DBA Kangaroo Paw Disc Rotor Ventilation Design

THIS PASTOR CAN PRAY

NASCAR pastor leaves little out of this pre-race invocation!

posted by Rob Kerby, Senior Editor | 8:55 am Monday July 25, 2011

Before Saturday night’s Nationwide Federated Auto Parts 300, Pastor Joe Nelms of Nashville’s Family Baptist Church was asked to pray. And pray, he did!

Before the NASCAR crowd at Nashville Superspeedway Nelms notes that God tells us to be thankful for all things — and then goes on to thank the Almighty for “these mighty machines that you brought before us. Thank you for the Dodges and Toyotas. Thank you for the Fords and most of all we thank you for Roush and Yates partnering to give us the power we see before us tonight.

Thank you for GM Performance Technology and R07 engines. Thank you for Sunoco racing fuel and Goodyear tires that bring performance and power to the track. Lord, I want to thank you for my smokin’ hot wife …’’

Best prayer EVER!

Pastor Joe Nelms - Nascar Nationwide - Nashville, TN

The respectful crowd begins to suspect something is up about the time he starts thanking God for Sonoco racing fuel. Drivers can be seen looking up and chuckling. But the line about his smokin’ hot wife – a line from the movie “Talladega Nights’’ brings the house down. The crowd roars — but with the cadence of a Southern preacher, Nelm’s voice rises in magnitude as he continues past “for my smokin’ hot wife tonight, Lisa,” and includes his kids: ”and my two children, Eli and Emma, or as we like to call them, ‘The Little E’s.’ ”

Perhaps the most unforgettable line of the prayer comes when Nelms quotes NASCAR Hall of Famer Darrell Waltrip at the end of his prayer.

“In Jesus’ name, Boogity Boogity Boogity, amen,” Nelms proclaims.

Race winner Carl Edwards appreciated the humor that came with Nelms’ prayer.

“I turned to Jack (Roush) after that. I said, ‘If anything happens, I want him to be at my funeral.’ That was one of the best invocations I have ever heard.”

Kung Hey Fat Choi!

The Chinese Year of the Rabbit Begins

In the Chinese calendar,

today marks the start of the Year of the Rabbit,

which is expected to be a 'quiet, positive & inspiring' year.

Find out what else to expect.

Could the Year of the Rabbit bring you love?

Cocktails made for the Chinese New Year

GM Introduces New E-Rod Crate Engines at SEMA

Posted By Ashley Majeski-Smissen, November 10, 2010 in Engine & Drivetrain, News & Events

The E-Rod LSA offers 556 horsepower and is available now. (Photo: GM Performance Parts)

GM Performance Products  announced at the 2010 SEMA Show that it has added three new E-Rod packages that are designed for hot rodders to its E-Rod line of crate engines. The company introduced the original E-Rod LS3 crate engine at last year’s SEMA Show.
The first of the new packages, the E-Rod 5.3L, is an entry-level option that features an engine from the Silverado pickup truck. It produces 315 horsepower and 335 lbs./f.t of torque with camshaft phasing, according to the company.
The engine was used to power the E-Rod ’55 Chevy pickup found in GM’s booth at the SEMA Show.
The second new package, the E-Rod LS7, features an engine from the Corvette Z06 and offers 505 horsepower.
The E-Rod LSA package features the supercharged 6.2-liter V-8 engine from the Cadillac CTS-V. It offers 556 horsepower and 551 lbs./ft. of torque. In addition, the LSA comes with a conventional wet-sump lubrication system. Other features of the LSA package include a unique aluminum-cylinder block casting that houses a forged steel crankshaft, integrated piston cooling oil jets, high-flow cylinder heads and relatively mild camshaft, according to the company. This package was used in a Superformance Corvette Grand Sport coupe that was seen on the SEMA Show floor.
All of the E-Rods are available for manual and automatic gearboxes. The packages include a wiring harness, ECU, exhaust manifolds, catalytic converter, oxygen sensors, mass airflow sensor, accelerator pedal, air filter and instruction manual.
The 5.3L and LSA engine packages are available now; the LS7 package is slated to be released for sale early in 2011.
For more information on the new E-Rod crate engines, go tohttp://www.gmperformanceparts.com/.

