Sebastien Loeb Obliterates Pikes Peak On His First Attempt

Possibly the world's happiest rally car, piloted by possibly the world's fastest racing driver

The legendary Pikes Peak International Hillclimb may well have had to compete with the legendary British Grand Prix this weekend, just one week after the legendary Le Mans 24 Hours, but as it turned out in the mountains of Colorado, there was no competing with Sebastien Loeb. If you haven't heard of Mr. Loeb, you need to watch more motorsports. Michael Schumacher won seven F1 World Championships, with a record five in a row through the early 2000s. Seb Loeb won the World Rally Championship nine times in a row from 2004 to 2012. The only reason it's not going to be a nice round ten is because he's only competing in the 2013 WRC part-time, as he winds down his rallying activity in preparation for a jump to the World Touring Car Championship next year, when long-time employer Citroën will enter the sport with (most probably) a new DS4 Racing, er, racing car.

Last year, Loeb tried his hand at Rallycross by entering the X-Games in a specially prepared DS3 (essentially a much more powerful version of his usual DS3 WRC). He won. This year, sister company Peugeot decided to enter Pikes Peak 25 years after Ari Vatanen had won the hillclimb in a special 405 T16 - a win immortalised in the short film Climb Dance that gets rally fans all twitchy and excited - so the Frenchman tried his hand at hillclimb racing in an utterly wild 875bhp, 875kg Peugeot 208 T16 Pikes Peak special with a mid-mounted turbo V6 (so not at all related to his WRC car). He won. By miles.

Last year's winning time was much faster than the 9:51.278 that Monster Tajima managed in 2011, because the track was fully-paved for the first time. For some reason (and also due to a couple of retirements) the Unlimited class didn't host the record-breaker, as Porsche GT driver Romain Dumas set a 9:46.181 in his "Pikes Peak Open" class 997 GT3R. Rhys Millen, holder of a two-wheel-drive record, posted a 9:02.192 on the fully-paved road course, which is a massive amount faster than Dumas. But Loeb was off the scale, taking his Peugeot (with the rear wing and possibly floor from a 908 Le Mans Prototype) from the start to the summit 12 miles of death-threatening corners away in... are you ready for this?

8:13.878

Not only was he the first and only one to do it in under 9 minutes, but he did so by over fourty-six seconds. Millen's 9:02 was enough to get him second place. I'll say again that this is Loeb's first Pikes Peak event, going straight in at the completely unhinged Unlimited class. If that's not awe-inspiring, nothing is! It's fair to say that the time itself was always going to be very fast compared to previous years, as before now it was part-dirt and originally all-dirt, but that doesn't take away from beating your closest rival - who does this event every year and whose dad is also a legend on these bends - by 48 seconds. Having an idea of what Loeb's like, he was most likely completely calm afterwards as well. What a legend.

Nobuhiro "Monster" Tajima taking his all-conquering ways away from internal combustion, but not Pikes Peak

As for Monster Tajima, he entered in an electric car, so he had no chance of winning outright, but his [breathe] 2013 Tajima Sport E-Runner Pikes Peak Special was good enough for him to beat his own 2011 record with a 9:46.530, besting himself by 5 seconds or so and only being half a second off the Time Attack-class winner Paul Dallenbach. Not bad at all for a 63-year-old racing without an engine!

Next year, we'll probably see less record breaking going on, or at least not by such huge margins, but unless they allow fan cars or something in the Unlimited class, I suspect Mr. Loeb's record will stand for a long time to come...

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NISMO and Williams Have Entered A Technology Partnership, Which Made Me Think...

"Nismo Williams" sounds like a cool name for a spy or alter ego of some kind... or a SUPERHERO type figure! Get ready, then, for The Sustainable Performance Adventures of... Nismo Williams!!

*awesome theme tune*

By day, a perfectly ordinary sodium and eel salesman...

But by night, he's a millionaire playboy street racer superhero, an Anglo-Japanese Iron Man with a four-wheeled Super Suit and a taste for danger, with the demeanor of a suited gentleman and the fighting style of a ninja warrior.

FUCK YEEEAAARRRRR.

This week on The Sustainable Performance Adventures of Nismo Williams, can out hero save a city from slow, evil Pollutotrons???

"AAAAHAHAHAHAHAAA-OGUGHUGHUGH *cough cough* WE WILL SMOKE YOU OUT OF THE CITY, PUNY HUMANS!! THEN WE'LL TAKE ALL YOUR VALUABLES AND TABLE SALT FOR SOME REASON!! BWAHAHAHAAA!!"

The people gasp a collective gasp...

*GASP*

...Then cough a collective cough as the Pollutotrons begin executing their Evil Plan...

*ochughughughugh*

...But through the thickening, sickening black smog, the city-dwellers hear a high-revving four-cylinder engine barking a constant Note that pierces through the smokey chuntering of Pollutotrons. A pair of headlights glow in the smog, flanked by wider-set headlights further behind. The revving dies down, yet the light beams keep racing forward somehow. Then, out of the sooty cloud bursts something that looks a lot like the Nissan ZEOD RC but definitely isn't, OK, deal with it.

A missile launcher extends out from the low-drag side skirt. The missile fires forwards, then upwards in a smooth arc and into the soft underbelly of the nearest Pollutotron.

The missile EXPLODES with a burst of clean energy!!

The monstrous machine that sort of looks like a tank had sex with Howl's Moving Castle staggers and falls to the ground as the clean energy DISSOLVES it into clean air!!

Having rushed to the scene at speeds of around 300km/h on electric power but occasionally utilising a 10,000rpm 4-cylinder turbo/supercharged range extender engine to recharge on the move, Nismo Williams glides silently into the side streets as the horrified Pollutotrons begin their search for this surprise superhero sensation.

Will they find him, or can he thwart their scheming schemes? Stay Tuned and find out after these messages!!

Welcome back! Valiant energy-saving superhero Nismo Williams is going all ninja car on the evil, slow-moving, inefficient Pollutotrons. But what next?!

As he hides in the side streets, he notices a restaurant in which all the salt shakers have been stolen. His noble car (not that Noble car) whispers a faint whir as it crawls along on electric power alone. But then, a second Pollutotron smacks the skyscraper, smashing all the glass in a dramatic fashion!!

Using instant torque, Nismo Williams zips away underneath the hulking gas guzzling, er, bad thing, and FIRES ANOTHER MISSILE! Another direct hit! The massive explosion of clean energy causes a glowing white light for a few seconds, the rays of which enter his car's carbon nanotubes that cover the top surface of the body, which turn the solar energy into more electricity! This means more time without needing the engine and blowing his cover... except that the loud explosion already did that!!

"Thanks to my car's Solar Skin, I can outrun them before they pinpoint my exact loca— oh no, they're already here!!"

But no matter! With his superior speed and agility, he is able to fire his last two missiles into the last two Pollutotrons!!

"WHY OH WHY DO WE BAD GUYS ALWAYS HAVE SOFT UNDERBELLIEEEEEEEES OARGLUGHHRIOHGIOGJHRZSIORGH!"

"Better your underbellies than your brains, Pollutotrons! Or something..."

But wait! There's ONE MORE LEFT, and it's the BOSS ONE, as it turns out!!

"SO, you've defeated my warriors and intend on destroying me too, mysterious warrior!"

"If that's what it takes to stop you!!"

"Well you know what? Fuck it. I've seen enough of these to know where this is going, and I don't want to die before TOP GEAR comes back this weekend. You may have thwarted my scheming schemes, mysterious hero-like driver, but I'LL RETURN MAYBEEEE!!"

"Hm. We may or may not see about that..."

And with that, Nismo Williams glides off in his carbon-fibre stallion and drives around a corner and into an alley way. An attractive woman with slightly more cleavage than is strictly necessary tries following him, but mere seconds after he disappears from view, a man appears from the same alleyway, with two different suitcases.

"Hello madam, I see this city's short of table salt. Would you like to buy some sodium?"

*awesome theme tune kicks back in*

Next week, our hero Nismo Williams has a dangerous yet hopefully-compelling adventure in the proud but conservative city of Jalopolis. Can his escapades change the eccentric people's perception of electric power and efficient propulsion? Will his booming sodium and eel business maintain its success? Can he defeat another large-looking threat before it declares its entire plan and whacks something that then explodes? Will I remember to even write it? Would anybody even read it?? Do I look like I give a fuck???

Tune in Next Time!!!!

