Race track

It feels like we've been waiting forever for the i30 N automatic, but Hyundai is finally ready to unleash the eight-speed dual-clutch auto on the world. With the production car not expected to arrive in Australia until 2021, we put a prototype to the test to see if it will be worth the wait.

Who is the Stig? It is, or certainly was, one of the great mysteries of our time.What we know for sure is that he was, and is, the unidentified, mysterious and enigmatic “tame racing driver” on the global televisual juggernaut that was, and still kind of is, Top Gear, and it was his job to set the hot lap times by which all of the world’s greatest cars were compared on the Top Gear leaderboard. A simple answer to the question would be Ben Collins, but that’s only one answer, because he was also Perry McCarthy, and Michael Schumacher, and Big Stig and Black Stig, among others. There is currently another white-suited Stig whose identity remains a secret.And then there are the things we know about him that make Stig truly mysterious and amusing, like the “fact" that he never blinks, sleeps upside down, and is scared of bells, ducks and boy Scouts. Some also say that he has two sets of knees, webbed buttocks, a digital face and that if you tune your FM radio to 88.4 you can hear his thoughts.All we really know, for sure, is that he's called the Stig.Not since the boys from Kiss finally took off their make-up to reveal their hard-rocked faces, back in 1983, had the planet been so caught up in the race to find out someone’s true identity. So when Ben Collins - a man no one had ever heard of, despite all the speculation about the secret racing driver being someone famous - outed himself as the Stig, publishing a book called The Man in the White Suit in 2010, it was a huge story.The myth and mystique of the Stig had been built up over many years, and magnified by the success of the Top Gear TV show, hosted most famously by Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond, which was, for several years, the most-watched non-fiction television program… in the world (as Clarkson would bray it).The Stig's identity had been exposed once before, in the form of a newspaper scoop, back in 2003, when Top Gear was only really a big deal in the UK, rather than worldwide.Clarkson and the his good friend Andy Wilman, the producer and genius behind the show, came up with the idea for the Stig when they launched the version of Top Gear we know today - featuring a racetrack, a live studio audience and plenty of crazy races and stunts - in 2002. The two of them wanted a professional racing driver to set fast, and comparable, times on the Top Gear test track, in a segment known as Power Laps, but they struggled to find one who was any good at speaking on camera, so they decided to make him a mute in a suit instead. The name “Stig comes from the private school both attended, where any new boy arriving was always called “Stig”. The idea that Stig was some kind of superhuman being was laid down the very first time Clarkson introduced him as an “it” - “nobody knows its name, and we don't wanna know, because it's a racing driver”.The first Stig, who wore a black suit, was Perry McCarthy, a not particularly famous F1 driver, who went to huge amounts of trouble to maintain his anonymity, wearing his helmet and suit at all times and even putting on fake accents when required to speak.The Stig’s other job on the show was to teach celebrities to drive around the Top Gear track at high speed, for another segment called Star in a Reasonably Priced Car, in which celebrities would set a lap time and be compared with other famous people for their driving skills.Doing this while maintaining his anonymity was yet another challenge for McCarthy, until his identity was revealed by a Sunday newspaper article in January 2003. The Black Stig was then killed off by the show in the first episode of Series 3, after driving off the deck of an aircraft carrier into the ocean at high speed. There has always been some debate over whether he was sacked or resigned.The Stig who would go on to genuine global fame was known simply as white Stig and was unveiled in 2003 and, incredibly, his identity remained a tightly held secret for seven years.During that time his role expanded beyond just doing Power Laps and training celebrities to being more of a comic foil and taking part in some of the show’s iconic races and even its Winter Olympics, in which Stig jumped a snowmobile off a ski jump in Norway.While the show’s hosts always talked up the Stig’s super-human driving abilities, the world speculated wildly about who he might actually be. Suggestions included F1 drivers Damon Hill and Michael Schumacher, musician Jay Kay and even US president Barack Obama (a rumour spread by the show itself).The question “Who is the Stig” is sometimes said to be one of the most asked questions on the internet, and T-shirts bearing the words “I am the Stig”, have made the BBC untold millions in merchandise sales.On one occasion, in 2009, the show allowed the Stig to remove his helmet and reveal himself as none other than Michael Schumacher. This was, of course, an elaborate ruse.When Ben Collins decided to write a book outing himself as the Stig (partly because he felt he wasn’t being paid enough and wanted to cash in), a legal battle erupted with the BBC, which makes the show and sells it worldwide, attempting to stop publication of the book, which they said breached his contractual obligations.After the court case, Collins was sacked, the show’s presenters and producers, and many fans around the world, were very angry at him for ruining all the fun and a search immediately began for a new white Stig. This new Stig was found in a manger in Bethlehem during the show’s Middle East special in 2010, it was a baby Stig but it soon grew to full size, and speed, and remains the official Stig on Top Gear to this day, even surviving his show’s most famous co-hosts, Clarkson, Hammond and May, who have all moved on to a new show of their own, The Grand Tour. Top Gear lives on without them, and with the Stig.In case you were wondering, the short-lived Australian Top Gear show’s Stig was also unmasked by the media as Cameron McConville, a V8 super car driver and Bathurst winner. 

Win on Sunday, sell on Monday. It's the foundation on which the Bathurst 1000 was built on. For generations families declared themselves either 'Holden people' or 'Ford people' and it drove their buying habits.

The 2020 Chevrolet Corvette has set a top-secret Nurburgring lap time.

Kumho aims to pitch itself as "the Hyundai/Kia of tyres" - a value offering with comparable tech to the Japanese market leaders.

