The domestics recovered this summer, and foreigners made the high-end interesting, for better and worse. If spring 2010 was Dan Neil's rebirth as an auto critic, the summer was a stabilization. One needed to take off the party blindfold to tell the pinatas from the pets.

Sept. 11: "To understand the 2011 VW Jetta, you could do worse than to walk into an H&M retail store, which specializes in cheap, dreadful clothes for anorexic children."

Sept. 10: "As it pulls out into suburban traffic, the Maserati GranTurismo Convertible radiates a weird and alien glamour—imagine a Frank Gehry building situated in central Pyongyang." Also: "Avoid becoming the clear stripper heels from out by the airport."

Sept. 3: "Snouty, frumpy, with a rear end like a soused diaper and a pair of the biggest, most ridiculous headlamps since the invention of fire."

Aug. 27: "Toupee glue and tape concerns should be very concerned."

Aug. 13: "The 918 Spyder looks epic, menacing and unholy. If it were a Romanian prince it would eat infants."

July 30: "This thing was designed by drunken kittens."

July 23: "Nicely kitted women eating in cafes were arrested in mid-fork, seemingly hit with an envious freeze-ray."

July 10: "Earlier this month, Range Rover unveiled the production version of its 2012-model-year Evoque compact 4×4 at a London party thrown by Vogue magazine, with none other than Victoria Beckham purring and rubbing her muzzle up against it. Indeed, like Icky Vicky, the Evoque has a kind of sawed-off, famished look."

July 3: "The CTS Coupe looks like it was beamed in from a near future when gangsters are armed with lasers."

To be honest, I haven't visited Dan Neil as much on the Journal's site as I did on the Los Angeles Times' site. When you charge for most of a site's content, I visit far less than I would otherwise. But I'm happy to report that, as of tonight, none of Dan's content is behind the pay wall. Viva el Neil! So, I present to you the best of Dan from recent months.

About the title of this post, I do believe there is a liberacion occurring.

After the Pulitzer Prize, in my opinion, Dan got more serious. His desire to blow a whole column on wild description fell to deeper LAT pressure and car column utility. But I'm happy (again) to report his balance now seems imbalanced once again. Specifics of engine and suspension are running too deep, but I would argue out of obsession, not concession.

Mattering more now is his loosening of voice, all over the road. Good.

On the Rolls-Royce Ghost:

In a car dedicated to serene sensations and sheer, gliding effortlessness, calling on this kind of thrust feels very much like going over Niagara in a beautifully appointed, leather-lined barrel.

On the Subaru Legacy:

Meanwhile, a whole galactic mindset away are the hard-handed libertarian Subaru drivers, the ornery Snowbelt hermits living far out of town, where the plows never go, who need to get to and from their forested keeps. These are people who darn their own socks and whittle their own fireplace mantles.

On the Hyundai Sonata:

No one will ever write erotic poetry about the Hyundai Sonata. No courting suitor ever promises a woman, "Darling, I'll give you the moon, the stars, a Sonata with cloth seats…" Snooki from "Jersey Shore" will be named secretary of agriculture before a Sonata crosses the field at the Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance classic-car show. These things are appliances, disposable widgets, destined to wind up as brightly colored cubes of crushed and fused metal, the unlamented scat of our mobility society.

On the Jaguar XJ:

And all of this provides a contrasting backdrop for the body-colored roof rails and the car's most heroic design flourish, the elongated chrome ellipse reaching around the side windows, a dramatic teardrop of mercury. There were moments I wanted to kiss this section of the car, or take it home and throw it in bed with me.

On the 2011 Ford Fiesta:

Can it be that Americans, with their bare muddy feet and big straw hats, are growing less provincial?

On the Porsche 911 Turbo Cabriolet:

Screaming into a top-down tornado at 130 mph in the Porsche 911 Turbo Cabriolet, I am reminded — as I'm sure most people are — of Thomas Aquinas. To wit: When is a thing perfect, complete, finished–when does Porsche drop the paint brush and walk away from the canvas? When will one more stroke diminish the whole?