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2013 Le Mans 24H - Red and White... and Black

A fan's video of the crash explained in the third paragraph

The 24 Hours of Le Mans is the greatest and most prestigious endurance race in the world, with the same status in sports car racing and possibly motor racing overall, depending on who you ask (if you ask an American they'll probably say the Indy 500 holds that status, while older F1 buffs might give that title to the third in the "Triple Crown", the Monaco Grand Prix). The first race was run 90 years ago this month, but due to a world war here and a strike there, this is only the 81st running of the LM24, or Vingt-Quatre Heures du Mans, if you want to sound knowledgeable and say it in French. The 56-strong grid is essentially a grid of two halves, with two classes of purpose-built "LMP" prototypes racing alongside slower "GTE" road car-based machinery adapted for GT racing.

With three drivers per car driving for up to four hours at a time, the cars these days are now so reliable that they can aim to go flat out for the entire day-long race, providing they aren't slowed down by a Safety Car period. Alas, the appearance of what these days is a red Audi with flashing lights on the roof - or rather three of them spaced out around the lap due to the 8.48-mile length of Circuit de la Sarthe - is all but inevitable thanks to flat-out racing on an often-bumpy track that's as road-based as the GTE cars, as well as the speed difference between LMPs and GT cars that's much bigger in corners than it already is on straights.

This year, the Safety Car was called out just 10 minutes or so into the drizzle-sodden race, as on lap 3, Danish rising star Allan Simonsen ran onto the kerb exiting Tetre Rouge corner to find that his Aston Martin V8 Vantage GTE wasn't finding as much grip as he expected. As it slid around on the "greasy" track surface, he countersteered the slide. Suddenly, the tyres found grip and the car speared off to the left and into the barrier sideways. By some terrible stroke of luck, the Aston Martin struck part of the barrier that had a large tree right behind it, meaning that there was no give in the barrier at all. The car was smashed to pieces, with wheels and body panels falling off long after the initial impact, an impact so great that the rollcage-reinforced frame of the car was bent quite dramatically around the windscreen area (on the passenger's side). Simonsen was rushed to hospital during the hour-long Safety Car period, where tragically he succumbed to his injuries an hour or two later. He was 34. It was the first driver death during the famed endurance race in 27 years.

Simonsen last year

Allan Simonsen was a well-liked and talented racing driver who had raced in a variety of series with a variety of success. While his five-year run in Australian V8 Supercars from 2003-07 was dismal, he won the 2007 Australian GT Championship and the 2009 Asian Le Mans Series GT2 Class trophy. His racing career started on a high in 1999 with a Danish Formula Ford Championship win on home turf, while recently he'd scored 4th in the 2012 Aussie GTs and 12th in last year's British GT3 Championship. His best result at the race that took his life was 2nd in the GT2 class in 2010, driving a Ferrari F430. This year he was sharing an Aston Martin Vantage with fellow Danes Christoffer Nygaard and Kristian Poulsen, racing in the GTE Am class for GTE cars driven primarily by Amateur drivers, a status which I think is based on the highest level at which they've raced.

Simonsen's family requested to Aston Martin Racing that they continue racing in his memory, and they duly obliged while issuing an official press statement. With the barriers eventually repaired, the Safety Cars pulled into their respective stations and the race got underway again. Something worth noting at this point is that in the 90-year history of Le Mans, the race has never been red-flagged (stopped), even in 1955 when a Mercedes SLR was launched into the crowd killing over 80 people and injuring dozens more. Mike Hawthorne's and Jaguar's was a hollow victory that year...

Thankfully nothing quite that horrific has been allowed to happen since, and returning to 2013, Aston Martin eventually scored 3rd place in the highly competitive GTE Pro class (which features up to three Pro-level drivers per car). It was looking like they'd win the class, but not long before the end the lead car lost control in a very similar way coming out of the first chicane on the Mulsanne Straight (onto which Tetre Rouge leads) and smashed into the barriers, which then had to be repaired under yet another Safety Car period - probably the 10th or 11th one of the race - during which spectators saw the barriers being replaced and repaired using a lorry full of spare bits and a van full of men and hammers. It wasn't a modern-looking sight, but it was a sight we saw multiple times this race, which I argue isn't good enough. Granted, these are barriers for public roads that are used as a race track one week per year, but in an age of TekPro barriers at F1-grade circuits, it doesn't cast a good image on Le Mans, and possibly sports car racing in general, as for many people this is the only endurance race they watch. Plainly more needs to be done, and the tree-lined section that Simonsen hit should have tyres or TekPro put in front of the traditional metal barriers to avoid a similar incident at next year's race. Ideally though, the whole length of skinny three-high Armco should be replaced or updated to not need extensive repairs every time they're hit. The Automobile Club de l'Ouest (ACO) who organise the race have pockets plenty deep enough to sort that out...

At the sharp end of this year's race, the LMP1 class was again dominated by Audi vs Toyota, with privateers Rebellion Racing and Strakka fighting amongst themselves for best of the rest honours. The speculation was that while Audi had the faster car (an evolution of last year's R18 e-Tron quattro with a Toyota-like longer tail), Toyota with their requested three litres of extra petrol would have fuel economy and a more potent hybrid system on their side. Could they be the tortoise to Audi's hare and sneak past them towards the end with fewer pit stops? Unfortunately for those tired of Audi's dominance, no. They were actually faster than the Audis at the start of the race, due to a softer tyre compound and apparent preference for cooler conditions, with both newly-overhauled TS030 Hybrids making progress from 4th and 5th on the grid to be 2nd and 3rd before Simonsen's ultimately fatal crash ended Anthony Davidson's fight for the lead in TS030 #8. After that things evened out again, with the overtaken Audis returning to their original positions in the third hour. R18 #1 then got past R18 #2 to see cars 1, 2 and 3 in positions 1, 2 and 3. How very German. It wouldn't last, though, as the #1 Audi was forced into the garage to have a crank sensor replaced in hour 7, which required Audi Sport Team Joest mechanics to dig out much of the 3.7-litre V6 turbo diesel just to get to it. This caused the car driven by André Lotterer, Marcel Fässler and Benoit Tréluyer (which nobody can pronounce...) to fall back to 27th place, at least 13 or 14 laps behind the leader.

Later, Audi #3 piloted by Marc Gené, Oliver Jarvis and Lucas di Grassi had a puncture and lost several minutes limping back to the pit lane, which promoted the Toyotas back up to 2nd and 3rd place, but they weren't without problems themselves as car #7 (piloted by Kazuki Nakajima, Alex Wurz and Nicholas Lapierre) was seen grinding to a halt on the Mulsanne straight at one point, but it turned out that all they had to do to fix that was to turn it off and on again. Through the night, the Audi team worked frantically to get their two troubled cars back up the grid, while the Toyotas just found a groove and stuck to it, plugging in lap times and maintaining their gap from the leader as the moon and sun slowly swapped places. There were more crashes up and down the field of course, with an LMP2 car in particular hitting a concrete wall so hard that it ripped the back axle off - taking the gearbox with it - and the car set fire for a bit. The driver got out on his own, though, and was fine. As the race pressed on, hour 22 of 24 saw a downpour of rain and Toyota #7 sliding off at the Porsche Curves into the tyre wall. Lapierre got out of the car, but then changed his mind about abandoning it (drivers can only walk a certain distance from the car for help before being classified as retired) and got it going again with the help of marshals and a big tractor. This let Audi #3 past, though, making a double-decker sandwich of Audi bread and Toyota meat. This is how the top 5 of the top class finished up in the end.

LMP2 and GTE Pro were almost impossible to predict even in the final hours of the race, but with the aforementioned Aston Martin taking itself out, Porsche took the GTE Pro win with a brand new, factory-backed 991-generation 911 RSR, while OAK Racing (sponsored by Morgan) won the fiercely competitive LMP2 class. A privateer Porsche won GTE Am, which was the 100th class victory for Porsche cars at Le Mans. That's one hell of a milestone! But then, Porsche's record at Le Mans is second to none, not even Audi, although the ringed racers are getting close to their record of overall wins, which is why Porsche are preparing an LMP1 return next year with an all-new car.

Audi #2 won the race, which meant Le Mans race win number three for Scottish former F1 driver (for Toyota, no less) Allan McNish, but overshadowing that massive achievement was a record ninth overall victory for Danish driver Tom Kristensen, popularly called "Mr. Le Mans," who drove the car in the final stint to take the chequered flag. The celebrations were subdued given that there had been a driver fatality, and Kristensen, who had mentored Allan Simonsen in his early career, payed tribute to him on the podium, saying: "In a way this is the dream come true, winning the toughest and fastest race, but we lost somebody yesterday who had the same dream as well and who was absolutely humble and a nice guy, so it is mixed feelings in that sense. I am driving with my father's determination and his ambition. He died in March but he had said: I will win Le Mans with my boys this year. I hope there will be another one. Maybe we can win another one and I can dedicate it to my dad. Because this one is for Allan Simonsen." His message was echoed by all.

