One Lap of the Web: It's always St. Patrick's Day when you're Irish

-- If your crippling hangover didn't remind you today, yesterday was St. Patrick's Day. You know what that means: today is a good time to catch up on both green-themed car news. What better way to celebrate the contributions of the Emerald Isle than to eat green food that reminds the Dubliners of famine and leeching Brits? No, wait -- don't do that. A better way is to celebrate an American car (Ford) from an Irish-American (Henry Ford) built by the Irish (in Cork, Ireland) with an article written by an actual Irishman (Brendan McAleer, who has the hair to affirm his credentials).

-- Aside from the Ford Cortina, Ireland's greatest contribution to motoring is the DeLorean, starring the bushy-browed playboy genius that was John Z. DeLorean. (An excellent profile of him, well-timed to boot, can be found here.) He might be proud to know that the time machine that bears his name was voted the best fictional gadget ever in a poll of nerdy British types who picked it over Doctor Who's Sonic Screwdriver, which has to be shockingly treasonous for the Brits.

-- An F1 fan in Melbourne has recorded the roar of 2013's V8-engined F1 cars and today's turbocharged V6 cars, back-to-back. Compared to the Sweet Sounds of Yesterday the new cars are slightly more muted, sure, but they also have a subtle electric hum to them that ultimately screams of the future, and of all those quiet, effortless, stunningly powerful spaceships with which we're supposed to be blasting off to Europa.

-- Davey G. Johnson was so enamored with the Singer 911 that he drove last year, he said, "a whole package so fantastic that, on the road, one forgets that one's driving a $400,000 hot rod." If he drove the Eagle E-Type Low Drag Coupe as Autocar has, he might say the same thing, only pausing to revise the price to a cool one million dollars. A brown Bugatti Veyron, or this? A Koenigsegg One:1, or this? A last-generation Mercedes SL500 covered in crystals, or…come on, that's not even a fair comparison. In a fair and just world both brands would be building nothing but those ad infinitum, but alas.

-- Why are Alfa Romeos emblazoned with the quadrifoglio? Well, the clover isn't exclusively an Irish species. Ugo Sivocci first put a four-leaf clover on his works Alfa Romeo in 1923, as a symbol of luck rather than Irishness. On the day he died -- while practicing for the Italian Grand Prix at Monza -- he forgot to paint a clover on his Alfa Romeo P1. If anything, that only cemented Alfa's relationship with lucky symbols.

Image from Flickr.

By Blake Z. Rong