Author: MrAngry

Ok, so you’ve got this car in your garage that you’ve done a butt-load of bodywork to. It’s straight as an arrow with a quick primer coat on it. The interior and gauges are installed and mechanically your baby is ready to roll. There is however one small problem. You’ve put so much money into the car already to get it to this point that you don’t have the capital for the paint job. Now it’s springtime and the car you thought would be ready will now just be taking up space in the garage unless you find an alternative.

A good paint job, at least up here in the Northeast is going to cost you at a minimum, $10,000. Now I know some of you will read this and say you have an Uncle that has a barn in a field where the uni-bomber was found and that he could do the job for $6.99… and that’s great. Here in good ole’ NYC a good painter charges big money, it’s just the way it is, so lets not argue about it.

If you don’t have the funds for paint keep in mind that there may be an alternative. Vinyl wraps on cars are nothing new. They’re relatively inexpensive (2-3 grand) and have a pretty extensive lifeline… somewhere in the neighborhood of about 5 years or so. You can get any design or color and have the whole thing done in about 3 business days. From 3-feet away onlookers will have no idea that what they’re seeing is not paint. In fact 99.9% of the population won’t no. Is it an ideal situation? Well, it really depends on how you look at it. You can either drive around for the next 5 years in a primer gray car or wrap it so that it looks pretty damn good to the untrained eye… who knows, it may just be something to consider.

Maybe you’ve been looking for something different. You know, that certain car that will stand out in the crowd of Camaros and Coronets that clog-up your favorite Friday night car show. You want to be noticed, regarded and most of all talked about. Well then, look no further because your old friend Mr. Angry has found the car for you.

This hulking mass of macho metal started out almost 100 years ago as an American Lafrance fire truck and over its lifetime has seen some modifications. The biggest one is obvious, as it’s no longer a fire truck but a dual chain driven speedster. Hell, the stats alone will make you chuckle.

ENGINE SPECIFICATIONS: 14.5 liter, 820 cubic inches, 105 hp and it’s a 6-cylinder T-head! Not that I know what that is…

I would love to own something like this, as it is such a unique piece of automotive history. This baby also has to be an absolute hoot to drive. Just imagine rolling into your local car show behind the wheel of this mastodon. You’d immediately be the star, you’d stand out above everything else and I can almost guarantee that your ego will be completely satisfied.

Take a look at the auction on eBay as this puppy really is a treat for the eyes.

Ok, I’ll admit it – I’ve tried repeatedly to emulate the sound of a big block V8 or import tuner by using nothing but my vocal cords. It is unfortunate, but I am generally unsuccessful and my impressions are more are less mistaken for a bad case of gas than anything even remotely automotive. This guy however has his shtick down pat and is rolling with some mad vocal skills. Hondas are no problem and dirt bikes are a cinch. Hell, he’s even managed to make Subaru’s sound better than they do in real life. The absolute best part though is the shifting… seriously; if you don’t laugh at this there is something seriously wrong with you.

Ever hear the old saying: “If you love what you do you’ll never work another day in your life.” Well, we here at Ridelust.com pretty much fall into that category. We wake up every morning, make some coffee and then get to write about our passion – Automobiles. We are not beholden to anyone so for us the freedom to express our true feelings about what goes on in the auto industry is a Godsend. If we don’t like something then we’ll tell you. If we think it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread, then hell, we’ll say that too. One thing we won’t do is feed you bullshit opinions, that’s just not the way we operate.

We also wanted everyone out there to understand that we really do live this stuff. Maybe it’s because we didn’t have a big enough sand box when we were kids or that our Hotwheels and Matchbox cars didn’t fill our automotive needs. All we know is that now, as adults, we’ve made it our business to do what we’ve always wanted to do… play with cars. We also wanted to thank all our readers for the emails and comments that you provide us with on a daily basis. It keeps us rolling.

• Mike Musto: Editor-in-Chief

“Life is like a box of chocolates… you never know what you’re gonna’ git.”

Such is the story of Mike Musto’s life. With expertise in such fields as Clam Digging, Corporate Web Design and White Collar Espionage, Mike Musto possesses a skill set few can rival.

His life experiences are those not of novel proportions, but of smaller, non-proof read periodicals. He is a real life race car driver in the land of make believe and his brain contains a wealth of knowledge that can only rivaled by the 1983 Edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. This knowledge based helped Mike Musto secure his seat as the Editor-in-Chief at Ridelust.com.

