The Two Beasts in my garage....

Its weird to have nearly NINE HUNDRED HORSEPOWER in your garage. I drive the S4 one day and enjoy its near ludicrous acceleration, screaming exhaust, luxury, and comfort on one day, then drive the EVO and enjoy its ludicrous handling, no-bones interior, super-tight cockpit and uber-precise controls the next! I am completely spoiled. But alas, the S4 has to go...and go soon. I've recently had my insurance redo the front hood and bumper and my GOD does the car look utterly bad-ass. Working on the final last details to get her ready for the sale:

1. A smog certificate on Friday which will be good for two years.

2. A complete polish and detail on Monday to get all the swirl out and ultimately get the finish looking damn close to Show-car level.

3. Have NTT's Brain take some pictures on his super-camera next Wednesday to upload on Audiworld Classified.

4. Finish my Ad and upload it onto Audiworld Classified.

5. And wait for a response.

The market on Stage III cars just eight months ago was as strong as it have ever been. Equivalent examples of my car were selling easily for 16K or more. Well now you can FORGET THAT...and the Audi Stage III community is outraged. Stage III cars simply do not sell well (or hardly at all) since the economic downturn. I've seen a dozen on Ebay over the last three months that have not even come CLOSE to their reserve price. The price-point has come down big time. The last Stage III car sold for a meager 11K!!!...ARGH! My GOD, the KKB price on a private sale for a BONE STOCK S4 is 11,900! What has this world come to.

But ultimately, with regards to the global economic depression, I've certainly come away ahead. I simply remind myself that I paid 26,888 for EVO X, a car that just a year ago folks paid (MSRP plus finance interest) 45K to own! And in the end, if I end up losing out a bit on the sale of the S4, all is still good...so I shouldn't protest too much.

So I've taken more pics of BOTH the cars at once. Its a rare pleasure to simultaneously own two Turbo-charged AWD monsters so I wanted to take some photos for posterity's sake:

Note the four-piston Brembo's...yummy:



The EVO weighs less but it is positively huge compared to the Audi.





And just the EVO...mmmmmm

A Day of Celebration.....

HAPPY OBAMA DAY!!

I can't help but feel hopeful, optimistic, and proud today. I watched the Inauguration and following speech yesterday with my fellow Clinic co-workers. Some 30 of us sat around the large desk in our conference room cheering throughout.

Mixed in with my colleagues were a dozen or so schizophrenic clinic clients. It was truly a surreal experience watching the Inauguration with a bunch of half-lucid psychotics. One of them stared at Obama's image with a horrified expression quietly mumbling near incoherent phrases describing some strange paranoid delusion re. the President "watching her". Another client irritatingly walked back and forth in front of the television screen....his/her (couldn't tell) therapist directed her to have a seat. Another sat two seats to my right popping his morning pills, rocking back and forth in his chair, and occasionally giggling to himself. And another, wearing a black Obama shirt, smiled at the TV, pointed at the Obama image and repeated "Wassup, Wassup....Wassup!" throughout the entire event.

So I knew I shouldn't have, but I did. I listened to conservative radio in the afternoon, "just to get a different perspective", I told myself. Big mistake. They dismiss our hope and would rather feel hopeless. They dismiss our optimism in favor of fear. They dismiss our pride in our country and see it as anti-White racism. While they mock us for seeing Obama as the Messiah, they have no insight into how they see that him as the Anti-Christ.

Their is an almost perverted wish to have out Country falter, fall further into economic hardship, fail in our war against terrorism just so they can PROVE US WRONG. And the ONE utterly obvious point that these Neocon's can't seem to fathom is how people of color see this as a symbolic victory....how being the first Black president, and what that means, and how that demonstrates how far we've come, and how so many see this as a Victory brought out from the culmination of generations of struggle...they simply do not see how powerfully important this moment is for soo many. They don't get it. They mock the tears of joy. They mock the jubilation. They laugh at our Hope and our Pride in our Country. And their apparent empathic incapacitation has left them unable understand why folks are soo emotional today, especially Black people...the entire historical narrative is lost on them. What a pity...what a pity.

