When the Japanese automaker Nissan released the R35 Nissan GT-R onto the U.S. market, they did so with a little hesitation. At the time it seemed a bit peculiar to me when Nissan’s Technology, Environment and Motorsports PR manager Colin Price refused to comment on camera about anything regarding Godzilla’s launch control. But only a couple of months later, everything started to make sense when GT-R owners began to complain about the car’s problematic transmission.
The problem is that the GT-R’s gear box wasn’t made to handle the constant abuse of lead footed American drivers and their inability to understand exactly how much stress repeated hard launches put on the super car’s drivetrain. The worst part of this is that that the R35’s high tech transmission doesn’t come cheap, a replacement unit will run owners about $20,000. After one particular victim of the less than bullet proof gear box took the Nissan motor company to court claiming that if they equipped the car with a function, it shouldn’t be his fault when the car goes kaput just because he is using it.
So after about a year of deliberation, Nissan settled the suit by offering an upgraded LC2 launch control feature as well as putting a few new stipulations on the use of the car’s VDC and are offering a $75 coupon to all 2009 GT-R owners. From now on Nissan will have to prove that the use of the VDC system is a direct cause of the catastrophic failure before they can refuse to flip the bill.
Continued with full details after the jump.
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Felipe Massa is set to make a return to the tracks sometime in December, although it won’t be in a Ferrari F1 car as a lot of people would have hoped. Massa’s first race back from his career-threatening injury at Hungary earlier this year will be in a go-kart.
It’s not exactly the most resounding of comebacks, is it?
Nevertheless, Massa will be making his racing comeback at the Brazilian Granja Viana endurance kart race in his native Brazil. The race, which will be held in Sao Paulo sometime in December, figures to get a huge boost in publicity in the event Massa - one of the country’s most popular race car drivers – does get the ‘go’ signal from his doctors.
In the meantime, the Brazilian continues to recuperate from the crash that almost ended his life but has made it clear that he’s itching to return to racing, saying that “I wish I could be on the track tomorrow because I’m bored."
We’re all rooting for Felipe Massa to have as fast a recovery as possible because we’d love to see him back where he belongs: on a race track.
Whether it’s behind the wheel of a Ferrari F1 car or a go-kart is inconsequential to us; we just want him back to doing what he does best.
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.
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Back on August 20th, Top Speed reported that the headquarters of the sports car manufacturer Porsche were raided by German officials in search of specific documents that would lead to prosecution of the Stuttgart based car maker’s former Chief Executive Officer, Wendelin Wiedeking, as well as the former Chief Financial Officer, Holger Haerter, regarding possible violations of the German securities laws and manipulation of the market with regard to the recent financial dealings with the automotive conglomerate Volkswagen.
The German manufacturer has now confirmed that subsequent searches have been carried out at private residences of select lower level Porsche employees. While the automaker has not revelaed the identity of the individual, an unnamed source informed Automotive News, "The investigators found what they were looking for." Just as we previously reported, Porsche is denying any allegations of bad conduct and continues to cooperate fully with the German government’s investigation.
The German regulatory body BaFin, which is similar to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, is mounting the investigation against the former Porsche CEO and CFO for alleged market manipulation and insider trading. While the investigation focuses on individuals who no longer work with company, the proceedings should not have an adverse affect on the sports car maker’s day to ay activities, however this wave of suspicion could do a number on the much larger Volkswagen AG, who just acquired a 42% share of the sports car maker from Stuttgart.
John Schnatter’s long lost love has finally returned. Thanks to a few helpful souls, Schnatter, the founder of the pizza chain Papa John, was reunited with his 1971 ½ Chevrolet Camaro Z28, a car he sold 26 years ago to help his father save the family business and also allowed him to start his pizza chain.
After turning Papa Johns into one of the biggest pizza chains in the world, it seemed that Schnatter had everything he wanted at the palm of his hands, except for his long-lost Camaro.
After decades of tiring searches – which included Schatter hiring an ex- FBI agent to search for the car and launching a promotion to search for the car with a reward of $250,000 - the car was eventually found somewhere in Flatwoods, Kentucky and was now owned by Jeffrey Robinson.
Fortunately for the Schnatter’s beloved Z28, Robinson took great care of the car - even fine-tuning the car’s engine that now pumps out 825 horsepower –but also kept most of the original details intact. As you can expect, Schnatter willingly paid Robinson the promised $250,000 just so he could be reunited with the car he last saw drove off on his father’s driveway 26 years ago.
If that isn’t enough, Schnatter has also promised that all Camaro owners will receive a free pizza on August 26. So might we suggest that if you have a Camaro sitting in your garage right now, make sure to drop by a Papa Johns pizza chain on the 26th to claim your free pizza.
It has been a week since the Champagne poured and the confetti flew over the 18th green at the world’s greatest car show, Pebble Beach, and the event’s official auction house, Gooding & Company, has just finished tallying their sales receipts to find out that they moved over $50 Million worth of classic cars selling 129 lots, two of which sold over $4 Million each and setting three world records over the Monterey weekend.
