Arias Pistons 12.5:1 Compression 82mm Bore Honda B-series on 2040-parts.com

Mini John Cooper Works WRC: the roll cage in detail

Mini claims it’s created the safest WRC car ever – with a little help from Prodrive.  And to prove the point, they’ve opened up the Mini Countryman WRC’s innards and spilled some of the secrets of its rollcage. The Countryman racer is stripped and fitted with a new type of rollcage designed by Prodrive. Its beams curve outwards and the Banbury engineers say it has been designed to withstand impacts much better than the straight crossbeams used in most WRC cars.

Time-capsule DeLorean with only 309 miles emerges

We see time-capsule cars on a pretty regular basis, but they seldom happen to be proper time-travel cars as well. Of course we're talking about the DeLorean DMC-12, an automobile whose several thousand examples were believed to be largely accounted for. So imagine our surprise when we heard about a DeLorean recently found in a storage bay with delivery mileage on the clock and a mild layer of dust on its stainless-steel body.

Volkswagen XL1 ‘Super’ Hybrid heading for the UK – costs £98,515

The Volkswagen XL1 ‘Super’ Hybrid (pictured) costs £98,515 in the UK VW announced a while back that their ‘super’ hybrid XL1 was going in to limited production, although they didn’t confirm a price for being super green. But now the first XL1 has already been delivered in Germany, Volkswagen has confirmed a chunk of the 200 run – thought to be between 20 and 30 cars – will be making their way to the UK and will cost £98,515. For almost £100k, there are plenty of options bordering on supercar, but the XL1 is ‘super’ in a different way, and if extreme economy and a design that looks like something imagined as a car of the future in Hollywood Sci-Fi films of the 1930s floats your boat, the XL1 could be the car you’re looking for.