Starting on Thursday and running through Sunday, dozens of racing teams will descend on the Nürburgring with their cars for the track’s annual 24 hour endurance race. In the case of Gazoo Racing, they’ll be packing a strong five-car hand: one LFA and two GT 86s. On top of that, a second factory-backed effort run by Toyota Swiss Racing Team will bring two more GT 86s to the race, making a sum total of four factory-backed Toyobarus in the race.

The LFA and the Nürburgring go way back together; the car was extensively tested there (then again, what isn’t these days?), and even comes in a Nürburgring Edition that rips around the Nordschleife in 7 minutes and 14 seconds. The GT 86 (a.k.a. Scion FR-S, a.k.a. Subaru BRZ) is a little less familiar with the track, but this won’t be its first N-ring rodeo either; it competed in a shorter endurance race at the ‘Ring last year, even before it lost all its camouflage.

The LFA has already won its class in two shorter races at the Nürburgring this year, so we wouldn’t be surprised to see it pull off a hat trick this weekend. As for the GT 86, well, we just hope it beats its previous best competition lap time of 10:26.4. [via Toyota]

Press Release:

The Toyota Swiss Racing Team will also be taking part, fielding two GT86 race-prepared by Toyota Motorsport. Both will take part in the competition class (V3) for production models. Their participation is part of Toyota Switzerland’s grassroots motorsport programme with GT86 to encourage a new generation of car enthusiasts.

Either way, News.com.au does have another piece of information to further bolster the belief that the Chevrolet SS Performance will be a rebodied Holden Commodore, just like the Pontiac G8 was and the Chevrolet Caprice cop car currently is. According to them, Holden has been testing left-hand drive Commodores on public roads in Victoria, Australia over the last few weeks, both by itself and in comparison with Dodge Chargers. In case you were wondering, Dodge doesn’t sell Chargers in Australia.

The upcoming announcement that could be scheduled for today or tomorrow is supposed to address just how much money this deal between Chevy and Holden is worth, which should also give us an idea just how big the SS Performance program is. Now let’s all just cross our fingers and hope that, since GM is going to all this trouble, they’ll bring the SS Performance over here complete with a stick shift. [via News.com.au]

Pictured: Holden Commodore SS V-Series Redline Edition

During a qualifying round at California’s Infineon Raceway, Hagata lost control of his bike and flipped over the handlebars, but through a combination of sheer adrenaline, upper-body strength and what we have to assume was a superhuman desire not to slam into the ground at speed, he wrangled his way back aboard his runaway steed. You’ve gotta see it to believe it.

[via GenkiHagata on YouTube]

This story originally ran in the Winter 2011 issue of 0-60 Magazine.

Story: Chris Harris

Photography: David Shepherd

Eleven years ago, on a windy runway in Gloucestershire—the posh, expensive part of Britain—I was invited to drive what was the strangest-looking vehicle I’d ever seen. It was called an Atom. Its creator, Simon Saunders, wanted to revisit the lightweight sports car subject but with an emphasis on styling language and involvement. He wanted to expose the driver to the air ahead of him, motorcycle style, and remind us that the Caterham Seven was now a very old car.

Even with a crash helmet on, I wasn’t prepared when the icy wind began licking up the inside of my trousers and shirtsleeves, nor when stones started peppering my visor. It looked and felt like nothing else, this Atom thing: two great pairs of parallel bars, lattice linked and then bent almost into two semicircles, and joined at the ends. The only trouble was that the wheezy Rover K-series motor (the U.S. was spared that generation of Rover cars, and was lucky for it) wasn’t so strong, and the chassis settings were, to be kind, unfinished. As an object, it made the Brit sports car establishment—Caterham, Lotus and the like—seem outdated, and as a driving experience, it missed the mark.

But not for long. Simon sensibly ditched the unreliable Rover motor and fitted a Euro-spec Honda Civic Type-R lump that gave 200hp. This transformed the car from amusing style icon to a four-second, zero-to-60 monster and forced the team to get help for the chassis—which they duly did. Very quickly, the Atom evolved into a serious driving tool: fast, nimble and reliable. Then Simon raised the stakes further by supercharging that Jap-donkey to 300hp and plonking it into a 1,100-pound car—and it’s this car I’m thinking of as I press the starter button on this new Atom V8.

