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Ferrari 458 Italia becomes most expensive prize ever on Price Is Right

In case you haven't been paying attention, it's "Big Money Week" on the long-running The Price Is Right televised game show. In a nutshell, it means that more than a million dollars in cash and prizes are up for grabs for those lucky enough to "come on down," play some games and correctly guess product retail prices.
Moments after opening the show Thursday, host Drew Carey broke the unexpected news. "Today you are going to see the single-most-expensive prize in the history of the daytime Price is Right," he boasted before the curtains were pulled back to review a brand-new Ferrari 458 Italia Spider.
To win the car, the contestant had to play "Three Strikes" - blindly pulling numbers out of a bag and putting them in the correct price sequence before grabbing three dreaded red strikes. As expected, your typical The Price Is Right contestant is about as familiar with today's retail Ferrari pricing as they are with fractional jet ownership. We won't spoil the fun of whether or not a lucky contestant gets to drive the $285,716 exotic home (and pay a midsize sedan's worth of taxes), but feel free to speed ahead to about the three-minute mark on the video below to watch the reveal.

Ecclestone wonders if F1's upcoming turbo V6s should get augmented sound [w/videos]

While every team on the Formula One grid is worried about making a good showing in this year's championship at the same time as they develop a brand-new car for next year's championship, Bernie Ecclestone and F1 circuit promoters have a different concern: how next year's cars will sound. The current cars use 2.4-liter, naturally-aspirated V8s that can reach 18,000 revolutions per minute and employ dual exhaust, next year's engine formula calls for 1.4-liter turbocharged V6s that are capped at 15,000 rpm and are constrained to a single exhaust outlet. Ecclestone and promoters like Ron Walker believe the new engines sound like lawnmowers and that the less thrilling audio will keep people from coming to races. If Walker's Australian Grand Prix really is shelling out almost $57 million to hold the race, every ticket counts. As a fix, according to a report in Autoweek, Ecclestone "suggests that the only way to guarantee [a good sound] may be to artificially adjust the tone of the V6s."
However, neither the manufacturers nor the governing body of F1, the FIA, think there will be a problem. Ecclestone fears that if the manufacturers "don't get it right" they'll simply leave the sport, but the only three carmakers and engine builders left next year, Renault (its 2014 "power unit" is pictured), Mercedes-Benz and Ferrari are so embedded that it would stretch belief to think they'd leave the table over an audio hiccup - if said hiccup even occurs. And frankly, these issues always precede changes to engine formulas, as they did when the formula switched from V10 to V8; fans, though, are probably less focused on the engines and more on the mandated standardization of the sport and the spec-series overtones that have come with it.
No one knows yet what next year's engines will sound like, but we've assembled a few videos below to help us all start guessing. The first is an engine check on an Eighties-era John Player Special Renault with a 1.5-liter V6 turbo, after that is Ayrton Senna qualifying in 1986 in the Lotus 98T that also had a 1.5-liter V6 turbo, then you'll find a short with a manufactured range of potential V6 engine notes, and then the sound of turbocharged V6 Indycars testing last year at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Any, or none of them, could be Formula One's future.

Ferrari 330 P4 is a stunning red bolide

There are many beautiful cars in the world, and then there is the Ferrari 330 P4 that outdoes practically all of them. Combining more curves than Christina Hendricks and the singing voice of Adele, it might just be one of the most aesthetically pleasing cars ever made. In its latest video, Petrolicious takes a look at the sole remaining original P4 in existence and talks to the lucky man who gets to drive it.
Ferrari Corsa instructor Nick Longhi has the enviable task about getting behind the wheel of the V12 racer in this video, and he says it doesn't drive the way you might think. The P4 isn't out to bite drivers who aren't paying attention. Instead, he claims that the car just does everything right and helps the person at the controls be that much better.
Historically, the P4 was Ferrari's attempt in the 1967 season to take on the dominating Ford GT40. The Prancing Horse's major achievement that year was a 1-2-3 finish in the 24 Hours of Daytona, but it couldn't quite beat the Ford at the famous race at Le Mans.