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I Bought The Most Reliable American Car Ever Built. Now I’m Putting It To The Test

The simplicity of the slant six engine design, its relatively modest output, and the quality of the main rotating parts (including a forged crankshaft) as well as the effective cooling and lubrication systems, meant these engines lasted forever. Find any “most reliable engines of all time” list on the internet, and the Chrysler slant six will be on it.

This is why I bought my 1965 Plymouth Valiant. I want a winter car to replace my Lexus LX470, which is a swell car, but worth too much for me to let rust out on Michigan’s salty roads, and a bit boring and thirsty, with its four-speed slushbox and ridiculous curb weight. I want something fun to drive in the winter, and few things are as fun as a three-speed column-shift manual transmission.

Image for article titled I Bought The Most Reliable American Car Ever Built. Now I'm Putting It To The Test — Image: Syd

I spotted the car on upstate New York’s Facebook Marketplace with an asking price of $2,835. Andrew and his wife Sydney drove me over an hour to a Christian bible camp, where the man who runs the place showed me his wasp-infested Valiant, which he swore had only 51,500 original miles (this, I later learned when going through the service records, was false; the notes clearly show the vehicle eclipsing 100,000 miles).

The man was nice (to me, not the wasps; he murdered them viciously — odd behavior for someone who runs a bible camp, but also maybe not), but didn’t know much about his car. He’d only owned it for a few years, and couldn’t tell me whether first gear is synchronized (it is not). Is it a bit alarming that he didn’t know the answer to that? Yes, a bit. I’ll change the transmission fluid as soon as I can to drain out chunks of those first gear teeth.

The test drive went well; motor fired up quickly, and the transmission was quiet. I handed the seller $2,000, he signed his registration, and I was off. Well, after filling the motor with a quart of oil, the radiator with nearly a gallon of coolant, and the single brake fluid reservoir with a splash of DOT 3.

Following Andrew’s Mitsubishi Montero, I drove the Valiant 60 miles from the bible camp to my friend’s house, and fell head-over-heels in love. The three-speed column-shift transmission is sublime; it’s fun to shift, and goes into all three gears (plus reverse) smoothly. The smooth-revving slant-six is just incredible, offering plenty of torque, and never stuttering under acceleration. Sure, there’s some vibration under acceleration; neither the fuel gauge nor the coolant temperature gauge works; and there’s plenty of rust on the floorboards, doors, and quarter panels (the main unibody rails are solid); but I don’t care. This regular old 1960s Plymouth sedan — with its blue interior filled with two three-person bench seats — has my heart.

Well, for now, that is. This machine still has to get me 650 miles from upstate New York to Michigan; only then will I know whether it deserves the title of “Most reliable American car ever.”

At $1,800, Could This 1992 Nissan Sentra ‘Dune Buggy’ Be All The Car You Need?

At $1,800, Could This 92 Nissan Sentra ‘Dune Buggy’ Be A Deal?

Sacramento, California, Craigslist, or go here if the ad disappears.

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Teen Gets Into A Car Then Drives Straight Into A Pool

An Infiniti G37xS gets a nice deep clean at the bottom of a pool.

A teen driver in Colorado likely learned a couple of good driving lessons on Thursday after they reversed an Infiniti G37xS into the deep end of a pool. The car may be a little wet, but the driver and their passenger are reported to be safe.

Police in Lakewood, Colorado, responded to a report of a car getting a deep clean at the bottom of a pool on Thursday.

Its driver, a teenager with a learner’s permit, accidentally put the car into reverse and sent it through a fence and into the pool, reports CBS 4 Denver.

Police cited the driver with careless driving but are happy to say that the teen and their adult occupant escaped the vehicle without injury.

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Of course, the police couldn’t help themselves and dropped a one liner that I feel so bad for giggling at:

Just FYI, the best line for this is “Check out our new Infiniti Pool”. Everyone else is battling for second place.

The responses on Twitter deliver even worse groaners.

Meanwhile, West Metro Fire Rescue posted a video of the extraction process for the car.

In it, the department shows its divers chaining up the Infiniti’s rear wheels to the winch and boom of a nearby wrecker. The car was then yanked out with the help of 2x4s.

It’s easy to roast the driver for the mistake, but we’ve all done a silly thing or two while learning how to drive, sometimes resulting in a crash. Hopefully, this teen isn’t deterred from getting behind the wheel again and now knows to make sure that they’re in the correct gear. They also likely learned the useful skill of how to escape a sinking car.

This Is Why Formula One Cars Are So Freakin’ Long

It’s that time of year again. You know, the part where we take the Formula One circus to the streets of Monaco and pray for an entertaining race despite the fact that the cars are about as long as the yachts parked out in the harbor. And, of course, that means it’s the time of year where we ask the same question over and over: why the hell are F1 cars so damn long?

It seems like the cars get bigger and bigger every year. Where the cars used to be bullets, they are now essentially longswords on wheels. And plenty of folks have had ideas about how to shrink the cars, like reintroducing refueling (which would create a smaller fuel tank) or using narrower tires. But there are legitimate reasons why the cars have grown longer—and why that won’t be changing any time soon.

