IndyCar, Drifting, and a V12 Espada — Dallas Car Culture 007

Hey — we're back.

I know, I know. It's been six weeks since issue 006 dropped on January 27. No excuses. Gas Monkey has been absolutely insane. Between the builds, the events, and everything happening behind the scenes over there, the newsletter got pushed. But I'm done letting that happen — DCC is back to weekly, for real this time.

And honestly? We're coming back on one of the best weekends for car people in DFW in a long time. Like, genuinely stacked. IndyCar is racing through the streets of Arlington. Sung Kang is pulling up to the Icehouse on Sunday. And TX2K kicks off in Houston. If you've ever needed a reason to get out of the house, this weekend is it.

Here's what's inside DCC 007:

1. The Link Ups: This Weekend's Events — Arlington GP, DRIFTER at the Icehouse, TX2K, and more local meets
2. Coming Up — What's on the radar for the next few weeks
3. From The Garage — Richard Rawlings bought a 1969 Lamborghini Espada Series I
4. Car News You Can't Miss — The ZR1X, the TRX is back, and new car affordability

Let's get into it.

The Link Ups: This Weekend's Events

As always, check ParkUpFront for even more meets and events around DFW — it's the best app for finding local car stuff.

HEADLINER: Java House Grand Prix of Arlington

Friday, March 13 — Sunday, March 15 (All Weekend)

When: Friday March 13 – Sunday March 15
Where: Downtown Arlington — 2.73-mile street circuit around AT&T Stadium and Globe Life Field
Tickets:gparlington.com / SeatGeek
Race Day: Sunday, March 15 — Green flag at 12:15 PM

DCC Notes: This is a first. IndyCar has never raced a street circuit in Arlington — or anywhere in the DFW Metroplex — and it's happening this weekend. They've strung together 2.73 miles of actual streets around two of the biggest sports venues in the country, and they're putting 500+ horsepower open-wheel cars through it. Friday was practice, Saturday is qualifying with St. Patrick's Day festivities at Texas Live!, and Sunday is race day followed by a T-Pain concert (yes, really — IndyCar + T-Pain, only in Texas). You'll also get Toyota GR Cup, INDY NXT, and USF Pro 2000 support races throughout the weekend. If you've never seen an IndyCar up close, these things sound like nothing else on earth. Go. Seriously, go.

Saturday, March 14

Corvettes and Coffee

When: Saturday, March 14 — 9:00 AM to 12:00 PM
Where:Corvette World Dallas, 1810 N I-35E, Carrollton, TX
Price: Free

DCC Notes: Monthly on the second Saturday. If you love America's sports car in any generation — from C1 through the ZR1X — Corvette World draws an honest crowd. Good spot to also have a conversation about what 1,250 horsepower means when it's wearing a bow tie. Free, so no reason not to roll through.

Bubba's 33 Car and Truck Show

When: Saturday, March 14 — 9:00 AM to 2:00 PM (Registration 9 AM – 11:30 AM, Awards at 1:30 PM)
Where: 4025 Hwy 121, The Colony, TX
Price: Check-in at the gate

DCC Notes: All makes, all models, judged show. Bubba's 33 in The Colony hosts a solid turnout every time. The judging format keeps it legit — this isn't just a hang-out parking lot, people actually prep their rides for this one. Good atmosphere, and honestly great food inside if you get hungry waiting for awards. Convenient location if you're also planning on making the DRIFTER event at the Icehouse that evening.

March Madness Car Show by Jenny's Treat

When: Saturday, March 14 — Check-in 3:00 PM, Event 4:00 PM
Where: 1209 Forest Ave, Dallas
Price: TBD at registration

DCC Notes: St. Patrick's Day edition, focused on old school customs. If your taste runs toward slammed, lowriders, or anything that looks like it came out of East LA by way of Dallas — this is your Saturday afternoon. Starts later in the day so you can hit Corvettes and Coffee in the morning, Bubba's in the early afternoon, and slide over here for the evening session. Full DFW car show marathon, if you're committed.