The star of the show happened to be Lot 135, a silver 1962 Ferrari 250 GT SWB California Spider that sold for a record $5,115,000 on Sunday followed by a beautiful 1933 Alfa Romeo 8C 2300 Drop Head Coupe which went home with a new owner for $4,180,000. Guests at the auction on Sunday night were also privy to the sale of the very first Bentley Mulsanne which sold for half a million dollars.
Bentley’s newest luxury sedan, which is proclaimed to be the “pinnacle” of high end automobiles, made its debut at the 2009 Pebble Beach Concours. The car is named after the infamous 200+ MPH straight at the Circuit de la Serthe at Le Mans. The Mulsanne is set to replace the dearly departed Arnage and is being billed as the up-and-coming challenger to the Rolls-Royce Phantom for luxury car supremacy. It looks like we will have to wait until the world’s greatest car show rolls around again next year to see if any more of these records can be broken.
Press release after the jump.
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No, that’s not President Barack Obama’s new ride.
That car, the No. 48 Chevy, belongs to Nascar driver Jimmie Johnson, who, along with colleagues Jeff Gordon, Tony Stewart, and Dale Earnheardt Jr, dropped by the White House on the invitation of the Commander-In-Chief.
Mr. Obama gladly took some time off – what we can only assume – his hectic schedule to honor Johnson, the three-time Sprint Cup titleholder and defending champion.
We all know the President is a sports nut but we didn’t figure that he ranks Nascar right up there with the NBA and the NFL. While a number of celebrated athletes have all been invited by the President, this is the first time he’s met with NASCAR drivers, something that he’s been looking forward to for a long time. When the time finally came, Obama showed why a lot of Americans have called him the ‘People’s President’, cracking jokes with Johnson and the rest of the NASCAR constituents.
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Early this morning in the sleepy town of Stuttgart, a group of German police inspectors arrived at the Porsche headquarters in Stuttgart-Zuffenhausen complete with search warrants in hand in an attempt to uncover some evidence of suspicious activity. The search order was handed down by their local public prosecutor’s office and dealt with the suspicion of breaching a publication duty as prescribed by the German Stock Corporation Act which means that they could have been manipulating the German market. The boys in blue who were on the scene were said to have seized numerous business documents by the end of their exploration.
Of course the German sports car manufacturer denies any allegations and are cooperating fully with the German officials in the hopes for a speedy resolution. Off the news that Porsche is making major moves on the financial market, recently selling 10% of their stock to a state run Quatar based investement group and only a short period of time after the Porsche/VW merger was completed, the perfect time for a world wide corporation to fudge some paperwork, not that this is the case. However now that the authorities are involved, this incident can’t help but make you think back to this past January when one of the richest men in the world, Adolf Merckle, took his own life after betting wrong in a big way on the German automotive conglomerate VW, which is now quite entangled with the sports car maker Porsche.
Press release after the jump.
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After suffering serious head injuries due to a rogue spring that came off of fellow Brazilian Rubens Barichello’s Brawn GP racecar during qualifying, it appears that Felipe Massa will be back in time for the most important race on Ferrari’s calendar, September 13, the Italian Grand Prix. Back at the Hungaroring, Massa suffered a fracture at the base of his skull and was immediately airlifted to a nearby hospital to undergo surgery and then put into an induced coma in order to speed up the healing process, and it looks like it worked.
This news comes right after the Maestro, Michael Schumacher announced that he will not be stepping back behind the wheel. This report has not yet been confirmed by the Scuderia, but team members have said that Massa is making remarkable progress with his recovery and should he make a return in Italy. Ferrari team principal Stefano Domenicali visited the Brazilian last week: "Felipe is in excellent form and his recovery is going very well!... I’m very happy about Felipe’s state,... The medical checks which have been carried out over the last two weeks continue to be very encouraging...Now it’s important to be patient and take one step at a time, without any hurry."
If Massa does return, Formula One’s governing body would require him to undergo a full examination by the sport’s doctors before he can compete at speed once again. Ferrari’s test driver Luca Badoer will stand in for Massa in next weekend’s European Grand Prix at Valencia after the sad news from the Maestro being forced to cancel his comeback due to the lingering neck injury.
For a few years now what most expected to be the rebirth of the Toyota Supra, a turbocharged sports car from Japan that was overbuilt and able to compete with the best that the world had to offer, they have even been known to race motorcycles and win. So once we knew that the Japanese automaker was going to once again build a proper sports car, the question then became, what will it be called?
For a while we thought that the future super car from Toyota’s luxury brand Lexus would be called the LF-A. Well the automaker has just come out with a new surprise, the LF-A will now be known as the LF-L to signify the endurance racer’s scheduled appearance at Le Mans next year. Although before we see it in production race trim, the production car is expected to make its world debut this October at the Tokyo Motor Show.
The good news is that nothing is changed under the hood, the LF-L will use a 4.8L “1LR-GEU” V10 engine with a rear mounted transaxle that includes a sequential six-speed gearbox. The Lexus LF-L will be offered with ASG (Automated Sequential Gearbox) that will have four modes, Auto, Normal, Sport and Wet; the cog swapper will be capable of making shifts via Formula 1 style paddles in 0.2 seconds when in Sport mode.
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