The podium-scoring Aston Martin drivers made their own sombre tribute at the end of the race as well, by holding up a huge flag and saying that they were all Danish that day. After Simonsen's death was announced, a flag of Denmark was flying at half mast above the iconic clock and podium hovering over the pit lane for the rest of the race.

Ultimately, this race will not be remembered fondly. The noteworthy things about it include two Safety Car records - twelve outings and around five and a half hours of total time, both the most of any LM24 - and the first driver death since 1986, or 1997 if you count Frenchman Sebastien Enjolras's pre-qualifying accident in preparation for the event, in a Peugeot-powered Welter Racing WR LM97. Positives to take from the race? Well, a ninth win for Kristensen will be significant for him, even if it is soured by the loss of a fellow countryman, and Audi will be pleased with scoring a twelfth win in fifteen years. We can all only hope that next year, everybody gets to go home on Monday.

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Formula 1 2013 - Australian Grand Prix Catch-Up

Not pictured: Vettel leading

Welcome to the first of my F1 2013 catch-up posts. I've been watching them on TV, but if you haven't been or you missed one, then fear not! A summary followed by a blow-by-blow report of each and every race this year will appear over the season. With a three-week break between an excellent Canadian GP and the good old British GP, now's as good a time as any to fill in my coverage gaps. Enjoy!

So once again, the Formula One circus rolled into the city of Melbourne, Australia for another new season of speed, controversy, bravery, strategy and crashes. With the cars mostly evolutions of last year's entries, you'd expect the results to be pretty similar, right? Well, as it turns out, no. As a qualifying session so wet it was delayed until Sunday showed, McLaren's bold switch to pullrod front suspension resulted in the same drop in competitiveness that Ferrari had when they did the same last year, which disappointed a lot of people after they'd arguably had the fastest car on the grid in 2012. What's more, the Mercedes team, who started well but were languishing in the middle of nowhere at the end of last season, surprised everyone when newly recruited Lewis Hamilton put his car third on the grid, with his best buddy and new team mate Nico Rosberg posting the fastest times of all up until Q3, at which point the usual suspects muscled their way into their party. Massa also showed that his return to form late in 2012 was set to continue by out-qualifying team mate Fernando Alonso in a much better-looking and faster Ferrari than last year.

The race itself saw much less crashing than Qualifying. Mark Webber got off to a dismal start, losing five places in one lap to find himself seventh (as it turned out this was because of an ECU glitch, for which supplier McLaren later apologised). A couple of early battles for position broke out as the two Ferraris got off to a flyer with an overtaken Hamilton keeping them in cheque, but the Super Soft tyres were proving to have a shorter life than a mayfly in a battlefield, so we saw pit stops as early as lap 4. Happily though, we didn't see Sebastian Vettel running away from the grid, as Red Bull like to set their car up for qualifying, which makes the RB9 quite tyre-hungry. Instead, it was Kimi Räikkönen's Lotus that was quicker on Sunday, as he kept the pressure on the front runners. Adrian Sutil - returning to Force India after a year off for being a naughty boy - started the race on Prime tyres, which proved advantageous as those in front of him slowly pitted in and he didn't. By lap 17 he was leading the race having started twelfth - well, eleventh, as Nico Hülkenberg had had a fuel problem before the race and Sauber decided not to race the car for safety reasons - and held onto his lead on merit until lap 21 when he was passed in the first corner(s) by Fernando Alonso, who had taken the lead in the pits, and later by Vettel and Massa (who later found that his pit strategy was wrong and rightly complained). On lap 25, Pastor Maldonado made a schoolboy error and braked for the first corner with a wheel or two on the grass. This put him in the gravel, and DRS was disabled until the marshals had removed him. Not long later, Nico Rosberg was forced to retire to the side of the road at turn 4 due to an electronics problem, a shame for the potentially high-scoring German.

Sutil returned to the lead by lap 40, after the second round of pit stops saw him cruise past the front runners again on his second set of Prime tyres. By this point, the ever-threatening rain had appeared in sector 3, but was light enough to deal with on dry-weather tyres, so nobody dived into the pits for Intermediates. Still, Sutil had only used one type of tyre thus far in the race, and the rules state that in a dry race you must use both compounds at least once. This meant that a second pit stop to use the super-soft Options was only a matter of time, something the would-be leaders (Vettel, Alonso, Räikkönen and maybe Hamilton) could keep in mind as he legitimately kept the lead of the race, even pulling away from them at one point. Alas, his reign was ended by fan favourite Kimi Räikkönen. Some way ahead of a much faster Alonso in 3rd, the Finn passed Sutil to take the race lead on lap 43, up the inside at the pair of right-handers in the final sector. Sutil's race engineer had already told him not to fight against Kimi, as they were on different strategies (yeah, get used to that sort of thing...). Unfortunately the Force India driver wouldn't stay on the podium, and after stretching his tyres out until lap 46, in which Alonso passed him in turn 3, he came in for a new set of Options, went well and then dropped right back as they started graining (when the surface ripples and creates "marbles" of rubber that flick off) and wearing out after just five laps. Hamilton and Webber passed him on lap 51 with relative ease, and in the end he held on to finish the 58-lap race in seventh place. Cue complaints from teams that the 2013 revision of Pirelli's tyres are too soft...

So the battle for the lead towards the end was between Fernando Alonso and Kimi Räikkönen. Lap 47 saw the Spanish double world champion 7.7 seconds behind Kimi and on a charge. In a situation not unlike Alonso's 2012 season, he had to keep charging without making any mistakes to beat him. Traffic and occasional drizzle played their parts, but the mistake came on lap 55, when he locked his brakes and nearly hit a Caterham in the final chicane, which opened the gap back out from 6 to around 8 seconds. Räikkönen promptly set the fastest lap of the race and kept his lead to win the opening race of the season. The podium was the 2012 World Driver's Championship top three in reverse order, proving that you can't just have the fastest car if you want to win Grands Prix, you also have to be one of the fastest drivers. Kimi is now tied with Mika Häkkinen as the most successful Finnish F1 driver in terms of wins, although Häkkinen won a second World Championship.

Lap-By-Lap

This has been typed in shorthand, so here's a quick key:

RAI - Driver's surname as displayed on the TV graphics (RAIkkonen, for instance). Always the first three letters, except for Giedo Van Der Garde.

(O -> P) = Driver changed from Option to Prime tyres (Option = softer of the two compounds, Prime = harder)
Wing+ means the pit crew increased the front wing angle during a pit stop.

T12 = Turn 12.

P1 = Position 1.

HAM 1:31.543 = Lewis Hamilton set the Fastest Lap (thus far) of 1:31.543.

DRS = Drag Reduction System (opening rear wing). Sometimes typed as "DR Sys" to avoid it looking like a driver's name.

KERS = Kinetic Energy Recovery System (on-demand temporary electronic power boost).

The Grid:
VET
WEB
HAM
MAS
ALO
ROS
RAI
GRO
DIR
BUT
HUL <-- Did Not Start (fuel issue)
SUT
VER
RIC
PER
BOT
MAL
GUT
BIA
CHI
VDG
Pic

The Tyres: O = Super Soft, P = Medium

THE RACE:

Lap 1/58: Ferraris quick off the line, WEB falls far back as usual, no crash in T1. HAM challenging Ferraris. ALO gets alongside MAS, RAI tries to pass HAM (who locks up) in T13, no overtakes, both pairs go side-by-side.

VET MAS ALO HAM RAI ROS WEB DIR BUT SUT GRO PER BOT VER MAL GUT BIA CHI VDG RIC Pic

Lap 2: RAI apparently faster than HAM. Passes around outside in T13. MAS 1:32.853

L3: VET not running away with it.

L4: BUT pits (O -> P).

L5: WEB pits (O -> P). Slow stop. So does GUT. PER passes GRO with DRS.

L7: VET pits (O->P). RAI still fast.

L8: MAS pits (O->P). Exits just behind VET. Oh, and MAL.

L9: RAI chasing ALO, who's driving hard. Chases him into the pits. Both O->P. Exit in same order. ALO's stop faster. MAL ran wide at T1, so both get past.

L10: Top three currently HAM ROS SUT. Mercs going long on Option tyres, SUT started on Primes.

L11: VET (T3) and MAS (T13) pass PER. RAI 1:31.9xx.

L12: ALO passes PER with DRS.  RAI passes PER in T11/12.

L13: HAM pits (O->P).

