Sommaire pour June 2020 de Octane

HERE AT OCTANE we have a great deal to be grateful for in these challenging times. While our work couldn’t be further removed from having to selflessly fight this horrible disease on the frontline like the real heroes, we still have a job to do and hopefully a purpose to serve while so many people are in lockdown. First of all I must congratulate our wonderful extended family of a team – not just the editorial faces that you may be familiar with, but all those others within Dennis Publishing and elsewhere without whom the magazine couldn’t exist – for grasping that nettle and making this edition of Octane happen. It might not look complicated from the outside, but the way we operate (and we are all extremely grateful that…

ARMY FLYING? Is that contradictory? Well, a couple of hours at the Army Flying Museum (formerly the Museum of Army Flying) will explain all. After parking near the memorial to the 5000 personnel lost over the century that the Army has been in the air, the first thing the visitor will see outside the entrance is a formidable Soviet ZSU 23-4 ‘Shilka’ self-propelling anti-aircraft gun. This machine could fire up to 4000 23mm shells per minute from its four cannon, tracking aircraft by radar, and was said to create an impassable wall of fire. Once in the entry hall it’s clear that the £2.59 million lavished on a recent renovation was well spent, the scene set by the bright, well-equipped shop and information desk. The museum is on two levels,…

LE MANS MCLAREN REUNION FOR CONCOURS A line-up of the McLaren F1 GTRs that virtually swept the board at Le Mans in 1995 is to be the centrepiece of The Concours of Elegance, presented by A Lange & Söhne, at Hampton Court on 4-6 September. Marking 25 years since the cars came first, third, fourth and fifth (the interloper was a Courage C34, trivia fans), it will echo the event’s 2017 display of Le Mans-dominating Jaguar D-types, but is touted as an even more remarkable achievement because the F1 was never intended for racing. All four cars are promised, meaning the winning Kokusal Kaihatsu Racing car, the third-place Harrods-liveried car of Andy Wallace, Derek Bell and Justin Bell, the fourth-place Gulf Racing F1 GTR, and the Giroix Racing Team F1…

AT DRAGON WHEELS, Alan Faulkner-Stevens makes his living from the Blue Oval – mainly via Cobra builds and Shelby Mustang restos – but at home there’s a Bowtie in the shape of an incredibly original Z28 Chevrolet Camaro. ‘This is an unrestored, all-original survivor car,’ says the former Aston Martin design and development engineer whose formal training was in the aircraft industry. ‘It’s exactly as the factory built it in January 1973.’ The Z28 package, first seen in ’67 as Z/28, was down to 245bhp by ’73 but it included a 350ci V8, four-speed wide-ratio gearbox, 3.7:1 LSD axle, heavy-duty suspension with anti-roll bars front and rear, wider wheels with Firestone Wide Oval 60-profile tyres, and the factory-installed spoiler package. ‘It was bought by Ritchie Albert in February 1973 from…

THANK YOU for a proper account at last of the experience of owning Rivas in Octane 203. I hesitated for years, until Alberto Arcangeli of Salo on Lake Garda took me in hand. My wife and I always popped in during classic car trips in the Dolomites to gawp at his Aladdin’s Cave of restored Rivas – he has more than 100 boats in stock. He first started me off with a perfect Super Florida for some €40,000, which runs a 180hp Chris Craft V8. I was smitten and yearned for an Aquarama with its twin engines, but couldn’t afford it. Then came the 2009 crash, and I snapped up and traded a number of boats owned around Naples from owners that were in difficulty. These were sold on to…

THE 1990 Aston Martin Virage was the last new Aston Martin that I ever bought. I had been a faithful customer throughout the 1980s, adoring the cars, relishing the spirit and rarity of them (in that decade, Aston Martin made between 80 and 200 cars a year, a scarcely believable level of production in modern terms), and I enjoyed close relationships with the characterful individuals running the company. And then, come the ’90s and the Virage, it all went a bit pear-shaped. The new Aston was a monumental undertaking for the marque, as it finally turned its back on the William Towns-designed V8 that had sustained it for 20 years and created a brand spanking-new car. Bringing such a thing to production is a challenging exercise for any manufacturer, of…

