Proton Exora in Pyrite Brown spotted in Tg Malim

The Exora will be built at Proton’s plant in Shah Alam but I suppose these test units went up for Tanjung Malim for some purpose or another.

There are a few shots after the jump with one that is particularly interesting - while it was hard to snap photos of the interior because of the window’s reflections, there is one clear shot of the automatic transmission gear shifter area. Looks like there’s a gate-shift but no manual override function, which isn’t really important as it’s mostly a novelty on such a car. There are actually 2 Exoras there, and according to H+Z the one with the B461A has a manual transmission while the B462A was automatic.

Brawn GP: Ross Brawn buys Honda Racing F1

After much speculation, Honda has finally sold their F1 team to someone quite close to home - Ross Brawn. Brawn has been in F1 for quite some time now, having worked in various F1 teams including Benetton and Ferrari.

After a 1 year break in 2007 he returned as the Team Principal of the Honda F1 team for the 2008 race year, and now owns the team, which has been renamed Brawn GP. From milling machine operator in 1976 to F1 team owner in 2009, that’s really quite a long way to have gone. The new Brawn GP team will use Mercedes-Benz engines and will be piloted by Jenson Button and Rubens Barrichello. The team’s new colours are white, fluorescent yellow and black, and its BGP 001 conducted its first test at the Circuit de Catalunya in Barcelona recently.

The car was pretty fast, in fact piloted by Button it was one of the fastest cars in the pre-season group test, despite being what Ed Gorman called “a Honda chassis and suspension bolted together with a Mercedes-Benz engine it was not designed for.”

So I guess we’ll see Brawn GP here in Malaysia then!