Raphael Orlove

Whoever will be crowned champion at the end of the 2024 Formula 1 season, it will be someone with a Twitch.

Part of this car writing job is illustrating stories with exciting photos. So, we take pictures of us driving cars, and those pictures should depict something thrilling. We need to slide the cars. That’s a weird job requirement! Pulling off powerslides, on command, for the cameras, in a borrowed car. Often a very fast and expensive car that would be A-Big-Damned-Problem if it found its way into a guardrail. Or ditch. Or off a mountainside.Formal training is a necessity. I went to see the best.I…

The new Santa Fe might look like a truck, but it doesn't drive like one. That's a good thing.

This is how quickly things can go wrong on a highway. In this video posted by the Lakewood Scoop, you can see a Toyota Supra either in the process of losing control, making a very evasive maneuver, or executing a hasty pass on the right all the way onto the shoulder, past the shoulder, nearly into the woods, and then back down onto the highway just in time to collect the barrier nearly head-on. The crash occurred on the Garden State Parkway in Aberdeen, New Jersey on Thursday morning. Per the La…

The Mustang Dark Horse rolled into the pits not quite on fire, but smoking enough to make us wonder about it.There is a lot to say about this vehicle. It makes 500 horsepower. It has a manual shifter, a manual handbrake, and rear-wheel drive. It also weighs 3975 pounds, and after even a relatively short if intense session on Thunderhill West, our test track for this year’s Performance Car of the Year evaluation, its brakes had been put to work. We knew it with our noses, and we knew it with our…

We sat low in the ferry to Venice, gazing through a porthole just above the water line. Light flickered on the whitecaps, the only way to distinguish sea from sky in the inky black. A large ship cut silently across our path.How small our ferry felt in that moment, the thrum and buzz of its little engine already filling our whole cabin. As the bigger boat passed, the two engines overdoubled. We shook and our ferry gently swayed in the wake. I knew this sensation. I’d felt it before.I sat low in t…

This is a practical, usable car, and yet it reminds you why it’s special from the moment you set off in it.

On a slippery Sicilian mountainside, there’s no car I’d rather have, price (or horsepower) be damned.

I would never admit to being mad online. I would never let a hater get a moment’s pleasure out of my innermost feelings of betrayal. But this is different. We in America might have gotten the new Honda Fit, but we didn’t. And I drove one. And it was wonderful. I’m pissed!As it happens, through a series of unfortunate circumstances, it has become clear that I may, myself, need to be the owner or caretaker of a modern car. Annoying! I already have all the car I need, my 1974 Volkswagen Beetle that…

It burned into my mind before it ever reached my ears. The howl of twin-turbo Toyota JZs and Nissan RBs, Japan’s powerhouses of the Bubble Era. Long before I ever so much as saw a JZX100 Chaser or a Skyline, I knew that six-cylinders was the sound of power, the sound that turned tires into smoke, the sound of drifting. And then I actually went drifting.My first lesson was in triple Formula Drift champion Chris Forsberg’s Nissan S13, him running a turbo KA, the nondescript 2.4-liter four that cam…