We don’t usually go in for adding speculation to the gargantuan gallery of whispers that is the global car industry, but having spotted these apparently leaked images of a new lightweight Lambo, we had to share. And the black and white palette of the car of course looks wonderful in the Influx layout.

If these leaked images, (which came via an obscure Romanian website and Jalopnik) are not pure fantasty, the Gallardo LP570-4 Super Veloce will probably get even more power and will drop even more weight than the LP560-4. That probably means (duh) close to 570 HP in an extremely svelte setup with (double-duh) four wheel drive.

Apparently the veil will drop properly when the LP570 is unveiled at the Geneva Motor Show later this year.

Wether or not there’s a market for yet another stripped-down raging bull, there’ll be a legion of devotees eagerly awaiting those first road tests. Stick us down for one Ms Lamborghini.

Ok, so you’ve probably heard that the long awaited Lexus supercar has been badged with the silly pricetag of £350K and that it goes like stik and that anyone with a heart and two ears could not but love the sound of its V10 engine. But now there’s a way to experience the sound of the LFA without being a jammy car hack or the heir to a tobacco fortune.

When designing the LFA’s exhaust system, the team at Lexus apparently studied the noise made by a Formula 1 car at maximum revs, then applied detailed design features to create an exhaust note for the LFA that is unlike any other car on the road, enhancing the sensation of speed and acceleration.

The car’s main silencer is made of titanium and has a valve-actuated, dual-stage structure that channels the exhaust flow according to engine speed. Up to 3,000rpm, the exhaust valve stays closed, routing the flow through multiple chambers, creating an unobtrusive note. Above 3,000rpm the valve opens, allowing the exhaust to bypass these chambers and flow into a single resonance chamber, before exiting through the stacked trio of tailpipes.

The V10’s induction system was also modified to complement the engine’s acoustic qualities. The uniquely formed horizontally split resin surge tank – a unique design – mimics the acoustic chamber of wind and string instruments: up to 4,000rpm it emits the engine’s primary firing frequency of 300Hz; this changes to 400 to 500Hz as the engine revs climb to 6,000rpm; and a peak is reached at 600Hz as the engine wails towards its 9,000rpm red line.

The air intake is made from a porous duct material to generate bass to mid-range tones. The LFA development team called this acoustic effect ‘Resonated Complex Harmony.’

If the above couple of paragraph read like Greek mumbo jumbo to you, then you’re not alone: but any fool can understand that piping the exhaust note into the cabin can only improve the driving experience.

The engine’s induction and exhaust soundtrack are channelled into the LFA’s cabin, so people on board can enjoy the experience as much as those on the outside. The main sound channel that pipes in the engine’s induction notes runs from the surge tank into the cabin below the main dashboard panel.

Two further sound channels run to an opening in the upper cowl on top of the dashboard structure and a reflector panel low down at the front of the cabin. Together with the primary sound channel, these put the driver at the centre of the LFA team calls the ‘3D Surround Sound Concept.’

This thrilling acoustic performance of theV10 engine can now be heard online, available in the sound library at the dedicated LFA site www.lexus-LFA.com

OK, ‘Sexy’ and ‘pickup’ might not be two words that you would naturally put together (unless you’re a plaid-wearing good old boy from Oklahoma that is), but we are immediately impressed wit the first official images of the new veedub truck the Amarok.

Available as a four-door double cab version from launch with a single cab model to follow in 2011, the Amarok combines the robustness of a pick-up with innovative technology, high safety standards, excellent fuel economy and Volkswagen usual standards of comfort, quality and durability.

As you can see the frontal styling is broadly in line with the latest Transporter and Golf and press releases tell us that the ladder frame chassis will be offered with a choice of rear-wheel drive and switchable or permanent 4MOTION all-wheel drive.

There’ll be an impressive fleet of tech available: including a six-speed manual transmission – and ir and will have impressive fuel economy with low emissions to make the Amarok the first all-wheel drive pick-up in this class offering CO2 emissions of less than 200 g/km. Like the new Transporter and Caravelle, the Amarok will have a gearchange indicator to help drivers achieve the best fuel economy – and with an 80-litre fuel tank it should offer a range of over 600 miles.

