When we think of Steve McQueen, our mind tends to drift to muscle cars — specifically the 1968 Mustang GT from "Bullitt." McQueen, however, was a well-rounded motoring enthusiast, sporting two-wheeled passions as well as four. He also maintained an appetite for trucks, including a 1969 Chevrolet Baja racing pickup that's set to go under the hammer at Mecum's Santa Monica auction next month.

The 2014 BMW M6 Gran Coupe is the new flagship car from the high-performance division of the world’s most performance-oriented luxury brand. It gets 560 hp with a maximum of 500 lb-ft of torque, and is calibrated tighter than a well-hitched noose. To say the least, it performs.

Albert Biermann, the chief engineer of the M Brand, showed off his masterpiece to a group of us last week in Austin, Texas, lovingly presenting his cross-bank exhaust manifold with reverse airflow as though it were his child graduated from Germany’s top university with highest honors. The car has a “wide span of engine performance,” he said, and could be pushed to its limits without testing the driver’s sanity.

“A lot of engines,” he said, “when they get to this point, they run out of talent, let us say. This one does not.”

Among the world's growing crop of unlimited mile-long drag events, the Moscow meet often draws some matchups impossible to imagine in the rest of the world. Like this one held last month between a stock Bugatti Veyron and a Nissan Juke-R — that is, a Russian remix of Nissan's gonzo idea of sticking the GT-R engine and all-wheel-drive power into a Juke.

The Juke in this race sports only 800 hp in its standoff with the Veyron's 1,200-hp. But as the results show, the far lighter Juke-R built by Russia's SV Engineering surprises from the line, and the outcome's in doubt until the final line with the winner decided by one-tenth of a second. See the Russian roulette spin below:

When Swedish airplane maker Saab AB decided to build cars after World War II, it faced a few hurdles. Namely, no one at the company knew anything about cars; even among the engineers assigned to the job, only a couple held driver's licenses. After years of tearing down other models and using much of their aeronautical know-how, Saab revealed its first car on this date in 1947 — nicknamed the Ursaab, but also know as the Saab 92, since the company's then-current airplane model was the Saab 91. The aerodynamic shape, rigid body and front-wheel-drive would define Saabs until the firm's demise in 2011; hear the typewriter-like sound of the Ursaab's two-stroke, two-cylinder engine below:

Electric cars and plug-in hybrids have been around long enough to become an everyday part of carbuying — so much so that there's now something of a price war playing out among the high-efficiency humpbacks. The newest warrior: Chevrolet, which has added a $4,000 rebate to its poky-selling Chevy Volt to match price cuts from Nissan and Toyota.

It's been too long since we last posted a photo from our guess the hood ornament series, and today's entry should take some time to figure out. (We'll even give you a hint: It's not a Mercury.) Tell us your guesses below, and if you have a photo to share, make sure you add it to the Motoramic group on Flickr, or send us a message via Twitter, Facebook and Google+

Here's the story of how the world's greatest racer rattled my cranium like the pea in a spray-paint can. I went faster than I'd ever cared to, probably faster than I'll ever go again, and I'll never be the same.

Hennessey Performance has been making waves recently with its Venom GT, boasting world-record speed while delivering sour words for Bugatti. During its record run, the Venom GT used all 1,244 hp to hit 158.83 mph in just 10.29 seconds, an insane feat if ever there was one.

There does, however, remain a car that can crush those figures, firing to 155mph in just 6.1 seconds. The weird part? It's an original edition, 1.8-liter VW Golf.