2010 SEMA Show: From Hot Rods to Exotics to Hybrids

November 4, 2010, 12:37 PM

By JERRY GARRETT

Jerry Garrett for The New York TimesThis naked steel sled in Hot Rod Alley may have drawn the most attention at the SEMA Show in Las Vegas. More photos.

The annual Specialty Equipment Market Association trade show in Las Vegas is an opportunity for companies selling aftermarket automotive accessories to let their imaginations run wild. Refinish a Rolls-Royce in black primer? Hot-rod a hybrid? Is one engine enough? Why not two? There are no limits. Nearly one million square feet of exhibit space inside the Las Vegas Convention Center is packed with one display after another, and aisles that seem to stretch for miles; what there is no room for inside spills out into the parking lots, to the nearby Sands Convention Center, and even various casinos.

The show, which is not open to the general public, officially lasts four days, Nov. 2-5. Unofficially, automotive tinkering never ends.

WATCH THE SLIDE SHOW

Pontiac Falls From Muscle Car Glory to Graveyard

By NICK BUNKLEY

DETROIT — Pontiac, the brand that invented the muscle car under its flamboyant engineer John Z. DeLorean, helped Burt Reynolds elude Sheriff Justice in “Smokey and the Bandit” and taught baby boomers to salivate over horsepower, but produced mostly forgettable cars for their children, will endure a lonely death on Sunday after about 40 million in sales.

Gary McCracken for The New York Times

The last new Pontiac for sale on the lot at Lee Pontiac GMC in Fort Walton Beach, Fla., is a 2009 Pontiac Solstice coupe hardtop.

 It was 84 years old. The cause of death was in dispute. Fans said Pontiac’s wounds were self-inflicted, while General Motors blamed a terminal illness contracted during last year’s bankruptcy. Pontiac built its last car nearly a year ago, but the official end was set for Oct. 31, when G.M.’s agreements with Pontiac dealers expire.

“They were C.P.R.-ing a corpse for a long time,” said Larry Kummer, a retired graphic artist who has owned more than two dozen Pontiacs and runs the Web site PontiacRegistry.com.

The G.M. brand that was advertised for “driving excitement,” Pontiac brought Americans the Bonneville, GTO, Firebird and other venerable nameplates. Sportier than a Chevrolet but less uppity than an Oldsmobile or Buick, the best Pontiacs, recognizable by their split grille and red arrowhead emblem in the middle, were stylish yet affordable cars with big, macho engines.

Its biggest triumph was the GTO, developed by Mr. DeLorean, the brand’s rebellious chief engineer, in violation of a G.M. policy dictating the maximum size of a car’s engine. The GTO was a hit, and the age of the muscle car had begun.

“When the muscle-car era was in its heyday, Pontiac was king,” said Frederick Perrine, a dealer in Cranbury, N.J., whose family sold Pontiacs since the brand’s founding. “It put us through school. We were the house on the block that had the swimming pool growing up.”

Ed Dieffenbach, a retired police officer, recalls admiring Pontiacs in magazines as a boy but he never bought one. But with the brand nearing death, he drove 1,300 miles last week from his home near Miami to the Lee Pontiac GMC dealership in Florida’s panhandle to trade in his Chevrolet Silverado truck for one of the last new Solstice two-seater coupes available anywhere in the country.

“I always wanted a hot rod, but never got around to it, so this is it,” Mr. Dieffenbach, 62, said after getting his new car home. “My wife sat in it last night and said, ‘Oh my Lord, wow.’ ”

For most of the 1960s, Pontiac ranked third in sales behind Chevy and Ford — a position now held by Toyota.

But in the decades since, Pontiac’s edge and high-powered image wore off. Repeated efforts in the 1990s and 2000s to revive the brand failed. Drivers too young to remember the GTO came to associate Pontiac with models like the DustBuster-shaped Trans Sport minivan or the Aztek, a bloated-looking crossover widely regarded as one of the ugliest vehicles of all time.

By early 2009, Pontiac had fallen to 12th place in the United States market, and its top-selling model was the G6, a sedan commonly found on car-rental lots.

