A few weeks ago, we spent 48 hours in Beijing trying to find out about the car culture in China's capital city. What we found was that, to quote Rush like the nerds we are, "big money goes around the world."

On this episode of /DRIVEN take a trip to the other side of the world, where customs fees add up to 150 percent to the price of a multimillion-dollar supercar, and that still won't deter the country's new rich from plunking all of that money down. Visit a government-owned city of tuning shops. Take a jaunt to the Great Wall in a new Bentley Flying Spur.

We only wish we could have spent a few more weeks there, trying to find this guy.

This past weekend, CJ Wilson Racing driver Patrick Gallagher — a mechanical engineering student at The Ohio State University — raced at the 2013 SCCA Pro Mazda Playboy MX-5 Cup at Mid-Ohio. The OSU Buckeyes fan was wearing the helmet Andy Blackmore designed for him.

How'd he do? Gallagher came in fourth at Mid-Ohio, his third top-five finish in a row and his second-best finish of the year.

You Big 10 Conference fans recognize that helmet as a replica of the Buckeyes' football headgear. Tyler Cenarrusa of Censport Graphics painted it from Blackmore's design. The helmet's being auctioned off to support the Hematosis and Thrombosis Center at the Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus.

Gallagher's already had a solid career for a 20-year-old racer. He took the SCCA National Championship Runoffs in the F500 class and the SCCA Triple Crown in 2010, left to race in the Cooper Tires USF2000 Championship with JAY Motorsports and won the SCCA Formula Enterprise National Championship this year, and was awarded a $75,000 scholarship to spend this season racing in with the Mazda MX-5 Cup.

Estimates of China's new-car sales by 2020 range from 22 million to 31 million per year. It's no stretch to imagine the chrome wheels and coffee-can exhaust business spiking along with it. So, you won't be surprised that a local Beijing government built a huge complex outside the city just for tuning shops.

It's called Tuner Tribe, also known by some as Cool Cars Town. It's a massive, former industrial site that's now home to both global distributors of aftermarket parts and smaller Chinese firms betting that the appeal of decorating one's car will extend to the city's widening upper middle class of car owners.

/DRIVE recently stopped in China for a 48-hour whirlwind tour of Beijing car culture (coming in a future episode of /DRIVEN). While we were there, we hooked up with Tony Sun, the local SEMA rep to find out why the government wants to be in the car-modifying business, and what the future holds for the aftermarket business in the world's most populous country.

Yes. It's going to be huge.

You've waited for it, lamented the loss of its DIY gear shifts, pondered the efficacy of its new active rear-wheel steering and feared for its steering — which in the previous model was the best in the world. Now, it's here. The new Porsche 911 GT3.

This week on Chris Harris on Cars, Harris shoots and edits his own video about the new GT3, which he drove somewhere on the European continent. As Harris says, "If we were a car magazine we'd call this a WORLD EXCLUSIVE, but we're not, so we won't. Let's just say we got very early access to the car everyone wants to know about. And it was very, very good. Volume to 11 please."

Last year, paralyzed open-wheel racer Michael Johnson was the subject of a Jalopnik on DRIVE mini documentary. Now, Johnson being featured in Mazda's latest national ad campaign.

A former flat-track motorcycling champion, Johnson, now 20 years old, was paralyzed from the mid chest down after a crash during a race at the age of 12. Now, he races using hand controls in the Cooper Tires USF2000 Championship, and climbing the Road to Indy ladder. His next goal is to reach Indy Lights, which would put him within striking distance of his dream of racing in the Indy 500.

Mazda, a major sponsor of the series, named Johnson as one of the “Game Changers” the company is featuring in a new national advertising and marketing campaign.

The campaign, running through 2013, features historical figures like Laird Hamilton and Dick Fosbury, who've "defied convention" and "changed the 'game' in which they 'played,'" according to a press release. As part of the campaign, Johnson will also appear in full-page print ads in Popular Mechanics, Esquire, Car & Driver and Road & Track.

Johnson, who races with JDC MotorSports, will race next on the streets of Toronto, Ontario on July 13th and 14th.

