PH has been getting very excited about Le Mans this week. With the team down in France to take in the entire weekend, our news towards the end of this week has been on the most famous endurance race of them all.
mysterious preview
ZEOD RC
challenger for 2014 on Friday. There will also be regular updates on the weekend's events through our
liveblog
; expect plenty of updates as the weekend progresses. POTW & TFT here?
Elsewhere in the world of motorsport, Volvo announced on Monday its plan to campaign anS60 in the Australian V8 Supercars touring car series. Next season will therefore see five manufacturers (Holden, Ford, Volvo, Mercedes-AMG and Nissan) duking it out for honours. Surely some time in Australia taking in a V8 Supercars race weekend has the makings of a great PH holiday?
Our regular features ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous this week. Following the excitement surrounding TVR's return last week, a gorgeous
S2
featured in Carpool and Garlick contributed his views in the latest
Chimaera/MX-5 PH Fleet
update. We've had a new addition to the collection also; Matt Bird will be keeping us updated on running a Shed-spec
Honda Civic VTI
as a pizza delivery car over the coming weeks. Another Honda featured in Tuesday's You Know You Want To as well, although a
Mk1 Insight
is certainly rather different to the Civic. Chris Harris was at his powersliding best with
this week's On Cars
, comparing the Jaguar F-Type V8 S, Porsche 991 Cabriolet and Aston V8 Vantage Roadster. Finally, this week's Shed was a rather intriguing Japanese 5 Series rival from the late 1990s, the
Mazda Xedos 9 Miller
Vanquish Volante
has stolen plenty of headlines, but we're also anticipating the Corvette Stingray very keenly. Whilst the
enticing
spec
was known, it wasn't until Wednesday that its
£61,495 UK list price
was announced. Fingers crossed its promising ingredients come together on the road. For now, a rather different dose of of V8 muscle did arrive in the shape of the
Jeep Cherokee SRT
Nissan's 370Z NISMO was driven on Monday, but unfortunately didn't really do enough to warrant its price hike over the standard car. NISMO's frank admission that it won't be afully-fledged performance arm doesn't bode well for exploiting the 370's full potential. Still, as our 350/370Z market watch indicated, there's plenty of great used examples around if you want a car to cherish or to modify.
BMW also took the wraps off the 4 Series this week. It replaces the rather staid-looking 3 Series coupe with a bold and aggressive design, set to move the car upmarket and create a similar relationship to the 3 Series saloon as exists between the 5 Series and 6 Series. A rather different BMW was celebrated in Tuesday's Time for Tea?, with another slick Petrolicious film on an E30 M3.
We've even had records on PistonHeads since Monday. A Dutch meet of MX-5 owners resulted in the largest-ever collection of Mazda models in one place, and Dale posted a 9min22sec Nordschleife lap
in a VW Transporter
on Friday. The video of the latter is well worth a watch...
Finally, a quick overview of the smaller new stories of the past seven days (yep, there really is more!). Mercedes has collaborated with a British design house to create a uniqueCLS 63 AMG Shooting Brake, Novitec has created a 646hp Maserati GranCabrio and Alfa showed how not to do marketing with Marc Gene and a 4C.
- Range Rover Sport driven
- Revised Porsche Panamera
- PH Heroes: CLK63 Black Series
- Harris on the Mille on video