Basically, F1 cars have been growing for decades. A deeper understanding of aerodynamics during the 1970s made a lot of team owners realize that a longer, thinner car provided a better distribution of air. You want something thin that can pierce the air, which means you need to redistribute weight laterally, not vertically. Safety saw drivers sitting lower in the cockpit to keep their heads tucked below a roll bar, to the point where they were almost laying on their backs. And changing regulations have resulted in very specific measurements being included in the rule books, so there’s not as much wiggle room as there used to be.

But cars started getting noticeably longer in the recent era for several reasons. First, the introduction of a hybrid power added a ton of more electrical components as opposed to a straight-up combustion engine, which requires teams to use extra space. The elimination of refueling saw the introduction of larger gas tanks. There are extra wires and electrical bits and bobs to power things like radios, in-car cameras, telemetry, and the data projected on the steering wheel. Once you start adding all this extra 21st century technology, you’re going to start running out of space unless you expand the car.

The FIA will generally take all these changes into account when it proposes a new set of rules, which means it comes up with mandatory weight and size limits to ensure that teams include everything without skimping but also without adding too much extra nonsense.

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And, of course, aerodynamics still play a role. You don’t want a wide car. You want something more arrow-like, that narrows to a sharp point and that keeps the sidepods slimmer and carved to redirect air more efficiently. So, if you keep adding more shit into your car, you’re going to need to put it somewhere, and no one wants to bulk up the sides of the car. Which means you get F1 cars that are as long as yachts.

If you’re not convinced, then consider this: for 2019, the FIA added five kilograms of allowable fuel capacity so teams wouldn’t have to scrimp and save fuel during the race. But even that relatively meager addition required an extension of the cars’ lengths because there just wasn’t space to cram all that extra fuel in. That was already the preferable route, anyway; Mercedes had opted for a longer wheelbase in 2018, which saw its extra body surfaces generate more downforce in corners that outweighed the fact that the extra length made for a heavier car. And you don’t need me to tell you that Mercedes was absurdly dominant in 2018.

There are, of course, other downsides to the longer car. It makes it more challenging for cars to pass each other, since it takes a greater amount of track space to do so. On thinner or twistier tracks, you’re not going to see as much overtaking because the sheer length of the car serves as an inherent blockade.

But we’re not likely to see many differences. Back in 2020, F1 technical consultant Rob Smedley told Motorsport Magazine that “there is no single magic bullet” to fix the length problem. You can’t just reintroduce refueling or mandate shorter cars when you’d end up compromising on safety or speed. There would need to be a wholesale rewriting of the rulebook to create shorter cars—and it’s probably just not going to happen in this day and age. You can go ahead and assume the longer cars are here to stay.

I’ve Got A Bone To Pick With Bentley’s Pikes Peak Race Car

What you see here is Bentley’s newest race car, the Continental GT3 Pikes Peak, built explicitly to attack the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb this June. This is the third time in as many years that Bentley has launched a factory effort at PPIHC, following a production car record in a Continental GT in 2019 and a production SUV record set by a Bentayga. This time Bentley is aiming for the Time Attack 1 record, a lofty goal, with mountain regular Rhys Millen at the wheel — Millen also drove in ’18 and ’19. There’s only one problem: this isn’t a GT3.

Cup Grand Touring Cars, colloquially known as GT3, is a set of regulations developed by SRO and maintained by the FIA for grand touring racing cars. Street cars are strictly homologated to the class with limits on horsepower, minimum weight, and aerodynamics. In order to run in the class, Bentley has to build all of its Continental GT3 racers to the same specification and it will receive adjustments to its performance relative to other cars in the class with series-mandated ballast or engine air intake restrictors.

While Bentley specifically calls its Pikes Peak machine a “GT3” it has been modified above and beyond the spec of the class so that it simply cannot be GT3 any longer. While it may have started as a car intended for GT3 homologation, it has been prepared and bastardized beyond the scope of that name. With a huge rear wing, the deepest diffuser I’ve ever seen, and a massive dual-plane front splitter flanked by gargantuan canards, it’s already beyond GT3, but then Bentley tuned the 4-liter twin-turbocharged engine to produce well more than the GT3 class allows. Come on, Stowe. Get your shit together.

Bentley’s Member of the Board for Engineering, Dr Matthias Rabe, comments:

“We are delighted to be returning to Pikes Peak for a third time – now powered by renewable fuel, as the launch project for another new element of our Beyond100 programme. Our powertrain engineers are already researching both biofuels and e-fuels for use by our customers alongside our electrification programme – with intermediate steps of adopting renewable fuels at the factory in Crewe and for our company fleet. In the meantime, the Continental GT3 Pikes Peak will show that renewable fuels can allow motorsport to continue in a responsible way, and hopefully it will capture the third and final record in our triple crown.”

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Pikes Peak doesn’t subscribe to any particular sanctioning body’s ruleset, preferring a run-what-you-brung approach, which is refreshing in today’s motorsport. I’m not knocking Bentley for building this truly badass Continental, but I do take umbrage with the use of GT3 in the name. I’m a stickler for things doing what they say on the tin.

To me, this car feels like the ultimate extension of a production-based machine. It’s kind of the GT version of what Porsche did with the 919 Hybrid Evo a few years ago. It took a car built to a very strict specification (in Porsche’s case the FIA’s LMP1 category) and removed the restrictive power and aero rules to see what it was capable of at full chat. If this had been called the Continental Evolution or some such thing, I wouldn’t even be writing this blog.

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