Prepare yourself for a fantastic voyage: I'm going to take you inside the mind of a geek. Strange things happen here, unpredictable, unbalanced, illogical things. The inner workings of the geek mind are poorly understood and more often poorly utilized, but they can be entertaining if you aren't too shy to point and laugh. Observe.
The Geek Mind gets curiousLet's look first at what happens when the geek goes to a round of the World Rally Championship. Sitting on a rock in the Finnish forest as the best drivers in the world fly by at nonsensical speeds, word filters through the crowd that Markko Mrtin just jumped his Subaru 55 meters without crashing or damaging the car. The common mind responds with amazement somewhere on the spectrum between "wow" and "I think I just wet myself." The geek mind, on the other hand, embarks on a complex, three-stage process.
Step 1, Calculation: The geek mind thinks, "Hmm, there are 3.28 feet in a meter, so 55 meters is about 180 feet."
Step 2, Amazement: The geek mind thinks, "I definitely just wet myself."
Step 3, Interrogation: The geek mind thinks, "Wait a minute, how does anybody know how far the car actually flew?"
The geek mind has a point. Cars approaching the jump at different speeds and different angles all leave the ground at different points. Pinpointing the exact takeoff and landing points is difficult under the best conditions, but with another rally car less than a minute behind, a tape measure is suicide.
Searching for greater knowledge, the geek mind interrogates anybody in a blue and yellow shirt. After many failures, somebody has an answer. Telemetry. Sensors measure every possible moving part and every force acting on the car. None of these can directly measure how far the car jumped, but the engineers downloading the data can figure it out.
Somewhere in the car, a yaw sensor measures the car's rotation several times a second. Only when the car is stopped or in the air will the yaw rate stop changing. By looking at how long the yaw sensor is flat-lined, they can tell how much time the car spent in the air. Figuring out how much ground it covered during that time is a simple matter of looking at the speed sensors at takeoff and landing. There's some approximation, what with wheel spin at both ends of the jump, but the answer is close enough that the geek mind is satisfied.
The Geek Mind gets angryBeing constantly burdened with such wasteful and complex thought processes, the geek mind is easily agitated and prone to bouts of rage when properly provoked. Let's look at what happens when the geek sees a Pontiac at the SEMA show. The Pontiac is really a Toyota, but that just amuses the geek mind; what enrages it is far more complex.
The Pontiac is a Vibe (twin to Toyota's Matrix) decorated in a fascinating Detroit interpretation of modern import performance garb. GM is trying to send a message; GM wants us to think it has its corporate finger on the pulse of the modern performance market. The geek mind gets the message all right; the message is, GM still has its head so far up its corporate ass it still doesn't know what the import performance market actually is.
The geek mind figured this out simply by reading the three letters on the side of the car: "GT-R."
Is Detroit an island? Do these people know there's a world outside their drab, fluorescent corporate prison? Do they have any idea what GT-R means? In the modern performance world, the Skyline GT-R is a performance icon without parallel. It's respected, no, worshiped by the same crowd Pontiac thinks they're going to impress. How impressed would Detroit be if Mitsubishi tried to sell them a sports car called a GTO? Pontiac lovers would flow from their trailer parks, baseball bats in hand, until every last one had been destroyed.
But Mitsubishi was too smart for that. It had a sports car called the GTO in Japan, but the company opened its eyes. Its executives traveled and read books. They observed the world beyond their cubicle walls and saw that 'Murricans revered the Pontiac GTO. They renamed the GTO the 3000GT VR-4, and even disguised some as the Dodge Stealth.
Had Pontiac done its research, it would know the Skyline GT-R has been an icon almost as long as the GTO has. It would know modern performance doesn't mean body kits and wheels, it means horsepower, just like it always has. Anybody who looks past the laughably insulting GT-R badge will notice Pontiac did virtually nothing to increase power on its Vibe.
Lesson learned? Never insult a geek.