Top Gear's The Stig is coming to Forza 5

Some say that the red ring of death is what he calls his belly button, and that in a past life, he was the dog from Duck Hunt. All we know is, he's not The Stig, but he is the Stig's digital cousin, and for the first time ever, you'll be able to race him.

That's right, as part of Forza Motorsport's tie-up with Top Gear, which began in Forza Motorsport 4 with Jeremy Clarkson's voiceovers, gamers will actually be able to race Digital Stig in the latest installment of the franchise. Top Gear's commercial director, Duncan Gray, had this to say about FM5's newest features, "Trying to beat The Stig on track has long been the petrol-fuelled dreams of Top Gear fans everywhere and whilst Jeremy and the team did not want to frustrate or embarrass gamers by putting forward the real Stig, they did help us track down a potentially more fallible relative of their tame racing driver."

In addition to Digital Stig, gamers will have access to the Top Gear Test Track, and will be treated to voiceovers throughout the game by Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May. To promote the Digital Stig's inclusion in Forza Motorsport 5, Turn 10 Studios put together a little driving vid, the tame racing driver behind the wheel of the XBox One V8 Supercar, ahead of its race at this weekend's Bathurst 1000, in Australia. Forza Motorsport 5 will be in stores on November 22, and will only be available on the XBox One Take a look below for the full video.

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List host Jessi Combs hits 440 mph, becomes World's Fastest Woman On Four Wheels [w/videos]

A couple of weeks ago, Autoblog's video series, The List: 1,001 Car Things to do Before You Die, tackled something that's been top-of-mind since the day we came up with the concept for the series: Drive The Bonneville Salt Flats. If you saw that episode, you know that not only did hosts Jessi Combs and Patrick McIntyre check it off their List, Combs was there to work on getting qualified to make a run for the title of World's Fastest Woman.

Autoblog is extremely excited and proud to tell you that, pending FIA certification, Jessi Combs is now the World's Fastest Woman on Four Wheels, having recorded a two-way average speed of almost 393 miles per hour a speed she reached not at Bonneville, but on a dry lakebed at the Alvord Desert in southeastern Oregon while her parents stood by and Autoblog's cameras rolled.

Jessi actually topped out at 440.709 mph in the North American Eagle (NAE) Supersonic Speed Challenger, a 14,000-pound, 50,000-horsepower F-104 Lockheed Starfighter jet converted for land speed record use. Effectively a four-wheeled wingless fighter jet, in a previous life, the land speed record (LSR) car served as a chase plane for the Air Force and NASA's X-15 experimental plane, along with the legendary SR-71 Blackbird.

Combs' 392.954-mph two-way average on Wednesday actually eclipsed her record-setting 344-mph session from the day before, a run that itself blew away the previous four-wheeled mark set by Lee Breedlove, wife of LSR legend Craig Breedlove. That mark has been standing since 1965. GPS data and telemetry is now being delivered to the FIA for certification purposes.

Yet Combs and the all-volunteer team of American and Canadian engineers and military personnel behind the North American Eagle aren't done yet they plan on using the car to claim the overall land speed record of 761 mph in 2014, and Combs herself plans to return to attempt to best the overall Women's World Land Speed Record, a 512-mph average by Kitty O'Neil that was set in 1976 in her rocket-powered SM1 Motivator, a craft with only three wheels.

Naturally, we'll have a followup List episode documenting Jessi's run for you as soon as we can in the meantime, check out a brief clip of her incredible record run below, along with the Bonneville Salt Flats episode if you happened to miss it. Congratulations, Jessi!

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Race Recap: 2013 Japanese Grand Prix flips several scripts [spoilers]

Japan's Suzuka circuit is a great track that all the drivers love, but it doesn't usually provide the most thrilling, head-to-head racing. Where it does excel, however, is with surprises and "What just happened there?!" moments, and this year it was no different.

It started with Mark Webber in his Infiniti Red Bull Racing out-qualifying his teammate Sebastian Vettel for the first time this year. They were followed closely by Lewis Hamilton in the first Mercedes-AMG Petronas, the still-solid Romain Grosjean again outdoing teammate Kimi Rikknen, Felipe Massa racing for another seat in Formula One and putting his Ferrari in fifth, then Nico Rosberg in the second Mercedes, Nico Hlkenberg in the first Sauber, Fernando Alonso in the second Ferrari, and Rikknen continuing to do himself no favors by qualifying tenth.

For the second year in a row, the lights going out was the cue to start the first corner action...

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