Inhaltsverzeichnis für October 2019 in Octane

ALL MY LIFE I have been a sucker for great feats of endurance and derring-do. And I really mean all, from Charles Lindbergh to Franky Zapata. The appeal, I suppose, is not so much the reminder that some people just have more vision, more stamina and more sheer bloodymindedness than the rest of us, but that there are those who are still prepared to push the very boundaries of human ambition to the limit, and all too often beyond. Obviously, the more bizarre challenges often stand out – crossing a choppy English Channel in a pair of Amphicars en route to the Frankfurt motor show, parachuting to Earth from Space – but sometimes the greatest endeavours happen on the most traditional of battlefields. I never miss an opportunity to mention…

29 August – 2 September Lime Rock Historic €estival Morgan – 110 this year – will take centre stage at the concours, while on-track there’ll be a grid to mark 50 years of US Formula Ford. limerock.com 30 August – 1 September Rømø Motor €estival You’ll need an invite to take part in the beach races on this Danish island, along with a pre-war car or bike and period attire – but anybody can go along and watch. romomotorfestival.dk 31 August – 1 September Bo’Ness Revival A weekend of hillclimb action 20 miles west of Edinburgh. Most keenly anticipated is the Jim Clark Celebration Class, open to cars owned or raced by Clark. bonessrevival.co.uk 1 September Shere Hill Climb Some 180 eclectic cars head for the Surrey Hills to tackle…

THE LOTUS LANDMARKS cover story in Octane 195 was a thoroughly good read, although I was a little disappointed that the Type 14 Elite was not included. However, given your criterion of focusing on the ‘greatest hits’, I can understand its omission. To be fair to the Elite, it was an amazing leap of faith to use a GRP composite in a monocoque back in 1957. The Elite’s racing successes were formidable, with the exploits of Graham Warner (LOV 1) and Les Leston (DAD 10) in club racing being well known, not to mention an extraordinary number of wins in an Elite by John Wagstaff both at home and abroad. At Le Mans there were six class wins for Elites between 1959 and 1964, including one at an average speed…

McLAREN M8B AND M8D Few career rises have been as meteoric as that of kiwi Bruce McLaren. His journey from coming to drive in the UK on a scholarship, to Formula 1 winner, to constructor, was unprecedented in its speed. When the Can-Am Challenge Cup launched in 1966, McLaren was still under 30, but he and the raucous series would peak together and immortalise the sight of orange monsters blasting through dust clouds. Robin Herd was called in to design the small-block Chevy-powered M6, and as that car took to the tracks McLaren was already planning its successor, the big-block M8, which was good for over 600bhp. With lightweight glassfibre bodies and square proportions, the speed without compromise could not have been more different to that of the then-3.0-litre F1.…

AUDI R8 First came the R8R, a 1999 LMP car that proved reliable if not world-shatteringly quick – although third and fourth at Le Mans are not to be sniffed at. The winter was spent working with Dallara and Joest Racing, and a Le Mans legend on a par with the likes of the GT40 and D-type was born. The R8 was victorious at La Sarthe five times on the trot, and although chassis 403 – technically WAUZZZ8RZAA100403 – was not one of the winners, it enjoyed an astonishing career. Run by Joest, and driven by Allan McNish, Rinaldo Capello and Michele Alboreto, it finished second at the 2000 Sebring 12 Hours, and was piloted to third at Le Mans by McNish, Capello and Christian Abt. There were wins at…

Benjamin Goethe started his racing in regional karting in the South of France before moving up to X30 Junior at French Championship level. In 2018 he graduated to Spanish Formula 4 where he was a regular top-six finisher, a notable achievement in his first year of single-seater racing. This season Benjamin became the youngest driver ever to compete in the SRO Blancpain Endurance series when he raced at the age of just 16 and one week at Monza with GPX Racing in the Gulf-liveried Porsche GT3-R. Oliver Goethe is shadowing his brother’s racing career in karting and was vice-champion in the 2018 French X30 Junior Championship. He currently races for VDK in the World and European OK Senior category before graduating to a European single-seater championship.…