It’s the Racing Car Show at Olympia in London, January 1966, and the latest competition cars, sports cars and specials are on display. On stand number 60 sits a remarkable example, alongside it a rolling chassis mounted at a jaunty angle, all the better for the many engineers at the show to pore over it. The Unipower GT is a mid-engined, steel spaceframed, low-slung two-seat coupé that looks for all the world like a British interpretation of a mini-Miura. And according to Ernie Unger, the man behind the Unipower, none of this is lost on Abarth’s design team: ‘Carlo Abarth and his entourage spent hours on our stand, which made the day rather special for me. They crawled all over the car, eager to find out what made it tick.’…

It may not seem to have the same gravitas, but reviving Spyker was no less audacious than resuscitating Bugatti. True, the Dutch company had been dormant rather longer but it was still the most prestigious embodiment of a nation’s motoring history, a name that carried with it great responsibility. And don’t forget that Bugatti initially relaunched itself post-WW2 with the unloved, eight-off Type 101, long before the Romano Artioli years. Or that, while that latter era and the EB110 are revered today, commercially it was a very different story at the time. The Dutch team faced an equally monumental challenge. Some context. The original Spyker – the Dutch spelling, Spijker, was phased out in 1903 – was to The Netherlands as Bentley was to the Brits. It had morphed out…

WITH THE NATION due to celebrate the 75th Anniversary of VE Day on 8 May, there are numerous flying displays planned across the country, including an RAF Memorial Flight flypast over Buckingham Palace. If they go ahead (somewhat doubtful in the current circumstances), a notable absence among the historic aircraft will be one that played a pivotal role in the war in Europe during D-Day and thereafter: the Hawker Typhoon. Significant though it was, the Typhoon is one aircraft of which the general public has almost no awareness. That’s because all but one of the 3317 built were scrapped, the sole survivor escaping to the USA before eventually returning to the RAF Museum at Hendon. A handful of partial airframes exist but there are no Typhoons in flying condition. Even…

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THE 1960s SAW a number of pre-war-style replica cars built – Excalibur and Cord 8/12s come to mind – but it was very rare for new-car builders to get involved in such projects. This was one such exception: a factory-approved Zagato ‘recreation’ of the Alfa Romeo 6C 1750 Gran Sport Spider Zagato from the 1930s. It was built by the coachbuilder using Alfa Romeo Giulia underpinnings, including its 1579cc inline fourcylinder engine and five-speed manual gearbox. The car was well-bought at $99,000 because RM Sotheby’s sold it in 2016 for $126,500. One of around 92 built during 1965-67, this ’68-registered red-with-black example was formerly owned by the late Martin Swig, founder of the California Mille. The Gran Sport was thoroughly modern under the skin, built with aluminium panels over a…

IT COULD BE ARGUED that the Tom Tjaarda-styled Pantera would attract more admiring glances in a vibrant colour scheme. It’s probably the reason most were ordered in bright yellows, reds and blues. Not this one… The original owner of this French-market Pantera wanted to keep his junior supercar as subtle and classy as possible. He ordered the most powerful 355bhp GTS model – powered by the Australian-built 351ci Ford Cleveland V8 at that point. That would usually mean that it came with riveted-on wheelarch extensions, but De Tomaso was instructed to stick with the standard narrow body for this car. Specified in black for its low-key yet slightly menacing appearance, this example was also fififitted with the more powerful ‘warm climate’ air conditioning option. Other desirable factory extras include Campagnolo…

AS OCTANE WENT to press, the Covid-19 outbreak was continuing to wreak havoc across the classic car industry, with businesses forced to shut their doors, the events calendar in turmoil and major auction houses pushed online. And with a more-or-less global lockdown expected to last months, people were only expecting things to get worse for some time to come. Indeed, with no sense of timescale for battling the killer virus, at least two leading dealers privately predicted a full-scale market collapse when the outbreak is finally quelled. One, who asked not to be named, said: ‘The world economy is being absolutely crippled by the effects of this illness and there is no way the sums that have been invested in classic cars will stay there. As soon as things return…

TEN OF THE WORLD’S most prominent classic car collectors have implored Bentley to jettison its plan to build a series of continuation ‘Blowers’. The high-profile names on the letter sent to Bentley CEO Adrian Hallmark are Ralph Lauren, Lord Bamford, Rob Walton, Peter Livanos, Evert Louwman, John Mozart, William ‘Chip’ Connor, Fred Simeone, Arturo Keller and Simon Kidston. In 2019, Bentley announced that it was to build 12 continuation 4½ Litre Blowers to the recipe conjured up by Sir Tim Birkin, backed by Dorothy Paget and against the factory’s wishes. The cars are to be based on chassis HB3403, which will be stripped down to its individual components and 3D scanned to help make the cars using the original tooling. Their four-cylinder, 16-valve engines will carry a replica of the…

