Latest news with #Porsche911Cabriolet
The South African
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The South African
Kid Cudi testifies Diddy looked 'like a Marvel supervillain'
The Manhattan federal court was abuzz this week as Grammy-winning rapper Kid Cudi, real name Scott Mescudi, took the stand in Sean 'Diddy' Combs's high-profile trial. The case, already packed with drama, took a wild turn as Cudi detailed a fiery incident that left his luxury Porsche in ruins and fingers pointed squarely at Diddy. It was January 2012 when Cudi's dog sitter rang him early in the morning with alarming news. 'Your car is on fire,' she said. Rushing outside, Kid Cudi found his Porsche 911 Cabriolet scorched on the driver's side. A Molotov cocktail lay nearby. He didn't mince words in court: 'I believe Diddy had something to do with it,' Cudi testified. The judge struck the comment from the record, but the message was clear. Diddy's lawyers noted that female DNA was found on the car and pushed back against the claims. However, the suspicion lingered, according to Page Six. Why would Diddy target Cudi? The answer, it seems, is jealousy. Kid Cudi had a brief romance with Casandra 'Cassie' Ventura, who was Diddy's on-again, off-again partner. Cudi claimed he didn't know Cassie was still seeing Diddy. 'I was in love with her,' he said. Cassie, meanwhile, appeared 'stressed, nervous, scared' and admitted to giving Diddy Cudi's address. The drama didn't end with the car fire. In December 2011, Diddy's assistant allegedly told Cudi that Diddy had broken into his Los Angeles home. Kid Cudi arrived to find gifts opened and his dog locked in the bathroom. 'You in my house?' he shouted at Diddy over the phone, as Diddy replied, 'I just want to talk to you'. Kid Cudi and Diddy later met at Soho House. 'He looked like a Marvel supervillain,' Cudi said, describing Diddy staring out the window, hands behind his back. When asked about the car, Diddy gave a 'cold stare' and said, 'I don't know what you're talking about'. Cassie's mother, Regina Ventura, also revealed another shocking detail. Diddy allegedly demanded R370,000 (converted from $20,000) from Cassie's parents because of her fling with Cudi. 'He was angry that he had spent money on her and she had been with another person,' Regina testified. She feared for their daughter's safety, so the Venturas took out a home loan to pay. Diddy faces charges of sex trafficking, racketeering, and more, The rapper has denied all allegations. If convicted, he could spend his life behind bars. Let us know by leaving a comment below, or send a WhatsApp to 060 011 021 1. Subscribe to The South African website's newsletters and follow us on WhatsApp, Facebook, X and Bluesky for the latest news.
The Irish Sun
14-05-2025
- Automotive
- The Irish Sun
I drove Aston Martin Vantage Roadster – it's car which cries out to be driven hard & will get you a nod of appreciation
I HAD two choices. Test an open-top Vantage dodging potholes in 20mph Great Britain. 4 Test an open-top Vantage dodging potholes at 20mph in the UK... or head to the Alps where roads are smooth, empty, and you can do much more than 20mph? Credit: Aston Martin 4 This roadster is basically the mega Vantage coupe but with headroom of about 20,000 miles Credit: Aston Martin 4 It's a car which cries out to be driven — and driven hard Credit: Aston Martin Or head to the Austrian Alps where the roads are smooth and empty and you can do a lot more than 20mph. I went for option B. The hills are alive with the sound of . . . a glorious V8. A masterpiece of engineering in one of nature's great masterpieces. READ MORE ON MOTORS Not Coventry ring road. Same 4-litre twin-turbo V8 sending 665 horses to the rear. And your ears. Same suspension set-up. Most read in Motors Same 202mph top speed. Just a tenth slower off the line. Because it's 60kg heavier. Iconic Top Gear Aston Martin that Clarkson compared to 'lightning' hits auction You won't be surprised to learn that driving it roof-down, on twisty mountain roads, turns everything up to 11. The power . The torque. The noise. The razor-sharp steering. The handling. The way it makes you feel. It's a car which cries out to be driven — and driven hard. Yet equally, it's a car that's just as pleasing parked up outside a cafe. Vantage Roadster or Porsche 911 Cabriolet? You can make strong arguments for bothx of them. Nod of appreciation Let's just say many other sports cars/supercars are often greeted with the old Nescafe wave from other road users. This car gets a nod of appreciation wherever it goes. Because it's cool and sophisticated. And so very British. As one might expect, the cabin fits like a tailored suit. Copy-and-paste the regular Vantage. Except here the numbers in the driver's display are bigger and easier to read and there's an extra button on the flight deck of controls. For the roof. Duh. By the way, the roof is eight layers thick, the motor is whisper-quiet, and it does the up/down sequence in just 6.8 seconds. It's an Aston Martin, darling. What do you expect? Ignore the £175k price tag. By the time you've spent two days on the configurator it's going to be way more than that. 4 It's cool, classy, sophisticated - and so very British Credit: Aston Martin Now I should perhaps explain why I'm really in the Alps. James Bond author Ian Fleming went to school in Kitzbuhel. Timothy Dalton's Bond drove a winterised Aston Martin on the southern Austrian border for The Living