Volkswagen Touareg Edition X announced
Michael Andretti Keith Andrews Elio de Angelis Marco Apicella Mário de Araújo Cabral
Michael Andretti Keith Andrews Elio de Angelis Marco Apicella Mário de Araújo Cabral
Source: http://moto-racing.speedtv.com/article/spoiler-warning-ama-sbk-nola-sunday/
Cliff Griffith Georges Grignard Bobby Grim Romain Grosjean Olivier Grouillard
Jerry Hoyt Nico Hulkenberg Denny Hulme James Hunt Jim Hurtubise
Dieter Quester Ian Raby Bobby Rahal Kimi Räikkönen Hernando da Silva Ramos
This Formula 1 season has so far been a perfect storm of unpredictable results, thrilling races and a closely fought title battle.
Who would have predicted that a man who has not once had the fastest car would be leading the world championship as it neared its halfway stage?
Yet Fernando Alonso, whose Ferrari started the campaign more than a second off the pace, goes into this weekend's British Grand Prix with a 20-point lead.
Who would have predicted that the defending world champion, who took 15 pole positions in 19 races last year, would fail to get into the top 10 qualifying shoot-out?
Formula 1 teams will have the opportunity to test a new hard tyre compound that Pirelli are developing for the future during the practice sessions of the British Grand Prix. Photo: Getty
Yet that is exactly what happened to Red Bull's Sebastian Vettel in China - and very nearly again in Monaco.
Who would have predicted that last year's runner-up, a man who is renowned for his delicacy with tyres, would struggle for pace in a season in which the fragile Pirellis are the defining characteristic? Yet there is Jenson Button having a terrible time in the McLaren.
Who would have predicted that a driver who owes his place to sponsorship money and who was previously known best for inconsistency and mistakes would win a race? Williams's Pastor Maldonado did exactly that in Spain.
Or that it would take until the eighth grand prix for the season to have its first repeat winner? Step forward Alonso again.
F1 has been maligned for years as being boring and predictable - overtaking, people said, was too hard and working out who was going to win too easy.
No longer. There has been so much action in the eight races so far this season that you almost don't know where to look.
There are concerns that F1 has now gone too far the other way, that it is too unpredictable, that too much of a random element has been introduced by the fast-wearing, hard-to-operate Pirelli tyres that are at the root of this new direction.
In essence, the fear is that F1 has been turned from an exercise in precision engineering into a lottery.
And there is unease in certain quarters that the drivers are always having to race "within themselves", with tyre life their biggest concern.
Yet through the fog of uncertainty and apparent haphazardness, a pattern has emerged.
As the competitive edge swung wildly from one team to another in the opening races, it was revealing that the positions at the top of the championship were very quickly occupied by the best drivers - Alonso, Vettel, his Red Bull team-mate Mark Webber and McLaren drivers Lewis Hamilton and Button.
The list of different winners continued, until Alonso's spectacular win in Valencia last time out, but through it all the big hitters continued to be the ones who scored most consistently.
Despite that, there has undoubtedly been a welcome element of unpredictability, and the top teams have not had it their own way.
So while Red Bull, McLaren, Ferrari, Mercedes and Lotus - the teams who have won every world title for the last 15 years - have all figured at the front, Williams and Sauber have also been up there mixing it with them. As, on occasion, have Force India.
This is partly to do with the tyres. This year's Pirellis have been deliberately designed with an unusually narrow operating-temperature window. Getting - and keeping - them there is far from easy, and the big teams do not have exclusivity on clever engineers.
The unusually great importance of the tyres has so far lessened the effect of aerodynamics - for so long the determining factor in F1.
Just as importantly, the regulations have now been pretty stable for the last four years. When that happens the field always tends to close up. Both Sauber and Williams have serious engineering resources of their own, and have clearly built very good cars.
Through all of this, one man has stood out above all others.
Alonso has long been considered within F1 as the greatest all-round talent, and this year the Spaniard has driven with a blend of precision, aggression, opportunism, consistency and pace that is close to perfection.
He has taken two stunning wins and scored consistently elsewhere. In fact, had Ferrari's strategy brains been a little sharper, he may have had four victories by now - that's half the races. And all without anything close to the best car.
Of the two wins he has taken, Alonso himself rates the wet race in Malaysia as the better.
For me, though, the one in Valencia shades it, for the skill and determination he showed in battling up to second place from 11th on the grid before Vettel's retirement from the lead handed him the win.
Some of the overtaking moves Alonso pulled on the way to that win were utterly breathtaking in their audacity, the way he balanced risk and reward and made it pay off.
