If you want to teach your children about race cars, not just about how they work, but about what they do, show them a 1964 Shelby Daytona. A Daytona coupe is nothing to glance at. It defies the cursory glance, the magnetic speed of its design and engineering requires more. It lingers there in your mind, drawing in bold, black, double lines the very idea of a race car. Only six of them were built, and they all remain, now outliving the man responsible for their creation.

Last Thursday, Carroll Shelby passed away at the age of 89, after complications with an illness. He leaves a wake of legend.

It’s been a good era for smallish, mid-size cars. Buick now has the uncharacteristic Regal GS; Cadillac the RWD, M3-killing ATS; and Dodge the evocative, peninsular Dart. All of them are stick-shifting, turbocharged oddities, but they represent a new wave of cars in America: Europe. None of these would have come around without European influence (which makes us wonder if we’ll start seeing small diesels soon), and now Ford has joined the fray with the Euro spec, 2013 Focus ST. It’s exciting for many reasons.

Car people like us don’t get enough auto-centric movies, least of all thought provoking ones. Hollywood producers seem to be under the impression that we’re all 14, but while we do love a great unrealistic car chase, the Fast and Furious franchise and Gone in 60 Secondsdo lack a certain depth. That’s fine on occasion. There’s nothing like muscular mindlessness to help you unwind after a horrible week of punching washers, shuffling papers, or whatever it is that you wish you didn’t have to do.

Still, we’d prefer a little more substance, wouldn’t we? Because we know that cars, as calculating and mechanical as they are, provide their drivers and admirers with very real, very human experiences. We want to see a little more of this.  What does it mean to be a performance driver? What happens to the human heart at 180 mph? Sly Stallone’s disastrous Driven didn’t give us much of a glimpse.

Thankfully, a small, baldheaded ginger has stepped in to save the day. Ron Howard has restored my hope for automotive cinema with his next film, Rush, about Formula One in 1976, a season which probably coined the phrase, “You couldn’t make this stuff up.”

Last week, in Salzburg, Austria, Ferdinand Alexander Porsche passed away at the age of 76.  F.A., as he was known by his colleagues, or “Butzi,” to his friends, was the grandson of Ferdinand Porsche, who founded the timeless sports car firm in 1931.  That Ferdinand and his son “Ferry” were both engineers, but F.A. never entered the field, focusing instead on the design aspect of car building.

He studied industrial design for a year, but was kicked out of his school for lack of potential.  So he went back to the family business and started training in-house.  His father Ferry, who came up with the beautiful Porsche 356, challenged him to design its successor.  The result was one of the two cars F.A. designed for Porsche, and though they were both beautiful and fast, it became one of the most iconic sports cars in history: the 911. Follow the jump for a look at some of the masterpieces we’d never gotten to enjoy had Butzi never been born.

Okay, okay, Mr. Champion. We know that wheelies don't do much for your quarter mile times, and that they're best avoided with the help of a solid wheelie bar. But even you can't help but cheer when you see one that ends well.

So to help you kick off the work week, here are eight liftoff-angled wheelies to put a smile on your face and make you cheer like a kid who's just seen…well…a wheelie. Hit the jump to see the videos!

Driver safety advances more with each new season, but it’s not always enough. It seems sometimes you need a little help from the Almighty. I've put together ten extremely close calls that will leave you wondering how in heaven and on earth the drivers survived. Check 'em out after the jump!

Saturday is God’s loser’s bracket. It stands at the end of the week, a whole blank page day to finish all the odds and ends you couldn’t during the week because you were too busy earning your bread.

It’s my last chance to get stuff done. No time for sleeping in, no time for cartoons. I hit Saturdays early with a to-do list, oft to the dismay of fun-loving housemates and ambitious shower mildew. And though that list this weekend included catching snatches of the 12 Hours of Sebring on the xBox, I didn’t relax much on Saturday.

I had already scratched off several vitally important items (try to disassemble A/C compressor pulley while still on car, trim goatee) when I headed over to my friend Jason’s house to help him replace the rear brake pads on his 2008 VW Rabbit. I’d changed brake pads before. It would be a piece of cake, an hour at worst, which was good, because the list still held weekly essentials like, “return shirt to Old Navy” and “tighten down spoiler,” which has been rattling like an October candidate. The job took us a little longer.

Continue reading after the jump!

Every year in early March, auto journalists from all over the world flock to one location to cover the industry’s latest, nakiri-edge concepts, emerging technology, and enthralling, interactive displays. It’s a magical place of wonder and merriment, where you can float around on the scents of fresh-stitched leather and the sounds of new rubber squeaking on polished cement floors. That place is called Geneva, and I didn’t go.

Instead, I took a couple of hours and skipped a few blocks east of the Streetside HQ to check out something a little less...involved: the Kansas City International Auto Show. I wasn’t expecting much, and that expectation was not disappointed. It might be best to say that when I left, I was glad it was a Friday. See the highlights below the jump...

Geneva only rises about 1,230 ft above sea level, but later this week, when journalists and other industry folk congregate on the shore of Lac Leman, their lightheadedness will have nothing to do with the altitude. The Geneva Motor Show is, after all, the pinnacle of new auto shows. It’s no place to unveil your new econobox or beige snoozer. It’s a convention for the coolest concepts, and production-ready supercars often have their sheets pulled there.

This year offers no exception, and a pair of Italians will duke it out for the supercar spotlight. It’s fitting that they meet on historic neutral ground, because they’ve been warring for generations. In fact, the great Lamborghini/Ferrari conflict started with an argument.

Legend has it that tractor magnate Ferruccio Lamborghini bought several Ferraris, but found a book full of shortcomings that Enzo Ferrari refused to correct. So Lamborghini set out to make a better car, and some say he did. The two companies are still fighting almost half a century later, but customers (and the rest of us) are winning.

In this corner, we have the Ferrari F12 Berlinetta. Technically, Maranello would like us to call it the F12berlinetta, but that’s ridiculous, so we won’t. Now let’s get power out of the way, because what you really need to know is that the F12 will be the fastest road-legal Ferrari ever built, capable of 730 hp and 590 lb/ft of torque, and that’s enough to get it to 60 in just 3.1 seconds, fairly insane for a front-engine GT car.

Continue reading after the jump!

I've loved rally racing for as long as I’ve known about it. But since I’m from a place called America, that hasn’t been very long. Rally isn’t very well publicized here in the States, and despite a national championship and a solid handful of regional sanctioning bodies, the WRC skips us entirely.

Still, it has more variables than most motorsports, and each of those variables makes rally another type of awesome. This weekend I grabbed a couple of friends and headed to a tiny spot on the map about four hours southeast of the StreetsideAuto HQ here in Kansas City for Rally America’s Rally in the 100 Acre Wood, a weekend of zig-zagging, high-revving, navigational madness. It was 113.73 miles of greatness, complete with blizzards of new-churned dust, reams of careful planning, and some of the best driving roads in the Midwest; and it was the first rally I’d ever witnessed live. Follow the jump for the lessons I learned!