All posts in “Video”

Top Gear’s Matt LeBlanc Drives the Ferrari 812 Superfast

He Says the Superfast is Too Fast for the Road

How much horsepower and speed do we really need on the road? That’s a question Top Gear’s Matt LeBlanc essentially asks while driving the Ferrari 812 Superfast. He said the 789 hp machine doesn’t really make that great of a grand touring car because it has too much power and too much of a penchant for the racetrack. 

To be fair, he makes a good point. A good grand touring car should be fast and fun, but it should also be supremely comfortable and lovely to drive. While the 812 Superfast appears to check most of those boxes, according to LeBlanc, it’s too hopped-up and race-ready for you to drive comfortably.

The car keeps you on your toes, which is an appealing feature in many cases, but if you were on a long road trip, it’d be the last thing you’d want. Your nerves would be shot after only traveling for a portion of your journey. Of course, you could drive the 812 Superfast like a grandma, but that’s not what this car is about.

LeBlanc also takes the 812 Superfast to the racetrack to prove its prowess there. It’s a killer car, but it’s not truly designed for the racetrack either. That begs the question, where does it really belong? There’s no denying the 812 Superfast is one of the best Ferrari cars yet, but it brings up some fair questions about horsepower, speed, and the true purpose of the grand touring car.

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March 11, 2019 / Comments Off on Top Gear’s Matt LeBlanc Drives the Ferrari 812 Superfast
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Watch Chris Harris Have Fun on a Track in the McLaren 600LT

Could This Be The Best McLaren Track Car?

That’s the question Top Gear’s Chris Harris asks in the video below of him driving the McLaren 600LT. The car lacks the insane horsepower and super-techy suspension of other McLaren vehicles, but it offers a more mechanical, analog, and natural driving experience, according to the presenter. It looks like a heck of a lot of fun.

Harris drives the hardened cousin of the 570S at the Circuit De Charade in France. As he does, the sky begins to spit rain, making the drive a whole lot more difficult. With that said, Harris completes the task in entertaining style, spinning the tires and getting sideways a few times.

The McLaren 600LT comes with a 3.8L twin-turbocharged V8 that makes 592-horsepower and 457 lb-ft of torque. It’s a revised version of the engine found in the 570S, though it’s not a revolutionary mill by any means. That doesn’t mean it lacks power, though Harris does note a bit of turbo lag.

That doesn’t hurt performance too much though, the car can sprint from 0 to 60 mph in just 2.9 seconds, and then continue on to 124 mph in just 8.2 seconds. The top speed for this beautiful supercar is 204 mph. That’s not the fastest car out there, but it’s very, very quick.

What seemed to surprise Harris the most was the playfulness of the car. It’s stiff chassis and suspension setup paired with its open differentials still allows the car to move around, and he seemed very pleased with it overall. Needless to say, McLaren’s 600LT is a car worth owning. 

February 15, 2019 / Comments Off on Watch Chris Harris Have Fun on a Track in the McLaren 600LT
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Mercedes-AMG Project One details revealed in private session with ‘Top Gear’

Mercedes-AMG put “Top Gear‘s” Jack Rix in a private studio with an AMG One, and let the journalist have his way with the static hypercar. Rix turned on the cameras and put on a show, divulging further particulars of Stuttgart’s crouching tiger. The 1.6-liter turbocharged V6 is built in the same British factory that builds the Formula 1 engines for the Mercedes-AMG Petronas team. The motor also can also brag about a thermal efficiency of 40 percent, matching the Toyota Prius.

Road manners and emissions requirements mean that instead of the 5,000-rpm idle and 14,000-rpm redline in the F1 car, the One idles at 1,200 rpm and maxes at 11,000 rpm.

Three F1-spec electric motors contribute mojo, one at the crank, one at each front wheel. They spin up to 50,000 rpm and add 160 horsepower apiece to a total figure expected to number at least 1,050 horses. In pure EV mode the front motors do all the work, making the One a front-wheel-drive hypercar for up to 15 miles.