L14: ROS pits (O->P, Wing+). SUT takes the lead of the race. Exits in front of BUT, who challenges while being challenged by WEB. ROS starts to pull away. "Look after these tyres but keep Jenson behind you."

L16: PER pits (P->O).

L17: Leaders (VET, MAS, ALO, RAI, HAM) back in position, except that Sutil is still in P1.

L18: WEB pits (P -> P).

L19: GRO pits onto Options. SUT is starting to pull away from VET... on original tyres!

L20: ALO pits (P -> P). HAM 1:31.543.

L21: SUT pits (P -> P). VET pits (P -> P). ALO passes SUT around T1/2.

L22: MAS told to show us what he can do after complaining about pit strategy. VET chasing SUT.

L23: VET dives down the inside, passes SUT in T3. WEB passes PER in T13 for P10. MAS pit (P -> P). Exits behind SUT. Right to complain. RAI leading by some way, still quick.

L25: VET chasing ALO. SUT 1:31.334. RAIN EXPECTED in ~8mins. MAL puts two wheels on the grass, spins into gravel at T1, can't move. DRS disabled until he's removed.

L27: ROS breaks down at T3/4. Electronic problem. DRS re-enabled.

L28: MAS challenging SUT. RAI leading by 17s, going for a two-stop strategy. Rain begins to start at T13/4.

L29: MAS tries to pass SUT down outside of T3, rain has started. "Short light shower." Not enough to need Intermediates.

L31: ALO pressuring HAM, needs to pass for a shot to win. Tries outside of T11 but doesn't, gets good run out of T12, HAM locks up in T13, so ALO waits and undercuts him to pass into T14. HAM pits (P -> P). Exits in P7. Tries to go long..

L33: RIC 1:31.330. ALO 1:30.836.

L34: RAI pits (P -> P). Exits behind MAS. ALO 1:30.375.

L35: HAM says his tyres won't last until the end of the race.

L36: MAS pits (P -> P). SUT P3.

L37: VET pits (P->P). BUT and GRO pit (P->P).

L38: SUT told "do not waste time with Räikkönen". i.e. he's not racing him. RIC has a cracked exhaust.

L39: ALO pits (P->P). Rain still light and localised to S3.

L40: VET passes HAM with DRS. SUT retakes lead, but has to pit to Options at some point. MAS looks at outside of HAM in T11, overtakes around outside of T13 instead. HAM basically let him through. WEB 1:30.053.

L41: RIC retires from P10. ALO 1:29.725, much faster than RAI, who's ahead by some way.

L42: WEB pressuring DiR, passes hard around outside into T9. RAI 1:30.3xx. HAM pits (P->P).

L43: ALO 6.3s behind RAI, drops to 6s by S2. RAI passes SUT inside T13/4 for lead.

L44: ALO 4.5 seconds behind leader, sets FL of 1:29.649. Still pushing.

L45: ALO still behind SUT, 4.0s behind RAI. SUT would finish P5 if he pitted late enough. ALO right behind him. SUT getting blue-flagged unnecessarily.

L46: ALO challenges SUT into T1, but passes around outside in T3. SUT pits (P->O).

L47: CHI tries to pass VDG, VDG defends, ALO passes CHI. Traffic put him 7s behind RAI.

L48: Gap between P1&2 now 7.7s. VET 5s behind ALO.

L49: Rain, which had stopped, picks up again.

L50: Gap staying about level, SUT P5 but being chased by HAM on better tyres. VER 1:29.498.

L51: HAM challenging SUT, goes around outside in T3, wasn't enough. WEB closes in on them. HAM passes SUT in T9. WEB tries to pass in T11, but drops back and passes in T13/4 instead. SUT's tyres are going off already.

L52: DiR could chase down his team mate and take P7.

L53: Gap between RAI and ALO now 6.0s. VET falling behind.

L55: ALO nearly hits a Caterham in T15 when locking his brakes. Gap widens to ~8s.

L56: RAI sets FL of 1:29.274. Checkmate.

L57: GRO passes PER with DRS.

L58/58: Gap now 12.3 seconds. Podium is reverse of 2012 WDC top three. "I'm so pleased that the car is good." - RAI.

Top 10:           RAI ALO VET MAS HAM WEB SUT DIR BUT GRO
Out of Points:  PER VER GUT BOT PIC CHI VDG
DNF:              RIC ROS MAL
DNS:              HUL

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Formula 1 2013 - Don't Worry, I Haven't Forgotten

The start-finish line of Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, sponsored by some foreign airline.

So we've had six races now of the 2013 Formula 1 season, making us about a quarter of the way through the last season of V8-powered screamers. As we head into race seven at Canada, it's high time I posted race reports like I did last year, as I'm determined to keep F1 coverage up. University has been the dominating factor up to this point, but a week ago I did my last exam of my first year and was free to go home the following day. That meant I could move out of the house I was staying in, my feelings about which can be summarised by this little snippet from Friends (and no, I'm not Ross at the start):

So yes. But this year, I'm doing it a little differently. Rather than give you a long-winded report, I'll post a summary followed by a lap-by-lap (or occasionally highlight-by-highlight) account of each race, so you can choose your level of detail! This will hopefully save me some time later in the year when I go back for a second round of Uni, because I'll just be watching the race back, typing what happens and then bringing it all into a paragraph or two.

These will appear over the next week, including Canada. Enjoy the race on Sunday! It could be slippery...

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Pagani Forgets That It Stopped Making The Zonda, Makes New Zonda

"Where is the Zonda? Did it go missing? Maybe we should just make another one."

Do you miss the Pagani Zonda? Well, don't feel alone, because it appears Pagani misses the Pagani Zonda as well. Either that or they've forgotten about their ultimate final version of it, the 760RS. For those of you that missed it, the 760RS (the final Zonda) was a version of the Zonda R (the final Zonda) that you could use on the road. This followed the five-off Zonda Cinque Roadster, which was the final Zonda. All these have lead up to this, the Zonda Revolucion, which is, would you believe it, the final iteration of the Zonda. Maybe...

The name might seem confusing when you find out that this is more Evolucion than Revolucion, but really the R is separate. They've just put 'R' and 'evolucion' together to try and avoid revealing that this is just an evolution of the track-only ear-destroying Zonda R would-be racer, or perhaps because they use the same faulty keyboards as the people designing the Ferrari F12berlinetta. The unsilenced 6.0 race-spec AMG V12 has been fiddled with to produce 800PS (789bhp), a jump of around 50bhp, while also producing 539lb/ft of torque. In a car weighing 1070kg, that should be plenty! The 2009 Zonda R went from 0-60 in 2.7 seconds (thanks in no small part to having slick tyres) and past 220mph, so expect this version to be slightly faster.

But there's more! The aero package has been uprated and updated with a vertical stabiliser down its spine and more winglets from nose to tail than you can shake a McLaren MP4-23 at, as well as a new DR System. Activated either by a button or automatically (probably dependent on some drive mode), the system on the rear wing increases straight-line speed by shedding off downforce until you brake. It's unclear whether it uses the wide-but-skinny main rear wing or the new smaller one that's closer to the bodywork. To make sure the higher top end doesn't torture the already-massive Brembo carbon ceramic brakes, those have been evolved as well. The lifespan has been increased fourfold, while durability and fade resistance are also better and the four stoppers weigh 15% less than before. Oddly, the '09 Zonda R weighed exactly the same, so I guess DRS adds the difference back on. It could also be the added or improved computers, as the ABS had also been updated and the Revolucion has a new traction control system with twelve settings. Does it really need that many?

Just like the R, Cinque and Cinque Roadster, Pagani will only make five Revolucions, and because we're in an economic downturn and nobody's got any money left, they're selling each of them for €2,200,000 (plus taxes) and will sell them with ease to customers who almost definitely already have a Zonda or two in their collection. Said people will need their own race track, as this final final final version is not road legal, not eligible for any racing series and probably not able to meet the noise curfew of any publicly available circuit anywhere except in the desert, where there aren't any and the lack of air conditioning or the fixed windows would be a problem. But hey, it's a faster and crazier Zonda R! It still has four white snakes coming out of the rear end! It now has more power than any Pagani ever produced and 97% of cars on sale!

It is the ultimate expression of the Zonda, essentially a functioning concept car that you (well, not you, but someone) can buy. That makes it pretty damn awesome.

Pagani go to painstaking lengths to make the weave of "carbotanium" match up from panel to panel, with a 'V' shape down the middle

Of course, there's also a stripe down the middle. Previously it was the Pagani oval in Italian flag colours along the top

As you would expect, the details on this thing are stunning. Also, it appears the lower wing is the one with a DRS.

