Unlocking the Zenith Series

Staying true to my goal of reaching the Porsche Road to Le Mans series in Real Racing 3, I have broke through the minimum threshold of progression.

A final race in the Ferrari 599 GTO was the key to unlock one more door....

....however, there is still a lengthy walk down the hallway to reach and draw the curtains to allow the light in.

One variation of the old saying goes, "It's the journey that counts, not the destination." I believe, like life, there are obstacles to overcome and attempts to learn from, just as events and challenges in video games can mirror the real world.

Now that I have unlocked the next series, I get presented with this. I am not sure if this a really good deal or not....

....but I think the opportunity to collect the Grand Sport Vitesse will come at a later time. Besides, I have been a long time "free to play" user and I already have something that I can to bring to the races.

Heavier Metal

Another vehicle from my past, memories triggered from events from more recent times.

Many, many years ago, I got the short lived bug to own a four wheel drive, full sized SUV. Low and behold, a friend just so happened to have a rather rough, but running 1984 Chevrolet Suburban available (traded a need-much-work 1970 Dodge Coronet 440 to him. Over ten years later, I am still kicking myself over that decision and he still has the car).

The picture above is a near perfect match to how it was painted, however there were some more noticeable differences between that image and my memory. Some were like the paint not being as shiny, sporting minor corrosion in the wheel wells and the factory slotted Rally rims were swapped out for aftermarket "White Spokes" wrapped in Kumho 33x12.5R15's. I do recall all of the exterior trim was there and thinking this was a bonus at the time.

As much as I wanted it to have rear "barn doors," this Suburban was equipped with an electric roll down window, mounted in a truck-like fold down tailgate (I will come back to this, later).

It was equipped with a 5.7 litre (350 cid for you old school folks) V8 that ran really good. It would have produced around 175 horsepower at it's peak, when it was still fueled by gasoline. Sometime during it's life, it was converted to run on straight propane (which was a real trend during the late 80's through mid 90's where I lived at the time), which robbed it of about 15 to 20% of it's remaining power output, yet still having to move almost 5,000 lbs (nearly 2,300 kgs for the rest of you) around....yeah.

The only part missing from the drive-train was the driveshaft that would have connected the front axle to the transfer case, so no four wheel drive for me. I do remember I was going to find and install one, just never got around to doing that set of tasks.

The interior was all there and in fantastic shape, no rips or tears in the seats and the carpet was like new (or somebody took the time to have it detailed not too long before I got it). Despite the fact that older propane systems were notorious for stealing away a lot of engine heat to function, I had hot air blowing from the vents when I needed it.

It could have been a keeper, but it just wasn't meant to be.

The first problem to rear it's head involved the powered tailgate I mentioned earlier. The rubber seal at the top of the tailgate, bottom of the rear power window, had been compromised and allowed a lot of water to pass through for years (best guess), rotting out the inside and burning out the electric when I tried to raise the window again. There was a "manual" way to get the window up, which required opening the tailgate and removing the interior panel. The window problem was fixed, but the shell of the tailgate was warped out of shape, thanks to it's internal corrosion issues.

The next disaster was associated with the after market White Spoke rims and wheel studs. One day, about a week after getting the Suburban, I was driving around and minding my own business when I felt the front end on the driver's side just drop. I managed to enter a parking lot just off the road I was driving down and took a look at what had happened. Much to my surprise, the rim was just barely hanging on to the rest of the vehicle (all the wheel studs except for one had snapped off at the same time).

Needless to say, I called the friend I made the deal with and told him what just took place. Lucky for me, he had a collection of parts and came to where I was, jacked up the  front-end and went about replacing the broken parts in the parking lot. I was informed this was a common problem with these rims and I should re-torquing the wheels about once a week. I wasn't impressed with that development at all.

The final issue came along when it started to get cold outside. It was coming up to being late in the year, just before that first, but brief snow touched the ground, signalling a change of the season. Having lived in these conditions for years, I always plugged my vehicles in (if it had an equipped block heater), not taking any chances on being stranded at home with a non-starting mode of transportation.

The upside was the Suburban had a block heater, the downside was it didn't seem to make much of a difference. I used an anti-freeze tester and the fluid was of adequate strength, so it was that. The block heater, from the angle I could see it, was either really clean or relatively new (the brassy outside where the electrical cord plugged in looked new and shiny), so my final conclusion was the propane system suffered from something serious.

