2002 Ford Focus Se Sedan 4-door 2.0l on 2040-cars

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Formula Drift kicks off 11th season on Streets of Long Beach

The 2014 Formula Drift series kicked off last weekend in Long Beach, and saw Chris Forsberg, who you'll recall went mad and drifted around a warehouse in an Infiniti M, take the title behind the wheel of his Hankook Tire Nissan 370Z (shown above).
Forsberg really ran away with the first round of competition, outscoring his closest opponent, second-place finisher Kenneth Moen and his Bridges Racing Nissan 240SX, by 20 points. Third place was 2013 championship winner Michael Essa and his Yokohama BMW M3, 30.5 points behind Forsberg.
In the manufacturers' title, Nissan took an early lead with 122 points, which isn't a huge surprise considering five of the top ten drifters were piloting either a Z or a product of the brand's S platform. Ford, which had two drivers (Justin Pawlak and Vaughn Gittin, Jr.) in the top ten, took home second place, while BMW is currently third in the manufacturers' standings.

Stock Miata beats bunch of high-powered cars in wet 1/4-mile drag race

When is a stock, 167-horsepower Mazda MX-5 Miata quicker than a Chevrolet Corvette, Ford Mustang, Lamborghini Gallardo, Lotus Elise and a Porsche 911? When it's raining. Sort of.
Mazda Canada arranged a unique drag race to show off the fact that the Miata's optional power retractable folding hardtop can go from top-down to top-up in just 12 seconds flat. In this video, all six cars line up for a drag race, and it starts to rain (well, sort of - but you'll have to watch the video all the way to the end to see what we mean). The green flag is waved, and the timer starts as soon as the convertibles begin to put their tops up. But because the Miata's roof mechanism gets the car's roof back up a full 5.1 seconds quicker than the second-place car, the Mazda gets a serious advantage off the line for the actual drag race.
It's a fun video. And while we've spoiled the results (come on, the video was uploaded by Mazda, you knew the Miata was going to win), be sure to see how it all unfolds, below.

NHTSA closes Ford F-150 EcoBoost acceleration probe

Typically when we report on the findings of an investigation from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, it's because the government body has discovered a safety issue and prescribed a recall. In this case, however, NHTSA has closed an investigation into a reported performance deficit without ever getting to the recall stage.
The issue revolves around the Ford F-150 - specifically those equipped with the 3.5-liter EcoBoost engine - of which some 360,000 were built in the 2011, 2012 and 2013 model years. After receiving an initial 95 complaints, NHTSA opened an investigation last May - almost a year ago - into the reported issue of reduced engine power under hard acceleration. The agency has since received a total of 525 such complaints, and Ford itself reported receiving over 4,000.
Together, NHTSA and Ford determined that the problem resulted from cylinders misfiring, an issue itself stemming from water getting into the charge air cooler (CAC) mated to the turbochargers. In particularly humid or rainy conditions, water was found to get into the CAC, causing some of the cylinders to misfire, which in turn triggered the ECU to disable those cylinders in order to protect the catalytic converter from damage.