"Oh hey, I found it! Don't worry guys, no need to make another one after all." - Horacio Pagani

(images from Pagani, via Autocar)

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Aston Martin V12 Vantage S Proves Just How Wrong Jeremy Clarkson Was

Black-on-yellow look good on pretty much anything. Or maybe it's the AMV12 S that looks good in anything...

In February 2011 when I started this blog, one of the first proper things I wrote was about how Jeremy Clarkson's moist-eyed prediction of supercar dystopia at the end of series 13 of new-age TopGear in a film that centred around the Aston Martin V12 Vantage was in fact wrong, and that supercars will continue on for a long time whether he doubts it or not. Happily, as part of their centenary shenanigans, Aston Martin has gone and proven him wrong once and for all by replacing the V12 Vantage with this sexy little bee: the V12 Vantage S. At least, it seems they have...

The V12 Vantage is a bit like an all-British Shelby Cobra, which is probably why it's utterly gorgeous in every way. To make it, Aston Martin simply take their smallest car and shoehorn their biggest engine into it (well OK, they also have to improve the suspension and brakes while negating all that added weight), and because the DBS has been replaced by the AM310 Vanquish, the outgoing AMV12's time was up. But rather than let it die completely, they've decided to keep people's spirits up during the company's 100th year by dropping the Vanquish's fifth-gen, 565bhp version of the long-serving 5.9 V12 into a car originally designed in 2003 to carry a Ford-based V8. The result is a 55bhp jump over the outgoing V12, and 37lb/ft of extra torque as well, making it 457lb/ft overall. Expect it to only go a little bit faster than before. Various other upgrades and changes mean that the S weighs 15kg less as well, not a difference you're likely to notice but nonetheless a move in the right direction. It's still 1665kg, though...

The only real sad part of this is that the 6-speed manual gearbox has disappeared in favour of a 7-speed "Sportshift III" paddleshift one, although it's meant to be all new and fast and stuff. These days, it is actually possible for an extremely good paddleshift gearbox to be a legitimate replacement for what's normally the driver's choice, according to road testers, but whether that happens here remains to be seen. By only using one clutch, Aston say this gearbox is actually 25kg lighter than the old car's manual 'box, and is capable of "motorsport shift speeds", so there's hope.

As is the way these days, the AMV12 S has three-way adjustable suspension (supplied by Bilstein and also seen in the new Vanquish), with Normal, Sport and Track modes letting you fine-tune your driving experience by deciding how hard the ride is and how reactive the throttle pedal is. As an added bonus and part of a two-mode "Servotronic" steering system, Sport and Track modes have different levels of steering weight and feel, with Track adding more of it. This is the first time the Vantage model has had either feature. Also helping you out on trackdays are Brembo carbon-ceramic brakes adapted from the One-77 hypercar and Pirelli P Zero Corsa rubber, although all-weather P Zeros are now optional. Topping off the driving aids is two-stage stability control you can turn off completely. Finishing off the package is an overhauled interior that uses higher-quality materials.

But let's consider something for a moment. The end result of all these changes is a car that has a broader appeal than it did before. The manual gearbox hasn't been left available as an option, it has gone completely. The suspension dampers can now be adjusted to suit a wider range of driving styles, while multi-mode stability control caters to different driving talent levels.

In other words, the car is now less focused.

Aston Martin product development head Ian Minards said that "the fact that it was so focused meant it wasn’t for all tastes to begin with. We’ve responded to that." Why? The V12 Vantage was established as the most hardcore car in the range, the one for people who wanted the best performance car AM could make, the one for people who go out for drives early on Sunday mornings, rather than wafting around the same roads in the afternoon when it's busier. It was for exactly the people that will be disappointed with some of the changes, because it dilutes the experience a bit to please regular (and potential) AM buyers. They may claim that it's lighter, but without the new more advanced gearbox it would actually be 10kg heavier.

This is evident elsewhere in the motoring world too. Take the Renaultsport Clio 200 Cup. This will go down in motoring history as one of the greatest hot hatches ever made. No hot hatch group test was safe. In a TopGear magazine group test of 11 cars from 7 manufacturers, it toppled the Abarth 500, every VW GTI and R of the time, the 350bhp Ford Focus RS500, the 400bhp (breathe) Subaru Impreza WRX STI Cosworth CS400, and even its big brother, the faster-but-heavier Megane 250 Cup. It wasn't the best looking and it had quite a boring interior (with serious Recaro front seats), but it was the most exhilarating to drive. The 2.0 naturally-aspirated engine revved to the stars and it was almost as light and agile as its racing counterpart. It was the 997 GT3 3.8 of hot hatches.

This year it is replaced by the Clio 200 Turbo EDC. I actually remember a time when a turbocharged engine was a good thing, but apparently it isn't in some cases, like when it's replacing an exciting, high-revving naturally-aspirated one. Instead of rewarding you for pushing harder, the new 1.6 DFI turbo unit gives you all the torque in the low-mid range, and has a notably lower red-line. It's the difference between a well-written movie with subtlety to the way it delivers an engaging storyline and a Hollywood-style one that just spells it all out for you so you don't have to think as hard and have a good chance of predicting the ending.

Oh, but it gets worse, pipe smokers. Just like the AMV12 S and the new Porsche 991 GT3, the six-speed manual gearbox (as it was after revising it from the original pre-facelift 197) has been replaced with a flappy-paddle one, a DCT here. The result is more weight but faster, smoother gear changes whose balance between speed and smoothness can be fine-tuned using settings on the now much more complicated dashboard, which features a touchscreen interface called "RS Monitor". This gives you the kind of readouts you'd expect to find in a Nissan GT-R, while also letting you play a selection of engine noises through the stereo system. You can choose between the old car, which is proof straight away that the new one doesn't sound as good, or an Alpine A110, or a Renaultsport Clio V6, or even, as it happens, a Nissan GT-R. It's an utter gimmick that should be reserved for electric cars, not something that should be capable of making its own engaging engine noise. But clearly it doesn't. You also get the kind of suspension and pedal fine-tuning that Aston Martin has inserted into the V12 Vantage S above, and it's generally been designed and engineered to appeal to as many people as possible. This is understandable when you look at Renault's situation during this economic shit storm we're in. As one local example (to me), in February last year, they had to cut their UK range in half due to poor sales, killing off the Espace, Laguna, Koleos crossover, Wind (a Twingo-based roadster, for those of you that already don't remember) and the child-friendly Modus, as well as closing dealers down. When your most-celebrated model only really appeals to hardcore driving enthusiasts, it's time to broaden its appeal.

But, much as those enthusiasts feared, something has seemingly been lost in the transformation. When compared against the Peugeot 208 GTi, Ford Fiesta ST180, BMW Mini JCW and Nissan Juke NISMO, the car that would previously have swept to victory came fourth. Fourth. That's not good enough when the only direct rival the supposed class benchmark can beat is something too tall and completely devoid of steering feel (according to evo magazine). Other reviewers have either found themselves making excuses for it or admitting that it's just not as special as the car it replaces, partly because the DCT isn't good enough to make you forget about the old manual gearbox after all. The only glimmer of hope is that Renaultsport develop their cars over time, so its flaws can be ironed out in the coming years. If only they could undo the Model Bloat of the standard Clio...

Whether the same thing has happened to the new 911 GT3 remains to be seen. That would bring more widespread disappointment.

With that considered, let's return to the original point here: was/is Jeremy Clarkson's belief that supercars are soon to be consigned to the history books a load of moaning nonsense? Well, let's also go back to the V12 Vantage. That has gone from a purposeful driving machine towards being a more mainstream sports GT. Originally it was a fun little project, almost akin to the Nissan Juke R although a bit less crazy than that, which pleased people interested in cars as cars rather than as status symbols or transport boxes or whatever. The new one is less like that, a sequel that now has to justify its existence and "make a business case" for itself by adding or swapping the features that buyers in China and America are statistically more likely to want. Sure you can partly blame it on the need for car companies - which are at the end of the day businesses like any other - to survive the economic downturn and not become the next SAAB, but it's still quite a sad sight, because the changes being made to models like these will almost certainly be irreversible afterwards. Thus, while on the face of it the V12 Vantage S laughs in the face of The Tall One's predictions, when you look at some of the details and what they mean, it's not quite as clear-cut as that...

