Motoring features

I met Ratan Tata yesterday. He seemed like a nice bloke. There I was, midway through my mission to cover every press conference at the Paris motor show, waiting for the Mini Crossover Concept...

My Paris motor show in one word? Scary. Almost all the tens of thousands of us packed into Paris Expo’s eight halls on press day depend on the car industry for our living. So it’s pretty bloody...

As our cars become more like hermetically sealed containers, and less like social-minded carriages, so road rage and dreadful driving and tarmac terror increase. Air conditioning, I suspect, is partly...

I spent a weekend driving an Aston Martin DBS. Lucky fella, I know. Lucky enough to expect an adverse reaction wherever I went. You can imagine the kind of thing: one-finger salutes, being snubbed at...

It’s 3am on Monday. The Singapore Grand Prix finished five hours ago and still the lights lining the Marina Bay Circuit blaze away outside the press room. Artificial light is now the norm for F1 folk...

This is turning out to be one weird weekend. Due to the late practice sessions and 8pm (local time) start on Sunday, the Formula 1 paddock is sticking to European time for the weekend. That means...

Performance car of the year 2008 blogs  Pilfering on PCotY  By Greg Fountain

We like Wales. You’d like it too if you don’t already. This place is like a giant playground for the car obsessed. The scenery is epic but the roads are even better. We needed a great track for this...

You can imagine the charged atmosphere, even among a bunch of hardened CAR writers. There were 29 of the most exciting cars on sale, each with their keys in, ready to roll out onto the smoothly...

I think I got carried away with this year’s PCotY logistics. Tasked with getting all the great performance cars of the past 12 months together for our annual extravaganza, I went a bit mad. That’s...

Mark Bramley’s got my umbrella. Other than that, most of my possessions appear to be intact. No mean feat for a four-day Performance Car of the Year caper. Usually you can expect to lose everything...

The last time we ran Performance Car of The Year at Anglesey was in 2004. Back then the circuit was still based around the old service roads of this former artillery base. Shortly after, things came...

I have a love-hate relationship with PCoTY. I love being around so many performance cars, but when it comes to getting all the shots you see in CAR Magazine, PCoTY is quite frankly my worst...

Looking at the Chevrolet Volt and Saab 9-X Air concept that have dominated CAR's homepage over the past seven days, I couldn’t help but play the ‘what if’ game. Instead of the catalogue of...

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the great German-American architect and designer, was famously known for his ‘less is more’ style. His minimalist philosophy works for me. But sometimes less is not...

I assume that because you are reading this website you have a pretty good overall knowledge of cars. Undoubtedly you can spot a B Engineering Edonis from 200 paces and identify a Castagna Aznom with...

At the end of last week CAR spoke to some senior car industry analysts at the big investment banks. What they told us, privately, was shocking. They said that while they could once be pretty certain...

So Porsche has extended its controlling stake in Volkswagen. Today Stuttgart confirmed it now holds 35.14 percent of the voting rights in the huge sprawling Volkswagen group – up from 31 percent. The...

'There’s something about Sebastian [Vettel],' said Gerhard Berger prior to the start of the year. 'Everything about Formula 1 seems to come so easily to him; it’s as if he was born to be here.' On the...

It’s absolutely bucketing down here. For those of you who can remember last year’s Japanese Grand Prix, the weather’s like it was there: rivers are flowing across the track, mechanics are sweeping...

‘Premium’ car sales seem to be collapsing, or so the August UK sales figures suggest. Aston Martin down 26 percent year-to-date, Bentley down 17 percent, Lexus down 23 percent, Porsche down 26...

Should Lewis lose the World Championship by four points, he will look back at this race and think ‘what if’? What if Nicolas Deschaux, Surinder Thatthi and Yves Bacquelaine – the three FIA  stewards...

The magic of Spa is its incongruousness in modern F1. New tracks – Sepang, Istanbul, Shanghai and Bahrain – begin life on Hermann Tilke’s computer screen, but Spa was created by nature. The track...

I need your help. Inspired by CAR’s latest adventures trekking through Morocco, over the Alps and into Russia, I think it’s about time I had a go myself. But while I have a location I also have little...

Cars are great but good car journeys are even better. Cars have given us unmatched mobility, broadening our minds as they broaden our horizons. After the Sumerian invention of the wheeled chariot, the...

'Timbuktu.' 'You want to go where?' 'Timbuktu. In a Discovery.' 'Does it exist – I thought it was a myth?' 'The Discovery?' 'No, Timbuktu.' 'Er, yes? I mean, I think so. But wouldn’t it be fun to find...

Best adventure drives special Why it's just more than A to B By Gavin Green What drives us By Greg Fountain

Where should CAR go next? We know most of the roads round Europe like the back of our hands, we’ve crossed the Pond at least a dozen times this year and Africa is almost old hat now. Heading east is...

Valencia laid on a great welcome for the Formula 1 circus over the weekend and it deserved a more exciting inaugural race than this weekend’s uneventful European Grand Prix. It was the most boring...

The track resembled Oxford Street on the last Saturday before Christmas. Drivers, engineers, sponsors and journalists tripped over each other yesterday while walking the new Valencia street circuit,...

Last week I did something I never thought I would do. I purchased a Volvo. A dirty great big V70 estate – a D5 SE if you like that sort of detail. Our little Skoda Fabia estate was battling to handle...

The Ferrari F40 wasn't the first supercar I ever drove. It was in fact the third. But before you shed a tear for me, you should know the F40 was the worst supercar I’ve ever driven. Back in June 2007...

Forget the Batmobile, the Mazda Furai is one of the wildest looking cars of the moment. And we've just had one of the wildest rides of our life in this astonishing race car-cum-concept. You can watch...

With oil at $130 a barrel, petrol at £1.20 a litre, our roads traffic clogged, our police force ever more vigilant against ‘speeding’ and eco green taking over from Italian racing red as motoring’s...

They were the most impressive ten seconds of Felipe Massa’s Formula 1 career. His reaction to the lights going out was sublime; he then fed the perfect number of Ferrari horses through his rear wheels...

The Hungaroring is the slowest permanent circuit on the Formula 1 calendar. The quicker cars lap at an average speed of ‘just’ 122mph, which makes slow-speed grip the main focus of attention for...