If you like on-the-limit tarmac action then stick to the Golf, of course, but for the family man who likes to get dirty and at the weekend as well as lugging tools for the day-job, we think the Amarok looks a lot more appealing than the Japanese competition.

Check out the pseudo Baywatch promo (below). All that’s missing is the Hof!

Remember how the original Mercedes-Benz A-class famously fell over in the ‘elk test’? Or how all the original Audi TTs had to be dragged back to the factory in Ingolstadt to cure their high-speed handling ‘idiosyncrasies’? Or Daimler’s disastrous take-over of Chrysler, and BMW’s doomed affair with Rover? Once in a while, you need to remind yourself that the German carmakers can cock it up as badly as anyone else. Because most of the time, their cars are predictably, crushingly, dispiritingly brilliant.

They’ve been at it for longer than anyone else, of course, starting with Karl Benz’s Patent Motorwagen (there’s a name that should be revived) of 1885, the world’s first horseless carriage. And they learnt faster. By the ‘30s Mercedes was producing the fabulous SSK roadster – a supercar long before the term had been invented (below) – and Auto Union was building the 560bhp Type C race car. With a sixteen-cylinder engine and a top speed of 236mph in streamliner trim it was so advanced that the Russians stole at least one from occupied eastern Germany at the end of the war a decade later to see what they could learn from its engineering.

During WW2 BMW made one of the first jet engines and Ford made a fifth of the German army’s trucks. Volkswagen made the V1 rocket, but it was a 29 year-old British Army Major named Ivan Hirst who restarted production at its shattered Wolfsburg plant after the war. His superiors told him he was insane. Henry Ford II declined the offer to take it over and the French Government demanded that the lines be moved France as reparations. The move was blocked by the French auto unions. VW went on to make 22 million Beetles and become Europe’s biggest carmaker. Oops.

The cars that Germany has made in the modern era have seldom inspired the affection that we have for the Mini or a 2CV, or the lust we have for an Alfa or a Maserati.

Instead we admire German cars. We climb into a new Porsche 911 and know that the glorious heft and precision of its controls will feel exactly the same after 40 years and 200,000 miles.

A Porsche has a mechanicity that other cars try to bury beneath a veneer of refinement. A good Porsche might be harder and less compromising than cars from the other German marques, but they all have one thing in common, one unifying principle that defines a good German car and has made the German car industry so riotously successful. They are mechanical devices first, and luxury goods second.

So we admire them, and despite the high prices — because German engineering and labour don’t come cheap — we buy them. The BMW 3-series (below) was once an expensive discretionary purchase but it now outsells the Ford Mondeo. The 3-series, like the 5-series, is so dominant that it defines its market sector; we just call it the 3-series class, and efforts of other carmakers are just known as 3-series rivals.

When I was a road tester on a British car magazine we were constantly criticized for bias towards BMW, but we were just being objective. Almost every car they brought out went to the top of its class. The best example is the E39 5-series, built between 1995 and 2004, which was so effortlessly superior to its rivals that even its brilliant replacement was a slight disappointment.

And not content with perfecting the premium saloons and estates in which they specialize, the Germans have reinvented other industries’ most famous brands. Mini, Rolls-Royce, Range Rover, Bentley Skoda, Lamborghini and Bugatti have all been brilliantly reimagined under German ownership.

Before the current financial unpleasantness the premium German carmakers ‘s sales charts were in near-vertical ascent and were constantly extending their ranges, inventing whole new market niches. The recession won’t slow them down much; fat cash reserves mean they’ll suffer less than their less profitable rivals, and can afford to keep working on the new green tech we’ll all demand when we start buying cars again.

