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

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.

Aston Martin adds a V8 Vantage S

Slotted between Aston Martin's vaunted V8 Vantage and the venerable V12 variant comes a tweener model that promises to be anything but vague: Aston is adding the S variant, with more power and an upgraded transmission. The Vantage S draws power from the 4.7-liter V8 making 430 hp, 10 hp more than in the base Vantage. The S also adds 15 lb-ft of torque, boosting total twist to 361 lb-ft.

Enormous Jaguar sculpture graces Goodwood

A 91-foot sculpture of the Jaguar E-type serves as a striking centerpiece for this year's Goodwood Festival of Speed in the United Kingdom. It took 10 days for a bridge-building company to install the 330,690-pound statue in front of the Goodwood House. That is the weight equivalent of 122 life-size copies of the Series 1 E-type.