The Cougar Bait team gathered Friday to continue stripping down the car. The paint has now been fully sanded and is ready to be cleaned and primed.  The interior has all been stripped out and we finally got the car running. However, there’s quite a miss and it’s going to need some tweaking and tuning before it’s set and ready to go.  The next big step will be getting the cage welded in.  At least we have until October.

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First, this picture has nothing to do with anything. Other than the fact that I think cows with a head stuck in a toy car is pretty funny.

Second, it’s hard to base “news” off of forums, because generally forums are a small, but very vocal sample of an audience.

Time to get our “news” on. Ok turns out the new Camaro is having some failure issues with the built in launch control (available on the six speed). In this post, a guy goes out to show his friend how big his wiener is sweet this Camaro is at doing burnouts. Well anyways, things go poorly. Like get towed to the shop poorly. Read along.  And another tranny issue here.  And an output shaft snapping. Or just browse through the problems and warranty board.

I’m not going to extrapolate this sample across the entire Camaro universe, but is this an issue with the car or the user? Are these limited to early production models? Is Chevy or GM communicating with these owners?

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Apparently, it’s rally day at c|g. One of our reader’s, John, posted this gem in one of the comments. Couldn’t pass up not throwing it on the “big screen.” It features driver, Ari Vantanen driving hauling ass, up Pike’s Peak in his Peugeot 405 T16.

So hot.

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If you can get past the lame music and spelling/grammar errors (its not it’s), you’ll find a wonderful tribute to the sport of rally racing. It highlights some of the greatest rally figures of all time. But what got me is the sheer amount of time this person must have spent compiling all the footage. And none of the clips are long, they are short and abrupt, which keeps your attention. Well done. Well, minus the crappy music.

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Apparently, I’m starting the week off right by sharing a bunch of advertising. Sorry. This is a pretty poetic commercial. Some good cinematography and art direction. It’s a bunch of barrels/drums on parade. The spot is ,  latest efforts for Audi and their diesel lineup. Many car enthusiasts have been begging for diesels, but other than a few VWs (Golf, Jetta, Passat) there are very few CARS. We get it, you have diesel SUVs, but give us the cool diesel cars. Anyways, interesting spot, showing how you can fight USA’s dependency on foreign oil. By driving an SUV.

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This gets a bit WTF. This is a French ad for Fiat. It shows a series of crash tests being done on a Fiat 500. Instead of dummies, there is a Panda. Wait. What? The ad ends, “engineered for a lower impact on the environment.” Yeah. Ok.

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Well CB2 (Cougar Bait 2) is off and running.  True to name, while stripping the interior down, we came across a size 32B bra. It smelled like Elizabeth Taylor’s White Diamonds. Ok that’s a lie. The car is a 1994 Saab 900 (V6) that we picked up for ~$200.

The body is a little rough, and it run’s pretty haggared, but is an excellent starting point for this year’s 24 Hours of Lemons campaign.

As it sits right now, the interior has been gutted, all the foam, sound deadening, etc is gone. We’ve even started test fitting the roll cage. We’re hoping to get this one done in enough time to run at autox and rallyx events, to get an idea of how it will handle.

Couple more pics below.

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One of my advertising buddies sent me the link to this. Apparently, his agency is doing some social media projects behind the launch of the new 2010 Ford Mustang.

The project is called Mustang P.O.V. (which sounds kind of porny), it’s a series of stories about the new Mustang and people’s interaction with it. Enter Roger Keeney, 20 some years ago a piece of farm machinery broke, struck him in the head and when he regained consciousness, he was unable to see.

It’s pretty poetic and the rest of the story is forth coming, essentially Ford flies him out and he gets to experience and drive the new 2010. Making for a very happy blind man. Looking forward to seeing the rest of the film.

You can check out more on the2010mustang.com; looks like they have short films and various other things going on with it.

Hey Ford and Scott Monty, General Motors got us behind the wheel of the new Camaro. When are you tossing us keys for the Mustang?  Or hell, even the Fiesta.

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A friendly Saab’er, Bill Anderson, shared his story from the other day. He’s with the Sports Car Club of Vermont and recently Ken Block’s car preparer and team owner, Vermont SportsCar approached them asking for help.

What help? Helping Ken prepare for the X-Games event. As you probably know, much of the course is on tarmac, so they asked SCCV to help them dial in the car for more auto-x geared racing.

The club jumped on the opportunity. They all had a blast, Bill went on to say how polite and thankful the whole team was. Having met Lance (owner), Ken and Lars (their photographer) when working with Subaru at my previous job, I completely believe it. Great group of people.

Few more pictures after the jump and a link to even more. Thanks for sharing, Bill!

And here’s a link to Bill’s full photo album.

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So I was reading through some recent tweets and saw that @craigboy had posted a link to an AdAge pictorial on award winning outdoor advertising. Most were fairly underwhelming (Maker’s Mark one was clever), but this one for the Chevy Volt is pretty cool. It was done by Campbell-Ewald, but the details are missing on the actual location of the ad. I’m guessing LA. Per the comment from Adam, of GM, this was in Michigan, during the Woodward Dream Cruise.

Follow us on twitter: @culturegarage or my personal one, @a_bald_guy

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