F1 the Scott Speed Homecoming

Well, here it is at last, one year after the total mess of last year's race the United States Grand Prix has returned....and guess who has a ticket! Yup, fortune has smiled and I somehow scored one. For me this is a historic race as it's the first time an American has competed in the United States Grand Prix since 1989. The last US victory at the United States Grand Prix was by Mario Andretti in 1977.

So show your support for Scott Speed this weekend by visiting the Team Toro Rosso Web Site. Be sure to tune into Speed this weekend for Sunday's race!

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Acura MDX to get Red Bull compatible cup holders!

The folks at the Car Connection always have great spy photos. For Example, here is a shot of the new Acura MDX. And while other auto web sites will point out such trivial things as new styling and engines, the first thing I zeroed in on was a cup holder that can hold a Red Bull can.....Its about frigg'n time!

In other Red Bull news, congratulations to Scott Speed for finishing in the top ten in yesterday's Formula 1 of Canada!

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Bad Car Accident

Watch Video Wow, very scary accident. This just goes to show how one accident can cause another, then another then another..... all because the driver of the Mustang hit that stopped van.

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Canadian Grand Prix... Spoiler

I say spoiler, but when you've won 6 out of the last 9 races, is it really unexpected? Renault yet again has cinched another victory, this time in Canada.

Finally, a Renault win in Montreal. You must be pleased!
Yes. It's fantastic for me again: six wins in nine races! All the wins are nice, but to get the monkey off our back in Canada is great. Finally, we can add this one to the list!
-Alonso (Renault Press Release)

Alonso on Michelin tires finished just one spot ahead of Michael Schumacher on Bridgestone, thus giving Michelin it's 100th F1 Victory. Quite a feat given Michelin has only been competing at this level for 14 seasons.

All your base are belong to Alonso.. Post/view comments

Why you should watch Fast and Furious 3 Tokyo Drift

I saw Fast and Furious 3 this past weekend, and I think you should too, heres why. It doesn't really matter if you're into low-riders or Hot Rods, Harleys or Hondas, Crotch Rockets or Model Ts. At the end of the day we all love cars, bikes, trucks..... it's our hobby and it needs to be supported. Hollywood often does a poor job accurately reflecting our culture, or even getting basic facts straight...(Nitrous does not blow out your floorboard)....but what Hollywood puts out to America and the rest of the world does greatly influence our culture (and the growth and direction of our hobby inside that culture).

Fast and Furious is not high art, it's not even a great movie, but it is an attempt by Hollywood to test the waters with us, (The car guys and gals) and see if we want more car movies. If Fast and Furious flops, then Hollywood thinks "Car movies don't do well, let's go back to making Superhero flicks". Do you want to see another "American Graffiti"? How about "Grease Lighting" or "Smokey and the Bandit". Who could forget "Le Mans", "Cannonball Run" or "Bullitt"?

They can't all be great, but if we ignore them when they come out they'll be less anxious to make more. But Guess what? Fast and Furious 3 actually was a fun movie to watch. I enjoyed it because I enjoy cars. It may not have been my type of scene but I enjoyed seeing a different take on the type of car scene I do participate in. Why not see a twist on a familiar hobby, the worst that can happen is you wasted a couple of hours. The best that can happen is Hollywood decides to get serious and start making quality car movies.

And honestly, if you watch a car movie and don't get some enjoyment out of it, then maybe you aren't quite the car lover you think you are.

PS, the other option is to watch the new Animated series "Cars" which is targeted to NASCAR fans I guess....I plan on seeing both even if it means I loose a brain cell or two.

PPS, neither "Fast and Furious" nor "Cars" paid me to write the above. I just said it because I think it needs to be said.

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Page Optimization

Had some complaints about this main page being a little slow to load due to the Flash widgets, so I'll see what I can do next week to speed things up a bit. So bear with us for now, next week I'll clean up a few things to get some speed. (PS, with this post the preview-widget post should roll off the page speeding things up a bit)

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Twin Turbo Ford GT...

Click to see Video

All I have to say is this car is amazing. The engine is just a work of art. Very well done plumbing, very high fit and finish. The rest of the garage doesn't look half bad either. Loved seeing the GT next to a Saleen S7.

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Restyled Element

For you surfer hippy types that are mad at us for only showing videos of 1300 RWHP Twin Turbo Vipers, have I got some news for you! The Honda Element is getting a slight face lift.... so says the gurus at the Car Connection. If the two photos aren't enough to sate your need to see Honda Elements here is a random Element vid from our library.

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Lizards on Planes

Congrats to the American racing team, Flying Lizard Motorsports for taking their Porsche 911 GT3 cup car to a 4th place victory at the 24 Hour Races Nuerburgring. First place honors went to a privately-entered Porsche 911 GT3, run by the less exciting named German Manthey Racing team. Congrats to all, I can think of no more fun than running 151 laps in 24 hours (3,832.078 kilometers) on the Nuerburgring-Nordschleife.

