Hot Wheels

I've never seen Days of Thunder.

So I didn't know who Rowdy Burns was when he was mentioned in this Car+Driver story.

It is about the overnight theft of 192 wheels and tyres from the cars in a Texas car lot:

I guess they aren't big on locking wheelnuts over there.

The article also mentions "Robin Reliants" - I guess I should be impressed that Americans have even heard of the Reliant Robin, even if they can't get the name right. They do some sums in the article too:

Considering the approximately four-hour window that the police figure it took to perpetrate the crime, that’s a theft rate of one wheel every 1.25 minutes. And the thieves removed nearly 1000 lug nuts in the dark. Whoever the perps are, clearly Rowdy Burns needs to hire these guys.

Hence the Rowdy Burns comment - I had already decided Christian Horner would be interested in them.

The article also makes the very good point that they must have been packing plenty of spare battery packs for the cordless impact guns that were used in the heist. Imagine trying to do that using a wheel brace or with cables trailing all over the place.

Now the thieves have to try and sell the wheels on knowing that the Police will be out looking for them:

Oops!

Lots of Fun

Car lots of fun? This amusing article on the Car&Driver site highlights the secret language used by salesmen working on America's car Lots.

Now Arthur Daley here also had his own patois used on his car lot:

But that was just Cockney - Corblimey Mate! Luvaduck. Beales - Don't talk to me about Beales!

I've been meeting a few car salesmen lately.  Never a car saleswoman - do they exist?

My wife is after a new (or newer) car - it all follows on from the little yellow light that appears in a photo in my earlier post about the MOT test.  So far we've visited (in order of appearance) our local Toyota, Mazda, Hyundai and Ford dealers for test drives.

At the moment, my wife is being "up" while I am being "Third Baseman".  However, I'm not very good at this.  When she has finalised her choice, I will switch to being "Paperboy" - a role I recently played while purchasing our new family computer.  I wasn't very good at that either.

I have seen a couple of "Lot lizards" and would wish them well with "de-horsing" given the condition of my wife's current car - but that doesn't tend to happen in Britain anyway - if they want to keep you in the place, they make you a hot coffee and you are supposed to feel guilty if you don't finish it.

If you want to understand the past two paragraphs, and this clever illustration...

...you will need to read the article.

However, if you want to understand Arthur Daley, and maybe spend some sausage and mash on a new jam-jar, then this site may be more useful.