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McLaren P1: New photos & video of production P1

The McLaren P1 production car pictured hot weather testing We’ve had a surprising amount of McLaren P1 news in the last couple of weeks, with a claimed lap time at the Nurburgring that didn’t quite meet expectation, P1 customer Jay Leno getting to grips with the P1 at the Top Gear track  and the news that the P1 is all but sold out. Now, with the first P1s getting close to delivery (McLaren are about to start building customer cars at the rate of one a day), McLaren has released photos and video from their final stint of hot weather testing in the US, with a completely undisguised, production version P1. McLaren have been in the west of the US, where temperatures reach 52 degrees, putting the P1 through its paces in extreme heat in California, Nevada and Arizona, both on the road and at the Willow Springs International Raceway in California, just to be sure it doesn’t melt in the sun.

Driven: Hyundai i40

CDN recently spent a day sampling Hyundai’s new i40 Tourer, which has just been launched in Europe. For the launch, Hyundai invited us to Waddesdon Manor, the home of the Rothschild banking family and a venue that has been used for previous Louis Vuitton events. It has recently added a new art gallery with fabulous views across rolling countryside, and contains work by Anish Kapoor, Michael Craig-Martin and bronzes by Angus Fairhurst.

Driven: Volkswagen Passat CC GT

Elegant and refined. Forty years ago these two words would not have been used to describe the Beetles bought in droves by the counterculture in the US; a symbol of the hippy movement and the definitive people's car, designed at a time when Germany sought to put people in motion. With the Passat CC, however, Volkswagen is indeed making a sharp move away from the ‘volks wagen', and these two words rolled off the tongues of those who saw the car in all three countries we drove through on our winter holiday.