2004 Pontiac Grand Prix Gt2 on 2040-cars

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Porsche Sports Car Together Fest is a labor of many Porsche loves

Over Labor Day Weekend, Porsche held its second annual Sports Car Together Fest (SCTF) at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. We happened to be nearby, so we swung by to check out an event we’d never heard of until a few weeks before. Reading about it on Porsche's U.S. web site made us think it would be something like Rennsport Reunion for the Midwest. Turns out SCTF is just as much of a different kind of fun. The fest Tom MooreÂ’s the man behind Dark Horse Motorsports, the motorsport consultant for Porsche Cars North America (PCNA) PR. "People love Rennsport Reunion, but thatÂ’s every three to four years," he explained. “We wanted to gather people on those off years, and we didn't want to just do a mini Rennsport, because thatÂ’s its own thing. WeÂ’ve maintained the motorsport history at Rennsport. Here [at SCTF], we're doing the current look at what Porsche racing is for." In this case, that means gathering what Moore called "our Porsche motorsport pyramid." ThatÂ’s the range of enthusiast drivers from novice to hotshoes trying to get to top-tier endurance racing, "[starting] with the progression from Porsche Club of America track days up to the top of the ladder of one-make racing in North America," the Carrera Cup North America, a series made up of nothing but the latest 500-horsepower 911 GT3 Cup cars.  The three days of racing action allowed almost any kind of Porsche owner interested in clipping apexes to compete around an Indianapolis Motor Speedway layout tweaked with an infield section. This year, that included ex-NASCAR star Jeff Gordon, coming out of retirement to reunite with his longtime NASCAR crew chief Ray Evernham for the top-class Cup races.  Evernham told us Gordon hasnÂ’t raced in five years and he hasnÂ’t been a crew chief in 22. On very short practice, Gordon finished in 14th in the Pro Class in the first Carrera Cup race of the weekend driving the #24 Hendrick Performance Group Porsche, and 11th in the second race. Afterward, he said, "I made a pass on the white flag lap. That made my whole weekend Â… I must say that yesterday, I thought ‘man, I am getting beat out hereÂ’ and I donÂ’t like that. If I am going to be in an environment like this, I want to be competitive. But today turned the corner for me. So, I hope I get to do another one day."  When we strolled the paddock after the event, exposed sheet metal proved "Rubbing is racing" is a thing in the Carrera Cup as well as NASCAR.

Looking back at Oprah's free-car giveaway 10 years later

Oprah kicked off her 19th season in dramatic fashion by giving all 276 members of the studio audience a free car.
Molly Vielweber's Pontiac G6 appears unremarkable at first glance. It wears forest green paint, rolls on five-spoke aluminum wheels, and it has a sizeable scrape in the driver's side door, the scar of a decade's worth of hard use. You wouldn't notice it parked at a big box store or cruising on the highway. Pontiac made hundreds of thousands of G6s in the 2000s, and a lot are still on the road. It's unremarkable in every way except for the front license plate, which reads, "Oprah 6."

Junkyard Gem: 1989 Pontiac 6000 STE AWD

During the middle to late 1980s, General Motors made a big push to grab back some of the sales swiped by makers of European luxury machinery during the previous decade. Around the top of the prestige pyramid, there was the Turin/Hamtramck-built Cadillac Allante taking aim at the Mercedes-Benz 560SEC and the super high-tech Buick Reatta trying to seduce away BMW and Jaguar shoppers; even the Riviera offered a futuristic touchscreen computer sorely lacking in anything out of Stuttgart or Bavaria. The General had a plan to take on the smaller German sporty sedans, too, and Pontiac of the "We Build Excitement" era offered a midsize sedan packed with modern hardware at a great price: the 6000 STE. Here's one of the rarest 6000 STEs of them all, an all-wheel-drive-equipped '89 found in a Denver-area yard last week. Any 6000 STE is extremely hard to find today; when I wrote about a front-wheel-drive 1987 6000 STE back in 2018, desperate owners of these cars filled my inbox with requests — sometimes demands —  for parts that continue to this day. Many of them pleaded with me to help them find an all-wheel-drive version, and now I have managed to find one at Colorado Auto & Parts in Englewood, just south of Denver (in fact, the same yard at which I shot the '87). You may recall CAP as the old-school yard whose owners built the amazing airplane-engined 1939 Plymouth pickup a few years back.  The all-wheel-drive system on the 6000 STE was introduced for the 1988 model year, and it became standard equipment on the 1989 STE. At this time, the automotive industry had taken note of the success of the idiot-proof all-wheel-drive systems offered by AMC and Audi/Volkswagen; Toyota began selling Americans all-wheel-drive Camrys, Celicas, and Corollas, while Ford offered the Tempo and Topaz with optional AWD and Subaru was just beginning to make the switch from manually-selected four-wheel-drive to genuine all-wheel-drive around that time (it took a few more years for everyone to standardize on the 4WD/AWD terminology we use today, though). The 6000 STE AWD was intended to compete with such all-wheel-drive-equipped sedans as the Audi 80 ($23,610), Audi 90 ($28,840), and BMW 325iX ($30,750); its $22,599 price tag (about $50,700 in 2021 dollars) certainly made it seem like a bargain compared to those cars. In addition to the all-wheel-drive system, 1989 6000 STE owners got a digital instrument panel and more switches and buttons than the Space Shuttle.