As one would expect, Ford is making a Bullitt version of its current iteration of the venerable Mustang.

As an adopted San Franciscan, I feel that it is incumbent upon me to let you know and discuss this with you.

For those of you that don’t know, Bullitt, was a movie produced in 1968 and starred the late, and occasionally great, Steve McQueen as a hard-nosed, straight shooting San Francisco cop by the name of Frank Bullitt (pretty macho name, huh?) who gets involved in a murder case and departmental corruption.

Overall, it’s a pretty good police yarn, and The City, as always, comes off as cool and beautiful as it is in real life.

But the real set piece, the bit of the movie that everyone remembers, is the chase scene: Continue Reading…

OK, so there’s been a lot of buzz over the past while concerning the new upcoming version of Knight Rider. Thankfully, they are only re-doing it as a TV series, and not trying to make it into a mediocre movie, and, as with everything widespread and hyped these days, there’s good news, and there’s bad news.

The good news is that the series will be largely Hasselhoff free.

The bad news, if you’re a Pontiac fan and/or a traditionalist, is that K.I.T.T. (that would be The Knight Rider’s car, for those of you who don’t know) is going to be a new Ford Shelby GT500KR Mustang.

Now look, I’ve got nothing against this move, per se. I actually like the latest iteration of the Mustang, and I’m sure the latest Shelby treatment is just as potent as all the other ones (except for that hideous Mustang II Cobra, the less said about that, the better), but for the series to, essentially, “change brands” is always a tricky move to pull off. Continue Reading…

As you probably know, in the new movie “Casino Royale,” James Bond is set to drive the new and beautiful Aston Martin DBS, based on my favorite Aston, the DB9. The funny thing is, Daniel Craig, who is set to play Bond in the new movie cannot drive a stick.

There are a couple of quick solutions to this, which for some reason don’t seem to be entering anybody’s mind. The obvious one being Craig learns how to drive a manual. I don’t really see the problem with this one (doesn’t anybody on the set know how to drive a stick?) but if that doesn’t work for whatever reason, they could simply outfit the car with the six-speed ‘Touchtronic 2′ fully automatic transmission that is optional on the DB9. Or better yet, bring me in to drive it. Yeah, I like that one.

This ought to get some blood flowing on both sides of the fence. The new movie “Fast & the Furious: Tokyo Drift,” due to be released on June 16, 2006 will feature a ‘67 Mustang, powered by a Nissan RB26DETT engine, a twin-turbo straight-six right out of the amazing Skyline GT-R. There was also a ‘Stang powered by a 430-cube Ford small-block used for some of the shots on set.

When the two were lined-up on the dragstrip, the GT-R powered pony ran the quarter mile in 13.32 seconds and 109.83 MPH - over 1.2 seconds quicker and 13 MPH faster than the Ford V8. I’m sure that left some blue-oval purists hanging their heads. I suppose I would be OK with either of them in my garage.