Somebody at Porsche must have heard that Chris Harris sold his 911 GT3 RS 4.0 liter for a Ferrari 599 and decided to win back his heart. They invited him to the Porsche test track to drive the Porsche 962 that won the 24 hours of Le Mans in 1987. As part of the deal, they also let Harris pick the mind of the man who designed the 962, Norbert Singer. Not only do we get to see the car in action, the interview with Singer really brings the significance of the car into perspective.
Motor Trend’s Johnny Lieberman brings us the latest in German executive express cars for this episode of Head 2 Head. BMW has been setting the benchmark standard for this class for a long time just like it’s done with the M3 and sport luxury sedans. The M5 has always been the perfect combination of size, comfort, outright speed and agile handling. This year’s model features the first turbocharged engine for the M5 line downsizing from the previous model’s V10 to a 5.5 liter twin turbo V8. The airflow through the heads has been reversed so that the two turbos sit in the valley of the V to improve efficiency. The turbocharged engine provides more power and a lot more torque while using less fuel than the V10. Porsche’s Panamera has been out for a while now and the GTS is their latest trim combination for it. As with many of their other GTS cars, the Panamera features a naturally aspirated engine with a lot of the goodies from the turbo model. Johnny does a good job explaining the nature of the two cars and picking a winner.
The latest video from Japanese Porsche tuner RAUH-Welt Begriff documents an unprecedented gathering of their international customers. Nakai-san invited RWB friends from Thailand and the US to help with a 4 car effort at a 12 hour endurance race held at the Twin Rings Motegi circuit in Japan. He made sure to mix everybody up when assigning the driver teams and pit crews to each car so that everybody could make new friends. The final scene describes it all: RAUH-Welt Begriff Brotherhood.
Nissan Europe teamed up with the RML Group last year to build a custom Juke-R. It was basically a Nissan Juke body put on top of a shortened GT-R chassis and drivetrain. It’s kind of funny because Nissan Japan only found out about the car after it had been built and were a bit unhappy about having somebody crossbreed their flagship car with an economy crossover. The Juke-R was a big enough success that several people, whom I assume are Abu-Dhabi oil barons, have asked to buy Juke-R’s. Nissan Europe has decided to do a limited run of them at $590,000 a piece. Now that the cars are being sold, that means they have to go through a legitimate review with the press. This is the first one that I’ve found outside some random hooning videos. Jethro Bovingdon of Car and Drive Abroad puts the Juke-R up against a pretty high performance benchmark with the Porsche 911 GT2 RS.
If you’ve got some time to kill, here’s some bonus videos that Nissan Europe released last year as the Juke-R was being built. There were 10 short videos that this YouTube user has thankfully condensed into two.Continue reading →
