Steve Davies

We've known since last summer that Porsche would launch a more sporting variant of the ever-popular Cayman before the year-end, and whilst speculation was rife about its nomenclature it was never likely to be called a CS.

Instead Porsche have chosen to call it the Cayman R and if you're familiar with Porsche naming convention then you'll already realise that such a distinction is important. The Porsche alphabet reserves the letter R for very special sports cars in its range: R for responsive and refined – but most especially for racy. Porsche claims that the new Cayman R combines all these attributes without compromise.

World-record holder and gold medal winner Usain Bolt, experienced a special day out in Maranello yesterday, where he tested out a 458 Italia and 599 GTB Fiorano at Ferrari's Fiorano circuit.

Earlier this month Lamborghini's Murciélago reached the end of production and with it went the venerable 60° V12 engine which has served the Raging Bull for more than 40 years. It was time for fresh start - in the intervening years Lamborghini's V12 had grown from the 3.5-litre F1-inspired design to a 6.5-litre unit with nearly twice the power.

Sometimes there's a reason why a niche is 'new' and perhaps other companies have considered and then dismissed it from their box of good ideas. Occasionally such innovations succeed, take Mercedes-Benz CLS, BMW's X6 or Smart's ForTwo, but sometimes those left-field ideas are supposed to remain just that - ideas.

Nissan disagrees however and has revealed the world’s first all-wheel drive crossover convertible in the run up to the LA Auto Show later this week

Some days I feel like I must have gone to sleep and woken in a parallel universe - perhaps the popular TV series, Fringe, is a documentary on life - a fictional metaphor, rather than the science fantasy we first thought?

We live in an age where Aston Martin make a cutesy city car, Lotus focus more on fashion than engineering and Porsche plan a top-of-the-range electric powered supercar. If we'd painted this vision of the future as recently as 5 years ago, you'd have laughed hysterically and questioned our sanity and yet here we are at the end of 2010 describing exactly such a reality.

You have to admire the ambition of Dany Bahar and his team at Lotus, despite doubts over the scale and achievability of their New Era strategy, they've certainly raised the brand's profile during the two months since their Paris Motorshow bombshell.

Turning the small Norfolk car maker into a worthy Aston Martin, Ferrari and Porsche rival is on a par with Red Bull winning the F1 World Championship - an unlikely ambition and yet we've just witnessed the Austrian drinks company achieving just that.

Put yourself in the shoes of Michael Stoschek - successful entrepreneur, collector and driver of historic racing cars and overall motorsport junkie. One day you decide to add another car to your collection, a New Stratos, successor to the iconic The Lancia Stratos HF rally car. But wait, Lancia ceased production of the Stratos in 1974 after only 492 cars were made and despite various concepts displayed at motor shows since, there is no 'New' Stratos.

It's become rather a contentious issue predicting just when we're likely to see the public release of Gran Turismo 5. I remember sitting down with the Sony Computer Entertainment Europe (SCEE) team back in 2008 discussing the launch of GT5 Prologue and figuring on a 12 month delay until the full-fat GT5 was in our hands.