Fifty years from now, what will these Neo-con fan-boys say to their grandchildren? "Obama meant nothing. I didn't celebrate his victory because being the First Black President is unimportant. In fact, I wanted him to fail. I don't care what he means to people around the world. All of them, every single one of them are stupid. Him being elected means absolutely NADA. I don't acknowledge his Presidency's historic impact...its all a bunch of hooey to me. Big deal if he's black...big...frickin...deal."

...what a pity.

Anywayz, other than the Inauguration, I have pretty much had nothing else but CAR STUFF swimming around my head...literally almost every quiet moment I have, I think about car stuff: camber, toe, inverted coilovers, spring rates, limited slip diffs, tire width, air-fuel mixture, etc. etc. This is what happens when I get a new car.

Anywayz, gotta go....

.......A New Chapter, A New Age, A New Car.......

The planets aligned on Monday and I've cashed in several years worth of Karmic Brownie Points to pick up the SWEETEST most LUDICROUS deal imaginable. My Dream Car (realistically speaking, and not psychotically speaking, else I'd obsess about owning an $800,000 Pagini Zonda "F" Clubsport) has been fiscally improbable and I've been resigned to the idea of selling my car in February and picking up a slightly used 2006-07 Subaru Imprezza STI for around 26 to 28K. Factor in used-car financing rates being at best 4.5 percent, you're looking at an additional 1300 bucks a YEAR over the life of the loan!

Enter the stock market crash and the subsequent flagellation of the Auto Industry and we're looking at car companies with unbelievable rebate offers and insane finance products in a near desperate effort to clear out their bloated 2008 stock. This is clearly a buyers market, and perhaps the best car-buying market in a generation. On a whim, I looked at Mitsubishi Motors and low and behold, they are offering ZERO percent financing up to SIXTY MONTHS on not only their economy cars but their HALO/Flagship car the EVOLUTION X as well...again, an extreme rarity. At this point, I began an utterly exhaustive investigation, calling every Mitsubishi dealership in Northern California, cruising Ebay, and scouring Craiglist for the best deal possible.

The special ZERO percent financing was up on Monday Jan. 5th so I did my final round of calling, visiting, and cut-throat negotiations that morning. You see, I'm looking to buy an EVOLUTION GSR with just the right options: the Track/Aero package and nothing more. This car MSRP is $37,490...whew, you see why I was looking at a used Subaru STI. My attitude in negotiations was simply; ask to speak to the supervisor and low-ball the F$%& out of the price...and I had two Bay Area dealerships positively furious with me insinuating I had insulted them, taking advantage of the Auto Industry's desperation...but I could care less. I WANT A DEAL. I offered 28,999 and salespeople threw up their hands in incredulity; "Are you serious!?", "That's 5 grand under Invoice!" (shaking paperwork to demonstrate their point). Twice salespeople dismissed me to EBAY to buy a used EVO 9 or even 8 with 10K miles on the odometer because my offer was so outrageous.

The last day of the ZERO percent financing offer was coming to an end and after being laughed at and scolded by salespeople up and down Nor-Cal, I figured it just wasn't meant to be. I gave it one last shot and swung by Serramonte Mitsubishi which had the largest glut of EVO's in the Bay Area. I walked into the showroom, spoke with a very friendly and very un-intimidating saleswoman and after some small talk asked her directly what their lowest price was on an EVO GSR with the Track/Aero package. She didn't bat an eye, walked over to her sales-manager, pulled out a newspaper ad from that morning, looked at her one and only GSR Track Pack, busted out the calculator, and said "How about $26,888?" My jaw dropped. I asked if we were talking about the right car. She checked again and said she was.

