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Notes from Day One of the 2013 Twelve Hours of Sebring

The 61st edition of The 12 Hours of Sebring is on, and Autoblog has come to central Florida with Audi to feast on jumbo boiled peanuts, pickled eggs and the final race for the LMP1 class at the oldest road course in North America. As Audi has been doing for more than a decade now, it's brought its latest endurance race car, the 2013-spec R18 etron quattro, to Sebring to begin testing for Le Mans.
Why the commitment to Sebring? Audi Sport executives have repeatedly called Sebring "punishing," "extremely demanding" and "one of the toughest tracks in the world." It is a 3.47-mile circuit that, in places, feels like it was made from the leftover bits of other circuits. Doing the 12-hour distance in Florida is thought to be a good start on lasting the 24-hour distance in France, and we can't think it a coincidence that Audi has won ten times here in the last 13 years and 11 times in Gaul.
Where there's rhyme - and victory - there is reason. We think we found a few of them on our first day where preparation, technology, fastidious attention to detail and sweat fit right in with swamp cabbage...

Audi 4.2-liter V8 to live again in next-gen R8

Fellow auto enthusiasts, it looks like the car gods have smiled upon us. Word is that Audi's stupendous 4.2-liter V8 will once again be available in the next-generation R8. Rumors pegged the trusty 4.2 as a dead engine revving, thanks to Audi's newer 4.0-liter twin-turbocharged V8 found in models like the S6 and S7.
We expected the 4.0-liter to be the go-to engine in the next R8, but according to Car and Driver, there have been some issues cooling the force-induced mill in the mid-engine R8. The issues are so severe, in fact, that the 4.2 is going to be retained in the car's second generation.
It's more than just practical matters like cooling that are keeping the R8 from going turbocharged. C/D reports that even with the current state of forced induction, a turbocharged R8's throttle response and its resultant exhaust note would suffer too much to be feasible.

BMW says SUVs killed the sports car market

In many ways, we're living in a golden age of automotive performance. After all, it's possible to show up at a Dodge dealer, hand over about $60,000 and storm away with a 707-horsepower Challenger Hellcat. Or for those who prefer a touch more luxury, the BMW M4, Mercedes-AMG C63 and latest Cadillac ATS-V offer between 425 and 503 horsepower, depending on your pick, with a bit more poshness. However, none of these powerful vehicles fit the classic definition of a two-place, droptop sports car, and according BMW head of sales Ian Robertson, that's because the segment is very much in the doldrums.
According to Robertson, two factors seriously wounded the classic sports car market. First, the global economic crisis of a few years ago put a serious hurt on sales, according to Bloomberg. Further worsening the situation, the boom in popularity of luxury SUVs and crossovers in the past few years hasn't allowed for much recovery. Even car-hungry China hasn't helped much because of the smog in many cities and preference among some of the very rich there to be chauffeured.
Combined, Audi TT, BMW Z4 and Mercedes-Benz SLK sales peaked around 114,000 units a year in 2007, but they are only expected to reach 72,000 annually by the end of the decade. Robertson is pretty pessimistic about the market's comeback too. "Post-2008, it just collapsed. I'm not so sure it'll ever fully recover," he said to Bloomberg.