Car Throttle

It began with a simple question from a good friend of mine, Zairul whether we would be going to Sepang to cheer on the boys from the local garage LMY Automobile & Services Sdn Bhd. Three of the LMY ‘Snails’ boys (named after the shape of a turbo unit, not the Gastropode)  had entered the time attack challenge organized by a famous Malaysian website called Zerotohundred.com together with local track day organizers HPC Motorsports. The event was called Time To Attack: Sepang coinciding with Zerotohundred’s 10th anniversary. It was held on the 9th of May, 2010 at the Sepang International F1 Circuit (SIC). I agreed mainly because there were no other activities for me to do in the day, and the boys would surely use more support

Just how far would you go to restore a car? Would you dive to the bottom of a frickin' lake and haul an old wreck of a car just to resurrect it like Lazarus? You would, or at least I would, if it was a 1925 Bugatti. And that's just what some total nut jobs, er, I mean, dedicated gearheads will be doing. When I was a little kid, my dad found a Kaiser Darrin in barn (no, literally in a barn) that was all there, but needed to be gone through and completely restored. Let me just put it this way: There was hay in the engine compartment. But by the time he got through with it (my dad, being a tool and die maker

Hello God? It's me, Tony. Are you jerking me around? Seriously man. I know we don't talk all that often – oh and hey, I really want to thank you for Caitlin – but I really want to know just what the Hell your thinking letting Jaguars being turned into cop cars. Honestly, man. Yes, I know, the shine has somewhat dimmed on Jaguar over the years. What once was a car company that posted "Grace. Pace. Space." and slew all that came before them at places like Le Mans has now been passed around like a doobie at a Grateful Dead concert, ending up in the hands of Tata. Not that there's anything wrong with Tata. They seem like nice guys, and they're doing

We know video games don't compare to the real thing of driving exotic supercars, but for many that is the closest they'll get to driving the cars in the upper echelons of motoring like the one where cars like the Bugatti Veyron resides. Last year, CarThrottle reviewed one of those racing games, Need For Speed Shift, a game that emphasizes the first-person driving experience and real-life dynamics. If you're one of the owners of the game, this new package is for you. It's called the Exotic Racing Series package, available for $10 (or equivalent amount of points) and it includes seven new vehicles: the Alfa Romeo 8C Competizione, BMW M1 Procar, GUMPERT apollo, Honda NSX, McLaren MP4-12C, Maserati GranTurismo and the Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren Stirling Moss. One of the criticisms of the game

Ah, advertising. Any publicity is good publicity, right? The aim of advertising is to garner attention for your product. Some succeed a whole lot better than others - this one is one of those. BMW dealerships are no strangers to ads that get attention. If you'll remember the Audi vs. BMW ad war that played out in Santa Monica, California last year, you'll know what we're talking about. This time, the billboard was put up by Bridgeport BMW in Bridgeport, Connecticut to promote an overnight test drive program. To illustrate the program, they put up a mannequin (in pajamas) and a big teddy bear. Get it, overnight? Apparently, the manniquins were a bit too lifelike for some, and motorists began calling 911 to report the man and

Well, it's a start, I guess. When you think of the Porsche Cayenne, efficient or eco-friendly aren't the first things to spring to mind. For me, words like "useless" and "insulting" are what pop up first, but that's not the subject at hand at the moment. No, what we have here is a Porsche Cayenne that has been worked over by an outfit called the Schaeffler Group, and they say it's spewing out 10% less CO2. The Schaeffler Group is a German bearing supplier, and their new concept based on the Porsche Cayenne, was made to demonstrate the possibilities for CO2 reduction through friction reduction. No, seriously. You don't think of that as a way to make things greener, but hey, Schaeffler obviously got to where

How cool is John Surtees? At 75 years old, the racing legend, who got his start as the guy riding in the side car in motorcycle side car racing (his dad was at the controls), a man who was world champion on two wheels as well as four, Surtees decided that a fun thing to do would be to drive a Ginetta electric vehicle through Chunnel. John Surtees is a Grand Prix motorcycle champion, winning the title in 1956, 1958 (twice, in two divisions), 1959 (also twice), 1960 (twice again) AND a Formula One World Champion, winning for Ferrari in 1964. Top that Valentino Rossi. Shoot, can anyone top that? Short answer: No. Surtees is the only man who is a champion on two wheels as

“Push the button, Max!” That was the line repeatedly uttered by Jack Lemmon playing Professor Fate to his hapless assistant, played by Peter Falk, in the 1965 film “The Great Race.” Although actually based on a real life, New York to Paris race, the '65 movie was a farcical comedy, as you can plainly see by the car shown here. The car in question is Professor Fate’s Hannibal 8, and for a mere $350,000, it could Be Yours. The car popped up on Hemmings (the font of all collector car goodness, it seems) and is being sold by an outfit called Volo. Yes, this is the actual car used in the movie by Jack Lemon/Professor Fate, and it seems to be in pretty fantastic shape

Many of the small, oil-rich states in the United Arab Emirates have been working hard to diversify their economies beyond petroleum (no pun intended). That includes investing in new development that will result in tourism. Perhaps the most visible in that pursuit has been Dubai, but a new development called Yas Island in Abu Dhabi is working to shift some of the limelight. Especially for car enthusiasts, it certainly seems to be succeeding in doing that, as home to the Yas Island Circuit and Ferrari World.

The design is just striking - the ultra-modern Ferrari-red roof is said to be "directly inspired by the classic double curve side profile of the Ferrari GT body." Ferrari World is home to a 200-foot-tall Ferrari logo, the world's largest. There

As goofy as scooters can be, it's hard not to say that Vespas have a certain cool factor to them. They got that Italian style, and that whole "Roman Holiday" continental charm and all that. So hey, why not turn them into office furniture? So why take a perfectly good Vespa and cut it up into furniture? Well, for one thing, these are older Vespas. They're at the end of their useful life, for one thing, and these are the older Vespas, which means they were powered by those old air-cooled, two-stroke, single cylinder engines that weren't the best, environmentally speaking. So a design studio by the name of Bel & Bel has decided to turn old Vespas into new office furniture. As you can see