Whatever you feel about American cars, the Corvette deserves a rightful place in a separate universe of opinion. For some reason, the totemic two seater sits apart from the rest of the Detroit ouvre - displaced by something barely identifiable but eminently stylish.

If you're a Corvette fan you'll know all about John Greenwood, who in the seventies cornered the market in racing tweaked, blown, star-spangled contemporary 'vettes - racing them with some success at top endurance venues like Sebring and Le Mans.

Examples of cars like the Greenwood evocation here change hands for as much as any American classic: and for us represent the high water mark of unashamedly jingoistic vettism.

God bless America!

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There's probably been more motoring column inches dedicated to the Ford GT40 than to any other racing car of the last half a century. There's a reason why.

At the Le mans Classic, to see these monstrously powerful, fathomlessly rakish racing cars powering through the straights of la Circuit de la Sarthe at speeds of over 200MPH hour is breathtaking. Fifty years on from their conception, they remain the most spectacular example of race-focussed design and engineering we, at least, have ever witnessed.

And the thing is about the GT40 is, that unlike, say, the Porsche Racers, which came to dominate the 24 Hours in the seventies, there isn't a sense of individuality about them. In fact, each GT40 seems, in a way, to be cut from the same cloth as one another - though the format developed and evolved greatly in terms of its beneath-the-skin identity from the early sixties until the Mark IV cars of the late sixties; that Ford brawn remained unrepentantly, unapologetically, the same.

But for us, the MK IVs are not what we think of as true GT40s. The true GT40s where the ones with that devastatingly snarling visage and the long, stubby-ended profile, the ones that dominated and slew Ferrari's - a mission that was of course, the car's birth right.

And one thing that is often missed - associated as it was so much with Henry Ford, Detroit and Carroll Shelby - that the MK I & 2 were British through and through.

Yet another superb victory for Team GB.

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Call it a Porsche baiting hare, an impractical bubble-top fantasy or the greatest Renault ever to race : but the Alpine A442/3 was definitely the fastest Renault ever to put rubber on a circuit - clocking 238MPH in qualifying trim in the 1978 edition of the 24hrs.

Piloted by Frenchman, it was part of a potential dream ticket for Renault that never really was able to break Porsche's dominance.

Still, it looked rather good and recently raced at both the Le Mans Classic and at Goodwood.

Hats off to the makers of a snarling yellow beast.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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If you're the sort of person for whom the very words Le Mans makes you break out in a fantastic motorsport inspired sweat, then you'll probably enjoy these images of a very special car.

It's basically the 1998 design study upon which Audi's unbelievably successful aspirations of success in the 24hrs was based.

Like all prototypes, it does, unfortunately, look even more beautiful and purely rendered than the cars that actually came to dominate in the first years of this century - but we think you'll agree this 'prototype of a prototype' is worth savouring for its rakish lines alone.

This beauty also teases out the very real relationship between endurance racing success and that of Audi's road cars - not just in the R8 supercars that are becoming almost as ubiquitous as 911s in certain postcodes - but in the more accessible everyman vehicles that rakishly ply our British byways.

Further justification, if it were needed, of the importance of a racing programme within an illustrious motor works...

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Some truly amazing footage here from a documentary focusing on the 1954 24 Heures Du Mans.

It's all pretty gripping but highlight for me is right at the start when the Jaguar team emerge from the Browns Lane plant with those immaculate new D-Types, heading for the coast and the drive down to the Circuit De la Sarthe.

You can see here how seat of the pants and simple the scene was this far back: though the Jags were pulling close to 180 MPH on the Mulsanne. No wonder Jaguar development engineer Norman Dewis, who we were lucky enough to meet a few years ago for a feature in the magazine, was keen to introduce disc brakes!

This sort of memory - the sounds, the sounds of those stirred boxes and the pure aesthetic of the whole spectacle - produces a proper lump in the throat.

Note to self: Must go to the Le Mans Classic this year!

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In a lovely collection of Motorsport-inspired pieces French graphic artist Thierry Nou introduces us to his work and lets us take a peek into his lifelong obsession with motor racing.

Having developed a particular penchant for all things Porsche as a kid, amassing a goodly stack of car magazines and other print ephemera, he went on to study at the French national school of art and design. He now makes his living as an Art Director for a leading design and advertising agency.

