Car and Driver July 2017

WAITING GAMES It is a sad time for car lovers when fully half of the 25 “cars” are hideous crossovers [“25 Cars Worth Waiting For,” April 2017]. And the one truly exciting, affordable car is the Honda Civic Type R, a car so ugly even its mother couldn’t love it. I just hope the rest of the automaker herd doesn’t follow the “styling” of the Civic. —Steven K. Poughkeepsie, NY I think you mean 14 cars, and 11 vehicles that don’t belong in this magazine. —Jonathan Bird North Reading, MA I read your “25 Cars Worth Waiting For” article and was surprised that there was no mention of Buick’s sale of Opel in the piece on the new Regal. Living in Montana, I find the all-wheel-drive wagon especially interesting. However, with the Opel sale happening,…

As my bosses keep reminding me, I’m extraordinarily lucky to have this job. The luckiest part is that it allows me to meet guys like Yates. Through adventures as varied as the coastto- coast Cannonball and the writing of such inflammatory genius as The Decline and Fall of the American Automobile Industry, Brock embodied high-speed rebellion, shattering the rules that served to limit our freedom. He stoked young men’s fantasies of driving fast and not giving a shit. And he along with David E. Davis Jr. and Patrick Bedard formed the Holy Trinity of this magazine. When I met him, it was post-post-Cannonball, he had waxed famous, and I half expected him to be someone who thought his name preceded him. If anything, meeting Brock was better than worshipping him…

THE STATION WAGON has long faced extinction, but a counterpoint to the rise of the crossover and the decline of the sedan can be found in the current wobbly resuscitation of the wagon. Subaru has done its part to preserve an otherwise unfashionable style, recasting the wagon as an outdoorsy hiking shoe that isn’t an SUV. It sold nearly 183,000 Outbacks in 2016. The Audi A4 Allroad and Volkswagen Golf Alltrack, among others, now mimic that template. Latest to the party is Buick, which is getting in on the wagon-conservation effort with its new Regal TourX, the first wagon to wear the tri-shield badge in the 22 years since the Buick Roadmaster Estate wagon expired. EXTERIOR It could be said that the Germany-built Buick Regal TourX is spun from Europe’s Opel Insignia…

IN THE BAD OLD days when you busted one plastic switch on a Pontiac Bonneville, your dealer forced you to buy an entire set. Now you can pay a Russian who builds replica Star Wars guns a couple of bucks to ship you a brand-new, OEM-quality part for your old Bonnie. And soon you may want to just make it yourself in your garage. At this point, an aftermarket car part made by a 3-D printer could save you hours and hundreds of dollars, or it might simply snap in half. But just as computer-aided design rewrote automotive engineering in the 1980s, 3-D printing is looking to revolutionize the replacement-parts business, allowing car owners to create precise copies in their own garages, albeit with varying degrees of success at this early…

YOU’VE RUN OUT of garage space and cars are stacked three deep in your driveway. Time to get more real estate! Know where there’s lots of room, often cheap? Airports. A hangar usually comes with security, heat, and electricity, making it the perfect place for your collection. Hangars near big cities can rent for less than $400 per month. Half that at smaller airports gets you 1000 private square feet for automotive hootenanny. But be careful how you go about your business. Responding to a wave of people using airport hangars as personal workshops and garages, the Federal Aviation Administration rewrote the rules to shove out non-aeronautical users. The FAA wants airplanes in hangars, and anything that gets in the way of aeronautical purposes will raise a red flag as of…

A LIST OF “BESTS” IS ALWAYS TEMPORARY, but these books will add weight to anyone’s corpus of knowledge for cars, racing, and race drivers. Our list includes recent titles as well as some oldies that deserve reacquaintance. And nobody’s automotive library is complete without Sir Stirling Moss’s All but My Life: Face to Face with Ken Purdy, Purdy’s The Kings of the Road, Denis Jenkinson’s The Racing Driver: The Theory and Practice of Fast Driving, and The Reckoning by the late David Halberstam on the parallels of the American and Japanese car industries. Total Competition: Lessons in Strategy from Formula One Ross Brawn and Adam Parr; Simon & Schuster A valuable peek behind the veil at the politics of Formula 1 and the sport’s economics over the past 20 years. Includes portraits…