All of the Suburban's aliments were enough for me to become very motivated to just get rid of it and found a buyer in short order. One day, I visited a muffler shop I had been to before, to have the exhaust on another vehicle I had at the time fixed. I don't remember how the conversation got onto the topic of my Suburban, but by the end of that business day, the owner/operator of the shop had a new toy and I had some extra money in my pockets.

How does this all tie into The Crew and a Cadillac Escalade?

Well, both are big, four door SUV's built by General Motors and can be off-road capable....yeah, that's about all I got.

Dream a Little Dream

Say the word Bugatti to someone and one of two things might happen. One, they will have no idea what or who you are talking about. Two, visions of a Veyron, Chiron and/or the hyped Divo could enter their heads (unless you are talking to a true connoisseur, then brace yourself for words like Type 46/50, Type 57SC Atlantic and such).

However, you also might hear about the EB110.

I can't rightly recall the first time I saw a 110, be it on TV or in a magazine (I know for sure I have yet to see one with my own two eyes), but the shape, the sound and the very mystique of the car has been burned into my mind for the remainder of my life. Even today, almost thirty years later, the very thought of it quickens my heart and brings about a sweat producing response.

Powered by a 3.5-liter V12 engine with four turbochargers, the EB110 put out anywhere from 550 to 603 hp horsepower through an all-wheel-drive system, something quite a few modern cars take for granted. The EB110 was the right car at the right time to take on other "Supercars" of the day, such as the Lamborghini Diablo, Dodge Viper, Ferrari Testarossa, Jaguar XJ220, McLaren F1 and Acura NSX to name a few.

Sadly, production ended in 1995, after four short years. However, because of this and low production numbers, with only 139 built, they have become very valuable, with a low mileage black 1993 Bugatti EB110 GT being sold by RM Sotheby's - ARIZONA 2018 for $967,500 USD.

Not that long ago, I had the chance to see this marvel from long ago on the small screen. A show called The Grand Tour, starring former presenters of Top Gear, got their hands on an EB110 and took it for a burn around their test track. Needless to say, I was disappointed with the times, compared to other cars on the board.

Thanks to racing games, namely Forza Motorsport 6, I have the opportunity to drive this dream car from the 90's that will never happen outside the virtual world....

An Italian Stallion on a Spanish Track

In Real Racing 3, I have acquired the final car in an attempt to complete a certain series.

Last time I talked about the game, I came to a decision that I wanted to proceed towards a goal, The Road To Le Mans Porsche Series.

Up until now, I was a little short in Credits department and a few races shy of unlocking the final car needed to advance further down the line.

I already had the Ferrari 458 Spider from a while back and just a short while ago and recently collected a 599 GTO.

However, the Enzo remained behind a progress lock, which I put off until I could raise enough credits to purchase it.

Which meant taking a few side routes to tie up loose ends and cash in on those rewards.

I have always though it's better to have too much left over than just enough to buy the car, especially with how "factory fresh" vehicles generally under-perform versus players who have challenged the track before and set much higher times to beat with the more upgraded cars.

Yeah, I still came up a little short for upgrades, so off to finish another series and collect those rewards as well.

Without diving too deep in how the economy of Real Racing 3 works, I will try to sum it up as briefly as I can. I have opted to take the "free to play" approach, meaning that I haven't spent any real world money. The downside is progress is rather slow (almost five years of playing and I have about half the cars in a half completed game) and I miss out on a lot of opportunities to get cars (sometimes with Credit and Gold bonuses to sweeten the deal) that might come in handy down the road.

There are a few upsides, such as getting more value out of the game time I do put in and "fixing" some of my old standings in races I have completed a long time ago. Along the way, I receive Credits for re-running races, Gold for completing an abandoned Series and even collect another vehicle for a few hours of effort.

Real Racing 3 also has a feature built in where a player can watch a few videos and get Credits, Gold or even speed up the delivery of a car or accelerate the progress of an upgrade. In the case pictured above, I watched about five commercials for apps and games to finish off a brakes upgrade before my first race in the Ferrari Enzo.

Would one completed upgrade be enough?

Ranting and Repairs to the RVR

It's hard to believe that I have owned my 2015 Mitsubishi RVR just over three months now, at the time of this posting. Along the way, I have racked up nearly 6,500 kilometers (just under 4,100 miles for you other folks) and still having the time of my life (more so than my previous 2014 Dodge Dart during the same period of ownership). Here it sits waiting for it's first servicing since I acquired it.

