Driving

Honda fanboys need to put down their energy drinks and take a big step back, because all of their bitching about the all-new Honda Civic Si being a disappointment is about as off-base as it gets.

I recently had the opportunity to drive the Range Rover SVR, and it truly is one of the most impressive vehicles I’ve driven this year, offering the full off-road capabilities of a Range Rover, combined with the heart and soul of a sports car.

We’ve seen numerous time-lapse clips of drivers making their way across America, but to be honest, most of the roads here are nothing like the ones you can find on the other side of the pond.

Take a lap of Italy’s renowned 3.6 mile Monza circuit with Ferrari driver Alexander Martin as he prepared for the first race in the European series of the Ferrari Challenge. Driving a Ferrari 458, Martin drives us through the lines, braking points, and gear selections on the track.

Volvo V8 Supercar drivers Scott McLaughlin and Robert Dahlgren, fresh off the Volvo Polestar Racing victory at the Melbourne Grand Prix, flew to the Northern Hemisphere and Volvo’s winter testing grounds to get behind the wheel of a 2015 Volvo S60 Polestar.

While we’ve had quite enough of the snow and ice in the Midwest this winter, we might have a different opinion of it if we got to do what these guys in Sweden did. For a recent challenge, Audi put DTM champions Mattias Ekström and Timo Scheider behind the wheels of a couple of Audi RS 6 Avant quattros, and set them loose on a racetrack carved from a frozen lake.

Stunt driver and Pikes Peak champ Mike Ryan gets behind the wheel of 2500 horsepower super-turbo Freightliner semi to pull off an epic series of stunts. In the clip, Mike takes on driver Daniel Leavitt and numerous other obstacles in a maze of shipping containers at the Long Beach harbor.

Ok, you can’t get there that fast, except in a time-lapse video, which is exactly what we have here. Artist Maurizio Sera took a road trip from Hollywood, California to Washington, D.C. and snapped an image every two seconds for the duration of the drive.

A few years back, the guys from Top Gear named Romania’s Transfăgărășan highway “The Greatest Driving Road in the World.” And while that may have been the case at the time, it seems that despite being a spectacular locale, sections of the road have become a victim of its own success, often too crowded and overrun with spectators.

Rally racing and drifting are clearly horses of a different color, but the two combine brilliantly when there’s enough snow on the ground – along with the right car and driver. Let’s go for a ride with Formula Drift driver Kenneth Moen as he tears up the snow and ice-packed countryside in Norway in his rear wheel-drive 840hp Toyota Supra drift car to show us how it’s done.

The 1956 Maserati A6G-2000 Allemano is a rare bird. Only 21 of the cars were ever built, and the specimen shown in this Jay Leno’s Garage video took the best in class award at Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance in 2011.