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The mirror plated supercar is a quintessential part of Gulf Arab car culture, along with the Transformers Camry and the fetishistic application of negative camber. When applied by Britain’s eternal and chamaeleonic rock star David Bowie to a plain old Mini, including all its windows, it becomes something else entirely.
What a way to turn a perfectly pedestrian activity into something very uncanny: A row of upright BMW 700 body shells on a Krupp truck with a Venn diagram for a logo. It’s like a secret Europe that’s hard to believe ever existed.
Low-digit license plates are big in Arabia. Abu Dhabi’s 1 sold for $14 million in 2008 while in neighboring Dubai 1 is registered to Sheikh Mohammed, the emirate’s ruler. This is plate number 1 from Oman attached to 612 hp of German bliss and I saw it go like hell.
A drizzle of rain, a sprinkling of team orders, a dash of slapstick, and Sebastian Vettel being Sebastian Vettel: the F1 race in Malaysia was a bit of a handful. Here’s a selection of the most interesting photos from the wire services.
Lewis “I Really Like To Name-Drop Ayrton Senna” Hamilton may have a flashy new car at Mercedes but he’s also got some issues with self-importance. In a slightly surreal interview with The Guardian, he talked about building a museum for his trophies and his self-designed helmets, his new dog, and his new $30M plane.
New new cars. Too heavy, doors too high to cock your elbow out, weird plastics, the works. It’s not a problem old Morgans have. Come and join us in the oldest new car on the show floor, the Morgan 4/4.
Volvo make Volvos, right? Volvos don’t get the blood boiling. But in a world where most carmakers outdo each other in aggression, Volvo’s quiet stance is quite remarkable.
If you’ve always wanted a humongous sort-of-British fastback, Rolls-Royce has now got you covered with the 623-hp Wraith. The most powerful Rolls ever made is also the most Mustang-y.
How would you impress a man used to the endless vistas of Texas and, er, Virginia, if he were to show up in Hungary in desperate need of a drive? A loopy French executive hatchback on greater Budapest’s best driving road may not be the worst place to start.
What’s it like to campaign single-seater cars on the doorstep of Formula One and watch the teenagers and young men who may turn into racing legends down the line? Alfonso de Orléans-Borbón, owner and president of the Spanish GP2 team Racing Engineering, has seen it all, and he will be here for the next hour, live, answering your questions about anything.
Before he becomes a globe-trotting racing god, the modern Formula One driver competes in GP2. It’s a racing series removed from the madness and attention, created to breed talent for the ultimate challenge of F1. We spent a Grand Prix weekend in GP2 to see the lives of Formula One’s future stars.
Nino Karotta’s videos have appeared on Jalopnik since 2009. He shaved his head and bore arms to test a Mercedes–Benz S600 AMG, learned to drive a Formula One car and, lately, teamed up with video whiz kid György Szeljak to create the Hungarian Wolverine series, where he drove a BMW M5, his old Renault Avantime and a Honda NSX. Nino is also the man who gave me my break in this business, in 2005, offering me a job at his magazine to write about cars. Love him or hate him for this, he’s here today
Last fall, two months before he died, I sat on a bench, awake for two days, and cried, thinking of Sergio Scaglietti. He was a relatively obscure racing car designer who imagined the most beautiful Ferraris of the 1950s and hammered them into aluminum.
No road trip in the Andes is complete without encountering a terrifying mountain road. Bolivia’s North Yungas Road, known from Top Gear and the adventure tales of your backpacker friends who’ve ridden bikes down its suicidal curves, is probably the most famous. If you don’t want to drop dead either of a heart attack or, literally, of a 2,000-foot drop, Argentina offers a gentler alternative. The road from Humahuaca to Iruya is gorgeous, long, terrifying and it won’t kill you.
Does writing whimsical posts about cars qualify one to buy a 17-year-old Japanese car in Eastern Europe? It does not! The true story of a doomed voyage to Armenia and my volatile love affair with a Subaru Sumo.
There’s a guy in a suit who appears at the end of each Grand Prix, much like the G-Man in the video game Half-Life, and hands the drivers various items before the podium ceremony. Long-time Jalopnik Formula One correspondent Natalie Polgar loves him for his cool. —Ed.
We love our supercars to death. We obsess over their top speeds and great power. But what is it like to actually use one? Over 500 miles of European motorway, we discover an inconvenient truth.
Not long after something happened in the hot, violent, drugged-out summer of 2002 that made me get hooked on cars, I began taking photos of them.
Will space humans float their hovercars down Interstate 90 to have space coffee next to Mount St. Helens in the year 4000? It's a little early to tell but you can do something very similar today. Go for a long drive in Italy!
(Our own Peter Orosz has been promoted up the Gawker ladder so, in honor of his service to the site, we're giving him the Fourth of July to post whatever he wants. He's been a great addition to the site and we're glad we're keeping him in the company. Having him work on American Independence Day is not random, but rather a sign of gratitude to Hungarian patriots like Colonel Michael Kovats, who died fighting for the American cause. Thanks Peter! — Ed.)
There is nothing in the Western world which quite prepares the Naples neophyte for the sensory overload of the city. The one in Italy, not the one in Florida. Neapolitan driving is a prime example of paravehicular traffic, where, instead of formal rules, drivers react to their immediate vicinity. The result is a densely packed flow of cars, buses, scooters and pedestrians which appears utterly chaotic at first sight.
A hundred dollars? In Monaco? Surely that will buy little more than a candy bar to gnaw on while counting Ferraris. Actually, it will buy three hours of Formula One up close. If you know how to spend it. Here’s our guide for 2013.
The Urus looks awful, is basically the same car as the revolting Bentley EXP 9F and, seriously, do we really need yet another SUV masquerading as a supercar? All valid points, but the Urus has a saving grace. It’s a Lamborghini and all Lamborghinis are silly in a good way.
It was 13 years ago, at the 1999 Geneva Motor Show, that Renault unveiled its Coupéspace concept, the didactic branding hinting at its origins: an Espace minivan turned into a coupé. This is the car which became the Renault Avantime, which was so avant of its time that the market demanded a total of 8,557 cars before production was killed off in 2003.
McLaren driver Jenson Button came to Budapest on Tuesday to show what it’s like to do 150 MPH on a downtown avenue. What must be a PR burden for a modern F1 driver is an aural delight for an entire city, sweltering in the early spring heat. The McLaren was loud in a rather cosmic way.
Skylon, in development by the British company Reaction Engines, would be the Holy-Grail-meets-cold-fusion of space travel, a single-stage-to-orbit spaceplane powered by the Sabre engine, which is both a jet and a rocket. While typical Skylon spaceports still belong to a hazy future, a recent test of the Sabre engine has put us a fraction closer to cheap hypersonic travel.
Eastman Kodak, who filed for bankruptcy in January, introduced Super 8 in 1965. Ten years later, Ford’s sole Liberian dealer used the film to document a country in its last years before its descent into one of history’s creepiest civil wars. These are his movies of driving across Liberia.