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Bob Bondurant at 80

Last fall, as we waited for our turn to partake in a braking drill at Bob Bondurant's driving school in Arizona, a black Cadillac CTS-V coupe came screaming out of the facility's parking area and onto the tarmac where we sat. The driver hustled the big two-door around a tight autocross course at a startling pace, though he likely would have been faster had he avoided some of the smoky, sideways stuff. Our instructor, Johnny O'Connell, grinned, “I guess it's good to be the boss.” Bondurant -- who turns 80 on Saturday -- started racing an Indian motorcycle as a teenager.

IIHS gives Camry, Prius v hybrid poor safety rating

Thirteen mid-sized cars have earned high marks on the insurance industry's newest frontal-crash test, but a pair of Toyota models tested fared worse than the rest. The so-called small overlap test involves crashing the front corner of a car into a barrier at 40 mph. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety devised the test to simulate a collision with a stationary object such as a tree or a utility pole.

Mercedes previews technology before Frankfurt auto show

Future Mercedes will crash less often and use less gas doing so. We got a few insights into exactly how that will happen when we attended the Mercedes preview the night before the Frankfurt auto show. Inside its own enormous hall at the International Auto Austellung, Mercedes previewed gas-saving and accident-avoiding technologies we can expect to see on production cars within the next decade.