Hamilton's season has been almost as good, but he has been let down by a number of operational errors from McLaren, ranging from bungled pit stops to refuelling errors in qualifying. He now faces an uphill battle to get back on terms with his old rival.
Alonso has long regarded Hamilton as the man he fears most in this title battle, but one wonders if he might change his mind following Valencia.
After two years of domination, Red Bull have stumbled a little this year. Yet operationally they have still been the best team and their car has always been among the strongest on race day.
After a difficult first three races, either Vettel or Webber have now been on pole for four of the last five.
Before retiring with alternator failure in Valencia the German put in a performance as crushing as any in his title-winning years (2010 and 2011), thanks to a major aerodynamic upgrade at the rear of his car.
Up and down the pit lane, rivals fear Red Bull have moved their car up to another level.
The confirmation - or otherwise - of that will come at Silverstone this weekend. Its blend of high-speed corners provide one of the most stringent tests of a car's quality on the calendar.
Last year, following a one-off rule change that hampered Red Bull more than anyone else, the British Grand Prix was won by Alonso.
But if the Red Bull proves as effective around the sweepers of Northamptonshire as it did at the point-and-squirt right-angles of Valencia, even Alonso at his most perfect will find it hard to fend it off.
Both this weekend and for the rest of the year.
Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/andrewbenson/2012/07/andrew_benson_the_season_so_fa.html
Philippe Etancelin Bob Evans Corrado Fabi Teo Fabi Pascal Fabre
Source: http://joesaward.wordpress.com/2012/10/06/vergne-gets-penalty/
Yuji Ide Jesús Iglesias Taki Inoue Innes Ireland Eddie Irvine
Trevor Taylor Marshall Teague Shorty Templeman Max de Terra Andre Testut
Just about 10 years ago, VW introduced an all-new SUV bearing a name that only those with the most talented tongues could pronounce: the Touareg. It was such an odd name that VW actually made a commercial poking fun at the fact that no one really knew how to pronounce it, much like the Merkur tongue twister in the mid-1980s.
In celebration of its 10-year anniversary, VW is releasing a special edition Touareg Edition X. On the outside, you have a standard Touareg ? one of the more stylish crossover SUVs available ? but it features a set of 19-inch ?Moab? wheels, silver anodized roof rails, bi-xenon headlights with LED daytime runners, and smoked taillights. You also get the ?Chrome & Style? package, tinted windows, and ?Touareg X? logos.
On the inside, your hind side is supported by luxurious Amber Brown Nappa leather in a braid embossed style. You get real ebony inlays on the door panels and on the instrument panel to add a little elegance to the package. The front door sills boast illuminated ?Touareg X? decals and you also get color-coordinated stitching on the leather-wrapped steering wheel, gear shifter, and the floor mats.
You have a wide array of engine and drivetrain options in the Touareg Edition X, as there are five different options available, including a hybrid drivetrain. The only option that VW offers us any details on it the 150 kW (201-horsepower) 3.0-liter V-6 TDI engine. This model with the 8-speed automatic transmission runs ?61,025 ($79,363 at the current exchange rates). That?s a ridiculous ?10,500 premium over the base SE model for minimal additions. According to the press release, the Touareg Edition X is available now, but there is no mention of its U.S. availability.
Once VW releases all of the official standard features we can better assess it. For now, it just seems way overpriced.
Vokswagen Touareg Edition X originally appeared on topspeed.com on Friday, 5 October 2012 14:00 EST.
Source: http://www.topspeed.com/cars/volkswagen/2013-vokswagen-touareg-edition-x-ar135891.html
Joachim Winkelhock Manfred Winkelhock Markus Winkelhock Reine Wisell Roelof Wunderink
Michael Schumacher was given a round of applause by the assembled media after he finished the prepared statement with which he announced his second retirement from Formula 1 at the Japanese Grand Prix on Thursday.
It was a mark of the respect still held for Schumacher and a reflection of the appreciation for what was clearly an emotional moment for the man whose seven world titles re-wrote the sport's history books.
Schumacher stumbled a couple of times as he read off the paper in front of him and once, as he mentioned the support of his wife Corinna, his voice almost cracked.
Once through the statement and on to a question-and-answer session with the journalists, he was more comfortable, relaxed in a way he has so often been since his comeback, and so rarely was in the first stint of his career.

Schumacher's retirement from the Singapore Grand Prix had a familiar look to it. Photo: Getty
The Schumacher who returned to Formula 1 in 2010 with Mercedes was quite different from the one who finished his first career with Ferrari in 2006.
The new Schumacher was more human, more open and more likeable.