But supercars will, I maintain, still exist. We need something to bridge the gap between pioneering motorsport technology and the normal road cars it will inevitably reach. Monaco millionaires need want something to show their wealth and well-off car fans want to enjoy speed machines with more cylinders and performance than you could ever otherwise justify. So, on that front, he was indeed wrong. The Veyron has reignited the top speed arms race and major sports car companies are now making hypercars that really push towards the future with innovative hybrid systems and more advanced lightweight materials. It's called progress, and complaining about or resisting that is fruitless and irritating to read/listen to. Besides, for the time being, if it's purity and manual gearboxes you want, then call the Noble M600 and Hennessey Venom GT to the stage as two examples of hardcore high performance. Or look for your thrills in a different flavour with cars that can't afford not to be focused like the Caterham R600, Ariel Atom 3.5 or the brilliant(ly selfish) BAC Mono. If you just want to have fun then you don't even need copious amounts of money, as the Morgan 3-Wheeler and Toyobaru GT86/BRZ are here to help for £30k or less (or more if you spec up the handmade Morgan).

How long can it last? It's impossible to know, so just enjoy it while it does and if the perennial options disappoint you, keep your eyes open for more left-field choices because they are out there. If all else fails, why not just go second-hand and buy the car you really want, probably for less than you expected? In fact, buy a Clio 200 Cup or a 997 GT3 now, because their value will only go up from here. Why? Because they will be seen by many of the people who buy them as the last of a particular kind.

So, the Aston Martin V12 Vantage S proves indeed just how wrong Mr. Clarkson was in that video. Unfortunately, the answer is "not 100%"...

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Nissan Has Genuinely Launched A GT-R Gentleman Edition

You read that correctly, sir/madam...

It was announced last week that France, which is where the French live, will be receiving the Nissan GT-R Gentleman Edition. Well, not everybody in France. That would be obscenely expensive. In fact, only ten people will be able to buy one, although which ten people they didn't say. They did say that it will cost whichever French gentlemen it may be the princely sum of €97,900 (approximately £83,500). That is most certainly an amount of money. But what does maketh a Gentleman Edition? Let's see:

> The car knows to hold the door(s) open for people getting in or out of it.

> It will never tell anyone whether you've had sex in it recently.

> It is based on the Black Edition, but is only available in Grey Squale with some rather spiffy new hand-stitched red leather seats and interior pieces.

> The sat nav always speaks in calm and polite tones, and will never swear.

> The sun-visor mirror has an alert system if it detects a tie or hair out of line.

> Along with premium interior trim, you also get a luggage set comprising a sunglasses case and leather bag.

> It only emits CO2 when there's nobody around.

> The glove compartment actually contains gloves. White ones.

> The TFT screen only divulges enough information to make it seem mysterious and attractive to women.

> A numbered plaque made of titanium is fitted below the CD slot, and there is a small edition badge under the wing-mounted GT-R logos (see top picture).

> The exhaust note has been tuned to have a distinguished English accent.

Sounds like it's worth the small extra sum to me, even if the 542bhp at 6400rpm, 460lb/ft at 3200rpm, 0-62mph time of 2.7 seconds (!), 196mph claimed top speed and 1730kg kerbweight are exactly the same as the standard 2013 GT-R.

Although, I may have had to make some of those features up to justify it......

Some polite pictures for you, sir/madam:

One of the main complaints about the GT-R is the interior. This is their second addressing of that with an LE.

Well, it wouldn't be a posh version if it didn't have a poncey label...

Why make a two-figure Limited Edition and then give it a three-figure plaque number?

There is even a small purse for the lady to keep her makeup and dish-washing gloves in.

Can you work out from the pictures which featured are real? I trust you can. Because I'm gentlemanly like that.

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My First Ever Video Game Is 15 Years Old

A classic scene for many '90s kids: a purple Nissan Skyline GT-R (R33) blasting down Trial Mountain.

The year is 1998. Over the summer, we visit an aunt's house, and one of my cousins is playing a demo for a new racing game on something I didn't have called a PlayStation. In it, he's driving a yellow Subaru Impreza WRX on a night-time street circuit. He lets me have a few goes, and being six I wasn't very good at it, but it didn't matter. I needed this game. On my seventh birthday in November, two presents are left for last, one small square one, and one bigger rectangular one. Up until this point, all my game-playing was done on a PC, primarily Need For Speed (yes kids, the series is that old) and Colin McRae Rally, but a few others too. I was told to open the smaller one first. Some paper tearing revealed a plastic disc case with a big tyre tread on the front, into which GT was embedded. And there were the words in white: GRAN TURISMO: The Real Driving Simulator. The bigger box was, of course, a Sony PlayStation - complete with a twin-analogue-stick-wielding DUALSHOCK controller, no less - which now sits in my dad's study (ran when parked).

That game became the centre around which my life revolved when I wasn't at school or a music lesson. Fifteen years later, the current version often still has a similar draw. I learned more about cars from this game than from TopGear (which was an actual car show back then, would you believe) or my dad, discovering more and more cool-looking digital machines and improving my racing... bit by bit. Gradually. OK it may have taken a few years...

The point is, this game had a similar effect for an entire generation, turning previously little-known Japanese models like the Nissan Skyline GT-R (the inspiration for Kazunori Yamauchi to make the game, hence the sheer number of them), Mazda RX-7, Toyota Supra, Honda NSX and Subaru Impreza into global hero cars for my generation, as well as teaching Americans and the Japanese about the wild ways of TVR. It did so using quality graphics the likes of which people had never seen before, and physics that convinced many that the cars - each with their own discernible performance characteristics - were cornering like they might in reality. Thanks to their ability to do this again and again, at the end of 2012 over 68 million Gran Turismo games of various types had been sold in total. It's become a byword for realistic console racing games. Today, at Silverstone, they celebrate its 15th anniversary by announcing the arrival of GT6 on the dying PlayStation 3 at the end of this year. Assuming they actually meet an initial release date for once, that is.

Of course, nowadays, there is a bit more competition than there was in the late 1990s, when racing simluators weren't really a thing, especially on games consoles. Like the Porsche 911, this enduring benchmark has batted away most, if not all competitors. Ironically however, the more recent Xbox equivalent called Forza Motorsport has become quite the Nissan GT-R to their 911 Turbo. Which is better? In the latest versions it's six of one and half a dozen of the other, but for me Polyphony Digital would have to really mess up GT6 for it to no longer have the edge on Forza. Perhaps I'm being a little sentimental when I say that, but in fairness I've owned and been equally obsessed by each edition of the Turn 10 series as well, bar FM4, which came out at the same time as a major update for GT5 (I got the free demo though). I might get it over the summer, but I'd rather wait for them to release a DLC-included version so I'm not totally ripped off by Microsoft's exploitative ways. Besides, my Logitech steering wheel doesn't work on Xboxes...

But enough of rivals! That's not what this is about, and fanboy wars are as tedious and fruitless as putting an Athiest and a Christian in a room and ringing the gym bell. Let's go all nostalgic and crap.

That part in the middle when the intro climaxes and the logo forms itself before, screaming Japanese engines break the short silence, will live with me forever. I can guarantee that, as I just got goosebumps watching it again.

Not a year later did Gran Turismo 2 come out, a game so big for its time that it required two discs, a red one for the pick-up-and-play Arcade Mode and a blue one for the more serious Career Mode, whose lettering you could rub for an "authentic pit lane smell." I've worn mine out but I can remember what it smells like vividly. Featuring many more tracks (including dirt ones this time) and cars, GT2 was vast indeed, so vast that in Career Mode they had to split the menu map into different sections for different world regions where the cars came from, each with their own little 16-bit theme tune. The intro featured a remix (in Europe) of a song I was into at the time, My Favourite Game by The Cardigans. How apt! The album's even called Gran Turismo...

Racing Modifications allowed you to make your car look they way you'd modified it to go, while improving performance further still. The feature also allowed you to recreate the entire 1998 BTCC works grid, which was nice (I'm pretty sure that's the only reason they included those otherwise completely uninteresting cars, to be honest)! Although of course, when talking about racing cars, you have to mention the All-Japan GT Championship (JGTC), as the series was also introduced to a global audience through the medium of Gran Turismo. The Calsonic Skyline GT-R (R32) in particular struck a chord, although I also remember the black and yellow Pennzoil NISMO R34 from this game as well. evo Magazine's Richard "Dickie" Meaden recently lived the virtual dream for real:

But towering above JGTC racers and slightly-hidden Touring Cars, both figuratively and physically, was a car with the power of a Veyron, the bodywork of a squashed Vitara SUV and an aero package that makes a Formula 1 car blush and try to look away in order to avoid the frankly indecent hillclimb weapon of choice for the now-legendary Nobuhiro "Monster" Tajima, a man who is among very few who could handle the sudden explosions of dirt-flinging speed provided by the equally-legendary Suzuki Escudo Pikes Peak.

