Author Archive: Eric Rood
Get up close and personal with Randy Ball’s MiG-17; this walkaround is a must for plane geeks
When the Cold War ended, a number of Soviet Bloc countries liquidated their air force inventories, particularly of older-spec planes, while they made room for more Western-built planes. The upshot of...
James Hinchcliffe will start the 100th Indy 500 from pole just a year after a near-fatal accident at the track
Just a year after watching the Indianapolis 500 from a hospital bed, James Hinchcliffe has penned the first chapter of a fairy tale comeback story with by claiming the 2016 Indy 500 pole. He was the...
CraigsList: The World’s Nicest Chevette Scooter Is Up For Sale
There’s no point in sugar-coating this: The Chevette was a miserable car from a miserable era of American motoring. The 1973 gas shortage had sent automakers into a panic and Chevy had...
Somehow everybody survived this massive airborne Formula 3 wreck in Austria
If there’s anything to take away from this absolutely brutal crash in the European Formula 3 Championship last weekend, it’s that modern safety gear is entirely remarkable. Chinese driver Zhi...
Two rally cars crash into same section of woods, which promptly catches on fire
Fire is a racecar driver’s biggest fear and there are few things more frightening than the prospect of experiencing fire on a rally stage miles from any fire crew. That circumstance befell not one...
Is this super-rare Ford GT road racer worth almost a million bucks?
Much ado has been made this year about Ford’s return to racing at Le Mans with the new GT, but it’s perhaps a less-well-known fact that Ford GTs have raced at Le Mans in the last decade and a...
Air Muscle: Watch a classic helicopter do some low-margin heavy lifting among the high-rises of downtown Chicago
During a recent weekend trip in Chicago, I heard the tell-tale drumbeat of helicopter rotors early on a Saturday morning. It was not entirely out of the ordinary, though, since helicopters fly tours...
Major Imapct Video: Touring car piledrives track barriers after a tire failure at Spa
In just his third weekend racing in the TCR International Series, Attila Tassi—who has an excellent racing name, we might add—found out the hard way the problems that a front-tire puncture can...
Ford GT wrecks hard at Spa, second car squeaks out second GT podium in a week
“It was the [second-]best of times, it was the worst of times…” [This has been your daily serving of “Boring Platitudes as Story leads.] So goes the saga of a two-car team in endurance...
This Australian turbo-rotary hillclimb car is one of the most maniacal creations in any hemisphere
A couple years ago, a 24 Hours of LeMons racer and I talked about the potential to turn an old no-wing formula car into wicked hillclimb car with the addition of some LeMons-ingenuity aero and a...
24 Hours of LeMons Michigan Action Gallery and More – The Cars, The Inside Stories Here!
I’ve done recovered from another 24 Hours of LeMons weekend at Gingerman Raceway near South Haven, Michigan, and like most LeMons races, it takes a few days to process the level of insanity one...
V8 Supercars driver uses weekend off to crush Porsche Carrera Cup field
On a rare off weekend between his duties as a Red Bull Racing Australia V8 Supercars driver and a McLaren factory driver in Blancpain GT Series, Shane Van Gisbergen does what any sane person does: He...
Watch former Top Gear host Tiff Needell flog a Group B car in a classic British rallycross
The Group B Rally days are remembered for the highs and lows they brought to stage rally with the manic, earth-shakingly powerful all-wheel-drive super-hatchbacks creating a spectacle off the beaten...
Callaway Corvette C7 GT3 collects its first race in German GT series
The Callaway-built Corvette C7 GT3 at long last debuted in Germany’s ADAC GT Masters with an up-and-down weekend at Oscherscleben, but this past weekend brought the car’s maiden victory at...