Dorman 557-026 Block Expansion Plug/kits on 2040-parts.com

Hyundai beefs up its WRC team

Hyundai revealed last year that they’re preparing to take on the World Rally Championship (WRC) from 2014 when a rally car based on the i20 will take to the world rally stage to cast some sport fairy dust on Hyundai’s showroom cars. At that time we had little information about the team, but in January we learnt that Hyundai had appointed Michel Nandan to head up their WRC efforts, a good move as Nandon was the technical director for the Peugeot WRC team until 2005, so he knows his stuff. Now we learn that Hyundai is beefing up its WRC team as it prepares for a full season of WRC in 2014.

Jaguar Land Rover open new engineering test centre in Dubai

Jaguar Land Rover are growing at a tremendous rate, and that means more and more testing of cars to make sure they can cope with the extremes of climate they’re subjected to by owners around the world. So as part of their growing test programme, JLR have extended their testing and engineering facilities in the Al Barsha area of Dubai so they can test durability, calibration and hot weather testing for heat and humidity as well as test the powertrains, chassis, HVAC and, as this is Dubai and it has plenty of sand, they can also give the Land Rover Terrain Response systems a proper workout. JLR has been hot weather testing in Dubai for more than 12 years – an area where temperatures can reach 50 degrees Celsius – and the new facility replaces a much smaller one in the same area, and joins Jaguar Land Rover’s other test facilities at the Nurburgring, Arjeplog in Sweden and Phoenix and International Falls in the States to ensure all JLR’s new cars get subjected to everything from extreme hot and cold to track work.

Lamborghini Aventador LP700-4: The Commercial

Lamborghini Aventador LP700-4 takes on the landscape There was a time in the dim and distant past (well, the 1980s) when advertising cars was easy – you just made them look as dramatic as possible and hoped viewers would think that buying the car being advertised would imbue them with endless cool. But then the world was made to feel guilt by a new religion which was even better than the Catholic Church at making its followers feel bad for anything in life that feels good – the ‘Global Warming’ believers. These descendants of the ‘Hole in the Ozone Layer’ brigade and the ‘New Ice Age’ predictors’ have managed to frighten a big chunk of the West’s population in to believing they are somehow to blame for our climate change, and in doing so have terrified car makers in to making anything other than fluffy-bunny adverts.