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A fun palate-cleanser for a chilly Friday: Ford’s new “customizer” website for their 2012 Mustang.

Beyond how much fun it is to play with and think that the automaker could actually deliver the combination of options selected, it’s refreshing to see Ford replicating a big part of what made the Mustang a runaway success in the ’60s: The ability to customize the car any way you want. I mean, how cool is it that the factory gives you 8 different air dams and 22 different wheel options to choose from? And they let you select the under-window trim strip color and headlight design, among other things? Amazing. Forget 2 or 3 pre-bundled “option packages;” this is how car buffs want to buy their cars. Provided you’re willing to wait for the factory to assemble “your” Mustang, it seems like it would boost new car sales significantly too, as chances are slim a second-hand pony car is going to have exactly the collection of features you want. It’s genius.

Between the essential goodness of the car and ability to tailor one precisely to your tastes, Ford really is firing on all cylinders.

So I guess I should follow up my preview of Adam Carolla’s The Car Show a couple of months ago with a review of the actual show.

I’ve watched a few episodes. It beats Top Gear US by miles (mostly by virtue of not being smothered by the shadow of the successful British show), but I still have the same primary criticism of both shows: They just look forced. The Car Show, like its counterpart on the History Channel, is stuck in the old post-TGUK predicament: How to grab and entertain an audience without seeming like it’s trying to do so. Top Gear UK had the luxury of always having been perceived as a “factual motoring show,” and when the chemistry between the hosts began to really gel (3 or 4 seasons in), it was icing on an already worthwhile formula, rather than the substance itself. With TGUS and The Car Show, there’s no there there, as they say; they’ve leapfrogged the “factual car reviews” part and tried to establish themselves on inter-host chemistry alone, a far too ephemeral and subjective foundation to build a successful series upon. But by the time a new car program grounds its credentials and allows the inside jokes between the hosts to develop at a natural (read: non-awkward) rate, the show will have been canceled for 2 or 3 seasons… Such is the attention span of the American viewer (and TV executive).

I particularly like The Onion‘s assessment of Top Gear US, and by extension The Car Show:

The worst thing I can say about them is that they’re exactly what a computer would generate if you programmed it to create the hosts of a show like this: three guy’s-guy types who fit together pleasantly but a little awkwardly and who aren’t so macho and aggressive that they’re going to offend anybody. When, during a three-vehicle expedition, one of them cracks jokes about leaving one of the others behind to die of exposure, you can hear someone straining a little hard to make it clear that it’s all in good fun.

Part of it may be the greater leeway given British versus American television, but the British hosts have no such fear of offending; indeed, they quite often (read: Clarkson) “cross the line,” and double down on it besides. But it gives the commentary and interaction an authenticity, a magnetic sincerity completely absent the American programs. I’m sorry to say it, but at this point, I’ve kind of given up on them.

Senna, the much-anticipated new documentary chronicling scenes from the life of the Formula 1 racing giant, opens today.

I’d like very much to see it. I’ve always been an F1 fan (chalk it up to having lived in Europe for a time, where the sport is huge), but the prime of my interest spans from ’87 to around ’94, a period of time neatly bookended by my two trips to the Monaco Grand Prix. I only observed the qualifying sessions, and not the actual race itself, but the noises, the smells, the mix of technology, speed and glamor weren’t lost on me. In spite of the fact that ’87 to ’94 happens to coincide nearly perfectly with Senna’s heyday, from his first solid seasons to his untimely death at the ’94 San Marino Grand Prix, for whatever reason, I was never a huge fan. Much like Michael Schumacher at his peak, Senna was always the “bad guy;” I rooted for his challengers, from Alain Prost and Nigel Mansell to Damon Hill and especially Gerhard Berger.

Formula 1 has lost it way in recent years, and even though interpersonal drama has always been an integral part of the sport, the past decade or so have seen that spectacle increasingly trained on the technical aspects of the cars—which for me really is the main draw. The formula of regulations which gives the series its name has grown so restrictive and so rigidity focused on micromanaging the engineering decisions in order to produce a “spectator-friendly” outcome that the sport is quickly degenerating into a NASCAR-like “single car” straightjacket for would-be innovators.

