Octane的December 2024目录

To take advantage of our special offer and get three issues of Octane for £5, either visit octane-magazine.com/subscribe or call +44 (0)20 3966 6695 BUYING YOUR ISSUE OF OCTANE – NEW AND OLD Print issues  Octane is available at the usual branches of UK shops, such as Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Waitrose and independents, as well as WH Smith High Street and Travel. You can order the latest magazine or a back issue, delivered direct to your door, by visiting octane-magazine.com Digital issues Download the Octane Magazine app on Android or Apple and you will be able to enjoy the new issue. Alternatively you can source the digital edition via either Zinio or Readly. Subscribe You can find superb offers on print and digital at octane.co.uk/subscribe. Order before 15 November 2024 to…

Copperstate 1000  5-9 April 2025 The 35th running of the Bell Lexus North Scottsdale Copperstate 1000 (above), to give it its full title, is open to sports, racing and GT cars up to and including 1973, while organisers add: ‘Clones, reproductions, tributes, and recreations are NOT eligible for participation on the Copperstate 1000.’ 2025 highlights include Lowell Observatory and Zion National Park. Entry is $11,250. mensartscouncil.com ThePyrenees XL  21-29 May A nine-day event in northern Spain and Andorra. The six competition days will tackle 16 cols and range from 213km to 433km. The roads and scenery are spectacular, with hairpins aplenty, but highlights are set to include the 5km Tunèl de Vielha, once the world’s longest road tunnel. bespokerallies.com The Three Castles Trial  3-6 June The perfect taster menu for…

IN A MAJOR SHAKE-UPfor German shows, SIHA, which has masterminded the vast Techno-Classica event every spring for the past 35 years, is to be replaced by rival outfit Retro Classics, which is behind the popular Stuttgart and Bavaria events. The change will come in 2026, though SIHA will continue to stage Techno-Classica Essen for one more year, on 9-13 April 2025. The news came out of the blue and shocked onlookers who have watched Retro Classics Stuttgart and Techno-Classica Essen go head to head for years, rather unhelpfully for German enthusiasts as well the tens of thousands from across the globe that visit these mammoth events. The first Retro Classics event will take place in April 2026 and Oliver Kuhrt, MD of Messe Essen, which hosts the event, said: ‘We…

Letter of the month I WANT TO THANK YOUfor producing my favourite magazine. My perfect Saturday or Sunday morning here in The Netherlands is reading the latest Octane with a cup of coffee and my two purring black cats. This morning spent with issue 257 is such an occasion! We all know the Dutch brand Spyker from its (mis)adventures with Saab, in F1, and of course for those outrageous road cars. The modern company was named after the Spyker that was one of the oldest Dutch car and airplane manufacturers. Fun fact: they also made the famous Dutch Golden Carriage. Pulled by eight horses, it’s still used once a year when our King makes his Speech of the Throne at the start of the political year in September. For nerds:…

‘THERE ARE NOlocks on any of the doors,’ says Bob Meijer, creator and owner of the Club des Autos. ‘It’s a house, not a hotel. That might seem strange, but you don’t usually have locks on your rooms at home, do you? And if you have guests to stay, you don’t put them in a bedroom with a lock on it. This is a very important part of my philosophy that Château de Sermet should not be seen as a hotel.’ So, how do you define Club des Autos? Perhaps best to think of it as a bolthole that members can visit as often as they like, in return for an annual membership fee and a per-night accommodation rate. What differentiates it from other private members’ clubs is that you…

So here we are, slaloming around potholes on the former RAF Lavenham site. Jolt, clonk, whoosh, jolt. Heavens, that’s a big ’un. Boost. And repeat. To think, this Suffolk backwater was once home to the Eighth Air Force, the skies above awash with B-17 Flying Fortresses. What’s left is losing its battle with gravity, or at least the parts that aren’t near the one building that is (conspicuously) well-maintained. That’s the centre of operations for a hush-hush outfit, one of its number not taking too kindly to a Lancia Delta Integrale descending on its perimeter. He doesn’t care that we have permission from the landowner. He’s too busy frothing at the mouth to listen. He obviously isn’t a fan of homologation specials, and one that by way of an awkward…