IT’S HARD TO make a surreptitious entrance in a half-track. For starters, noise carries when you’re halfway up a mountain in central Portugal, and an Autocar M3 is commotion itself. Your arrival is trumpeted from a mile away, perhaps further, depending on wind conditions. The sound of a ginormous straight-six under load is matched for volume by transmission whine and road roar. Oh, and laughter tinged with disbelief. The shock and awe at somehow not demolishing every local landmark has taken its toll on both the driver and on the trusting occupants in the back: the ones who are now hoarse from barking instructions that consisted mostly of ‘No, my left!’ and ‘Look out for the…’ Juddering to a halt, it’s as though a seismic disturbance has unsettled the air.…

IN AN ERA WHEN most superstar car designers were Italian, a Dutchman with global roots but little design education found a way to crawl to the top. Harm Lagaay’s path to car design – and key cars including the Porsche 924, 968, 993, 996, 997, Boxster and Cayman, plus the BMW Z1 and Ford Sierra among others – was an unconventional one. Lagaay (or Lagaaij in the original Dutch) was born in The Hague, South Holland, on 28 December 1946, but thanks to his dad’s work for Shell Oil he spent his early life in Ecuador and Venezuela. In the 1950s he went to an English-speaking primary school in Brunei and in the ’60s a boarding school back in The Netherlands. ‘My youth is a bit of a mixture of…

THE VOICE ON the phone said: ‘Would you like to bring your lovely little Abarth Sperimentale to the Cartier Style et Luxe concours at the Goodwood Festival of Speed?’ There is, of course, only one answer to that question. Having miraculously survived its jettisoned wheel incident (see Octane 193) undamaged, a touch of T-Cut to remove the rubber residue on the wheelarch appeared to be the only preparation required. That, and a polish. Hmm. Absence of floor covering starts to niggle, so a decision to make a set of floorboards covered in grooved rubber prompts a flurry of activity. The indispensable eBay throws up a roll of finely grooved matting and, surprisingly quickly for me, a pair of floorboards materialise out of a sheet of ply that I just happen…

YOU CAN SENSE the double-take before it even happens. A middle-aged chap is crossing the road in front of us, our Tiger temporarily snared in an Irish small-town traffic jam. He glances at the car, and at the driver. Then, as he passes by on the pavement, he looks at the driver again. ‘It’s you, isn’t it!’ he exclaims in cheerful surprise. And Rosemary Smith agrees that, yes, it is indeed her. Turns out the chap saw her racing a Mk1 Escort at Phoenix Park in the early ’70s. This kind of thing happens a lot when you’re co-driving with Rosemary in Ireland. Everyone recognises her; everyone wants to say hello and remind her of how they once met, 20 or 30 years ago or more. ‘Yes, of course!’ she’ll…

THE M25 London Orbital Motorway isn’t synonymous with a relaxed and enjoyable drive but, if any car can make it so, the S-class Cabriolet is that car. The sun was shining and Mrs H and I had found the controls for the massaging seats and the guided cruise control so, bar the occasional nudge on the steering wheel, both of us could simply sit back and relax as the S560 eased our way down to the Goodwood Festival of Speed. As we left the motorway for some Surrey B-roads, we took the opportunity to lower the roof: the flick of a switch turned this vast and silent coupé into a mobile sun-deck. Even better, dialling up from Eco mode to Sport+ woke the beast that had purred along half-asleep with…

JUDGING BY THE contents of the car parks at Bovington Tank Museum, many car enthusiasts like tanks, too. Bovington was the main training ground for tanks during World War One. At the end of hostilities, several surviving examples were returned to the fields around the current museum. The idea was to use them to educate new Tank Corps soldiers about the development of their mounts. The author Rudyard Kipling is said to have visited Bovington in the 1920s, where he made the suggestion that important tanks should be saved for the nation. The tank was a British invention, though Leonardo da Vinci takes credit for coming up with the idea. That said, the ancient Roman testudo, or ‘tortoise’, in which soldiers marched within and under a barrier of shields, shouldn’t…

