A month after confirming that it would be entering the World Touring Car Championship in 2014, Citroën can now reveal the model that will be driven on the circuits by Sébastien Loeb.
Photo: Citroën Racing
The Citroën C-Elysée WTCC will be the very first vehicle to be designed in accordance with the new regulations, currently being prepared by the FIA for the category next year.
On 26 September of last year, at the opening of the 2012 Paris Motor Show, Frédéric Banzet, Yves Matton and Sébastien Loeb announced that Citroën was considering taking part in the World Touring Car Championship. A few minutes earlier, the C-Elysée had just been unveiled for the first time to the world's media. Ten months on, these two events come together again with the release of the first pictures of the Citroën C-Elysée WTCC.
Photo: Citroën Racing
The Citroën C-Elysée is a C-segment saloon aimed principally at high-growth, international markets such as those in Latin America, the Mediterranean region, China and Russia.
Under the bonnet, the Citroën C-Elysée WTCC is powered by the same 1.6-litre direct injection turbocharged engine as the DS3 WRC. With a wider booster flange, power output is now close to 380bhp. The car comes with a front-wheel drive transmission, controlled by a six-speed sequential gearbox.
Fernando Alonso has admitted he needs to start making up ground on runaway championship leader Sebastian Vettel.
Having won two grands prix so far in 2013 compared to reigning triple world champion Vettel's four, Spaniard Alonso said Ferrari is working "day and night" to recover lost time in the car development race.
"We must try to finish ahead of Vettel," Ferrari's Alonso told Italian television TG1 ahead of this weekend's Hungarian grand prix.
Photo: WRi2
The last race before the summer break and factory shutdowns, Budapest marks the exact half-way point of the 2013 championship.
German Vettel, driving for Red Bull, has a 34-point lead over Alonso with ten races to go.
Alonso admitted: "The gap to Vettel is beginning to be a bit too much in terms of points. We have to reduce this gap as soon as possible."
Having recently watered down his anti-Vettel rhetoric, Alonso this week insisted that the 26-year-old German has a clear car advantage again in 2013.
"Any driver who goes into the Red Bull manages to go very strongly," he said.
"We saw that in the tests for young drivers (at Silverstone). Whoever goes into the Red Bull is very fast -- it is a fact that it is stronger than the others," Alonso added, referring to tests last week for Antonio Felix da Costa, Daniel Ricciardo and Carlos Sainz jr.
A clever tax arrangement sees formula one pay a tiny amount of tax, it has emerged.
Writing in The Independent, leading F1 business journalist Christian Sylt said the sport paid less than $1.5 million in tax in 2011, despite making a profit of almost half a billion dollars.
Sylt said the low tax bill was achieved due to a complex web of loans within the Bernie Ecclestone-headed empire.
Sun journalist Ben Hunt quoted British tax office Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs as saying: "We do not discuss individual businesses."
The formula one teams association FOTA also declined to comment.
John Surtees, F1's 1964 world champion, has questioned Mercedes driver Lewis Hamilton's focus.
Briton Hamilton, while regarded by many as perhaps the most naturally gifted driver today, has had a leaner period of success since winning the 2008 title in his second season.
Photo: Mercedes AMG F1 Team
"Other things have partly had a bearing on his career, but to what degree? I don't know," Surtees told the Daily Mail.
79-year-old Surtees may be referring to Hamilton's involvement in numerous scandals, his friends, his amateur music and film careers, his controversial paddock pass for dog Roscoe, and his on-off relationship with a pop singer girlfriend.
"In the end it is up to the person concerned to live their life, and if Lewis believes that he is getting the best out of life in the way he lives it on and off the track than that is up to him and no one else," he said.
"At the same time, it would appear that he is not quite as constantly focused on getting the job done as he was perhaps at one time. And when you are competing against the likes of Fernando Alonso and Sebastian Vettel, then you have a problem," added Surtees.
Photo: Twitter Lewis Hamilton
Lewis Hamilton admitted at the Nurburgring recently that he is struggling to cope with his latest split from girlfriend Nicole Scherzinger.
British Sky commentator Martin Brundle insists: "He needs to find a way pretty soon to be able to package that up and be able to manage his private life and make sure he's maximising his racing life."