The whole review is amazing. "Thus configured, and motoring at 60 mph through a Southern twilight on fresh asphalt with the top down, fireflies vectoring past the windshield like warp stars, the 911 Turbo Cab is effortless and euphoric." But then! After you start messing with the settings, the guts of the car, something happens. "The resulting machine is exactly the soul-chewing, face-pulling monster you'd expect of a new Porsche Turbo: fitful and furious, hyperkinetic, breathtakingly responsive, with big, whopping, molten sounds on trailing throttle, the sort of aural elementalism exhibited by Icelandic volcanos."

(more…)

He returns to newspapering with one of my favorite cars, the Mustang.

Of the 2011 model, he uses the word "stonky" in his fourth graf. The fifth graf begins, "The Ford Mustang is rapidly becoming America's low-rent, GED-educated version of the Porsche 911." That graf ends, "They may be platypuses but you won't find a better duck-billed fur-bearing egg-layer anywhere." You wanted Dan Neil, Journal? You've got him. Drawing the most comments on the review? A Palin joke in the lede.

Such as: "By now checking my side-view mirrors before I change lanes is an autonomic neural function, somewhere between breathing and cringing at the sound of a shrieking fan belt, or Sarah Palin."

The commenters don't like that one bit. Dan isn't in California anymore. But the money Neil-alive-and-kicking passage comes midway through:

This engine does for the Mustang V6 what a trip to Lourdes does for intractable VD. It's a miracle cure, sheer deliverance, salvation. Zero-to-60 acceleration feels easily in the high five-second range as car comes off the line with a big smooth rushing moment over-vaulting the car's 3,400-pound inertia, with almost no axle tramp or other squirrelly-ness. Awesome. Big righteous torque is available in the upper rpm registers, and the handling hardware–revised front and rear suspension and antiroll bars, redesigned rear-end lower control arms, tuned tires and other esoterica–puts a seriously athletic leg under the whole project.

The base-model Mustang–previously a good-looking, clumsy doofus (note the restraint with which I avoid mentioning Matthew McConaughey)–is now actually fun to drive. Actually, it's kind of a riot.

The review comes free on the Journal site, but let's see over time. Neil appears to be writing regularly for the org's Driver's Seat blog. There's also a video, "The New Mustang, Muscle or Girlie Car?" A serious, tie-wearing, Type-A man interviews Neil, who looks amused to be there.

Oh wait, it appears this just happened. How did the world not end?

Ferrari has named CMMB (Catholic Medical Mission Board) and the William J. Clinton Foundation as beneficiaries of an auction of the first Ferrari 458 Italia to arrive in the United States. …

Grammy-Award winner John Mayer will donate his time to perform during the evening and director and Ferrari-collector Michael Bay will be acknowledged for his long-lasting friendship with the company.

The auction of the first Ferrari 458 Italia in the North America will be conducted by the Wall Street Journal's Pulitzer Prize-winning automotive journalist Dan Neil.

More in this short "story" from "Elite Traveler, the Private Jet Lifestyle Magazine." (About page: "Articles provide detailed information readers can't find anywhere else, such as the names of the best therapists at top spas, and direct phone numbers for resort general managers.")

Longtime Patrickcooper.com hero Neil and longtime Patrickcooper.com goat Mayer land mere photos apart in a gallery. And between them in the gallery is car enthusiast and Grey's Anatomy star Patrick Dempsey, whom this blog likes as an actor but guesses is odd personally. I don't know what to feel. Except that Ferrari is messing with strange forces.

As Neil wrote in February of the Ferrari he auctioned, "The 458 Italia is spooky fast without the haunting of mortality." Strange, scary forces.

That's Mr. Dan Neil talking to Southern California Public Radio about his departure for the Wall Street Journal. As of this mid-February interview, he'd packed the family onto a plane and was wrapping up work around the house. At this point, I guess we can welcome Dan back to Carolina — and wonder when his first Journal reporting is coming. The interview showcases all kinds of insight around the Toyota situation (giving a big hat-tip to LAT staff and calling the situation "a Malcolm Gladwell book in the making") and other topics. We need that mind back in publishing.