PORSCHE 956 SCULPTURE BY JONNY AMBROSE More evidence that Federico Fellini was right about all art being autobiographical, this sculpture nods to Jonny Ambrose’s former life as a developer of video game graphics. Flowing curves are suggested with just a handful of straight lines, simple ‘polygons’ hewn from walnut and obeche recreating the unmistakable shape of the 956. The piece is a one-off, but more of Jonny’s work will be exhibited at the Royal Automobile Club during London Motor Week (28 October onwards). £950. jonny€mbrose.com ‘THE LANDIE’ T-SHIRT BY DEUS EX MACHINA As perfect and enduring a design as anything conceived by Aston Martin or Rolls-Royce, the David Bache-styled Land Rover Series II was essential to Rover’s post-war success, and we suspect it will shift a few T-shirts for Deus…

NEXT MONTH is Pebble Beach month, where everything from hotels to mixed drinks and the cars on offer is frighteningly expensive. So, this month, let’s celebrate summer with cheap convertibles. The Allante was meant to be Cadillac’s answer to the Mercedes SL. To say it didn’t work out well for GM is an understatement. The Allante was not wholly from Detroit, because Pininfarina in Italy built the bodies. Cadillac had worked with the Italian design house before, notably in 1959 and 1960 when 201 cars resulted. This time around the bodies were shipped by the ‘Allante air bridge’, specially equipped Boeing 747s flying between Turin and Detroit. In 1987, the first year of production, Cadillac offered original buyers a guarantee that the Allante, priced at a huge $54,700 (a base…

VERY FEW fixed-head Bugatti Type 57 Atalantes were produced, and of those far fewer remain today. Bonhams will offer this matching-numbers Faux Cabriolet at the Goodwood Revival sale on 14 September, where the car is likely to sell for £1,000,000-1,500,000. It’s one of six cars being sold from the collection of the enthusiast Barry Burnett. It spent its early years living in France, but then became one of the first Type 57s to make the trip across the Atlantic in 1957 to the USA. It subsequently returned to the UK during the 1980s, and was first spotted by Burnett while in the possession of fellow collector Peter Rae. Restored during Rae’s time, it retains its original chassis, engine, transmission and body. Burnett swapped a Delage for the Bugatti and added…

FARMERS ADORED the BRAT from the moment it was launched. It was tough, reliable and – thanks to four-wheel drive – pretty useful off-road. It was the complete package at an attractive price point. It gained a significant following, especially in the USA. The BRAT was in essence a chopped-down Leone, Subaru’s mid-sized saloon, but having such close ties with the saloon car gave it a scaled-down El Camino attitude that was well received at the time and still looks surprisingly cool today. The name might conjure up visions of an annoying younger sibling, but it actually stands for ‘Bi-drive Recreational All-terrain Transporter’. This was Subaru’s way into a rapidly growing market for small pick-ups in the USA. Launched in 1978, it became an overnight success for Subaru. It was…

MORE THAN 50,000 Citroënistes from around the globe travelled to the small French town of La Ferté-Vidame to celebrate the marque’s 100th anniversary, in what the company called ‘The Gathering of a Century’. Approximately 4200 classic Citroëns made the pilgrimage to the grounds of the ruined château, home to the company’s top-secret test facility used during the development of the Citroën 2CV. Every era of Citroën’s past was well represented, although DS and Traction models – neatly arranged to mimic the twin-helical-gear logo – dominated. 2CV numbers were also healthy along with strong attendance from ‘Big Citroën’ communities, including what must be the largest single gathering of SM, CX, XM and C6 ever seen. Xavier Crespin, managing director of L’Aventure Peugeot Citroën DS, had a hand in the event from…

IT LOOKS A flyweight, but you’d be surprised how much a Bugatti Type 35B weighs: 900kg. And by how much torque the supercharged 2262cc straight-eight puts out: a turbodieselrivalling 330lb ft at just 2000rpm. Which explains the 14-sec standing quarter-miles. You find these things out when you build them. Stephen Gentry, who runs the family business Gentry Restorations Ltd specialising in vintage Bugattis on the Oxfordshire/Bucks border, built this one from a mixture of old and new parts in 2012. Along with its owner he has raced and hillclimbed it since. A ‘new’ Bugatti? With the price of originals now around the £2m mark few of them race, but a perfect copy at £350,000 is less risky. Besides, without ‘HTP’ cars we’d be denied the pleasure of watching Historic racing…

