KLM

Definitely. She had totally fallen off the radar here until Delon decided to diss her and re-open this whole can of worms. I like Delon's music, and I like her's too (especially Paper Planes) but because she is a little Tigress, I refuse to listen to it. She even performed on Letterman recently - the video is on 'tube. This whole story is being carried in Today's Daily Mirror as well.

Machan for this novices event you won't have to. You should enter it, just for the fun of it. As Prad says - only a helmet and seat-belts are required.

Albertho by 3-door wagon do you mean the Troop Carrier? Care to post a picture?

dhp is right - the chicanes were first run in 1990. This year's speed was the fastest post-chicane, which is impressive because there were some fast prototypes even in the mid-nineties, petrol obviously.

Anybody notice how the fastest average race time was recorded by one of the legendary Porsche 917s back in 1971? Granted, this was before the 2 chicanes were added to the Mulsanne straight, but it is still an impressive feat. That said, the average time set by the winning TWR Jaguar in 1988 is all the more impressive because it is only marginally slower but this was after the chicanes were added I believe. The notable absentees on that list of winners are Nissan and Toyota. Nissan especially, since one year they went with 3 different teams running different versions of their R90s or whatever, but because there was so much in-fighting, they refused to share data and each car dropped out because of issues that the other Nissans had already endured.

It was a good race, but they need to do introduce parity between the diesels and the petrols, because the current rules clearly favour the Audis and the Peugeots. I was rooting for Jacques Villeneuve to become the first man to win the Indy 500, the F1 World Championship and the 24 Hours of Le Mans, but it'll have to wait until next year I guess. The coverage was good although I wished they showed more of the GT cars and didn't allow that Indian guy to commentate when the trackside commentators were off air - the bugger knew f**k-all about the teams, the cars, racing and didn't even notice the things that were happening on screen.

No doubt GTAm, the Rizla Suzuki girls in blue are fantabulous.

At Montreal last year, Kubica had to be helicoptered to hospital after his death-defying crash while Hamilton because the toast of the British press after his maiden win. A year later and Kubica is celebrating his first win while Hamilton is being vilified for playing the goat. Such is life I guess.

The repeated KKG postponements were due to various issues, and the initial Pelwatte cancellation was due to the security situation in the area. The second cancellation was due to a scheduling mistake on the part of the plantation. However, both events will be run in the second half of the year. SLARDAR cancelled the Gajaba and Minneriya race weekends because those tracks are located within the premises of strategic military camps and the Ministry of Defence refused to give them permission to run race-meets this year. However, since the Diyatalawa camp is only a garrison/training camp, Fox Hill was allowed. As for the other events, I have no idea why they were cancelled.

Parts of the KKG route were under 4 feet of water as of last week, so the rally probably won't be run until the rains cease. The underwater dam gates were opened, which is why the roads were submerged.

The odd thing is, there is a Porsche 911 on track, in the background. Was this a test day or were they running the Aston race concurrently with a Porsche Cup race? That's unlikely because Dilantha runs that series as well. Most likely, these Astons were entered in the 'Malaysian SuperCar Series' because the Aston Martin Asia Cup guys run an 'Aston Martin' sticker on their windscreen and not 'Asian GT', as these have.

I've been waiting for this since January. Let's hope it is as awesome as it sounds.

Yup, the new Hilux Single-Cab 4WD with the D4D at 2.75 million is a steal and a half . How difficult is it to get the heavy duty license?

Ya man, rallying was like the wild wild west. Check out the YouTube videos of the Group B guys going through veritable seas of spectators, and you'll see them step away just as the cars gets close - the drivers relied extensively on the navigators' pace notes I guess. If you can find it, check out the Audi TT ad featuring Michele Mouton - it's ridonkeylous how dangerous it was back in the day. I can't seem to think of any rally drivers that have made it over to F1 and done well, although F1 drivers have impressed in rallying on occasion. Jim Clark famously won stages in the very competitive RAC Rally one year in the sixties, in a Lotus Cortina, before rolling the car and retiring. More recently, Minardi and Prost driver Stephane Sarrazin tried his hand at rallying when his single-seater career died, with some success. He won the French national rally championship and was signed by the works Subaru team to contest select WRC rounds in a third factory car. I believe he even made it onto the podium at least one. He has since gone back to circuit racing, with the works Aston Martins in the Le Mans Series. Apparently Colin McRae had once tested Martin Brundle's Jordan in the mid-nineties and had been astoundingly quick, but never considered a switch. Valentino Rossi also tested Ferrari F1 cars several times and was very very fast for a neophyte - he lapped Fiorana under a second slower than Michael but when push came to shove he decided to stay with bikes for a few more years. Last month he said he wondered what might have been had be switched to cars, although he seems dead set on a career in top-flight rallying after his bike days end.

I love the entire Gruppe B generation but I would have to say that the 205T16 and it's successor the 405T16, although it was not strictly a Group B car. Trivia - Mika Hakkinen's first go-kart used to belong to Henri Toivonen. The 959 was also fantastic, to have won the Dakar and Le Mans with essentially the same car is an unbelievable feat.

