Indholdsfortegnelse for May 2024 i Octane

MORE OFTEN THAN we would probably like to admit, amazing stories fall into Octane’s lap and a tentative email with a picture attachment sets in motion a chain of events that ends with you reading about a very special car. Every one of those easy wins, however, is counterbalanced by something that takes a lot more time, effort and, inevitably, money to put together. And in 28 years in this game I cannot remember a more fraught process than our collective quest to get a Schuppan 962 CR into Octane. The reason for wanting to is obvious – great car, great story, plus the compulsion finally, and for the first time, properly to tell the world how this remarkable Le Mans car for the road measures up to its billing. The…

30 March Brooklands Easter Classic Car Day Pre-31 July 1994 cars are invited to park at the museum for this year’s Easter Classic Car Day, which will feature live music and a barbecue. brooklandsmuseum.com 31 March Bicester Heritage Motorsport Assembly Bicester Heritage holds its first themed car gathering of 2024. Entry is free for paying members of Bicester’s ‘Scramblers’ club, and tickets for everybody else cost just a tenner. bicesterheritage.co.uk 3-7 April Techno-Classica Essen The daddy of indoor classic car shows will again test the stamina of visitors, who will find more than 1250 exhibitors packed into the Messe Essen in Germany. siha.de 5-7 April Mugello Classic Group C brutes will be among the cars in action at Peter Auto’s first racing meet of the year, at Mugello Circuit in…

London show gearing up There will be a Who’s Who of the world’s greatest motor manufacturers at Salon Privé London on 18-20 April at the Royal Hospital Chelsea. The raft of marques that will be on display includes Aston Martin, Brabus, Bugatti, Ferrari, Koenigsegg, Lamborghini, Land Rover, Polestar, Porsche, Rimac and Rolls-Royce. Meanwhile, cars that visitors can buy in the event’s unique Concours de Vente are being added to daily. Specialists and dealers who will be displaying their wares include the renowned likes of Hilton & Moss and Aston specialist RS Williams. Making its Salon Privé London debut is P&A Wood, offering an elegant 1966 Rolls-Royce Phantom V Touring Limo by James Young, while The Aston Workshop & Car Barn, which took the show’s Prix d’ Honneur in 2023 with…

AT THE END of the 1980s, the decade of big spenders, the idea of a supercar was moving into a new dimension. The Jaguar XJ220, the McLaren F1 and Bugatti EB110 were in preparation and promised to bring race-car performance to the road. That raised the inevitable question: why not make a contemporary race car street-legal? Take a Group C sports-racer, fit catalytic converters and silencers, change the engine control unit, add licence plates and (a few) creature comforts and you could have a spectacular road car. That was the thinking that led to the Schuppan-Porsches that flowered for a short time from 1991. Vern Schuppan – 1983 Le Mans winner for Porsche – ran a highly professional endurance racing team that developed its own carbonfibre chassis and a host…

IF YOU’VE BEEN to Le Mans and attempted to sleep, you can probably blame this man – and his many bright yellow Corvettes – for waking you up at 3am. For more than 20 years the Corvettes have been pretty much the loudest cars on the track, and Bedfordshire-born racing driver Oliver Gavin has played an instrumental part in their success. Making 204 starts, winning 51 of those, and completing 18 full seasons with the team, this man is one of the most seasoned sports car racers in the world. Gavin last raced a Corvette in 2021, yet he is still very much a part of the team as a brand ambassador, offering driver tuition and experiences through the Oliver Gavin Driver Academy. We meet in the ‘Corvette Village’ at the…

COME WET AND chilly December in the UK, Europe and USA, the classic car scene goes into the workshops for spannering or general winter hibernation. But not in the United Arab Emirates! Boasting cobalt-blue skies, warm and dry weather with temperatures around 28ºC, the mostly deserted highways and byways of the UAE are classic car heaven. Think vast open spaces, magnificent backdrops, no traffic, cheap petrol and around 120 classic and performance cars let loose among a few bemused camels and goats amid the most breathtaking moonscape in the world. It has to be the 1000 Miglia Experience UAE. The latest event sees entries from Germany, Italy, Switzerland, France and the UK, participants arriving from 31 countries in total. Supported by the UAE Ministry of the Interior, a stellar field…

