When you reach the age of 50, it’s normal to start thinking about things that you still want to accomplish before you become too old to do them. For 52 year old, Roy Locock, that involves circumnavigating the world in a car.
Now if you think that this is more than just a pipe dream from an ambitious man, guess again.
Locock is dead serious about going around the world and he’s doing it behind the wheel of the unlikeliest of vehicles, a 1977 MG Midget. Locock purchased the car three years ago and began touring parts of Italy and Spain. Not content with the miles he covered in his first go-round, Locock decided to take his trusty Midget – which, by the way, goes by the name of Bridget – to see the world. Literally.
Armed with nothing more than five-days of ration, two 10-liter gas cans, and his trusty old Bridget, Locock set out for his journey a year ago, starting from Oxford, England and moving all the way to Chennai, India. Not long after that, Locock took a boat down to Australia, where he proceeded to drive around the entire continent before hopping on another boat, this time to Argentina, where he has gone all the way up to Canada.
The German automaker Audi is making a move before the Frankfurt Motor Show with a series of viral videos and the website Electricity Untamed. The site is not much more than a counter that will zero out on September 15th and a series of facts that come in and out of view. Informing you that lightning is 5 times hotter than the sun and that 1 bolt creates 1 billion volts of electricity and can cook 30000 microwave dinners. However the most tantalizing of those factoids is that electricity travels at over 670 Million MPH, especially because the automaker has denied that the electrified R8 would make it to the show.
The only thing that we have to go on, aside from the electricity theme, is that the new car should look something like an R8 or even a TT depending on how you squint at the rendering below. If Audi is planning on brining a battery powered sports car to Frankfurt, they may have to share the stage at their 100th Anniversary at their home show with that pesky electric SLS super car from AMG. We are sure that if the German automaker did decide to prepare something special for their home show shouldn’t disappoint, as the last of those quotes stated, a shock you can feel delivers 250 volts of electricity, so if the jolt that sent the kid in the video clear across his living room, the electric Audi should be packing quite a punch as well.
The upcoming Ferrari 458 Italia not only easy on the eyes, but it is also a delight to the ears. Being fully aware of this, the Italian automaker has now made it easier to bring both the sights and sounds of the F-430 replacement with you on your iPhone. Just by visiting the new mid engine supercar’s mini site you can gain access to all sorts of multimedia goodies for your intelligent mobile device. Aside from the high resolution backgrounds and screen savers, Ferrari is also offering five different sound files that will make for some very memorable ringtones.
The first audio file is entitled overtaking and it delivers the sound’s of the new 458’s 4.5 Liter V8 screaming all the way to redline along with the sounds of lesser vehicles on the circuit. The on the track file offers perhaps the best mix of what the future Italia is capable of, mixing in a healthy amount of engine noise, tire squeal and speed. The other ring tones being offered are entitled: acceleration, off the mark and on board. So if you can’t wait until Frankfurt to see the car undisguised and hear the all new V8 officially fired up for the first time then now you have something to hold you over, and the best part is that it’s free.
Click the link below to visit the Ferrari 458 Italia mini site.
The identity of Top Gear’s masked racing driver, the Stig, is quite possibly one of the biggest mysteries facing automotive television fans and at the same time is one of the things that keeps viewers coming back week after week to watch the BBC’s best program. It would appear that the Stig’s popularity has led him to set out on his own and star as the face of a new "Where’s Waldo?" type magazine in which the white racing suit wearing top secret test driver is hidden amongst hoards of other individuals and all sorts of wacky automobile paraphernalia in Top Gear world. This is quite a paradox indeed, the Stig is mostly known for stepping into a car and going like hell, so the idea of having to catch the fastest man on Top Gear standing still is just absurd.
While the mystery of the original Stig is a closed case, being unmasked as Ben Collins, a professional racer who specialized in everything from rally car racing to stock car racing, only to have the BBC killed off the original man in black and replace him by the racer in white overalls that we know today. This lastest creation from illustrator Rod Hunt and BBC Books, “Top Gear, Where’s Stig?” has just been released and should soon be available wherever books are sold.
How come it is that you see so many exotic super cars going up in flames? One would think that with the highly inflated price tag and ridiculous maintenance costs that you would at least be buying some sense of peace of mind reliability. However unfortunately this isn’t the case and for each of these unlucky exotic car owners, their pleasant Sunday drives all ended with an eerily similar smell, charred super car.
All of these driver’s stories sound about the same, it doesn’t matter whether they were behind the wheel of a Diablo, Gallardo or even a Chevrolet. They were all driving along peacefully when out of no where their olfactory nerves begin to sense an odd smell emanating from their engine bays, and only seconds later their big boy toy were engulfed in flames.