HEADLINER: DRIFTER Movie Night at Gas Monkey Icehouse

Sunday, March 15

When: Sunday, March 15 — 5:00 PM to 8:00 PM
Where: Gas Monkey Icehouse, 4545 Destination Dr, The Colony, TX
Price: Free to attend (check @gasmonkeyicehouse for RSVP details)

DCC Notes: Sung Kang — Han from the Fast and Furious franchise — wrote, directed, and stars in a film called DRIFTER, and he's bringing the hero car from the movie to the Icehouse this weekend. Let me paint the picture: it's an AE86. The car. The one. Named Lola. The film follows a struggling janitor with a dream of becoming a professional drift racer, and the whole thing is soaked in the spirit of drifting culture. It is, by anyone's honest assessment, spiritually very much a love letter to Initial D even if Kang hasn't called it that outright.

There will be a Q&A with Kang, a sneak peek trailer, and the actual hero car from the film on display. Cold beer. Good people. An AE86 at the Icehouse. This is the kind of night you'll be talking about for a while. I'll be there — come say hello if you see me.

HEADLINER: TX2K26

Monday, March 16 — Saturday, March 22

When: Kicks off Monday, March 16 — runs through Sunday, March 22
Where: Royal Purple Raceway, Houston, TX
Tickets:tx2k.com | Live stream on FloRacing

DCC Notes: Every year, TX2K reminds the world that Texas takes horsepower seriously. This is the event. If you've never been, the premise is simple: the fastest street cars in the country — Supras making 3,000 horsepower, GTRs on methanol, Mustangs that run low 6s — come to Houston to settle the argument. Monday is sponsor setup and tech inspection. Tuesday is drag Test and Tune with spectator gates opening at 11 AM. Full competition week runs through Sunday. It's about two and a half hours south, which makes it a day trip, but the drive down is worth it for one session in the stands watching quarter-mile passes that are over before you've processed what happened. TX2K is legitimately one of the best car events anywhere in the country. Go at least once.

Coming Up

• FueledUP Dallas — Saturday, March 22 | 9:00 AM – 12:00 PM | 450 Freeport Pkwy, Coppell, TX
• Dallas Showdown Truck Show — Sunday, March 22 | Garland, TX | The biggest truck show in Dallas — bring it all, lowered, lifted, cars, bikes. Follow @dallas_showdown for location details
• Convoy Showdown — Saturday, March 28 | Texas Motorplex | Presented by Dallas Dropped Trucks — trucks, cars, SxS, Jeeps, bikes. Registration day of show or online
• Supercars on Sunset — Saturday, March 28 | 9:00 AM – 12:00 PM | Icon Automotive, Grapevine, TX | Exotics only — this one draws serious iron
• FuelFest DFW — Friday, April 25 | Texas Motor Speedway | One of the biggest automotive festivals of the year in DFW

More details on all of these in the next issue.

From The Garage: Richard Rawlings' 1969 Lamborghini Espada Series I

This one's personal for me.

I work alongside Richard at Gas Monkey, and I've watched a lot of cars come through the garage. Classic Mustangs, wild customs, modern supercars — the whole spectrum. But when Richard posted about this car earlier this month and called it a "bucket list car," I knew this one was different. The Espada has been on his radar for a long time.

Here's what you need to know about the car he just acquired.

The Lamborghini Espada was built between 1968 and 1978 across three series, with a total production run of 1,217 cars. That sounds like a lot until you realize we're talking about a 4-seat, 4.0-liter V12 grand tourer from 1968. The V12 made 325 horsepower — genuinely terrifying power for the era. And it looked nothing like anything else on the road, because it was designed by Marcello Gandini at Bertone. Gandini is also responsible for the Countach and the Miura. The man had a particular gift for lines that age perfectly.

The name comes from the Spanish word for a bullfighter's sword. As in — this car came to end the fight, not participate in it.

Richard's car is a Series I, and this is where the rarity becomes something worth talking about. Lamborghini's official history records 186 Series I Espadas built in 1968 and 1969. The International Lamborghini Registry puts the number closer to 176 — the discrepancy comes down to documentation and how you count pre-production examples. Either way, we're talking about fewer than 190 cars made in a two-year window, with roughly half of all Espadas estimated to have survived to today. I've heard estimates of somewhere around 60 to 70 Series I units in the United States — which, if accurate, makes this genuinely one of the rarer things you'll see in a private collection anywhere.

I'm not going to pretend I wasn't excited when I found out about this. The Espada doesn't get the attention it deserves because the Countach and the Miura get all the press from the same era. But the Espada was actually Lamborghini's best-selling car for years. It was the car that kept the lights on at Sant'Agata while the more famous models got the magazine covers.

