(what's left of) Sir GT-R

Contrary to many people’s belief, the first car to be adorned with the ‘Challenger’ name was not the beloved 1970 Challenger. Instead, it was the 1959 ‘Silver Challenger’, a special version of the 1959 Coronet. This ‘Silver Challenger’ was a large coupe that was only available in silver. This special edition was offered with two engine choices, the praised inline-6 230 CID that produced 135hp or the 255hp ‘Red Ram’ 326 CID V8.

Starting in 1984, Audi had revolutionized the motoring world by creating the first accessible car with an all-wheel drive fitted to it, the Audi Sport Quattro. This Quattro was obviously first utilized in motorsport, making a name for itself on the inherently crazy world of Group B rallying. Sadly, Group B came to a drastic end after a series of tragic events, such as Henty Toivonen and Sergio Cresto, tragically dying after their car went off track and caught on fire.

Back in 2005, Audi had been dominating the endurance races with their R8. To stop this, the A utomobile C lub de l’ O uest decided to implement some performance restricting mods to the R8, such as bigger restrictor plates and a weight ballast. All of this heading to the 24 Heures Du Mans wouldn’t do much except for almost taking away any chance of having a competitive car in the most iconic race. Due to this, Audi decided that the days were counted for the R8, and they decided to implement a new racecar to avoid this mess of problems.

Frenchmen had always been succesful with their rallying machines, such as the A110 and the 205T16, and Citroën was by no means the exception. After having proven their success in several Paris - Dakar rallyes, they decided to endeavour into the W orld R ally C ar championship with their Xsara. Once the Xsara had ended it’s racing life, Citroën begun work in 2004, but the unveil was not done until 2006 because they hadn’t partaken in the previous season.

Back to 2001, BMW wanted to compete in the GT2 class, and to do this, they decided to enter the new M3 (E46). Of course, the road going version wasn’t going to be competitive enough, and they had to fabricate a homologation special series of M3s to be allowed to enter the A merican L e M ans S eries, and so they begun the modifications to transform it into a GT2 racer.

45 years ago, Porsche had launched the 917/20, a car built for racing in the Can-Am Challenge Cup, North America’s almost restriction-free racing series made for prototypes. The 917/20 was driven by George Follmer, and so, after this car’s dominance in the 1972 championship, the face of motorsport was inevitably changed during the remaining 70’s and 80’s decade. The change was thanks to the fact that the 917/20 was Stuttgart’s brand first turbo’d racecar, belting out 850hp from a boxer 12 engine.

The Evo V’s development started in 1997, year in which the FIA approved a new homologation for cars that were going to be used in the World Rally Championship. Those new regulations stated that the new WRCs had to comply with the same regulations as Group A cars , and so Mitsubishi redesigned the Evo IV with Group A homologations in mind and unveiled the new Evolution model to the world in January of 1998.

The i20 WRC is Hyundai’s first proper attempt at participating in a top-tier motorsport class, although they did participate in a clubman series with the Accent. The i20 WRC was unveiled to the world in 2012, with a concept shown in 2013, after both concepts the car debuted in the 2014 Rallye de Montecarlo, with Dani Sordo (SPN), Thierry Neuville (BLG), Juho Hänninen (FNL) and Chris Atkinson (AUS) given the job to drive the new project.

Introduction The F-150 SVT Raptor (or Raptor, much easier) was introduced by Ford (Wow, really? Thought it was Renault for a second) to american dealerships in late stages of 2009, with the sole objective of being a pure off-roader, to Ford’s surprise, sales went much better than expected (insert everything went better than expected meme here). But, continuing with the sales topic, Ford was able to sell 1,186 Raptors, outselling Honda’s Ridgeline, who would’ve thought a performance F-150 could outsell a standard Honda?

Built to celebrate Lamborghini’s 50th anniversary, they unveiled another submodel based on the Aventador, of which only 12 units will be built, 3 as a coupe and 9 as a roadster. Keeping on with the tradition, it is named after a bull, this time “Veneno”, which stands for poison in Spanish, this bull was made famous after wounding to death a torero in 1914, Andalucia, Spain.

First up, a brief history of Pagani: It was founded by Horacio Pagani, a former employee of Lamborghini. The company originally destined itself to the carbon fibre research, later it derived to cars, presenting their first car, the Zonda C2, in 1999. The Cinque is up next. Born as a special project for a Hong Kong Pagani Dealer, “SPS”, that was produced in only five pieces that all were sold (of course).

The R35 is the sucessor to the infamous R34. This generation of the GT-R was unveiled by Nissan in the 2007 Tokyo Auto Salon, it was available on the U.S. by 2008 and to the rest of the world by 2009. The GT-R concept was unveiled at the 2005 Tokyo Auto Salon, with Nissan saying that the production car would look 90-95% like the concept shown

Inspired by GTA Motorsport, I’m going to do a series of my favourite cars, starting with the R34 GT-R