What's in your backpack?

Peter Oliver Age: 24 Hometown: Morehead City, North Carolina Year: Third year medical student What’s in your backpack? Wallet, hospital ID, ophthalmoscope, Tums, Ibuprofen, Band-aid, ear plugs, laser pointer, three pencils, blue pen, $3 in change, poem from mentor, shipping receipt, good luck note from girlfriend, Zune MP3 player, empty plastic food container in plastic […]

Speed racer

In the early ‘80s a class of fifth graders from Stonewall Elementary School in Clear Brook, close to Winchester, took a field trip to White Post Restorations, a car restoration shop in White Post, Virginia. On that afternoon, the kids looked inside some of the most specialized and elite cars ever designed—Bentleys, Rollses, Jags. But […]

Dangerous curves

  Since his childhood, a dream of working on luxury cars has revved Kenny Shreves’ engines. He currently works mostly on Porsches in Werkstatt, his performance shop in Charlottesville, where vehicles like this finished Porsche (top left) are prepped for the track (top right). His current fixation is the Ford GT (center), a $1 million […]

Speed thrills

When I arrived at the Augusta Government Center in Verona, I was immediately greeted by a line of Porsches waiting for their turn to race the circuit. I was supposed to be meeting Sherry Westfall and husband James Condon, social chair and webmaster of the Shenandoah Regional Porsche Club of America, respectively. This was the […]

Craig buys Wachovia building for $6.7M

Not everyone is in retreat mode during the current economic climate. Local developer Hunter Craig has purchased the Wachovia building on the Downtown Mall for $6.65 million. The building at 119-123 E. Main St. is the Mall’s tallest structure, with Wachovia as the principal tenant. The properties will be managed by CB Richard Ellis-Charlottesville, which […]

CAAR to write neighborhood Wiki entries

Once a novelty and now a rather pedestrian online encyclopedia, Wikipedia triggered its news avalanche when someone rewrote the entry about Sarah Palin shortly before she joined McCain’s presidential bid. The Charlottesville Area Association of Realtors (CAAR), however, doesn’t anticipate that much controversy when it creates Wikipedia entries for the area’s neighborhoods. CAAR President Judy […]

The "X" miles

“The project that really gets my fancy right now is that I am building one of those X Prize cars,” says Oliver Kuttner, one of Kenny Shreves’ early employers and a race car enthusiast himself. The goal of the Automotive X Prize competition, sponsored by Progressive Insurance, is to “think about a cleaner, safer, more […]

Lean, green racing machines

It was bound to happen: even racing has “gone green.” The American Le Mans Series (ALMS) announced in January its commitment to using alternative fuels in motorsports and partnered with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Department of Energy and the Society of Automotive Engineers International. According to the ALMS’s President and CEO Scott […]