Ferrari calls it the 458 Spider. We call it awesome.
The British motoring show Fifth Gear reviewed this car in its Italian homeland, and we thought you’d be interested to see it. Try to keep the drool off your keyboard.
You Are Currently Browsing: The News
Mopar appears to be bringing back an updated version of the famed Viper V10 engine.
This time around the 512 cubic inch monster produces 800 horsepower and 695 lb/ft of torque. The new motor features an aluminum block and heads and is fortified with a forged crank and rods. The compression ratio is said to be around 12.5:1.
Mopar is intending the engine for drag racing and off-road use, so if you were planning to put one in your Daytona, you might be out of luck. Hopefully, we’ll see more options in the future.
GM just recently announced new two-year production plans many of its models. Included in that list is a new C7 Corvette which should show up sometime in the spring of 2012 as a 2013 model, which moves the timeline for the debut of the C7 model up a year. That’s good news for fan of the iconic American sports car, but what exactly we’ll be getting is anyone’s guess at this point.
Whatever shows up, it’s likely that the newest Corvette will look quite different than its predecessors. Continue Reading
What a way to kick off the first Baltimore Grand Prix IndyCar race!
This video shows driver Helio Castroneves minding his own business going into Turn 1 of the Baltimore street course when Tony Kanaan comes up hard from behind, hits Castroneves’ car and actually flies over it. Kanaan said the problem was a stuck throttle–we’re just glad everyone is OK. The resulting footage from Castroneves’ in-car camera is mind-boggling.
Check out the incredible video after the break.
Just ran across this cool video from the Depth of Speed blog about young hot rod builder Chris Davenport and his Salt Flat Speed Shop. Josh is an old-school builder and some of this metal shaping skills are on display in this video.
Some pretty cool stuff.
Now this is the kind of electric car that we can get behind.
An offshoot of Toyota known as Toyota Motorsport GmbH just stuffed an all-electric drivetrain that they hoped to put into production into a race car chassis and attacked the nearly 13-mile Nurburgring like they were being chased by the IRS. Beats the pants off of any Prius.
Along the way they shattered the existing nine-minute plus record for electric vehicles on the Nurburgring by over a second. Thanks to two electric motors pushing out a combined 599 lb/ft of torque and a top speed of 162 miles per hour, helped the car along to a seven minute 47.794 second lap. Who knows how long it will stand, but for now you can watch the full record-breaking lap complete with eerie silence except for the squealing tires.
There are few things as cool as seeing a supercar pushed to its limits. And it gets even better when there is a real pro behind the wheel.
This is in-car video from a test session for the race car fielded by TopSpeed Motorsports for the One Lap of America. The testing is taking place at Virginia International Raceway’s excellent road course. Major props to driver Leh Keen behind the wheel.
I recently had the opportunity to sit down with famous engine builder Keith Dorton of Automotive Specialists to discuss some of the techniques he used to develop engines that dominated the USAR Pro Cup racing series in the ’90′s all the way up through today.
One of the more interesting things he talked about was that he once reached a point where his engines were producing great power but the valvetrain movement was simply too harsh for the rockers, lifters and valves. He was able to solve that issue after three days of Spintron testing with Comp Cams’ engineers at their facility. Continue Reading
While testing the RTS Tooling Pressure Differential Valve we were pleasantly surprised by the outstanding performance of RHS’s Pro Elite 23-Degree Chevrolet cylinder head. The head is a bit unique because it’s one of the few CNC ported cast iron cylinder heads out there.
So you might be interested to know that RHS has also worked the same magic for the small block Ford. The Pro elite ford head is constructed from aluminum and is designed for circle track and drag racing applications. It features intake runners sized at either 205 or 221 cc’s and 79 cc exhaust runners. The chambers are sized at 62 cc’s each and the seats arrived already cut to fit 2.080/1.625 diamter intake and exhaust valves.
For more information you can check out the RHS website.