You see, I’ve never really come to grips with the Atom 300. It’s a girly admission from someone who’s supposed to wrestle this fast-car business on a daily basis, but it’s true. I’ll do you skids in a GT2 RS on any road, but the Atom 300 scares the shit out of me: The torque arrives in one great slug, spitting the car sideways, and then you realize how little steering lock is available to sort out the ensuing mess.

And that’s what I’m thinking right now. I’m not man enough for the Atom 300—and this one has 500hp. Bollocks.

The vital statistics of this machine don’t encourage light reading; it might well be the case that somewhere in the world, a street car can offer a more favorable power-to-weight ratio, but I’ve never seen or heard of it. That V8 is actually a U.S. design, splicing two Suzuki Hayabusa motors onto a flat-plane crank, but not before they’ve been taken out to 1,500 cc. It sits transversely, a few inches behind the driver’s backside. Drive is fed through a Sadev sequential gearbox, used by most Euro-rally cars, and out through a pair of driveshafts that cost $1,500 a pop.

On the page, the Atom looks otherworldly, like someone locked Gordon Murray in a shed for three days with nothing but an Erector set, several trips and three bottles of ’shine. In fact it’s so otherworldly that it never quite registers as an automobile with some people—they just stare at it with the glazed incomprehension of a tourist at Victoria Falls.

It has delicious control weights, the Atom. It encourages childish fondling when stationary, so you twiddle the wheel and prod the pedals to feel the resistance they offer your limbs. Getting the car moving is an undeniably self-conscious event, because people around you can see what you are doing, so you take extra care and attention over your inputs—like leaning over to reach for something on the beach and clenching your abdominals to keep that belly in check. I like that; it rather defines the Atom driving experience as something to savor, but it also preempts in-line savagery of a type that makes the Lamborghini Superlegerra—a car that an hour earlier seemed almost too violent for the public road—feel plain underpowered.

It isn’t easy to drive the Atom slowly, not because it offers any great tantrums or low-rev histrionics that might be expected of such a specialized combination of high-revving, torque-shy motor and dog gearbox, but for an entirely opposite reason: It works so well. You sit in the seat and pull the right paddle, which is perfectly sprung to provide just the right amount of resistance. Any fears that dispensing with the services of a gear lever might detract from the Atom experience subside the moment you hear a hiss of pneumatic pressure and the distinctive clatter of dog-gears engaging. This is not some god-awful actuated manual ’box but a pukka Sadev ST90 whose day job is being abused by some S2000 rally car driver.

And still it is perfectly easy to use: Select first, release the clutch, and the car will pull uphill without any extra throttle. We shouldn’t forget that with “just” 284 lb.-ft. of torque, the Atom’s torque to weight ratio is 515 lb.-ft. per ton, but oddly enough, that figure doesn’t echo inside your crash helmet as you mosey out onto the street. It is somewhat overshadowed by the 882hp per ton Ariel claims for this machine. I have never driven something so punchy that doesn’t live exclusively on a circuit and enjoy the benefits of vast rear slick tires.

So why is it such a doddle at low speed? Masterful calibration, I suppose; the engine and gearbox feel made for each other in the way a pair of Hayabusa motors sharing a flat-plane crank and bolted to a rally tranny have absolutely no right to. The rev counter is configured to provide information on the upper reaches of the rev range, so it’s actually difficult to see how low it will lug, but like I said, it’ll pull first from idle and then any small increments of throttle from thereon in. What it doesn’t like is being asked to hold a constant, minuscule throttle opening—just the type photographers want for tracking shots—but then, in my experience, very few cars do.

To protect the dog rings, there’s a throttle sensor that doesn’t allow clutchless gear changes without at least 10 percent throttle, but if need be, you can dip the left pedal to shift gears at very low speed. You rarely choose that option, though, because feeling and hearing the gearbox work even remotely hard is so captivating that you push a little harder.

This is both an easier and a much more pleasurable car to drive than an Atom 300. This again comes as a surprise, because on paper it looks psychotically overendowed. Being naturally aspirated is the key advantage in that it gives the driver much more accurate control of the power delivery and, more important, torque delivery.

The Atom’s throttle has sensible springing, and the long travel is certainly welcome, but as with any motor this free from inertia (it revs to 10,600 rpm, and peak torque doesn’t arrive until 7,750 rpm), a few millimeters of pedal equals several thousand rpm—but you have instinctive control over the stuff.

Whereas the Atom 300 driver is never quite sure when the supercharger will rouse itself and deliver a spurt of energy that requires attention very quickly (in my experience, normally just when you neither want nor expect it), the V8 holds no great surprises.

