It is a great time to be a car enthusiast. Now I know that the sky is falling, that terrorists are planning attacks right now as I type this and that car companies are using every trick in the book to sell just one more unit; but the fact remains: it is great time to be an enthusiast.

For the moment, we are going to ignore the super car world. It really doesn’t matter what is going on in the world to the super car market. China could launch a full nuclear attack on the United States and Ferrari would shrug their testarossa shoulders and plug on with yet another rendition of Italian sex appeal meant only for those that can meet the asking price; whether or not they are under a cloud of fallout ruin.
No, we shall stick to cars that most people can aspire to owning. This includes the current offerings from Subaru, Mitsubishi and to some extent GM and Chrysler.

Now, you are going to ask what the first two have to do with the latter two. The answer is simple: Horsepower and price. The STI, EVO X, Challenger and Camaro (should anyone ever get to buy one) all have around 300hp and cost about $30,000 depending on the dealership and the day and how desperate everyone is to offload an expensive “toy” car.

The next thing you will ask is why not include the GT-R in this list, or even the up and coming Supra or NSX? The answer to that is simple. The GT-R is no longer an everyman’s car and the NSX and Supra do not exist -- yet.

So, again, we are left with cars that everyone can actually buy.  It has been some time since there was such selection of fast-out-of-the-box cars. We have to remember all the way back to the nineties. Before there were interweb forums and the tuning craze was just a handful of Asian kids in Southern California, and if you wanted a big horsepower muscle car, you bought… well you bought an old American muscle car.

Now, however, you can have your cake and eat it too in either cherry blossom or cheeseburger flavor. In Cherry Blossom you have the STI and the EVO. Both cars are brand new. Both are AWD, turbocharged and very fast from the get go. They come with sticky tires, race-inspired interiors and very long and storied histories in rally racing. They also have a very strong aftermarket following so that after you purchase said car, you can have half again as much horsepower over stock with a few changes to the car’s ECU.  Then there are endless suspension choices, bigger turbochargers, stickier tires – the list goes on. If you are an STI or EVO owner you can easily build a car that would shame most of the offerings from Marnello.

Then there are the cheeseburger flavor cars. The Camaro and the Challenger. Notice I have left the Mustang out of this equation, which I suppose is a bit unfair as it too is cheap, has a big engine and is about the equivalent of the Challenger and the Camaro, but I have always thought of the Mustang as the poor cousin in the Pony car world. But whatever, again, if you want cheap speed these cars offer great value for money if all you care about is pedal mashing from stoplight to stoplight or looking moderately cool at the Friday night drags.

The really fantastic bit is that fuel costs are now dropping through the floor. The very life blood of automotive enthusiasm, which just two months ago was marching its way towards $5 a gallon mark has plummeted to below $2 in the past week.  OPEC, it has been reported, is now saying that the cost of a barrel of oil is perilously low. I want to know what that means, but I think it means that the sheiks from the Middle East are going to have to put their palaces filled with Ferrari’s and Swiss models on some form of payment plan. Which is rough to be sure, but sadly, I don’t care. I am happy that gas prices are plummeting. It means we can all get to work and get from stoplight to stoplight without seeing our paychecks evaporate out the tailpipe.

There is another trick to this economic downturn. Enthusiast cars are cheap. Take the STI for example. Six months ago, a new STI was selling for damn-near $40,000. Now, you can get one for just about $30,000! Dealers are taking $7,000 off invoice with zero down and no payments for 63 months. While Mitsu seems to be sticking to their guns on price, this won’t last long as the dealers will have to move units to keep the doors open.  The Domestics have long been doing slash and burn sales to keep cars moving out the door. You really can’t go wrong here.

Pick your poison, and keep the loud pedal down. Hopefully, enough of you go out and buy some form of performance car to keep the dream alive, or, like the Nineties, we will end up having to drive minivans and dreaming of modifying our Camrys, and that just sounds like death.