This all started when I received a call from the dealer, asking me if I would like to keep a automatically booked service appointment. First, I felt a little special, since this never happened during my last, year long ownership experience (Hmmm....I wonder why Chrysler forgot about me....) and second, the cheerful tone from the female voice during the conversation from the other end (an honestly cheerful voice, not a fake attempt to hid how much some could see this call being more of a "chore" then decent customer service).

With the booking confirmed, I felt somewhat compelled to give the dirty RVR a bath (left unclean since my last, out of town and off-road adventure).

Now, before I go any further, I want to state that I don't have any serve obsessive compulsive disorders when it comes to the cleanliness of a vehicle. I know full well dust, dirt and other nastiness just happens. What really irritates me to no end is when other people don't even attempt to respect my property and ignore the results thereof.

Take the above picture for example. This is obviously the driver's side of my RVR and even with the door open, the dirt and dust levels seen is pretty low....

....but the passenger side, even with the door closed and a light source from outside the vehicle, shows easily I could grow a garden (a slight exaggeration) there.

I just don't get it. Granted, I was the only driver, but I carried four different passengers over nine days, we all walked the same ground (that fine, dry dust that just sticks to nearly everything) and yet I took an extra minute or two to not track it into the vehicle that served as transportation to and from, a lunch room and home for over twelve hours a day.

On the flip-side, I take that same extra time and care to "bang my boots" when I am a passenger in other people's vehicles (if I notice dust, dirt and/or mud on them), despite the condition of their interior. I know doing this doesn't eliminate everything I could potentially track in with me, but I am also not bringing in half the countryside on the bottom of my footwear either.

Enough about that, something new to complain about, like how poorly the automatic car wash missed cleaning off the bug buildup from the front-end of the RVR (an eternal struggle that technology may never get right). I am not too sure how the lower grille popped it's clip, but it did and I will have it looked at on a later date.

One thing that really irked me was these three scratches, revealed after the water washed the dirt away. Going from right to left, the first two are small and shallow, could be taken care of with touch-up paint (if I had any, perhaps I should get some soon). The third one on the far left is deep enough to see a sliver of exposed metal looking back. At least I know where all of these came from (my fault, I was traveling a little too close behind a pickup and it threw a rock....boulder....small planet back at me as we both cruised down a gravel road).

The day of the appointment came and off to the dealer I went.

Aside from the scheduled oil change (a $169.00 touch there, after taxes), there were a few recalls to deal with. One was for the possible corrosion on the parking brake shaft, the rear brake caliper boot not keeping moisture out and a fix to the automatic adjuster for the parking brake pad. The other was for replacement of windshield wiper links (another water/moisture issue).

While that was going on, I spent sometime in the parking lot, checking out the updates to newer RVR model and seriously eyeing up the Eclipse Cross.

Cleaned and serviced, I am now ready to take on more of life's challenges (except maybe that white car beside me, I will let that one go....).

The Spirit of McQueen - Porsche 918 at Circuit des 24 Heures

To some, Steve McQueen is best remembered for starring in twenty films and having fourteen appearances on television across his twenty seven year career. His onscreen/offscreen "King of Cool" image is still very strong in the public eye even today, nearly forty years after his passing.

He was also fairly famous for being a race car enthusiast, collector and especially driver, never passing up the chance to do both when the opportunity was presented. Onscreen, he would perform a lot of his own stunts, when the producers and insurance underwriters would let him. Offscreen, he was a serious driver.

McQueen started his formal racing career when he entered a Siata 208S in the 14th Palm Springs Road Race in 1958. During the 1961 British Touring Car Championship season, McQueen would finish third in a Mini at Brands Hatch. In 1970, he raced at 12 Hours of Sebring with a cast on his left foot (thanks to a motorcycle accident two weeks earlier). McQueen and co-driver Peter Revson would take the Three-Litre Class title with a Porsche 908/02.

There have been volumes written and documentaries produced about McQueen's movie and racing career that would be more informative in content, so to cover all that same martial here would be an exhaustive and pointless venture.

Instead, I will talk about my personal perspective on one of what I would consider to be McQueen's greatest movies (the other would be Bullitt), Le Mans.

Of everything I have seen in my life, Le Mans has had the biggest impact on how I look at cars from the outside and how to drive them from the inside. Part drama, part documentary, the movie is an immersive time capsule of a era where drivers fought each other and themselves to not just win races, but to stay alive to see another day. Their attention to minute details and overall environmental awareness seems to be something lost on today's everyday motorists, even with all of the technological advances in "driver's aids."