Look at BMW’s Vision EfficientDynamics concept car, which it unveiled at this year’s Frankfurt Motor Show (below). It’s a diesel-electric hybrid; it has 351bhp and 590lb ft of torque, can do 60mph in 4.8sec and has a top speed limited to 155mph, but will average 75.1mpg and 99 g/km, and if you plug it in for two and a half hours you can run it purely electrically for 31 miles. Not cheap to develop, but all of this tech will be in BMW’s production cars within five years. We might be waiting a while before they screw up again.

10 Ruf CTR Yellowbird

Poster child for insane German tuning industry. Beat the Ferrari F40 to first production car with 200MPH top end. ‘Nuff said.

9 Mercedes-Benz 560SEL 6.9

The most outrageous S-class borrowed the 6.9-litre engine from the vast Pullman limo. James Hunt had one, and stored it on bricks when he couldn’t afford the tax

8 Auto Union V16

Legendary, terrifying, Hitler-sponsored racers with over 500bhp: it took decades for post-war Formula 1 cars to get close

7 BMW 507

Albrecht Goertz’s iconic design was early proof that the reborn German car industry could do gorgeous as well as good

6 Volkswagen Golf GTi

Groundbreaking hot hatch, and still sensational to drive. We’ll have ours in Mars red, please

5 BMW E39 530d

Arguably — pound-for-pound — the best car Germany has ever made because it so comprehensively eclipsed its rivals

4 Volkswagen Beetle

Where it all re-started for the German car industry after the war; the original stayed in production in Mexico until 2003

3 Benz Patent Motorwagen

Innovative wagon from the early years of internal combustion. Look out for the AMG version!

2 Porsche 911

Of course it has to be in this list, but which do you pick? An early seventies, 2.4-litre 911S is arguably the sweetest of the lot

1 Porsche 917

Like Wagner on four wheels. Count Rossi’s road-registered version is possibly the coolest thing ever to wear number plates

Paul Anderson: BMW 1502

Paul Anderson lives in the Pembrokeshire resort town of Tenby and works for clothing company Howies. When he’s not surfing and tinkering with his pretty little 1976 Beemer, that is. “The Marks & Spencer taupe colour matches the clothes that I wear. It somehow seems to fit my style, “ he tells me as the setting sun bathes car and driver in a vaguely retro pool of light. Paul swapped the car last year, which he has subsequently restored to mint condish, for a decidedly less-than-stylish beaten up old Mondeo estate. “I used to drive past it on my way to work, and it was just rotting away there being ignored. I don’t think the guy really knew what a little gem he was sitting on and he bit my arm off for the deal.” Just shows you. One man’s meat is another man’s poison.

Bob: Heinkel Trojan 200

You can see from the design of Bob’s characterful little bubble car that its antecedents lie in the realm of aeronautics _ the whole issue from many angles resembles the top turret of a Luftwaffe bomber. “The detail is incredible. Even down to the fixings of the door and the workmanship of the bumpers, the quality is amazing.” Bob is no stranger to interesting exotics. As the owner of a near perfect Facel Vega, an E-Type Jag (in its fourth decade of Bob ownership), as well as a 1962 Corvette project, he knows a thing or two about how cars are put together. Having rebuilt the Heinkel as a barter for the build of the garage where he keeps his cars, the civil engineer-turned property developer finds stillness in the contant movement of owning and restoring classics. “I spend about a day a week out in the garage, slowly returning them to the original condition. It’s actually quite therapeutic.”

James Clayton: BMW 330 CS

Somewhere in the windswept field of Worcestershire is a haven of BMW love. Having owned a series of BMWs and falling in love with their functionality, James came across his current project last year and snapped it up for £400. “Considering the steering wheel alone was worth around £100, it didn’t seem a bad deal to me!” Having completely rebuilt a E24 6 Series a couple of years back James had learnt a lot about what makes German heavy metal tick, and is now deep in the process of stripping the bodywork back to the base, repairing all the corroded panelling and pretty much starting from scratch. And what is it about German cars that inspires this sort of devotion? “It’s just that they work really well. That’s all there is to it.”

