Mason Gibbons

Valtteri Bottas would accept team orders from Mercedes to help team-mate Lewis Hamilton if it would earn the manufacturer a fifth straight Formula 1 title double

It's been a year since vacuum giant Dyson announced plans to build an electric car, something founder and chief engineer James Dyson has been hinting at since 2008. The company on Thursday gave an update on the plans, confirming that the former Hullavington air force base in southern England it acquired in 2017 will be turned into the main hub for...

Fancy a McLaren with a five-figure price tag? These are the top bargain buys we've spotted for sale The used car market is brimming with tasty deals, but sometimes it can be hard to tell the wise buys from the potential money pits. Fear not: our used car experts have compiled their picks from the classifieds . See anything you like? Best to move fast and buy them before we do... McLaren MP4-12C , £99,900 - As your mum often said, you can’t have everything. So it was with the McLaren MP4-12C, which was launched in 2011, offering dynamic treats in inverse proportion to the simplicity of its name. For the record, the ‘12’ referred to McLaren’s internal matrix of vehicle performance, which combined power, weight, emissions and aerodynamic efficiency and gave it all a score. ‘C’ was for carbonfibre, in reference to the car’s tub. Most testers detected a glitch in said matrix, ranking the MP4-12C behind its arch rival, the Ferrari 458. Scoring the car on a spreadsheet was one thi...

Usually, when someone has to ask "how well are we doing?" the answer is "not very well". Matt Prior shares his thoughts The Toyota Verso has been axed in Europe . I know, you didn’t realise it was still on sale, right? It seems that SUVs, 4x4s and other crossovers continue to decimate the once-ubiquitous ‘people carrier’ segment. Traditionally, MPVs are big, boring and dull to drive. Something, I reckoned, we wouldn’t miss too much. The kind of vehicle you’d dissuade people who like cars and driving from buying. But the alternative is a crossover: big, boring, dull, etc – and it doesn’t even have the excuse of being spacious. Another case of being careful what you wish for. Stop asking me about the service ‘How did we do?’ has reached peak irritation. I thought the apogee was airport security, which has a range of smiley-faced buttons on exit so you can push one that accurately reflects how pleasing, or otherwise, the experience was. And yet the screening pr...

Updated Ford Mondeo rival remains a convincing choice six years on from launch, and mid-range 2.0-litre petrol is the sweet-spot of the petrol line-up Yet another facelift for the third-generation Mazda 6. If it feels like there’s been quite a few of those, you’d be right; this is the third range update the Volkswagen Passat rival has benefitted from since it was launched a full six years ago. Such frequent revisions are necessary because six years is an awfully long time in the car business. Almost every rival has moved on a generation since the 6 first graced the motor show stands. Often, no amount of nip-and-tuck can really revitalise a design of such vintage, but we reckon Mazda’s saloon remains among the more visually appealing shapes in the class. The changes for 2018 are subtle, including a deeper, CX-5-aping grille, new LED headlights and a chrome grille surround extended underneath them. Nothing too drastic, thankfully. Clearly, what customers were cry...

VW’s upcoming T-Roc R will have only a few styling tweaks over the standard car Due to success with models such as the Golf R, the performance arm is playing a greater role in developing Volkswagens Volkswagen R performance variants are now so important to the car maker that the R division is involved from the start of a standard model’s product development. Speaking to Autocar in Peterborough at the customer handover of the 200,000th Volkswagen R car , division boss Jost Capito said Volkswagen’s executives have been “pushing” him for more input into each new model because they’re aware of the positive impact a halo variant can have on overall sales. “R has become so successful – we’ve sold nearly 100,000 Golf Rs alone – that we are thinking about this version of a car as soon as the process begins,” he said. “If we did it differently, if we had to adjust cars at a more advanced stage of development to make the R model, we wouldn’t be able to create the fast and well-rounded cars...

A spotted test mule has hinted at design cues for the extreme end of Porsche's next 911, which is due in 2020 The next-generation Porsche 911 could resign an illustrious line of race-bred naturally aspirated performance engines to the history books, according to sources close to the German car maker who suggest the successor to today’s GT3 is in line to adopt a twin-turbocharged powerplant. The move, not yet officially confirmed by Porsche , would bring the 2020 911 GT3 and its more heavily focused 911 GT3 RS sibling into line with other models in the new 992-series 911 line-up, which are already confirmed to received updated versions of today’s turbocharged 3.0-litre and 3.8-litre units. The Stuttgart-based source, with direct links to Porsche Motorsport, contends plans are for the GT3 to adopt a heavily reworked version of the existing 911 Turbo’s twin-turbocharged, 3.8-litre horizontally opposed six-cylinder engine. In the new 911 Turbo, due to be revealed during the latte...