 |  | | END OF THE ROAD | | | Yeah, it's a cliché title for a final column, but I've never been very original on that front. Anyway, it gets straight to the point. It's been four years since the first Fumes, almost to the day and, like Michael Schumacher, I'm wrapping things up. Unlike Michael, I'm not leaving with millions in the bank. | | Full Article | | By: Richard Chang - 11/16/2006 |
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| Fumes-TALK TO ME, GOOSE: COLIN MCRAE
Last year, after being out of the WRC for over a season, Colin McRae reunited with his longtime co-driver Nicky Grist to run a Skoda at the Wales Rally GB. If there ever was a built-in plot for a working class Brit comedy starring Stephen Rea (and maybe Timothy Spall) this was it. The two hadn't raced together in the WRC since they were at Ford in 2002. McRae's numbers speak for themselves: 11 seasons in the WRC, 25 wins, one championship (1993) and a best-selling videogame series.
5/10/2006 - Full Article
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| Fumes-RED BULL RISING
Red Bull is taking over the world. This year alone, Red Bull has its logo on cars in Formula 1, WRC, DTM, GP2, Paris-Dakar, Baja 1000 and Daytona Prototypes. I'm probably missing a few, but if it's got wheels and there's some chance of death, then Red Bull is involved. Motorsports has never seen this kind of sponsorship blitzkrieg. Ever. The next generation of racing fans will likely remember the Red Bull cars the way I remember the Marlboro letters on the red and white Penskes and McLarens of the '90s. Nevermind that Arden Red Bull team is a championship favorite in GP2 or that WRC legend Carlos Sainz drove a Red Bull VW Toureg in the Paris-Dakar or even Red Bull's partnership with Toyota in the NASCAR Nextel Cup.
4/26/2006 - Full Article
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| Fumes-ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WORLD...
I just saw the trailer for The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift. Good stuff. From what I can tell, the movie pairs up a white guy and a black guy to tackle the Asian mafia. I know it sounds familiar, but I have it from a good source that it's actually nothing like See No Evil, Hear No Evil. Apparently, it's not a comedy at all, even though Bow Wow is in it, and Lucas Black sounds like Forrest Gump. (Speaking of Bow Wow, the success rate of rappers getting into acting continues to grow. Ludicris, Latifah, Eminem, T.I. I can't name another genre of music with more acting credits than hip-hop. Not even R&B acts have made the en masse leap that rappers have.
4/17/2006 - Full Article
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| Fumes-FORMULA FUN: FINAL WORD ON MALAYSIAN GP
Wicked wicked jetlag. I left KL on Monday at 8:30 a.m. After 21 hours in the air and one more in the train, I got home at 8:30 p.m. (still Monday), watched "24" and passed out. I woke up 16 hours later and was still tired. So this is what you're dealing with right now. My head feels kind of like it's floating lightly tethered above my body. It feels more like a giant jelly doughnut. I guess this is what happens when you circumnavigate half the globe in one day ...
3/23/2006 - Full Article
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| Fumes-CRASH TEST DUMMY
Remember when you first heard about the Enzo crumpled on the side of the Pacific Coast Highway? Well, I thought the exact same thing: typical rich idiot. We've been through this before. It's what the Internet was made for. We've seen Lambos wrapped around trees and Ferraris split in two. Later that same day, in fact, I received a link to multiple shots of a Ford GT after it French-kissed a post—with less than 10 miles on the odometer. So when I heard about the Enzo, I didn't think twice.
3/8/2006 - Full Article
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| Fumes-DOUBLE TRUE: GOOGLE VIDEO IS THE BEST
I don't know how long Google Video has been up, but I found out about it about a month ago. And now I'm hooked like Chris Bangle to a crooked line, mostly going through its backlog of "Top Gear" episodes. There's nearly a hundred of them—some of them from waaay back, when Richie Blackmore co-hosted the show. Really great stuff. A time-waster on the level of "Real World" marathons. If you ever feel like playing hooky on life for a day, they're worth checking out.
2/21/2006 - Full Article
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| Fumes-'06 CIVIC SI: THE FINAL REVIEW
Is it just me or does it feel like the '06 Civic Si has been around for a few years and not just a few months? Seriously, we're barely into February, and it's already been reviewed to death. We've seen widebody versions and racecar versions. It's even appeared in the Black Eyed Peas video for "Pump It", which is up for a Grammy for Best Sell-Out Video of the Year. (Yeah, I know—B. E. P. selling out? No way.) And the only question left is: What can I add to the discussion?
2/8/2006 - Full Article
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| Fumes-IN SEARCH OF ... THE WRC
The WRC kicked off its season last weekend with the Rallye Monte Carlo. On Sunday afternoon I checked my trusty ol' Speed Channel to see if its recap show was still on at 11 pm. Yes, I'm being sarcastic, although - if there's one thing that Speed TV has been trusty and reliable at in recent years, it's giving the WRC the shaft. Still, I was somewhat surprised to find the WRC recap missing from it's Sunday lineup, replaced instead by Chop Cut Rebuild, Dream Car Garage and My Classic Car - a OWG (old white guy) hot rod block that's preceded by two obligatory hours of NASCAR Test Series from 8 pm to 10 pm.
1/25/2006 - Full Article
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| Fumes-THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY OF STILL TOO FAST TO RACE
For the longest time, Group B rally fans only had one source for classic race footage—an old Duke Video VHS tape called Too Fast to Race. It came out in 1997, featured way too much MG Metro 6R4—a naturally-aspirated grunt of a car that didn't even blip the Group B radar until the last gasp of the series—and relied heavily on slow-motion to make the most of its limited archival footage.
1/11/2006 - Full Article
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| Fumes-LONDON COUGHING
I'm in London and I'm sick and my head feels it's been through the Paris-Dakar Rally in the jumpseat of the Wraith. So I'm keeping things fast 'n' easy this week. Since I landed at Heathrow, I've been loading up on UK car mags like there's no tomorrow. They're so beautiful and well produced that I can't read a page without trying to calculate how much it cost to produce it. A few weeks ago, my magazine collection got so out of control that I decided to throw away some back issues of Evo.
12/22/2005 - Full Article
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