Mark Tomlinson: Porsche 911 Turbo (996)

“ Out of any of the cars that we drive around this circuit the Turbo is my favourite,” says Mark Tomlinson, chief engineer at the Racing School, which based at the Rockingham Motor Speedway in Northamptonshire. “It’s really, really fast, but very forgiving because of the four wheel drive. It hardly ever goes wrong, and you could still fit two kids in the back for the school run.” Not that the school run is this particular car’s usual line of duty. More than the express trip to the local primary, the Turbo performs a bridge between the slower cars and the single seater racers that he runs at the school. “There’s just a lovely controlled drift with these cars as you come out of the corner and put the power down,” he tells me,” but you can tell you can still tell there’s an animal beneath the bonnet.”

[Show as slideshow]

If someone hadn’t invented Group B rally at the start of the eighties, the times would have defined the form and it would have happened anyway. All of a sudden, what had been a relatively worthy, moustached and tweeded form of motor racing went into the excessive stratosphere.

And of all the Group B Rally cars, it was the Quattro that captured the imagination. Having been introduced on the streets at the end of 1980, the Audi Quattro instantly evoked an Olympian, fundamentally tonic blend of power and technology that left anything built in the West Midlands looking about as stale as an old cheese sandwich on a strike-wracked Leyland factory floor.

When ITV’s World of Sport began to cover Group B rallying, the British public didn’t need Dickie Davis to tell them that the future had arrived, and that the future was all about four wheel drive and Turbochargers. The Triumph Dolomite – which previously had occupied the heights of boy-racer aspiration – began to look something your grandpa would pootle down to the pub in. Even the rally-bred Escorts driven by the local nutters seemed to hark back to another era, a decade where two dimensions were all you needed to race well and look good.

But everything about the Quattro was exotic, not just the drivetrain. The engine was a two point one, in-line five cylinder. The Turbo had something called an intercooler, which sounded, well, really cool. The dash was riddled with LCD displays and there were chrome trimmed Quattro badges all over the place. It was fast too the engine produced around 200 BHP and it could pull away to sixty in a shade over seven seconds, topping out at over 140 MPH.

The advent of the Quattro marked the rebirth of the Audi badge, and its innovations set the tone for much of the European car industry’s exploration of the possibilities of AWD and relatively small but powerful turbocharged engines. It didn’t matter that Group B had proved a dangerous blind alley. A generation had already become hooked on the innovations the psycho formula had encouraged.

When Porsche released official pics of its new lightweight champion this morning, they bound to point out that the Boxster Spyder always be driven, loved, cooed-over with the top down.

Because like a great Hollywood leading man disgracing himself with a cheap toupé, this racing beauty was never meant to be covered up on top. In fact, we think with the ragtop in place the car looks awful.

But sling the cabin open to the elements, and the whole car’s dynamic aesthetics come alive.

It’s not only the Carrera GT like twin humps that rise provocatively from the rear three quarter of the car that floats out boat. It’s the fact that Porsche have produced a completely re-imagined, sports oriented Boxster for the legions of the faithful. Because in our opinion the bog-standard Boxster has become a bit of an eyesore on the streets these days. It has become an icon of aspirational motoring that fails by and large to live up to the nobility of the brand.

But no matter. A tweaked evolution of the Boxster S six cylinder rests just forward of the Spyder’s rear axle, and produces ten more horsepower than the engine in the S. But crucially, the extra power here will combine with around 80 KG less bulk, a lower centre of gravity and revised running gear to create a guaranteed tarmac hugger in the tradition of great GT racing Spyders of other eras, like the brushed steel cool of 1953’s 550 Spyder (pictured).

Porsche reckon the car will accelerate from 0–60 in around the mid-four second mark, and  top out at 166 MPH (with the top down, of course). We particularly dig the retro detailing and the almost carnal rear three quarter perspective.

The Spyder will be available worldwide from february 2010, and will retail at around £44,500.

No sooner had Toyota announced the advent of the long-awaited FT-86 supercar, than the digital rumour mill had begun to grind out the preposterous idea that that Subaru would also be offering a version of this prodigal child –  and a bigger, badder, faster version to boot.

