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Tom Kristensen walks through a perfect lap of Le Mans in Forza 5

One of the best ways of learning a new track, aside from driving it, is to hear someone that's intimately familiar with it give you a good walkthrough. That's just what you'll get here, as the winningest driver in 24 Hours of Le Mans history, Tom Kristensen, walks you through the Circuit de la Sarthe's high-speed, 8.5-mile strip of pavement.
Kristensen is dubbed over scenes of drivers from a Forza Motorsport 5 contest lapping the track at the wheel of an Audi R18 E-Tron Quattro, adding a bit of visual sense to the Danish drivers description of the track.
With the 2014 24 Hours of Le Mans kicking off this weekend, this is just the sort of video you'll want to watch to get you in the mood. Take a look below, and then let us know what you think in Comments.

2018 Audi A6 endures winter training in Norway

The upcoming 2018 Audi A6 was spied in northern Norway. Still clad in appropriate, but garish camo, the basic shape and detailing of the next-generation A6 can be made out. The grill is wide, the headlights mean; the look matches the recently overhauled A4, but with larger dimensions – a recipe from which Audi hasn't really strayed far since the blob-like A6 of 1997. Audi tried to disguise the new headlights under something that resembles the current front, but there are slimmer units underneath. Other detectable details are the hood's straight line toward the radiator grille, and the mirrors fitted on the door sheetmetal now instead of the A-pillar corners. There can even be a LED light strip between the taillights, like the A8. The car will share its MLB platform with the A8, so some shared design makes sense. The new A6 will also be the first Audi work of the new design boss, Mark Lichte. In 2018, the A6 will face tough competition as both the Mercedes-Benz E-Class and the BMW 5 Series have been recently renewed. It is likely that Audi will line the car with the latest available high tech and a credible Virtual Cockpit integration, as the executive class battle is awash with tech gadgets. Rumors say the new A6's screens will even feature haptic feedback. Related Video:

Stanford goes from Pikes Peak to Thunderhill with autonomous Audi TTS

In the years since Stanford University engineers successfully programmed an Audi TTS to autonomously ascend Pikes Peak, the technology behind driverless cars has progressed leaps and bounds. Back then the Audi needed 27 minutes to make it up the 12.42-mile course – about 10 minutes slower than a human driver. These days, further improvements allow the vehicle to lap a track faster than a human. The researchers recently took their autonomous TTS named Shelley to the undulating Thunderhill Raceway Park, and let it go on track without anyone inside. The Audi reportedly hit over 120 miles per hour, and according to The Telegraph, the circuit's CEO, who's also an amateur racing driver, took some laps as well and was 0.4 seconds slower than the computer. To make these massive technological advancements, the Stanford engineers have been studying how racers handle a car. They also hooked up drivers' brains to electrodes and found the mind wasn't doing as much cognitively as expected. It instead operated largely on muscle memory. "So by looking at race car drivers we are actually looking at the same mathematical problem that we use for safety on the highways. We've got the point of being fairly comparable to an expert driver in terms of our ability to drive around the track," Professor Chris Gerdes, director of Stanford's Revs Program, said to The Telegraph. With progress coming so rapidly, it seems possible for autonomous racecars to best even elite drivers at some point in the near future. Related Video: