1979 Ski Doo Blizzard 5500 Rear Axle on 2040-parts.com

'Grid Autosport' finds its motorsports roots

Video-game maker Codemasters is back in the news today, this time with its next driving game for PS3, Xbox 360 and PC. The trailer for “Grid Autosport” appeared on YouTube on Tuesday, and it looks like the company is going back to its beginnings. From the trailer and interviews at videogamer.com, we can see that nearly every shot features real racetracks and race cars.

One lap of the Web: The 917 song, eating an engine block and Saab sputters back to life?

-- Your author can attest to the aural joy of a properly tuned Porsche flat-six (cooled by air, please), but FlatSixes has posted a video of a 12-cylinder 917K lapping Monza at full-tilt that'll make your mouth water. -- We're all aware of what happens to "end-of-life" vehicles: The crusher or, in many cases, the shredder takes what was once someone's pride and joy and returns it to raw materials. But have you ever seen it happen?

Let Q modify your Aston Martin

We imagine there were really two options for naming Aston Martin's new personalization program: Q, or something boring like Amalgamated Personalisation & Colour Programme, complete with British spellings that will vex most spell-checking software and render it unsearchable in Google. Fortunately, Aston Martin has wisely decided to adopt the same name as the Quartermaster in Ian Fleming's "James Bond" novels -- a pure coincidence, we're told. Lucky owners of these customized machines will be able to tell their friends that it was Q who added a few special touches to their cars.