According to various sources out there on the WWW, it seems that a turbocharged, 4WD version of the FT86 with the scooby magic has been confirmed as the Subaru A 216.

It has been known for a while that the two companies have been collaborating on the development of the the new model, but sources close to the industry have revealed finally that there will be clear water between the Toyota badged manifestation of the car and that bearing Subaru’s five stars.

As well as different model codings, the Subaru version will be driven by a 2-litre turbo, probably in the shape of an evolution of the lump that powers the Impreza 2.0 GT. Look out, also, for the inevitable STi version someowhere down the line. The 216’s body will be fatter, wider and longer, and of course the extra drive train metalwork will inevitably add a substantial bit of weight.

Prices haven’t as yet been released, but we reckon it would make sense for the scooby to sit somewhere around the £60K mark, broadly in line with the Nissan’s delectable GT-R.

Thanks to 7Tune for the scout.

Four Italian craftsmen who would define twentieth century automotive style.

Illustrations by Current State

//The Founding Father: Carlo Castagna//

Castagna started out as an apprentice at the prestigious Mainetta and Orseniga workshops in Milan, which was one of the main producers of coaches to European Royalty. When the patron of the company retired in in 1849 Castagna took over the company, renaming it C. Castagna & C. Castagna’s promenade carriages (the nineteenth century equivalent of open-top sports cars) were ostentatiously appointed, passionately conceived and meticulously constructed. Towards the end of the 1800s Ottolini and Ricordi, importers of Benz Quadricycles for Italy, commissioned the first motorised carriages from the master. Castagna set the benchmark that all other European carrozeria aspired to, and therefore set the tone for Italian motoring for the entire twentieth century.

//The Autodidact: Ugo Zagato 1890–1968//

Ugo Zagato’s legacy is to have created a distinctive, instantly-recognisable aesthetic based on lightweight, aeronautical style bodies. Throughout the twentieth century the ‘Z’ appellation gave client cars a sleek, aerodynamic remix of the base design. Designs like the Alfa RL SS Torpedo, through to the 1938 Lancia Aprilia Sport were shot through with the flowing lines of the modernist movement, and later models, like the Aston Vantage Zagato of the mid eighties remain classics of uncompromised penmanship. Though the Zagato look will never be to everyone’s taste, it remains unconventional and classic. Take a look of some of our favourite z-cars.

//The Populist: Giovanni Michelotti 1921–1980//

Michelotti Began his career as an apprentice at the Farina works in the mid-30s and in the 50s became business partner with Alfredo Vignale. In the 50s and 60s he was one of the most prolific Italian designers – having as many as thirty cars on display on various different stands at the Turin Motor Show of 1960. Whilst working for Vignale he designed the BMW 700 and 1500 Coupés which raised his and BMWs profile greatly – and Michelotti’s innovation and foresight meant that he was the first western car designer to be hired by a Japanese company (he designed a car for the Contessa for the Hino company in 1959). He also worked extensively for Triumph, creating the particularly successful ‘2000’ series and developments like the Triumph Stag. Michelotti may not have had Gandini’s flair for the jaw-dropping stylistic flourish, but was more responsible for disseminating the Milanese aesthetic than any other Italian designer of the century.

//The Genius: Marcello Gandini 1938-//

There was obviously something in the water in Turin during the summer of 1938. Gandini was Born on August 26, just nineteen days after his legendary collaborator and rival Giorgetto Giugiario. Both pensmen would come to represent the apotheosis of twentieth century car design. When Giugiario left carozzeria Bertone in 1965 Gandini was offered his job. Controversy still rages as to which of the pair was ultimately responsible for the epoch-making Lamborghini Miura of 1968, but Gandini’s early, bold statement was the introduction of the scissor door on the Alfa 33 Carabo concept, which was first shown at the Paris Motor Show at the time of the Miura launch. This, of course was one of the most distinctive elements of the Lamborghini Countach, Gandini’s outrageous masterpiece.