Without the humble spark plug, the petrol internal combustion engine would not exist. Motor vehicles are the sum of their parts, but perhaps none is more fundamental to a petrol engine’s being than the part that ignites the fuel. Some historians credit Edmond Berger for producing the first credible ‘plug’ design as far back as 1839, but it was unpatented and intended not for a motor vehicle engine but a gas engine. A few years later, in 1858, the first real internal combustion engine as we recognise it was built by Jean Joseph Étienne Lenoir, who held a patent for the all-important spark ignition system. Karl Benz once described the delivery of a high-voltage spark to ignite the fuel and air mixture in a combustion chamber as the ‘problem of…

When Aston Martin finally retired the V8 after 20 years, it was well past its prime, resembling an old pop star, a faded idol clinging to a greying fan-base. Production had fallen to just a dribble and was a grave concern for Victor Gauntlett. Even Giuseppe Mittino’s 1986 V8 Zagato, as startling and modern as it was, couldn’t lift the image of Newport Pagnell’s old campaigner. Aston was in serious danger of becoming Buckinghamshire’s Morgan, a company then resolutely stuck in yesteryear. It was definitely time for change. The V8’s heir was DP 2034: the Virage. It marked the opening page of Aston Martin’s last hand-fabricated chapter yet, despite its importance, it is also arguably one of the marque’s most overlooked models. A life less extraordinary nestling amid A-list sisters;…

‘DURING THAT FAST-GROWING ECONOMY, BURGLARS AND SMUGGLERS WANTED A SLICE OF THE CAKE ’ Think of early-1960s Italy, and what springs to mind first for many is La Dolce Vita. That film represents the joy of living at its best, the happiness that followed the end of World War Two and an economic boom without precedent. We all remember Marcello Mastroianni in his Triumph TR3, rescuing Anita Ekberg from Rome’s Trevi fountain and the paparazzi chasing the movie stars on their evening out at the city’s most celebrated restaurants and clubs. A Ferrari GT, already a status symbol for the world’s wealthiest, perfectly fits this image of lavish lifestyle and never-ending parties, but in the case of a very particular 1962 Ferrari 250 GTE 2+2 series II, chassis #3999, there’s…

Photographer Evan Klein has artfully arranged a quartet of 1963 and 1964 Avantis in front of a sleek Mid-Century Modern house in Palm Springs. Fewer than 5000 of the dramatic coupés were built before Studebaker folded, and Palm Springs is a resort community in the Southern California desert with only 50,000 residents. So getting four Avantis together in this remote location seems like a coup. But even as we’re patting ourselves on the back, we have to clear the street to let a car trundle past – another Avanti, as it turns out, only this one is uninvited. It’s simply passing through. Evan and I are astonished. But local resident Scott King, who owns the white Avanti we’re featuring, laughs at our crestfallen expressions. ‘Oh, that’s Bill Ruttan,’ he says.…

HOW QUICKLY THINGS change. Just a few months ago I received a phone call from Italian collector Guido Avandero, inviting me to join him at a lunchtime gathering of some English enthusiasts who were on a drive through northern Italy. I didn’t have to think twice: not only does Guido own one of the most interesting collections of Lancia rally cars in the world, but he is famous for his hospitality to classic car collectors and personalities from all over the world. Taking advantage of the beautiful sunny weather of autumn in Italy, I drove the empty, twisty roads to his house in my Mercedes 500SL. It’s not a loud car – the German engineers did their best to mute the sound of the 5.0-litre V8 – but a silent…

THE COLOUR is called Kinetic Yellow, and it’s exactly the shade of a workman’s fluorescent safety jacket. For a car as small as this, it’s a great choice. No-one can claim they didn’t see you coming, and you’ll never lose it in a car park. The Jimny’s size really is deceptive. Walk up to it and you seem to be approaching an optical illusion: it may look like an SUV, but close-up it appears like a twothirds scale model of one. The impression continues once you’re inside. Without wanting to bandy about the ‘L’ word too carelessly, it really does feel like sitting inside a miniature 1980s Land Rover. That ’80s vibe is maintained on the road because, frankly, the Jimny has NVH levels reminiscent of a MkIII Ford Escort.…