The bodywork’s been shaped and polished so as to aid motivation depending on application. For high-speed reasons, the front badge has been airbrushed on, and the 10-spoke wheels — in aluminum or magnesium — wear carbon inserts to reduce drag. When racing is the reason, flaps atop the front fenders stand up to increase downforce on the front axle, and the electrically-deployed rear wing deploys its wing-in-a-wing.

Check out the video for more minutiae, such as the friendlier-than-a-Valkyrie seating position, the four drive modes, and how the tires limit how much downforce AMG could extract from the rear wing.

Related Video:

January 21, 2019 / Comments Off on Mercedes-AMG Project One details revealed in private session with ‘Top Gear’
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VIDEO: Porsche 911 GT3 v McLaren 570S Track Pack

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I am a big fan of Steve Sutcliff’s video reviews. He gets cars and you can tell just how genuinely excited he is to be behind the wheel. In this video he focuses on comparing the GT3 and the McLaren 570S Track Pack. It’s funny because we talk a lot about choosing cars here at Supercars.net and we often struggle with this very choice and whether McLaren can unseat the GT3 as our favorite all round car. Watch this video to find out.

November 8, 2018 / Comments Off on VIDEO: Porsche 911 GT3 v McLaren 570S Track Pack
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Lamborghini Aventador SVJ full onboard record lap at Nürburgring

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ventador SVJ laps the Nürburgring Nordschleife in 6:44:97 minutes under the formal scrutiny of Remak personnel who managed time and GPS certification using VBOX-Racelogic instrumentation. The new king of the ‘Ring’ driver was Marco Mapelli that managed the challenge with Lamborghini’s Research and Development team and the extensive tire support from Pirelli technicians and driver.

October 30, 2018 / Comments Off on Lamborghini Aventador SVJ full onboard record lap at Nürburgring
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Millions of dollars of smuggled exotica crushed in the Philippines

Here at Supercars.net – in case you haven’t noticed – we love supercars.

That’s why this footage of millions of dollars worth of supercars, classic cars and other precious metal is so painful to watch.

More than 60 luxury and high performance cars and motorbikes were destroyed by Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte as part of an anti-corruption campaign.

The expensive metal had been smuggled into the country illegally in attempts to evade the country’s tax regime that makes buying and importing high value cars prohibitively expensive.

Any car costing more than 2.1 million Philippine Piso (around $39,550) is classified as a luxury vehicle, and hit with a PhP 512,000 tax, plus a further levy of 60% on any amount above PhP 2.1 million.

For something like a base model Porsche 911 Carrera, on sale in the US from $91,100, that would push its cost from the PhP 4.8 million price tag up to PhP 8.25 million – or $155,400 at today’s exchange rate.

The Philippines tax on luxury cars means vehicles like the Porsche 911 Carrera are significantly more expensive to buyThe Philippines tax on luxury cars means vehicles like the Porsche 911 Carrera are significantly more expensive to buy
The Philippines tax on luxury cars means vehicles like the Porsche 911 Carrera are significantly more expensive to buy

If you can’t bear to watch the footage then turn away – in the clip cars sentenced to a crumpled end by bulldozer include a Lamborghini Gallardo, a Porsche 911 Carrera S, a Mercedes-Benz S-Class, Nissan 350Z and a Ford Mustang from what we can see.

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And this isn’t the first time Duterte has put on such a public display of automotive destruction in the name of combatting corruption. As the clip below attests, he has form for this kind of thing.

Beware – clip includes graphic footage of a C3 Corvette meeting its end.

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August 2, 2018 / Comments Off on Millions of dollars of smuggled exotica crushed in the Philippines
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It’s complicated: Watch a Bugatti Veyron get a $21,000 oil change

Here’s a fascinating peek under the hood, or rather the rear carbon-fiber engine cover panel and undercarriage, that shows the complexity of getting a simple oil change for a Bugatti Veyron, courtesy of the folks at Royalty Exotic Cars. Servicing this Veyron Mansory Vivere owned by Houston Crosta costs an estimated $21,000. Jiffy Lube, eat your heart out.

