Ricks Motorsport Electric Stator 21-816 on 2040-parts.com

Ultimate Street Car Association opens registration for 2014 season

Back in November, the Ultimate Street Car Association was announced at SEMA as a national race series to oversee the Optima Ultimate Street Car Invitational and Qualifying. Registration is now open for the first event at Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca. Those of you who picked up any tuner mag from the last six years will remember the Optima Ultimate Street Car Invitational, which played host to some incredible cars -- and demonstrated an overwhelming bias toward Camaros, it turns out.

Get Your Cash Ready For Nissan’s New Qashqai

FOLLOWING on from its recent glitzy London unveiling, Nissan has now released pricing and specification details for its hotly anticipated latest generation Qashqai. When the mid-size SUV goes on sale in January prices will start from £17,595 and rise to £27,845, and buyers will have a choice of four trim levels. Nissan’s engineers have also done much to improve the car’s green credentials, with the result being an engine line-up spanning the 99g/km to 132g/km CO2 range.

Early cars, fashion on display at the Petersen

Automotivated, a new exhibit at the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles, traces the evolution of clothes worn in cars--from the bulky circus-tent stuff people had to wear to keep from freezing to death in the jangly, open-topped conveyances of 100 years ago, up to the height of the European Concours in the 1920s and '30s, when what you and your date wore was just as important to winning best of show as the styling of your Delahaye/Delage/Talbot Lago. “In the earliest days of the automobile, you were sitting on the car, you weren't sitting in it,” said Leslie Kendall, curator at the Petersen. So the first section of the exhibit shows people (mannequins dressed as people) in heavy, practical overcoats, scarves and goggles.