The All-New Mercedes A45 AMG

The all-new Mercedes A45 AMG. Commence drooling.

It's quite good looking, but in typical Mercedes fashion, it does everything wrong for me: it's heavy, it's expensive and it features some new goofy transmission that rules your gear selection more than Terminator would with a gun to your head.

It will supposedly weigh less than 1,500kg. But 1,500kg is a lot! Certainly light for a Mercedes, but I'm tired of making these qualifiers! This is the precise reason Mercedes owners' clubs take trips to the golf course rather than the race track.

In the back of virtually every Mercedes engineer's head is the desire to put a higher emphasis on luxury over performance. And when they want performance, luxury is the last thing they'll sacrifice, after fuel economy, the stereo and a quiet exhaust note have all been thrown out the window.

For me, a "real" car fan (argue what you will what that entails), but in short, I love lightweight, manual-transmission sports cars with rear-wheel drive. This car is none of those. Nor is it expected to be cheap. It's estimated to cost anywhere from $55,009.50 to $62,868.00. However it's worth noting these figures were achieved after a Pound-to-Dollars conversion. I'm even skeptical this thing's even going to come to the 'States.

All that means one less douchebag with an undeserved sense of self-fulfillment for owning a car well above his own driving ability and despite this, thinks he's an F1 driver thanks to the car he drives. In our country, anyway.

My Instagram Attempts

Over the past two days I have found myself completely engulfed in Instagram. I cannot believe how much fun it is to take my [car] photos and add a few filters, brightener and blur effects.

 I think it's the app's ease of use that makes it so addictive. I mean, it's so simplistic. Who comes up to you and says, "Man, have you tried out this new program?! It's called Photoshop!" By comparison, Photoshop is like molecular physics. 

Also, the speed at which you can produce (churn) pieces of art (shit) out is unparalleled. I include those parentheses because most of the content on Instagram really doesn't deserve filters or any of the other effects the app offers because they're crap with or without the filters. 

People like to feel like they're professionals, when in actuality, they don't deserve half of the attention or support they've garnered. Little do they realize you can take a picture of feasibly anything, Instagramize it and it'll turn out at least alright. 

And yes, I realize, all I damn post are car pictures. Get over it.

I don't know about you, but I think my "work" is a step above the majority of the selfies and wannabe-hipster landfill that take up the majority of Instagram's server storage.

You be the judge.

If I'm honest, the black and white photo above this very text is absolutely exquisite. 

This almost looks like a toy.

Give me your feedback, like always there is room for improvement, or so I'm told.

Enormous Frustration: SCCA Northwest Indiana Region for April 15, 2012

I realize this is weeks old now, but after searching for my results online, I found that for my first official autocross, I did very competently. I felt I deserved a far better result with the times I was clocking it at. But no, the SCCA seems to have a deep-seated hatred for all things BMW.

My, or should I say, my father's 2007 BMW 328xi, for which he was gracious enough to allow me to drive to the [not so] wonderful city of Gary, IN to participate in the Northwest Indiana Region SCCA autocross for Sunday, April 15, 2012.

In an older post, I said how "great" things went. Sure. They went real "great." No really, as cynical as I sound, they really did go quite well. However, I am quite astonished with how unfair the SCCA rulings are for my FULLY, GODDAMN STOCK BMW. Not a single modification was made to this car. Not only because it isn't mine, but also because its sole [and quite sad] purpose to to carry people from the proverbial "point A" to "point B." If you can ever pinpoint them on a map for me, get back to me and I'll give you a cookie.

Anyway, back to how unfair the SCCA is to BMWs. My dad's car was fully stock, and yet, I was placed in the ASP group, which implies that I have GODDAMN high performance tires, GODDAMN coilovers, GODDAMN brake upgrades, and any other sort of GODDAMNNESS. No. I had all-season run-flat tires, OEM brakes, OEM suspension, and not a mod to be seen, unless you consider my sister's wonderfully artistic scrape to the right of the front bumper. But seriously.

 Here are my results if you dare to look. Look for my name, it's "Michael Lenoch," in case you happened to forget. The best raw time I posted was a 48.152. Which is not bad. Not bad at all. Especially noting what I had to work with here, people!

My Results ARE HERE!

See, I am so angry with this situation because of how screwed I got thanks to what the rulebook said. If you look at my, and my fellow novice competitors' raw times, you will see that I fairly got fifth place out of eight. However, I would and [damn well] should have received a better time multiplier from being placed in the D-Stock group, which I never was. Sure, we read it in the handbook. 2006-2010 BMW 3 Series automobiles belong in ASP (that's "A Street Prepared") group, but this made no sense. The only competition I had in my class was a fully modified 1993 Mazda RX-7 with coilovers, summer tires and brakes. Okay, SCCA, that's fair.

And your organization is a joke.