Daylights. Now I should perhaps explain why I'm really tooling about in the Alps. Any excuse, really. Q&A: ASTON MARTIN CEO ADRIAN HALLMARK FAST-forward to 2028 and Aston Martin will be killing it – as a car company, as a Formula 1 team, as a brand. I'm 100-per-cent certain. Billionaire owner Lawrence Stroll doesn't do anything by half and he's recruited the biggest brains to make Aston world-beaters on and off the track. Here's ten minutes inside the mind of Aston Martin CEO Adrian Hallmark, headhunted from Bentley last year to reinvent the car side of the business. Who phoned who? A mutual contact asked if I'd be interested in a conversation, which I agreed to because I was interested in the story. So I had the conversation, understood the story, could see the credibility of what they'd done and what they were doing, and thought about it. It wasn't a quick thing. It was a conversation over many, many months. What was the deciding factor? To prove if I could do it again. When I arrived at Bentley I was almost angry with the condition the company had got itself into having worked there before. I knew what it could be and had seen how Ferrari and others had developed. Aston is another brand that has never realised its true potential. It was never really sustainably profitable. It was very niche. So the chance to do it one more time, as long as I'm feeling happy, healthy, fit and fully energised, what an opportunity. Have you ever owned an Aston Martin? Never. In fact, when I drove the Vantage, I almost felt a twinge of guilt. The performance and the quality and the feel of the Vantage is phenomenal. I'd never tried it because I always underestimated what it would be. The whole philosophy at Bentley is super-fast but relaxed. In an Aston Martin, you feel energised. Every single one. The DB12 looks like an intercontinental cruiser. When you drive it, it's rampant, and feels really energetic and alive. The Vantage is a step even further and Vanquish is another level. All very different characters, but they've all got this vitality in the way they feel and drive. And they look the nuts . . . Honestly, you can't drive anywhere without being photographed. Everybody wants to talk to you about them and that's not just in the UK, that's when I'm in France or in Switzerland or travelling. So what needs fixing? To be really punchy about it, we were either unimaginative or self-limiting in assuming that we could launch a car for five years and take the top off it as the only action to keep the car relevant to customers. If I buy a Vantage in 2023, I probably want to change it by 2025-2026. So what's changed that allows me to come back and feel I'm buying a different and more attractive car than the one I'm already selling? That's our duty and we've not planned enough of that. We're gonna do the exciting stuff as well. But the real key to building a sustainable profitable business is having this bedrock of products that work through this five, six-year life cycle where there's lots of innovation. The luxury market has expanded exponentially over the past 20 years and we need to go and get our share. We're covering a price range from £150,000 to £1million for the base cars. With the plans we've got to take each nameplate and express its full potential, do more specials but at the right cadence, I can see a clear pathway to making the brand sustainably profitable. Talk to me about electrification . . . Step one is hybridisation. Beyond Valhalla, you'll start to see a complete hybridisation offer in parallel to some of the combustion offers that we have. We will focus our hybrid approach on performance first and the emissions benefits will be the given. We are still committed to full electric in the future. But we won't rush to change every model to electric one year after the next. We will launch something in this decade – but we won't have an offer in every body style by the end of this decade. Will the first EV have four doors and a high hip-point? More than likely. An all-new model? Or will you use an existing name? We've not made those decisions yet. It's like babies, isn't it? You have ideas before they are born but always do it after they are born. Aston has always had James Bond. Now it has F1 too . . . I was jealous to death of James Bond, F1 and the specials business of Aston Martin when I was at Bentley. Any one thing on its own is interesting. But if you look at the credibility and the integrity of what Lawrence is pulling together, I mean to get Adrian Newey, Enrico Cardile and Andy Cowell into the F1 team, this is not a vanity project. This is freaking serious. All-in. For now, we've got to get through this season and it's all about 2026, 2027, 2028. That three-year window is what Lawrence and the whole team are absolutely obsessively focused on. It coincides with where we should be as well. In the next few years we will have refreshed everything. Replaced everything. Not just the derivatives. Every car will be redone. You'll start to see a complete reset of the company both on track and off. We've got the resources and the talent. Everything we need to get it done. Last question – what's in your garage at home? I don't collect cars. I'm a profligate consumer. I would never buy something just to own it. I buy it for the fun of the driving. I've got two G-Wagons, a 1991 Swiss Army eight-seater, and a G63. We've also got a Fiat 500 Electric for the city. It's beautiful. Satin grey, OZ Racing wheels.
