Tag: BangShift APEX

Wonderfully Cheesy: Tournament Of Thrills Is A 50 Year Old Video Featuring Awesome Traveling Stunt Drivers

Apr 08, 2021Apex Video, BangShift APEX, BangShift News, FUNNY STUFF, HISTORIC, MISC, Videos

Wonderfully Cheesy: Tournament Of Thrills Is A 50 Year Old Video Featuring Awesome Traveling Stunt Drivers

It’s pretty crazy how “entertainment” changes, right? Back about 50 years ago, ABC’s Wide World of Sports would show up at a dusty circle track on a fairgrounds somewhere and shoot, for national television, a stunt driving troupe doing their act. If you suggested even a small cable outfit come and shoot the same thing these days they would laugh you out of the joint. Now, add some flaming hoops, rotating knives, or seemingly death defying act by 2021 standards and you’d have something to argue about but back in the day, this was extreme and as you’ll see people at it up.

Not only did crowds eat it up, companies loved to sponsor these shows. Manufacturers like Ford would either give cars or cut buddy deals on them, companies like BFG would give tires to the shows in trade for promotional value, and the list of parts and pieces goes right on down the line. These guys were warriors back then, performing multiple times a day at fairs, multiple times a week in different locations, and living almost entirely out of the very cars that they were performing in.

Yes, this is all kind of cheesy by our “extreme” 2021 standards but we love every second of this footage. It is fun, the cars are awesome, and the history is just too cool.

Press play below to see this awesomely cheesy 1970s BFG tire promo –

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Aussie Sleeper: Watch This Holden Commodore With A Turbocharged Stock Bottom End LS Rip Low 9s At 150+

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Awesome Build: Watch This Operational Scale Model Of A Rotary Engine Constructed With Lego Blocks!

Nov 09, 20201320 Videos, Apex Video, BangShift 1320, BangShift APEX, ENGINES, FUNNY STUFF, MISC, Videos

Awesome Build: Watch This Operational Scale Model Of A Rotary Engine Constructed With Lego Blocks!

This is easily one of the most awesome Lego builds we have ever seen. We know we had some rotary stuff on the front page today already but this is in a different league. The whole engine is custom built from the imagination of the guy snapping the blocks together, to start. This is not a kit, this is not something already made a video about. From the creation of the rotor itself to the fact that this thing has “spark plugs” intake and exhaust ports, the right eccentric travel and the list goes on and on, your mind will be blown like ours.

There may be kids who watch this video and have a lightbulb come on in their minds about how one of these weird little engines work. In fact, they aren’t so weird when you see a happy little version of one, built of out of Lego blocks whirring away. This guy even went so far as to include the tip seals on the rotor in his build!

The addition of the “spark” light is a big one here because there are some animations that show the cycle of a rotary engine but when he dims the lights and then cranks the engine up with the little cam and rocker arm to trigger the light up block, things go from interesting to completely awesome.

We have no idea how many hours are in this build but what a teaching tool. I watched this with my kids and both of them were able to see what exactly happens inside the engine and they were both 100% more understanding of a rotary engine than they were after I explained it to them 100 times.

THIS is great!

Press play below to see this incredible scale model rotary engine built from Lego!

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If You Aren’t Smiling After Watching These Citröen Dyanes Rally, Then You Are Probably Seasick From Watching The Suspension Work!

Aug 23, 2020Apex Video, BangShift APEX

If You Aren’t Smiling After Watching These Citröen Dyanes Rally, Then You Are Probably Seasick From Watching The Suspension Work!

Think of the Citröen Dyane as an upgraded version of the 2CV: in top-performance Dyane 6 form, there’s a 602cc flat-two engine driving the front wheels, a very light body structure, and after watching them go all-out at a rally, suspension travel that requires Dramamine to tolerate. We love an inappropriate car doing what it shouldn’t do, and with bicycle-wide tires and 32 horsepower on tap, rally racing is the last possible thing we would do with one. Alberto Miera, on the other hand, has absolutely no issue whatsoever wringing out his Dyane 6 on rally courses. The YouTube video description refers to Miera as the “brave pilot”, and watching the Dyane move around reinforces that statement. It might not be powerful, but anything past cruising speed brings out the suspension travel, and Miera isn’t afraid of the car at all, going so far as to induce oversteer. Watching the front wheels lay over in the corners makes us wonder just how many tie rod ends he goes through per race!

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(Courtesy: Jalopnik)

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Historical Footage: Mazda’s Group B RX-7 – It Might Not Be The Fastest, But It Was Certainly The Loudest!