THERE ARE SOME truly glorious routes to financial ruin: for example, vintage wine, art or old Ferraris. Yet those who really know maintain that the single most effective way to submit your assets to the hecatombe is to buy a yacht. The old saw says that the two happiest days in a yacht owner’s life are the day they take delivery and the day they finally sell the moneypit. So, if you fancy the bragging rights that come from perceived yacht ownership but without the wallet-immolating cost, or if you just have a thing for interesting watches, a yacht timer is for you. It’s useful to clarify, briefly, the sort of yacht that might merit a timer. We’re not talking about the multi-million-pound seagoing Chatsworths beloved of yer average oligarch.…

1:18 scale 1964 Cobra Daytona Coupe By CMR Price £68.95 Material Diecast No, the price is not a misprint – this large-scale Daytona Coupe, with full engine and interior detail, costs less than 70 quid. For that price, you might expect it to look a little shonky, close-up, but in fact it’s not far off the quality of competitors that retail for five times as much. CMR stands for Classic Model Replicars, a relatively new brand that’s produced in Bangladesh and China for the German market. Its latest subject is Cobra Daytona #CSX2299, which finished eighth overall at the 1965 Le Mans 24 Hours in the hands of Jack Sears and Dick Thompson, the only one of five Daytonas entered to complete the race – albeit not without extensive nose…

TECHNOLOGY HAS COME to the rescue this month, as most auction houses have attempted to move sales online. For years, auction houses have invested in new online platforms, which for some is paying dividends now. Most of us have grown even more accustomed to conducting business through our laptop screens this month, but whether that would translate to collector car auctions remained to be seen. All eyes were on the RM Sotheby’s Palm Beach sale, which took the bold step of moving fully online. The auction ran in much the same way as its previous online sales, with end times staggered over four days. RM reported a respectable 66.8% sale rate, for a total of $13,619,165. At the top of the sale charts was a 1996 Porsche 911 GT2 (pictured…

KNOWN FOR SOME of the wildest hot-rodded BMWs of the 1980s and 1990s, German tuner Hartge gained its reputation by shoehorning large and powerful engines from the bigger cars into smaller models. That being the case, you might be wondering why you’re looking at a Mercedes-Benz W124 saloon. This happens to be the one and only example of the Hartge F1, which is hiding something wholly unexpected under the bonnet. Gone is the 300E’s engine and in its place a far more exotic BMW Motorsport M88 – as found in the M1 and M5. Moreover, this was enlarged to 3535cc (from 3453cc), with higher compression. It delivers about 330bhp via an E24 6-Series manual transmission. To handle the extra power, bespoke Bilstein suspension was fitted, along with wider wheels and…

Southern Cross Safari 15 February – 5 March Some 25 cars in five classes, ranging from vintage to modern 4x4s, set off from Watamu on the coast of the Indian Ocean for this 19-day epic through Kenya and Tanzania. Not that it was all hard work, the stats reading 3600km covered, 12 regularities, six tests on private land… and ten open-air dinners, of which three were beside the ocean. Demonstrating that such events can often render the class system vestigial – and testament to both modern prep and the sturdiness of vintage-era vehicles – first overall and in class were Keith and Norah Ashworth in their 1927 Bentley 4½ Le Mans. They scooped victory on the final day by accruing just 13sec of penalties over 200km to win by two…

Most of us are confined to barracks while the invisible virus rages, venturing out only for essential supplies or vital exercise. Both forays could involve your classic car, responsibly of course, but what to do when stuck at home with more time to hand than you’ve ever known? What you need is a project. The internet is full of ideas – online art classes, how to re-model your garden, getting started on that novel – and there’s always Houseparty when you can stand worthy isolation no longer. But we classic car lovers have a big advantage. We have an old car, probably in a garage, that always needs something done to it. Now is the time to do that something, simultaneously safeguarding your sanity with a new sense of purpose.…

