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

The Super Bowl's most refreshingly honest car ad

In 2000's High Fidelity, hapless record-store owner Rob Gordon -- played memorably by John Cusack -- opines, “What really matters is what you like, not what you are like." In the year 2000, I was 24 years old and was working on a punk rock magazine, an environment not dissimilar from Gordon's Championship Vinyl. The line made a lot of sense to me; it was a quiet, back-of-the-head maxim that informed much of what my friends and I did and how we saw people. It's a shallow way of looking at things, but for those of us who came of age amid the us-vs.-them liberal identity politics of the '90s, awash as we were in Public Enemy's political consciousness, the post-AIDS gay-rights push and the loud-fast feminism of the riot grrrl movement, there was a good chance that if somebody liked the things you liked, they thought like you and they were good.

Alfa Romeo 4C on track with Giancarlo Fisichella (video)

Giancalrlo Fisichella takes the Alfa 4C round Balocco (pictured) The Alfa Romeo 4C – Alfa’s baby supercar – is due on sale next month following its UK dynamic debut at Goodwood, so to get a bit of adrenaline flowing in the veins of potential buyers, Fiat grabbed Ferrari test driver Giancarlo Fisichella and stuck him behind the wheel of the 4C to play at the Balocco test track, Fiat’s proving ground. And we have to say, the 4C doesn’t just look good, it sounds great and looks to be as light and nimble as expected. In many ways, the Alfa 4C is an Italian take on the Lotus Elise, but it manages to do it with a huge dose of Alfa flair, both in its design and its execution.

ICEM Style creative design software launched

ICEM Ltd, known for its ICEM Surf Class A surface development software, has launched ICEM Style, a new software product developed specifically for use by creative designers in the transportation design and industrial design industry. The launch presentation highlighted the integrated workflow from concept development in ICEM Style, through to refinement in ICEM Surf, enabling designers and engineers to share the same model data throughout the design process. According to ICEM, it is now possible, for the first time in a concept design tool, to design in a photo-realistic modelling environment, without using third-party visualisation products, or to wait for a static rendering to be generated.