CJ Wilson Racing driver Patrick Gallagher is a mechanical engineering student at The Ohio State University. Naturally, he's a devoted Buckeyes fan. Later this month, when he races in front of the hometown crowd at Mid-Ohio, he'll be wearing a very special helmet.

That helmet is a replica of the red-and-silver Buckeyes football headgear created by Andy Blackmore, racing livery designer — and spotter guide illustrator — and painted by Tyler Cenarrusa of Censport Graphics. The twenty-year-old from Thornville, Ohio will wear the custom-designed helmet later this month (June 14-16) when he competes at the Mid-Ohio stop of the 2013 SCCA Pro Mazda Playboy MX-5 Cup.

Gallagher, a race instructor at The Mid-Ohio School, is currently the leading rookie and is in fifth in the overall championship standings. After the race, Gallagher will sign the helmet and it'll be auctioned immediately after the event to support the Hematosis and Thrombosis Center at the Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus.

Andy Blackmore:

It was great fun designing something different. "The main challenge was to change the visual proportions of the Arai helmet to make it look more like a Football helmet. Not just with the face area, but you may notice a small area of black at the bottom of the helmet to fool the eye that the helmet as a different shape.

We needed to ensure the face mask didn't compromises Patrick's view when he's racing in the MX-5 Cup this weekend. There is a huge variety of masks available for different positions and skills in the 'real world', so I choose a design which gave the largest aperture and base it off that.

The Buckeye leafs are an iconic graphic for the OSU so it was important to include these on the back of the helmet. Players also have the Stars and Stripes and significant numbers, so we decided to include Patrick's race number to personalise it further.

Tyler did an awesome job bringing this design to life, quite a challenge to make one type of helmet look like another. Hope Patrick and the successful bidder enjoys their lid.

Tyler Cenarrusa:

This helmet was completely different from anything I normally do. If it weren't for Andy's amazingly detailed renderings, I don't know if I would have been able to do it as nicely as it came out. I have seen numerous football helmet themed paint jobs on auto racing helmets and to me they all looked like garbage.

I think what makes this one look so authentic and real is the fact that we added vinyl facemask bars to the visor of the helmet so it makes the visor blend in and disappear. I also went ahead and put some silver vinyl on the visor along with painting the visor hardware to further make it blend in.

The most challenging thing for me was to get the facemask right. but again, because of Andy's rendering I had to only follow what he had already designed. I guess airbrushing the highlights and shadows on the bars to make them look three dimensional was maybe the most nervous part for me, but I think it came out really really good.

Reading Jalopnik this year has been a bit of an E30 barrage. Instead of annoying me, this contributed heavily to me realizing that now was the time to either sit back and watch from the sidelines or get some skin in the game. The more I learn about cars the more I realize that in life, owning a genre defining car is a fleeting opportunity.

Want to own a '73 Carrera RS? Sorry. Too late unless you have about 500k in the bank. I don't. My daily driver is a '98 Subaru on it's 2nd engine. I realized though that an E30 had many of the same ingredients as an RS, things that make good cars great: Heritage, Race pedigree, first of breed status, heavy acclaim, and the passage of time.

So instead of wondering why I didn't 20 years from now, I bought and E30 M3 this week. I searched for little over two weeks and finally found one that was the right mix of condition and price. I didn't get a top 5% bubble car, but I got a good one. Good enough to make me smile.

It took some real convincing to convince my wife that this wasn't a stupid guy thing, but to my amazement she got behind the idea... after I built a shed and cleaned out the garage so that we'd have somewhere to park it.

She and I flew out Wednesday and drove it back home in a 1000 mile 21 hour road trip. The drive was incredible and the more I drove the car, carved corners, and let it rev, the more I understood what people have been describing all these years. I can't wait to get more acquainted with it as time goes on. This isn't a flip, it's the beginning of a motoring relationship.

In 20 years when the car has reached stratospheric values I expect I'll look back to this week with a sense of relief that I pulled the trigger when I did.

I'm going to write up the whole experience soon and post it to my blog. I'll cross-post it here as well. Thanks Jalopnik for helping me see the light.

Who among us hasn't watched a video of some hatchback storming through the woods at a high rate of speed and thought, "That could be me"? No one. And so, find a comfortable seat, grab a beverage and watch this video. Or just listen like it was a podcast. It's all the same to us.

