BY ALISA PRIDDLE, PHOTOGRAPHY BY CARPIX AND THE MANUFACTURER

The sexy coupe gets a V-10, then drops the top—but getting your hands on either one could be a challenge.

There aren’t a lot of available Audi R8s and adding a V-10 version next year and potentially a powerful diesel option down the road will only make it worse.

In Germany, there currently is an eight-month wait for an R8, Michael Dick, Audi’s member of the board of management for technical development, tells Car and Driver in an interview at the 2008 Paris auto show. In the U.S., customers fight over the roughly 50 that arrive each month. (more…)

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BY TONY SWAN, PHOTOGRAPHY BY JIM FRENAK

So here it is, the third and final entry in the 21st-century pony-car-revival derby. Get your bets down early because we don’t expect to see any more resurrections of famous makes from the galloping go-go Sixties—Barracuda, Firebird, Javelin, et al.—and even gloomier, we think it likely that, given fuel prices and other concerns, this revival is likely to lack the fervor and duration of the original movement. (more…)

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BY JOHN PHILLIPS, PHOTOGRAPHY BY AARON KILEY

Antique Road Show: What would Andy Warhol drive?

This road test may be irrelevant. Which wouldn’t necessarily make it unique to the pages of C/D. This time, however, it isn’t our fault. See, Bentley is going to create only 550 Brooklands—delivering the final one toward the end of 2009—and 549 of them are already spoken for. The grand-touring coupe you see on these pages, in a color Bentley calls “Porcelain,” is the last copy for sale. Or was at the time this was written. (more…)

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BY AARON ROBINSON, PHOTOGRAPHY BY DAVID DEWHURST

Day 2 Second and First Place: Extremists

2008 Porsche 911 GT2
Second Place: Extremists

Check it out: Black leather, red seatbelts, splashes of fuzzy Alcantara, deep-scallop buckets in glossy carbon-fiber shells, fish-gill vents, and flaring air snorkels on the wing posts. The GT2’s visual cues mix the subtle with the animal. (more…)

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BY AARON ROBINSON, PHOTOGRAPHY BY DAVID DEWHURST

It’s man against motherboard in this four-way flog of max-horsepower machines.

Behold four machines sitting on the pointy end of a horsepower skyrocket that lifted off sometime in the 1980s and hasn’t hit the chutes yet.

For now, anyone can buy these vehicles by flashing a valid driver’s license and a healthy checkbook. But this may be it. The last act. The apogee right before reentry, when post-peak oil prices and carbon-emissions limits and general economic malaise threaten to make memories out of 500-horsepower cars. Maybe someday you’ll bore grandchildren with tales of Porsche GT2s practically falling out of trees for just $198,875. Is it 1971 all over again? Who knows? Maybe you’ll be telling them from the back seat of their parents’ 700-hp minivan. (more…)

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BY STEVE SILER

Japan’s Eagle has landed.

Infiniti relentlessly pursues a sporty image as much as Lexus claims to relentlessly pursue, well, you know what. So it surprised us somewhat that Infiniti chose the stodgy ol Pebble Beach Concours d Elegance to unveil”officially, anyway”what is arguably its sportiest ute yet: the G35-based EX35 crossover. Think of it as a G35 wagon. Or a mini FX35. We see a spiritual descendant of the 1980 AMC Eagle wagon built upon one of the world’s most prolific and capable platforms and stuffed with a swank interior. (more…)

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BY STEVE SILER, PHOTOGRAPHY BY MORGAN J. SEGAL

The quickest BMW you can get that doesn’t start with an M (until the 135i arrives, that is).

It used to be easy to write about the BMW 3-series. For the most part, we knew what we were gonna say before we ever got in the car. On the other hand, there were nuances about the character of the car that were extremely hard to put into words to convey just how good these cars feel. But we’d try, and it usually came out in the form of unbridled praise for perfect steering, elegant interior simplicity, and a brilliant ride-and-handling balance.

Maybe BMW got bored of hearing the same thing over and over again, because suddenly we had to come up with new words to describe the 3: controversially styled, technologically overwrought, and now this: quicker with the automatic. (more…)

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BY ALISA PRIDDLE, PHOTOGRAPHY BY MARTYN GODDARD AND THE MANUFACTURER

The 2008 CTS is only the start. We clue you in on the rest, including a sub-CTS model, an upcoming diesel, and the next-gen SRX and DTS.

Cadillac is launching a much-improved, second-generation CTS for the 2008 model year. The car will initially launch as a sedan in more than 40 countries worldwide. It should be in U.S. showrooms in mid-August. (more…)

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BY RAY HUTTON

Well, the swallows come back to Capistrano,and so do the rumors of Alfa’s return to the U.S.

Alfa Romeo has a fine heritage but a difficult recent history, particularly in the U.S. In the early 90s, the Italian marque limped away, just as too many of its 164 sedans had done. (more…)

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BY STEVE SILER, PHOTOGRAPHY BY MIKE VALENTE

Alfa Romeo will relaunch its sales operations in the United States with the scrumptious 8C Competizione coupe.

The 8C, designed by Alfa Romeo, is directly derived from the concept car that set loins astir at the 2003 Frankfurt Motor Show, and is the first car we’ll see that comes out of the new Alfa Romeo-Maserati partnership. (more…)

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