Most people familiar with the marque’s history know about the Bentley Boys and how their enormous, overpowered British cars conquered Le Mans more than 90 years ago. Fewer are likely aware that there was also a contingent of “Bentley Girls” – Mary Petre Bruce, Dorothy Paget and Diana Barnato Walker – who also owned a chunk of Crewe’s performance heritage based on their design work and performance in speed trials generations ago.

Ir’s appropriate, therefore, that Bentley has chosen to mark International Women’s Day by introducing three new versions of its Bentayga wagon, each executed to mark each one of the Bentley Girls’ accomplishments. Each luxury car is uniquely finished to recall, respectively, the Mary Bruce’s 4½ Litre Bentley race car, Dorothy Paget’s supercharged Blower and Diana Barnato Walker’s Spitfire aircraft of World War II. Colors, trim and interior appointments help to set each Bentayga apart.

Ray Evernham went from racing stock cars in New Jersey to winning multiple championships in NASCAR as a crew chief, to spearheading Dodge’s reentry to the sport, to becoming a vivid personality in the world of antique and historic cars, especially race cars. The constant for all this has been Evernham’s preternatural skills at organization, oversight and personal motivation, drawing inspiration from both the NBA coaching legend Pat Riley and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Any racer, or aspiring racer, would benefit greatly from a dose of Evernham management skills. Finally, here’s where you find them all in one place.

The title of this book, Trophies and Scars, is apt, because Evernham makes clear in its 338 hardbound pages, (very liberally illustrated) that motorsport at any level will test you every day, and can leave you deflated if you don’t measure up. Having the fortitude to get back on your feet is essential. Evernham has done this so effectively over the course of his career that he earned enshrinement in the NASCAR Hall of Fame as a crew chief. This wonderfully honest book, published by Octane Press and priced at $34,95, should be required reading for anyone who’s seriously contemplating getting into motorsport.

If you’ve had any significant exposure to American motorsport over the past 60 years or so, you know the name of Ed Pink, whose nickname, The Old Master, is appropriate given Pink’s mastery – and that’s exactly the right word – of engines ranging from Top Fuel Chrysler Hemis to IndyCar Cosworth V8s to IMSA GTPs to the shrieking little USAC Midgets that run today’s Chili Bowl Nationals. Pink’s journey is told wonderfully, and enticingly, in The Old Master, his autobiography penned by our good friend Bones Bourcier, maybe the best pure motorsport journalist in America today,

In Pink’s voice, the 276-page hardcover narrative is a rollicking ride through decades of hard work, innovation, going fast and meeting some unbelievable characters. There’s way too many anecdotes in the book to list them here – they’re sprinkled on literally every page – but the subject’s encounter with the great Mickey Thompson at a casino in Las Vegas immediately sticks out. This is a great read, and as a bonus, it’s printed on heavy paper in a large format, making it easy to read the text if you’re too lazy to put your glasses on. Arguably the best motorsport book we’ve read in the past year, The Old Master is a production of Coastal 181, which retails it for a very reasonable $39.95.

When you win the Daytona 500, as somebody will a week from today, you get your name emblazoned on a plaque on the base of the Harley J. Earl Trophy, named in honor of the longtime General Motors styling wizard. The huge permanent trophy is topped with a replica of the General Motors Firebird I, a famed design study of a gas turbine-powered personal car that Earl designed in 1953, back when Daytona races were still held on the beach, in time for the great GM Motorama shows of the 1950s.

This week, the original Earl design study made a brief return to Daytona Beach, where it’s on respectful display at the Motorsports Hall of Fame of America, which is located on the grounds of Daytona International Speedway. This priceless GM artifact will be at the MSHFA through this coming Friday, Feburary 16th. Our good friend Dave Seyse, who’s on staff at the hall of fame, provided us with this image.

Subaru doesn’t do conventional, U.S.-style motorsport, which is why you haven’t seen one on an oval track since the United States Auto Club approved a version of its flat-four engine for Midget competition. Instead, Subaru engages in motorsport that augments its own values of toughness and all-everything capability, which is why, like Audi, Subaru is very big into the wild outdoor motorsport of rallying. Subaru owns multiple global titles in the World Rally Championship, and closer to home, is planning a full assault on the American Rally Association’s eight-event schedule for 2024.

Extreme sports icon Travis Pastrana is back with the Subaru of America rally operation, along with Brandon Semenuk, who scored a perfect season in ARA competition during 2023. The rally cars are prepped for Subaru of America at the race car factory operated by Vermont SportsCar in Milton, Vermont, with sponsors ranging from Red Bull to Yokohama Tires to AT&T Business. The cars are hyper-performance versions of Subaru’s compact, rally bred WRX sedan. There’s likely no form of competition that’s tougher on production-based cars than all-out rallying on every kind of surface you can image, in both daylight and darkness. Subaru is very good at this.