Complete Race Results and Comments

StreetFire joins MySpace

Can one web site really become a member of another one? We have recently started an official page on MySpace for StreetFire and are having a great time with it. Regretfully, MySpace has yet to return the favor by joining StreetFire, but the invitation is open. Feel free to drop by and check it out.

http://www.myspace.com/streetfirenet

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Add random fresh content to your MySpace or Web Page with the Video Preview Widget

I had a lot of fun making that preview widget in the title bar of this page. What it does, is it looks through new video submissions to StreetFire (well the ones that have been moderated), pulls their thumbnail and then places them into this rotator. It does this based on an RSS feed from the main site, and will work with other RSS feeds as we add them. Soon, you will be able to pull an RSS feed for just the latest Camaro videos if you want, or an RSS feed for the featured drift videos. But what better way to see the results of such an RSS feed than by watching it real time with the widget above placed on your website?

<embed src="http://videos.streetfire.net/previewrandom.swf" flashvars="urlRSS=http://videos.streetfire.net/rss/rss2.asp" quality="high" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="428" height="320" scale="exactfit"></embed>

To place a video preview widget on your web page, place the following HTML code onto your page. I've also included the ability to customize the look and feel by added extra information to the "flashvars" statement in the embed tag. Here is a list.

• videolines=false //Inerlacing Filter on/off
• videoshade=false //Video Shade effect on/off
• videoquote=false //Determines whether Quoted text shows or not
• videolink=true //Link entire image rather than just the text
• videofont=Arial //Change the font of the quoted Text (choose any font name)
• videofontsize=10 //Change the Size in pixels of the quoted Text (Choose any size)
• videoloop=false // False shows just one thumb instead of many

The above are optional, and you can add multiple "flashvars" to a single EMBED tag. In order to do this change the statement to look like...

from
flashvars="urlRSS=http://videos.streetfire.net/rss/rss2.asp"
to
flashvars="urlRSS=http://videos.streetfire.net/rss/rss2.asp&videoloop=false"

Use the "&" to add multiple flash vars together. Note you can also change the height and width of the widget by modifying the HTML code. For example Here is a rotator widget that is resized to 320x240, with interlacing and film-shade filters turned off, quoted text is off, but click-ability is turned on.

Note, you can also just have it show a single frame and not animated by using the flash vars above.

So try it out, play around with it and if you have any questions you can post in our tech support forum and we'll be sure to help you out.

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StreetFire gets a Face Lift

StreetFire has been long overdue for a freshening and today we start the slow process of updating the site beginning with the main page. I always get a little nostalgic when I do an update to StreetFire so I this might be a good time to recap for those of you that are new to this site. Originally we started StreetFire in 1999 with big ideas of making it into a "CNET" for the automotive aftermarket. Well as is often the case with projects, we got it started and never brought the idea fruition. So from 1999 to 2003 StreetFire was pretty dormant until Jeremy and I had the idea of using StreetFire as a testbed for some cool web-services we wanted to write for the online-automotive community.

We started with a free web-mail service that quickly expanded into a full-blown office application on the web. Email, Contacts, Calendars and File Sharing... honestly it was a bit too ambitious and too buggy. But Google stole our thunder as we launched our 2GB service right when they launched GMail. So of course they got all the buzz. The one thing that did get some traction was file sharing with videos. Users were uploading videos and sharing them with their friends. So in 2004 Chris stepped up and helped us reformat and overhaul our Version 1 system into the Version 2 video sharing system you see today. Focusing the system on just doing video sharing proved to be exactly what was needed and by early 2005 StreetFire went from a few thousand visitors a day to where we are today streaming more than a million videos daily to 4 million car enthusiasts a month across the entire world.

Being gear heads, running a car-video web site was pretty easy for Chris, Jeremy and I, but why not a skate-boarding web site? How about a video game web site, or even a paint ball web site? So in early 2005 we started Vidiac.com as a spin off company that would handle the videos and let people create their own StreetFire in an area of their own interest. This proved to be a great idea and today Vidiac powers 600 free video sharing web sites just like StreetFire.

So, three gear heads in their spare time built a pretty successful video service, 100% self-funded and mainly in our spare time. Since we launched in 2004 there has been dozens of rival services that have cropped up like YouTube & Google backed with millions of dollars of VC. Despite our small company size we've managed to stay independent and become profitable on our own. Now all that said, I sort of feel like I've spent so much time focusing on Vidiac that StreetFire has been neglected and at the end of the day the only reason we're in this industry is because we love our cars and sharing our hobby with other car enthusiasts. So, over the next few months we're going to spend more time on StreetFire add some services and update the usability of the site. So keep coming back! We're working hard and have a lot of cool features that we're going to release over the next few months. It's our way of saying "Thank You" for making us so successful at this in spite of ourselves.

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