Previously we have speculated that there could be a foul hand afoot, and that these high priced rides are being sacrificed in order to free up some liquid from a very overpriced asset in a tight economy. However if this is the case, those owners ought to be persecuted because they are giving the exotic car builders a bad name.
We have to admit, we’ve never seen anything quite like this before.
The photo’s you’re seeing is that of a replica Formula one car. That much is sure. But closer inspection, which in this case, we highly recommend, will show that the car was created out of...bread.
Yes, bread. You know; those tasty loaves that have become staples of our everyday diet. In an attempt to create the largest race car made from bread, a group of individuals, led by the Culinary Executive Chef from the Royal Plaza on Scotts in Singapore, decided to create something that has never been done before in the history of Formula One racing.
According to our source, Klik.tv, the creators of Formula One bread race car used more than one thousand loaves of bread of about 22 different types. In addition to that, the team also had to use 33 pounds worth of yeast, about 14 liters of water, and 4 pounds of salt, just to turn the car into a ‘bread-winner’.
Now we know the Singapore Grand Prix is set to happen in a month’s time and it probably isn’t a coincidence that these folks decided to turn a month’s worth of bread into a replica of a Formula One race car just in time for the race. The only problem we have with that is whether or not the race car would still be ‘fresh’ by then.
It was just last week when we brought you a Russian R8 owner who was pining for the days of the classic BMW luxury grand touring coupe, so it was quite comical when we came across this modern day nomad who is proud to call his workhorse a BMW, and that doesn’t stand for Bavarian Mule Works.
Aside from all the all terrain, test mule and harmful emissions jokes you have to ask yourself, what would possess a person to do a thing like this? Could it be the allure of owning an import or being able to ride around on a piece of fine German engineering that motivated this man to badge his donkey as a bonfire Bimmer. We guess that at the end of the day the question you have to ask yourself is, how much more is a BMW ass worth than the regular kind?
Aparently the sculptors at Legoland are as big a fans of the BBC’s Top Gear as we are, because as soon as they got a lead on the $60,000 Caterham Superlight R500 becoming the automotive journal’s car of the year they couldn’t help but capture the moment in Lego. Located near Windsor in England in the U.K. the four stars of the English television show find themselves at home surrounded by over 40 million other colorful building blocks in Legoland U.K.’s motor sport arena.
Legoland’s chief model maker, Guy Bagley said, “the Caterham is such a timeless and iconic car that it was a no-brainer as our choice for the motorsport area…my colleague remembered that the Stig had put the R500 through its paces and how incredible it was on the test track…it’s a design that lends itself particularly well to our bricks, too." If you just can’t get enough of this Top Gear Lego action, then do a search on youtube where you will find quite a few impressive recreations of the best television show about cars on the air today.
Sometimes, people just become too creative for their own good. While we applaud those who exercise their creative freedom – especially in tuning concept cars – we believe that it’s always a good idea to not go overboard.
In the case of this car – do we even call it one? – maybe it would have been best to err on the side of on conservativeness. But the folks over at NImik definitely had other plans. They created this: the ‘2CV Nimik’. The name, by itself, is reason enough for us to question the sanity of these guys but they sure did themselves one better. The Italian firm built this ‘vehicle’ by placing the casings of a Citroen 2CV on top of – get ready for this – a Ferrari F355.
Wrecking a perfectly good Ferrari just so you can put a Citroen on top of it to make a vehicle that’s too confusing to describe definitely puts the ‘2CV Nimik’ on top of the list of worst customizations in the history of the world.
To be fair, the ‘vehicle’ does come with a Ferrari-powered V8 engine and it is unique for aesthetic reasons. But we just can’t get over the fact that sitting under that Citroen was once a Ferrari F355.
For every person in the world that hits the lottery, there’s one on the other side of the spectrum that just can’t buy any luck.
Unfortunately, for this poor South Korean man, he’s probably wishing by now that he wasn’t at the wrong place at the wrong time. While driving along the highways of South Korea in his Hyundai Sonata, the man came across a flatbed truck with a 2009 Lamborghini Murcielago LP-670 safely stowed in the back. Rather than keep his distance from the ultra-expensive supercar, he instead crashed his Sonata into it.
To be fair, he probably didn’t mean to do it. Maybe he was mesmerized by the car – who wouldn’t - and forgot that he was about to hit it. In any case, the poor fellow is being ordered to pay for the car, which in South Korea costs at about $750,000. The guy does get some sort of relief because his insurance would pick up $100,000 of the tab. As for the remaining $650,000, that’s coming out of his own pocket.
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