Also in this interview? An update on the Trib employee lawsuit. It goes on, Neil says. "I'm very proud to say the lawsuit is called Neil vs. Zell."

And at the very end, we hear when Neil's Journal writing will begin…

This week has been good but also bruising and exhausting — to some extent because I don't know to whom I can explain why the week has been good, bruising and exhausting. I'm an explainer. Lacking answers there, you're stuck listening for now to one of the little good parts.

You know my blog post this morning about Dan Neil? I got a text from buddy Nate tonight while I was grocery shopping, "Dan posted on the fb page via his wifes profile!" I got home, and, sure enough, Dan had found my blog and then landed on our Facebook page for the Dan Neil Fan Club. Wrote the man: "Dan Neil here. Quite belatedly I've come to say thank you for being such a wonderful and faithful audience. You've made my job a lot easier and more fun. I truly appreciate it."

Made my day. Realized halfway to home I'd left my case of beer in the rack under my grocery cart in parking lot — this is exactly why I never use my vegetable crispers — and it didn't matter. A random dude who writes great stuff for newspapers had once again proven himself cool.

Which, really, is why Nate and I are fans. It's fun to prop the dude as larger than life on Facebook and in a blog. But by all appearances, Dan is a guy with a regular life who works in a newsroom, just like I do and in many ways analogous to what Nate does. Dan has a creative, cool job in which he invests himself a crazy amount, gets pissed at The Man on a regular basis and wants to do awesome by his audiences every damn day of the week. Nate and I, on our respective coasts, live that and drink to it. In a world where ("In a world where…") we all struggle to break through the information cloud, we salute success in doing so.

Difficult news in the last week on the Dan Neil front. As you may have heard, this blog's favorite columnist is leaving the Los Angeles Times for the pay-walled and increasingly USAT-competing Wall Street Journal.

Jalopnik may have put it best: "Pulitzer-Winning Auto Writer, Explorer of Sexual Positions Heads to WSJ." Friend Nate, a resident of greater Los Angeles and creator of Facebook's Dan Neil Fan Club (44 members and counting, join today), were texting about the news this evening.

The upshot? Don't worry, Dan Neil, we're coming.

Sure, you're headed to Carolina — back home — with the family in tow. The WSJ can also give you play the LAT had begun to lack. Along with, probably, some money. The "Free Dan Neil" movement was likely right. If you love Dan Neil, set him free. If he goes back to Carolina, well…

I don't know how, but we're going to liberate you from that pay wall. Your adjectives, hyphenations and extended ledes yearn for freedom.

Neil's last LAT column is now online. He travels to Italy and drives the 2010 Ferrari 458 Italia. "The effect on the human body," he writes, "is like biting into your neighborhood electrical substation." And the lede, the lede… pardon my quoting at length, but you won't regret reading:

Snow is a beautiful thing.

Snow wraps a pretty white scarf around the sordid and everyday. It's the stuff of Cascade watersheds, the frosting on Kilimanjaro, the secret ingredient in Telluride daiquiris.

Snow is to be cherished.

Yet it's not snowflakes that I see drifting into Ferrari's brick courtyard on the Via Abetone, the Temple Mount in this, the Jerusalem of Red Cars. Instead, I imagine I see tiny, confetti-like news clippings from Corriere della Sera, each one telling of an American journalist who managed to plunge a Ferrari 458 Italia into a snowy mountain suckhole. If I did that, it would be the biggest weather related-accident since Dallas Raines bought his wardrobe.

I kid you not, young lovers. As I turn the red enamel key in the ignition, and the V-8's devils begin to dance on the drumhead – KeWhe-drummmmmmmm — I am genuinely concerned.

Alas, the timing is what it is. I have a chance to drive Ferrari's newest mid-engine V-8 Berlinetta, a car that's quicker than the legendary Enzo (less than 3.4 seconds to 60 mph), with 72 horsepower more than the mind-frying F430, with a top speed in excess of 202 mph. A car with a wicked, scything aerodynamic shape, a bloody knife like never haunted Lady Macbeth.