This car is dripping in history and you can see all of it. With all the fuss over the Bugatti Type 59 winning Pebble Beach, it is a good thing that I am not a concours judge there. Heart over head every time, me. And patina goes straight to my heart. I know plenty disagree and I know that me falling for the aged beauty of this much-loved and much-used car is a bit different to the ex-King Leopold car taking the top honour at the world’s most glamorous concours, but how can you be other than utterly charmed by a car such as this? Don’t get me wrong, it’s not some hanging rat rod, it is in perfect, usable condition – which to my mind is actually perfect condition…

WHEN I WASat college, studying for an Art and Design degree, my reading included the great 20th Century French essayist, philosopher and semiotician Roland Barthes, who briefly discussed the image of the mythological ship Argo. During the voyages of the Argonauts, as repairs were required, the sailors gradually substituted every plank and nail of said ship until it was ‘an object with no other cause than its name’. Barthes opines that, while this results in an entirely new ship, perhaps both the name and form (or image) of the Argo remain the same. So to my Alfa, which has turned a significant corner at Kent-based Turner Classics. While the chassis and upper part of the shell were mostly sound, the lower quarter had begun to decay, as with many Alfas…

BACK IN THEpre-internet Dark Ages, a self-confessed amateur driver pulled off something remarkable, a feat that would nowadays be much commented on. Eric Thompson guided an unproven Grand Prix car to fifth place in his sole appearance in the Formula 1 World Championship. He did so after jumping the notoriously obstreperous ‘Nino’ Farina late in the day, the Italian having claimed the drivers’ title two years earlier. And Thompson’s reward for fifth place in the 1952 British Grand Prix? Two points and £83.6s.8d. With a successful weekend behind him, the 30-something returned to his day job on the Monday morning. No fuss, no fanfare. Thompson was a delightful man who had a lax grasp of the phrase ‘off the record’. He was a born raconteur. He would regale you with…

BONHAMS HELDan incredibly successful sale in Knokke-Heist, Belgium, alongside the Zoute Grand Prix in 2023, and the auction house has just returned yet another stellar result at this year’s event – totalling €21,300,064, with a sell-through rate of 95%. Although slightly down from 2023’s blockbuster €26.8m result, this year’s sale was Bonhams Cars’ highest-grossing auction of the year, outstripping Monterey by some margin. Top-seller was the overpoweringly red 2010 Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren Stirling Moss (above), which sailed past its €1.5-2.5m estimate to make €3,220,000. There were a few other limited-run Mercedes-Benzes offered, all at no reserve. The 2007 CLK DTM AMG Cabriolet proved popular at €540,500, as did the 54km 2008 SLR McLaren Crown Edition at €483,000. Next up was the 1956 Porsche 550 RS, notable because this Equipe Nationale…

ALTHOUGH THE 1990srepresented a quiet period for hot hatches – at least those we would class as legendary – the French managed to produce this little firecracker. Stylistically making the most of its Williams F1 connection, the hottest Clio was actually developed in-house by Renaultsport. A total of 5400 Williams 1s would be built, with just 390 of those coming to the UK. This is number 0181, which stayed with its original owner for 25 years – and was utterly cherished. Iconic sold a 40,000-mile car at the NEC last year for £28,688, so it’s no surprise that this beautifully presented sub-10k-mile car is estimated to make £40,000-50,000 at the same venue next month. iconicauctioneers.com…

AS AMAZINGas a beautifully restored car can be, there’s something very special about a classic that has survived almost 50 years in original condition. This gorgeous Alfa GTV is one such example, a late-registered UK car that has covered just 19,000 miles without any major restoration work or evident wear. It’s finished in Grigio Chiaro, fitted with a tan cloth interior, tinted glass and even the original Eight Track player. The first Hertfordshire-based owner held on to the car until October 1998, when it was offered for sale in the Alfa Romeo Owners Club magazine with only 14,700 miles on the clock. After it had been in dry storage for 12 years, the next owner decided to sympathetically refresh the Alfa, which included a full repaint due to the original…

Velocity Invitational 4-6 October Only in its fifth year, already huge and yet still getting bigger and better every year, the Velocity Invitational at Sonoma Raceway, California, seems to be setting the template for how to launch and rapidly grow an event. The 2024 edition was dripping in star cars and drivers, including three outings for 2009 F1 World Champion Jenson Button, in his 1952 Jaguar C-type, a Ferrari 250 Testarossa and an Alfa Romeo GTA. Romain Grosjean was also on an impressive roll-call of ‘name’ drivers. Car highlights included a celebration of 70 years of the Jaguar D-type and NASCAR, but the three days boasted everything from a hillclimb to drifting and Group B rallying. Next year’s event will shift to early summer, so put 6-8 June in the…

