Dan Crouch Blog

Update: Still have a lot to do, but hang on for the ride!

Just a heads up to readers that this blog is being moved. I've just purchased the new URL, dancrouchblog.com and most of the car content on this blog will move to that location. I hope to have everything moved in the next several days and will provide one last notification if I can before this site is shut down.

Thank you!

Dan Crouch

I was doing some photo editing for Sports Car Shop tonight on a new piece of inventory, a 2000 Porsche 996 Carrera 2 with only 33k miles! I shot a quick pic of the crest and decided to make an wallpaper out of it. Not a perfect image, but the red is really striking.

Porsche 996 Carrera 2 Wallpaper Widescreen 1680

Porsche 996 Carrera 2 Wallpaper 1280

dc

Got a chance to hang out at PIR for an afternoon with Paul, Ed, Bob, and Brenda for the Rose Cup races, featuring the Trans Am series. The weather was a perfect high 70's and cleared up nice by the time the main event was on. Congratulations to Tommy Drissi for his authoritative win in that Jaguar!

Here's my quick pics from the event {yep, they're over Photoshop'd, sue me!}:

A Mazda RX-2 Custom

An exceptional Porsche 951

Congratulations to Tommy Drissi!

The Chicane at Portland International Raceway:

The Sports Car Shop support rig with the race cars:

Check out the entire gallery, unedited:

dc

I recently got the opportunity to catch up with an old friend from my childhood, Christian Hansen, who now happens to being making performance parts for Ducati motorcycles -- right up the road in Portland! SpeedyMoto manufactures custom triple clamps, clips-on's, rear sets, and many other billet aluminum pieces. Christian explained that what started as a business making custom clutch covers five years ago has grown every year and expanded to provide numerous parts for the discerning Ducati enthusiast tuner.

Here are some pictures from my SpeedyMoto tour:

Christian kicking back at the SpeedyMoto office. That's their Ducati Monster development bike in the background and to the left is a custom 250 MotoGP frame on the conference table.

Here is a SpeedyMoto triple clamp development piece that they were working on the day of my visit.

Christian showing me the rapid prototyping machine that spits out an ABS plastic prototype piece after clicking print from the workstation. He said this piece took about 8 hours to build.

As we started to walk through the production area we stopped to check out a lot of recently produced bar risers for Ducati SuperSports.

At the far end of the shopping, Christian pointed out the raw aluminum stock as delivered, which will eventually become clutch covers.

And here are the clutch covers in mid-production form. The aluminum stock is first cut into 3-4 inch discs, and the shapped on each side as seen here.

On our way out of the production area, Christian pointed out this vintage P&H welder. It was originally used in Portland to build Indy Car race car frames and has always resided in a race facility in the Portland area. He tells me they're like vintage guitar amps.

Here are the SpeedyMoto showroom bikes. These bikes feature lots of custom SpeedyMoto parts and are not show queens but hardcore development machines.

A SpeedyMoto Pressure Plate on the custom Sport Classic on display.

As we wrapped up the tour, Christian had two pieces of exclusive news for dancrouchblog.com readers. First that there will be a special edition 848 model coming from Ducati later this year and it will feature a few pieces made by SpeedyMoto! And in other news, the SpeedyMoto crew is excited to see their first product on the big screen in the new Transformers Movie: Revenge of the Fallen. Check out the triple clamp on the Ducati in the movie!

It was great catching up with Christian and something tells me this won't be the last time he's mentioned on this blog as we're planning to meet up again soon.

If you have a business that should be featured on this blog, shoot me an email and let's talk about advertising.

dc

GT Planet got this video up about an hour after it was shown at the E3 conference:

Looks like real time damage, and it look REALLY good! That shot of the rally car is fantastic. And to get WRC and Ferrari licensing in is welcomed news as well. But if the inclusion of NASCAR is what delayed this game the last 3-4 years, I'll be pissed. The marketing powers that be really squeezed in a whopper though and this should bring the game to a whole new audience segment. Hopefully they'll all see the light: that turning left and right is a more entertaining sport!

dc

btw - I dug out the old PS2 and started working through GT4 again. Join me over at theS2000blog.com to play along