How complicated can it be, you ask? Well, the video is 20 minutes long — and that’s with the benefit of plenty of editing to cut out the boring waiting-around and taking-things-apart parts. Crosta estimates the Veyron is held together by nearly 10,000 bolts, and a heck of a lot of them have to be removed.

Changing the oil on one of the supercars starts with needing specialty GoJack car dollies to get underneath and hoist the lowered body high enough to get it on the shop’s lift. Then, you have to remove the wheels on both sides, rear fender and carbon-fiber panel, carbon fiber wheel-well panels, the fuel filler … and on and on and on.

Also, where most modern cars have one or two drain plugs, the Veyron has 16. The mechanics managed to drain 16.5 quarts of oil from the quad-turbocharged 8.0-liter W16 engine.

Rather do it yourself? Well, the mechanics estimate the difficulty of the oil change ranked a 20 on a 1-to-10 scale. At least for the first hour or so, until they managed to pry off the rear panel. Then it went to a 6, they say. “After everything’s taken apart, some of this stuff is just plain and simple super easy,” Crosta says. “But getting everything out to get to this point, that’s a couple-day process.”

Interestingly, Royalty will let you rent out a Veyron Mansory Vivere for almost the same price as the oil change — $20,000 — for 24 hours of fun.

Related Video:

July 19, 2018 / Comments Off on It’s complicated: Watch a Bugatti Veyron get a $21,000 oil change
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Watch Zenvo TSR-S’s fascinating Centripetal Wing active aero at work

The Zenvo TSR-S is the middle sibling in the Danish carmaker’s three-model lineup. The 1,163-horsepower TS1 GT sticks to the road with a demure rear wing, while the racetrack-only, 1,102-hp TS1 sticks to the track with a high fixed wing. The road-legal TSR-S plays both sides, but outdoes its track-only sibling in two ways: It has 1,177 hp and an active “Centripetal Wing” that moves in two planes to increase cornering grip.

The wing’s trailing edge can rise a little to increase downforce, or a lot to act as an air brake. In corners, one side of the wing will lift in order to create what Zenvo calls the “centripetal” force; when the TSR-S turns right, the right side of the wing lifts, and vice versa. Zenvo says that in doing so, downforce remains perpendicular to the wing surface, resulting in more force on the inside wheel and more grip. While overall downforce drops by about 3 percent, angling the wing shifts 30 percent of overall downforce to the inside wheel.

Zenvo took the TSR-S to test at the Assen TT Circuit in The Netherlands, running with a bunch of high-dollar machinery. Admittedly, the rollercoaster centripetal wing is completely distracting, looking something like a class project devised by garagiste engineering students. But all kinds of inventions have made many people feel the same way, at least until they started winning, so we look forward to seeing where this goes.

Related Video:

May 29, 2018 / Comments Off on Watch Zenvo TSR-S’s fascinating Centripetal Wing active aero at work
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VIDEO: NEW Porsche 911 GT3 RS Review

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Henry Catchpole drives the 991.2 Porsche 911 GT3 RS in search of the forgotten Sudschleife circuit.

May 9, 2018 / Comments Off on VIDEO: NEW Porsche 911 GT3 RS Review
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VIDEO: 2018 Porsche 911 GT3 RS Review

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May 7, 2018 / Comments Off on VIDEO: 2018 Porsche 911 GT3 RS Review
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VIDEO: Lamborghini Urus 2018 Review

Shock, horror: Lamborghini has made an SUV. The new Lamborghini Urus is the company’s first off-roader since the LM002, but this time it’s totally different. The twin-turbocharged V8 Urus is based on other VW-group SUVs, like the Audi Q7, Porsche Cayenne and perhaps it’s closest luxury rival, the Bentley Bentayga. Lamborghini wants it to be the best handling car in its class, and among the best 4x4s off toad too. We try it on track, on the road, and off road too, to see if Lamborghini’s claims stack up.

