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Hyundai i20 WRC starts testing

Hyundai has been busy plotting its return to WRC Rallying for 2014, but so far it’s all been about behind the scenes work on building an i20 capable of taking on the rally world and gathering a team that can make it a success. But with the first official outing for the i20 due in January 2014 in Monte Carlo, Hyundai has finally taken their i20 WRC out in the world to give it some proper testing outside the workshop, Hyundai have been playing on a private testing ground to check out the i20′s systems, followed by a comprehensive testing session to work on different setups and gather data, with a major focus on the i20′s 1.6 litre turbo which, until now, hadn’t been run in the car outside Hyundai’s R&D. Hyundai say all went well over the 55okm of testing across three days, a prelude to a full programme of testing in the coming months as Hyundai get closer to their official debut.

New Lotus Esprit revealed

The New Lotus Esprit We’ve been banging on that the new Lotus Esprit would turn up at the Paris Motor Show forever. It seemed the most logical step, but then Lotus went and shoved a spanner in the works a couple of weeks back by revealing the new Lotus Elite. So we thought that would be the powder spent for Paris.

Video: Jaguar's Julian Thomson on the importance of design values

Jaguar's Head of Advanced Design, Julian Thomson, appeared at this month's PSFK Conference in London giving a talk on design values. Thomson's talk, ‘Concepting Dreams, Making Reality Happen', dealt with questions of creating a design story as well as how Jaguar uses the value of its heritage while keeping things original and new. Thomson – the man behind the 2010 C-X75 and the recently revealed F-Type – said, "You can't get a good design story if you don't look at your heritage, where you came from, where your values came from." He went on to discuss the ‘sad years of Jaguar', from around 1968 to 2004 where Jaguar was too timid to develop and "essentially made the same-looking car." He put this down to a reluctance on Jaguar's part to move too far away from its successful models and, quite interestingly, because "not only did we start doing market research, we started asking Americans what they wanted." Watch the full video on the left.