Racing

There’s just something romantic about an old race car. The associations we make usually include memories of going to see it in action on the track or watching it on TV, and it can be a powerful thing for those of us who breathe gasoline. But what if we took these classic speed machines and updated them for the modern era? Well, that’s exactly what Budget Direct did with the following eight classic race cars, and the results are simply stunning.

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The Pikes Peak International Hill Climb is an absolute monster of a challenge. Composed of 156 turns laid across 12.4 miles of narrow two-lane switchbacks, The Race to the Clouds lives up to its name by climbing some 4,720 feet, with the peak touching the sky at over 14,000 feet above sea level. As such, aero set-up is particularly tricky to work out, as the extreme high altitude conditions make wings and cooling substantially less effective, even when compared between the start and finish lines. Volkswagen is tackling the problem by testing and tuning in the wind tunnel is it preps for a run at America’s Mountain with the new I.D. R all-electric racer.

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It’s been a long, arduous journey so far, with numerous setbacks along the way, but it’s looking like the Bloodhound SSC jet/rocket car will finally get to show what it’s made of next year.

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Looking down the packed start/finish stretch of the Nurburgring GP Track on Saturday afternoon, the sunbathing each and every one of the thousands present, you wouldn’t have thought that a deluge was just around the corner. But unpredictability is the name of the game up in the Eiffel Mountains for the 24 Hours of Nurburgring, and it was the same this time around.

Every year since 1970, thousands upon thousands of racing fans line the mythical Northern Loop of the Nurburgring race track in Germany to attend one of the most grueling 24-hour-long races of them all. It involves the longest permanent road course in the world, the largest array of machinery, and the largest grid plus the always-enthralling weather that’s got enough curveballs for the race weekend to fill an entire F1 season.

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Plans for a “Miami Grand Prix” have been in the works for a while, with the hope to kick off the first race in 2019. Well, those plans have moved one step closer to becoming a reality as both the City of Miami and Miami Dade County’s Economic Development and Tourism Committee gave apparently given preliminary approval after unanimous votes in favor of the race came down from both entities.

IMSA’s return to the scenic Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course in Lexington, Ohio, has been a true rollercoaster, Acura enjoying a green light route to their first victory where they needed it most, at the venue sponsored by the luxury brand itself. It was the first time that IMSA raced at Mid-Ohio since 2012, a return that’s been long awaited by sports car racing fans across the land. All three classes were present with the grand total of cars reaching 34 including 14 prototypes. With the other 20 cars being GTs, there were worries of incidents on the tight and tumbling 2.25-mile-long road course during the race, as was the potential of rain that eventually evaporated.

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The FIA World Endurance Championship got their fairy tale kick-off to the 2018-2019 Super Season with the overall winner while GT battles kept us glued to the screen throughout the whole six-hour-long fight in the Ardennes. This promises to be a very interesting season.

We’ve said it before, but we’ll say it again - we here at TopSpeed love ourselves a tasty engine swap, especially when it involves head-spinning redlines. That’s why we’re going a bit gaga over this one - say hello to the Toyuki Starbusa.

Rocking 200 horsepower and just 780 kilos (1,720 pounds) of curb weight, this RWD three-door is a mighty impressive little machine. It’s certainly got the goods to embarrass all kinds of bigger, more expensive machinery, especially when you put it on a twisting, challenging hill climb course.

That much is obvious from this 2-minute, 14-second video clip, which shows the Toyuki Starbusa sprinting up the course at the 2018 Leadfoot Festival like a scalded mountain goat. The video includes both an in-car point of view and shots from along the course perimeter, and with that little Suzuki engine at full song, it’s a feast for both the eyes and the ears.

Remember when your car’s power steering system required fluid, or how about when cars had a shaft that physically connected your steering wheel to the steering box or rack-and-pinion? Most cars these days don’t even have a throttle cable now that electric throttles have been introduced. So, now we have electric power steering and drive-by-wire. We even have electronic suspension. Well, things are about to change even more, and brake fluid will become a thing of the past as Brembo has just announced. In an interview with Car & Driver, that F1-derived electrified brakes are coming. What does it mean? Keep reading to find out a little more.

The World Endurance Championship is back with a revised calendar, hanging its title on the back of the GT manufacturers and a sleuth of new cars in the P1 class – as well as a return to Sebring! Less than a week separates us from the start of the seventh season of the FIA WEC, and this one will be historic, as it marks the transition of the series towards a “winter” schedule via a Super Season that starts in May of this year and ends in June of next year. The schedule includes two visits to Le Mans for the fabled 24 Hours race, two at Spa-Francorchamps, as well as one at Sebring in the same weekend as the IMSA 12 Hours race.

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The Volkswagen I.D. R Pikes Peak racer is no joke. The German automaker finally unveiled its all-electric time attack racer and, judging by the technical specifications; it looks like it’s ready to conquer the 2018 Pikes Peak International Hill Climb. The I.D. R Pikes Peak has a serious amount of power at its disposal. More importantly, all that power translates to performance abilities that make it quicker than a Formula E race car and a Formula One racer.

It’s finally happening! After competing for eight years in the Xfinity Series, the Ford Mustang is finally joining the Cup Series, the top tier of NASCAR. The Mustang will replace the Fusion, which the company has been racing in the premier series since 2006.

"We’re combining America’s favorite sports car with America’s top stock car racing series," said Mark Rushbrook, global director at Ford Performance Motorsports. "Mustang always has been about affordable performance, which can be traced to innovations we’ve made competing in racing, like NASCAR. Mustang is a perfect fit for our racing heritage today and tomorrow."

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