• Kurt Ernst: Lead Writer

Some babies had rattles and mobiles to play with in the crib, but Kurt Ernst had ratchets and combination wrenches. He spent his formative years working in the family garage, thriving on a steady diet of used motor oil, carb cleaner and asbestos-laden brake dust.

Post college, he spent a year racing only to find he was neither fast enough to get rich nor rich enough to get fast. After spending far too long in international business, eating unfamiliar food at strange airports in the middle of the night, Ernst had a revelation. While driving a car load of terrified colleagues through the Alps at triple digit speeds, in the dark of night, in a torrential downpour, as the GPS barked incomprehensible instructions in German, he realized that his life’s calling was to be an automotive journalist. Years of rejection slips and death threats followed, but he was eventually welcomed with open arms to RideLust.com.

Willing to ride or drive anything on two, three, four or ten wheels, Kurt remains free of felony convictions. Armed with a rapier like sense of wit, he routinely pours through thousands of pages of content to weed out the nasty bits so you don’t have to.

• Dustin Driver: Contributor

Dustin Driver was incubated in the cylinder bore of a big-block Chevy and raised in a fleet of rusty, primer-dusted, sputtering project cars. He lusts for gears, wears used transmission fluid as aftershave, and has a tattoo of a Citroën DS on the roof of his mouth. His favorite car was his father’s primer-gray ‘55 Chevy. He worked as a lackey in a transmission shop and has been a journalist and marketing writer for more than a decade.

It’s stuff like this that really burns me. Virginia is known to be one of, if not the toughest state in the country when it comes to speeding. Now it seems that because the state has a budget deficit of $2.2 billion they’re trying to use motorists to bail them out. My favorite part of this mess is that our tax dollars helped fund this by paying the overtime to the Troopers with a federal grant.

The state issued a total of 7,016 tickets to motorists over the two-day blitz. With the majority of them being speeding tickets. If you got nailed doing 10 to 15 mph over the speed limit, your fine was classified as “Reckless Driving” and came with a “GO F*CK YOURSELF” fine of $2500… ARE YOU KIDDING ME? The entire state should be embarrassed by this…

Source: egmcartech.com

Not long ago I threw up a post stating what my true feelings about Gran Turismo 5 for the PS3 were. They’ve been jerking us around for almost 3 years, which is a bit ridiculous. I then caught wind of this new trailer called “GT5 Nights” which, I must say is pretty amazing. The renderings look to be killer, the car list I’m sure is phenomenal and they’ve incorporated damage (about flippin’ time). Now, I still stand by what I said in my previous post, but this video does peak my curiosity as to what the finished product will look like.

Source: Streetfire.net

I don’t know if any of you remember the opening scene of the movie Smokey and the Bandit, but if you do, you’d recall a bunch of semi-trucks racing around a big dirt oval. I always knew people raced these things, but I had never actually seen them in action. This two-part video shows these bad boys going toe to toe and quite honestly, they’re out there racing for blood. Seriously, these guys are no joke when it comes to slinging these big rigs around.

Source: Bangshift.com

This was awesome. I truly don’t understand the mentality of some people. Here we have a gentleman who looks to be intelligent enough but has found himself in a very precarious situation. He has what looks to be a 1995-1996 Corvette that is in very nice shape. His problem? It’s located in his pole barn that is surrounded by rising water… not good. So, as opposed to doing it the right way and either towing the car out, or simply raising it up on jack stands, the owner decides to do a Bo and Luke Duke and jump it out of the barn. You can probably guess what happens next…

I’ve been playing videogames since the late 70’s. This meant we had one game… Pong – that was it. Then the 80’s hit and videogames started getting nutty with consoles like the Atari 2600, Intellivision, ColecoVision and the King Schwing of yesteryear, Nintendo. Nowadays game systems simply kick ass. They get better and better every year and really push the boundaries of not only graphic technology but game play as well by immersing you in a true modern day gaming experience.

We here at Ridelust.com love games, especially those having to do with anything mechanized, we also have a deep love for motorcycles. Both my comrade-in-arms Kurt and myself have some wicked seat time both on the track and on the street. In fact before I was a car junkie I was a motorcycle nut who logged between 10-15k per year in the saddle. I bring this up because I just found a few videos of the upcoming game MotoGP 09/10. This looks like one helluva’ lot of fun. Most motorcycle racing games are tough to wrap your hands around because the physics are SOOOO much different that of an automobile.

