Ford has announced plans to begin accepting orders for the 2013 Focus ST in the United States.
Birabongse Bhanubandh Lucien Bianchi Gino Bianco Hans Binder Carlo Abate
Tuesday, May 1, 2012
2013 Ford Focus ST pricing announced (US)
Ford has announced plans to begin accepting orders for the 2013 Focus ST in the United States. 
Vettel collision: A champion under pressure?
Sebastian Vettel's behaviour during and after the Malaysian Grand Prix has been causing a bit of a fuss in Germany over the past few days.
The media have lapped up his response to his collision with backmarker Narain Karthikeyan, in much the same way as their British counterparts would have done with a similar incident involving Lewis Hamilton, and Vettel has come in for a fair bit of criticism.
On the BBC after the race, Vettel called Karthikeyan an "idiot" for his role in the collision that cost the world champion fourth place.
Speaking in German, the word he chose was "cucumber" - a common insult in that country for bad drivers on the road.
Vettel faces increased competition from outside and inside his Red Bull Team. Photo: Getty/AFP
It has also been pointed out that shots from Vettel's onboard camera appear to show the 24-year-old Red Bull driver giving Karthikeyan a middle-finger salute as he drives past. This has led some to call for him to be punished by governing body the FIA, which so far is keeping a low profile on the matter.
Comparisons have been drawn with McLaren's Jenson Button - who also failed to score any points in Malaysia, but who reacted with his usual calm.
Vettel, some in Germany have said, doesn't know how to lose.
They point out that last year he won 11 races on his way to one of the most dominant championship victories in Formula 1 history. Failing to win four races in a row in that context, the critics say, should not elicit this kind of reaction.
Vettel has not spoken in public since leaving Malaysia, and Red Bull are shrugging it off.
After the race on Sunday, team principal Christian Horner defended Vettel's driving in the collision with Karthikeyan, saying that it was the Indian's "responsibility to get out of the way of the leaders as he is a lapped car".
Although the stewards penalised Karthikeyan for the incident, others are not sure it's quite so clear-cut.
One leading F1 figure told me: "It was completely Vettel's fault - he needed to give Karthikeyan more space. He only had to clear the last inch and he cut across the front of him. He was showing a bit of frustration and it bit him."
Certainly Vettel has found himself at the start of 2012 in a situation with which he is not familiar.
Vettel has had the fastest car in F1 since at least the middle of 2009, and he has used it to good effect.
But now things are different. Red Bull's new car is not a match for the McLaren, and it has also been behind one Mercedes and one Lotus on the grid in each of the first two races.
For a man who is as driven to win - to dominate even - as Vettel is, that will not be a comfortable situation.
Nor will it have escaped his attention that team-mate Mark Webber has so far out-qualified him in both races this year - again, quite a turnaround from 2011, when the Australian managed it only three times in 19 grands prix.
It is early days, but so far the comparison between the two Red Bull drivers looks much more like it was in the first part of 2010 - before the team started fully exploiting the exhaust-blown diffusers that dominated the last 18 months and which have been banned for this season.
Webber was never that comfortable in last season's Red Bull - and while he came to match Vettel on race pace in the second half of last season, he never really got on terms with him in qualifying.
Much of that was to do with the behaviour of the car on corner entry, where the exhaust-blown diffusers were so powerful in increasing performance.
Red Bull's decline has also coincided with the stiffening of the front-wing load test, an attempt to stop teams allowing the ends of the wing to droop towards the track at speed to increase downforce. Red Bull were noticeably better at doing this than the other teams.
It may be an unrelated coincidence, but this year's Red Bull suffers from understeer, a lack of front-end grip - a handling characteristic Webber is comfortable with, while Vettel prefers oversteer.
This is not the first time Vettel has been criticised for letting his emotion get the better of him when things are not going his way.
There was the infamous 'nutter' sign he directed at Webber following their collision in the 2010 Turkish Grand Prix.