Apparently, only hard-core enthusiasts would be interested in an EVO GSR Track. To get buyers into their showroom this week, they had run an ad that morning for their ONE EVO GSR Track to get buyers in to look at their 18 other less hardcore EVO's. They had a large number of offers for that ONE CAR in the 8 hours since the ad had run but NOT ONE qualified for financing...the demise of the financial markets in effect. I submitted my SSN and my near 800 FICO scored sealed the deal!!!!!

Talking with the sales manager afterwards, he mentioned that I had just purchased the lowest priced EVOLUTION X in Northern California since they first began selling them fourteen months ago! In fact, they were selling for 5K over MSRP (43K!) with 4.9 percent financing late last year! People were actually spending nearly 50K for this car!

Anywayz, I felt dizzy when they told me the price and had to sit down when they told me I was approved. I was positively shaking when they handed me the keys to the car which was washed and waxed, with a full tank, and ready for me to take ownership. The drive home was an exercise in containing my jubilation. EVEN MY WIFE APPROVED OF THE DEAL!!....my last and final hurdle.

Here are some pics:





The specs on this car is too numerous to list, but here are the highlights: Brembo GT's front/rear, Recaro buckets, front limited slip, rear limited slip, active center differential, ASC, active-yaw control, ABS, inverted dampers, strut tower bracing, aluminum control arms, front-splitter, undertray aero, rear diffuser and wing, etc. etc. etc. I can't say it better than the hundreds of Magazine articles praising this car, placing it on a short list of Uber-Track-Weapons....but I'll try in one sentence:

......Telepathic Handling.......

My GOD, the performance is mind-bending. I'm sure the PerfectLine can describe the sensation when he first drove the M-Coupe and the Lotus Elise....you literally have to RE-LEARN how to drive a car. Yes, my S4's acceleration is like a bomb exploding, but the GSR will run circles around it in the handling department...and 400HP ain't nuthin to laugh at either!

Anywayz, gotta go. I'll let you guys drive it when I see you next. One thing though, the clutch needs another 400 miles of break-in and the motor another 500 miles of sub-5000 RPM driving. The ECU map has been switched to "stock/break-in" so I'll be driving it like a Grandma for a while.

Back from the East....

...and had some great times, but man, am I happy to be home...and so are our little cats.

Some items of note:

- The American History Museum on the Mall has been reopened after two years of renovation. The place is massive and was packed with tourists. BTW, the day I went was the warmest Dec. 28th on record in DC: 68 degrees! Overall, the Museum was so-so; disappointing in some areas and up-to-par in others. No need to get into any details.

- My wife's Aunt and Uncle celebrated their 40th Anniversary and took my wife and I, well as several other family members, to L'Auberge Francois, a French Country/Inn restaurant in a super-posh DC suburb that makes Hillsborough look positively third world. This was my first experience in French cuisine and I AM HOOKED! We had 8 frickin courses over a span of 3 hours and everything was crazy-ass good; sauce after yummy sauce, tiny Amuse-Bouche's, tasty palette cleansing dishes, and portion sizes that completely blew-out all my presumptions about French culinary fare.

- Read DEWEY READMORE BOOKS, a true story about a very special library cat in Iowa whose story touched so many throughout the world. The book is partly about the cat but mostly about small-town life, small-town values, and the beautiful Midwest state of Iowa. Quick read and had to bust out the Kleenex at the end.

- Also reading OTHER CRITERIA by Leo Stienberg, a hefty text on confronting, deconstructing, and decoding 20th century contemporary art. Massively dense but utterly fascinating in the way it RE-addresses our notions about Art, unlocks areas in our psyche in which Art had not had access to previously, and challenges us to experience Art in ways we Could not and Would not experience previously. My brain is being put through the paces, exercising neurons and accessing uncharted areas of my cortex. It's like my brain is one FIRE! I've experienced epiphanies about seemingly enigmatic art (particularly Jasper Johns and Pollack) and want to share these revelations with you folks.

That's it for now...run out of time at work.