Jun 19, 2020Apex Video, BangShift APEX

Historical Footage: Mazda’s Group B RX-7 – It Might Not Be The Fastest, But It Was Certainly The Loudest!

Group B Rally racing conjures up images of Lancias battling Audis, Ford RS200s flying through narrow streets, airborne Opel Mantas and all sorts of crazy, borderline unhinged designs. It was pretty much anything goes, and manufacturers did just about everything possible to gain the upper hand. Lightweight bodies that were barely production? Turbochargers and superchargers, sometimes on the same engine? All-wheel-drive? Check, check, and check. Even to this day Group B is considered one of the most exciting times in any motorsports genre ever, and in it’s heyday it was more popular worldwide than Formula One. It was big enough that Ferrari was going to join the ranks…if that doesn’t speak volumes, nothing does.

Mazda even played along too, with their RX-7, and while it was already at a disadvantage against the four-wheel-drive crowd, it did have one neat feature that the audience was sure to love: a tachometer that swung around to 12,000 RPM and an engine fully capable of hitting that number. The worked-over 13B rotary was good for 300 horsepower at 8500 RPM, and when thrown into a race car that weighed around 2100 pounds, fun was had. Unlike other manufacturers, Mazda didn’t have to produce homologation models; instead, they were sort of grandfathered in since the RX-7 had been homologated for Group 1, Group 2 and Group 4 already. They were the underdog on the stages, but you could hear that rotary bark for miles!

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Ride Along In The Rear Of A Ladder Truck As A Tillerman Handles His Business

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Drift Beretta: How Chevy’s Front-Drive Two-Door Got Blended With A Camaro To Create This Monster!

Jun 16, 2020Apex Project Cars, Apex Sideways, BangShift APEX

Drift Beretta: How Chevy’s Front-Drive Two-Door Got Blended With A Camaro To Create This Monster!

YouTube is such a grab-bag of whatever. Some days all you see is a bunch of teenagers in 1990s Mustangs doing donuts behind a grocery store before they get busted by the cops, and sometimes you get led to the entrance to an Alice in Wonderland rabbit hole and are handed a tiny scrap of paper that simply says, “Hop In”. This is one such occasion of the latter happening. The car you see is a Chevrolet Bereta that’s seen quite a bit of cutting, to put it mildly. The wheelwells are chopped, the bumper caps are missing, and obviously the wrong set of wheels is providing power according to what you brain instantly knows. Go ahead…hop in:

Jon Janke’s Beretta build mated a former show car Beretta that had already been treated to what Aussies would call “sex-spec” modifications. Don’t know what that is? Think to the first couple of Fast and Furious movie cars. Once you’ve finished launching your lunch, keep reading. That car was then mated with a fourth-gen Camaro in what could jokingly be called a slight re-working process that saw the F-body hacked, chopped and re-shaped to fit underneath the shell of the Beretta. Over a span of seven years, the chassis was prepared for a drift-car setup, and as of writing the wide-body kit that this car will eventually wear was starting to be created.

You can go through all forty-two pages of build to learn the technical aspects behind the Beretta Z28 build over on Beretta.net, but for simplicity’s sake, it’s built, it works and here it is in action:

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Money No Object: 1986 Ford Bronco XLT – One Burly-Looking Bullnose

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Meziere Enterprises Safety Lock Radiator Cap Should Be Mandatory Equipment On Every Race Car

In racing we always talk about the big stuff. We talk about big tires, big horsepower, big numbers, and big performances but the reality is that the little things are what not only win you races but keep you safe. Take the Meziere Enterprises Safety Lock radiator cap. This device is a real world solution to a real world problem. I can give you at least a dozen examples of wrecks I have seen on the track due to people’s radiator caps failing, coming off, or otherwise letting them down. With the unique and awesome Safety Lock design, these problems are quite literally eliminated.

Made from billet aluminum and available in multiple pressures, the cap utilizes a roller pin design to contact and secure itself to the filler neck and then there’s the locking shell which is quite literally the lynch pin of the system. Once the shell is installed and the safety pin is inserted, that thing cannot come off.

There’s nothing worse than wrecking your stuff because of something like a radiator cap. Actually there is. There’s wrecking the track for your fellow competitors and potentially wrecking someone else’s car if they get caught up in your mess. This is a great solution to a problem that exists in the world and can be solved. We think every race car in the country needs one!

Press play below to see a great video on the Meziere locking safety radiator cap –

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