In the modern world of "over-safe" vehicles, be it on the road or the track, this movie could be a real somber eye opener of how far we have come (or gone backwards, depending on your perspective) from having a driver in control of a vehicle and not a series of computers.

Ignore the look on my face, I was just told how much the car I am touching is worth.

The current Porsche 918 is so much the spiritual and technological successor to McQueen's 917 that once I learned our local Porsche showroom possessed one, I just had to see it and if lucky enough, touch it. Imagine my surprise once I saw it was wearing Gulf livery, almost completing a connection from my youth to today.

Steve McQueen died in November of 1980, when I was entering my third month of Grade 1, so I will never meet the man. However, I do believe that anyone who understood what he was trying to do with Le Mans, that connection he had with that Porsche 917, the very package of it all, will have a little McQueen inside of them....

Evolution of an Evolution: Gran Turismo 4 vs Forza Motorsport 6 Apex

Of all the driving games I had, Gran Turismo 4 was my all time favorite title I played at home.

Back when I acquired my first Playstation 2 (it was black, thick and very temperamental when it overheated), I built up quite the library of games, across nearly all genres, but it was the driving games I enjoyed the most, plugging a lot of time in attempting to finish them.

I had titles like Need for Speed Underground, ATV Offroad Fury 2 (my first online, multiplayer experience from a console), Tokyo Xtreme Racer 3 and an older PS1 game called World's Scariest Police Chases, just to name a few. However, it was the Gran Turismo series that really stole away most of my free time.

Despite the fact I recently bought a real world Mitsubishi, I have been driving the virtual versions for years (when available in games). I drove them in Tokyo Xtreme Racer 3, I drove them in Gran Turismo 3 A-Spec and I drove them a lot more in Gran Turismo 4.

Due to being a lot younger and not nearly as financially responsible as I am now, I sold my first PS2 and game library to a friend, just to cover a bill that came by "surprise mail." A few years would go by before I got my second (and last, the silver one pictured way up there) Playstation 2 as a Christmas gift from my wife. I wasted no time and partially rebuilt my library, only replacing the titles I really missed the most (namely Gran Turismo 3/4).

However, with the then recent arrival of my son and real life demanding more of my time with family and work, I drifted away from racing on virtual tracks and driving on a road to a much different "daily grind." That silver Playstation 2 and it's games wound up getting lost in the great shuffle of life....

Fast-forward nearly ten years later and Playstation is up to number 4 and I discovered a free to play variant of the Forza series for PC. I have talked at length and created many gameplay videos using this title, but I haven't shared one particular car I use a lot....

Since I am on the topic of virtual Mitsubishi's, wouldn't it be a cool idea if somehow I could play a favorite game from the past against it's modern replacement in my life?

Thanks to the mysterious power of emulation on PC, I can....

Le Mans Through Ferrari

Ferrari.

The name alone can have a very strange, but almost magical effect on some people. Seeing one pictures or with a person's own eyes can cause a physical stimulus that could be closely equated to a boy having a serious crush on a girl and vice versa. Driving one....well....let's keep this conversation at least PG rated, shall we?

Much to the shock of some, Ferraris don't do much for me. I am completely able to maintain physical, emotional and psychological control of myself when I see and touch one. In fact, I took the above picture of a parked Rosso Scuderia California T with a 553 horsepower, 557 lb⋅ft of torque, twin-turbo 3.9-litre V8 with the most steady of hands. I won't lie and say the look of one wasn't pleasing, but from the point of view of admiring a timeless work of functional art, not some unattainable object that embodies euphoric sensuality.

Besides, I have owned a Ferrari (of sorts) for over twenty five years and despite not being able to drive it, it hasn't let me down through it's intended purpose yet!

Since I started playing Real Racing 3, I have been all over the place with gameplay. I never had a plan for progress and jumped onboard with every special event to earn vehicles that only sidetracked me from carrying on in a linear fashion.

As it goes for Ferraris, I have built up a rather modest collection of those, through gameplay purchases and completing a few special events along the way.

However, I have set my eyes on a goal and I need to play through the cars I got, cars I will have to buy and one more locked series to reach it....

The 24 Hours of Le Mans.

Here's to hopping this latest acquisition will be part of the ticket to get there....