Ten things we learned this week: 25 November 2016 edition

Looks like someone at Bologna Airport – a stone’s throw away from the Lambo, Ferrari and Pagani factories – has been reading TopGear.com.

A few years ago we joined Heathrow’s airside operations team for a day. They told us to bring a suitable car, so naturally we phoned Lamborghini and borrowed a bright yellow Aventador.

Bologna, it appears, has done much the same. Lambo has leant it a Huracan to act as a ‘Follow Me’ car until January, bedecked in a livery designed by its Centro Stile. All airports should have them.  

Image via Twitter

A couple of weeks back, police in the States spotted a 19-year-old doing 84mph down an Oklahoma freeway in what’s described as a ‘heavily-modified’ 2011 Ford Mustang.

When they attempted to pull him over for a quiet chat, he instead booted it up to an alleged 208mph, and at one point turned off his headlights to try and evade capture.

Ignore the idiocy at work here (which you really shouldn't attempt at home) for a second. A five-year-old Mustang that can hit 208mph on a public road? Heavily modified indeed. And under the control of a presumably quite ordinary 19-year-old, no less. Either the police’s equipment is way off (very unlikely, because he’s been arrested and charged), or that’s some Mustang. 

So BMW’s launched the configurator for the new 5-Series. A quick play reveals you can spec a 530d xDrive up to almost £78k, a little under £30k more than the basic RRP.

Priciest option? Probably the £2,855 Bowers & Wilkins hifi, which, if it’s anything like the one in the 7-Series, will be totally worth the outlay.

Meanwhile ‘Adaptive Drive’ is £2,435, and the rear-seat entertainment £1,995. Spec everything and you’ll no doubt end up with a lovely, lovely thing. But no 5-Series short of an M5 should cost £80k, surely...

Thanks to McLaren’s Special Operations division, just about anything’s possible when it comes to speccing a Woking supercar. You may have seen evidence of certain dubious P1s and LTs roaming the internet. If Lady GaGa demanded a pork-covered 650S, chances are it'd be rumbling down Fifth Avenue chased by every stray dog in Manhattan within the week. 

In an effort to guide the rich and tasteless of the world in how to paint and wheel their Macca, McLaren’s designers have created five ‘Design Edition’ edtions of the 570S, showcasing how to tastefully co-ordinate the baby supercar.  

You can choose from black, red, grey, orange and white versions with matching interiors, calipers and what-have-you, for £8,500 more than a boggo 570S, which is a tidy saving on speccing it up yourself. Just hope you don’t spot an identical one at the lights…

At one end of the model car scale, you have the Matchbox-style die-cast set of fairly crude but pretty much bombproof miniatures. At the opposite end, meet Racing Heroes.

These hand-built 1:18 recreations of classic Ferraris, Porsches, Alfas and so on are very much not for scrubbing along the carpet into an unyielding skirting board. We promise to look after them. Can we have the Mercedes 300SLR and matching transporter lorry, please?

Red Bull F1 upstart and Most Exciting Thing About F1 Max Verstappen helped Aston Martin and Red Bull unveil their joint-effort hypercar, the AM-RB 001 in Dubai this week. A happy hunting ground for customers, you'd imagine.

However, he arrived in denim shorts. Not doing much for F1's dreadful fashion reputation, there Max. Someone buy the lad some long trousers, please. Okay, it's the desert, but we're supposed to be staring at the car, not your legs...

Electric cars are just a sliver of Elon Musk’s plan for world domination. As this week – having recently acquired clean energy company SolarCity – he proved that you can power a whole island by harnessing the goodness of the sun, instead of relying on icky diesel fuel.
 
Using the island of Ta'u (in American Samoa), Tesla fitted a solar energy microgrid (using 5,328 solar panels and 60 Tesla Powerpacks) that chucks out 1.4 megawatts of energy. That’s enough to cover "nearly 100 per cent" of its electrical needs without the need for a recharge in three days. Neato.

BMW’s M Performance parts catalogue is big. It contains some 1,300 items, from carbon mirror caps to Alcantara steering wheels and carbon-ceramic brakes.

Ahead of this weekend’s Essen motor show, BMW has added even more parts to the collection – this time a special carbon wing and coilover suspension for the M2 and M4. The suspension is ‘infinitely’ adjustable – manually, might we add – by between 5 and 20mm. Expensive? Almost certainly.