Table of contents for February 2018 in Automobile

WHAT’S ON DEMAND THIS MONTH? SCHEDULE KEY: RACING | ORIGINAL PROGRAMS DECEMBER 29 Auto Mundial Motorsport Mundial DECEMBER 29 Tuner Battle Week Junkyard Gold, Episode 3 DECEMBER 30 Tuner Battle Week JANUARY 1 Roadkill Garage, Episode 26 JANUARY 3 Engine Masters, Episode 30 JANUARY 5 Put Up or Shut Up, Episode 7 JANUARY 10 Ignition, Episode 187 JANUARY 12 Dirt Every Day, Episode 72 JANUARY 15 HOT ROD Garage, Episode 61 JANUARY 17 Head 2 Head, Episode 97 JANUARY 22 Roadkill, Episode 74 JANUARY 26 Junkyard Gold, Episode 4 The programing information provided is subject to change. MOTORTRENDONDEMAND.COM…

I WAS BARELY six hours into a 12-hour flight across the Pacific, and I’d already finished my book. Ugh. I checked my iPad. Dammit, forgot to load any e-reading. I sighed, tucked the book and iPad away, and unfolded the multimedia screen. Let’s see. “War for the Planet of the Apes.” Nah, all that hair might land on my semi-faux Salisbury steak. Hmmmm. “Transformers: The Last Knight.” Uh, not when I could already picture the sequel: “Transformers: The Very Last Knight. Promise.” I flipped absent-mindedly through more pages of CGI-inflated, Dolby-drenched pablum and then suddenly had to blink twice. There amid all the robots and superheroes was Richard Sarafian’s dusty, existentialist 1971 car classic, “Vanishing Point.” I first saw it as a wide-eyed teenager on late-night TV but hadn’t seen…

LITTLE BIG CAR “THE LONG WHEELBASE and short nose lend the car a sense of dynamism, even when viewed at a standstill.” So says the news release on the Bentley Motors website. If you believe that, you’re a great deal more gullible than you should be. It’s going to be a good long while before the long hood and tight passenger compartment ceases to be the most desirable look for front-engine performance cars. Look at the last Packard V-12 roadster from 1939, and you know it’s powerful and fast with no need for a vulgar chrome insignia on its flanks telling you how many cylinders are under the hood. Apart from the copywriter’s unconvincing hyperbole, this is an extremely attractive little coupe. Or at least seemingly so, because there’s nothing…

IN 2018 AND BEYOND, the Ingolstadt power brokers will further expand the Audi Sport range and bring the division up to speed. From what we know today, there will be no replacement for the slow-selling R8, which will be phased out in 2020 when the new Lamborghini Huracán arrives. Also dead: the proposed zero-emission R8 e-tron and the Scorpion supercar powered by a 1,000-hp V-8 boasting a desmodromic valvetrain created from four 1.2-liter Ducati motorcycle engines. But over the next two or three years, expect to see business as usual from Audi Sport. We have just seen the new rear-wheel-drive R8, and we won’t have to wait long for the next-generation S/RS 6, S/RS 7, and S8. The forthcoming RS 4 and RS 5 (below) use a new 2.9-liter twin-turbo…

WHEN JACK GALLIVAN was a boy in Salt Lake City, Utah, in the middle of the last century, he and his brothers played a game. Their father was the publisher of The Salt Lake Tribune, the local newspaper of record, and in order to prove the Trib’s classified section worked, they would buy used cars out of the paper. “We’d look through the Sunday listings, whittle it down, make calls, go visit, and take the finalists to the mechanic to check them out,” Gallivan says. “Of course, the sellers didn’t realize that we were kids making the [initial] calls.” In the early ’60s, one of the vehicles they came across was a 1955 Mercedes 300 SL Gullwing. Gallivan’s father wasn’t a car connoisseur, but he responded to vehicles he found…

VERIZON INDYCAR SERIES officials have called the new race car design for their 2018 season “reverse engineering.” In other words, make it look good first and then dial in performance. The series is still in the days of early returns, with the car’s running limited so far to off-season testing, but it appears IndyCar accomplished both objectives. Drivers have said the new sleek shape creates a smaller aerodynamic wake, which should allow trailing cars to have more stability so passes become less about drafting. Ideally, better racing follows. The process of outfitting the series’ Dallara IR-12 chassis with a new aerodynamic kit began in the spring of 2016, with initial designs from Dallara and Chris Beatty, a U.K.-based concept-design and 3D-animation consultant. IndyCar officials orchestrated the rest, taking input from…

I CAN’T SPEAK for all auto scribes, but it seems to me once you’ve been writing long enough, interest in your automotive literary out-put, adventures, and car news tends to wane among family and friends. “I’ve just returned from driving D-type Jaguars overland to the Bosphorus with Jackie Stewart, Henry Kissinger, and Linda Vaughn co-driving,” you might apprise a loved one. Only for them to weigh the information thoughtfully and ask, “Have you seen my phone charger?” It’s one of the reasons that concours make such fine forums for automotive journalists. Like Capitol Hill reporters rubbing shoulders with congressional staffers, car writers find themselves in the presence of many who not only care about cars but who might have actually once read something they’d penned, unlike in, say, the real…

