Petrolicious

Everybody asks for a sign eventually. Not the kind on a pole. The kind you ask for out loud in the car by yourself when you've run out of ideas about what to do next. What you're asking for is direction from a higher power, or maybe just where to get on the interstate so you can get home. The word has done both jobs for a long time. The one on the pole has the harder job.

By the very nature of big-money professional racing competition, sports car manufacturers come and go with metronomic regularity. They race when it suits them, usually when new models come out, and often it does not when it comes to budgetary cycles.

"I had to talk to my mother really nice, because I didn't even have a driver's license," Jim Glass says. "So she gave me a permission slip, and I went racing." He was 14. He grew up in a race car family in dirt modified country, his father and both uncles on the local tracks. "On the weekend, it was what we did," he says. "You went racing, and I guess I didn't know anything else." When his father moved up to a faster class, the car he'd been racing sat there, so Glass asked.

When I decided to attend Ultrace Dusseldorf for their first iteration outside Poland, I expected the show to follow their usual theme of modified cars with a few motorsport icons spread amongst them. But the moment I set foot into Areal Böhler, I was dumbstruck. Historic motorsports with icons from Porsche, BMW and Mercedes were scattered along with the usual modified display.

It’s noon on Thursday, May 4, and I’ve just finished loading my 997.1 Carrera S for a long weekend of driving and camping with friends at the 2026 DWA Camping While Awesome Rally. First stop: Cayucos, California, by way of Big Sur and the famed Pacific Coast Highway. Founded nearly a decade ago in Santa Cruz by childhood friends Lane Skelton and Warren, later joined by Art Sees, Driving While Awesome! has become one of the pillars of California car culture.

People smile at the car. That reads as a nothing statement until you know the thing lives in England, where drivers do not often smile at each other. The typical British vernacular between strangers is a flash of the headlights and at most a hand lifted an inch off the wheel. Thank you, or the opposite. The rest of the time everybody stares straight ahead through weather that stays grey more often than not. Roads full. Limits coming down for years, camera on a pole to make sure you noticed.

Astonishment. Pointing and staring. Perplexed frowns. Smiles. Waves. A friendly thumbs up. That’s the chronological order of reactions that Sami Sasso’s cheerfully orange Renault 4 receives. It really is one of the happiest cars on the road today, guaranteed to take that frown and turn it upside down. This from a machine that was built in 1989 and used as basic transportation just outside Paris till it was put out to pasture a few years ago.

Photos: Porsche It’s 1979. Two companies don’t know it yet, but they’re about to spend the next decade fighting to survive. One is a four-year-old startup running on the Apple II. The rainbow logo is current. The Bandley Drive campus is new. The IPO is still a ways away, and so is the Lisa, the Mac, the IBM PC’s arrival, and the day in 1985 when Steve Jobs gets pushed out of the company he started. None of that has happened yet.

There is a decal on the console behind the shifter that reads, in part, "must operate on fuel having a minimum of 103 research octane and 95 motor octane or engine damage may result." In 1969 that meant racing fuel, bought separately, forever. Chevrolet put the sticker where a driver could not help looking at it.

Every shape on an air-cooled 911 is the residue of a decision somebody made about hardware. The hips got wide because the tires got wide. The roof falls away the way it does because the engine sits out behind the axle and has to breathe. Porsche hung a whale tail off the back of the first turbo to keep the rear right side up at speed, and when the 3.3 arrived a few years later with an air-to-air intercooler, the wing had to be reprofiled to make room for it.