MINI Countryman JCW revealed

MINI Countryman John Cooper Works is official The MINI Countryman John Cooper Works has been revealed ahead of its debut at the Geneva Motor Show in March. We had MINI teasing with a glimpse of the MINI Countryman JCW playing in the snow back in December, with a few bits of camouflage tape obscuring the money shot. And now we learn that just about all the camouflage was covering were the thumping great stripes the Countryman JCW sports.

Glickenhaus may enter LMP1 class at Le Mans

James Glickenhaus, the man who brought you the Ferrari P4/5, is working on a new car to be used in top-level endurance racing such as the 24 Hours of Le Mans, possibly as early as 2014. Recently, sketches of the car—currently called the P4/5 Competizione LMP—have made their way to the Internet. Glickenhaus made his money in the stock market and film industry, but he became a household name among car guys when he commissioned the one-of-one Ferrari P4/5 Pininfarina.

Toyota to unlock secrets of black-box recorders

Reacting to criticism that data from black-box crash recorders in its vehicles can be accessed only by the company, Toyota Motor Corp. is moving to ship hundreds of data-decoding machines to the United States and make them commercially available to help diagnose vehicle problems. The devices, known as event data recorders, are similar to the black boxes on airliners and record information such as vehicle and engine speed in the seconds before a crash.