Lawrence Butcher

Onsemi to develop next-gen GaN devices with Global Foundries

Real-world testing of Smart’s all-new electric city car advances

Gears were, in the early days, like bearings: very magical things. According to the scientific understanding of the time, they could not possibly work. The faces of two gears touching can be approximately represented as a single line contact of infinite ‘thin-ness' along the faces of the gears. When you calculated the forces acting here, they were of course infinite (the line having no area, and the equation for stress being sigma=force/area). This was very upsetting for early gear pioneers, who were pleased when German physicist Heinrich Hertz published Über die Berührung fester elastischer Körper (On the contact of solid elastic bodies).1

Donut Lab has unveiled a solid-state battery, set to go into production with Verge Motorcycles in Q1, 2026, reportedly ready to scale to series production volumes.

First teased in mid-2025, further details of a new, top level, single seater championship, HybridV10 , have been released, with a target date of 2028 or 2029 for the initial races.

Historic racing may not be the most obvious place to roll out a host of sustainable technologies, but that is exactly what Lola Cars has done with its new T70S. Despite having a full FIA Historic Technical Passport, the T70S boasts a carbon footprint nearly that is 54% lower than previous iterations of the 60’s

McLaren has officially revealed the MCL-HY hypercar that will contest the World Endurance Championship and the Le Mans 24 Hours from 2027, alongside the track car variant MCL-HY GTR, which will be offered to VIP clients through its exclusive Project: Endurance program.

Volkswagen has confirmed plans to enter the 24h Nurburgring in 2027 with a dedicated racing version of the current Golf R in partnership with long-standing collaborator Max Kruse Racing . A show car previewing the project will be unveiled to the public on the Ring Boulevard at the Nurburgring.

JCB , the UK-based manufacturer of excavators and other off-highway equipment, is to return to the Bonneville Salt Flats 20-years after securing the world land speed record for a diesel car with its Dieselmax streamliner. Back in 2006 its LSR adventures were to prove out its in-house diesel engine technology, in 2026, it looks to repeat the feat with hydrogen power, using the all-new Hydromax streamliner.

UK-based simulation specialist Dynisma has unveiled the DMG-S, a compact driver-in-the-loop simulator that brings the company’s proven motion platform to a broader range of motorsport and driver training applications. The DMG-S shares the same core motion architecture found in Dynisma‘s engineering simulators, which have proved popular with F1 teams and other high-end motorsport outfits, delivering