For cropping and resizing I'd recommend XNView:
http://www.xnview.com/en/xnview.html
Remember to crop away everything other than the raw image as the example in my first post:
vs
As some simple guidelines for resizing, very high quality pictures from HD sources can be as much as 960px wide or 498px tall. DVD quality should be 720px wide if in widescreen. In cases such as this with youtube videos I'd say they probably should be 640px or 600px, unless they are very good quality.
Make sure the ratio is right too. See if the cars appear too tall or too long (are the wheels round?). If they look fine, then upload them as they are. As general guidelines:
Widescreen: 640x360 or 720x405.
Older non-widescreen (like those pics of the Volga) 640x480 or 600x450.
However, if the pics look fine ratio wise but don't quite match these size, don't worry. So long as they look right.
Compare:
vs
To see what I mean by this. The second pic as at a wrong ratio.