Real Time View

I took the Corvette to the dealer for maintenance and while it was up on the lift, we found a big hole in the panel wrapped around the windshield-washer reservoir. It’s always an adventure-land for me, whenever the car is on a lift, as I get to wander underneath and look at the “unseen components” that contribute to making the car go, corner, and stop. And I am always amazed at the almost miraculous technology that goes into today’s cars, and at how little we pay for them these days. But what punctured the panel, pictured above, is anyone’s guess! Technology may keep changing, but maintenance remains a constant – today’s automobile requires routine servicing. Some manufacturers offer better programs than others, with longer service intervals but, no matter the program offered, all cars eventually find themselves in the service center sooner or later. Tires and brakes wear out, suspensions begin to sag and to lose their responsiveness, oils need to be changed, rust needs to be treated,

It was good to find time to just take it easy last weekend, and once again I relaxed by driving on the Pacific Coast Highway (PCH). On Saturday I had driven along four of the canyon byways that connect the valley to the coast, while on Sunday a more leisurely approach was adopted as, once again, I found myself briefly on Mulholland Drive before crossing to the coast and then heading up Sunset Boulevard. And the picture above was taken of me on Rodeo Drive, where time was found to do a little shopping and to have a late lunch. Walking Rodeo Drive and wandering through the stores is always entertaining – but at this time of year, tourists pretty much take over the place. I thought I heard as many languages as I had on my recent trip to the Baltic region! But it wasn’t the tourists that interested me as much as number of empty stores we passed. No, it wasn’t as though every second shop had closed down but rather, I only came across three shop-fronts devoid of goods. Compared with what I h

This past weekend saw me once again driving around a race track. This time it was at the very impressive Auto Club Speedway, formerly California Speedway – the site of NASCAR and Indy Racing League events. The professionals race around the main course, which looks more like a “D” than an oval, while we ran only on a portion of the oval – the curved main straight that passed the Start / Finish line and includes NASCAR corners 1 and 2. We left the oval through a very tight left hand turn half way down the back straight, and continued around an infield road course. And the picture here is of the Infiniti coupe, prepared, and ready to leave for the track. The designers of the track threw in a couple of surprises and those drivers new to the course took some time to figure it out. It wasn’t just that it was a mix of high-speed straights with some diabolically slow corners, but on two sections of the track, the sequence of turns forced you to look a lot further ahead. As the goal of a driver