There were also mistakes in Britain, Belgium and Singapore that year as he very nearly gifted the world title to Ferrari and Fernando Alonso, who lost it only after a strategic error in the final race.
Such was Vettel's domination in 2011 that it never arose- leading some to say he had reached a new level of maturity both in and out of the car.
The truth of that claim looks set to be tested this year, as Red Bull and Vettel struggle to regain a position that the driver at least seems to consider is rightfully his.
Meanwhile, his rivals will have been watching with interest.
Webber, Alonso, Button and Hamilton remember Vettel's behaviour in 2010 all too well.
Betraying his emotions in such an obvious way will be seen by them as a weakness - they will look at it and think he is rattled.
So it is true to say on the one hand that Vettel's reaction proves he is a winner.
But it is also the case that learning how to lose gracefully - as Button and Alonso, particularly, have learnt in recent years - has its benefits as well.
Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/andrewbenson/2012/03/vettel_collision_a_champion_un.html
Peter Arundell Lamborghini Alberto Ascari Peter Ashdown Ian Ashley
' 75 AMC Matador X My Old Ride . . . . . . sorta!
I had a bit of a dilemma when I bought this kit quite a while back. Did I want to make an exact replica of my old car, or do it up like I always wanted mine to look? I finally settled on a combination of the two, and I think it turned out alright. Thanks to railroad for posting his Matador in Factory Stock, as that spurred me to open the box mine was in, and finally get it done. I'd always wanted one of these cars, and I recall vividly drooling over one that a girl in high school drove, a black ' 76 X. So back in the fall of ' 88, I was cruising down the avenue not too terribly far from where I grew up, and a car sitting in the back yard on one of the side streets caught my eye. I circled the block and went down the back lane, and there it was. A ' 75 Matador X, faded orange with a white stripe. I cautiously opened up their back gate (after whistling to check if there was a dog, lol!), and went and peeked at the car. Hmmmm, buckets and console, no rust at all. So I knocked on the back door, and asked the lady who answered if that car in their yard was for sale. She said she and her husband had been talking about selling it, as it had been sitting for about a year. I asked how much, and she said I could have it for two hundred dollars. Well for that price, I didn't even care if it had an engine! I pulled the $$ out of my wallet, went and grabbed the serial # off the dash for the bill of sale, and told her I'd be back the following Saturday. Once I got it in to my Aunt Catherines back yard, where I'd arranged to store it 'til spring, I was able to look it over better. It had a 360 two barrel, single exhaust, and one busted rear spring. I fired it up, and it was banging on all eight cylinders, and just needed a tune up. I was pretty pleased, needless to say.
Regards,
sfd
Source: http://cs.scaleautomag.com/SCACS/forums/thread/1013698.aspx
Christijan Albers Bentley Supersports Michele Alboreto Jean Alesi Jaime Alguersuari
New F1 season could prove unpredictable
The Formula 1 teams arrived in Melbourne's Albert Park to be greeted by grey skies, intermittent rain and blustery wind. But not even the weather could dampen the palpable excitement and nervous tension.
The start of the new season is just a few hours away and everyone from world champions Red Bull to lowly HRT is desperate to find the answer to the question they have been asking all winter. Where will they be come Saturday and Sunday afternoons?
The F1 teams like to keep outsiders guessing before the first race by saying they don't know where they are in terms of competitiveness, but usually this is little more than kidology.
Such is their capacity to analyse data with massive super-computers that usually they have a very good idea of their position in relation to their rivals, despite the well-known difficulty of predicting form from pre-season testing.
But this year seems different; they genuinely don't seem to know - so the usual anticipation ahead of the first race of the season is magnified.
Lewis Hamilton said that judging by the data that mattered from winter testing he felt McLaren were "in the top three or four".
Ferrari's Fernando Alonso has also bigged up his team's chances for the 2012 season. Photo: Getty
Meanwhile, a senior engineer from one of the teams who will be contesting what is expected to be a congested midfield battle told me he was pretty sure Red Bull and McLaren were out front but he didn't know "whether we will be third or seventh".
