MISC auto news

Official: Lola files for bankruptcy

Lola may not be a name recognized by the average consumer, but racing fans will know it well. The British concern has built and continues to build race cars that have spanned an enormous variety of series and disciplines since its founding in 1958, including (but not limited to) Formula One, Le Mans, CART and just about every formula feeder series you could think of, including Formula Two, Formula 3, Formula 3000, Formula 5000 and A1GP. Now, unfortunately, the company is filing for bankruptcy protection.

The reasons are pretty simple: too many expenses and not enough revenue, although tax credits it was due from the British government are also said to be partially to blame. As a result, the outfit responsible for - among numerous other accolades - five LMP2 titles at Le Mans since 2000 alone is entering financial administration as it seeks new investors.

Along with it, Lola Cars is taking Lola Composites, however the effect this might have on its concerns in defense and aerospace (among other areas) remains to be seen. As is the future of the SP/300.R track car which Lola builds for Caterham, or the countless racing teams that continue to count on Lola to build and support their sports prototypes. But with so many racing programs at stake, we can hardly imagine the company's considerable capabilities and expertise will go unclaimed for long. Scroll down for the official announcement.

Continue reading Lola files for bankruptcy

Official: McLaren celebrates 40th anniversary of Indy win

When McLaren was bringing its new MP4-12C to the United States, there were fears that Americans wouldn't recognize the name. After all, the team from Woking is known principally for competing in Formula One, which has had a spotty presence in the U.S. at best. Those fears proved to be misplaced, as customers in the States have been snatching up all the McLaren supercars they can get their hands on. And part of that might come down to the days when McLaren didn't only race in America, it dominated.

The bulk of McLaren's victories on this side of the Atlantic were notched up in the Canadian-American Challenge Cup, a radical form of sports-prototype racing campaigned in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, which Bruce and company won five times in a row. But Can-Am wasn't the extent of McLaren's success in America.

In 1970, the team entered into the Indianapolis 500 with its own car design. The following year, McLaren came back with a radically different design that scored pole position and finished the race in second place. And the year after that, the legendary Mark Donohue piloted his McLaren M16B fielded by the Sonoco-Penske team - complete with its Offenhauser four-cylinder turbo engine producing upwards of 700 horsepower - to the checkered flag.

Not only did McLaren win at Indy that year, but it also won races in Formula 1, Formula 2 and Can-Am, entering the history books as a force to be reckoned with. It would go on to win at Indy twice more in 1974 and 1976, and became the first car to exceed 200 miles per hour on the famed oval in 1977.

Now forty years later, McLaren is celebrating the first of its Indy by showcasing the #66 Sunoco-Penske car at the second annual Celebration of Automobiles in the speedway's infield. There it will be displayed alongside the current MP4-12C to showcase just how far the company has come since then. You can check out the historic high-resolution images in the gallery and the details in the press release below for more info.

Continue reading McLaren celebrates 40th anniversary of Indy win

Report: McLaren MP4-12C Spyder coming this year

Our friends at Car and Driver recently spent some time poking and prodding around McLaren headquarters in Woking, England, and they have confirmed plans for a convertible MP4-12C. This isn't exactly earth-shattering news, having been rumored since 2009 and even spotted earlier this year, but it does suggest the program is on track for a public reveal this year. The MP4-12C Spyder is expected to be mechanically identical to its hard top cousin, which means buyers can look forward to finding twin-turbocharged 3.8-liter V8 with 593 horsepower kicked out through the rear wheels.

The report says McLaren designed that engine along with its partner, Ricardo, to serve as the beating heart behind more than just one model. In addition to the lidless MP4-12C, McLaren is hard at work on a true successor to the F1. That machine will feature more conventional side-by-side seating and a dual-clutch gearbox bolted to a higher-output version of the same 3.8-liter engine. McLaren also has its heart set on creating a full product line. What does that mean, exactly? Car and Driver says we can forget purist-affronting models like an SUV or a sedan, but the odds are fairly high that the stable will swell beyond the three models mentioned here. Color us excited.

Report: Valmet working to meet demand for sold-out Marussia B2

By all accounts, Marussia is just another exotic automaker hoping to sell a few supercars but just as likely to disappear into obscurity. Except that it hasn't, and may not for some time.

