It’s been a great day of cooking and the odd celebratory beverage as we wait to welcome the new year. The house is about to get really rambunctious as 6 families arrive to share New Years Eve 2008. In these last few quiet moments I thought that a gallery of vintage F1 cars from this year’s VARAC Festival at Mosport would be a great idea. Grab a glass while it’s still quiet and enjoy this great show.

Created with flickrSLiDR.

Oh yes! Happy New Year!

Lose a billion or so, garner a Motor Trend Car of the Year award. It’s been that kind of an upside down year for the General. But 2008 might get off to a positive bang with odds in the favor of GM to win the prestigious North American Car and Truck of the Year awards.

In what is shaping up as a really strong ‘08 model year for GM, the automaker has already won several significant awards for the Chevrolet Malibu and Cadillac CTS.
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Everyone knows that the Rolls-Royce Phantom Drophead Coupe is a drop dead gorgeous automobile . The rich and famous have now spoken with their checkbooks to reinforce that belief

Sales of Rolls-Royce cars for 2007 are expected to be up by nearly 25 per cent over the previous year, fuelled partly by strong demand for its Phantom Drophead Coupe. The marquee, which is owned by BMW, will detail its performance for 2007 shortly as it embarks on a substantial expansion at its factory at Goodwood, West Sussex in England.
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I just came across this great video of the Rocky Mountain Rally way back in 1987 courtesy of Shawn Bishop at Rallysport.ca
This was a time when rear wheel drive rally cars still dominated the Canadian rally scene. I was at the Rally of the Tall Pines in 98 or 99 when Tim Bendle brought that yellow Datsun 510 out of retirement to have another go. The man is stunning to watch in the snow. In the early 90’s, I spent some time driving a Plymouth Fire Arrow that had a full rally suspension that had been pulled from a rally car that had some level of success. I wonder if it was one of these shown in the video.

As readers may have noticed, Jeff Bressler has become a big part of daily life here in The Garage. Our little corner of the net gives him an outlet for some of those emissions that he can’t vent over at his daily haunt. Every weekend, The Garage will now offer an audio week in review, featuring the vocal stylings of DJ Jeff.
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Can you believe it? It has been a year since Mark Tapscott put the Carnival of Cars on hold and I decided to start the Carnival of Wheels. That is 52 consecutive Sunday’s of reading some great content from the auto bloggers and mashing it all together for our readers. We’ve met some interesting new bloggers that we wouldn’t have come across otherwise and I’m sure some of their readers have found their way back over to The Garage to share in our automotive ramblings. Ok, enough sappy stuff from me. Let’s strap in and get ready for the last hot lap around the blogosphere for 2008.

First up, as we often do, let’s take a visit to RaceDriven, where Brian presents some possible reasons behind the recent drop in NASCAR’s television ratings. I have a hard time with people or organizations that don’t have the stones to accept responsibility for their own problems, so I find Brian France’s comments unbelievably lame and Brian’s suggestions are far more plausible.
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There are times when Euro supercars just make me shake my head. The incredible sounds emanating from this Lightweight Lambo could just as easily be from a F1 car rather than from a road based coupe. Turn the speakers way up and prepare to be amazed.

After the break of course:
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Here in The Garage, we are taking a couple of weeks vacation. But this isn’t your regular vacation, as we are really doing next to nothing for a change. We have been hanging around the house, saw a movie and are doing the usual holiday season stuff. Beyond that, we are taking the odd day trip here and there. Today we visited Toronto’s Black Creek Pioneer Village, which has been preserving heritage buildings and lifestyle since the middle of the last century. The village is similar in concept if not scale to the Henry Ford Museum at Greenfield Village neat Detroit except that the setting is in the mid 1800’s, well before the automobile took over from the horseless carriage.

So why do readers of The Garage care? Well, it is a pretty cool place to take the kids, but garage like activities played a bit part of life in those early days of Canadian life. You might even see some clues of what was to come. The Dominion Carriage Works that you see above may have indeed played a part in the early days of General Motors. It seems that W.C. Durant may have owned shares in DCW at some point. This carriage works stayed in operation until 1972 on a limited basis and was moved to Black Creek in 1973 along with all the tools and original carriage patterns.
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This one looks a little scary and could keep me awake at night.

Toyota will unveil a concept for a small hybrid pickup at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit next month.

Toyota said the A-BAT truck was conceived by its U.S. sales and design experts with suburban drivers in mind. Looks like a discussion during the aftermath of a wild Christmas party initiated this one.
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Maybe you can live without barley soup in favor of doing your part for the environment by supporting ethanol use. But beer? Well that’s a different story.

Many farmers in the Pacific Northwest, where our nations hop production is concentrated, have turned to more profitable lines, especially corn, which can be made into ethanol. The decrease in hop production, put at some 50 percent over the past decade, has sent hop prices through the roof, according to The Economist.
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