Photos are coming — Richard's team is working on getting them uploaded. When they're live, we'll share them here. Trust me, you want to see this one in person.

Car News You Can't Miss

1. The Corvette ZR1X: America Decides to Win an Argument

In the world of automotive one-upmanship — and if you've ever watched Clarkson lose his mind over a fast car, you know exactly the tone I'm going for here — there is a certain kind of announcement that lands not like a press release, but like a dropped gauntlet. Chevrolet, a company that has spent the better part of seven decades insisting that America can build sports cars as good as anything from Stuttgart or Maranello, has now built something that doesn't just make that argument. It ends it.

The Corvette ZR1X makes 1,250 horsepower. Let that settle.

Here's how: a twin-turbocharged 5.5-liter flat-plane crank V8 producing 1,064 horsepower on its own, assisted by an electric motor generating an additional 186 horsepower, all routed to all four wheels. Zero to sixty miles per hour in 1.89 seconds. The quarter mile in under nine seconds. On pump gas. With a manufacturer's warranty. Top speed of 233 miles per hour. Starting at $209,700.

For context, that's roughly half the price of a comparable Ferrari. It's built in Bowling Green, Kentucky — pure American — and it will, in the fullness of time, appear at our Cars and Coffees looking like it just escaped from a government test facility. Every Lamborghini driver in Highland Park is going to need to reckon with the fact that a Corvette now exists that can follow them home at triple-digit speeds and still have enough left in the budget for a decent watch. It is, by any rational measure, an absolutely deranged machine — and I mean that as the highest possible compliment.

2. The Ram TRX Returns: 777 Reasons to Question Your Life Choices

There exists, somewhere in the fever dreams of automotive engineers who clearly were not supervised closely enough, a concept so magnificently unhinged that it defies explanation to any reasonable human being. That concept is the super truck. And Ram has just reminded everyone why they invented the category.

The Ram 1500 SRT TRX is back, and it now produces 777 horsepower from a supercharged 6.2-liter HEMI V8, up from 702 in the previous generation. Six hundred and eighty pound-feet of torque. Zero to sixty miles per hour in 3.5 seconds. In a truck. A full-size pickup truck that can haul your furniture and your ego and still reach sixty faster than a Porsche 911 Carrera.

It starts at $99,995, which is either shockingly expensive for a pickup truck or genuinely remarkable value for what it does, depending entirely on which side of the argument you came from. Ram calls it "the fastest and most powerful production gas pickup truck in the world," which is the kind of claim that stays true until Ford or Hennessey gets annoyed about it.

If you live in Texas, you already understand the philosophical framework here. This is not a truck that needs justification. You bought it because you can tow your track car to a race weekend and then run low-12s on the way home. The TRX doesn't ask for permission. Neither does Texas.

3. The Affordability Problem (And the March Deals You Should Actually Know About)

Here's the less fun part. Reuters ran the numbers and USA Today called the dealers, and the conclusion from both is essentially this: new cars are expensive, the average transaction price has risen faster than wages for the better part of a decade, and lower-income buyers are now financing vehicles over seven-year terms just to make the monthly payment fit.

Seven years. For a depreciating asset. That's the automotive equivalent of ordering a filet mignon and paying it off in installments until your next birthday.

The irony is that March is historically one of the best months to buy a new car. Dealers are closing out Q1, manufacturers are pushing volume, and the incentive programs right now are genuinely worth knowing about. Tesla is offering zero percent financing for 72 months on the Model Y. The Hyundai Santa Fe Hybrid is at zero percent for 60 months. VW Atlas, same. The Chevy Equinox EV has approximately ten thousand dollars off MSRP depending on how the federal credits shake out for your situation.

The broader affordability problem is real and it's not going away. But if you are in the market right now and your credit is solid, the manufacturers are fighting each other hard enough that March might be the month to move. Do your homework, know the invoice price, and don't let a 72-month loan on anything other than a house become your new normal.

That's a wrap on 007.

Thank you for sticking with us through the gap. I mean it — the newsletter is better when people are actually reading it, and knowing you're out there makes it worth writing every week.

DCC is back to Fridays. Every week. No more six-week gaps.

Reply to this email and tell me what you want more of — events, car features, build stories, deals, whatever. This is still a collaborative project and I'm still listening.

Stay safe. Buckle up. New issue every Friday.

We'll see you on the road.

— Sanjay
Dallas Car Culture