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May 7, 2018 / Comments Off on VIDEO: Lamborghini Urus 2018 Review
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VIDEO: McLaren Senna Driven

The McLaren Senna, Woking’s new Ultimate Series model, packs a 789bhp punch and weighs considerably less than the mighty P1 and 720S. Matt Prior talks you around the limited edition hypercar, as he drives a prototype around the international circuit at Silverstone.

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May 7, 2018 / Comments Off on VIDEO: McLaren Senna Driven
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Chasing Down a Mercedes-AMG GTR in a Porsche 991 GT3 RS VS at Nurburgring

Quick race on a half Nurburgring lap, the Mercedes-AMG GTR was on the rear from the beginning and Porsche 991 GT3 RS just let it pass to see how this beautiful car works and yeah it works well! Lap time in 7.33 btg with big traffic and yellow flag at the beginning of the track.

March 20, 2018 / Comments Off on Chasing Down a Mercedes-AMG GTR in a Porsche 991 GT3 RS VS at Nurburgring
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Porsche 911 GT3 RS Exclusive Testing

One of the best sports car to drive on a race track, the 2016 Porsche 911 GT3 RS is stripped to the bone to save weight, with magnesium roof, carbon-fiber hood and trunk lid, carbon-fiber seats and a rollcage. Because of that cage, it’s only 22 pounds lighter than the GT3, with a curb weight of 3130 pounds. It uses a 4.0-liter flat-six engine making 500 horsepower and 338 pound-feet of torque, not turbocharged, mated to a racing dual-clutch seven-speed transmission. It will hit 60 mph in 3.1 seconds, 124 mph in 10.9 seconds, and more than 200 mph.

March 20, 2018 / Comments Off on Porsche 911 GT3 RS Exclusive Testing
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This Porsche 928 and Mercedes-Benz 500E Satisfies a V8 Fetish

“I was a bit skeptical about the color in the beginning, but I kind of like it now. It stands out, definitely,” says Torfi Sigurjonsson of his Speed Yellow 928. With a small list of cars to collect, the brightly-colored Porsche was actually #2. “On the top of the list was the E500, which I bought 2006, and this is a US model. I bought it in New Jersey.” Torfi’s day job? Airline pilot.

“I was hooked on aeroplanes since I was a small kid. Nothing else was an option, other than being a pilot. I’m quite lucky really, to have a job,” he says. “It’s a hard competition to get a job with the national carrier like Icelandair, but I made it there, I’ve been there for now 26 years.”

Torfi agrees that there’s a connection between fast aeroplanes and fast cars—least of which their aversion to the winter months. But he doesn’t own his vehicles for speeding, saying, “It’s a nice feeling just to drive around, not too fast. You know of all the power in there, and knowing that you have it is a good feeling. You don’t have to be going 200-plus [kph].”

With a busy working lifestyle and a dedicated hobby, no matter what, Torfi will always make room for the machines he loves. “I try to keep my life not too complicated, but I have this car fetish. V8 fetish. You only have one life, so I try to make the most out of it.”

February 20, 2018 / Comments Off on This Porsche 928 and Mercedes-Benz 500E Satisfies a V8 Fetish
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Porsche Carrera GT Doing Some Donuts

At the Cars & Coffee Italy event the former rally driver and manager of RM Autosport Raul Marchisio entertained the crowd doing some very nice donuts in his Porsche Carrera GT. Not something you can see every day…

July 19, 2017 / Comments Off on Porsche Carrera GT Doing Some Donuts
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VIDEO: Porsche 911 GT2 RS VS. Ducati

Chris Harris races the Porsche 911 GT2 RS against the Ducati 1199 Panigale.

The GT2 RS, weighing 3,170 pounds, is packing 611 horsepower. The Ducati on the other hand, weighs in at just 415 pounds curb weight, packing 192 horsepower and giving the Ducati a power-to-weight ratio of 2.16 lb/hp. or 3.82 fewer pounds per horsepower than the 911.

Who will win – the 911 with its grip and stability, or the power-to-weight Ducati? Watch and find out!

July 26, 2012 / Comments Off on VIDEO: Porsche 911 GT2 RS VS. Ducati
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