Having potentially overextended itself by buying the majority of a Formula One racing team from Virgin, the Russian upstart needed its newest product - dubbed the B2 - to be the runaway success that the (relatively) less dramatically-styled B1 wasn't. And so it appears it will be as reports indicate that Marussia has sold out its entire production run of 500 vehicles.

In order to keep up with demand, production is reportedly shifting from Marussia's own facility in Moscow to Valmet in Finland, the same place where the Fisker Karma is built now and the Porsche Boxster and Cayman were before it. Cosworth will then be shipping the 3.5-liter V6 that provides between 300 and 420 horsepower (depending on customer specification) to drive the 2,425-pound lightweight supercar to 60 in as little as 3.2 seconds.

Check out the pair in the fresh image gallery above for a closer look.

Report: Poland's Arrinera supercar hits the road with 650 HP, $160K list price

There are a handful of countries where you'd expect most any supercar to come from. Italy, Germany, England... and even these United States have produced their fare share, and there've been a handful from Japan. Even France and Sweden have produced some notables. But Poland?

Hardly the first country that would come to mind, but the folks behind Arrinera Automotive aim to fix that. We first reported last year on the supercar the Polish outfit has been developing, and now they've released a whole slew of details - including specifications and pricing.

The as-yet unnamed vehicle (aside from the Arrinera marque, anyway) is powered by a 6.2-liter V8 that's been supercharged up to 650 metric horsepower (641 by our measures) and 605 pound-feet of torque, driving through a Graziano gearbox for a 3.2-second sprint to 100 kilometers per hour (62 miles per hour) and a claimed 340 km/h (211 mph) top end.

Lee Noble - the talented engineer behind supercars marketed under the Ultima, Ascari, Rossion, Fenix and Noble names - has set up the suspension, with 380-millimeter brakes providing the stopping power up front and 350-millimeter discs in the back. The 1300-kilogram (2866-pound) package is made up of a high-strength steel frame with bodywork that's carbon-intensive and similar in appearance to a Lamborghini, but that's no bad thing.

Production is slated to begin later this year, with pricing starting at £100,000 (about $160,000 at current exchange rates). Scope it out in the extensive and fresh gallery of high-resolution images above.

Video: Rimac Concept_One shreds its custom Vredesteins

Go back a decade or so - before Koenigsegg, SSC and the Bugatti Veyron were on the scene - and the idea of a million-dollar, thousand-horsepower supercar that could break the three-second barrier to sixty would seem out of this world. Posting those kinds of figures with an electric car? No way.

Way. That's what the Rimac Concept_One is all about. It chews up Tesla Roadsters and spits them back out into the Silicon Valley from whence they came. The electric motors mounted at each wheel give the electric supercar 1,088 horsepower of thrust and a 2.8-second sprint to 100 km/h (62 mph). Range comes in at a claimed 372-miles. All yours (if you're one of the first 88 customers to call) for the low, low price of $980,000.

We could hardly believe it when we saw the show car in Frankfurt last year, and neither could the show-goers in Monte Carlo where it made its production debut. So to show the public that it was for real, Rimac put out this short video clip showing its Croatian creation laying down patches of its Giugiaro-designed Vredestein rubber on the tarmac. It's brief, but it's worth a watch. Scroll down below to check it out.

Continue reading Rimac Concept_One shreds its custom Vredesteins

Report: Ex-MG Rover workers to get check for lb2.50

Until the Chinese began producing the rather attractive MG6, the initials "MG" had been ill omens for at least ten years to all who approached them. The era of the Phoenix Four - former MG execs John Towers, Nick Stephenson, Peter Beale and John Edwards, who bought the company from its previous owners, the badly burned and hastily retreating BMW, for £10 - was just an especially nasty capstone. Their collective £10 investment turned into millions of pounds for each of them but nary a car made before they declared bankruptcy and closed up shop. According to a government report that cost £16.3 million to produce, however, the Phoenix Four didn't break any laws.

After all that, there's one more unsavory epilogue. There were 6,500 workers at MG's Longbridge factory who left with nothing when Phoenix went bust. After everyone else took their share of the heavy amounts of cash that passed between boardrooms, there is £22,000 ($35,523 U.S.) for final payouts for the workers. That means they'll each get a check for £2.50 ($4.04 U.S.) - it would have been £3, but according to the report at AOL UK the cost of the stamp needed to send the check comes out of the check.