Work like this confirms further for us an instinct we've had for a while now - that as well as the noise, the sound and the power of it all - one of the most interesting thing about motorsport remains the visual vibrancy - that is shot through its graphic identity.

Thierry will be exhibiting the art at the Porsche Centre in Monaco to the 21th April 2012.

Via Southsiders MC

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Top level motorsport is poorer without the involvement of works teams.

That's why we were gutted when Honda, Toyota and BMW pulled out of F1.

And that's why it sits uncomfortably with us that an F1 team with the name of an energy drinks company is running away with the title this year.

The wider automotive world needs companies that are making road cars involved in motoring's cutting edge so that the trickle down effect of tech and aesthetic becomes bedded into mainstream car culture.

When they pull out the opposite happens. Look at Honda's discontinuation of the sublime NSX and the super fun S2000. Look at Toyota's blandified lineup. Look at BMW's stultified development of new, exciting products these last few years.

So when we received word today that Porsche will be entering a fully developed works team at Le Mans in three years' time, it made our hearts leap.

Surely the most successful team in the history of the 24 Hours needs to be there competing against the likes of Audi, Peugeot and Aston.

Not only does it put Porsche right at the heart of where they need to be, it throws down a gauntlet to your Ferraris and your Fords and any other global manufacturer who want to achieve true credibility.

Step up to the plate. Don't just trade on memories and spurious ideas of 'heritage'.

Bravo Porsche. May you make history anew.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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With the great weekend at la Circuit La Sarthe almost upon us there's little we'd love to do more than pull up the deep buttoned man- chair up close to the 'tube, stack a case of fine claret and some fruits of the delicatessen, and gorge on the ultimate endurance event of motorsport.

Problem is, as with most forms of top-level racing, designs and sponsorship liveries have tended to meld into one colourful mass - and it has become more and more tricky to I-D your Astons from your Audis, your Porsches from your prancing horses. Especially at night. Especially eighteen hours into your marathon endurance armchair session.

So the kind folk from Nissan have offered these spotter's guides to make life a little easier - and if you are like us nerdish about things graphic and car-shaped, we think you'll agree that they look pretty beautiful in an aesthetic kind of way, even if you stripped away the use value.

Let's raise a toast to the most famous single motor race on the planet!

The post Le Mans 2011 appeared first on Influx Magazine.

The C11 - Mercedes' 1990 Sports Car stallion might appear to be retro in design terms these days, but we'd more readily call it a classic.

Carbon Fibre hulled and packed with that monstrous twin turbo-ed engine packing over 700 horsepower, this was the car that Michael Schumacher drove when promoted from his drive in F3 - before moving on of course to make F1 history.

The young Schuey was mentored in the C11 by died in the wool racers Jochen Mass and Mauro Baldi - while his current F1 technical director and team principal Ross Brawn was working across the pits for Mercedes’s great rival Jaguar.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Strangely enough Mercedes decided to swerve Le Mans for that year, choosing instead to focus on defending their the Group C sports car championship itself - which in fact they did easily.

In our opinion this was the prettiest of the bunch of that late-period sports cars - F1 would soon come to totally eclipse these sorts of cars in popularity - mainly because of the complex machinations of the FIA - it had the aggressive essence of the Porsche 917 with a hint of the carbon-fibre trickery that changed Motor Racing forever.

This was a real bridge builder between the steel and valves ancien regime and the CG-dominated future...

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We've heard a lot about how the relatively humble 924/944 series were the cars that in the late seventies/early eighties saved Porsche from financial wrack and ruin.

But for some reason we've never really understood their appeal.

Until, that is, we recently stumbled upon an interesting thread on the GT/GTS version of the cars.

We're suckers for race bred road going cars.

Call us shallow but include an intercooler, flared arches, scoops, intakes, bumps, bulges etc onto a standard sports car we go all weak at the knees.

So when in 1981 Porsche produced the 924 Carrera GT and the GTS in order to comply with homologation regulations - what was conceived as an evolutionary stepping stone between the bog standard 924 everyman-mobile and and the 911 supercar benchmark became a car worthy of true desire.

Happy weekend!

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