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YouTube tallies votes for this year's top five Super Bowl spots [w/video]

When we asked you to tell us which of this year's 16 car-themed Super Bowl commercials you liked best, you chose the Farmer commercial from Chrysler Group, advertising the Ram trucks, over Audi's Prom commercial in second place. Turns out the voters in YouTube's Ad Blitz poll agreed, voting the same commercial to the number one spot from among the field commercials in every category.
From there, however, they went in a totally different direction. Budweiser's The Clydesdales spot came second, Samsung's The Next Big Thing took third. The Jeep Whole Again ad scored fourth in the YouTube poll, fifth in our poll of auto commercials, and the Hyundai Team spot got fifth from the YouTubers, but ninth in our poll.
The voting results don't match up with the viewing numbers, though - while Farmer has more than 13 million views, The Next Big Thing is well beyond 21 million. You can read the press release below and see all five spots, lined up for you, one more time.

Hyundai shocks Korea with mid-engined Veloster concept

There are many things we love here at Autoblog, but one of the quirkiest is the mid-engined hot hatch, whether it's the Renaultsport Clio V6 or the Volkswagen GTI W12-650 concept. Unfortunately, we can never seem to get our hands on one - the former never having made the transatlantic journey and the latter remained strictly a concept. And now we've got one more to salivate over.
It's called, simply enough, the Veloster Midship concept, and Hyundai is unveiling it this week at the Busan Motor Show in South Korea. As you might have guessed, it's essentially a Veloster with the engine - a 2.0-liter Theta turbo four producing 296 horsepower - mounted behind the two seats. It's also got a lightweight aluminum suspension, a reinforced chassis and extreme aero to help that mid-mounted turbo engine do its thing.
The project was undertaken by the same team that developed the initial i20 WRC rally car, but unfortunately as Hyundai itself says in the press release below (released with the solitary image above), "The Midship is a concept only to explore possibilities for the Veloster chassis and is currently not related to any future production model." Which is a bit of a shame, but hardly a surprise.

Hyundai Motorsport tests its performance at the WRC Rally Finland

Autoblog joined Hyundai to check out the Neste Oil Rally Finland, where thousands of kilometers of lightly traveled, rolling gravel roads have turned out decades of astonishing racing and cold-blooded drivers. Even though the World Rally Championship is well tamed from its feral Group B days, Rally Finland is still the drivers' favorite, with the fastest speeds and the biggest jumps.
It's the rookie year for the Hyundai Shell World Rally Team, run by Hyundai Motorsport out of Alzenau, Germany. The squad entered the season aiming for podiums in the second half and looking to get its three cars to the finish at every race for maximum development data. It's already outdone itself, Thierry Neuville scoring third places in Mexico - where he used a bottle of Corona to fill his radiator - and Poland.
Denis Giraudet told us that the rally's sternest challenge is not one of heart, though. Giraudet isn't part of Hyundai Motorsport, he was our guide and he's been in the sport as a co-driver for more than 30 years; he won Rally Finland with Juha Kankunnen in 1993 in a Toyota Celica Turbo 4WD. Giraudet said the race tests that particular confidence that comes from about 18 inches below the heart: "Here, you have to go all out. If there's a problem, it's usually between the steering wheel and the seat."