2011 Lotus Evora Base Coupe 2-door 3.5l on 2040-cars

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Watch some vintage F1 cars blast up a Japanese mountain road

It's a rare treat to see classic Formula One cars racing anywhere, but watching them on a Japanese mountain road is absolutely sublime. The folks behind Motorhead from Japan took over the toll road's twisting stretch of tarmac to turn this impossible dream into a reality. The unusual opportunity of a closed mountain road would be a waste for only two vehicles, and there were plenty of drivers in amazing machines that wanted to blast up the hill. After the vintage F1 cars got their turn, some drifters in a Nissan GT-R and a Toyota GT86 added some tire smoke to the misty mountain air. A couple more GT-R racecars and some modern sports cars eventually joined them. Before the rain hit, this team had quite a party going on. This video features amazing camera work, but the music unfortunately drowns out the chance to hear these amazing racecars. If watching this leaves you wanting more, Motorhead released a video last year of another group of impressive performance vehicles on the mountain road.

Lotus renames Russell Carr its head of design

There's been a changing of the guard at Lotus recently. The legendary British sports car manufacturer fired its controversial chief executive Dany Bahar and replaced him recently with Jean-Marc Gales. And now it's named a new chief designer. Or rather, renamed its old one to the post.
That designer is the appropriately named Russell Carr, who had previously held the post until Bahar brought in his former compatriot Donato Coco (with whom he had previously served at Ferrari) and charged him with designing a series of ambitious but ill-fated concept cars that debuted at the 2010 Paris Motor Show and were subsequently axed on Bahar's way out. Now Coco has been shown the door as well, effective at the end of this month. In his place, Carr - who has been with Lotus since 1990 - has been given back his old job after having been demoted to playing second fiddle to Coco for five years.
Although both Gales and Coco both served in senior positions at PSA Peugeot Citroën, Gales didn't join the French automaker until 2009 - the same year that Coco joined Lotus, five years after having left PSA to work at Ferrari.

Race Recap: 2013 Bahrain Grand Prix follows the template of this year and last [spoilers]

The sand, the wind, the penalties, the contact and the one crash - all of them collided to make the Bahrain Formula One Grand Prix a surprise affair from day to day and lap to lap. Oh, and did we mention the tires? Pirelli made a last-minute swap after the amusement park ride that the Chinese Grand Prix turned into with the soft compound tire, and brought medium and hard compounds to the desert. That didn't stop things from falling apart for some teams - literally - and that didn't stop the one team that seems to love the hard compound Pirelli tire.