Pontiac, named for the Michigan city where the company started and an 18th-century Ottawa Indian chief, found itself on the wrong end of G.M.’s government-aided bankruptcy restructuring.

“They had a lot of glory years, but from the ’70s on, Pontiac just couldn’t meet the bar,” Mr. Kummer said. “It was always living in the past.”

For the most part, Pontiac’s final months generated no more excitement than its last few decades did. G.M. said dealers had fewer than 125 new Pontiacs in stock at the end of August, mostly heavily discounted G6’s, but only eight of them were reported sold in September.

“You hate to see them go, but they were floundering and couldn’t find their place in the market,” said Tim Dye, who owns 21 Pontiacs from various eras and a huge collection of Pontiac memorabilia — started with a bottle of GTO cologne from his uncle — that he had assembled over more than 30 years.

Mr. Dye’s home in Oklahoma, along with two buildings on his property, are filled with thousands of items from Pontiac’s past, including showroom brochures, advertising posters, model cars, pencils, ashtrays and matchbooks. Now that Pontiac is gone, Mr. Dye plans to turn his collection into a museum in Pontiac, Ill., a city on Route 66.

“I can’t think of anything better to do than just visit with people about Pontiac every day,” he said.

The Pontiac Motor Division was born at G.M. in 1926 as a single model under the Oakland brand, but its roots date to the 1890s, when horse-drawn carriage-making was a big industry in Pontiac, 25 miles northwest of Detroit. The Pontiac Spring and Wagon Works started building automobiles in 1907, before merging with the nearby Oakland Motor Car Company, which was then bought by G.M. in 1909.

G.M.’s first Pontiac was an $825 model known as the “Chief of the Sixes” for its 6-cylinder engine. It sold so well that G.M. shut down Oakland to focus on Pontiacs.

Pontiac became known as a conservative brand, building stodgy cars for grandmothers, until its general manager in the late 1950s, Semon Knudsen, sought a hipper image and much younger buyer. Mr. Knudsen, the son of a former G.M. president and a fan of auto racing, unveiled Pontiac’s “wide-track” design, which improved the cars’ handling by pushing the wheels five inches farther apart.

Mr. Knudsen, known as Bunkie, was once quoted describing wide-track Pontiacs as resembling “a football player wearing ballet slippers.” The style was distinctive, and Pontiac’s frequent wins on the racetrack in that era helped sales soar.

No innovation did as much for Pontiac’s high-performance image as the GTO, whose glory days were from 1964 to 1974. The original GTO’s 389 cubic-inch engine was larger than G.M. allowed in a car of that size, but Pontiac executives got around that rule by offering it as an upgrade package to an existing model, the Tempest, and no one at the corporate level was aware of the option before it went into production and dealers began clamoring for more.

“We got 5,000 of them out into the marketplace before we got around to telling the corporation what we were doing,” said Jim Wangers, a Pontiac advertising executive at the time who worked with Mr. DeLorean to create the GTO, short for Gran Turismo Omologato.

Mr. Wangers, who was born the same year as Pontiac and never thought he would outlive it, recalls the time that the German luxury carmaker BMW sent a team of engineers, designers and marketers to meet with Mr. DeLorean’s team and study how the brand did so well.

But Pontiac sales peaked in 1973, when 920,000 were sold, and the ride was mostly downhilll after that. Pontiac fans lament that the brand finally got a few worthy models in its final years — the G8 full-size sedan and the Solstice sports car — but by then it was too far gone.

Gary Lee Jr., an owner of the dealership that sold Mr. Dieffenbach his Solstice this week, remembers the sadness of losing Oldsmobile when G.M. killed that brand in 2004. But with Pontiac, he has just been eager to move on. Signs for Pontiac at his dealership had long been removed, and he said, thankfully, he had no more new Pontiacs to unload.

“It was a great line,” Mr. Lee said, “while it lasted.”