Actually, that’s a complete lie. It holds suitcases full of surprises, because it is that very rare thing: a car whose ultimate straight-line potential is only usable for very, very short bursts. When it hits hard in second gear, you keep the throttles wide open simply because there’s nothing else your body can do. You are encapsulated in this weird amalgam of tubes and engine, transfixed by the way this car can squeeze your body—as in make you brace to resist its energies—and for a moment you cannot concentrate on anything else. The result is right-foot-rictus: That Tilton pedal stays pinned to its stop. What I should have said is that its deployment is at least predictable.

The chassis is firmer than anything we’ve seen from Ariel. The V8 uses Intrax suspension with a fixed-rate spring and adjustable dampers. It’s set up for track use, so it feels pretty busy on the road, but not so unyielding that it hinders progress. Its most impressive aspect is traction; you’d have thought that fitting a firmer spring and adding a load of compression damping would have played havoc with the exit phase of a bumpy Welsh bend, but those Toyos claw into the surface, and the car rockets away.

It is a frustrating experience at times. If the Ariel team have done a superb job of destressing a potentially overbearing driving experience, the fact remains that the car just doesn’t feel right on a trailing throttle. Nor, most importantly, does it sound right. The Atom has always been a sensory overload, but this version communicates even more cleanly than the others through noise. On a trailing throttle, everything sounds a little slack and lazy, like it isn’t functioning properly, but under load everything blends into a seamless whole so enjoyable you really don’t want it to end. The problem is that to use the car this way, you have to be on a circuit. On the road, you find yourself squirting forward, drinking in the induction noise, then giggling into your chin bar at the naughtiness of a clutchless, instant upshift. Do this for six seconds on full throttle and the Atom will go from 20 mph to 110 mph, so you choose your moments wisely.

For these reasons, I found myself covering ground much more slowly than I would have in many much slower cars. Technically, it is possible to drive an Atom V8 faster than any other four-wheeled device, but common sense precludes such antics, which leaves you squirting, slowing and squirting again. Constant velocity in an Atom V8 just doesn’t feel right: You want those noises, the full-frontal attack from stones and sheep shit, accelerated air penetrating your cuffs, collars and then slowly lifting your crash helmet from your neck.

With some tire temperature and a circuit, the Atom can be used properly, but even then caution is required. New Intrax suspension makes this a much more capable track car; this one is set up to avoid killing journalists, so it understeers a little, although working through some infantile front-axle push with 500hp isn’t a problem. If you have the arm and foot skills, it’s possible to lay great black lines in the V8, but it doesn’t have any more steering lock than the 300, so don’t get too carried away.

The one thing I don’t get to do is run the V8 above 140 mph. Of course, the car will hit 140 mph pretty much every time you open up the taps with a reasonably clear view ahead, but I’d quite like to know what air does to the human body at the 170 mph Ariel claims with this car’s gearing. Presumably, I’d be left with a ligature neck wound from my chinstrap and a convincing Brazilian from the accelerated trouser airflow. They reckon it might hit 200 mph with the correct ratios, but with the aerodynamics of a toothbrush, I think that’s fanciful in the extreme.

What a machine, though. Each throttle opening is an event, something you compose yourself for, in preparation for the thwack! in the backside. It feels out of control yet more controlled than the lesser 300, and the noise is pure racecar—a high-intensity V8 blare redolent of the great Ford DFV motor from the ’70s. This is driving in its most basic, most fearsome form. Some tubes and 500hp: easily worth $175,720.

Specs:

Price: $175,720

Power: 500hp, 284 lb.-ft.

Engine: 3.0L naturally aspirated V8

Drivetrain: Rear-wheel drive, 6-speed dog box

0-60: 2.3 seconds

Top Speed: 170 mph

Weight: 1,212 lbs.

Power to Weight: 2.4 lbs./hp

Then we stumbled on this little video, with the following description: “Lexus loaned Tony Hawk a super rare, super expensive LFA model for a few days, which gave him time to jump over it on a skateboard.” Which, we have to admit, pisses us off.

Look, Lexus, we’re reasonable people. We understand you only have a handful of media fleet LFAs in the United States, and that as the halo car, it’s going to keep busy. We don’t even mind that Motor Trend gets to drive the damn LFA every other week. But when you tell us that there’s no way you can carve out a single day for us to drive the LFA—which, you said, is the usual length of a loan for that car—and then we turn around and see that you’ve loaned it to Tony Hawk for multiple days so that he can jump a skateboard over it…well, you can see how that leaves a bad taste in our mouth.

