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Renault taking Alpine endurance racing, enters 24 Hours of Le Mans

Renault isn't letting up with the return of its Alpine brand. After announcing a partnership with Caterham to bring a new Alpine to market by 2015 (now expected by 2016), the French firm has announced it is taking Alpine racing again in the European Le Mans Series this year - and that includes The 24 Hours of Le Mans.
It has been 35 years since Alpine last competed in Le Mans, when it won the race outright and dropped the mic as it left the pits, never to return. Before that, in the 11 years it campaigned in the most famous endurance race on the planet from 1963 to 1978, it took seven class wins.
Caterham won't be involved with the race team, however; that will be an effort spearheaded by the Signatech-Nissan team that has been running GT Academy winners in LMS racing. Alpine is preparing an LMP2 chassis that will get a 500-horsepower Nissan engine for this year's championship, with the first two named drivers being Nelson Panciatici (above right) and Pierre Ragues (above left). The third driver for Le Mans will be announced later this month when the racer is launched at the Le Castellet race track in southern France.

Nismo smartwatch concept tracks both car and driver [w/videos]

Whether you agree or not, this writer believes that every supercar needs a wristwatch to go with it. Though the Nissan GT-R has been lacking in this one regard, Nissan is keen to correct that wrong. But while most of these automotive-inspired timepieces are decidedly mechanical, Nissan has gone a suitably different direction in creating its new Nismo watch concept.
The electronic smartwatch connects driver, car, watch and phone in a sleek design. The device allows drivers to monitor such parameters as the car's average speed and fuel consumption, access performance telematics on the track, monitor their own heart rate and interface with their smartphone via Bluetooth and a dedicated app. The watch can even tell the driver when it's time to bring his car in for scheduled maintenance, post lap times and such to popular social media platforms, and of course, you know - literally give you the time of day.
Though still in the concept phase, Nissan seems keen to bring this to market, has even gone so far as to design the packaging - made of tire rubber scraped off the track - and done it up in three colors: red, white or black. In the meantime Nismo will be showcasing the smartwatch concept at the Frankfurt show this week, where we hope to get a glimpse up close, but you can delve into the press release and the pair of videos below.

Nissan owners complain to feds about rusting floors

"You can feel it's soft right here," Jeff Talman told KSHB. "Right under his driver and passenger seats, the floorboards were rusting from the inside out," a KSHB reporter said. "This is a seven-inch area where it's actually rotted up here," Talman said. That was Jeff Talman, just one of many who have had issues with rusting floorboards in Nissan Altimas. KSHB reported the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has received more than 400 complains about rust issues in 2002-2006 models. NBC highlighted a Chicago woman's 2005 car, which had rusted so much the floorboards were actually crumbling. "The hole was big enough to fit her foot through," NBC reporter Tom Costello said. "I'm not Fred Flintstone. This is not a good thing," Marie DeMaria said. While NBC reports snow and road salt could account for rust damage in some vehicles, that's probably not the cause in places that don't get snow and ice. And complaints are coming in from all over the country. Both Toyota and Ford have recalled hundreds of thousands of vehicles in the past few years because rusting underbody parts made the vehicles fall apart. Despite the number of complaints, Nissan isn't recalling the Altima vehicle models in question. "It's not a safety recall problem that's going to cause immediate death and injury if you have a hole in the floor. As a result of that, what we've seen is that Nissan has been able to get away with this problem," auto safety expert Sean Kane told WBZ-TV. KSHB reports the age of the cars is another way Nissan is able to avoid covering cost to fix them. "Once it's out of the warranty period, obviously they don't have any legal obligation. It becomes more of a customer service issue of whether they want to deal with it or not," body shop owner Bill Eveland said. NBC did reach out to Nissan for comment, but the carmaker reiterated that both it and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration do not consider the rust problem to be a safety defect. This video includes an image from Getty Images.