Sunday 31 January 2016
2016 #Audi R8 V10 Plus
Sunday 24 January 2016
Wednesday 20 January 2016
Tuesday 19 January 2016
Tuesday 12 January 2016
#Mercedes-AMG GT / GT S
Devastatingly handsome in its own right, the GT’s design tells a bigger story than the official one about emotional tension and muscular proportions. It pretty much looks like an SLS at the front and a wannabe Porsche at the rear, meaning it’s a synthesis of design DNA that properly reflects the spirit of the car.
The bodywork is by no means “wrapped around the mechanicals,” a phrase we hear issuing from the mouths of so many designers. Open the long hood and you’ll find what appears to be a plastic engine cover. Unclip this and you’ll discover it shields nothing more than the coolant reservoir and expansion tank. The twin-turbocharged V-8 is so compact that it sits several inches aft of the axle line, well behind this faux shroud. Mercedes could have easily made the GT a couple of feet shorter, but it presumably didn’t want it to look underendowed next to the grandly phallic SLS AMG.
The Mercedes GT S is resplendent in $9900 worth of yellow paint. Or you could pay only $3950 for matte-silver paint, if that's your thing.
And despite being nearly $100,000 cheaper than the recently retired SLS, the GT S is no poor relation. In addition to being the quickest car in this test across the board, it also outsprints the SLS. In our testing, we recorded a blistering 3.0-second zero-to-60 time, two-tenths quicker than even the megapriced SLS AMG Black Series. Both cars manage identical 11.2-second quarter-miles.
The GT S’s cabin feels better finished and better equipped than the SLS’s ever did, and the hatchback rear makes it vastly more practical. Other than the gullwing doors, you’re really not missing much. But can it deliver on the other part of its mission, to beat the 911? In terms of raw firepower, absolutely. The V-8 is definitely the most charismatic engine here, rumbling like a straight-piped brodozer at low speeds, then delivering some proper thunder when worked hard. It pulls cleanly and without lag, and although it might lack some low-down enthusiasm compared with the compressor-fed F-type, it revs higher and more relentlessly. It even pulls hard beyond 6600 rpm, where the Jaguar calls time.
The AMG’s dual-clutch gearbox isn’t as refined as the 911’s PDK, with some noticeable clunks as it shuffles between first and second at low speed. But with one of the more aggressive drive programs selected through the rotary controller—which cycles through individual, comfort, sport, sport-plus, and race modes—gearchanges become brutally fast and accompanied by a head-bobbing torque bump that makes them feel even quicker.
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Thursday 7 January 2016
Faraday Future FFZERO1 Concept
Faraday Future’s vision of tomorrow is not the future we were expecting. Based on the company’s utopian teaser video, we were prepared for a sexier take on Google’s koala pod. A Tesla Model S fighter wouldn’t have surprised us, either, given all of the hype comparing Faraday Future with Silicon Valley’s darling Tesla. Or maybe the company would launch with a sleek-but-sensible sports car.
Among the long list of possibilities, though, we never predicted something as radical as the Faraday Future FFZERO1 concept, a fully electric, single-seat supercar with no doors. The California startup teases that “if developed for limited production,” the FFZERO1 will be good for more than 1000 horsepower, a top speed of more than 200 mph, and a zero-to-60 time of less than three seconds.
We wouldn’t bet on any of that becoming a reality, though. Unveiled under the dazzling glow of the Las Vegas strip and ahead of the 2016 Consumer Electronics Show, an event where no one remembers the grand claims made just 12 months earlier, the FFZERO1 reminds us of concept cars from another era, when show cars were fully divorced from production realities. We were convinced that world of pure automotive fantasy had been killed off by bankruptcies, massive recalls, unfathomable scandals, and a global recession. Now we just wish we were 10 years old again so we could fully appreciate the bizarre FFZERO1 track car.
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2013 SRT Viper / #Viper GTS
Production of the last-gen car—which was nearly the last in the “final” sense of the word—ceased in summer of 2010, but it’s again time to give thanks to the gods of internal-combustion barbarism: The new Viper is debuting at the New York auto show. But it’s no longer called a Dodge; now it’s just the SRT Viper.
Since the beginning, the Viper’s big, bad V-10 has received just as much attention as the car itself. The good news: It’s still big and bad. The only-bad-in-this-day-of-the-650-hp,-200-mph-Mustang-GT500 news: You’re going to wish it made at least 10 more horsepower; the total is 640 at 6150 rpm and 600 lb-ft of torque at 4950. (The engine revs to 6400 rpm.) Both figures are increases of 40.
V-10 Vitals
A number of small changes help the 8.4-liter engine both hit those higher figures and drop a few pounds. The trick cam-in-cam variable valve-timing system remains, although the profile of the intake lobes was reworked. Engineers credit this with about 10 of the additional horses. A new composite intake manifold with longer runners replaces the old aluminum piece, dropping seven pounds from the top of the engine and ratcheting power up another 10 horses or so and pumping torque up about 20 lb-ft.
An aluminum flywheel cuts 11 pounds, helping revs build faster, and sodium-filled exhaust valves help keep engine temps down as well as saving a pound. In total, the engine is 25 pounds lighter now than its predecessor.
