SPY PICS: Dallara hits the road

The weather is warming up in the northern hemisphere, bringing out high-performance models from a host of car companies.

Italian race car chassis builder Dallara is set to introduce its first road car. The firm has previously assisted Alfa Romeo develop the 4C and has also worked on the KTM X-Bow, so its own car is certain to embrace many of the same fundamentals – including a pared-back design aimed at enthusiasts who are also purists. It's speculated the Dallara will feature Ford mechanicals and the company is aiming for a sub-800kg target weight.

Over on the western side of the Atlantic, GM is testing its Corvette ZR1 at the Milford Proving Grounds. The blockbuster 'Vette will be available in both coupe and convertible form, as the spy pics reveal. It is, as we reported late last year, the final outing for the C7 model, before the mid-engined C8 Corvette arrives next year. Originally the plan was for GM to debut the C7 generation of ZR1 at Detroit back in January, but the car's launch date has apparently been pushed back to August.

In Europe, Bentley's Continental GT has been snapped with little camouflage remaining. We published pics of the drop-top version nearly a year ago, but these latest images are the clearest yet of how the Continental GT will look when it launches globally in 2018. To be built on the same platform as the new Porsche Panamera, the Continental GT is expected to shed a lot of weight.

A company with a much longer history of building road and race cars is Porsche, which is currently working on its 911 GT2. In the rear of the GT2 is a tuned version of the 3.8-litre flat six from the 911 Turbo and Turbo S. Informed guesses put peak power somewhere around 600 horses, all galloping through the rear wheels alone.

Still a year away, according to Aston Martin, is the DB11 Volante – the convertible version of the DB11. These pics show a mule, with added bodywork at the rear. Although the Volante is likely to add considerably to the kerb weight of the coupe, the 5.2-litre V12 should provide more than enough torque – 700Nm – through its eight-speed ZF transmission four a 0-100km/h time in the four-second range.

Lamborghini is putting the final touches on its Huracan Performante, which is still getting around on public roads in camouflage. Why, you ask? We don't know… the mega Huracan premiered in Geneva over two months ago. But to hijack that old aphorism, a test engineer's work is never done.