This is footage of German rally legend, Walter Rohrl, driving the monstrous Audi S1 at some kind of historic rally event. The S1 was introduced in 1985 as an update to the original Audi Quattro rally car. It has a 2.1 liter turbo inline 5 that produces over 500 horsepower at 8,000 rpm. The engine produces a very unique exhaust note with some definite similarities to a high revving V10.
Car and Driver pay a visit to performance car builder RUF in Germany to tour their factory and to see what they’re up to. Apparently RUF will let people test drive the car that put them on the map: The CTR Yellowbird. The car in the video is the same one used by RUF for development and stars in a Nurburgring drift video. There’s no need to look up the drift video because they’ve included a few shots in case you haven’t seen it. The tour ends with taking a spin in RUF’a newest CTR 3 on the Autobahn. RUF is an interesting company in that they sort of piggyback engineering development with Porsche. They basically use the front half of Porsche’s cars for the crash test structures, suspension and interior and then develop their own back half of the chassis to put their tuned engines in. It’s actual a pretty clever business model for a small aftermarket tuning company.
I really enjoy these Depth of Speed videos. They do a great job capturing the essence of what it means to love a car like the owner of this Mercedes Benz Gullwing 300SL. He’s wanted one since he was 10 years old and now that he’s made it in life, he’s got one. It’s kept mechanically sound and the owner drives it everywhere. No sterile trailer life for this car.
You know there’s something special going on when a guy who reviews supercars for a living is awestruck about riding in several of his dream cars and meeting his heroes all in one place. That’s exactly what happened when Chris Harris was invited to Pirelli’s launch of their new historic rally tire. Oddly enough, he wasn’t allowed to drive any cars equipped with the new tire, but Pirelli had four time WRC champion Juha Kankkanen, rally legend Markku Alen and 6 time Italian rally champion Paolo Andreucci there driving all of Lancia’s Group B rally monsters along with a few modern rally cars. Chris gets to go for a ride in a Lancia Stratos, the twincharged Lancia Delta Integrale S4 and the only two wheel drive car to be the Audi Quattro, the Lancia 037. It’s an amazing collection of some of the greatest rally cars ever built and we’re lucky enough to see them in action and have Chris Harris describe their natures to us.
The story of the Bentley Continental GT V8 starts with the president of company casually asking one of his engineers how much fuel they could save by going to a twin turbo V8 instead of the W12. The engineer estimated “probably around 40%” which the president then started using as a hard statistic for the car even before it had been designed. The engineering teams were actually able to more or less hit the mark (37%) in the “fuel efficient” Bentley which still makes 500 hp and 480 ft-lbs of torque. Motor Trend’s senior editor, Johnny Lieberman, takes the new Bentley for a tour of all of the places he’s wanted to see in Scotland. The video is long, but you learn a lot about the car and about some cool things in Scotland.