AFTER 32 YEARS trimming Aston Martins in Newport Pagnell, Chris Brewer is now retrimming many of those he helped create originally. ‘I often find my own signature on the back of trim parts as I strip them,’ he says. Brewer started his apprenticeship as a coachtrimmer in 1988, towards the end of V8 production, and also worked on the Lagonda. In 1990, the production line switched to the Virage. ‘We had people who did the prototypes, working with the engineers; they sorted the patterns out, then each of us would learn the new process. More modern shapes and bigger panels, but the same leathers. Trimming is one of the first and last elements during the build: some parts go in early, carpets first over the sound deadening, then we’d do…

Doesn’t look like much, does it? Some kind of racing car, obviously, but one with a body that appears to have been cobbled together out of sheets of alloy by a metalworker – craftsman would be too kind a term – with an eye to function rather than form. Its blunt, cowled nose and wide, bullfrog stance are suggestive of a 1950s special, and the mis-match of front disc wheels with rear wires doesn’t add to its overall elegance. But there’s an Alfa Romeo badge on that nose, in flowing pre-war script… and that’s a clue to the fact that underneath the DIY bodywork is something rather special. Very special, as it turns out, for the foundation of this battered racing car is nothing less than a 1929 Alfa Romeo…

Book of the month Weekend Heroes II TONY ADRIAENSENS, Corsa Research, £500 Can you see the discarded cigarette packet in the picture, above? The one lying on the ground between the’Healeys? That tiny, insignificant scrap of cardboard sums up what makes this three-volume set so engrossing: the fact that its 1950s colour photos show Western USA sports car racing with such intimate detail, on such a lavish scale, that you are inexorably drawn in to examine every trivial element. Weekend Heroes II is a massively expanded version of the original Weekend Heroes that was published in 2007. The first edition received rave reviews and has been fetching up to £1000 on the collector’s book market, yet this new release costs half the price while delivering twice as many pages. In…

IN MARCH, as global financial markets and many asset classes went into meltdown, the classic car sector showed notable resilience. The HAGI Top overall investment-grade market measure, as well as all individual marque indices, posted gains against a backdrop of global equities (S&P Global 1200) shedding 13.8% month on month. Growth within the Lamborghini LPS was more measured than some segments, with an advance of 2.05%, compared with 2.95% for the HAGI Top for example. Year-to-date the LPS is down 2.45%, which can only be considered benign in comparison with other markets. Despite variations in index performance, this is a time to look at the bigger picture. In the first half of March, trading volumes remained more or less stable, but they declined dramatically in the second half. While, in…

YOU COULD DESCRIBE any Ferrari 275 as extraordinary, but the super-lightweight 275 GTB Competizione is in a different league altogether. The 20-gauge aluminium body panels were half the thickness of the ‘ordinary’ alloy road cars’. The steel spaceframe chassis was also lighter, stiffer and underpinned by racedeveloped, fully independent suspension. The 1966 series 2 ‘long-nose’ models – as offered here by Fiskens – resisted the high-speed lift of the earlier cars, and benefited from a new, more exotic dry-sump version of the 3.3-litre Tipo 213 V12 engine. This was fed by twin-choke triple-weber 40 DFIs, with unique rear-facing curved inlet trumpets. A higher compression ratio (thanks to new pistons and crank), sodiumfilled valves and a free-flowing exhaust also helped to increase power output. Further weight-saving was made by casting various…

IT MAY WELL have been the taxi of choice for many late-night airport runs in the 1990s, but when was the last time you actually saw a Renault Espace? For years these hugely useful cars were everywhere, carting large families to the beach or taking old mattresses to the tip. Now they’re almost all gone. You’re probably thinking that this is hardly the sort of glamorous machinery that usually graces these pages, but it’s only when something as groundbreaking and popular as the Espace disappears from the roads completely that we will really appreciate just how clever the quirky-looking MPV pioneer was. It also has an interesting story behind it. During the late 1970s, French manufacturer and former racing car constructor Matra was looking to replace the Rancho with something…

ALTHOUGH I’ve lived all my life within 40 miles of where I was born in San Fernando, California, the hot rods that feature in so many of my paintings weren’t part of my childhood or teenage years; the classic 1932 Ford ‘Highboy’ would have been an oddity when I was growing up. Maybe that’s why I paint them now, because I never took them for granted back in the day. My earliest car memories are of my dad fixing them in the garage – the smell of exhaust fumes, the ring of a dropped wrench hitting a concrete floor. I can remember him hoisting me up when I was very small so I could see his ’56 Chevy Delray’s straight-six valve train operating with the rocker cover removed. The San…