IT IS OFTEN said that the first race you win is the most expensive because it mainlines you into the world of motor racing. I would say the same is true of collecting! I met Adrian Hamilton in 2008 when he sold to me a Ferrari Dino GP car that today sits in my office at Rofgo Park. This started a relationship that ultimately led to the ROFGO Collection and me becoming a senior partner of Duncan Hamilton Rofgo Ltd. The collection would not have happened without Adrian so I felt when we brought everything under one roof at Rofgo Park I should be involved with the company! Soon after we met, Adrian and I discussed the idea of building a collection. Given my background in the energy markets and…

ASTON MARTIN DBR9 Chassis 007 may not have had quite as illustrious a career as the other DBR9 in the ROFGO Collection, but it’s still an important part of Gulf motorsport history. Chassis 007 made its race debut at Silverstone in May 2006, and scored a series of top-six finishes in that year’s FIA GT Championship, topped by fifth places at Brno and Dubai. Fabrizio Gollin and Miguel Ramos was the most frequent driver pairing. In 2007, its major focus was Le Mans, with the only other races being two FIA GT events. At La Sarthe, raced by former GP ace Johnny Herbert with Tomas Enge and Peter Kox, 007 finished ninth overall and fourth in LMGT1. The 14th and final race for chassis 007 was at Le Mans in…

DUNCAN HAMILTON NEEDS little introduction. Established by the larger-than-life Le Mans-winning driver, the company has traded continuously since 1948. Duncan stepped down in the mid-’70s and his son Adrian took it over at a time when both classic cars and historic racing really started to gather momentum in both popularity and value. Adrian is widely recognised as one of the founders of the success of the sector and has been responsible for the sale of more Ferrari 250 GTOs and Ford GT40s than anyone else in the classic car market. Adrian is now Chairman of the recently established Duncan Hamilton Rofgo Limited. Drawing on the long established reputation of its founder company, Adrian’s fellow directors Simon Drabble, Nick Maton and Jack Tetley continue to curate the Collection as well as…

ROFGO RACING WAS was set up to prepare and provide race support to cars from the ROFGO Collection. The team, co-headed by former World Endurance champion Stuart Hall and highly experienced Le Mans crew chief James Chown, in conjunction with multiple World Championship-winning former Aston Martin Racing engineer Stuart Gale, has extensive knowledge of all areas of motorsport. This has been repeatedly demonstrated at events such as the Grand Prix Historique de Monaco, where the ROFGO team has enjoyed enormous success. The team never rests on its laurels, however, and development of in-house engineering projects with Gale’s Venture Engineering Company continues. Nowadays the team’s duties are incredibly varied, from running McLaren M19s at Monaco to its Mercedes AMG GT3 in the Creventic Zfi Hour Series, most recently taking victory in…

Milan in Italy is many things to many people. For some it is the hub of the fashion industry, for others it is noted for two great football teams, or the river of culture that flows from La Scala theatre. In our world many acknowledge it as the original home of Alfa Romeo, but few are aware that Milan is where Italy’s car industry started at the end of the 19th Century. One of the leading lights of that era was Isotta Fraschini, known for its avant-garde mechanicals and peerless quality, and, amazingly, the very first Isotta Fraschini, chassis number one, still exists. It is called the Tipo 1902, despite being built in 1901. In November 1896, 30-year-old Oreste Fraschini, a self-made man and the eldest of the five Fraschini…

