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2012 Ford Focus ST gets 297bhp

Those clever chaps at SuperChips have given the 2012 Ford Focus ST a bit of an ECU tweak to deliver 297bhp and an extra 85lb/ft of torque. When we reported last week that WTC outfit Arena had in roped Ford’s tuner of choice, Mountune, to give the new Ford Focus a makeover, we were a tad disappointed to discover that they were tweaking the rather journeyman Focus Zetec S. That meant the Zetec S got 200bhp – a handy jump – but we bemoaned the fact that they hadn’t fiddled with the Focus ST to give us a car to fill the void left by the absence of a Focus RS in the current iteration of the Focus.

Porsche Panamera S E-Hybrid qualifies for £5,000 taxpayer incentive

Porsche Panamera S E-Hybrid qualifies for £5,000 taxpayer incentive When Porsche revealed the first facelift for the Panamera back in April, they also revealed the Panamera S E-Hybrid, a plug-in hybrid with the power of a V8 and the fuel consumption of a city car. It’s a brilliant demonstration of how car makers have worked their way round the daft CO2 tax regimes designed to strangle the marketplace for powerful, luxury cars by using technology to attain far lower official emissions figures than ever. In the case of the Panamera S E-Hybrid that means a plug-in hybrid with a 94bhp electric motor to boost the power from the 3.0 litre V6 to 410bhp.

Solar car built by Cambridge University crashes

The annual World Solar Challenge is taking place right now. 38 teams from all round the globe are racing 3,000km (1,864 miles) across Australia using energy from the sun alone. Unfortunately, the planned entry from the UK’s very own Cambridge University isn’t amongst them – because five days before the start the above happened.