Danica Patrick won her first Indy race this past weekend at Twin Ring Motegi. She overtook two time Indy 500 winner Helio Castroneves in the final laps of the race. Motegi is considered a difficult track because of its asymmetrical oval shape. Corners 1 and 2 are wide open, but 3 and 4 requires a down shift of 1 or 2 gears. The tighter turns also make it more taxing on the cars and drivers.

It’s even more breathtaking in HD. This is the intro for the European version. The US version was just released today and I don’t know how to capture, but I’m sure they’ll pop up soon.

When I heard the award of “Green Car of the Year”, this wasn’t what I had in mind. So why did Green Car Journal give the award to the Tahoe Hybrid? Well, they say that it’s deserving because the Tahoe Hybrid gets “50 percent better fuel economy than a Tahoe powered by a standard 5.3-liter V-8″ and it has “a fuel efficiency improvement of up to 30 percent compared to similar vehicles equipped with a standard V-8″. That all sounds well and good on paper. But 50% improvement upon an embarrassing 14mpg is little to boast about.

Notice that Honda and Toyota are the only big stand-alone Japanese automakers. While Toyota branches out to other subsidiary brands, Honda pretty much stays to itself. Mitsubishi, Mazda and Nissan all have large portions of their shares owned by another entity.

I went to the Austin Auto Show with a couple of friends. I haven’t gone since the one a few years ago and this time there were noticeably more cars. We went about an hour and a half before closing time so there were fewer people to get in the way of my picture taking, but having people around popular cars like the Carrera S is unavoidable.

Go to flicker and check out all the pictures I took

The car to play KITT in the new NBC Knight Rider event has been confirmed to be the new Shelby Mustang GT500KR. Follow the link for real pictures of the new KITT.

… and all his potted plants are called Steve.
All we know is, he’s called the Stig.

On the next episode of Top Gear: rookie F1 prodigy, Lewis Hamilton, takes on the Stig. Hit the jump for a couple of videos honoring the Stig and a list of Stig intros.

I’ve missed it the last two year, but this time it’s not gonna slip by. Come and check out all the new 2008 models from Porsche, BMW, Infiniti, Nissan, Lexus, Toyota, Mazda, Acura, Honda, Lotus, Jaguar, and many more.

December 7-9, 2007
$5 Admission
Check their site for details
Photos from last year’s show

A nice run-through of the new Nissan GT-R at the LA Auto Show. The guy talks about the in dash screen using the UI created by Polyphony Digital (about 2 minutes in), which is also the company behind the exalted Gran Turismo series.

A guy’s encounter with the infamous clothier, he seem like a pretty nice guy.