Car lovers from across the globe descended on the grounds of Goodwood House, West Sussex, England for the 2015 Goodwood Festival of Speed an annual hill climb featuring historic motor racing vehicles, including Aston Martin, Bentley, McLaren, Ford, and many others.
The Moving Motor Show formally launched the Goodwood Festival of Speed on Thursday. On Friday, professional drivers and racers will try to break the hill climb record set by Nick Heidfeld in 1999 at 41.6 records.
More than a hundred thousand car enthusiasts and fans will have the opportunity to see new vehicle debuts, including the new Ford GT, Focus RS, Nissan Juke-R 2.0, Peugeot 308 GTi, Mazda MX-5, Aston Martin Vantage GT12, Lexus GS F, McLaren 570S Coupe, McLaren's 986bhp P1 GTR, Volkswagen's Sport Coupe GTE, XL Sport and Golf R400, and hundreds of other cars, reports Autocar.
Lotus has unveiled its new 3-Eleven, the super-fast track-day sports car is understood to be capable of lapping the Nürburgring in just over seven minutes - just a few seconds slower than the McLaren P1, Porsche 918 Spyder and LaFerrari, at the Festival. The Lotus 3-Eleven is priced at $157,363 per unit.
Lotus CEO Jean-Marc Gales literally drove this box-fresh car straight out of the box at 10:30am Friday- to the glee of the packed FoS audience. Jean-Marc told the crowd, 'There is no better place than Goodwood to present a completely new car - especially the fastest Lotus ever. To make a better Lotus you need to make it lighter and faster and the 3-Eleven does exactly that.' We don't know all the details yet but we do know enough about the 3-Eleven to get our appetites well and truly whetted.
The Lotus 3-Eleven can get from 0-62mph in 'under 3 seconds'. Top speed is 180mph, or 174mph for the race version. In that race trim, with race seat and harness, and more aggressive aero, it weighs under 900kg, more in road trim. The race car costs £115,200 including VAT.
Power is 450bhp, courtesy of a revised version of the supercharged V6 from the Exige S and Evora 400. Lotus say it is faster than either around the Hethel test track - by as much as 10-seconds for the race version.
Andy Elliman, chairman of Lotus's longest continually serving dealership Bell & Colvill in Surrey and who has a stand at FoS this year, said the new 3-Eleven is exactly the right sort of new Lotus.
Jean-Marc summed up: 'It's a very exciting time for Lotus and we have lots more to come in the next two years.'
Chris Harris Drives the Dodge Charger SRT Hellcat
Hellcat - say it again and look at the vehicle in the picture, just to make sure you're not holding a boy's toy or watching some pugilistic cartoon. The Hellcat is a car. I think Hellcat might just be the greatest name ever bestowed upon a muscle car - perhaps any car?
The expectation is a little overwhelming with the Dodge Charger SRT Hellcat. Peak power is a claimed 707hp, and this is supported by 650lb ft. The claimed performance figures are absurd: 204mph all-out and a standing quarter in 11-seconds dead. For reference, the McLaren F1 was a tenth of a second slower over that same drag race. And yet any old Joe can wander into a Dodge showroom and buy one of these things for $64,000. Well, they could if the order book wasn't already massively over-subscribed - funny how a car can be so popular when it offers nearly double the power of an M3 for two-thirds of the cash.
It takes much force-feeding to tease seven-hundred horsepower from a Hemi V8, and the twin-screw IHI 'charger can move - wait for it - 30,000 litres of air per minute! The thing is so big it needs 80hp just to rotate.
But it augments a 6.2 litre V8, most of which is entirely new, to create an instant muscle car icon. Dodge first gave us this motor in a Challenger early in 2014 with a manual transmission, but for this application it has chosen to uprate its Eight-speed Torqueflite auto-box. The four-door Charger body is a little heavier and more aerodynamic, helping it to move beyond 200mph, where the 2dr Challenger is pinned back to the late one-nineties. Slow-coach.
You can watch this video to get an front seat view of some of the actions at the on-going Goodwood Festival of Speed.