The shortlists for the 2024 International Historic Motoring Awards Presented by Lockton have been revealed. Contenders for the 14 awards have been selected from a record number of nominations and will go before an expert panel of judges to decide the winners. The 32 judges include Octane columnists Jay Leno and Derek Bell, among other notables such as Peter Stevens. Their final selections will be revealed at a fabulous ceremony hosted by Amanda Stretton at The Peninsula London on 22 November. For more information, or to book your place at the awards, visit historicmotoringawards.co.uk; single seats cost £280, a table of ten £2600. Of course, as well as all the categories listed to the right, there are two more coveted trophies up for grabs: the Lifetime Achievement Award and the…

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TO MANY, Alex Xydias is synonymous with the famed hot rod company So-Cal Speed Shop. However, his achievements in lakes racing, publishing and event production are equally impressive. The man (his name is pronounced ‘ex-hideous’) had quite a career. Of course, I knew the name because somebody on my paper round took Hot Rod Magazine. I’d sit under grey British skies reading about him and the red-and-white liveried So-Cal Racing Team. It wasn’t until 1988, when I moved to the US to work for the Specialty Equipment Market Association (SEMA), that I got to know the man. Tall and Depression-era slim, Xydias had a great sense of humour, a flirty nature, but a serious side when it came to business. We met through hot rod designer and customiser Pete Chapouris,…

Could this be the successor to the legendary Integrale? Lancia’s fourth-generation Ypsilon will be landing soon, rather like the old Delta, basically an upmarket shopping car based on fairly humble mechanical components (think Peugeot 208, in this case). But more exciting for us Octane types is that there’s talk of a return to motorsport, too, with this hot little range-topper, dubbed the Rally 4 HF. Underneath the bodywork, power comes from a 1.2-litre turbo three-cylinder; doesn’t sound like much in comparison to the Delta’s 2.0-litre Lampredi engine, but it packs an Evo 2-matching 215bhp, and it’s fed to the floor via a five-speed sequential transmission and a limited-slip differential. Which should make trips to Waitrose a lot of fun. Outside, there’s a roof scoop plus a vented bonnet, stage-ready straight-spoke,…

REGULAR READERSwill recall that in Octane 253 I wrote about the fact that, at a Historics auction in November last year, I bought back this 2004 Rolls-Royce Phantom that I owned from new until 2009. Well, an awful lot of work has been done since and the car is running well; I’m using it whenever I can but, as feared, small things have been tripping me up. I drove from London to the North-East of England and back in a day and thought on my return that the headlights weren’t working. I stopped the car to check – they were working but were just incredibly dim. The bulbs are Xenon, that favoured headlight technology of the Noughties, and apparently they age: mine had lost around 50% of their brightness in…

IT’S NOT EVERYday that a Jaguar XKSS comes to the open market, especially not at a public auction. In fact, RM Sotheby’s says that, when it presents this intriguing example at The Peninsula London next month, it will be the first time an XKSS has ever been offered at a European auction. ‘XKD 540’ is one of two XKSSs to retain a D-type chassis number, out of a total of 18 built. Originally built as a ‘short-nose’ D-type in November 1955, it remained unsold for over a year. Amusingly, Jaguar records list this rare and now desirable car as ‘redundant after experiment’, although exactly what that experiment was remains a mystery. Eventually it found its way to arch Jaguar enthusiast and competitor Phil Scragg, who returned the car to the…

ZAGATO-BODIEDAlfas span a wide spectrum, from the glorious elegance of pre-war cars and the muscular beauty of the TZ racers through to the bulbous 2600SZ and the boxy ES30 SZ. But one Zagato-bodied Alfa stands out through a combination of simple yet innovative design, competent performance, and a price that won’t break the bank: the Junior Zagato. Hagerty condition 2 (‘Excellent’) values for both the 1300 and 1600 models have risen slowly over the past few years and currently sit at £42,300 and £46,300 respectively. Like most classic cars, prices experienced a post-Covid boost but increases were not as pronounced as for a lot of other models and, when corrected for inflation, current prices are a little down on where they were in 2018. That is surprising, as the model…

