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Motor Trend holds World's Greatest Drag Race for the third time

As part of Motor Trend's Best Driver's Car competition, the buff book has held its third iteration of the World's Greatest Drag Race. With an airfield and a dozen of the world's finest performance cars at its disposal (oh, and a helicopter), the MT team did what any good group of enthusiasts would do, and tried to figure what car could cover a quarter mile the quickest. World's greatest drag race, indeed.
The contestants, as MT points out, cover a huge variety of engine types, drivelines, aspiration types and body styles, making for a genuinely varied and interesting field of competitors. Here's the full list of cars taking part.
Aston Martin Vanquish

Volkswagen Group's Vision 2030 strategy could bring revolution to the brands

One would expect a corporate plan called "Vision 2030," looking 11 years ahead through wildly tumultuous times, to involve great change and numerous forks in numerous roads. According to Automobile's breakdown of Volkswagen's path forward, though, the plans contain some lurid potential surprises. The ultimate aim is return on investment, and that means ruthless reorganization of a conglomerate with eight primary car brands, two car sub-brands, and Ducati motorcycles. The first two Vision 2030 cornerstones Automobile mentions are near boilerplate: Production network restructuring, and "streamlining of key technologies." The latter two are the ones that could upend what we know as the Volkswagen Group: focusing on the Group's core brands — meaning Audi, Porsche, and VW — and transitioning to EVs, autonomy, and other mobility solutions. Based on the report, a quote from Audi's CTO referring to the Audi brand could cover how the Group plans to handle all of its brands: "We need to find a sustainable solution for the indefinite transition period until EVs eventually take over." The boutique divisions adjacent to carmaking, Ducati and Italdesign, look likely to be spun off. For the halo car brands — Bentley, Bugatti, and Lamborghini — apparently shareholders want double-digit returns on investment, and the trio doesn't have long to hit the target. One eyebrow raiser is when the report states, "Bugatti is tipped to be gifted to [ex-VW Group Chairman] Ferdinand Piech." Piech fathered the Veyron during his tenure at VW, and it was thought he commissioned the La Voiture Noire, but he's lately stepped so far back from VW that he sold all his shares in the Group. Automobile quoted a senior strategist as saying of money-losing Bentley, "Why invest on a backward-looking enterprise when you can support a trendsetter? A proud history and excellent craftmanship alone don't cut it anymore." We guess no one at Ferrari, McLaren, or even Porsche got that memo. Bentley is reportedly close to being put in time out, and if brand CEO Adrian Hallmark can't right the Crewe ship, the hush-hush Plan B is to prop the Flying B up enough to lure a buyer. As for Lamborghini, caught between two masters at Audi and Porsche, even record-breaking numbers at the Italian supercar maker barely staved off sacrilege. It's said that VW brand CEO Herbert Diess considered putting a 5.0-liter Porsche V8 into the Aventador successor.

1964 Porsche 356 Cabriolet Emory Outlaw First Drive

The black lacquer badge affixed to this 1964 Porsche 356 Cabriolet has two words on it: "356 Outlaws." When it was first produced by a jeweler in the 1980s for the Emory family, the word "Outlaw" was a term of pride only meaningful to the father-and-son team that were building these custom Porsches. Outside of their Orange County garage, the Outlaws attracted less respect than outlaw humans. In the past few years, Magnus Walker has helped Outlaws blow up outside nontraditional Porsche circles. Collector car brokers now happily promote Outlaw builds, and online how-to guides will teach you to create your own. Despite their newfound recognition, Outlaws began with Gary and Rod Emory and continue with Emory Motorsports. We didn't drive the black 1958 Porsche 356 Emory Special and silver 1959 356 Outlaw in the gallery – completed cars move through the shop so quickly that we couldn't organize a shoot and a drive on the same day. We drove a 1964 356C Outlaw that gets by with leather hood straps, deleted bumper guards, Raydot fender mirrors, and a drilled fuel filler cap poking through the hood. The interior is dressed in red leather in sanguine contrast to the beige German square weave carpet along the bulkheads. The three gauges are taken from a 904, the racer Porsche developed to succeed the 718. Emory's tuning lineage is as old as the cars he restores. Emory's tuning lineage is as old as the cars he restores. His grandfather Neil ran Valley Custom Shop in Burbank from 1948 to 1962, channeling and sectioning the slab-sided bodywork of '40s and '50s domestic sedans in ways that OEM designers would later adopt. Neil's tenure also included building the body for the SoCal Streamliner in 1950, the first hot rod to hit 200 miles per hour at the Bonneville Salt Flats. When Chick Iverson opened a Porsche dealership in Newport Beach he asked Neil to run the body shop. Neil's son Gary would become the parts manager. When he saw inventory being thrown out for lack of space, Gary then opened his own Porsche parts operation. Gary's son Rod started playing in the warehouse from the age of six, mixing and matching pieces to make go-karts and help build the Porsches Gary would sketch. Rod began his first restoration, a 1953 Porsche 356, at 14 years old. He spent two years on it, then went vintage racing. This wasn't a concours build – growing up in a parts shop, Rod had no qualms about using whatever suited his purpose and vision.