This week on AFTER/DRIVE, we stopped in at Broken Motorsports in Union, New Jersey, a race shop that does tons of work on rally cars — in many cases for local guys just in it for fun. There, we talked with shop proprietor Bill Petrow and rally driver (and Bill Caswell's sometime co-driver) and Team O'Neil heavyweight Wyatt Knox, and some kid who just got back from learning how to left-foot brake at Team O'Neil. You may recognize him from having his head shaved by a Ferrari mechanic.

I'm not going to lie; today's show is super long, and you might just want to do the podcast thing with it. But there's great information in there you can act on right now — while the rally season is still kicking — from guys who know what they're talking about. It's not hard to get started in rallying, a sport where you can race almost side-by-side with your heros at the same event — what other motorsport lets you do that?

So there's no excuse not to at least find out how. Now get in there, Mr. Sebastien Loeb of Tomorrow, and go.

Admit it. The Chrysler Crossfire has slipped your mind. Days, no weeks — months, a year, two, three — have gone by, and no Chrysler Crossfire, a car to which you once probably devoted a thought here and there. How could something once present in your consciousness just go away like that?

It's not like it's been gone that long. The Chrysler Crossfire has only been off the market since 2008. Yet, experts say, on any given day more people think about Bob Dole driving a Cadillac Catera than they do about the Chrysler Crossfire.

Of course, this is less likely to be true if you live in Michigan. In Michigan, you see everything all the time. Wait on a street corner in Michigan for a couple of hours and you'll see a Pontiac Astre. The Pontiac Astre was Pontiac's version of the Chevy Vega. You didn't remember that? Obviously, you don't live in Michigan, where the last remaining Pontiac Astres in the universe live in blissful ignorance of their extinction elsewhere. And where only a real shithead would tell them about that.

Right now, somewhere in Michigan, an Oldsmobile Alero just went by and nobody even noticed.

The line between forgotten classic and just plain forgotten is pretty clear. I know car guys younger than 25 who could rattle off the entire product cycle of the Chrysler-Maserati TC. But the Chrysler Crossfire? Not even a blip. Maybe in a few years they will, but for right now the Crossfire is in limbo, thanks to the 22-year rule. That is, a car has to be at least 22 years old before bringing it up in conversation with car nerds will change the energy of the room.

Try it. Next time you and your car nerd friends are hanging out on someone's patio, drinking an IPA brewed in some other car-nerd's basement, mention the Oldsmobile Achieva. Schmuck, the Achieva is only 21 years old at best. Had you said Buick Reatta, you could have sat back in smug satisfaction as the car-nerd fireworks went off. Instead, the conversation switched to LeMons cars.

But what about the Chrysler Crossfire? Was it any good? I know I've driven it, I think I even wrote about it, but I can barely remember it.

Here's what I have, strictly from memory: It had a Mercedes platform, wasn't that it? An SLK? Or an SL? No, it'd be too small. An SLK. C-class based. And it had a V6, and there was an SRT version with a supercharger that some people liked. And it was a little cramped inside and it had that narrow hatchback, and (oh!) there was a weird roadster version. That's all I've got.

Clearly, the Crossfire was a hopeful collaboration, but ultimate disappointment of strained Daimler-Chrysler tensions. It appeared first as a show car in 2001 before launching into production in 2004, the base model powered by Mercedes' 18v, 3.2-liter SOHC V6. The design language was visionary, but largely awkward and divisive. It did have its fans, though, who appreciated its grand-touring ride quality and Benzish anointment.

The Crossfire sold pretty briskly — at just under $40 grand a pop — in 2003 and 2004, peaking in its first year at around 36,000 units, but sales fell off so sharply that by 2006, you could get one on Overstock.com for less than an espresso machine. And that's only partly a joke — they were offered on the big O for $8,900 off MSRP.

The SRT version was actually pretty kickass. It had a stiffened suspension, lots of rubber and a 330-horsepower Kompressor V6 similar to that in the SLK320, but resentfully detuned by Stuttgart to the de-tune of 20 horsepowers. Still, there was quite a lot of Mercedes in there for the money. It's been described, somewhat charitably, as a bargain SLK AMG, assembled by Karmann in Osnabrück, Germany, which is a real place.

