GREAT NEWS!!!!

GREAT NEWS!!The New Dacia Duster is on sale in the UK Right Now!!The basic one is only £8995 for a FWD 1.6 and the top spec one is only £14,995 for a 4WD 1.5 diesel.You can also see it at the Goodwood Festival Of Speed (or see it here after I've been on Sunday).Anyway...

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Video - Always Hoon Responsibly

29/6/12, 0:40, 91 views (when posted)I'll admit, being brought up on a balance of TopGear, Gran Turismo and Formula 1 hasn't really given me much love for American cars. The very competitive and aggressive-defensive American car fans on the internet that try force-feeding them to you don't help either, because they make you not want to like them. Nevertheless, the ones that stand out tend to be big V8 muscle cars. It's hard to ignore or resist that cartoon-character quality that a massive, stripy, shoutier-than-your-car Shelby GT500, Dodge Challenger...

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Mazda Builds Its Last Rotary Engine... For Now?

Mazda rotary engine cutawayWhile 99% of cars in recent years (leccy cars aside) have used reciprocating piston engines of some sort, the efficient-yet-inefficient rotary engine, devised in the 1920s by Felix Wankel, has powered NSUs, motorbikes, and, all the way up to yesterday, Mazda sports cars. The idea of converting pressure into rotating motion rather than reciprocating motion (i.e. pistons going up and down in a cylinder) creates a significantly...

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Just Before It All Went Wrong

16/6/12, 1:47, 35911 views (when posted)So the Le Mans 24 Hours was last weekend. Toyota took the fight to Audi in a way no-one truly expected, even taking the lead of the race on-track, as this video shows.Unfortunately, you know what happens next. If not, well, there's a video of it in my blow-by-blow report of the race. The video I originally used has been removed, so I found another copy of it in about ten seconds and used that one instead. The very next camera shot after the one at the end of this video is Toyota #8 deeply embedded...

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Aston Martin AM310 Vanquish Revealed Officially

Brown is the new Tungsten GreyScroll down the main page past the monowheel and you'll find revealing spy shots of Aston Martin's DBS replacement, the new Vanquish II. Actually, don't do that, because you can just look at official images of AM's new flagship - officially called the AM310 Vanquish - right here. Sadly the carbon fibre front splitter still looks tacky, and its bum still looks a little big, but to call it ugly as a result would be like...

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Volvo Polestar S60 Sets Us Up For Disappointment

Polestar S60 ConceptSo a couple of years ago, Polestar, Volvo's in-house tuning and racing company who builds the C30-based STCC entrant, made an odd-looking but otherwise unspectacular C30 into a 400bhp, All-Wheel-Drive super hatch and then said that Volvo weren't going to build it. Everyone got all excited at just how awesome the blue bombshell was, and how great a car it was, before being disappointed that it would never be produced. Well now,...

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Video Sunday - The Greatest Stunt..... In The World

16/6/12, 1:56, 46942 views (when posted)We've seen the AMC in The Man With The Golden Gun doing a barrel roll. We've - well, a couple of dozen people have - seen Fifth Gear do a loop-the-loop in a Fiat 500. But answer me this: have you ever seen a car do TWO loop-the-loops? I bet you haven't, unless you've already hit play and seen TopGear Live doing Exactly That at a show in Durban, South Africa yesterday instead of watching Le Mans. I think that's probably a good enough excuse.The only question is, how are they going to top it? By using...

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2012 Le Mans 24 Hours (Updated Periodically)

Full spotter's guide. Click to embiggen (open in another tab for 4000px).So it's here again, and this time it doesn't coincide with Formula 1. The Le Mans 24 Hours is being run for the 80th time, and without Peugeot, it's down to Toyota and their updated TS030 hybrid (pictured below) to take down the dominant Audi team in their first LM24 since 1999. Meanwhile, the much-lauded DeltaWing-Nissan is running outside of the rules - and therefore won't...

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OMFG MONOWHEEL!!

1910 Edison-Puton MonowheelThe Cholmondoley Pageant of Power (pronounced the Chumley Pajent of POWARR) is where all things weird, wonderful and indeed powerful meetup in The North to smoke brown ale using mahogany pipes specially attached to beards using vintage-grade motor oil. Remember the Brutus that raced a pre-war Bentley on TopGear last series? Yeah, cars like that. Why doesn't it get more coverage again?At any rate, making an appearance at...

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Aston Martin's "New Vanquish" Spied (UPDATED)

Twelve seconds of porn.Aston Martin has been rehashing the DB9 for long enough now. The DBS from Casino Royale is essentially a Need-For-Speed DB9. The AM Rapide concept was essentially a DB9 with four doors and a chess board in the boot, and the Rapide production car that followed was only set apart by being longer and having different headlights. AM then put those headlights and a new front bumper on a lightly tuned DB9 to make the new...

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Anglo-French Relations

Renaultsport Clio 182 TrophySo Euro 2012 has gripped the televisions of homes and pubs alike. England drew 1-1 with France recently, so as a deliberately coincidental post, I've decided to do a short profile on a car that shows how England and France are level in another way: our love of hot hatches. You see, they love making them (205 GTi, Renault 5 Turbo, AX GT, DS3 Racing, Clio 200, Megane 250, 306 GTi-6, etc.) and we in Britain love buying them....

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KERS & DRS - What They Are & What They're For

11/6/12, 10:48, 21617 views (when posted)The above video is double world champ Sebastian Vettel on an American talk show hosted by an old bloke trying desperately to be funny. That's not the interesting bit of this article by any means, but in the interview - which includes an F-bomb and the mentioning of "balls" - David Letterman asks him several times at once to explain Formula 1's KERS and DRS gadgets, and makes it needlessly complicated. So,...

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Post 201 - Ferrari F40

Ferrari F40Why is post #201 about the Ferrari F40? Because 1) It goes 201mph, 2) it's awesome, and 3) if you somehow haven't heard of it or don't know all about it, you desperately need educating. The last road car that Enzo Ferrari was alive to see, one of only two turbocharged Ferrari road cars ever (to reflect the Formula 1 engines of the time - maybe there'll be a turbo Ferrari after 2014?) and the first road car ever to break the fabled 200mph...

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