·                                 Collecting: When Bigger Was Better, Pontiac Was a Winner(December 20, 2009)

·                                 When Pontiac Meant Muscle(May 3, 2009)

·                                 Its Muscle Car Glory Faded, Pontiac Shrivels Up (February 20, 2009)

Classic Cars Converge in Hershey

1974 Fascination

Pirelli Celebrates F1 Tyre Factory Inauguration

On September 23 Pirelli officially inaugurated what it calls the “Factory of Champions” at its plant in Izmit, Turkey, where the company will produce tyres for all Formula One teams during the 2011 to 2013 seasons. The inauguration served as a double celebration for Pirelli, as 2010 marks the 50th anniversary of the Izmit facility’s opening and the Italian tyre maker’s operations in Turkey.

Producing eight million tyres for cars, trucks and motorsport each year, Izmit has the largest unit output of any Pirelli tyre. The group has invested 140 million euros there over the last ten years and plans to invest a further 30 million euros in 2011 to support expansion in Turkey and nearby emerging markets. The Izmit site has housed Pirelli’s motorsport tyre production line since 2007 and, in synergy with the company’s research and development centre in Milan, will become the heart of Pirelli’s Formula One activities.

Driver Chooses Infinity Tyres for Dutch Drifting

Oliver Harrsch drives a BMW E-30 powered by a 3.6 Litre engine from an M5 BMW 

and equipped with Infinity 050 UHP tyres

Drifting driver Oliver Harrsch recently competed in a round of the Dutch Open Drift Championship held in Kalkar, Germany (held 11 - 12 September) equipped with Infinity tyres. Harrsch was supplied the tyres by Venlo-based Infinity distributor Euro-Tyre and according to the company, the small and technical course was suited to lower powered cars and the more skilled drivers. On the first day, dry conditions allowed Harrsch to push the Infinity 050 UHP tyres to their limits and to experiment with tyre pressures. He commented: “Lots of grip and very smokey! Infinity are unbelievably good tyres!" In extremely wet conditions on the second day, Oliver took a very commendable fourth position... 

Brembo Plans Brake Plant in Czech Republic

Italian brake product maker Brembo has announced plans to build a new production plant in the Czech Republic. The three-year, 35 million euro project will start operations in 2011. The project included rehabilitating an existing industrial building in the city of Ostrava, Brembo said.

Brake calipers and other aluminum components will be cast, machined and assembled there, Brembo said, and it plans to develop an “integrated industrial center supplying quality brake systems with a high technological content to the European market.”

Brembo Czech s.r.o. is expected to achieve sales turnover of around 55 million euros in 2014, generated through new business through the new plant.

Industry News

Borla Performance Industries announced the merger of TWM Induction into the Borla Performance group of companies. According to a release, the merger enables the two companies to leverage their collective 60 years of experience to design, manufacture, market and sell induction and exhaust systems worldwide. TWM Induction, originally based in Goleta, California, has moved into the 320,000-sq.-ft. headquarters of Borla Performance, located in Johnson City, Tennessee. Borla and TWM Induction have supplied racing teams, classic car enthusiasts and speed fans with their world-class engineering expertise and personalized approach. A joint operation named Borla Induction will soon launch, introducing a new line of late-model products

A new formula for 2013 emerges

Turbos have been banned in F1 since 1989 © Sutton Images

Enlarge

Details of Formula One's radical new regulations for 2013 have begun to emerge, although they will not be confirmed until later this year.

The sport is set for a major overhaul to introduce more efficient engines, ground-effect aerodynamics and road-relevant technologies to F1 cars.

According to GP Week the teams have agreed to adopt 1.6 litre, 4 cylinder turbo engines, limited to 10,000 rpm and producing approximately 650bhp. The new engines will be mated to kinetic energy recovery systems, capable of producing a further 150bhp power boost. A fuel flow rate limit will also be introduced to ensure the engines are frugal compared to the current crop of 2.4 litre V8s.

To reduce drag engineers will be allowed to reintroduce ground-effect aerodynamics - pioneered in the 1970s but banned due to safety concerns. Sidepods will also be moved forwards to increase driver protection, while the size of the wheel rims is expected to increase in future years.

The basis of the 2013 rules are likely to be outlined in more detail after a forthcoming meeting of the World Motor Sport Council.

Big Interest in Tiny Cars