Solberg was stoked. The new car was very very fast on debut and he wasn't even pushing, he said. After the lack of development (and pace) of the old car, he deserves a competitive ride, so good for him.

For the record, Nigel Mansell was an equally big poser. He always made things seem more difficult than they really were, just to make it seem as if he were overcoming the most difficult circumstances, even when he walked the title in 1993 due to the complete technical superiority of the Williams that year. This is the guy, who you might remember accidentally shut his car down on the final lap of the Canadian Grand Prix in 1991, while he was leading by a country mile. How did it happen? He was waving to the crowd so furiously (before the race had finished obviously), that he hit the kill switch somewhere inside the cockpit. There is no doubt that Nige could drive (his pass of Ayrton Senna at the Hungarian Grand Prix one year and his pass of Nelson Piquet at the British Grand Prix another time are still amazing), but the guy was a real media whore. Hamilton (Lewis, I mean ) is in fact much classier. It's because we're exposed only to the English-speaking media that we get bombarded with all this hype about the British drivers. In my opinion the ballsiest, bravest and hardest charging drivers were/are Gilles Villeneuve, Niki Lauda, Ayrton Senna, Jean Alesi, Michael Schumacher, Takuma Sato and even though I can't stand his guts, Fernando Alonso.

Nope, mainly because Clarkson is a giant douche. What was he on about this time?

He does the Porsche Carrera Cup Asia, Malaysian SuperCar Championship & the Aston Martin Asia Cup, which is another one-make spec series.

Don't dis leaf-springs bra. America's finest sports-car, the C6 Corvette Z06 comes with good-old leaf spring suspension , albeit in a transverse setup for an anti-roll effect. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corvette_leaf_spring

Dude I thought you did your Evo 3 conversion and then sold the car? So did they revert that Evo 3 back to a Lancer to donate the conversion to this Proton or am I missing something here?

It's amazing how accurate these generated letters can be. About 8 years ago me and a friend had one generated about his sister, and mailed it to his address with her school letter-head, as if it were from her principal. It was hilarious what happened - the mother started crying, the Dad wanted to call the school immediately and the girl was completely flabbergasted.

Madhawa, I've taken the liberty of responding to Mona on behalf of Autolanka. :) The prerequisite to understanding this letter is to have encountered some of Mr. Monamonu's press releases and to have realized how uncongenial they are. The key point of the following exposition is that my purpose here is not to tell Mr. Monamonu how wrong he is. Well, okay, it is. But I should point out that Mr. Monamonu alleges that we should all bear the brunt of his actions. Naturally, this is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Mr. Monamonu should hide his head in shame before the judgment of future generations, whose tongue it will no longer be possible to stop and which, therefore, will say what today all of us know to be true: If you looked up "recalcitrant" in the dictionary, you'd probably see Mr. Monamonu's picture. It is painful to write such truisms, but statistical details released by a third-party agency indicate that he is perfectly willing to show his embarrassingly poor reasoning and warped ethics in print. That's clear. But his lickspittles, who are legion, have been running around recently trying to discourage us from expressing our sophistries in whatever way we damn well please. Meanwhile, Mr. Monamonu has been preparing to ruin people's lives. The whole episode smacks of a carefully orchestrated operation. If you ask me, Mr. Monamonu occasionally shows what appears to be warmth, joy, love, or compassion. You should realize, however, that these positive expressions are more feigned than experienced and invariably serve an ulterior motive, such as to belittle all fine social standards. All of the bad things that are currently going on are a symptom of Mr. Monamonu's nettlesome campaigns. They are not a cause; they are an effect. It's somewhat tricky to extend the compass of democracy to manipulative criminal masterminds, especially since the media in this country tend to ignore historical connections and are reluctant to analyze ideological positions or treat a fringe political group seriously. Mr. Monamonu insists that merit is adequately measured by his methods and qualifications. That lie is a transparent and strained effort to keep us from noticing that he is on some sort of thesaurus-fueled rampage. Every sentence Mr. Monamonu writes is filled with needlessly long words like "phototelegraphically" and "plethysmographically". Either he is deliberately trying to confuse us or else he's secretly scheming to enshrine irrational fears and fancies as truth. Some day, I want to shield people from Mr. Monamonu's obdurate and nativism-prone deceptions. But you don't have to wait for that. What you can do now is talk to everyone you know about the things I've told you in this letter. Use every medium available to you. Use the Internet. Use your telephone. Use radio and newspapers. And whatever you do, never be afraid to speak out against the evil that is Monamonu.

If you can get a hold of it, watch a documentary movie called 'A Star Called Senna'. It details his development as a driver from his youth in Brazil, to the period in England, and onto F1. They interview his family and friends, team-mates etc. and give you a real insight into the man. Especially memorable are the rare archived footage, his explanations of how he scares himself by having out of body experiences while qualifying (he really was the greatest qualifier ever), and his battles with Alain Prost as well as Jean-Marie Balestre, the President of the FIA at the time. Really, it is a phenomenal piece of work, which can be expected given the subject matter.

Nice article. Wasn't there an AL thread on the mysterious James Dean Spyder that kept killing and injuring people even after he died? It's a fantastic story.