LIÈGE-BRESCIA-LIÈGE rally impresario Malcolm McKay seemed surprised by the competitiveness of the 26 Triumph TR crews entered into this year’s event. I wasn’t. A load of Jaguar E-type and XK owners may have been perfectly happy to swan around the 2200-mile, ten-day route – originally used by the Royal Motor Union of Liège rally for microcars with engines under 500cc – but, as soon as they’d got competition numbers on their flanks, the TR crews went for it big time. TR owners always try harder, dontcha know. Not that the starters lined up for the first time in front of Liège’s Le Palais des Princes-Évêques were short of opportunities to struggle, running in record temperatures across Belgium, Germany, Austria, Slovenia and Italy. My TR3A, Yoo Hoo, might know her way…

ATTENDING THE launch of a new Lotus is a rare event. The last one I can remember going to was that of the 340R in 1999, so, when I was invited to the global reveal of the Lotus Evija in London and asked if could I bring my Elan Sprint along. too, the answer was always going to be yes. Lotus wanted the Elan because it was assembling cars from its back-catalogue to display outside the launch venue. The common theme was that they should all be yellow, hence the request for my Elan. I’ve owned it since 1993, which I find remarkable given that I generally like to churn my cars every few years, but then there’s something about the Elan that has elevated it to what you might…

ONE SATURDAY this summer, I released the Jaguar from its lair at the top of the road. It started perfectly, as usual, after a few weeks of inaction, but I noticed a faint smell of petrol. Examining the SU carbs, it seemed the rear one was weeping fuel from the brass retaining nut on the bottom of the float chamber. I just managed to get a 16mm spanner onto it and nip it up and so far it remains dry. Heading out of London, our destination was the Daylesford farm shop in Gloucestershire to enjoy George Bamford’s Tyre Kicker Club summer gathering. Dozens of exciting cars arrived at the smart shop, where we started with delicious bacon butties before some brisk driving. I met upwith Octane contributorHarry Metcalfe in his…

BOOST, FLUTTER, whistle, spool-up, lag. These might be common descriptors among car enthusiasts today, but once upon a time turbochargers were exotic artefacts. It’s easy to gloss over the important part that Renault played, but it genuinely did lead the turbocharged revolution through motorsport and into its road cars. This year marks the 40th anniversary of the company’s first victory in Formula 1, scored by Jean-Pierre Jabouille and the RS10 at the French Grand Prix two years after its revolutionary RS01 predecessor, also driven by Jabouille, had been revealed to a sceptical paddock and an intrigued public at 1977’s British Grand Prix. Renault had some successes in endurance racing to its name, but a victory in F1 with a blown 1.5-litre V6 surprised more than a few people. The technology,…

WE’RE A SMALL and rather perverse motoring sub-culture of a motoring sub-culture – we who lust after not just tiny, virtually unknown Italian cars, well outside the legacy mainstream, but best of all, the tiny, snotty, pumped-up cars who truly believe they’re mightier than the mighty. Cars with displacements measured in eye-droppers, attitudes worthy of entire F1 starting grids, and noises somewhere between atomic chainsaw and leopard in a burlap sack. And if you grew up in the golden post-war decades and dreamed of sending your Fiat out to humiliate Ferraris, your patron saint simply had to be Italian tuning genius Carlo Abarth. Although he didn’t actually start life as Carlo Abarth. Or as Italian. Originally he was Karl Albert Abarth, and he was born Austrian, in Vienna, 1908. He…

HEEL TREAD INDIE GOGO GT40 COLLECTION £9.99 plus shipping www.heeltread.com A road-legal V8-engined race car that stood a mere 40 inches from the tarmac… need we say more? The inspiration for the design was Gulf Oil colours, which in combination with the sweeping lines of the Ford GT40 made the car arguably the most iconic race machine of all time. Enter #FuellingThePassion to get a 10% discount on your first order. OILY GULF MUG £10 www.meandmycar.co.uk Inspired by the blue and orange oil-splattered livery of the Gulf Racing Porsche, our mug is an eye-catching addition to the daily brew. Made from ceramic with a high-gloss finish, the mugs will withstand many years of service. A great gift for any Gulf fan. TRAVEL IN STYLE WITH GRANDPRIX ORIGINALS Jacket €189 /…

