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By Mike Kojima
Yes, China the land of crappy copycat parts and shady business practices offers up a new plague, this one aimed straight at MotoIQ. For the past two weeks we have been bombarded by Chinese spammers on a daily basis who are attempting to fill our article comments section with crap and have been probing our forums and community sections as well. It's a whole slew of Chinese coming at us from many IP's.
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By Mike Kojima
A lot of us at MotoIQ are driving instructors for NASA, Speedventures and other groups. As instructors we get all kinds of students, some good, some bad. This is a classic example of a typical type of bad student. More inside....
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By Mike Kojima
So it looks like Jeff has too much time on his hands and has been hard at work making digitally enhanced unflattering images of me again. I guess the point this time is not some sort of tech rant from me but to show what showed up in the mail at the palatial MotoIQ Headquarters. Someone named Mr. Thumb has started up a group called NoFakeShit.org and since MotoIQ has always had an anti janky copy policy, Mr. Thumb has sent us a care package full of cool anti fakes stickers. I especially like the one you could stick on someones car that is equipped with fake stuff.
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By Mike Kojima
During my trip to Germany to the 24 hours of Nurburgring last week I hung out with D Sport Magazine's publisher Mike Ferarra who was also traveling with us. Mike holds the same ideas about the green revolution as I do, perhaps even more extremely, hence last months "Green Sucks" issue of D Sport. Sharing rants, I realized that I forgot to finish my thoughts about being green here.
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By Mike Kojima
A couple of weekends ago I took my 9 year old Daughter Christa to the NHRA Winternationals in Pomona. Being the jaded 9 year old she is, she loved the Top Fuel cars, liked the funny cars and thought the 6 second Pro-Stock cars were lame because they were "too slow". In between runs I explained how the inner workings of Top Fuel and Funny cars tick. She was pretty amazed at some of the facts I told her about the cars and wanted to know how I knew so much about them. I told her the story of how I was a crew member for a Top Fuel Funny Car last year during SEMA week. I learned a lot about these amazing cars that day and I'll tell you the story I told her.
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By Mike Kojima
Today Toyota announced perhaps what is the most extensive, comprehensive and expensive recall in the history of Automotive manufacturing. The recall involves eight of their best selling models from the Camry to even our Project Tundra. 2.3 MILLION vehicles will be affected by this recall. In an unprecedented move, Toyota has also stopped all sales and production of the potentially affected models as well. This affects more than 100,000 brand new Toyotas in the sales pipe line. This is STOPPED, dead cold, with thousands of workers at plants and dealerships who as of next Monday will be sitting around twiddling their thumbs. This recall will probably be disastrous financially for Toyota.
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By Mike Kojima
One of the things that pisses me off to no end is misdirected members of the green movement. At a recent party I was cornered by one of the guests, a eco hippie hemp wearing type who accused me of pillaging the environment due to my penchant for high performance cars and the fact that I own quite a few of them. She ranted on about how GM killed the electric car, and other conspiracy theories that this type of person seems to always prescribe to. She proudly alluded that she drove a "super efficient" 30 year old VW bus to prevent from contributing to the self-serving industrial political machine, plus recycling an old vehicle reduced her "carbon footprint". Note to reader, this person also makes her own soap from old cooking fat, hardly flushes the toilet in her house and has a smelly compost pile in her back yard. She does bath and shave her pits though.
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By Mike Kojima
When we launched MotoIQ, I wrote another article on this subject but it sorta got buried in our initial rush of article releases and since it never appeared on our front page, it languished with almost no reads deep within our tech section. I think this subject is too interesting to remain buried so this month I am devoting Nerds to the subject of Nissan's new oil technology. The new Nissan 370 and the Infiniti G37 with the VQ37VHR engine has been plagued with issues regarding high oil temperatures in severe use since their launch making debate on oil a big topic on internet forums. The conversations on oil temperature issues leads to Nissans recommendations for Genuine Nissan "ester" based oil and the super expensive oil service. |
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By Mike Kojima
A lot of people in our industry bemoan the fact that the passion and innovation of the game is getting diluted by the influx of fly by night Asian companies that are in the business of making cheap knockoffs of parts made by the established performance companies. These companies sell their fake wears for a fraction of the original’s price using no cost marketing ploys on Ebay and other inexpensive direct selling arenas. |
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As of late when I am not working here, I have been helping out at Falken Motorsports as an engineering consultant for their drift team. My role has been to help sort out the chassis on a few of their cars. I have greatly enjoyed this new set of challenges and have found that working with a drift cars unique dynamics to be very difficult. I have found that some of my colleagues in the realm of pro road racing, when they found out what I was doing lately, chuckled at the idea of drifting being a real motorsport. When I polled some of our readership if they would like more drift coverage, I got some push back. Despite this, I am going to take MotoIQ into the realm of drifting and will start to cover drifting editorially, especially the technical side. |
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By Mike Kojima
A lot of you are probably familiar with me and my name, you probably know me from the pages of Sport Compact Car Magazine. I have been actively involved with the publication of SCC for the last 14 years since editor Larry Saavedra "discovered" me as a writer in early 1995. Larry was the one largely responsible for elevating SCC to its position as the premier tech based magazine for the import/compact performance market
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