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....

A Father and Son take on Wangan Midnight

Thanks to the modern age of portable, console and computer gaming, it's been a very long time since I stepped foot into a video arcade.

Way back in my younger years, I spent a lot of time and money plugging and playing coin operated video game machines for my escape from reality. The first arcade I ever walked into was called House of Coin, pictured above at it's first of two locations in my hometown.

There is no way of knowing just how many quarters I dropped into those machines over the years, but it's safe to guess I could have purchased one outright (getting it home would have been another story altogether). Games like Pole Position, Hang On (and the later Super Hang On), Out Run (it's sequel Turbo Out Run) and Ridge Racer, just to name a few.

A personal favorite from the past was a top down viewed title called All Points Bulletin, I relive in part in my mind whenever I play a police themed game today.

Now, let's take a trip down to a local arcade and skip ahead over twenty years from when I spent any real measurable amount of time in one, where the games have become a much improved experience.

This particular arcade title, Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune 3, is based of the manga, then anime and later Live action movie of the same name. The basic premise of the series involves fictional characters involved with high speed racing on Tokyo's highway and expressway system, loosely based on real life events and people during the late 80's and 90's in that area in Japan.

My son tried to convinced me to give this "climb in, sit down and drive experience" a try. After watching him perform a few practice rounds on his own, I decided to give it a go, since it didn't look too hard to me....

Well, so much for my first versus battle against my son.

As much as I love good driving games, one of the things that most can't replicate is the very "feel" of driving. Sure, they can simulate the feedback through the steering wheel and pedals (both arcade sit down machines and home consoles/computers can have this optional equipment, I still use gamepads for both), but not the g-forces the body is subjected through in hard cornering, accelerating and/or braking (I suppose gimbles could be used to some effect, but the cost of maintenance and safety certification of those machines could be very prohibitive).

For an experience that comes as close to real driving (short of actually doing it, in a legal and safe manner), would have to involve Go-Karts.

I decided to purchased a game card for Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune 3, to save the progress of my races and any upgrades to my Mitsubishi Evolution VI RS, should we go back for future rematches. My son got a really lucky break, collecting a free, pre-loaded card from one of the attendants of the arcade and awaking the Paul Walker fan inside him....

Seems I have to step up my game.