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Honda to field this awesome Civic Tourer wagon in BTCC next season

We all know that the letters BTCC stand for British Touring Car Championship. But one of those Cs might as well stand for Civic, so dominant has the Honda team been in one of the most competitive tin-top racing series in the world. Honda has taken the manufacturers' and teams' titles in the BTCC for the past four years running, and the championship-winning drivers for the past three years have claimed the prize behind the wheel of a Civic. While that might have proven enough for any other manufacturer, Honda is returning again next season to defend its dominant position, and has just revealed the new car with which it intends to do so.
Next year Honda will be back on the grid with another Civic, only this time it's based on the new Euro-spec Civic Tourer. That will make Honda the only team in the BTCC (and one of only a few worldwide) fielding a wagon-based racing car. In announcing the new BTCC-spec Civic Tourer, the Honda Yuasa Racing team only released this one photo and didn't reveal much in the way of details, but team manager Peter Crolla indicated that "the weight, wheelbase, layout and suspension remain the same" as the hatchback which it will replace, only with a longer roofline.
Testing of the new touring wagon will commence in January before returning champions Gordon Shedden and Matt Neal will pilot the new Civic Tourer in the season opener at Brands Hatch in the UK in late March. It remains to be seen what car Andrew Jordan (who took the title this year in another Civic with the Pirtek Racing team) will be driving next season, but in the meantime, you can check out the full press release below for more.

2015 Honda CR-V

Predicting the future direction of Honda's compact CR-V would have been difficult based on the Civic-derived model that first arrived on our shores for the 1997 model year. The newcomer, selling alongside the body-on-frame Passport (a hastily rebadged Isuzu Rodeo), was a cute compact crossover with four doors and an awkward curb-side hinged tailgate thanks to its Japanese home-market design. The five-passenger CUV offered generous interior room, but its wheezy 2.0-liter four-cylinder, with an output of just 126 horsepower and 133 pound-feet of torque, required 11.7 seconds to bring the 3,153-pound vehicle to 60 miles per hour. Rear drum brakes didn't help much in the stopping department, but Honda offered safety-minded consumers optional anti-lock brakes on the premium trim.
Nearly two decades after its introduction, the CR-V has matured in spectacular manner. The refreshed 2015 Honda CR-V, now in its fourth generation, is dimensionally within two inches of its ancestor in overall length and nearly identical in height and wheelbase. That consistency of dimension is impressive in this age of size and segment creep, and it stands as a testament to how 'right' Honda engineers got the model's original packaging. Of course, the CR-V hasn't stood still - nearly everything else about the best-selling compact CUV has improved in leaps and bounds.
But Honda is not the only player in this hotly contested segment today, so the automaker has taken the unusual step of updating its fourth-generation model just a few years after its introduction in an effort to keep it seated on the podium. To learn more about the automaker's improvements, and form our own impressions, we spent a day driving the CR-V in sunny Southern California.

McLaren working on P15 supercar to slot between 650S and P1

McLaren has been busy these past few years. It launched the MP4-12C in 2011, the 12C Spider in 2012, the P1 in 2013 and (most recently) the 650S in 2014. But it's not about to stop there. It's got an "entry-level" model in the works, set to take on the Porsche 911, and - according to information reported by Car and Driver and confirmed by McLaren in correspondence with Autoblog - a new flagship model, too.
The project is internally codenamed P15, and it calls for a new flagship that will cap the company's lineup once the P1 finishes its limited production run, but carry a price tag in the neighborhood of $500k to slot in between the P1 and the new 650S.
Just how, you wonder, can McLaren possibly develop another supercar each year? Simple: underneath, they're all essentially the same. (Only we're sure it's anything but simple.) That is to say they're all based on the same carbon monocoque structure and powered by the same 3.8-liter twin-turbo V8 mated to a seven-speed dual-clutch transmission driving the rear wheels. What differentiates them is what the engineers in Woking build around that monocoque and how they tune the engine: +/- 600 horsepower in the 12C (depending on the year it was built), 640 hp in the 650S, or 727 hp in the P1 (with another 177 from the electric assist). The 911 fighter would likely develop in the 500hp range, and the P15 will probably land in the upper 600 (or lower 700) range.