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Budget 2014: Fuel Duty freeze, Classic Car VED & £200 million for potholes

No fuel tax increase, and 40 year rolling road tax exemption for cars. Most of the 2014 Budget headlines are about cuts in cost for beer and bingo and help for pension prisoners held to ransom by annuity regulations. But in amongst there’s some good news for motorists; nothing that will change your world, but welcome nonetheless.

Watch the Audi Sport Quattro tear up the back roads

Audi revealed its 700-hp Sport Quattro concept at the Frankfurt motor show in September; the car pays homage to the classic rallying Sport Quattro from the 1980s. On Monday, the automaker uploaded a video of the upcoming vehicle to celebrate 100,000 Facebook likes on its German social-networking page. The video shows the Quattro whipping and gripping through a forest/mountain stage.

New Hyundai Test Centre at the Nurburgring revealed

Hyundai’s new test centre at the Nurburgring If anyone had said, just a few years ago, that Hyundai would develop a test centre at the Nurburgring to help shake-down their cars, they’d have been laughed at. But Hyundai – and Kia – have come so far in recent years that it makes absolute sense for them to develop a full-time testing facility at the Nurburgring to test their cars for the road, along with just about every other car maker of note. James May may object to the Nurburgring factor in the suspension set-ups of many road cars (and we do have some sympathy for his point of view), but the sometimes extreme nature of the Nurburgring’s surfaces – and its endless twists and turns, uphill and down – do offer car makers an easily accessible place to test cars in the (almost) real world.