I've waxed lyrical about the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb before, when the same retirement-aged nutter broke the elusive 10-minute barrier in 2011, but that was on a part-tarmac course. When he used this car in the mid-late 1990s, it was all dirt, all the time. To make the nearly four-figure power output, the two gigantic turbochargers attached to the 3.0 V6 had to run at a very high boost pressure, creating monumental turbo lag, wherein the turbos aren't spinning fast enough to do their thing until they're at high revs. You don't need to know what the effect's called to know the Escudo has it, as even revving up on the start line you find the needle creeping slowly up to about 3000rpm, when instantly it's bouncing off the redline about twice as far round the dial. It did this in all five gears when you were moving. You had to really know what you were doing - and be playing with manual gear changes - to keep this thing on the power, otherwise it would spit you out like a shocked person's coffee. In some ways, perhaps it's a good thing that GT games didn't have damage until GT5 (which even then is mild)! What's really great is that in GT3 you could add a Stage 4 Turbo upgrade to almost double the power to 1843bhp. It bordered on undrivable if you did that. The funny thing is, thanks to that skate ramp they put on the back, and the short gearing set up for acceleration, the top speed wasn't actually all that high considering the engine. The adjustable gear ratios did allow tinkerers to get fully-tuned ones up to 280mph though, faster than any road car on the (real) planet even now. The Pikes Peak course (or part of it) was playable in GT2, but strangely it hasn't appeared since...

Then, in 2001, Sony brought out the PlayStation 2, a console I can reasonably assume that you the reader own, or have owned. GT3 was a release title, and the graphics stepped up in a big way. We had trouble at first to tell game footage from real footage in the intro! Said intro got me (and probably many others) into British alternative band Feeder, with one of their Echo Park B-Sides Just A Day accompanying the usual assortment of normal and racing cars zooming around on screen, after we were shown where fuel goes in an engine.

I remember during this period wanting a new bodyshell for my Tamiya TL-01 R/C car (not that there's anything wrong with a Peugeot 406 WTCC), and in the end it had to be of the 2000 Toyota #36 Castrol Tom's Supra JGTC featured at the start of this intro. Unfortunately, I've lost the controller, so it sits collecting dust in my room...

GT3 introduced us to RUF, a tuning company that games use when they can't get a license to use Porsches. This started a trend that has lead to RUF being quite the big name among car modders, and they opened up a new dealer in Dubai last year having unveiled a 730bhp supercar that's largely their own work, using only the front end and engine block from a 911 GT3. Before that CTR3 though, there was the CTR2, a 993-based beast with a pram-handle rear wing and the punch of a half-pint Escudo. Man it was quick. Even around the aptly-named Complex String, a fictional circuit that features pretty much every kind of corner it's possible to have. Repeatedly.

This ultimate test circuit needs to make a comeback.

This made it useful for License Tests, so you could learn how to tackle any corner with speed and accuracy. A perennial Gran Turismo feature, unlike the circuit which only appeared in GT3. The licenses are tiered just like FIA racing licenses, with B, A, International C, I-B, I-A and then Special, equivalent to the Superlicense that all F1 drivers must carry. Each series of 8 tests got progressively harder, with B tests starting off as simple as starting and stopping, making the game accessible to any level of talent from novices to the people who should really be playing iRacing. Or going outside more often...

But it was Gran Turismo 4 that was for me the peak of the series so far. I distinctly remember waiting for this, going through the delays and finally getting it on 14th March 2005. For this intro vid, I'll give you the one with Japanese music (the uploader fiddled with their US disc), because in its home market the game always had its own theme tune, known as Moon Over the Castle. GT4's is the best version:

We're talking around 750 cars, plenty of tracks including snow routes for the first time - not to mention the Nürburgring Nordschleife and Circuit de la Sarthe - and a debut to the series for both endurance racing and Photo Mode, which used as many settings as your real camera to give you the potential for stunning photography, which you could then print out or save onto a USB stick. Appropriately for Gran Turismo, it's just like being a real photographer! The three 24h endurance races (two routes of Le Mans and the treacherous Nürburgring 24H) helped add up to 100 hours of Career Mode gameplay to be had, and remember that this came out in 2005. Cars that were new and exciting then included a 200mph, V10-powered BMW M5, a revival of the Ford GT40, and the McLaren-Mercedes SLR. But history is important too, which is why some curveballs in the car lineup included a 1937 Auto Union V16 Type C Streamliner, Jay Leno's Tank Car (literally a car with a tank engine, as put together by the plainly bonkers "Blastolene Brothers"), a 1915 Ford Model T and not one but two cars from 1886, the Benz Patent Motor Wagen - widely believed to be the first car - and a four-wheeled Daimler Motor Carriage. The Benz had 0.8bhp from a 1.0L single cylinder engine, a top speed of 12mph and only three wheels (including the steering, which was done using a tiller steering system rather than with a wheel).

Then there's the 2022 Nike One, a concept car made for the game that the driver rode like a bike, which had rear wheels next to eachother, a red glass canopy for imaginary ingress and egress, eight forward gears and it sounded like it was running on energy crystals (but actually runs on something far more ridiculous than that, according to Wikipedia). It almost makes the Toyota Motor Triathlon Concept car look normal. It certainly made the Chaparral 2J "fan car" and the insane, tyre-shredding TVR Cerbera Speed 12 look normal, as well as Polyphony Digital's pretend F1 car, the 900bhp V12 Formula Gran Turismo (based on a Renault R24).

And so we get - having skipped out the "Prologue" extended demo for GT4, Concept 2001/2002 Tokyo-Geneva extended demo after GT3 and a Career-less PSP game - to Gran Turismo 5. The first full GT title on PS3 was very, very delayed. Originally it was going to be a launch title when the console came out at the end of 2006, but instead we got "Gran Turismo HD", a demo which did the job of showing off the super-powerful new console's visual potential very well indeed but only had one track and a handful of cars. At least one of those cars was the brand spanking new Ferrari F599 GTB Fiorano! You could do a race, time trial or, as a first, a drifting contest. Then GT5 Prologue came out in Japan at the end of 2007. Concerned that it might not become available outside Japan, I ordered one. It was all in Japanese. I didn't care, and worked it all out anyway, which is a testament to the user interface! This allowed me to witness the unveiling of the all-new and all-exciting Nissan GT-R (R35) in the game at the very minute (6AM my time) that the real thing was being wheeled out at the 2007 Tokyo Motor Show. Ditto for the new Subaru Impreza WRX STI, which was a hatchback for the first time and didn't go around Suzuka - the only track - as well as the razor-sharp and also brand-new Mitsubishi Evo X. A small set of tiered events kept me busy.

In 2008 GT5P came out in Europe after all, with a "Spec 2.0" update that upped the car total from 6 to 74, which included a real F1 car for the first time in the Ferrari F2007, and the crazy GTbyCITROEN hydrogen supercar concept, the first ever made-for-virtual car by a major car manufacturer (a life-sized model did the motor show rounds and eventually they stuck a Ford V8 in it and did some filming, but that was all that came of it). More tracks appeared too, with Daytona making a series debut in both oval and road course formats. More than that though, Gran Turismo entered online racing at last, having failed to add the feature to GT4, and drifting events appeared for the first time as well, which meant that drift cars built for the "D1GP" drifting championship entered the fray. Didn't know about D1GP? That's OK, because with another new component called Gran Turismo TV, you could watch highlights packages of events from 2007. Ditto SUPER GT, which was JGTC's new, slightly more international incarnation. Plus old episodes of TopGear! Although in the UK we have Dave for that...

The world got fed up of waiting. As we got within a week of the final release date, it was then pushed back to after my birthday, FINALLY appearing in the post on 24th November 2010. This was the big one, though. 1000 cars. Over 70 different circuits across 26 locations, plus the ability to generate your own track on tarmac, snow or dirt, sector-by-sector. Full online functions. The TopGear Test Track. Does it get any better?

Well... it could. Whether it's just that nowadays I have the internet to point them out to me or not, I don't know, but GT5's idiosyncrasies were a bit more... noticeable than any of previous titles. For a start, the intro is six minutes long and featured a poppy new song from My Chemical Romance...

I like how the first part captures the apparent organised chaos involved in building a car though, before diving into the kind of intro we all know and love.

