Last month we showed you a video chronicling Jeff Zwart's 1,132 mile road trip from Southern California to Pikes Peak in his quest to break his own 2WD Time Attack record in a stock Porsche 911 GT2 RS. The second video, showing Zwart's run up the mountain, has now been released. The footage of the attempt is excellent.
While Zwart didn't manage to come up home with the title, it would be difficult to not consider his drive a success. He smashed the Pikes Peak record for stock production cars, and his time of 11:07.869 bested his previous attempt in a Porsche 911 GT3 Cup race car by 24 seconds. Only Zwart's good friend Rod Millen was able to top him on the day, albeit by a mere three seconds and with a fully-prepped race car producing over 700 horsepower.
You can watch Zwart drive his 911 GT2 RS up Pikes Peak in the video after the jump.
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It had be all too easy to forget about the Punto. But Fiat offers more than one model, and so does its tuning division, Abarth.
The Grande Punto has been around since 2005, and was updated in 2009 as the Punto Evo, something of a stopgap until its eventual replacement comes along. Abarth offers its own version of the Punto Evo for those who find the 500 either too small or too cutesy, and has now rolled out an even more powerful version of the Italian performance hatch.
Instead of the 165-horsepower turbo four in the existing Abarth Punto Evo, the EsseEsse version gets a more promising 180, thanks to revised ECU programming and bigger turbocharger. The brakes are also upgraded, as are the springs, dampers and wheel/tire package. The result is a 7.5-second sprint to 62 and a 134 mph top end.
Best of all, the modifications in the EsseEsse kit can be ordered and installed from the dealership up to a year after the car was purchased. Although the model was unveiled nearly a year ago in Paris, it's only just hitting the market. Read more about it in the press release after the jump.
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Lotus has a lot planned for the coming years, but before its next generation sports cars comes along, rumor has it some significant revisions are planned for the current Evora.
Among the 147 upgrades reportedly planned are a revised interior, a new exhaust and a sharper transmission. Convertible and plug-in hybrid versions are also reportedly under consideration, but Lotus is said to have another trick up its sleeve.
Taking a page out of the "more power, less weight" playbook used on the likes of the Ferrari 430 Scuderia, Lamborghini Gallardo Superleggera and Porsche 911 GT3 RS, a hardcore Evora GT4 or Type 124 racer for the road could be in the cards. In the process, the 345-horsepower supercharged V6 in the current Evora S could get tuned up to 400 hp. Those are some changes we could get behind.
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