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

Mini Cooper Countryman gets New York freshening

The Mini Countryman has undergone a subtle midlife facelift for the New York auto show, four years after it was launched in North America. The lightly reworked range-topping Mini Countryman model is expected to go on sale in July at prices company officials suggest will remain largely unchanged here in the U.S. As this first batch of official photographs reveals, there is very little to distinguish the refreshed Countryman from the existing model.

Sarah McLachlan teases upcoming Audi Super Bowl ad

For all the overt hyper-earnestness Sarah McLachlan ladled upon us during her 1990s heyday, we might not’ve noticed that the Canadian singer-songwriter has a sense of humor. A cameo a couple of years back in the excellent Aimee Mann-as-housekeeper episode of Portlandia suggested McLachlan’s lighter side and now this weirdly-captivating teaser for Audi's 2014 Super Bowl ad sees the Lilith Fair founder futzing around with her own image, imploring that the Doberhuahua is a misunderstood animal that deserves our attention. We assume that the morphologically-perverse Doberman/Chihuahua cross is supposed to suggest that the new A3 is both small and vicious.

One Lap of the Web: Forsberg can't stop, won't stop drifting

-- Jann Mardenborough won the "Nissan GT Academy" back in 2011 and since then has finished on the podium at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, as well as participating in the Infiniti Red Bull Racing driver program with aspirations of Formula One. He explains what it's like to move on from video games -- which he started playing at age 7 -- and transitioning into real sports cars. Mardenborough, it must be said, once drove too fast in British GT to be considered an amateur, but not quick enough to enter the pro class -- and race organizers, who didn't know what else to do, gave him a time penalty so the amateurs could catch up.