WE’RE WELL ABOVE 5,000 feet, the sky a wash of cobalt blue and El Greco’s clouds as the helicopter banks hard toward a gray summit amid the endless range of snow-dappled peaks. Closing in, our pilot slows to a hover, gingerly easing down to a “landing site” that looks more like a minefield. The uneven ground is littered with jagged rocks, tufts of slippery grass, and bus-sized boulders—with sheer drop-offs on every side. “You’d never get up here without a whirlybird,” I think to myself as the skids finally touch down, “unless maybe you’re a mountain goat.” It’s then that I notice four new 2018 Jeep Wrangler Rubicons parked on tall rocks nearby, a band of brothers in silhouette, their military-inspired profiles as unmistakable today as an original Jeep was…

LESS THAN 10 miles into a drive on roads near the Algarve International Circuit, the laughter circulating inside the cockpit of the 2018 Porsche 911 GT2 RS is as valid a verdict on the new Turbo as any empirical Vbox or drag-strip data would provide. It begins with a little smile during the blazing approach to a braking zone, gestates into giggles as you fly around a long, constant-radius right-hander fast enough to bend your neck like licorice, and finally breaks into full-on snorts as the car comes off the corner and accelerates into oblivion for about the 23rd time in the past 3 minutes. Holy. Blanking. Lucifer. “We said, OK, let’s make [the car] with 666 horsepower, so that’s the number of the Beast, and that was how we…

BARRETT-JACKSON’S 10th-annual Las Vegas sale was held in the shadow of the horrific mass shooting there just weeks beforehand, leading some to wonder how the event would fare. Miraculously, Barrett-Jackson reported an all-time record attendance, with roughly 74,000 people packing the halls of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino. It also auctioned seven cars for various charities, including a 900-mile 2007 Ford Shelby Super Snake that brought a whopping $1 million for the Injured Police Officers Fund, which benefits first responders. In total, $30.6 million worth of vehicles were sold in Las Vegas, and thanks to Barrett-Jackson’s mostly no-reserve format, almost every last one of the nearly 700 cars to cross the block found new owners. Here’s a closer look at four of the more interesting small cars that had…

LOTS OF TRACKS get fogged in. Few seem so determined about it as Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca on summer mornings. While race cars crackle to life in the infield, Robert Orcutt steers a Mazda6 out onto the circuit. A bank of lights flash yellow across the roof and light up the haze. It’d be beautiful if only we could see where this pace car is going. “Good morning, race control,” Orcutt says into a two-way radio, a declaration more than a salutation. It’s 7:45 a.m., and the chief pace-car driver’s long day is just getting started. On Saturday morning, the first race day of the Monterey Pre-Reunion the week before the Rolex Monterey Motorsports Reunion main event, I thought I had an idea of what it’d be like to drive…

ROB WILSON LOOKS at the stopwatch on his trusty Nokia 6210 cellphone. “I think a 1:50.4 deserves a cigarette,” he says as he delivers a warm and congratulatory pat to my shoulder. “It’s been a great morning.” I drop him off beside a decommissioned Boeing 747 tinged a bluey green by unidentified vegetation and then drive gently to the end of the runway to cool the brakes before looping around to collect him. “Right,” he says as he drops back into the passenger seat of our humble 198-horsepower Vauxhall Astra hatchback. “Let’s get lunch. Then I’ll set another target lap, and we’ll go again.” And that’s how it goes. Wilson consumes maybe another 10 Marlboro Reds over the course of the afternoon as he chips away at my driving technique…

THE TRACK IS still moist in spots, the marbles on both sides of the racing line shout “caution,” and the maintenance squad has begun to steam clean the roadside drainage system. Tension is in the air as we approach today’s subject. Only three people have driven this car so far without a watchdog in the passenger seat. I’ll be number four. Over the last 24 months, Porsche’s hand-built, electric-powered sport sedan—the metallic white Mission E that’s charged fully and ready to roll—has clocked less than 200 miles, most of them until today on the Portimão circuit in Portugal. To drive it, you need permission from the board of directors and a highly specialized crew trained to deal with the bytes and possible bugs that could befall the one-off, high-voltage prima…

1992-2002 Dodge Viper LAUNCHED IN 1992, the first-generation Dodge Viper RT/10 roadster was about as sparse and raw as anything new you could buy at the time. The production car retained much of the concept’s wild appeal and boasted a truck-based 8.0-liter V-10 engine good for 400 horsepower and 465 lb-ft of torque—more than enough power to grab attention. It didn’t have traction or stability control—or exterior door handles. The flexible plastic side windows were removable. A fabric top was optional. (A hard fiberglass version was made available in 1994.) Driving the car was like going 10 rounds in a heavyweight prize fight—drivers emerged tired, beat up, and overheated while taking care not to burn their legs on the side-pipe exhaust. The big news for the second-generation Viper was the…

TACKLING THE TESLA empire head-on might seem a bit less daunting than it once did given the Model 3’s much-publicized production issues, but don’t expect those hiccups to last. You better have your AC/DC game wired up tight if you expect to make a significant dent in the market share of the global leader in all-electric-powered transportation. POLESTAR 1 WILL REPORTEDLY GENERATE A COMBINED TOTAL OF 600 HP AND 738 LB-FT OF TORQUE, PUTTING IT ROUGHLY ON PAR WITH AMG’S STOUT TWIN-TURBO V-12. Polestar is yet another emerging brand with grand designs on becoming a bona fide Tesla challenger, although unlike some of the other startups we’ve seen run into trouble and delays, it might be able to make a go of it given who’s behind it. The new entity…