Car Trends Magazine

Bentley Motors is staging an art auction at Bonhams, London, to raise money for The Christie, a specialist cancer centre in Manchester, which treats 40,000 patients a year and is an international leader in cancer research.

Bentley Styling and Design team have created individual pieces for auction, drawing on the skills and techniques utilised in their roles and their enthusiasm for art.

The auction of the collection will conclude with an exclusive event to be held at Bonhams, London, on Tuesday 1st December.

The collection ranges from the traditional to the contemporary; sculptures set in bronze, wood, metal, and leather through to stunning palette knife and brush paintings on canvas, digital art and photography.

Bentley designer Richard Gilmartin has been raising funds to support the charity since 2001 and is the inspiration behind the exceptional project. Working with his colleagues, Richard aims to surpass his previous fundraising achievements by auctioning this unique collection.

The complete collection, including info on the single designers, is available at Bentley's official website.

(www.carbodydesign.com)

I've always been a fairly strict utilitarian when it comes to vehicle features and design. Useless gingerbread and eye-candy don't do much for me. I had a conniption the other day when I got an up-close look at the new Mustang Shelby GT. This car is a veritable poster-child for useless tacked-on styling trinkets. Hood scoop? Non-functional. Side-scoops? Also non-functional. Hood Pins? Well, arguably functional, but since the car has a conventional and fully-operational hood latch, I'll also put them in the "non-fucntional" category. There were probably more offending items still, but I was too enraged at the time by the gratuitous and patronizing tacked-on bric-a-brac to take notice.

About a week later, a co-worker sends me a story about Kumho's new Ecsta DX tires. Now, as a compact enthusiast, I've known about Kumho tires for quite a while, and know they're a favorite of autocrossers and club racers for their competitve dry-pavement performance as well as their low price. (Heck, I'm running a set of them right now on my daily driver!) So Kumho has some built-in enthusiast cred in my book. But when I read about the defining characteristic of the DX line, Kumho got knocked down a notch or two on my cred list.

You see, the DX's claim to fame is its lavender scent. Yes, the same as that of many shampoos and body washes. In the press release for the tires, Kumho is claiming functional benefits from the addition of the aromatic agent, including, "...heat-resistant oils are said to enhance the bonding of rubber chains and maximize the viscoelasticity of the rubber compound, which helps reduce braking distances on wet or dry roads. The Ecsta DX Aroma compound also features silica to improve all-weather performance and wet traction."

Said to enhance? Wow. That really sounds like a ringing, empirical endorsement of the functionality of the lavender scent. Now, if from exhaustive testing, the lavender-scented additive is shown to improve performance beyond a shadow of a doubt, I'll be at the front of the parade touting the benefits of girlie-scented tires, and advocating their use on all vehicles.

But for a tenuous stretch to try to justify the use of perfume in tires for some nebulous perceived benefit, I'll stick to the good ol' stinky vulcanized rubber tires for now.

(blogs.modified.com)

Yes, you’ve seen this movie before. And yes, even with 540 horsepower, to some a Mustang is not, strictly speaking, a sports car. A sports car, by the classic British definition, is one that can, in a pinch, be raced. But times change, and even our resident hotspur Brit, Mr. Gillies, thinks this is talk that predates his birth.

In its most recent encounter with a Corvette—July 2006—the super pony didn’t fare well against Chevy’s shark. Road-course lap times favored the Vette, and even on something as uncomplicated as a drag strip, the big-horsepower Mustang didn’t cover itself with low-ET glory.

So at a glance, this may look like another mismatch. On the other hand, Chevy’s new Camaro inventory has nothing that measures up to this latest Carroll Shelby–anointed Mustang, in either price ($50,895 as tested) or power. (Note: Anointed is not the same as developed. The development was handled by SVT, Ford’s Special Vehicle Team.)

Composed of young engineers dedicated to adding a little glamour and/or haste to various Fords, SVT has teetered on the verge of expendability for years. Nevertheless, even in this age of green priorities and tight money, SVT persists, while GM’s performance group has been disbanded.

SVT has made a number of positive upgrades to the GT500, giving it essentially the same chops, including those 540 horses, as the GT500KR (King of the Road) that ruled the 2009 Mustang family, for far less money. Meanwhile, even though the perform­ance group has been scattered throughout GM’s mainstream gulag, development hasn’t ground to a halt at Corvettestan, where the disciples of Zora Arkus-Duntov have made some revisions for 2010. These include the revival of the Grand Sport name (base price $55,720, $64,815 as tested), a name once confined to racing editions originally created by Saint Zora himself.

So, two perennial rivals—updated for 2010, with a combined engine output of almost 1000 horsepower—meet on bad-boy territory, our favorite automotive turf. Having provided ourselves with an excuse to indulge in kidney-displacing g-loads, we corralled a GT500 and a Grand Sport Vette and headed west for some hasty driving, including an afternoon at Grattan Raceway Park near Grand Rapids, Michigan.