Business Mayor
12-05-2025
- Automotive
- Business Mayor
Aston Martin Vantage Roadster
Eyebrows were raised when an Aston Martin engineer, speaking at the Austrian launch of the new Roadster, suggested the spring and damper rates had been carried over wholesale from the coupé unaltered. For something without a proper carbonfibre tub, this would be irregular. When you lop the top off a coupé, the body often then needs to be dramatically strengthened, adding heft to a car whose axles are already no longer singing in perfect unison because torsional stiffness has plummeted. Custom suspension rates are devised to claw back some precision and cohesion – or at least enhance the perception of those attributes. As it happens, the Vantage Roadster's rear dampers do run recalibrated software, but the change compared with the coupé is minimal and the front axle hasn't received any attention at all. So is this conversion a rush job? Budgets biting, perhaps? Nope. The Roadster simply doesn't need special treatment, apparently. So meagre is the weight gain over the coupé and so stiff is the aluminium chassis (thanks in part to the fact it was developed from the outset with both derivatives in mind) that from a dynamic standpoint the coupé and convertible are essentially the same. Given how keen and fun-loving the coupé is, that will be music to the ears of those in the market for a rip-snorting drop-top that really handles. Here's another surprising stat: 6.8sec. Not the 0-62mph time, thankfully. Rather the time taken for the 'Z-fold' fabric roof to arc through its full scope in either direction. It really is a rapid bit of mechanical choreography. The Porsche 911 Cabriolet needs 12sec and Ferrari's Roma Spider a little longer still. READ SOURCE
Scottish Sun
28-04-2025
- Automotive
- Scottish Sun
Stunning Porsche 911 Cabriolet and £100k cash prize up for grabs in Omaze Early Bird Prize Draw
*If you click on a link in this story we will earn affiliate revenue va va vroom Stunning Porsche 911 Cabriolet and £100k cash prize up for grabs in Omaze Early Bird Prize Draw Click to share on X/Twitter (Opens in new window) Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) THE Porsche 911 Cabriolet is nothing short of an iconic motor - refined and powerful, it's a car lover's dream. Thanks to the Omaze Million Pound House Draw Cotswolds, you could drive away in one and take home a cool £100,000 in cash. The Porsche 911 is worth over £120,000 Credit: omaze Omaze Early Bird Prize Draw As part of the Omaze Early Bird Prize, one lucky person winner will get the keys to a brand new Porsche 911, finished in a sleek vanadium grey tone and packed with over £20,000 worth of premium upgrades. The convertible version of the world's most famous sports car is perfect for drop-top driving throughout summer. An electrically folding roof that opens in just 12 seconds means you'll be able to effortlessly switch from coupe to cabriolet. Under the bonnet lies a 394hp engine, delivering a powerful performance that's perfectly balanced with Porsche's world-class handling. But the luxury feeling doesn't end there. The 'Club Leather' interior adds a rich, tactile feel to the inside. The 911 Cabriolet isn't just built to perform, it's built to be driven, experienced, and loved. Credit: omaze Omaze Early Bird Prize Draw The digital cockpit combines cutting-edge technology with intuitive design, so you're always connected while remaining focused. Porsche has spent decades perfecting the 911, and this latest Cabriolet variant is the result of that evolution. How to enter For a chance to win this stunning Porsche, worth over £120,000 plus £100,000 in cash, enter the Omaze Cotswolds House Draw by midnight on 11 May, 2025. Entry also gives you the chance to win the grand prize, which is a 17th-century Cotswolds country house, worth over £5 million. The home comes complete with stunning gardens, a guest cottage, and an outdoor heated pool. The new owner will also receive an extra £250,000 in cash to get settled in. Funds raised from the draw support Guide Dogs charity, with a guaranteed minimum donation of £1 million. Over 18s and UK residents only. No purchase is necessary. Visit for full terms and to enter. Car closes 11/05/25.
The Irish Sun
28-04-2025
- Automotive
- The Irish Sun
Stunning Porsche 911 Cabriolet and £100k cash prize up for grabs in Omaze Early Bird Prize Draw
THE Porsche 911 Cabriolet is nothing short of an iconic motor - refined and powerful, it's a car lover's dream. Thanks to the and take home a cool £100,000 in cash. The Porsche 911 is worth over £120,000 Credit: omaze Omaze Early Bird Prize Draw As part of the The convertible version of the world's most famous sports car is perfect for drop-top driving throughout summer. An electrically folding roof that opens in just 12 seconds means you'll be able to effortlessly switch from coupe to cabriolet. Under the bonnet lies a 394hp engine, delivering a powerful performance that's perfectly balanced with Porsche's world-class handling. But the luxury feeling doesn't end there. The 'Club Leather' interior adds a rich, tactile feel to the inside. The 911 Cabriolet isn't just built to perform, it's built to be driven, experienced, and loved. Credit: omaze Omaze Early Bird Prize Draw The digital cockpit combines cutting-edge technology with intuitive design, so you're always connected while remaining focused. Porsche has spent decades perfecting the 911, and this latest Cabriolet variant is the result of that evolution. How to enter For a chance to win this stunning Porsche, worth over £120,000 plus £100,000 in cash, enter the Entry also gives you the chance to win the grand prize, which is a The home comes complete with stunning gardens, a guest cottage, and an outdoor heated pool. The new owner will also receive an extra £250,000 in cash to get settled in. Funds raised from the draw support Guide Dogs charity, with a guaranteed minimum donation of £1 million. Over 18s and UK residents only. No purchase is necessary. Visit