IT’S DIFFICULT NOTto be slightly cynical about the Cygnet. Here is a car that was widely reported to have been developed solely to lower the average fleet CO₂ emissions for the Aston Martin range. At launch, the Cygnet certainly got a bit of a thrashing from the press – and the public. Yet the world feels like a very different place almost 15 years later and, while a lot of Aston purists turned their noses up at the idea of a Toyota-based luxury city car, the small number that actually bought and drove them – Stirling Moss included – absolutely adored them. The Cygnet also turned out to be one of the least depreciating modern Aston Martins of all time. At its core, the Toyota iQ on which it was…

I WAS BORN INLivno, Bosnia, in 1988 and it was quite a backward place in those days – both of my parents were still riding horses and cars and roads were very uncommon. In 1990 the Bosnian War started, so my family emigrated to Germany, and, all of a sudden, cars were everywhere. It was like heaven. Neither of my parents had anything to do with cars but they’ve told me that I was always obsessed, even when I was a baby – I have no idea why. Once we were in Germany, I just absorbed as much about them as I could from TV, F1, books and magazines, but I was too young to do anything in a practical sense. One of the most vivid memories of my time…

Ferrari 288 GTO Fit at 40! Driving Maranello’s seminal supercar, plus assessing its fortunes vs the rest of Ferrari’s Big Five Plus Finest GTs Aston Martin DB4 and Lamborghini 350GT Targa Florio road race Mercedes 2-litre racer, back for more a century on Is it a car, is it a, er… Meet the crazy, genre-defying two-wheel Gyro X Time with Mr GT-R The Octane Interview: Nissan’s Shiro Nakamura (Contents may be subject to change)…

24-27 October Auto e Moto d’Epoca Bologna Bologna Exhibition Centre is filled with classic cars and motorcycles, thousands of them available to buy. There’s also a huge trade village – two whole halls of parts and automobilia. autoemotodepoca.com 26-27 October VSCC Cotswold Trial The Cotswold Trial moves to a new venue at Gretton, just up the road from Prescott Hill Climb. Old hands will compete on the Saturday before novices (those who have driven in fewer than six VSCC trials before) tackle the course on the Sunday. vscc.co.uk 26 October – 1 November Rallye de Grèce Post-1949 classics follow a 1280km route around Crete. rallystory.com 30 October – 3 November Classic 24 Hour at Daytona Some of the great competition cars of old thunder around Florida’s most famous circuit. hsrrace.com…

If it were human, the Mercedes-Benz 300SL would represent a potent blend of wealth, cheekbones and swagger. You would be liquid to its every demand even if it regarded you with lethargic half-interest. It is just so utterly fabulous. And that is now – imagine the reaction 70 years ago. The ‘Gullwing’ marked a new territory of aesthetic adventure, and the irony is that it almost didn’t happen. It was born of a racing car, and even that was a means to an end. The marque was in recovery mode, and a limited competition programme ahead of a full-blown return to Grand Prix racing was just the ticket. It took a persuasive Austrian émigré to transform it into a road-going marvel. The W194 SL was conceived by Daimler-Benz’s chief engineer,…

If ‘Z’ gives the alphabet a suitably futuristic-sounding sign-off, it literally means future when applied to two-seater BMW sports cars – it stands for zukunft, the f-word in German. A little ironic, then, that each of BMW’s original Z cars is now either firmly in classic territory or – looking at you, Z4 – a sure-fire zukunft classic. We’re re-visiting Z1, Z3, Z4 and Z8 to find our favourite – the book-ends from BMW’s own heritage fleet, the Imola Red Z3 M and Z4 M Coupés in the middle kindly sourced by specialist Munich Legends. As the name hints, BMW was crystal ball-gazing when it launched the Z1 in 1989. It was conceived inside the newly formed BMW Technik GmbH, an ideas lab founded in 1985 where designers and engineers…

He was unimaginably wealthy. He ruled over a landmass that was larger than England and Scotland combined. His collection of precious gems and jewellery was worth the equivalent of well over a billion euros in today’s money. And over the course of six years during the 1920s he bought 17 Rolls-Royces – to add to the seven early Silver Ghosts that were already parked in the family garage. It’s easy to see why (deep breath) Colonel His Highness Shriman Rajrajeshwar Maharajadhiraj Sri Sir Hari Singh Indar Mahindar Bahadur, ruler of one of the five most important states in British India, was a particularly favoured client of Rolls-Royce. So favoured, in fact, that Hari Singh – as he was known to his friends – was allowed to buy one of the…

