Hit The Road
Mar. 9th, 2020 07:59 pmSeveral of these models have already ended their production runs.
Several of these models have already ended their production runs.
While chasing a research addiction thread, I learned overday that the United States leg of the World Series Formula V8 3.5 tour will be at the Circuit of the Americas in Austin Texas the third weekend of September.
And I wish I could go see it in person.
It won't be on American broadcast TV because it will be the height of gridiron season and all the networks that bother have committments with the NCAA conferences.
A research thread that started with a fellow on Facebook posting the pictures of an old Doyusha car model he'd just bought last week has led me in a bunch of directions that appealed to my weirdness.
One such place was the particulars of my sister's first car, a Datsun 1200 (a.k.a. Nissan Sunny). At the time it was built it was the cheapest new car available in the States...and I sort of wonder what manufacturer and model has that title now.
After that, it led me to the story of Isuzu cars in America--which ended (among other places) with the Impulse and the Geo Storm. For years I saw Storms parked in the backs of people's yards and was weirdly attracted. Now I know why--they're four-fifths of the way to being LOTUSES. I wonder now how much work it would entail to fit a Storm with the same kind of Lotus suspension that was optional on Impulses--and what modern Lotus powerplant would work in the engine bay.
I won a $50 gift card for Amazon.com in a sweepstakes over the weekend, and I'm looking forward to spending it.
Because of the event, I decided to look at a bunch of quasi-gift cards I received from car dealerships for GoShoppingMall.com and selectyourgifts.com (which are one and the same company!) that I've had for years. They're still "good" because I hadn't "spent" them.
The business model of American Sales Industries is kind of hard to grasp. You can't exactly buy direct from them like a normal retailer...you have to have been issued a prize card, usually from a car dealership sales event or some other such promotion. The dollar amount shown on the card doesn't mean an actual cash value: it's quasi-credit for inflated prices on the catalog of items, whose actual retail value matches the "shipping and handling" fees, which the consumer has to pay out of pocket (the prize amount then only sets a limit on what you can buy, but doesn't go towards buying anything!). So to actually get "$500" of use out of a prize card, you'd have to spend probably $50 to $100 of real money yourself.
So what's in the catalog? Basically the same kind of stuff you find in the tourist-trap stores like Golden Eagle and Lily's...but not as many of them. Steak knives. Travel mugs. Little tool sets you can keep in your car. Chintzy jewelery and cheap watches. Tote bags and gunny sacks. Obsolete electronics and software.
In theory, my "$1550" in collected quasi-credit would get me 38 of their RC model cars. But I'd have to spend about $645 in real money for the shipping and handling. That's why I haven't used the cards yet.
* Eddie Cheever, # 3 Tyrell
* Danny Sullivan, # 4 Benetton
* Mario Andretti, # 5 Lotus (the year he won the season)
* Michael Andretti, # 7 McLaren
* Danny Ongais, # 14 Penske
* Brett Lunger, # 18 Surtees
* Scott Speed, # 19, Toro Rosso
* Bobby Rahal, # 21 Wolf
* Mark Donohue, # 28 Penske
* Kevin Cogan, # 51 Ram Theodore
* Peter Revson, # 66 Penske
The only current American Driver in F1 is Alexander Rossi at Caterham F1 Team, although he is as of the just-finished season a relief Driver and not assigned a number.