1950s Plymouth Hub Caps on 2040-parts.com

Top Gear’s Jeremy Clarkson & Richard Hammond BANNED from driving

Top Gear’s Jeremy Clarkson & Richard Hammond (pictured) BANNED from driving in France It’s an astonishing claim from a man with a lead right foot, but Jeremy Clarkson claims to have never been nicked for speeding. But that claim is something Jeremy will have to qualify by location in future after the French ‘Rozzers’ nicked both Clarkson and Richard Hammond on a Top Gear drive in France last month. How we all managed to miss this little snippet of news when Jeremy revealed it in his column in The Sun last month, we don’t know.

Production output decline slowing

By Alex Michaelides Motor Industry 24 July 2009 12:09 It appears there may be some light at the end of the tunnel for ailing car manufacturers as the most recent vehicle production figures are released. The data, presented by the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT), show that, while production levels are still on the decline, the pace at which they are declining is slowing. Car production figures for June 2009 are still down by 30.2% compared with this time last year, however this is an improvement on the 50.2% by which production is down so far this year.

2012 Ford Focus ST gets 297bhp

Those clever chaps at SuperChips have given the 2012 Ford Focus ST a bit of an ECU tweak to deliver 297bhp and an extra 85lb/ft of torque. When we reported last week that WTC outfit Arena had in roped Ford’s tuner of choice, Mountune, to give the new Ford Focus a makeover, we were a tad disappointed to discover that they were tweaking the rather journeyman Focus Zetec S. That meant the Zetec S got 200bhp – a handy jump – but we bemoaned the fact that they hadn’t fiddled with the Focus ST to give us a car to fill the void left by the absence of a Focus RS in the current iteration of the Focus.