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Lotus Evija X track special appears in spy photos at the Nurburgring

Few people would say the Lotus Evija is lacking in performance. It's meant to make just shy of 2,000 horsepower and is light for an electric car at around 3,700 pounds. But apparently Lotus wants to go further. These spy shots reveal a wild track-only special that's clearly labeled the Lotus Evija X testing at the Nurburgring. We're assuming this X will be substantially lighter than a regular Evija. It has a bare carbon body with seemingly fewer individual pieces. The headlights are gone and so are the rear windows. The interior appears gutted, too. That carbon body is far from stock, too. It's much wider and has all manner of downforce-producing add-ons. The front has a massive front splitter and canards and cutouts above the front wheels. The sides even have wide splitters with struts. And the X's crown aero accessory is that enormous wing that rises well above the roof.  The wide body also encompasses fat slick racing tires that are almost certainly not street legal. They bear the Pirelli P Zero name on the sidewalls, and they're wrapped around center-lock wheels. AP Racing brakes are tucked inside. There are of course plenty of questions surrounding the Evija X. It's definitely a track-only machine, but is it a one-off, or is it going to be sold in extremely limited numbers to select buyers? Maybe Lotus wants to take the Evija racing? Though it seems more like a rules-be-damned type of car like the Pagani Zonda R. Or maybe the Volkswagen ID.R, the fastest electric car to lap the 'Ring, would be a closer analogue to the Evija X. The spy photographer that provided these photos said the track was rented out for the day by Lotus, and some sort of notary was on hand, likely to certify a lap time. If Lotus is gunning for an EV lap record there, the Evija R is going to be outrageously fast. The ID.R's time sits at a shocking 6:05.336. And if the Lotus tops it, it would become the second fastest overall car at the 'Ring. We'll definitely be looking forward to more details and an eventual lap time. Related video:

Race Recap: 2014 Spanish Grand Prix is boom and bust [spoilers]

The Spanish Grand Prix's 2.892-mile Circuit de Catalunya is considered a preview for the rest of the season, since it's a combination of long front straight and twisting middle sectors mimic sections from every other Formula One track to follow. After the long break following the flyaway races to open the season, teams and fans have also been looking forward to this race to see if anyone had a realistic hope of catching Mercedes AMG Petronas; Infiniti Red Bull Racing honcho Christian Horner boiled his team's outlook for the season down to the line, "We've got to [beat them in Spain] if we're going to make a championship of it."
If we take that as our starting point then the weekend began as a bust. Lewis Hamilton only just beat Mercedes teammate Nico Rosberg for pole, the Brit's final effort getting him 0.178 seconds clear of the German. Daniel Ricciardo, proving Red Bull is at least the best of the rest, took third but did so more than a second behind Hamilton. Valtteri Bottas of Williams lined up fourth, almost 1.5 second behind and Romain Grosjean delivered overdue good news for Lotus by taking fifth on the grid, more than 1.7 seconds behind pole. Kimi Räikkönen in sixth outqualified his Ferrari teammate Fernando Alonso in seventh, but he couldn't be happy about it because the Ferraris were nearly two seconds behind, and Jenson Button in eighth in the McLaren was more than two second behind. Felipe Massa put the second Williams in ninth, and Sebastian Vettel overcame a terrible start to the weekend to make it into Q3, then didn't set a time when his gearbox failed, then got dropped five places to 15th on the grid when the gearbox had to be changed.
When the lights went out, then came the boom...

European commission investigating F1 finances and anti-competitive accusations

The Kingdom of Formula One reminds us of renaissance Florence - ruled by a singular chieftan behind a mask of representative involvement, rife with spectacularly convoluted machinations, awash in innovations that help define our world and far-flung, vindictive misery. If we found out Bernie Ecclestone's real last name was de Medici, well, it would explain a lot. Now after a bit of back-and-forth, the European Commission (EC) has taken aim at the kingdom, investigating whether F1 is anti-competitive and if the FIA has abused its antitrust agreement. The reason for EC scrutiny is that a British member of the European Parliament who represents an area in southwest England, Anneliese Dodds, has fielded complaints from engineering companies in her constituency that recent moves in F1 have put them out of business. She wrote to the EC to question why the FIA now has a stake in F1 when it signed an agreement in 2001 to be solely a governing body and abdicate any stakeholding in the sport. She also questioned the F1 Strategy Group, a group of the six top teams in F1 that makes decisions about the direction of the sport; she says that the Strategy Group not only appears to be a case of the F1 shirking its rule-making duty, it has resulted in unfair treatment of the small teams that aren't in the group. Dodds has a bit of a point. In 2001, the FIA sold F1's commercial rights to Ecclestone for 100 years for a sum of $313.7 million. That was done to placate European regulators who insisted that "the role of FIA will be limited to that of a sports regulator, with no commercial conflicts of interest." Although the rights are ultimately owned by the FIA and bring in a $10M fee every year from Formula One, those rights bring in $1.6 billion each year to Formula One Management (FOM), the company that owns F1. When Ecclestone was trying to get the new Concorde Agreement signed in 2013 that governs the running of the sport, the FIA wouldn't sign, saying it wanted F1 to share a larger slice of its revenue – the FIA has been losing money for years, see. To the get the FIA to sign, Ecclestone sold it a one-percent stake in F1 for $460,000 and gave the FIA a $5M signing 'bonus;' whenever F1 has its IPO, that stake is estimated to be worth about $120 million - not a bad return. Yet, according to the aforementioned 2001 agreement, the FIA can't have that equity stake.