Automotive awesome: Lancia Delta Integrale

Thanks to Jalopnik for providing this bit of deliciousness this morning:
My god what a beautiful car. I love what they said about it:

The Lancia Delta Integrale WRC is one of those great litmus tests for car people. If someone looks at it and sees and old Italian econobox they are not a car person. If they see it and immediately start drooling you know they are.

It is so true! What–you wonder–is the big deal? /You just want to hear it go?

From inside:

From outside:

I remember this kid Nabil had a whole bunch of 1/18 model Italian cars made by Burago. One of my favorites was the Martini liveried Integrale he had– it had the full-opening rear of the S4 Group B car and the similar front as well. I was wowed with that car before I ever even watched it go anywhere, before I found out about it’s rally domination and now I find myself wondering– wouldn’t that make just a great daily?

-r-

Fiat in USA! It’s happened!

Look!:

I just realized something amazing today, while being slightly less disappointed at something more amazing not taking place– I mean, I saw an ad for “Alfa Romeo Seattle” and got really excited only to discover Alfa is still not actually in the US. No, the Competizione 2C does not count! BUT– Fiat has apparently finally landed! Above is actual footage from the fiatusa.com website where you can find out that a new Fiat 500 is base-priced at just $15,500. That is quite less than I was expecting, and that is very exciting. Now the real question is, when does the Abarth come to our shores?  :)  Ok, ok, I’ll take a moment to be happy about what’s actually there now. All sorts of old-timers will be making fix-it-again-tony jokes, and an unfortunately large amount of people will think these are unreliable Italian cars of the early eighties. Hopefully, though, there will be enough of us excited to have something different than the usual malaise of Hondas and Toyotas plodding along our streets touting some otherworldly mileage figures and scoring zero for being a good, interesting car!

Also on the topic of Fiat getting to places, they’ve also brought this car to Kuwait recently. More on that later.

Cheers,
-r-

How lucky can you get on a moped

So thanks to Jalopnik for pointing out this crazy video of how lucky one can sometimes get. (The flipside of this is the guy on the motorcycle should have seen crazy people coming behind and moved away)

The real question, though, as Virginia asked when she saw this: “why did that happen?” I mean the first car sweves left too fast, ok. But why does the other guy crash? Was he staring at the first car crashing?! I wonder if this was in Kuwait…