1924 SUNBEAM 14/40 & 1926 DELAGE DISS DAVID BURGESS-WISE LAST YEAR SAW the departure of the 1903 De Dion-Bouton (bottom right) and 1911 Pilain (above) to custodians new, and the arrival of the 1924 Sunbeam 14/40 coupé (bottom left). The Sunbeam is more usable, with weather protection, electric starting and four-wheel brakes – an ideal foil to the 1926 Delage DISS skiff. Their 2121cc engine capacities are identical. A further coincidence is that in the 1920s both the Delage and Sunbeam marques built successful Grand Prix winners as well as cars that held the Land Speed Record. The advent of the Sunbeam represents the closing of a personal circle: I started my vintage motoring career in the 1960s with a Wolverhamptonbuilt car – a 1927 Clyno – and this latest…

2003 BENTLEY CONTINENTAL R MULLINER MATTHEW HAYWARD SITTING IN SUCH a gloriously old-fashioned, handbuilt cabin, it’s difficult to comprehend that this car was built in 2003. Around six months after this ‘Final Series’ Continental R Mulliner came into the world, the first Continental GT – a car that, despite turning 20 last year, still feels relatively modern – rolled off the very same production line. In many ways this two-door grand tourer was one of Bentley’s most significant cars. The original 1991 Continental R was an important stepping stone, as it was the first Bentley with a bespoke body not shared with Rolls-Royce since the 1952 R-Type Continental. The Continental R Mulliner of 1998 introduced this slightly shortened and widened body – the blistered wheelarches make its haunches particularly shapely.…

ON 26 APRIL 1956 the SS Ideal-X, a converted World War Two oil tanker, left Newark, New Jersey, bound for Houston, Texas, carrying 58 pre-packed ‘trailer vans’: corrugated steel boxes measuring 8ft by 8ft by 35ft and designed to fit on a flatbed truck. As it departed, an official of the International Longshoremen’s Association was asked what he thought of the new innovation, and said: ‘I’d like to sink that son of a bitch!’ And he would not have been short of colleagues ready to lend a helping hand. Not only would thousands of longshoremen’s jobs soon disappear, but many of the city docks where they worked would also close as container ports moved to locations with vastly more space. The shipping container might have been little more than a large…

For an enthusiast looking for something different, is this is the time to invest in a 15-20-year-old exotic as a weekend driver or second car? Of course, anyone who thinks that all the required repairs will have stopped by now on a car of that age and type is kidding themselves, but perhaps a buyer who snaps up a car such as this one-owner, well-maintained Aston stands a good chance of having a positive ownership experience. Selling for $50,400 – just within the $50,000-60,000 pre-sale estimate – this 2007 Aston Martin V8 Vantage (4.3 litres, a six-speed manual transmission, always garaged) straddles the line between a used car and a low-cost exotic. It’s finished in Vertigo Blue Metallic with Crème leather, and at the time of cataloguing the recorded mileage…

AROUND SIX YEARS after it was bodied new by Pininfarina, this 1960 Ferrari 250GT was sent to small coachbuilder Carrozzeria Sports Cars. The chassis was shortened and this interesting one-off body was fitted under the watchful eye of Piero Drogo, who had been responsible for a number of successful Ferari racers – not least the 250GT SWB ‘Breadvan’. Over the years, chassis 1717GT has been seen at various events and historic races around the world. As you might expect, it has changed colour a few times, and also featured a GTO-style front end for many years – which it was wearing when it was shown at the 1985 Geneva motor show. During a mechanical and cosmetic overhaul in the last few years – including a colour change back to the silver…

SOMETIMES CARS THAT weren’t an instant hit when they were launched, or even those that slightly missed the mark, can make for particularly interesting classics a few decades down the road. Take the fourthgeneration Maserati Quattroporte, for example. This compact high-performance saloon was priced to compete against the top executive cars from Germany and, with the company still struggling to shake off a reputation for poor build quality, unreliability and low residual values, it was a model that really struggled to find its audience. Almost 30 years on from its launch, however, this rare Maserati could make a highly stimulating classic purchase. The Tipo AM337’s unmistakable wedgy profile came from the drawing board of Marcello Gandini, as a big brother to his similarly styled AM336 Ghibli. Despite being the first…

FEW PEOPLE can claim to have marked the style of a decade in the way of Marcello Gandini. The ‘wedge shape’ trend of the 1970s was a Marcello Gandini trademark, typified by his Lamborghini Countach. Born in Turin to a musician father who hoped his son would share that interest, at five years old Gandini was captivated by a Meccano set he received as a present. As an adult, his talent was so apparent that, even without specific design schooling, he was hired by Bertone in 1965, when only 27 years old, to manage the style of one of the most important carrozzerie of the period. Among Gandini’s first tasks was to create the shape for a new sports car, of which the extraordinary rolling chassis had been shown at…

