1991 Lotus Esprit Turbo Se Coupe 2-door 2.2l on 2040-cars

Auto blog

New Lotus owners ditch ambitious five-year plan

This didn't take long. The new overlords at Lotus have reportedly scrapped the company's five-year plan. DRB-Hicom ditched the turnaround strategy, penned by ousted CEO Danny Bahar, because it believes the market viewed the plan as overly ambitious.
The new product plan will slim the number of new model lines from five to three, and Lotus will likely slash the number planned consultants in favor of relying more heavily on in-house talent. According to The Star, the move should help expedite product development and save cash at the same time.
Even so, nothing is written in stone as of yet. DRB-Hicom says the new plan will take up to a year to finalize. The company has dumped around $242 million into Lotus so far this year, and the struggling automaker may require another $121 million by 2013. Lotus all but stopped production earlier this year during a loan freeze, but the lights came back on in April. The company now produces around 44 vehicles per week.

All 25 James Bond movies ranked only by their cars

There is no shortage of lists ranking the best James Bond movies. Ditto lists about the best or worst James Bond cars. I know, I've written some of them. As such, why not combine the two ideas into one new list that ranks all 25 official James Bond movies based exclusively on their cars, or more accurately their car content. I would then pull from my 25 years of James Bond nerddom plus the excellent "Bond Cars: The Definitive History" and our interview with long-time Bond special effects supervisor Chris Corbould to provide tidbits and factoids about the cars and their roles in the movies. And yes(!), this list now includes "No Time to Die," which impresses by adding plenty of car content to the series. It's now available on Blu-ray and download. To determine the list, I considered the inherent coolness of the cars as well as their importance to Bond, film and car history. I considered their importance to the story as well as the quality/excitement of the chases and scenes they participated in. Finally, I tried my best to divorce the car content from my opinions about the movies in general. That my personal list of best James movies looks nothing like this shows I was at least partially successful.     25. 'Moonraker' There are virtually no cars in "Moonraker." None. Oh, there's a gondola on wheels that makes a pigeon do a double-take, but that's not the same thing as a car. Neither is a golf cart. Or an ambulance. Or a space shuttle.   24. 'From Russia With Love' The literary James Bond mostly drove an ancient Bentley, and "From Russia with Love" is the only film in which it appears. It stays parked and the coolest thing that happens (by 1962 standards) is 007 answers its car phone. Thereafter, we get some old cars (even by 1962 standards) driving around Istanbul and a yellow truck. So yeah. Classic Bond film, a must-watch, just not for its car content.   23. 'Dr. No' History records that the first "Bond car" is the Sunbeam Alpine in "Dr. No." The car itself was literally borrowed from a Miss Jennifer Jackson of 53 Lady Musgrave Road in Jamaica for 10 pounds per day for two days during filming. Also, the stunt where it drove under an excavator blocking the road was entirely conceived because the filmmakers showed up to the road they intended to film on and discovered an excavator blocking the thing. Sadly, those are really the only two things interesting about the Alpine, which is a pretty small and dainty thing by Bond car standards.

European commission investigating F1 finances and anti-competitive accusations

The Kingdom of Formula One reminds us of renaissance Florence - ruled by a singular chieftan behind a mask of representative involvement, rife with spectacularly convoluted machinations, awash in innovations that help define our world and far-flung, vindictive misery. If we found out Bernie Ecclestone's real last name was de Medici, well, it would explain a lot. Now after a bit of back-and-forth, the European Commission (EC) has taken aim at the kingdom, investigating whether F1 is anti-competitive and if the FIA has abused its antitrust agreement. The reason for EC scrutiny is that a British member of the European Parliament who represents an area in southwest England, Anneliese Dodds, has fielded complaints from engineering companies in her constituency that recent moves in F1 have put them out of business. She wrote to the EC to question why the FIA now has a stake in F1 when it signed an agreement in 2001 to be solely a governing body and abdicate any stakeholding in the sport. She also questioned the F1 Strategy Group, a group of the six top teams in F1 that makes decisions about the direction of the sport; she says that the Strategy Group not only appears to be a case of the F1 shirking its rule-making duty, it has resulted in unfair treatment of the small teams that aren't in the group. Dodds has a bit of a point. In 2001, the FIA sold F1's commercial rights to Ecclestone for 100 years for a sum of $313.7 million. That was done to placate European regulators who insisted that "the role of FIA will be limited to that of a sports regulator, with no commercial conflicts of interest." Although the rights are ultimately owned by the FIA and bring in a $10M fee every year from Formula One, those rights bring in $1.6 billion each year to Formula One Management (FOM), the company that owns F1. When Ecclestone was trying to get the new Concorde Agreement signed in 2013 that governs the running of the sport, the FIA wouldn't sign, saying it wanted F1 to share a larger slice of its revenue – the FIA has been losing money for years, see. To the get the FIA to sign, Ecclestone sold it a one-percent stake in F1 for $460,000 and gave the FIA a $5M signing 'bonus;' whenever F1 has its IPO, that stake is estimated to be worth about $120 million - not a bad return. Yet, according to the aforementioned 2001 agreement, the FIA can't have that equity stake.