Before the politics begin, yes we know this is how business works; the Phoenix Four only did what the laws of the land allowed, and that's as far as you need to look for ruthless reason and rationale. Or you could paraphrase Hunter S. Thompson and say that some get rich and fat, others, well, don't. Regardless, the MG trustees are appealing to the four directors to personally contribute to the worker payouts, but the odds on that are quite long.

Official: Savage Rivale GTR earns Top Marques in Monaco

If the idea of building a four-seat hard-top convertible supercar in Holland strikes you as off-the-wall, then its racing counterpart should blow your mind. We're talking about Savage Rivale, the markers of the Roadyacht GTS and the competition-spec GTR model it just unveiled at the Top Marques show in Monaco.

Packing upwards of 700 horsepower from a turbocharged 6.2-liter V8, the Savage Rivale GTR is said to be good for 2.8-second sprint to 62 miles per hour and a 360-km/h (234-mph) top speed. With those capabilities, the race-ready Savage is earmarked to tackle the Nürburgring Norschleife lap record for four-door automobiles, a distinction which (to the best of our understanding, anyway) currently belongs to a Subaru Impreza WRX STI driven by rally ace Tommi Mäkinen for Car and Driver in 2010 to a 7:55 lap time, edging out Pikes Peak legend Walter Röhrl in the Porsche Panamera Turbo at 7:56 the previous year.

Only 69 examples are slated for production. We're still waiting on final specifications to be released, but in the meantime you can check out the gallery of high-resolution images from its unveiling in Monte Carlo in the gallery above.

Official: Rimac Concept_One shows up in Monaco with $980k sticker price [w/video]

It takes a lot to stand apart at an exposition as jam-packed with glitzy treasure as the Frankfurt Motor Show and impress the hordes of automotive journalists there assembled, but we were suitably impressed when we laid eyes upon the Rimac Concept_One at the Messe this past September. The Croatian upstart put together a supercar of (figurative, if not literal) Bugatti proportions, but instead of building it around a fossil-guzzling conventional powerplant, Rimac designed its hypercar with the equivalent of 1,088-horsepower worth of electric motors.

With a 92kW battery powering the electric motors at each wheel, the Rimac is said to be capable of rocketing to 62 from a standstill in just 2.8 seconds while traveling as far as 372 miles on a single charge. The team of former Pininfarina designers penned an attractive shape to go with it, the Bulgarian leathercrafters extraordinaires at Vilner were brought in to craft the interior, HRE developed a unique set of monoblock alloys and Vredestein debuted its new Ultrac Vorti tires designed by Giugiaro all for the Concept_One.

Impressive specs, all, but what's most impressive is that the Concept_One is no mere concept - you can actually buy it, assuming you've got the scratch. Upon showcasing the electric supercar at Top Marques in Monaco, Rimac announced a limited run of 88 examples will be built, each fetching $980,000 - a price as princely as the regent who was on hand to check it out in Monte Carlo. Which only goes to prove that you can, indeed, have your cake and eat it too, but it'll cost you dearly.

Take a closer look at the fresh crop of high-resolution images added to the gallery above and check out the bonus video of the car moving under its own power by scrolling below.

Continue reading Rimac Concept_One shows up in Monaco with $980k sticker price [w/video]

Report: Morgan 3 Wheeler coming to three dealers in the States

We knew the Morgan 3 Wheeler was coming to America, we just didn't know when or how. The skinny, according to a report on Inside Line, is that the 3 Wheeler will be sold through three U.S. dealerships beginning later this year. One of those dealers will be Liberty, the Seattle company that got this whole thing started by designing the prototype - Morgan then bought Liberty and used it to develop the production model.

The other two locations haven't been divulged, but one on each coast is the early betting line. We'll probably know after Morgan scion Charles has finished running his 3 Wheeler in next month's Gumball 3000 rally, and by then the company might have settled on an official U.S. price. Even if you do plan to make it yours, though, don't expect on soon: Morgan only plans to make 500 per year, and that exact number was already pre-sold eight months ago.