News

Robert Shwartzman will drive Peugeot's revised 9X8 in the World Endurance Championship from 2027, closing a season in which the 2025 Indianapolis 500 polesitter had no race programme at all after Prema pulled out of IndyCar. He already has a Hypercar win, taken at Austin in 2024 with AF Corse's Ferrari. The 9X8 has 29 starts, four podiums and no wins.

BMW has finished driving-dynamics testing on the combustion-engined 3 Series at Miramas and confirmed the car at the top of the range. The M350 xDrive is the only six-cylinder in the line-up, with 443 hp and 0 to 100 km/h in 4.1 seconds, and it is the first 3 Series with a drift mode. Production starts in the second half of 2026. The drift mode does not.

Dacia has replaced the Spring with a Slovenian-built car on Renault's AmpR Small platform, 3.85 metres long and 18 cm wider than before, with a 27.5 kWh LFP battery good for 250 km. The Expression opens below €18,000 and the Journey stays under €20,000. The synchronous motor is still a Shanghai e-Drive unit, and the Chinese-built old Spring stays on sale underneath it.

Ferrari brought the second of its permitted engine upgrades, ADUO 2, to Monza, but it did not close the power gap to Mercedes, and team principal Fred Vasseur admits the car is still “missing pure power.” Ferrari was 5.6 km/h slower than Mercedes in top speed at Monza, and Vasseur says the team never expected ADUO to recover the deficit, with the real fix only coming with the 2027 power unit rules. Even Ferrari-powered Haas found the upgrade a minor step next to its aerodynamic gains.

Six companies of the Siegen-based Wahl group have filed for insolvency in self-administration, putting 31 sites and around 1,000 jobs into a restructuring. It comes eight days after Berlin's Autohaus König, the largest Renault retailer in Germany, filed with 82 locations and 1,200 employees. Wahl had gone from five brands to sixteen in two years, adding MG, Xpeng, Leapmotor and Maxus on the way.

Audi has settled the outline of a restructuring that ends its double four-ring operation in China. FAW-Audi takes the design, production and sales of every four-ring model, while SAIC Audi is left with the letters-only AUDI brand. It is a reversal for a joint venture set up in 2021 specifically to build four-ring Audis, and it lands as Audi's Chinese profit collapses.

Polestar has released a single image of the Formula 2030, the first concept drawn from scratch under design chief Philipp Römers. The full car arrives in October, but the styling only reaches buyers with the next Polestar 2 in 2027 and the Polestar 7, the brand's first Europe-built car, in 2028.

Valentino Rossi will not complete his Nordschleife permit this year. BMW M Motorsport confirmed the calendar could not be made to work, and the September NLS double-header lands on exactly the same three days as the San Marino Grand Prix at Misano, where Rossi runs a MotoGP team. The October finale collides with Indonesia. His Nürburgring 24 Hours debut now hangs on a tight 2027 run-up.

Skoda chief executive Klaus Zellmer has put the Superb's future in doubt, saying saloons and estates are not growing and that the brand is examining whether one model could cover both the Octavia and Superb segments. It comes as the Volkswagen Group prepares to halve its model range by 2035, and as Skoda posts its strongest half-year on record with an 8.5 percent return on sales.