By CMC Price £589.95 €aterial Premium diecast Drink-driving is rarely recommended, but in 1953 it was how Tony Rolt and Duncan Hamilton won Le Mans. Disqualified on a technicality from starting the race, they drowned their sorrows by drinking through the night. Six hours before the start, nursing enormous hangovers, they found they had been reinstated after William Lyons paid a fine. ‘Hairs-of-the-dog’ in the form of double brandies sorted them out, and the rest is history. Their winning C-type, fitted with the disc brakes that proved so vitally effective against the drum-braked opposition, has been modelled in incredible detail by CMC. Yes, it’s expensive, and maybe not quite as subtle in execution as CMCs used to be (that stitching on the fabric half-tonneau looks very over-scale) – but it’s…

GULLWING PRICES may have slipped back in recent months, but Silverstone Auctions bucked the trend with the sale of a 1954 Mercedes-Benz 300SL for £832,500. Sales at its Silverstone Classic auction totalled a very respectable £6.4m, with 74% of the entries, a mixture of classic and competition cars, sold over the weekend. This particular Gullwing comes from a long-term private owner, and has been regularly used and very well maintained. It was sold alongside a 2010 Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG, which achieved £203,625. One of the highlights among the competition cars was a 1988 Group A Rouse Ford Sierra RS500 Touring Car, which made £170,000. The collection of the late Barrie Williams was also offered by Silverstone, his treasured Mini Cooper ‘S’ selling for £65,250. Whizzo’s Lancia Fulvia 1600 HF was…

AS FERRAR€ DROPPED back 1.45% in July, Porsche gained 3.12% and the HAGI Top overall collector car benchmark took the middle ground, posting 1.97% up month on month. Such short-term performance variations are no more than an illustration of the rich texture of a multi-faceted market. This is highlighted further by year-to-date comparisons, with all segments dropping back apart from Lamborghini, which has so far gained 4.85%, as deficits elsewhere range up to 7.08%. The HAGI Top is down 4.77% YTD. Simply, while Lamborghini continues to trend sideways, the Top and most other segments are trending downwards. In the case of the HAGI Top, the origins of the current trend date back to May 2018 when the index stood at 352.18. Despite briefly eclipsing that, the Top has declined 3.3%…

ORIGIN STORIES can often be some of the most interesting, and the creation of the first Lister racing car is no exception. That all of the great motor racing moments from Lister’s past owe something to this relatively unknown two-seater Lister JAP makes this a very special part of the story. In many people’s eyes, the Lister story began in 1954 with the formation of Lister Cars and the production of the Lister MG, featuring the very first chassis built by the company. But the first car to wear a Lister chassis number actually dates back to 1951. Brian Lister spotted a lightweight two-seater that had been built by local customer John Tojeiro. This was only Tojeiro’s second completed car, but Lister saw its potential for hillclimbs and sprints and…

The Silverstone Classic 26-28 July With 109,000 visitors, 21 races featuring over 1000 competitors and just about every formula imaginable, the Silverstone Classic is exciting enough without the downpours (aka ‘traditional British summer’) that make spectating miserable and magnificent in equal measure as pilots and cars are tested to the limit. This picture shows Japanese ace Katsuaki Kubota in the spectacular Lotus 91/7 leading… well, your guess is as good as ours! PEKING TO PARIS MOTOR C€ALLENGE, 2 JUNE – 7 JULY With the average daily distance being 400km and the longer ones 650km, there can be no greater test than HERO’s revival of the epic 1907 rally. Entrants ranged from 1907 Contal Mototri tricycle (above) to 1975 Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow; Gerry Crown and Matt Bryson (below left) won outright…

.naugural street drive for Hispano Suiza 5armen Less than a year before customer cars are due to be delivered, the Hispano Suiza Carmen has taken to the streets of its home city, Barcelona. The electric car, referred to by its maker as ‘a fully electric hyperlux grand tourer’, was piloted by members of the company, and cruised a series of well-known landmarks and hotels. Hispano has been working hard since the car’s Geneva debut, and the model apparently now has completely new suspension, plus reduced weight and increased rigidity thanks to the use of carbonfibre. Miguel Suqué Mateu, Hispano Suiza president, said: ‘We are extremely proud of our long heritage, which dates back to our beginnings on the streets of Barcelona in 1904. This legacy and the style icons of…