The second most noticeable thing was that, of the 1000 new cars, approximately 750 of them were ported straight over from GT4 and GT PSP, with just updated light reflections to make them look newer. Only 200 or so cars were the full-HD, interior-view-included masterpieces seen in 5 Prologue and GT HD. The thing is that an entire "Standard Model" car has about the same number of polygons as the headlight of a "Premium Model" car, so if they had updated all of them, it probably would've taken them another two years to finish the damn thing. They eventually added interior cameras for Standard cars, but didn't actually render the interiors, so you saw pitch-black pillars and steering wheel unless it was open-cockpit, in which case you were treated to a PS2-quality interior rather than the pixel-perfect Premium interiors that featured working dials/screens and a rear view that looked past any back seats and through the rear windscreen. Not good enough. They also got stick for roughly 35 of the 1000 cars being GT-Rs of each year, while some notable performance cars of the day and days past were missing. As updates came, that number grew anyway with more and more special-edition R35s. As it happens, Yamauchi-san owns an R35, and Polyphony Digital designed the new Godzilla's computer screens, which they then used as the HUD in GT5. No bad thing, but it explains all the GT-Rs...

As well as these things, the damage modelling is far from realistic - while you can take a door or a bumper off, it takes a hell of a lot more effort than it does in real life - and much like the new bodykits, only applies to Premium Model cars. So does Photo Travel, where you place your car in a scene and play photographer (if you want to snap a Standard Model, it has to be in a replay, and you can't zoom in as close). So does Racing Modifications. In fact, RM'ing only applies to about 17 cars...

And yet. And yet the handling is uncanny. Jalopnik's initial review includes the following:

The expectation bar's been met. Polyphony Digital's built a driving game with the most accurate individual vehicle driving dynamics mapping I've ever seen. That's right, Gran Turismo 5 is the most life-like racing game ever. Go ahead, dump the clutch in a Camaro SS for a devastatingly stable tire-shredding burnout. Skitter around a corner like an excited puppy dog in a Mini Cooper S. Take off in a GT-R with launch control. It all feels spot on.

And when I mean spot on, I mean it causes flashbacks. I took a level left-hand corner hard in the 2008 Dodge Challenger SRT8 (no driving aids on other than ABS) on a city course and felt the same sloppy steer-with-your-right-foot cornering I last remembered feeling driving around a Michigan left on Metro Detroit's Woodward Avenue. Entering the corner a touch too fast, I actually felt, through the controller, the rear end shift out from underneath me and start to slip sideways. Applying throttle while exiting the corner corrected the muscle car's big back end just like in real life.

But, for a real treat — and after eight hours of continuous play turned my thumbs raw and blistered from numb-on/off button-controlled acceleration and braking — I decided to pair the game with a Logitech Driving Force GT racing wheel provided for me by Sony's PR team. The result was a driving experience that let me feel a car's weight, suspension set-up, and road surface in a way I've never felt before in anything but a multi-million dollar automaker simulator. The wheel changed the entire feel of the game, sucking me in for another 12 hours of gameplay.

So to drive, it's so real it's unreal. The graphics are a trip into Uncanny Valley, where they're so similar to reality you end up picking out the teeniest, tiniest flaws, like shadows not quite lining up from body panel to body panel. In low lighting it really is hard to tell GT5 and reality apart.

And then there are some of the cars you're looking at. Here are 30 of my 1400+ photos from GT5:

Quite frankly, it's incredible, this game. It just is. It's one of those things where, if you stick with it, you'll find that it transcends its flaws to get a place in your heart and mind after all. Of the many things that run through all Gran Turismo games, one is a personal one. With Gran Turismo and its realism, my imagination runs wild. I've driven a Bugatti Veyron and McLaren F1 flat out. I've taken a 2010 Ferrari F1 car around the Nürburgring. And a Nissan GT-R really a lot of times. I've blasted a Peugeot 908 up Eau Rouge and go-karted around the TopGear track (karting is actually one of the funnest features of GT5). I've been The Stig, Sebastien Loeb, Lewis Hamilton and Jeremy Clarkson. I've "experienced" cars I'll only dream of so much as sitting in. And a Honda Life Step Van. And a Toyota Prius. This is the key to GT games. They capture my imagination like they did when I was six or seven years old. Then there are cars like the Red Bull X1 that just blow your mind completely.

Also running through every GT game is the fact that, like Pokémon or, y'know, real life, you start off small. With your ten or twenty grand, you find some wheels, change the oil immediately to take advantage of a glitch and go racing against similarly slow cars. After the first championship, you'll get a prize car and some money to tune one of them up, and it grows out from there until eventually you've got hundreds of cars in your garage and millions in the bank. That's the best way to structure a game like this, and it's been that way from the start. It keeps you going as you aspire to reach the star cars and then keep going until you win the highest championship of all. I will admit, as much of a fanatic as I am, I've never managed 100% completion on a GT game (my closest is GT4 with over 95%). I would've done in GT5 by now, but for B-Spec mode. B-Spec was introduced in GT4 - although with GT3's full name being Gran Turismo 3: A Spec, you get the impression it was meant to be introduced sooner - and in it you swap being Sebastian Vettel for being Christian Horner, watching from the sidelines, planning pit stops and in GT5, egging your driver on or telling him to keep cool, depending on what they need to be told. It's a great idea and I can see why people do it, but I'd rather be behind the wheel. Besides, to start with the B-Spec drivers are almost useless at overtaking...

Along your journey, you'll go to the massive Test Track oval (or Special Stage Route X, as it's now known) to see just how fast you car can really go, from 0-60MPH, 0-400m, 0-1000m and onwards to your top speed. This is how you get your Escudo to go faster than an entire deck's worth of Top Trumps Supercars. You'll race on both real tracks and ones made up by the Polyphony Digital team, most of which are brilliant and designed to test the car in various ways. High centre of gravity and poor suspension balance? You're going to hate Grand Valley Speedway. Built a B-Road blaster out of your Toyota Corolla? You're going to love Deep Forest Raceway (which is apparently based on some obscure circuit in Iowa). If you live in Madrid, Tokyo, Paris, New York, Hong Kong or London, you'll enjoy street circuit routes devised on the real streets. Then of course there's Monaco. You may even like hooning a Daihatsu Midget II around the new Kart Space tracks! Whatever floats your boat, GT's got it. Unless vinyls and engine swaps float your boat. Then there's the engine sounds. Generating them with computers was fine at the start, but now that other games are recording the real engines, they don't sound good enough. It's almost like they taunt us with this fact in the GT5 Spec 2.0 intro at 4:02 into the equally-long video, when V8 AMGs sound like Imprezas:

That said, I do like the more intense song and editing in the latter half of this one compared to the original.

But I'm rambling. Enough dissecting of GT5. The future was announced earlier. What of that?

This:

This brief clip is confirmation that the latest installment of PlayStation's biggest ever franchise is coming fast. The people at Polyphony Digital don't do downscaling; Gran Turismo 6 will feature around 1200 cars, with many (hopefully all) cars now upgraded to Premium Models. It will feature 71 circuits across 33 locations, including Silverstone at long last. The game engine and physics engine are being replaced with new ones that will push the PS3 to its very limit, with updated modelling for the suspension, tyres, kinematics, and aerodynamics. Cars featured will include the Audi Quattro Group B rally car, Gordon Murray's bike-like LCC Rocket single-seater, the 50-year-old Alpine A110 and the Alfa Romeo TZ3 Stradale, not to mention the excellent Plymouth XNR Concept that won a concours award at Pebble Beach (the same way the Miura prototype and TZ2 made it into GT5).

For more information and several more images, visit the official website.

All that and so much more is to follow after a demo comes out in July, which will also kick off this year's edition of GT Academy, a brilliant competition that lets devoted GT'ers have the chance to become racing drivers for real. The inaugural winner, Lucas Ordoñez, has gone on to race competitively in GT racing and at Le Mans in an LMP2 car. Twice. He won GT-A in 2008. The talent gained through this process has become too strong for the usual route of British pro-am GT racing, so they've had to go another route. That says it all! If you've got what it takes, some free time and a steering wheel attachment, give it a whirl. I will be for sure.

Some breathtaking screenshots for you:

Audi Sport Quattro S1 Rally Car '86

Alpine A110 1600S '68

Alfa Romeo TZ3 Stradale '11

Ferrari Dino 246 GT '71

KTM X-Bow R '12

Light Car Company Rocket '07

Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG GT3 '11

Tesla Model S Signature Performance '12

Alfa Romeo TZ3 Stradale '11 interior

Ferrari Dino 246 GT '71 interior

Silverstone Grand Prix Circuit - "The Wing" paddock building

Silverstone International Circuit - joining from the start of the Wellington Straight to Maggotts and Becketts

Silverstone Grand Prix Circuit - Club Corner grandstand

More about Gran Turismo 6 will appear in the coming weeks and months. It is looking like it won't disappoint! I can't wait to get all giddy with anticipation again. This is going to be great!

Why is it going to be great? Because it's from Gran Turismo, a series that changed racing games forever and had a huge cultural impact on a generation. My generation. Long may its greatness continue.

For more GT-related writings, visit the Games section!

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