To be sure, the creative lengths engineers go to in order to extract maximum performance within the bounds of the rulebook will always excite the imagination. I just wish they were given more free rein to create cars of the caliber of the truly spectacular F1 racers of the past. Let new drivers of Senna’s brilliance tame the machines.

Today we discuss a car that consumed innumerable hours of my waking and sleeping childhood fantasies: The flying DeLorean DMC-12 time machine from the Back to the Future film franchise. Naturally.

It would have to be its flying incarnation—the grounded version of the first and third films in the series held little interest. I can understand why it remained on the ground for as much of the series as it did, special effects costing what they do. That said, the scene at the very end of the first film where the car levitates, blasts forward, does an immelmann turn and dives at the viewer was one of the defining moments of my childhood. It was unbelievably cool.

The second film didn’t let me down, featuring lots of scenes of the car in the air. I got to see it land in the rain (pictured above), weave side-to-side as it descended during the tunnel scene and drive on the 2015 freeway. I loved it, and I wanted my own.

I didn’t need the time traveling functionality as long as the hover capability was present. I remember drawing endless pages of schematics on graph paper detailing the mechanism whereby the wheels would pivot downward and the car would levitate. I theorized about how I would accomplish that last part: Would the car’s wheels function as fans and direct air downward, or would I have to invent some kind of anti-gravity device? Having the most tenuous grasp of how cars worked at that point in my life, and no conception of the complexities of an AWD system, let alone any of the other elements I postulated were necessary, I decided that coming up with an anti-gravity solution would probably be the “easier” solution in the long run. My interest started to taper off at that point, as I encountered dead ends in my research and other things began to consume my time, so my progress ground to a halt.

Why did the flying DeLorean fascinate me as much as it did? It probably had to do something with the fact that it was a merging of two main interests of mine: aviation and cars. More than that, I loved the non-conformism of the car (it definitely isn’t something you see every day), and—full disclosure—the idea of pulling up next to a group of friends, pressing a button on the dashboard and flipping my sunglasses down a la Doc Brown as I rose away from terra firma. I visualized myself in that scenario more than once, believe me.

The car might be closer than I think, after all—the second film is set in 2015, 4 short years away. Maybe I’ll be able to do a hover conversion on one of my cars sooner rather than later.

“They just don’t understand a single word we’re on about.”

—Jeremy Clarkson on the American focus groups assembled by NBC to preview an American version of the hit British car show, Top Gear.

The latest attempt to pitch a Top Gear-like show to an American audience, Adam Carolla’s The Car Show debuts this Wednesday on Speed TV.

When it finally arrived on History, I gave Top Gear US a fair shake; I really did. I wanted it to work, but maybe it was something about the strained and forced chemistry of the hosts, perhaps it was something as superficial as the lack of British accents giving their car geekery a hokey feel, or it could have the desperate attempt to ape absolutely everything about the British show—whatever the reason or reasons, although it had some good moments, overall, it just didn’t work for me. I stopped watching after the first half-dozen episodes.

And though I wish Adam Carolla the best in his new endeavor, I have a sinking feeling it’s going to be more of the same. The promo, in particular, has the same sort of “chopped and edited to improve the comic timing” feel the Top Gear US spots had. Also, they’re pitching the “four guys yakking about cars” theme from the get-go. I wrote this about Top Gear US soon after it came out, and the same could apply to The Car Show:

Thing is (and I’m not terribly familiar with the first few seasons of the current format of Top Gear UK), it seems like the British show didn’t start out with an emphasis on inter-host chemistry and crazy challenges. I mean, they had them, but the first “great race” (DB9 vs. Train, IIRC) didn’t happen until what, Season 4? Up until that point it was pretty much a factual, well-made show that reviewed interesting cars. They wouldn’t have been able to do something like the Vietnam Special until much, much later.

Top Gear US is making a mistake if it thinks it can “force” the chemistry from the very beginning. Much better to front-load the show with entertaining reviews of cool cars and let the inside jokes develop at their own pace.

It’s kind of a catch-22, though, since it’s an open question whether a “factual car show” would hold the attention of American audiences long enough to allow the rapport between the hosts to develop. I kind of doubt it.

With this latest attempt at a American car show, I guess we’ll see. Until then, I remain loyal to Clarkson, Hammond and May.