racing

During practice sessions for the Race of Champions last week, two Tesla Roadsters got a real workout in the hands of such professional racing drivers as Michael Schumacher, Sebastien Loeb, and Alain Prost.

Video of one of the races shows Schumacher and Loeb battling it out on the parallel track, the cars taking the many curves in eerie silence. With the heavily designed indoor course and the brightly colored cars, they almost look like toys.

As they were run as an exhibition, no winners were declared for the races in the Tesla Roadsters.

The Race of Champions is a yearly … Read more

It's been a huge week for iOS gaming. Yesterday witnessed the arrival of a dazzling new Star Wars title, and today I've got quick takes on five more noteworthy new games--starting with a just-in-time movie tie-in.

Lego Harry Potter: Years 1-4  A near-perfect replica of the outstanding console game, Lego Harry Potter (which I previewed last week) loses almost nothing in its transition to the small screen. (And for now, it's only for small screens: the game requires iOS 4.1 or later, which leaves iPads out.)

Alas, there's no option for cooperative play, and … Read more

Back when I was a young pup, I dropped more quarters than I care to admit into an arcade game called Super Off Road. It was a top-down dirt-track racer--and one of my all-time favorite coin-ops.

EA's Reckless Racing just rekindled my love affair. It's a top-down dirt-track racer that delivers all the same freewheeling fun--with vastly superior graphics and online multiplayer!

Seriously, I can't remember the last time I fell in love with a game so quickly. Reckless Racing (which should really be called "Redneck" Racing, as that's the clear motif here) is crazy fun, to the point where I keep interrupting my review so I can go back for just one more race.

The game delivers on two major counts: graphics and controls. Reckless Racing is absolutely dazzling, with vibrantly colored cars and tracks that are just shy of photorealistic. And you get to choose from five different control schemes--everything from basic left/right-gas/brake buttons to an onscreen steering wheel ("half" or "full") to accelerometer steering. I'm partial to the buttons, but I am also enamored with "tank" mode (in which your car just goes flat-out the entire time--all you do is steer).

Whatever control option you choose, you'll find absolutely perfect arcade physics. Cars skid and slide and screech around corners (in varying amounts depending on whether you're on gravel or asphalt). If you like drift, you'll love RR.… Read more

Feeling the need for speed? Feeling the need for a permanent ban on the phrase, "feeling the need for speed"? Wishing I'd quit with the lame jokes and just get to the deal already? Got you covered, peeps.

From now until October 13 (aw, they're ending on my birthday), Microsoft is offering the off-road racing gem Dirt 2 (PC) for just $9.99. That's a whopping 75 percent off the original list price of $39.99.

The game will get delivered to you via Microsoft's Games for Windows Live client--meaning it's a download. … Read more

Whacksy Taxi is a fast-paced, ad-supported racing game with old-school graphics and controls--and a surprising amount of quality content for a free game.

Whacksy Taxi looks superficially like an Out-Run-style racer, but your lateral movement is much more like Frogger: you're always driving forward, on an endlessly straight road, but you use left and right buttons to switch back and forth between three vertical lanes, dodging a maze of traffic that becomes more dense with every level. You also have buttons to jump cars (one or two at a time) and to brake (to give yourself some breathing room). … Read more

History was made last weekend when American Bobby Cleveland won back his record for the world's fastest lawn mower, restoring order to the natural world. Cleveland's former record of 80.833 mph was broken by British driver Don Wales, who swiped it right from under Cleveland's nose with a 87.833 mph record at the Pendine Sands in Wales last May.

But we Yankees practically invented the sport of riding lawn mowers, and if American men are ever going to be able to justify spending $2K on a new John Deere riding mower, the country needed that … Read more

Mercedes-Benz released new photos of the Cigarette Racing AMG boat. The 46-foot Rider is capable of reaching speeds in excess of 130 mph. A pair of twin-turbocharged, 552-cubic inch 1,350 horsepower Mercury Racing engines powers it.

The Rider is inspired by the Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG Super Sports Car. Engineers at both companies worked together to bring the SLS-inspired watercraft to reality.

Although the boat is inspired by the car, it is also an amazing-looking craft with hand-applied AMG Alubeam silver and AMG Designo Mystic White paint in a bold design that echoes the AMG logo.

Imagine what movies would look like if producers thought everybody was watching their films on iPhones, and never in theaters or big screen TVs. That may be the perfect analogy to how the music business thinks the audience is listening to music.

The root source of the problem is that good-enough sound quality is all most people need, so the record companies and recording engineers don't have any incentive to make great-sounding recordings anymore. Other than a few audiophiles, who would hear them? The engineers have to "dumb down" the recordings to sound passably good on ear … Read more

Trucker's Delight is a risque, arguably misogynistic driving game based on a popular, inarguably profane Web video of the same name--and each game opens with a short excerpt of that video.

You're driving a tractor-trailer, in pursuit of a woman driving a red convertible--with whom, let's say, you've had some sort of romantic misunderstanding. Your goal is to rack up points by bumping the red convertible as many times as possible, while reaching checkpoints every 30 seconds. If you ever don't reach a checkpoint (because you've been delayed by collisions with other vehicles, off-road … Read more