He didn’t take pole position. He wasn’t even on the front row. He qualified fifth, behind faster cars and wilder drivers. And yet it was Niki Lauda who won.

It’s informative. It’s entertaining. It’s an introduction to how cars work, how they should be driven, and how weird they can be. It’s not Top Gear or The Grand Tour; it’s Best Motoring’s Hot-Version and it’s on Amazon Prime.

The Alpina V8 Roadster has a bad reputation among diehard car nerds. The strut towers made the news for buckling under load, and Clarkson trashed the car on Top Gear back in the day, saying that how it drove didn’t match how it looked. These cars are so expensive, and so rare, that nobody ever really gets a chance for…

With all of the retrospective gaze of Radwood, it’s easy to think that these teens have perfectly grasped how everyone dressed up their cars and themselves back then, But it’s important to go to the source material every so often, and for that we have the New Orleans bounce classic Bootin’ Up.

There may be a day that Tesla looks back on all this—the Roadster, the S, those troublesome early Xs—and laugh at how simple it was. Volkswagen is rolling in. All that and more in The Morning Shift for May 15, 2019.

Minitrucks. Lowrider imports. Kandy paint Accords with scissor doors. These were cars of the magazine era, and you may have thought that the internet forgot about them. But you were wrong. Welcome to UndergroundStyles.us, where the chrome Lexanis never stop shining.

You’re in your car. Surrounding you: honks, beeps, meeps, toots, bizz buzzes. What does not surround you? Good driving, as seen here, with the inimitable Jordan Cox passing roughly 900 cars at the start of this race at Bathurst in Australia, then moving to overtake yet more cars on the grass.

You have dollars. You have several thousand dollars. You have several tens of thousands of dollars. Great! Hurl them in the direction of this 1990 Autech Zagato Stelvio on Bring a Trailer.

In the late 1850s, the third-largest “German” city in the world was New York, as noted by the Lower East Side Preservation Initiative. Only a few decades on, a quarter million German-speakers lived here, as the city itself recalls, centered in Kleindeutschland, Little Germany. And it is all but forgotten.

The original BMW M5, the E28 generation, is a historic car, the fastest sedan in the world when it came out, the start of a dynasty. You’ve known that. I’ve known that. What I didn’t know (and what I set out to find) is if it’s actually as good to drive as the legend suggests.

This is something that I’ve been lucky enough to see on some prototypes, but it’s more than a little valuable for the public to get a sense of what a self-driving car “sees” when driving down the road. In this case, we have one of Waymo’s test cars predicting the path of a cyclist before a crash might even happen.

If anyone tells you making cars is easy, turn around and leave. Prep yourself for getting into the world of earnings and EVs, as things get weird. All that and more on The Morning Shift for Wednesday, May 1, 2019.

The Nissan 350Z and Infiniti G35 are probably the best beginner drift cars a person can buy, in the States at least. Cheap, not too old, with plenty of power from the VQ-series Nissan V6. That’s the problem though. These all have VQs, and they sound notoriously awful.

Tesla’s got the chips, Uber is getting beaten by an Estonian startup, and Porsche is leaning in on tech from China. All that and so much more for The Morning Shift of Tuesday, April 23, 2019.

Tesla is adamant that its cars are significantly less likely to catch fire than your average car, as Reuters reports, but that still hasn’t kept a surveillance video from spreading worldwide, showing a Tesla Model S bursting into flame and all but disappearing, Spinal Tap-style, in a parking garage reportedly in…

We’ve all seen the video of Ayrton Senna thrashing an NSX on track in a pair of loafers. Now, please enjoy this dude drifting the hell out of a Nissan Silvia in a pair of slides.

Geely isn’t one of the very biggest carmakers in China, but it’s growing increasingly well-known here in America, what with its recent acquisitions of Volvo and Lotus. So it’s worth keeping an eye on, particularly when it launches a new all-electric brand emphasizing “overseas” sales.

When the 1998-2002 clown shoe BMW Z3 M Coupe was first presented to management (the first prototype of the Z3 Coupe, rather), the executive was at a loss for words. He just stood there, silent, as Car Magazine reported at the time. That probably wasn’t a good thing.

The 1980s were good years for BMW. This was the yuppie decade, when E30s ruled and M cars blossomed. This was even when the company finally got its V12 engine project off the ground, having sat in development hell since at least the early 1970s. The bar was getting raised, and in 1987, with the BMW Z1, the company…

Formula Drift is interesting in that it’s just a bunch of cars burning tires going sideways but it’s also the most unrestricted and creative top-level racing series in the country and the most innovative in how it broadcasts, including drone replays in the online livestream. Those shots are pretty low-res when live,…