Blue/red 40 Jt Racing Classick Vented Pants on 2040-parts.com

Chris Evans CarFest: It’s all coming together

Chris Evans’ CarFest South & CarFest North are on track to deliver great weekends of petrolhead delight at Laverstoke Park Farm & Cholmondeley Castle. Listeners to Chris Evans’ Radio 2 Breakfast Show discovered Chris’s plans for his very own car festival – to benefit the BBC Children in Need Charity – when Chris was looking for a way to take his mind off bread for Lent, and CarFest was born. The CarFest plan was nothing more than a brief outline for a great weekend – super cars, great food and terrific music – but soon gained a life of its own as word spread of Chris’s plans.

New Porsche 911 Speedster reportedly in the works

When European-car importer Max Hoffman suggested to Porsche that the American audience might like a cheaper, open-top version of the company's 356, Stuttgart responded with the Speedster. And while every Porsche partisan is a special snowflake -- some love road-going racers like the 904, others can't imagine life without a roof-rack-equipped 912, others go gaga for anything with a legit, lift-off Targa top, and some folks just really, really, really love 924s -- the Speedster's the light, lovable kid brother for which any fan of the marque has a measure of affection. Porsche knows it, and as such, they've introduced limited Speedster models of every 911 series since the 3.2 Carrera -- except for the oft-maligned 996 (which is still loved by its proponents, IMS-bearing issues aside).

Driven: BMW X3

The BMW X3 had the premium CUV market to itself when launched in 2004. Skip forward to the launch of the second generation and not only does the new version have a whole host of competitors for company, it also has to fit around its X1, X5 and X6 siblings. We took the 2011 BMW X3 (known internally as F25) to the Austrian Tyrol and spoke to its exterior designer, Erik Goplen, to find out if it still has the segment covered.