The great thing about decrepit car collections – or historically important single cars – that suddenly come up for sale, and cause such a furore that the news seeps into the national and international press, is that they are rarely as ‘discovered’ as the media would have you believe. What actually makes them astonishing is the level of belligerence and bloody-mindedness the owners must exercise, for decades, to fend off the army of dealers and auction houses hoping to persuade them to sell. Only death, divorce or taxes usually swing it. Such was the case with the mammoth Baillon Collection in France and the infamous Portuguese barn from which its treasures were ingeniously drip-fed into public consciousness. Epitomising the fact that there is a world of difference between something being…

THANKFULLYthere has been a last gasp of summer. The Boxster was a little challenging over the last year or so, running perfectly well (thankfully) but without a radio or 12V socket following my, er, handiwork in trying to attach a Bluetooth dongle to its original Porsche-branded Becker stereo head unit. And more recently the roof stopped working. Anyway, it then came back from MoT and service at Templetons Garage (templetonsgarage.co.uk) and all seemed well. As well as sorting a couple of fuses hidden well within the dash, which I had clearly blown in my connectivity attempts and had subsequently failed to get at, Stuart Templeton had re-calibrated the potentiometers in the roof mechanism, and the mostly dead switch on the fascia (it was intermittent) came back to life. For a…

PICTURE YOUR IDEALMaserati. What form does it take? Perhaps it’s the legendary 250F racer, spectacular MC12 hypercar or uncommonly raw MC20 sports car. If so, then the death knell of the eight-cylinder Maserati may not bother you unduly. But if you crave an original Ghibli, wedgy Bora or classic Khamsin, then a farewell drive in this Ghibli 334 Ultima saloon is much more poignant: it’s a limited edition, waving farewell to V8-powered Maserati production cars. Of its two nametags, the numerical one is most immediately enticing. It represents this 103-off special’s top speed in km/h; a mite over 207mph. Whatever you feel about its robust £159,625 price tag or the relevance of a hefty, two-tonne performance saloon without drive on its front axle or steering at its rear, the glamour…

Motorsport Classic calendar by McKlein The folks at McKlein have again mined their treasure trove of old photographs, digging out two dozen fabulous images for the 25th Motorsport Classic calendar. Among our favourites is a snap from the 1960 Safari Rally (top left), showing an exhausted Ford Zodiac being cooled down like a racehorse. The car, crewed by Bill Young and Colin McNaughton, finished the 3200-mile event – just about. Footage from later in the rally shows the Zodiac lying on its side, seemingly done for after rolling off the road. Then McNaughton kicks out the rear ’screen and steps free, his hat miraculously still atop his head… Young, somehow also unhurt, slithers out the front… And locals help the pair to right the car, which rejoins the rally sporting…

SIR THOMAS LIPTONrose from the tenements of Glasgow to build a grocery store empire and compete five times for the America’s Cup, though never wresting the world’s oldest international sporting prize from the American cup holders. Lipton’s final attempt in 1930 was with the 36.58m Shamrock V, which holds a special place in the pantheon of J Class yachts as the first British J, the only one planked in wood and one of only three original class survivors. As this remarkable yacht surfaces from her latest restoration, a fragment has emerged that connects to a time when the working sailors of Essex fishing villages trod the planks alongside aristocrats and royalty. Her skipper in the 1930 challenge was Essex man Edward Carrington Heard, from a neighbouring village to Albert Turner…

Argentinian racing driver Alejandro de Tomaso’s first supercar entered production in 1967. It was styled by Giorgetto Giugiaro at Ghia, 401 were built, and only around half are thought to have survived. Chassis 998 gives a good indication of the model’s rise in value in the 2010s: the four-headlight European-spec car first crossed the block at Bonhams’ Paris sale in 2013, taking €91,762 (£76,500) before returning to Paris in 2018 when RM Sotheby’s achieved €286,250 (£238,750). RM’s 2014 Monaco sale set the bar for the best recently restored cars at €268,800 (£224,250), a level that was pushed higher in 2023 when Mecum sold its Wayne Carini-restored example for $418,000 (£311,500). An exceptional unrestored Mangusta holds the auction record: sold by Mecum as a one-owner car (pictured) with 6217 miles for…