Bittersweet.

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Braselton, GA – Fifteen years. Compared to NASCAR’s 65 years running, not a big number. Compared to Indy and Le Mans’ ACO and FIA at or above 100 years each, barely a flash in the pan. Yet, in 15 years – the last twelve of which I’ve spent covering the American Le Mans Series – we have seen storied battles on pavement between global manufacturers and upstart privateers. We have seen a showcase for future technologies being tested in competition. We have seen history being made at high speed all over North America. In 15 years, some of the best racing anywhere has taken place in ALMS.

With the series to be absorbed into the Tudor United Sports Car Championship in 2014, this year’s Petit Le Mans closed out the ALMS season – and the series itself – on an unusually wistful note.

“It’s kind of sad, isn’t it? I mean… it’s an end of an era.” So said Muscle Milk Pickett Racing’s Lucas Luhr, prior to the start of Saturday’s last-ever ALMS race, which summed-up the overall feel on the paddock last week. Adding to the tinge of sadness in the air was the pain of loss within the motorsports family. Famed young Porsche ace Sean Edwards was killed in a crash in Australia on Tuesday while instructing a student, and his team made the decision to remove the No. 30 MOMO Porsche 911 GT3 from competition. The Porsche’s livery was redone in a tribute to Edwards, and taken for a solitary lap prior to the race.

The undercurrent of sober reflection was inescapable. Edwards was a popular driver and proven talent in GTC class. At 26, likely not yet into his prime, he was leading the Porsche Supercup Championship points race at the time of his death.

Thus, it was almost poetic that the 1,000-mile contest began with a somber backdrop of light rain, which continued for most of the daylight hours, before eventually giving way to clearer skies and cool October breezes for the finish.

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Test Drive: Audi S5

It’s great fun to drive purebred sports cars like the Porsche 911, the Audi R8 and the Corvette, but in the real world most of us need to spend the majority of our time driving a car that has decent room in the trunk, a comfortable highway ride and good fuel economy. Thankfully, there are some great cars on the market today that fulfill all those requirements while also being attractive and fun to drive. Some of the best in this class of versatile performance cars are from Audi, with the A5, S5 and RS 5 models. The S5 may be the middle child in this family of sport coupes, but it may be the best at combining practicality and performance in a car that can be driven every day.

The Audi A5, S5 and RS 5 coupe models are all based on the same platform but cover a wide gamut in price and performance; from the $39,000 A5 with a turbocharged inline-four making 220hp to the$69,600 RS 5 that has a 4.2-liter V8 under its hood that makes 450hp. The S5 slots nicely between those two models, priced at $52,000 and powered by a supercharged V6 making 333hp, a horsepower figure that falls almost exactly between the output of the A5 and RS 5. All three models come with Audi’s excellent quattro all-wheel drive and all three also have a sister convertible model available. Kudos to Audi for still offering a six-speed manual (Save the Manuals!) in both the A5 and S5 models, while the RS 5 is only offered with an S Tronic dual-clutch gearbox. Audi also makes the dual-clutch transmission available in the S5 (the A5 uses a standard automatic tranny) for an extra $1,400. Our test car had the manual.

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The Street Giveth and The Street Taketh Away.

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Baltimore. Ten years ago, while working a stint for the Mayor’s Office in Baltimore, the thought occurred to me as I was driving home through the streets, “It sure would be cool to see a sports car race through here some day.” Of course, I’ve probably said that about three-fourths of the cities I’ve driven through over the years – and who would ever think of doing a race on the streets of Baltimore, anyway? In those days, the city was known nationally as little more than the backdrop for HBO’s The Wire, a show sometimes criticized for being too true to life. Too gritty. Too brutal. Too real. If Los Angeles has a polar opposite, it’s covered in Old Bay seasoning, hon. Baltimore is a picture of working class hard times, and not unlike Detroit has suffered economically for decades. The city’s got scars, ugly ones, and they’re front-and-center.

Of course, there was no way a major race could ever happen. Baltimore, for all its picturesque aerial shots of the Inner Harbor, has way too many counts against it. It’s one thing to whip-up a concrete canyon in a city where snow is something you only see on TV (that’s you, Long Beach & St. Pete), but here? With streets in such characteristically mid-Atlantic shape, they’ll turn a new car’s suspension into crab cake mush in a few months. It’ll never work.

Except that, for the last couple of years, it mostly did.