And now that you've thought of it, the Chrysler Crossfire can, and will, slink back into your deep memory well until around 2029, when your kids will bug you, over homemade IPAs, about what the weird cars of the 2000s were really like.

An ECU-tuned Audi S4 Avant formerly employed as a dog transporter. A spanking new base-model Porsche Cayman. What can these two cars teach us about driving pleasure? Quite a lot, it turns out.

Recently, Matt Farah showed up at the UK doorstep of Chris Harris. Over something called "pints," the two /DRIVE hosts got into a discussion about the ideal amount of tuning for a daily driver. They also discussed whether they'd rather drive a sleeper Audi that smells like damp Schnauzer but launches out of corners like a scalded tabby, or a Porsche Cayman with less torque than a Ford Focus ST but the driving character of a, well, a Porsche.

The next day, the two set off to tour the Welsh countryside and shoot a buddy comedy about cars. And sheep.

Tony Kanaan, the Brazilian driver who took this year's Indy 500, is a lunchpail racer. By that, I mean he's just as involved with the day-to-day operations of the team, KV Racing Technology, as he is with driving the car. You can learn a lot from a guy like that.

This week on /SHAKEDOWN, Leo Parente interviews Kanaan about building a winning team from scratch, his definition of luck, the "mental math" it takes to win the Indy 500, his friendship with the late Dan Wheldon, how Rubens Barrichello taught him to find a bathroom and his frustrating, often-shaky relationship with IndyCar racing.

Why the frustration for Kanaan? Imagine holding the record for non-winning Indy 500 laps led, at 221, and never converting that into a checkered flag. Indeed, this win was a long time coming. The closest he'd come before this year was second to Buddy Rice back in '04.

Even if you don't plan to watch another Indy race this season, you need to get to know Tony Kanaan, if only because he's a racer who speaks his mind. That's the freedom you get when you're they guy out there making it rain.

Is there anyone left here who isn't some indignant, pedantic nutsack?

The Morgan Three-Wheeler deconstructs driving as we know it, and offers a completely different set of solutions. The Caterham Supersports R provides an absolutely pure driving experience. But is that all there is? Hell no it isn't.

This week, Chris Harris drives both of those amazing, lightweight sports cars, each coming in well under 1200 lbs, and talks about the experience on Chris Harris on Cars. We haven't seen him this excited since the last time.

How does a country not quite known for its sunny days build such delicious open-top sports cars? Well, is the answer.

Leh Keen may not be a household name, yet. He's the driver whose heroics caused major sphincter-clenching among those who saw his Nürburgring 24 performance in the rain on Driver's Eye this week. Here he is.

Keen, a championship GT racer, appeared with Leo Parente on this week's /SHAKEDOWN to talk about his career and that wet-weather lap of the Green Hell that's made more than 100,000 laptop pilots soil their "fire suits" (aka pajamas).

"I love moments like that," Keen says of getting the opportunity to race in the dark, wet conditions during his overnight stint at this year's Nürburgring 24, "it brings everything you have as a driver out of you."

At /DRIVE, both on screen and off, we've been playing a game called #BRZorThat, in which we debate whether we'd buy a new BRZ — the most hyped sports car in the history of sports cars — or something else. Today, that something else is the Honda S2000.

This week on AFTER/DRIVE, Ian "Mr. Saab" Whalen steps out from behind the camera to discuss a budding desire to replace (or supplement) his beloved 9-3 Viggen with either a used Honda S2000 or a new BRZ (or Scion FR-S) — two cars that couldn't be more different in character from the 9-3.

[UPDATE — I'd kept forgetting to watch this great, very apt comparo of the FR-S, RX8 (watch for this one in an upcoming #BRZorThat) and S2000 from our friends at Everyday Driver, to whom I will suggest starting their own Kinja page here to post their stuff. It's good.]

The point of the segment is largely academic — who loves to argue more than car enthusiasts? And frankly — to pull back the curtain — YouTube is more than happy to have decent conversations going on in their comment section. To our surprise, these shows produce far fewer "you suck" and "get a fucking haircut" trolls than average.