Audi made history on a number of levels last week while capturing the overall victory in the grueling Dakar Rally, as the all-Spanish team of rally legend Carlos Sainz and navigator Lucas Cruz built a winning margin of 80 minutes in capturing the multi-stage, 7,900km charge across the desert wastelands. It was the Sainz/Cruz combo’s fourth overall Dakar win, scored for four different manufacturers, with Audi carrying them to their second victory for the Volkswagen Group.

Sales of purely electric vehicles have slowed somewhat as buyer adjust to the cost and recharging realities, but Audi has gone all-in on non-ICE power. The Dakar winner was the Audi RS e-tron, making it the first victory scored by a vehicle with electric all-wheel drive, a high-voltage battery and an energy converter. The Audi converter runs on residual fuel-based ReFuel. Sainz and Cruz took the lead after the rally’s sixth time stage and held it the rest of the way.

Volvo Cars, as the Chinese-owned firm is now known, has established a new annual global sales record for 2023, with a reported 708,716 new cars and SUVs sold during the year, a remarkable increase of 15 percent over the previous year’s sales totals. In large part, Volvo is crediting an ongoing break in the pandemic-triggered supply chain bottleneck with its ability to boost sales so dramatically.

The other major contributing factor to Volvo’s recent sales performance is a marked increase in buyer appetite for its line of EVs. Last year, Volvo Cars sold 113,419 fully electric cars, an increase of 70 per cent compared to 2022, and 152,561 plug-in hybrid cars, which was a 10 per cent increase compared to 2022. Sales of fully electric cars accounted for 16 per cent of all Volvo cars sold globally during 2023. Overall sales in Europe were also up by 19 percent. China boasted a 5-percent annual sales increase. Volvo’s top-performing model through all this, we should add, was the XC60 crossover, followed closely by the XC40.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has singled out Hyundai as an industry leader for its performance on fuel economy and greenhouse gas emissions, the South Korean giant placed second only to Tesla in those categories under the EPA’s latest Automotive Trends Report. Hyundai is thus recognized having the best fuel mileage and lowest overall CO2 emissions of any mainstream auto manufacturer in the U.S. market.

According to the report, between 2017 and 2022, Hyundai reduced its CO₂ emissions from 311 g/mi to 302 g/mi. Hyundai also improved its real-world fuel economy from 28.6 to 29.1 MPG over the same period. Hyundai’s ranking was based in part on results stemming from the presence of both high-efficiency ICE-powered vehicles and a selection of EVs in its U.S. product lineup.

Before we talk about the car in this book, we’ve got to first point out that it’s legendary on several levels, first for being driven by one of the all-time greats in eastern Sprint car racing, Tommy Hinnershitz, the quiet Pennsylvania farmer. What happens beyond that is a terrific detective story. The Pfrommer Offy is the step-by-step tale of the research that was required to identify it from a pile of remains that had been first been raced in 1954 and was campaigned through 1972, with a driver lineup that included 15 veterans of the Indianapolis 500 and eight drivers enshrined in the National Sprint Car Hall of Fame in Knoxville, Iowa. Hinnershitz won the 1959 USAC Eastern Championship with the Pfrommer car before it gradually faded into history.

Alan F. Gross’s 154-page story is a year-by-year accounting of what happened next to the Pfrommer Offy, one of just 37 Sprint cars constructed by the hall of fame builder Hiram Hillegass, as the prologue to the race car’s eventual restoration to its 1950s appearance. Rescuing historic cars, especially after they’ve been discarded, requires the kind of intensive research that Gross conducted while trying to determine what he had. It’s a gratifying story told in this volume, which was published by Coastal 181 and retails for $34.95. Go to http://www.coastal181.com.

Depending on how you grew up in the sport, your favorite race cars may well be the upright, center-steer, big-block Modifieds that are common to the dirt tracks of the Northeast but periodically range farther afield, including Florida, the deep South and depending on sanctioning body, the Texas region. One such body that venerates the Modifieds is the Super DIRTcar Series, which is operated by World Racing Group of Charlotte, which also runs the World of Outlaws tours for Sprint cars and dirt Late Models. The tour, which generally consists of 100-lap features, will race in 2024 at 18 speedways located in six states and two Canadian provinces, with four new stops including Atomic Speedway in Ohio.

This photo, from WRG, essentially sums up DIRTcar’s 2023 season in a single image. Matt Sheppard of Waterloo, New York, running up high, cemented his 10th DIRTcar season title and now lies nine wins away from 100 series feature wins. The other guy is Mat Williamson of St. Catherine’s, Ontario, the series’ most recent breakout star, who celebrated 2023 with his third win at the Super DIRT Week extravaganza at Oswego Speedway in New York. The Super DIRTcar Series campaign starts next month at Volusia Speedway Park with the DIRTcar Nationals, the Modified portion set for February 14-17.