It's been a long wait, but thanks to a joint model development program with BMW, Toyota has landed a new, fifth-generation version of the Supra sports coupe in Australia. It's bold, fast, and delivers mega bang for your bucks.

You’ve got to try pretty hard to find proper icy driving conditions in Australia, but when you do, you want to have every option at your disposal to give you the best chance of avoiding a collision. Just look at the popularity of inherently all-wheel drive Subarus in the Snowy Mountains area or Tasmania. Audi is another brand synonymous with all-wheel drive, but parent brand Volkswagen is turning all four wheels by an increasing measure, with 44 per cent of passenger car and SUV sales now wearing 4Motion badges. The German brand claims this is double the industry average. It’s not just ice where all-wheel drive can come in handy either. Gravel, wet bitumen and mud are much easier to come by, and often when you’re not planning to. Australian roads are still 56 per cent unsealed according to Volkswagen.It’s easy to say that stability and traction control systems go a long way to playing the same role as all-wheel drive when it comes to accident avoidance, but it’s important to understand that all wheel drive as a proactive means of preserving traction, unlike traction and stability control which are reactive. If you can prevent a problem before it starts, surely that’s better, and the systems actually compliment each other when calibrated to work in harmony. Given the lack of ice in Australia, we’ve just travelled to New Zealand to experience Volkswagen’s 4Motion systems in the most trying of conditions, at work in everything from a small SUV, to a hot hatch, to a full-size commercial van. Volkswagen 4Motion all-wheel drive is currently available in two main types, Haldex and Torsen. The Haldex-type used in all 4Motion models aside from the Touareg and Amarok, and is a part-time system where fluid pressure controls a clutch pack to send power to the rear wheels as needed.The latest fifth generation Haldex-type system is integrated with a whole bunch of drivetrain sensors to help predict traction loss before it happens.The Touareg and automatic Amaroks use a full-time system with a Torsen, or torque sensing, mechanical centre diff that’s essentially reserved for their north-south engine layout. The Torsen system was made famous by various Audi Quattro models, and also sees duty aboard vehicles as diverse as the Toyota LandCruiser Prado.The third 4Motion type currently in use is only found aboard manual versions of the Amarok, and is essentially the traditional mechanical low-range transfer case. This version was not available to test in New Zealand. Volkswagen chose the Southern Hemisphere Proving Ground in Cardrona to highlight 4Motion’s ice capabilities, which is the sort of James Bond mountain-top network of ice circuits you’ve probably dreamed about. It would be ideal to test the same cars back to back in two- and all-wheel drive, but given the ice was hard enough to walk on, two-wheel drive would have been next to useless. So the fact that the 4Motion cars were able to drive at all is amazing. They did have winter tyres fitted, but I really doubt they made any difference on the slick ice. The cars on hand represented a good spectrum of the VW 4Motion range, including the upcoming T-Roc small SUV in 140 TSI guise, the Golf R hot hatch, the Tiguan 162 TSI mid-size SUV, the Passat Alltrack 140 TDI wagon, the Arteon sedan, the new Touareg large SUV in NZ-spec 210 V6S guise, the Amarok Ultimate 580 and would you believe it, the big Crafter van in MWB TDI 410 spec. The two ice courses on offer proved a masterclass in weight transfer and how a bigger car is much harder to turn. And I’m not just talking about the Crafter either, the T-Roc may seem like just a Tiguan with the back of its roof chopped off, but it is so much more nimble than the Tiguan on the ice. The longer wheelbases of the Passat Alltrack and Arteon made them even more difficult to unsettle, but the lower ride height and roofline of the Arteon made it that much easier to change directions.The ice also highlights how each car is set up to suit its intended purpose. The Golf R will let you turn off all its stability control for proper Ken Block-style four-wheel drifting, while the cars aimed at more sedate driving, like the Touareg or professional use, like the Amarok and Crafter will keep some of the stability control on all the time in the interests of outright safety. This also highlights the role of stability control with all-wheel drive. Without stability control, it is a challenge to get a car sideways, and planting your right foot will quickly straighten everything out. But with stability control, it’s almost impossible to induce oversteer, and therefore pretty much idiot proof, so they work really well together.For this integration of systems to keep vehicles as large and rugged as the Amarok and Crafter stable in these conditions is simply amazing.  The benefits of all-wheel drive aren't so obvious on dry bitumen, which is indeed where most of us spend most of our time driving. But to demonstrate how broad the models’ range of capabilities are, Volkswagen gave us access to Highlands Motorsport Park race circuit to experience most of the same cars at the other end of their performance spectrum.We drove the Haldex-equipped Tiguan, Arteon, Golf R and Passat Alltrack back to back with the Torsen-equipped Touareg and Amarok, and couldn’t pick any difference in the systems on the dry bitumen surface. This is going to sound a bit like a VW ad, but our track time did highlight that both 4Motion all-wheel drive systems are beautifully integrated with the stability control, suspension and tyres, with no sense of tugging or unsettling emergency reaction when you reach the limits of adhesion.This includes the Amarok too, which is a big ladder chassis ute with a solid axle and leaf springs on the back, and it maintains stability and predictability. A dual cab ute! On a racetrack!

The time has finally arrived for the Aston Martin Valkyrie to put its money where its aerodynamically-honed mouth is.

Call it what you will; a rite of passage, a bucket list tick off, a mad fang... driving on Germany's Nurburgring Nordschleife.

The annual Sandown 500 is one of Australia's oldest, best-known and loved touring car endurance races. Its origins can be traced to 1964 and it has been held 48 times in the 55 years that have since passed.