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Corvette gets slidey with Britain's best performance cars

Autocar wants to find Britain's best driver's car, and it's challenging a murderers' row of some of the world's best performance vehicles to find out, including the latest Chevrolet Corvette Stingray. All of them were therefore assembled at the Castle Combe Circuit to find a winner.
If it wants to take the crown from this pack of mostly European competitors, the 'Vette has to beat some steep competition. Its challengers include monsters like the Ferrari 458 Speciale, Ariel Atom 3.5R and Jaguar F-Type Coupe. As a further hurdle for the winner to clear, Autocar also has last year's champ among the fighters - the Porsche 911 GT3.
Even if you're not at all interested in the C7, there's still something here for practically any fan of fast cars. The competitors include relative oddities among the pack like the Renault Mégane RS Trophy and Alfa Romeo 4C. Plus, Autocar has some well-positioned microphones that let you hear the Atom wailing like a banshee and the roar of the 458 Speciale. Check out the video to see which one of these all-stars takes home the award this year.

LaFerrari for sale in Florida for $4.7 million

Want to get your hands on a new LaFerrari? It's gonna cost you, and cost you big. The factory charged $1.35 million for each of the 499 it will ever make, but you can bet speculators will be selling them for much more than that. Just take a look at this listing from Florida. The Fort Lauderdale Collection South has one LaFerrari for sale with an asking price of $4.7 million. That's more than triple what Ferrari charged for it. The example in question bears the VIN ZFF76ZFA2E0205216 and appears to have been built for the US market in September 2014. It's done up in the classic combination of Rosso Corsa over a black interior and has just 388 miles on the odometer. It has a few options installed, including carbon-fiber side mirrors, a sports exhaust, and Prancing Horse logos embroidered into the headrests. Each of those options is worth a good grand or two on top of the list price, but their addition doesn't go very far toward explaining the enormous markup. With no other examples of LaFerrari having been sold at auction just yet, we don't have much of an indication of how much they're worth on the open market. According to Sports Car Market, the most anyone paid for the previous Enzo was just over $6 million this past August at the RM Sotheby's sale in Monterey, but that was the final example of the breed that was gifted to Pope John Paul II. Most of the rest have sold for a million or two – not over four. Related Video: Featured Gallery Ferrari LaFerrari for sale in Fort Lauderdale View 40 Photos News Source: Fort Lauderdale Collection South via The Supercar Kids Auto News Green Ferrari Car Buying Coupe Hybrid Supercars ferrari laferrari laferrari

BMW, Ferrari, VW cars use tungsten mined by terrorists

Bloomberg Markets is reporting that BMW, Volkswagen and Ferrari have been using tungsten ore sourced from Columbia's FARC rebel terrorists. The extensive story focuses on Columbia's illegal mining trade and calls into question the provenance of the rare ore that is used not only in crankshaft parts production, but is also found in the world's computing and telecommunications industry for use in screens.
The ore is mined by the FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, or Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia - People's Army), and exported to Pennsylvania, where it is refined. The refined ore is then sent over to Austria, where a company called Plansee turns it into a finished product. Now, it's important to note that we aren't talking about the world's supply of tungsten here. In 2012, Plansee's American refinery purchased 93.2 metric tons of tungsten, valued at $1.8 million. That's peanuts, with the entire Colombian tungsten mining industry producing just one percent of the world's supplies.
That doesn't make indirectly supporting FARC any more acceptable, though. BMW, VW and Ferrari are all committed to not accepting mineral supplies from the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is also in the grips of a guerrilla insurrection funded, in part, by illegal mining. The same commitment would figure to extend to Colombian mining, but as BMW points out, it's difficult for a multi-national manufacturer to know where every item in its supply chain comes from. A company spokesperson says as much, telling Bloomberg, "These few grams out of the billions of tons of raw materials passing through the BMW supply chain are of no practical relevance."