THE ALVIS CAR COMPANY has announced a bold plan to bring the marque back to life in its centenary year, with a range of continuation cars in six styles on two chassis. The Kenilworth-based firm announced its first continuation model – a revival of the beautiful Vanden Plas short-chassis 4.3-litre of the late 1930s – as far back as 2010, and three have been built to date. Now the company plans to produce not only the 4.3 but also post-war 3-litre and Graber models. The post-war cars will be built with unused chassis and engine blocks stored since the original factory closed in 1968. All cars will be IVA-approved and road legal, and will come with a three-year warranty. The Alvis Car Company, wholly owned by specialist Red Triangle, adds…

KEY CARS FORD GT40 It came to define corporate involvement in motor sport. After Enzo Ferrari famously rebuffed Ford’s early-1960s buyout bid, the Blue Oval responded with a money-no-object scheme to give Il Commandatore a good drubbing at Le Mans. Enter the GT40. Former Aston Martin team boss John Wyer oversaw the model’s ill-starred maiden tilt in ’64, only to become increasingly sidelined by more mundane duties. Productionising the MkIII road car was never going to contain him. Once free of Ford’s restrictions, and armed with Gulf’s patronage for ’67, Wyer instigated the construction of an entirely new variation on the theme, the Len Bailey-penned Mirage M1 being essentially a GT40 with a smaller greenhouse. Regulations changed, so the squad reverted back to the more familiar outline; it scooped the…

MIR AGE M1 The first Mirage was, perhaps unsurprisingly, not a great deal different to a GT40, because it was masterminded by Johns Wyer and Willment, and born out of the ashes of the Ford racing programme that had given the world the all-conquering GT40. Slough’s Ford AVO became John Wyer Automotive Engineering in 1967, and the Gulf liveries that it made famous eventually, and literally, became synonymous with the cars as they were renamed the Gulf-Mirages in 1974, although they remained under the guiding hand of John Horsman. The ledgers are testament to the unparalleled success of the Mirage team – one of only two independent marques to take an outright Le Mans win, and for four years never outside the top ten there. At the start of it…

TO MOST MOTORSPORT enthusiasts, a car in powder blue and orange livery says one thing: Gulf. The brand seems to have been around for ages – and indeed, Gulf was one of the original Seven Sister major oil companies, dating back to 1901 in Texas. This means the Gulf in question is not, as most people today think, the Arabian Gulf, but in fact the Gulf of Mexico. Legend has it that when Gulf’s founders went to register their oil claim, they wanted to call themselves the Texas Oil Company, but another outfit had used that name only a matter of days earlier. Had it not been for that, Gulf would have been Texaco… Ironically, it was Chevron-Texaco that took over Gulf in the 1980s, keeping control of the brand…

The flight tickets say Zurich, so I’m a bit confused. Isn’t that Switzerland? And isn’t the Silvretta Classic in Austria? Oh well, it’s all a bit Alpine, so I figure the geography will sort itself when we land. And so it does. The rally takes its name from the Silvretta-Hochalpenstrasse, a high pass through stunning mountain scenery in the Montafon region of western Austria, sandwiched between Germany, Liechtenstein and Switzerland. It is captivatingly beautiful, and the roads promise to be spectacular. As does the weather, too. All of which is important, because our steed is a 1961 Mercedes-Benz 300SL Roadster. We’ll be travelling roof-down, naturally, all the better to witness the sights, sounds and smells amid these snow-capped peaks, and the breeding of this surefooted Merc will come into its…

Forget about the viral in-car videos. Throw the computer games in the rubbish bin. Nothing really prepares anyone for this. The rush up the long hill from the grid, with 600bhp jammed against my back and the turbos whooshing; barely kissing the dragon’s teeth lining the right-hander and flicking across to the left-hand set, far tighter than I’d ever imagined, hard right again and the Dunlop Bridge zooming ever closer. I don’t really see it, mind; the Bridge itself is irrelevant. What dominates my attention is the totally blind crest and the lightness welling up as I swoop down the other side. The lightness in my belly, too, not so much from the swoop as from the fact I’m driving the very last Bugatti to race in the Le Mans…

