Jump-start car enthusiast's year with gifts that keep giving

Ford's Legendary High-Performance Street and Race Cars ($34, Amazon) chronicles how the Ford Motor Co. wove America's passion for fast, tough cars and motorsports into a winning business plan.

Spiced with war stories and insights accumulated through years as a magazine editor, Schorr covers everything from post-WWII hot rodding, time trials and street racing, to oval, rally, drag and Grand Prix competition.

Randy Leffingwell's "Porsche Turbo" ($42, Amazon) zeros in on Porsche's pioneering work in maximizing the "unfair advantage" of exhaust-driven forced induction.

[...] true to form, Leffingwell, a veteran journalist and gifted photographer, leaves nothing to chance, including plenty of eye candy in the form of illustrations, cutaways, archival photos and his own artful images.

Scan Tool's OBDLink LX ($69.95, Amazon) is a diagnostic scan tool and data logger that can shed light on what's setting off that pesky dashboard warning light on 1996 and newer cars or light trucks.

The OBDLink LX doesn't just scoop up all that data and trouble codes, in dashboard mode it turns your smartphone or tablet into an auxiliary gauge panel displaying miles per hour, rpm, engine temperature, battery voltage and fuel consumption rate.

Operating a vehicle shouldn't be a contact sport, but when metal meets metal, having video footage can quickly and decisively settle any dispute about who did what to whom and when.

A dash cam like the KDLINKS X1 ($170, Amazon) is also handy on the track to review driving techniques or record some entertaining quick laps.