And so the table is set: pounding snow, icy roads and a 562-hp, mid-engine reptile on stone-cold tires. An Italian hurt locker.

Via Romenesko this morning, Neil's LAT farewell note is here. "It's been a rough few years here, mainly because of the jackasses in Chicago who own us. To them I say, with as much gusto as I can muster in an email, fuck you. On a happier note, there's not a person in this building I do not like, if not love. The paper has more greatness ahead of it, and I'll be watching from the east coast and rooting you on."

Thank you, Lotus. After recent sparks of spring with an Audi, where the engine "brims with futurism, a chamfered, beveled cutting tool of high-speed atmosphere," Dan Neil publishes a truly inspired work of auto criticism in the Los Angeles Times with the sexy 2010 Lotus Evora.

A ruptured fire hydrant of pleasurable endorphins, the Evora is the first all-new car from Lotus — a small sports-car company in Hethel, England — since it was reborn with the Lotus Elise in 1995. The company goes back to the 1950s and founder Colin Chapman, whose guiding principle in fast cars was extreme lightness. Lightness cures what ails sports cars like Lourdes cures scabies. All other things being equal, lighter cars change direction more quickly (less mass, therefore a lower moment of inertia). Likewise, lighter cars have better cornering grip (the vehicle's weight doesn't overwhelm the tires). A lighter car accelerates harder and stops more quickly. Meanwhile, all the stresses on the components are reduced — the tires, brakes, suspension and gearbox. It's one big, beautiful, positive spiral.

And:

The biggest difference between Lotuses and other cars is that Lotuses love to slide: Bend them into a corner at high speed, give the suspension a millisecond to compress and just hang on. The Evora arcs along in a perfectly peaceful, drama-free four-wheel drift. Lotus might as well have a patent on this feeling. Exiting a tight hairpin, you can get on the gas hard — the traction control system offers minimal interference — and the car swivels with heavenly, progressive power-on oversteer, gaining degrees of crossed-up heroism until you breathe the throttle. Bang the rev limiter, slam the gear. Ya-freakin'-hoo. It's like corner-carving on skis in fresh powder. My God, that's fun.

And:

Is a Porsche Cayman S quicker and faster? Yeah, probably, a little, if you judge things so parlously as to measure your life in tenths of a second. The Evora is a connoisseur's car, a driver's shibboleth and secret code, a prime number of a machine that is indivisible by anything other than itself.

I sense real cars have come to bore him. Amid contraction, the future must seem so far away. Of the present, only the ridiculous remains.

So, he drives and enjoys a fast and expensive Aston Martin. "The DBS Volante is not, in other words, a real car, in the sense that it doesn't exist in the same Chevy-and-Honda world that you and I occupy. It's a legend, a myth, a beau ideal, a 510-hp unicorn of an automobile. You don't have to like it. You don't even have to believe in it. But you've got to concede the world is a more wonderful place for it."

Then: "Lathed from solid envy, thick with menace, low with conspiracy, wide with mayhem, the DBS Volante sends other motorists into a lane-crossing frenzy as they dive for their cellphones to take pictures."

And now deluded in happiness… "In the Volante, under acceleration, when the engine revs reach about 3,800 rpm, a bypass valve opens up and wild, feral decibels come pouring out, though not exactly a snarl. It's more refined, brighter, more metallic, richer and more musical; the chain saw you'd use to cut down the Enchanted Forest. Like if you could somehow catch the Perseids on a tea service…"

Dan Neil introduces me to the term, with hundreds or thousands of people moving in coordination: "There might be something deeper at work here than simple arty set pieces in post-Beijing euphoria. These ads are, after all, demonstrations of mass cooperation, human beings operating harmoniously, collectively and selflessly to make something beautiful. Maybe we've forgotten that we could do that?" I think yes.

Reminds me of the "human statue of liberty" pics from WWI. (Snopes.)