Some people's anticipation is more nervous than others', though.
For teams such as Mercedes and Lotus, there is a genuine sense that they have done a good job and moved forward over the winter.
In fact there is a growing sense in the paddock that Mercedes may even be able to give McLaren and Red Bull a run for their money, something team principal Ross Brawn was quick to dismiss as "unlikely".
For others, the desire to discover the true pace of their car is tinged as much with trepidation as anticipation.
Ferrari have had what Fernando Alonso described here on Thursday as a "tough" winter, struggling with "quite a complex car in terms of set-up and understanding it".
Alonso was doing his best to talk up the team's chances, saying: "Maybe we didn't reach our targets but it doesn't mean that we are slower than the other cars. That we will not know until Saturday."
Others are keen to play down the importance of this first race of the season.
Vettel said that Australia this weekend and Malaysia next would do no more than demonstrate a "trend" for performance over the season.
And Brawn said he "preferred to look at the first four races and the range of circuits we have and see how that looks".
But the statistics belie that point of view.
Albert Park might be a unique street circuit, with a dusty, low-grip surface, and the teams may only just be beginning to work with their new cars. But actually it has proven to be a rather good arbiter of the season to come - five of the last six winners of the Australian Grand Prix have gone on to become world champion that year.
Other themes are also emerging this weekend that will have importance to one degree or another as the season develops.
F1 wouldn't be F1 without a good technical conspiracy and this year looks like being no different.
Already during pre-season testing there have been eyebrows raised at the way some teams are trying to exploit exhaust gases for aerodynamic effect.
This practice was supposed to have been ended by rule changes that have restricted the positioning and angle of the exhaust pipes and put much stricter limits on engine mapping - both an attempt to rid the sport of so-called exhaust-blown diffusers that became such important tools over the previous two seasons.
But this weekend another potential controversy has emerged over the rear wings on several cars, particularly the Mercedes, Red Bull and the Ferrari.
These new devices - that some believe to be on the fringes of legality - seem designed to exploit the DRS overtaking aid in ways not originally intended.
The DRS was designed as a tool to make overtaking less difficult - if a driver is within a one-second margin of a car he is trying to overtake, he can use the DRS in a specified zone on the track to give him a straight-line speed boost.
Mercedes, Red Bull and Ferrari, meanwhile, have what appear to be extra slots on the rear wing that can work in conjunction with the DRS to either increase straight-line speed even further, or allow the teams to run extra downforce with no drag penalty.
The most noticeable feature of the 2012 cars, though, remains the noses - and specifically the ugly 'platypus' step on all but the McLaren and Marussia.
This is a result of a rule that has lowered the nose tips of the cars to increase driver safety, but not lowered the top of the chassis.
The result is a grid full of ridiculous and ugly-looking cars, and very few are troubling to hide their frustration at the situation.
"It is unfortunate," Brawn said, "and the teams should look at themselves and blame themselves.
"[Governing body] the FIA tried to do what they could and a number of teams wouldn't agree to the changes because they said they wanted to carry over their chassis, which we all know is a load of nonsense because nobody has carried over their chassis.
"We've ended up with a very odd feature on the cars which is not very endearing and I'm sure will get fixed for 2013."
The noses, of course, will soon be forgotten if the season is close and competitive. And that will only begin to become clear as this weekend unfolds.
Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/andrewbenson/2012/03/new_f1_season_could_prove_unpr.html
Frank Armi Chuck Arnold Rene Arnoux Peter Arundell Lamborghini
62 Custom Vette.....................4/30
Going to build a custom Vette..........................................................
More coming soon..........................
Source: http://cs.scaleautomag.com/SCACS/forums/thread/1014489.aspx
Walt Ader Kurt Adolff Fred Agabashian Kurt Ahrens Jr Christijan Albers
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