You wanna build a 552 horsepower carbon fiber-bodied supercar, more power to you. You want to loan it to celebrities so they can be seen in it, go crazy. But don’t cut out the true enthusiasts—the people you’re ostensibly building this car for—in favor of famous people who aren’t going to actually drive the car the way it was meant to be driven. (Tony, if you’re reading this and you did in fact hoon the hell out of the LFA, we apologize. Also, we demand footage.) [via YouTube]

When pressed on the question by Teamspeed, Jaguar admitted the car would use the supercharged version of the company’s V8, which means we should expect at least 470 horsepower out of the hottest F-Type—and possibly as much as 543 or so. We’ve already begun stretching our shit-eating-grin muscles.

Jaguar spokesman Ken McConomy, whose last name looks way too much like “economy” for a man who works for a luxury car maker, also hinted that the F-Type might find itself receiving a manual transmission—thought it would “not be available at launch.”

“We’ve benchmarked it against everything, and it would make sense to have a manual,” McConomy told Teamspeed. We heartily agree with that statement. [via Teamspeed]

Lamborghini R&D director Maurizio Reggiani knows this isn’t the easiest problem to solve. “We were given a very challenging target: Make the production Urus the best-performing and lightest vehicle in its category. This is forcing us to think outside the box,” he told Automotive News. Reportedly, Lambo has their sights locked on bringing the Urus to market at less than 4,400 pounds, which is at least 400+ pounds lighter than its present-day competition—your Cayenne Turbos, your ML63 AMGs, your X6 Ms, and so forth.

However, the platform the Urus will be built on—the VW Group platform code-named PL73, destined for use in the next Cayenne, Q7, Touareg and the new Bentley SUV—is based on a steel unibody, which forces Lamborghini’s hand when it comes to where they can cut weight. The Urus concept’s carbon fiber center tunnel is one way the company is considering chopping the pounds, as are the concept’s largely CFRP interior and the possibility of aluminum/magnesium body panels.

Then again, they might cut some weight from the engine as well—by using a small-displacement (for Lamborghini) forced induction V8 instead of a naturally aspiated engine. We knew this was a possibility, but after we saw what looked like a V10 under the Urus’s hood, we felt we could breathe easy. Maybe not, says Reggiani. “Such a car needs huge torque at low revolutions rather than high peak power, therefore a V-8 twin-turbo is an interesting possibility,” he said. The 4.0 liter twin turbo V8 used in the Bentley Continental GT and Audi S8 seems like the obvious fit; its shorter size would allow it to be mounted behind the front axle for better weight distribution than the Gallardo’s 5.2 liter V10, while still cranking out the desired 590 or so horsepower. Better in many ways…but so much less Lamborghini.

Lamborghini reportedly hopes to sell around 3,000 copies of the Urus per year; if the sales volume of Lamborghini’s other cars stayed the same, that would put the brand at around 4,500 sales per year. Hmm. Seems like there’s plenty of room there for a fourth model. [via Automotive News]

There are two schools of thought when it comes to preparing to unleash a hotly anticipated new car on the world. The first is to keep it as secret as the car maker can and let people jump to their own assumptions about it—call that the SRT Viper model. Then there’s the school that shows off the car at every possible opportunity along the development process in order to whip up excitement. That’s the Porsche 918 Spyder model.

The 918 Spyder is still more than a year away from production, but already, we’ve seen the original 918 Spyder concept, the because-race-car 918 RSR concept, the production car’s order guide and price tag, the 911 Turbo S 918 Spyder Edition, and the Frankenstein-esque mules Porsche was giving other publications test rides in at Nardo. And now, they’re showing off the full-bodied prototype.

As you can see in the gallery above, the 918 Spyder prototype is pretty faithful to the concept car. The headlights have been shrunk down and changed to more production-feasible light clusters, the wheels have become a little more conventional, the exhaust pipes have migrated to the top of the engine, the side scoops have grown taller and the car looks a little more streamlined overall, but the prototype is otherwise very faithful to the car we saw back in 2010. (And no, it won’t be a coupe when it shows up; that’s a removable carbon fiber roof the prototype is wearing.) Porsche calls that Holstein pattern adorning the car “camouflage,” but it’s really just livery; hell, even Porsche admits the “camouflage” design is designed to evoke the classic 917.