Brazilian legend Emerson Fittipaldi thinks the second half of 2013 will be crucial to countryman Felipe Massa's future.
Having emerged from his performance slump of 2012, Massa has more recently struggled with a string of crashes and spins that now threaten his place at Ferrari, where he only has a contract until the end of the season.
"I see Massa's future as depending on how well he will go in the second half of this year," Emerson Fittipaldi, a two-time world champion of the 70s, told Brazil's Totalrace.
"He's aggressive, he has talent and is very fast, but sometimes an athlete has phases where he cannot put it all together. But I'm sure he will come out of it," he explained.
Felipe Massa. (Photo: Ferrari)
Fittipaldi revealed that, in the midst of Massa's string of incidents, he managed to speak face-to-face with the 32-year-old Paulista.
"I spoke to him at Silverstone and told him that every athlete goes through difficult times in his career -- and this is not just in motor sport but in every sport. And, suddenly, everything comes back in your favour."
Massa's first chance to turn it around is this weekend in Hungary, the last race before the summer break and factory shutdowns.
"What I would like most of all," said the Ferrari driver, "is to turn things around, because going on holiday with a good result under my belt would really make the difference."
If you want to totally enrage Corvette fans, here's a fun thing to do: argue that the Corvette should be a four-cylinder. Then watch the capillaries burst in their cheeks as red-hot indignation flows like 93-octane through a Holley double-pumper. The notion of neutering the Corvette down to anything less than full V-8 glory is right up there with pawning the Constitution to China or outlawing hamburgers or declaring soccer the national sport. And yet, when you see a new seventh-generation Corvette lope past on the street, chances are it's powered by a four-cylinder -- 3.1 liters, 126 hp, and 221 lb-ft of torque. Oh, great. Texas just seceded.
It's funny, when I break down the Forester's attributes and compare the parts to the competition, the Subaru is mediocre; however, when I look at the whole package I quite like it. The Forester is a great size -- neither too small nor too big -- with a low H-point, but a higher vantage point than a car or wagon. The 2.0-liter turbo is peppy and when put into S# (Sport Sharp) mode, the CVT acts almost like a smooth eight-speed automatic. The problems begin to mount once I stack the Forester up against its competition. The Mazda CX-5 is much more involving to drive and the Ford Escape offers more technology. And with a price tag north of $36,000, the Subaru is hardly a good value.
You wouldn't touch up an Annie Leibovitz photo, so why would you mod a 2013 BMW M5? That question nagged at us as we drove to Oberlin, Ohio, to visit Switzer Performance. The company is best known for its wicked quick GT-Rs, which are still its bread and butter, but owner Tym Switzer wanted to build something with four-doors. His quarry? The new BMW M5. The fact that we were driving an absolutely brilliant, stock 2013 BMW M5 with a six-speed manual transmission made that nagging question resurface continually. Just a voice inside our head, asking, "You wouldn't cut a Harmony Korine film, so why would you mod a BMW M5?"
Enterprise Holdings has named Nate Lattimer its vice president of remarketing sales and operations for its Enterprise, National and Alamo car rental brands, as well as its commercial-truck business and its fleet-management affiliate.
The redesigned 2014 Mazda3 has received an EPA rating of 29 mpg city/41 highway. The rating covers the 2014 Mazda3 sedan with a manual transmission and a 155-hp, 2.0-liter four-cylinder engine.
Gentex, a supplier of rearview mirrors and related parts, today reported that its net income rose 28 percent in the second quarter after a 2 percent drop last quarter. Net income in the quarter rose to $52.
In a sweeping change from the product plan Chrysler Group outlined this year, the lives of the Dodge Avenger, Dodge Grand Caravan and Jeep Wrangler have been extended, The Detroit News reported today.
US-based XL Hybrids is a developer of hybrid-electric powertrain technology for commercial vans and pickup trucks. In this interview, Matthew Beecham talked with the company's VP of business development and co-founder, Justin Ashton about what makes their technology different and where we can see it.
Faurecia, the French supplier controlled by PSA, plans to close eight seat factories, mostly in Europe, as the region's slumping vehicle sales hit car production, sources said.
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