Trying to replicate the feeling of dragging your knee through a corner at over 100 mph is something that I don’t think any video game will ever succeed at doing. This is and has always been the Achilles heel of this genre. You can stuff a developer in a race car and actually have them feel what it’s like to experience the g-forces associated with cornering, doing this on a motorcycle however proves to be much more difficult.

This doesn’t mean that the current crop of developers are not trying. In fact it’s just the opposite, as can be seen in these videos. How far they get with actually replicating the true feeling will have to wait until the games release on March 19, 2010. I’m stoked about this game as every time a new version comes out they get that little bit closer to bringing the experience home. Hopefully MotoGP 09/10 will take us to that next level.

Far be it from me to call bullshit on tragedy but the last few days have caused my skepticism meter to go into the red. Yesterday we heard about a gentleman by the name of Jim Sikes who claimed that his Toyota Prius took him on a 90 mph joy ride that almost ended up launching him over a cliff. Sikes said that when he attempted to pass a car on while traveling on Interstate 8 in San Diego, the accelerator pedal did something funny… meaning it was stuck to the floor.

Now we’re hearing of yet another incident involving a 2005 Prius, this time however it happened up in Harrison, NY. The driver stated that they were simply backing out of their driveway when the mishap occurred and just like the incident that was reported yesterday the claim was that the accelerator pedal stuck to the floor thus making the Prius run into a stone wall. No injuries were reported.

I hate to sound like a skeptic, but why now? I mean up until 2 months ago we never once heard of any problems with unintended acceleration from a Prius, but now all of a sudden we have two in two days… I don’t know. Listen, if these accounts are true then yes, Toyota must step up to the plate and rectify these issues immediately, but if they’re not and people are trying to cash in, then I truly hope they’ll receive the same public flogging as Toyota.

Source: CNN / Autoblog.com

You’ve all heard me talk about custom cars before – the good, the bad and unfortunately the, ugly. Customization is something that is a very personalized thing. You’re building a car to your tastes and creating a vision that came from the inner workings of your mind and your mind alone. Now, if you are building a car that will never be sold, then this is fine. Built whatever you wish, enjoy it and to hell with what people say about it, be it positive or negative.

If however you are building a custom car for resale than I think you have to be very careful about how you go about not only designing the car, but how you go about the marketing as well. What you’re looking at here is a highly modified1968 Dodge Charger. Many have revered the ‘68 Charger as the most beautiful American car ever built, a sentiment, which I whole-heartedly agree with. Most people also think that modifying one in any way is sacrilege and God knows I’ve been down that road many times.

This particular Charger is up for sale on eBay at the moment and is putting me in a tough spot emotionally. I know some of you are going to crush it immediately, hell I did to when I first saw it. The red paint is simply blinding and the wheels… well, that’s another story all together. HOWEVER – this is in no way a bad car or some hodgepodge mess that was quickly thrown together. I’ve built these cars before, I know what goes into them and I know what things cost. With that being said, I will tell you that this particular car has some VERY high-end components on it.

One look at the laundry list of parts from their eBay add confirms they did in fact use some of the best items on the market today and in the process spent some BIG money. The build quality also looks to be top notch as well. It’s a car that, from a build standpoint anyway, looks to have been very well thought out. It’s stated that the appraisal on the car stands at $250,000, which I can believe. Look at the car and the work that was put into it, NOT THE RED PAINT. The sale price on the car is $199,000, which in my opinion is a big stretch.

Now, do I think this price is way to high? Yes and no. From the sellers’ perspective I am sure they put in every bit of 2000 hours labor in on this thing, so to them that price is justifiable. From a buyers perspective though, it would have to be something that I REALLY wanted for me to pay that much. There are two things that kill the value of the car in my opinion – the color and the wheels – there is just too much of both. Otherwise I can AND would be more than happy to live with everything else on the car. Hell, I could even grow to like that molded rear spoiler on the deck lid.

As stated above, this car really does have some of the best components money can buy, with a build execution that looks to be top notch. So, do I think this car will sell for that price, well, no… no chance actually, if fact they’ll be lucky to get half that in my opinion. Now, if it was a different color, with some different wheels and maybe just a touch of chrome, there may be a chance. We’ll follow the auction though and see how it pans out.

Check out the full eBay ad here.