As the title image for this week’s podcast indicates, we have some very exciting news this week about the KTM X-Bow. The Austrian motorcycle and now track-day weapons manufacturer announced last week that they will be working to bring the X-Bow to North America. Also featured this week are some of the more important performance figures for the Cadillac CTS-V, a three-pack of model news disappointment, Ford gets overtaken again in the sales rankings, I once again go on for far too long about the American Le Mans Series (I put the bulk of my ramblings beneath the jump if you decide to skip them in the podcast), and our first set of actual aftermarket performance parts in this week’s Useless Automotive Tchotchke. Share and Enjoy™.

 

 SSL Radio 9/01/08 [15:34m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Autoblog seems to think that Acura is prepping a diesel-powered entry [for the 2009 American Le Mans Series season], as the two dominant teams in LMP1 both run diesels and Acura well be debuting a diesel engine in the spring of 2009, but I’m not so sure….I think it’s much more likely that Acura will make the ARX-02A a turbocharged gasoline-powered car, or possibly E85-powered. Audi spent three years developing the R10’s engine before it first was used in anger at the 2006 12 Hours of Sebring, Peugeot took two years to make the engine for the 908 HDI before they even debuted the car, and Acura spent all of last year developing their LMP2 car on the track and just debuted the final product this year. So unless Acura has had some astonishing insight, they’ve been building a racing diesel engine for a LMP1 car before they were even finished developing their LMP2 entry, and there’s no chance that this is some offshoot from LMP2 development, as LMP2 cars must be naturally aspirated and therefore couldn’t run a diesel engine. It’s certainly possible to make a gas engine powerful enough to compete with the R10 and 908 HDi’s diesel powerplants, it just requires the kind of money that’s really only available to large manufacturers. Acura certainly has the money to throw at their ALMS program, especially since they’re now winning races and have a good shot at the 2008 LMP2 championship. Running a gas engine gives you a larger fuel tank than the diesels, as they’re currently penalized nine gallons to bring them closer in laps between fuelings to the gas engines, and possibly more importantly to Acura, it means that you have a much lighter engine and more weight to distribute however you want. In LMP2, Porsche still has the power advantage over the Acura cars, but the Acuras are winning through superior agility and downforce, something that the ability to distribute weight around the car more freely would certainly help with, and is another advantage that Acura can try to leverage over the diesel-engined Audis and Peugeots. LMP1 cars have reputations as huge tanks, massively fast in a straight line, but much slower in the corners than the LMP2 cars. If Acura can manage to combine the straight line speed of the Audis with the agility of their LMP2 car, they stand a serious chance of knocking Audi off of the LMP1 throne.