As he put it himself on Thursday: "In the past six years I have learned a lot about myself, for example that you can open yourself without losing focus, that losing can be both more difficult and more instructive than winning. Sometimes I lost this out of sight in the earlier years."
Most importantly, though, the new Schumacher was nowhere near as good.
In every way possible, there is no other way to view his return to F1 than as a failure.
When he announced his comeback back in December 2009, he talked about winning the world title. Instead, he has scored one podium in three years, and in that period as a whole he has been trounced by team-mate Nico Rosberg in terms of raw pace. In their 52 races together, Schumacher has out-qualified his younger compatriot only 15 times.
It is ironic, then, that there have been marked signs of improvement from Schumacher this season. In 14 races so far, he has actually out-qualified Rosberg eight-six.
And although Rosberg has taken the team's only win - in China earlier this year, when he was demonstrably superior all weekend - arguably Schumacher has been the better Mercedes driver this year.
Schumacher has suffered by far the worst of the team's frankly unacceptable reliability record and would almost certainly have been ahead of Rosberg in the championship had that not been the case. And he might even have won in Monaco had not a five-place grid penalty demoted him from pole position.
That penalty, though, was given to Schumacher for an accident he caused at the previous race in Spain, when he rammed into the back of Williams driver Bruno Senna having misjudged his rival's actions.
That was only one of four similar incidents in the last 18 months that have crystallised the impression that the time was approaching where Schumacher should call it a day.
It is unfortunate timing, to say the least, that the last of those incidents happened less than two weeks ago in Singapore, almost as if it was the straw that broke the camel's back.
That was not the case, of course. Schumacher has been vacillating on his future for months and in the end his hand was forced. Mercedes signed Lewis Hamilton and Schumacher was left with the decision of trying to get a drive with a lesser team or quitting. He made the right call.
His struggles since his return have had an unfortunate effect on Schumacher's legacy. People within F1 - people with the highest regard for his achievements - have begun to question what went before.
There have always been question marks over his first title with Benetton in 1994, given the highly controversial nature of that year. Illegal driver aids were found in the car, but Benetton were not punished because governing body the FIA said they could find no proof they had been used.
But since 2010 people have begun to look back at the dominant Ferrari era of the early 2000s, when Schumacher won five titles in a row, and begun to wonder aloud just how much of an advantage he had.
It was the richest team, they had unlimited testing and bespoke tyres. Did this, people have said, mean Schumacher was not as good as he had looked?
If you watched him during his first career, though, you know how ridiculous an assertion this is. Schumacher in his pomp was undoubtedly one of the very greatest racing drivers there has ever been, a man who was routinely, on every lap, able to dance on a limit accessible to almost no-one else.
Sure, the competition in his heyday was not as deep as it is now, but Schumacher performed miracles with a racing car that stands comparison with the greatest drives of any era.
Victories such as his wet-weather domination of Spain in 1996, his incredible fightback in Hungary in 1998, his on-the-limit battle with Mika Hakkinen at Suzuka that clinched his first title in 2000 were tours de force. And there were many more among that astonishing total of 91 victories.
So too, as has been well documented, was there a dark side to Schumacher, and it was never far away through his first career.
Most notoriously, he won his first world title after driving Damon Hill off the road. He failed to pull off a similar stunt in 1997 with Jacques Villeneuve. And perhaps most pernicious of all, he deliberately parked his car in Monaco qualifying in 2006 to stop Fernando Alonso taking pole position from him.
Those were just the most extreme examples of a modus operandi in which Schumacher seemed often to act without morals, a man who was prepared to do literally anything to win, the sporting personification of Machiavelli's prince, for whom the ends justified the means.
Those acts continue to haunt Schumacher today, and even now he still refuses to discuss them, won't entertain the prospect of saying sorry.
"We are all humans and we all make mistakes," he said at Suzuka on Thursday. "And with hindsight you would probably do it differently if you had a second opportunity, but that's life."
He was given a second opportunity at F1, and he took it because in three years he had found nothing to replace it in his life.
His self-belief persuaded him that he could come back as good as he had been when he went away, but he learnt that time stands still for no man.
He has finally been washed aside by the tide of youth that with the arrival of Alonso and Kimi Raikkonen towards the end of his first career already seemed to be replacing one generation with the next.
It seems appropriate in many ways that the agent for that was Hamilton, the man who many regard as the fastest driver of his generation.
That, after all, is what Schumacher was, as well as one of the very greatest there has ever been. And nothing that has happened in the last three years can take that away.
Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/andrewbenson/2012/10/never_forget_how_great_schumac.html
Chris Bristow Peter Broeker Tony Brooks Alan Brown Walt Brown