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Grand Am Six Hours of Watkins Glen, 2013

CLICK FOR GALLERYThe Six Hours of Watkins Glen is always a barn-burner of a race and the 2013 race was no exception, as Christian Fittipaldi and Joao Barbosa get their second DP win in a row, and John Edwards and Robin Liddell get another GT win in their Stevenson Motorsport Camaro. As round two of Grand Am’s North American Endurance Championship, the Watkins Glen race also drew some cars that haven’t raced in Grand Am since Daytona, including an Audi Sport R8 and two additional Ferrari’s. PHOTO GALLERY

Test Drive: 2013 BMW M5

Back in 1988, the first-generation BMW M5 wowed driving enthusiasts with a six-cylinder engine producing 256hp and 243 lb-ft of torque - capable of reaching 60mph in 6.7 seconds, which was pretty damn quick for the time. Fast forward 25 years to 2013, and the latest fifth generation M5 is continuing to fulfill its original role as a four-door sedan with supercar performance, though it’s now going about it in a different way. The 2013 M5 is more than just another model generation with a new body and interior, it’s also the first M5 to use a turbocharged V8 after years of using normally aspirated inline-six, V8 and V10 engines.

It’s a safe bet that the BMW engineers that worked on the original M5 back in the 1980’s are surprised that today’s M5 makes as much power as it does, yet is so efficient. Thanks to technology like turbocharging, direct injection and variable valve timing, the 2013 M5’s 4.4-liter V8 makes an incredible 560hp and 500 lb-ft of torque, well over twice what the original M5’s inline-six produced. What may be just as impressive as those power figures is that the 2013 M5 is a lot faster than the original M5 while getting better fuel economy, even though it weighs almost 1,000 pounds more.

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"Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!”

Sebring, Fla. – This year’s Mobil 1 Sebring 12 Hours brought with it two major dramatic themes. Both involve the closing of an age.

For nearly as long as the American Le Mans Series has run, one of its biggest attractions has been the super high-tech presence of Audi’s LMP team. Their drivers have always been among the world’s finest, often with Formula 1 pedigree (indeed, the years-old joke on the paddock is that F1 is the “feeder series” for Le Mans sports cars), nearly as diversified as the UN, or at least Angelina Jolie’s nursery.

Thus, with the FIA World Endurance Championship continuing to play to the more sterile but market-friendly circuits (its only US date for 2013 being COTA in Texas), and with the LMP1 class departing from the series after this year, the Audi team returned for a Swan Song run – a thank you and farewell to the fans and the series, and as always a tune-up for Le Mans 24. What’s remarkable about Audi’s run last Saturday was not that they won, but how they continue to make it look so easy. It isn’t. Just completing 12 Hours at Sebring is a conquest of its own; winning it, and winning so convincingly for so long, leaves Audi with an overall streak to rival the greatest ever.

Then, there’s the story of the Series itself.

“Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria!” 

The words of Peter Venkman in Ghostbusters may have been intended as a joke, but no less hyperbole has been spent in recent months on next year’s integration of the American Le Mans Series and Grand Am into one combined program.

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The Way Things Were.

View Gallery Daytona Beach. For those of us who live, eat, and breathe sports car racing (or for those who just follow it on a casual basis), 2013 is the last year of The Way Things Were. Over the past 14 years, the split between the Grand Am Rolex Series and American Le Mans Series has forced divisions between teams, manufacturers, sponsors, circuits, media, and fans. Every one of those variables means millions of dollars.

This went on much the same way that the Indy Racing League and Champ Car steadfastly remained in their own walled gardens, until. Until it was too late. Until nobody else cared anymore. Until the rest of the racing world – and even the IRL’s media darling, Danica Patrick – had moved on.

So, while the two sets of racing series spent years with each pretending the other didn’t exist, NASCAR kept cashing all the checks. More than five years later, the unified IndyCar series is still struggling to rebuild.

The split in sports car racing has followed a similar trajectory – a cold war of sanctioning bodies, each hoping the other would eventually either run out of money, or just give up. Last year, the two sides reached a détente of sorts: NASCAR (which owns Grand Am) agreed to buy out the American Le Mans Series and pretty much everything that came with it. The rest of the deal will some day be history – except that history is being written on tarmac right now.

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Test Drive: Audi R8 Spyder

It wasn’t that long ago that Audi would have never been mentioned in the same breath as Ferrari, Porsche or Lamborghini. That has all changed not because of Audi’s racing success at Le Mans, but because of the car you see here, the R8. The multiple endurance victories certainly helped to elevate Audi brand awareness and equity with the sportscar cognoscenti, but the R8 takes all of Audi’s know-how and engineering prowess that has evolved through racing and puts it into a high-performance road car model – a model that is also raced very successfully around the world. I had a chance to spend a week driving an R8 and my time in the car revealed how good it really is, even as it is set to be updated for the 2014 model year.

Audi offers the R8 in a few different flavors that are differentiated by body style and engine choices. You can buy the R8 with a 4.2-liter V8 that makes 430hp, a 5.2-liter V10 that makes 525hp, or in the case of the GT model, a 5.2-liter V10 that makes 560hp. These engine choices are available in either coupe or convertible (Spyder) form, ranging in price from $114,200 for the R8 4.2 coupe to $210,300 for the R8 GT Spyder, and all R8 models come with Audi’s famous quattro all-wheel drive. While my first choice for our test would have been a GT coupe (since its closest in performance to the R8 LMS race car), I didn’t hesitate when Audi offered me an R8 4.2 Spyder to drive.

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