Over the years, The Canadian Motorsport Hall of Fame has moved several times while trying to find an appropriate venue to display its’ collection of historically significant race cars and memorabilia. Finally, it looks like the CMHF has found a permanent home at Legendary Motorcar in Milton, just a short drive west of Toronto. Legendary is the home base of Peter Klutt, host of Dream Car Garage on SpeedTV and the building actually houses the show studio, along with an incredible collection of cars. To showcase this new home, the CMHF is holding a Grand Opening on Saturday, June 10th. The entry fee is only $5 per car and the event runs from 11 to 3. I’d be willing to bet that they may be offering tours of the whole facility. If they do, take the tour as the place is stunning.
The Collection is home to such gems as the Mackenzie Financial Indy car that Scott Goodyear drove to victory at Indy and a Canadian built Walter Wolf Racing Formula 1 car along with a number of other cars that have won in the hands of Canadian drivers.

Along with the opening at Legendary, there is a track day at Mosport. This event will give participants the chance to experience one of the most important tracks in North American racing history. Several important Canadian drivers will be on hand including Scott Goodyear, Ludwig Heimrath and Marty Roth. Registration is limited to 50 participants and you can find more info here.

First, Autoblog reported that the Challenger concept had appeared in Orange County and posted links to some pics. On Saturday Morning, the car cruised into the weekly Crystal Cove Auto Show on Pacific Coast Highway in Newport Beach. The folks over at Chrysler really seem gung ho to get the public hyped with public glimpses of this real driver. Thanks to Drew Phillips Photography for these pics.

In response to my post asking where the pocket rockets have gone, Boston Listed a handful of cars currently for sale that fit the bill of Pocket Rocket. What struck me as odd was the prices he qouted for these cars, so I thought it might be fitting to do some cross border shopping. Often, vehicle pricing varies greatly from North of the border to South of the border. What may be an affordable car in the United States may not be such a great deal up here in The Great White North.

Pocket Rocket North South Price Comparo

Cooper S USA $21,900

Canada $30,600

RSX USA $20,325

Canada $27,100

WRX USA $24,495

Canada $35,495

Civic Si USA $20,290

Canada $26,080

Just for fun, as we have a couple of Elise owners as regular readers, I thought I’d throw out the numbers for it as well.

Elise USA $42,990

Canada $58,550

Now that we see the full break down, you can see that some cars that are a great deal down south are not so cheap up here. The Elise, while still a great car for the money, is $15,500 more in Canada than it is in the States! Given current currency exchange rates, where the Canadian dollar is about 92 cents on the US dollar, that certainly doesn’t account for the giant price increase.

There is no question that there are some great little cars running around out there. The Garage definition of a Pocket Rocket includes the word VALUE. Perhaps I’ll change my previous comments a bit to say that there are no real budget concious pocket rockets available in Canada, rather than in North America.

Looking back to 1968, Arthur C. Clarke predicted a computer who’s intelligence had risen to the point of self thought. Hal thought for himself. At the time, it was unthinkable. Today, most of us probably think it’s just a matter of time. Of course, when there is new tech floating around, there is always some gearhead who will apply it to cars.

Over at Togelius, a couple of guys with really big brains are applying technology to create video race cars that actually are able to think their way around a race track! They even use a reward system that the neural systems react to, to affect the way the cars drive around the track. They can go for the fastest lap, or they can just try to out do the other car. In that case it becomes like a short track stock car race, where competitors are stuffing each other into the wall.

It has been said for some time that modern Formula 1 cars could be driven by monkeys, but perhaps in the future they will drive themselves! Move over Michael, Hal is movin in.

I was strolling across the local AMC Theater parking lot, when there it was. This may be the ultimate in Tuning by Trailer Park Boys! Spinner hub caps, how lame is that?

One thing you can count on in Durham Region is lots of car shows. Just down the road, Oshawa is home to one of GM’s highest quality plants. Having that many autoworkers in the region pretty much assures that there will be car buffs of all kinds. It’s odd that few of these shows are actually advertised, so often i just stumble across them. This show was held at Auto Accessory Zone and hosted by the Toronto Civic Club. This was definately a Tuner show and not a Civic show, as there was everything from Civics, to Saturns, Mazdas to a supercharged Cadillac. The old school was even represented with an old Galaxie 500. To see more pics, you can visit here.

The 1967 Player’s Grand Prix of Canada was held at Mosport. Reigning World Champion Jack Brabham was the winner, driving a Brabham B19-Repco. The program holds some pretty cool advertising for the 67 US GP as well as an ad featuring Graham Hill Girl’s Driving Gloves for $9.95

Over at Jalopnik, they are talking about this really cool engineering wonder of the German car world. It looked pretty cool so I scooted over to the home site to find that this incredible car stacker is only just the beginning of a wild automotive adventure.

The incredible car dispenser is actually housed within a VW new car dealership and holds their complete new car inventory. Buy a new car, give a token to the attendant and the machine retrieves your car. A glass door opens and spits our your new car. I wonder how they shake the machine when a car gets stuck in it’s slot. When it finally falls, do you sometimes get two?

The Volkswagen dealership is actually one of 2 dealerships in Autostadt, an automotive theme park. The other store is none other than a Lambo shop! The park also boasts a Ritz-Carlton hotel, 7 restaurants and a car design studio. There is an automotive museum, a technology museum and even a theater with dance school. There are 3 driving schools, catering to Schumacher wannabes, off road newcomers and even little kids.

Anybody visiting Wolfsburg soon has got to check this place out. Just watch out for things falling from the vending machine!

Earlier this week I was watching the net hard trying to find results from the Pontiac Solstice’s first race, but yesterday I got busy & one of the big guys beat me to it!

Race prepped by Phoenix Performance and driven by Andrew Aquilante, the Solstice headed out to it’s first ever race in the SCCA’s SSB class at New Hampshire International Speedway on May 6th. What a debut it was. Qualifying 2nd, the 18 year old driver was only 9 one thousandths of a second off the pole sitter’s time. Press releases haven’t given any actual race details, but when it was all said & done the car finished in 3rd place, only 1.5 seconds behind the leader.
This is actually the first Club Sport Package Solstice off the production line, so a podium finish is a big boost to the program. It’s likely that the other 2 podium cars are fully sorted racers with a couple (at least) of seasons under their belts.

The teams running Mazdas had better have some tricks up their sleeves, or else they are going to get steamrolled once the Solstice package is fully sorted.

The Chicago SVT Club has posted a group of pics from another club’s trip to a secret location. It seems that this elusive individual has an unbelievable garage full of some of the most sought after exotics. Photos were allowed, but for obvious reasons, the location and identity of the owner have not been published. follow the link to see the full photo set. This is truly wild.