Porsche also gave us a brief update as to what their hyper-hybrid will be packing when it shows up at the end of next year—a combined maximum output of “more than 770 horsepower,” along with fuel consumption as low as 78 miles per gallon. Or even better, theoretically, if you only drive it 10 miles a day around town and depend almost exclusively on the electric motors. But if you drive a 770+ horsepower Porsche like that, you deserve to be dragged into the street and beaten like the red-headed step child of a rented mule. [via Porsche]

Press Release:

The super sports car is designed as a plug-in hybrid vehicle combining a high-performance combustion engine with cutting-edge electric motors for extraordinary performance: on the one hand, the dynamics of a racing machine boasting more than 770 hp, on the other hand, fuel consumption in the region of three litres per 100 kilometres. Moreover, Porsche is breaking yet more new ground with the technology demonstrator with spectacular solutions such as the full carbon fibre reinforced plastic (CFRP) monocoque with unit carrier, fully adaptive aerodynamics, adaptive rear-axle steering and the upward-venting “top pipes” exhaust system. In the process, the 918 Spyder is offering a glimpse of what Porsche Intelligent Performance may be capable of in future.

The BMW 1 Series M has come and gone, but the hard-charging spirit that drove it lives on in the newest addition to BMW’s M Performance Line, the M135i. As predicted by the concept that debuted a few months ago, it’s not quite as powerful as the 1M, but it does come in three- and five-door versions. (Hey, we’re trying to look on the upside here.)

The M135i uses a 315 horsepower, 332 lb-ft version of BMW’s venerable turbocharged 3.0 liter inline-six, connected to a standard six-speed manual transmission or option eight-speed automatic. The 0-62 mph dash supposedly takes 5.1 seconds for the manual and 4.9 for the automatic, but those extra two-tenths saved in the sprint do not excuse buying the automatic transmission.

Should you live in a part of the world where sub-freezing temperatures and icy roads cramp your driving style for a long chunk of the year, there’s more good news to be had here—starting in November, BMW will offer the M135i with all-wheel-drive. There is one bit of bad news here, however. We still don’t know when the new second-generation 1 Series—of which the M135i is a representative—will come to the United States, or if it’ll come in hatchback form. Worst case scenario, figure on seeing M135i coupes hitting U.S. shores sometime late next year.

[via BMW]

Press Release:

Fuel consumption (EU)
Urban l/100 km: 11.2 (10.3)
Extra-urban l/100 km: 6.2 (5.8)
Total l/100 km: 8.0 (7.5)
CO2 emissions g/km: 188 (175)
Emissions standard EU5

We like Minis. We like horsepower. We like cars that rip off quick laps of the Nürburgring. So yeah, we like the new Mini John Cooper Works GP.

Like the prior JCW GP, the new car is based on the conventional John Cooper Works hatchback, which is in turn based on the Cooper S hatch…which, in turn, is based on the basic Mini Cooper. Basically, the GP is the Mini raised to the fourth power of fun. In JCW GP spec, the Mini scores an adjustable racing-designed suspension, front and rear aprons, a unique rear spoiler, and special racing rubber, all in the name of delivering maximum performance. Also, Mini tossed out the rear seat, just like Porsche did with the 911 GT3 RS—a fact you can bet JCW GP drivers will certainly mention while chatting up loose women at the bar.

The change also involves a boost in horsepower—though Mini isn’t saying just how much the power will rise. They do claim the new car will have “an even greater spring in its step” than the previous-generation 214 horsepower JCW GP, and say the new GP laps the Nürburgring Nordschleife 19 seconds faster than the old one—it’ll knock off a lap in 8 minutes and 23 seconds, in case you’re keeping track. With a figure like that, we’re guessing the new car’s turbo four is cranking out at least 230 horses.

Now comes the bad news—only 2,000 examples will be built for the entire globe, presumably at a price point that’ll make you say, “I coulda had a V8 Mustang! With everything!” The official price should drop (along with engine output figures) in the near future; in the meantime, though, feel free to flip through the gallery above while fantasizing about reenacting The Italian Job and making out with Charlize Theron. [via Mini]

Press Release:

Hosting the preview of the new model is another Grand Prix race track with history etched into every corner. The MINI John Cooper Works GP will be unveiled publicly for the first time at Le Castellet in France, during the MINI United festival on May 11-13, 2012.