It had the unreal quality of a dream. That strange hyper-cleanliness, that dazzling intensity of colour, that haunting feeling of being suspended in time, and even in motion; sitting there with the speedo reading in excess of 160mph and two more gold Lamborghinis drifting along ahead.’ The opening paragraph to one of the most famous automotive drive stories of all time. Early in 1977, journalist Mel Nichols helped deliver three brand-new Lamborghinis – a Countach, a Urraco and a Silhouette – from Sant’Agata to London. The resultant story was published in Car magazine and instantly became an inspiration to a generation of enthusiasts for both its passion and its poetry. How ironic, then, that such a well-remembered piece should have featured one of the least-familiar Lamborghinis. With just 52 production…

THERE’S BEEN a huge gap between the last report and this one and the simple reason is that I needed the space for my Mustang restoration, so the Cossie had to winter away elsewhere. Work didn’t stop, though. I wanted to substitute original springs for the lowered and uprated items that mine, as with the majority of surviving RS Cosworths, had acquired over the years. Problem was, nobody makes them. But then some research took me to Alpha Springs in Sheffield, who made race springs for the Sierra Cosworth back in the day and kept a record of the free length and rates of the standard items first. Bingo! Alpha made a fresh set for me and Richard Upton at ITG Motorsport fitted them over the winter while I cracked…

THE GERMANS HAVE one of their compoundwordsforit– Existenzminimum, subsistence-level living. A pared-back but not impoverished minimal living space was a concept that gripped the European progressive architectural community in the 1920s and ’30s, not least among the members of the Bauhaus, the seminal art school founded in Weimar in 1919 by Walter Gropius. For the practitioners of Modernism, the elimination of extraneous detail became a cult-like obsession, which in half-timbered mock-Tudor Britain met with much resistance and considerable ridicule. In Britain, Jack Pritchard and wife Molly were among the first of the few who fully embraced the idea of the minimalist lifestyle. The dramatic block of flats in Lawn Road, Hampstead, that they commissioned and which is now referred to as the Isokon building (Octane 195), was conceived along the…

The Self Preservation Society MATTHEW FIELD, Porter Press International, £45, ISBN 978 1 907085 86 4 The film critics tend to be a bit sniffy about The Italian Job but, to our way of thinking, a film that can successfully combine Sir Noël Coward and Benny Hill in major roles has to be worth watching, even if you discount all the car (and coach) action. Of which there is a lot. To say that The Self Preservation Society – the definitive book about the movie and how it was created – has been a labour of love for author Matthew Field would be a heinous understatement. He was just 18 when he started work on his first book about the film, The Making Of The Italian Job, and 20 when…

THERE ARE FEW more satisfying cars to own than a well-restored Miura. With the work undertaken correctly, these spectacular cars can be made to drive considerably better than when they were new. Most have been rebuilt several times, sometimes losing the individual features that make each Miura unique. Lamborghini Polo Storico’s restorations offer an official seal of approval, but imagine finding a Miura in completely original and unrestored condition, just as it left the factory. RM Sotheby’s will offer just such a car at its Olympia auction in London on 24 October. Despite a layer of dust and grime, the P400S has been off the road for only four years. Chassis #4245 was sold to its slightly eccentric first owner, advertising director Walter Becker of Nürnberg, in 1971. Becker then…

I’VE BEEN engineering director for Jaguar Land Rover’s Special Vehicle Operations since last summer, based at what used to be RAF Fen End in Warwickshire. This amazing facility is one of the things that attracted me to the company. We have the ability to build a vehicle here totally from scratch – a Project 8 body-in-white is shipped in at one end of the building and a completed car comes out the other. There aren’t a lot of performance operations in the world that have that resource at their fingertips. Day-to-day there are several facets to my job. First is the strategic cycle planning: whether it’s developing all the tech or the performance-vehicle concepts, we spend a lot of time reviewing rivals’ benchmarking data and putting together business cases for…