Category: News

It’s hard to believe it is now over a year since Paul Newman left us. If you’re a fan then you may enjoy reading this new biography on his racing career, Winning: The Racing Life Of Paul Newman.

Put together by Motor Trend executive editor Matt Stone and co-authors Preston Lerner and Mario Andretti the book takes you through pretty much all facets of his motoring and racing passion. There’s more info available at Jalopnik, including some very cool historical pictures.

Winning: The Racing Life Of Paul Newman is available now from Motorbooks.com.

A young family in the Sydney suburb of Parklea were lucky to escape uninjured after this freak accident. The incident happened at 2am this morning and Police understand the car lost control, ran over a median strip, then launched into the air over nearby landscaping before crashing into the roof of the home on Guernsey Way, which backs onto busy Sunnyholt Road.

Two male occupants, aged 24 and 21, were initially trapped inside the Holden Commodore before being rescued by emergency services. The residents of the home, two adults and three month old baby were uninjured.

Given the state and position of the resting vehicle it is unsurprising that Police are speculating that high speed was a major contributor to the accident.

Blacktown Police Local Area Command Inspector Adrian Grech said, “I have been to some pretty bad accidents, but this is genuinely a different and strange accident. To have an accident which starts 90m away and actually gets a vehicle airborne, there would have been substantial speed involved.”

[Source: Daily Telegraph]

BMW tv have just released a new promo for their M5 Ringtaxi. This is the cab where you pay your cash, strap yourself in and get a very, very wild ride around one of the world’s best stretches of tarmac—the Nürburgring Nordschleife.

This is the gig that helped launch Sabine Schmitz into the blogosphere as probably the world’s most famous female cabby. For a closer look from inside the cabin, take a look at the previous AUSringers post from June this year. For more information on how to get yourself a seat in this wild ride, take a look at the BMW website.

You may remember news from last month about the Radical SR8LM giving Nissan and all the other wannabes a two finger salute when it set a new lap record for a “road car” at the Nürburgring Nordschleife. Now, video of that blistering 6 minute 48 second lap is available for your viewing pleasure.

Check out AUSringers for more pics and to watch the lap in full.

Gordon Murray, designer of the legendary McLaren F1, is up to his old tricks again with his new T.25 city car. As shown above, the seating plan for his T.25very closely mimics that of the F1 supercar. Although, early sketch plans of the T.25 show this wasn’t always the case. Now, though, the “iCentre” layout is the way forward.

Each of the six seating and packaging layouts shown are able to be configured within 30 seconds. In terms of human cargo, the T.25 has been designed to accommodate up three adults, or in geek speak, up to three “95th percentile occupants”. Marjorie Dawes‘ Fat Fighters need not apply, then.

At just 2.4m long and 1.3m wide the T.25 clearly hopes to knock the Smart Fortwo off its perch as the nifty little shopping trolley that could. Indeed, Murray has previously declared his hand saying the T.25 will be “funky, iconic and fun to drive”.

Speaking of shopping trolleys, when in single person mode Gordon Murray Design say the T.25 will be able cram in up to six trolley’s worth of goodies. Or to quantify that, there is 750 litres of cargo space.

GMD won’t build the car itself, rather it has developed an “iStream” manufacturing process and the company plans to license production to a third party. The T.25 is scheduled for launch in 2012.

AUSmotive made its twitter debut today. Make sure you check it out for the latest AUSmotive and AUSringers updates, plus random motoring musings – www.twitter.com/AUSmotive