Ten things we learned this week: 24 March 2017 edition

*Well, with a few caveats and addenda. Number one – it’s from Manor (nee: Marussia), which means it’s not an official 2017 team. Number two – it’s not exactly big enough to get in. It’s a 6:1 model, used to test the stillborn 2017 Manor F1 car.

But, if you’re looking for something a little more life-sized, there are also five F1 steering wheels on offer, as well as a raft of car parts, paraphernalia and merchandise.

Yes, after reaching the end of the road, Manor F1 has had no choice but to auction off its assets. If you’d like to get in on the action, it’s all going through Gordon Brothers auctions in May. 

No longer do you need to form a queue at Halford’s or Autozone – McLaren will now sell you all the aftermarket carbon fibre you could ever ask for!

There is, as always, a catch. And this one’s a biggie – you have to own a McLaren Sports Series – that’s a 540C, 570S or 570GT – to take advantage of it. 

However, if you’re lucky enough to be among the number who do, McLaren will sell you anything from mirror casings and speaker surrounds to plenum covers and rear diffusers.

How… Ferrari-ish of them.

Motorways, as the name implies, are for motoring along. Yes, sometimes traffic moves so slowly that it seems like you could get out, fix yourself a quick salad and jump back in without losing much time, but that’s not the greatest idea in the world. 

It is, however, an idea that a trucker has had on the M25 motorway (the one that forms a ring around London, if you’re not from around here), stopping to fix himself a healthy snack on the hard shoulder. 

Halfway through chopping his vine-ripened tomatoes and spring onions, he was approached by the rather bemused plod, who reminded him of the purpose of a motorway, and that the “hard shoulder of the M25 is probably not the best place to start preparing your dinner.”

But, it seems, not in the exceptionally exciting way that the RX Vision is promising. 

It seems that Mazda’s applied for patents that’ll see the rotary return as an integral part of a range-extending hybrid. It’s not what fans of the RX-7 (i.e., us) would have hoped for, but it’s still a happy thought to know that Mazda is, as ever, dedicated to dragging rotary engines into the 21st Century.

The rotary, if buttoned down for modern emissions requirements, is the perfect engine for this application – they’re exceptionally small, light and are simple, compared to reciprocating piston engines.

And it all centres around getting a good launch off the line, for those of you who live your life a quarter mile at a time. 

Now, launch control is nothing new and, before that, you could hold an automatic car on the brakes, building up torque in the torque converter, to fire off the line at the right moment. But Dodge says it has something new entirely – a system called ‘Transbrake’.

In essence, the Demon’s Transbrake function locks the output shaft of the automatic gearbox while you build up the torque, before you pull a shift paddle to launch in a hellish storm of tyre squeal and g-force. Sounds neat. 

Remember those old Xzibit memes? You know the ones – ‘Yo dog, I heard you like…’ and so on.

Well, here’s a late pitch: “Yo dog, I heard you like Mustangs, so I put mustang in your Mustang.” 

Yes, it’s actually happened. Car customisers Vilner have, as per a customer’s request, outfitted the interior with horse hide and leather, as peeled off an actual mustang. 

Yes, it’s a fairly thorny topic, but the fact remains that as you get older, your mental and physical state just isn’t what it used to be. Ask a 40-year-old about his knees and you’ll get the idea. 

But, rather than being banned from using their cars, citizens in the Aichi Prefecture (the area around Nagoya, roughly halfway between Osaka and Mount Fuji) have a bit of an incentive instead: a 15 per cent discount on their funeral if they agree to give up their driver’s licence. 

The thing is that Japanese people tend to live quite a long time, and there are nearly five million drivers over the age of 75. There is, as you might expect, a rather solid uptick in crashes involving the elderly, and the ever-collaborative Japanese are offering OAP discounts for ditching their licences all over the place, including cheap taxi fares, cut-price noodles and pensioner rates at the local bathhouse. 

Yes, this one’s a bit more morbid, but hey, savings are savings.

With some fairly predictable results, we might add.

While it all seems like quite a bit of public pain and humiliation, it’s apparently to raise awareness of the dangers of ice (and possibly of how strong a little Russian ‘Oka’ hatchback can be).

Maybe we’ll put it after the car-bobsleigh runs in our Winter Car-lympics. 

*Kind of. And that’s a very big kind of.  

In a scene plucked from Fantasia (or perhaps Toy Soldiers, if that’s more your thing),  15 remote-controlled cars have pulled an entire Toyota HiLux. Talk about the little engine that could…

We’re not sure when the hype-train surrounding Tesla will ever run out of steam, but we can reasonably assume that, for South Koreans at least, there’s another six months at the very least. 

With requests for test-drives stretching out to nearly the end of the year, it actually takes less time – three months, versus six – to order one on spec and have it sitting in your South Korean garage.

So, who’s ready to buy a car without test-driving it first?