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Jaguar C-X75 Concept
On announcing the cancellation of the C-X75 supercar last December, Jaguar brand director Adrian Hallmark tried to put a positive spin on the story, saying that the car’s development would be completed and that regular Jaguars of the future would benefit from the work done on its hybrid technology, aerodynamics, and carbon-fiber composites. He also promised that Car and Driver, which had followed the project closely, would have a chance to experience Jaguar’s vision for a 21st-century supercar.
That opportunity came a few days ago and showed that Jaguar, together with Williams F1, is capable of producing a high-tech road car that could compete with the likes of the La Ferrari, McLaren P1, and Porsche 918.
Gestation Recap
The C-X75 began as a show car “as close to a pure art form as a car can get,” according to design chief Ian Callum.
That was because it was unfettered by the need to package a big V-8 or V-12; the idea was that it would pack a hybrid system that combined electric motors at the wheels and two micro gas turbines as generators. Unexpectedly, in May 2011, Jaguar announced it had joined forces with Williams Advanced Engineering to turn the concept car into an environmentally focused, limited-edition production model to challenge the Bugatti Veyron and its ilk.
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Friday 1 January 2016
2015 Aston Martin DB10
EON Productions, the producers of the James Bond film franchise, has just announced that the 24th installment of the movie will be launched as "Spectre." That’s great news if you’re a fan of the franchise, but there’s even bigger news coming from Aston Martin, the automaker providing agent 007 with the finest sports cars since 1964. In case you haven’t guessed it yet, the Brits have developed yet another Bondmobile, this time in the form of a DB10.
Yep, a brand-new vehicle that’s not available in the company’s current lineup. Aston says its a "bespoke sports car," but it sounds like a concept to me; one that previews the next-generation DB9.
Now that’s a very good reason to get excited about the upcoming "Spectre" movie.
Details are still under wraps as of December 2014, but the DB10 concept looks downright aggressive. It is, in fact, the most aggressive-looking Aston Martin I’ve seen in recent years, and if this is what the company’s future looks like, we’re in for a gorgeous replacement to the DB9. Aston Martin plans to build 10 examples of this bespoke sports car, but don’t hold your breath for a chance to buy one.
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1967 Ford Mustang Shelby GT500
Seven liters! Four hundred and twenty-eight cubic inches in a Mustang! We were expecting a cataclysm on wheels, the automotive equivalent of the end of the earth. We were pleasantly surprised to discover that the GT 500 isn’t anything like that.
The old corollary to that old adage, “There’s no substitute for cubic inches,” is “except rectangular money”–and who would know better than Carroll Shelby. When the Cobra 289 peaked out on the racetrack, there were several ways of making it go faster–most expensive, one cheap. One of the more expensive ways was the Daytona coupe body. The late Ken Miles found a better way. At Sebring in 1964, he shoehorned a Ford 427 NASCARized engine into a Cobra roadster. The experiment came to rest, sorely bent, against a palm tree, but Miles persisted. By the end of the season, at Nassau, he had another one bolted together.
It blew up, but the die was cast. Early in 1965, Shelby announced the Cobra II with a 427 cu. in. V-8 replacing the 289. That June, at Le Mans, two of Ford’s rear-engined GT prototypes appeared with the big 427 instead of the 289. The Europeans hooted and jeered at the bulky, heavy, unsophisticated V-8 with its pushrods and single four-barrel carburetor. A year later, Ford 427s swept the first three places at the French classic, with Shelby’s two entries dead-heating the final lap. What the 427s had beaten was a team of 270 cu. in. Ferrari V-12s with multiple carburetion and four overhead camshafts. The Italian engine developed almost as much horsepower as the Ford–425 hp vs. 485–but it was much more tautly stressed and, therefore, fragile. Which is the whole point of 7-liter Fords, Cobras, and now, Shelby Mustangs.
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2016 Acura NSX
Acura clearly wants to get this thing right. The original aluminum-intensive 1991 NSX was a stunner, a sunrise of engineering inspiration that chased away the darkness in the realm of sports cars and laid bare the multitude of sins being committed there.
For the first time, a large automaker that took quality seriously had applied itself to a segment rampant with all manner of pop-riveted, glued-up, hammered-down, and wiggy-wired silliness. In the presence of the $60,000 NSX, the self-important air-puffed mediocrities of the eroti-car industry scurried for cover.
It didn’t last. Everybody else got better, with newer and faster cars, while the NSX mainly just got more expensive, chained as it was to the rapidly inflating yen. The final targa-topped NSX went off the line in 2005, and hardly anybody noticed. Since then, Acura has launched, scrubbed, relaunched, rescrubbed, and re-relaunched projects intended to replace it. In the first two tries, the car got as far as a fully styled and drivable prototype, which in NASA parlance is 30 feet above the moon, before Acura aborted.
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McLaren P1
Here is a rough transcript of what I uttered when I first unleashed the full 903 horsepower of the McLaren P1: “[Cackle, cackle] Holy [bleep]! That’s . . . [cackle]. I, uh . . . wow. [cackle].”
It was about then that my co-driver reminded me of the pending terminus of the airport runway on which we were driving and the imminent braking zone, which I was now crowding at something like 135 mph. I would tell you our exact speed but, honestly, I haven’t a clue what it was. I never thought to look down at the speedometer.
I was by then a speed-drunk sack of cortisol and adrenaline with what I’m guessing were wildly dilated pupils. It wasn’t until much later that remorse would overwhelm me for having used hyperbole in describing other fast cars I’ve driven. I’d wasted all the superlatives on cars that I now know were unworthy.
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