I WAS ALWAYS going to be a petrolhead. My father Norbert worked for Paul Emery at his Fulham workshops and then joined Paul in the Grand Prix Midget scene, eventually buying and racing an Emery Dastle Mk7. We still have that car, which will get restored this year. Growing up, we had a lot of Italian cars in the household, as dad’s best friend owned multiple dealerships over the years. A bright pink Lancia Beta Spider looked quite the part in the oncemean streets of Wandsworth where I grew up, whereas a loaned Lancia Y10 put modern-day superminis to shame. Our Touring was loaded with Alcantara and electric windows all round. Both my sister and I learned to drive in it and I passed my test a few weeks after…

YOU KNOW SOMEONE pretty well after 12 hours in a waiting room together. The scene was Fiorano, Ferrari’s test track in Maranello, the characters were Vern Schuppan and myself and we were working a photoshoot of Vern’s car around a French Ferrari dealer’s track-day. It was the ex-Steve McQueen 275 GTB that Vern had converted back from a Straman NART Spyder and later sold amid a blaze of publicity at RM Sotheby’s in Monterey, 2014. After a brief burst of activity while the dealer’s clients enjoyed their lunch, Vern and I reckoned we’d probably got the job done. Not so photographer Julian Mackie, who predicted amazing evening light, light for which it would be worth waiting five hours doing nothing except chatting. Julian was right. Shoot in the bag, the…

‘The nice thing about this car is that everybody gives you the thumbs up.’ We’re sitting in traffic in Beverly Hills – does anyone need to be told where that is? – and your average buttonedup Brit might expect that a heavily chromed, garishly flamed, fenderless hot rod would be causing lips to curl and eyebrows to lift in this enclave of Ultra High Net Worth individuals. But it isn’t. Quite the opposite, in fact. That’s undoubtedly in part due to the fact that Los Angeles was built on the motor car, and its citizens have always had a special appreciation of what made it great. But in Beverly Hills it’s just as likely that the inhabitants are acknowledging one of their own: local boy made good, Bruce Meyer. Throw…

Well, goodness, won’t this be a jolly adventure. It is still dark, but our presence here is causing a sore-thumb resonance for other park-goers. Good morning, please don’t mind us. Jog on by. We will just unload the racing car and fire it up. Locate the kill switch, reconnect this and that, prod the starter and chug, chug, chug… contact! Normally, a Jaguar E-type emits an exhaust note that is crisp and burbly. It isn’t so vulgar as to be loud. Here, not so much. This straight-six is gloriously uproarious, the non-local doing his best to quell the impulse to flex the throttle. That, and to discharge a frothy comment or two. The backdrop seems so incongruous: an area of protected woodland in central Lisbon bisected by a busy thoroughfare.…

1965 TRIUMPH 2.5 PI JAMES ELLIOTT WELL, THAT escalated quickly. Even though I knew that large sections of my Triumph were pretty rotten, let’s not forget that the main impetus for sending it to James Godrey-Dunne of JGD Classic Services (find his company on Facebook) last May was that I was a bit fed up with the ripped headlining that happened when Andy Thompson and I were transporting a few Triumph doors in the early 2000s. What we are looking at now is every inch of rust being removed from the car, an exterior (plus engine bay and boot interior) spray, new diff (thanks Matt George), full gearbox rebuild and a bit of engine fettling. By the end of all that, my Triumph should near as dammit be as good…

2023 LAMBORGHINI HURACÁN STERRATO NICK HENDRIX ONLY A FEW times has Lamborghini taken a no-bull approach to its nomenclature. ‘Sterrato’ translates as ‘dirt road’. Luxury bespoke cars are on the increase, and we all remember the LM-002 fondly, but designing a supercar specifically for a ‘dirt road’ is a niche niche – the Sterrato is for those dusty, rough terrains one might find on the Paris-Dakar. Or the moon. It’s also good for messing around on fields or farm tracks, should those other destinations feel a stretch. I’m told by Lamborghini’s wizards that their design ethos is based around three words: brave, authentic, and unexpected. Cue a day of military-grade security at Italy’s iconic Nardò Technical Centre, to investigate whether the Sterrato toes the party line. We’ll take that ethos…

2024 RANGE ROVER SPORT SV ELLIOTT HUGHES SUPER-SUVS ARE no longer the novelty they were. Everyone’s at it: Lamborghini, Aston Martin, Ferrari and Porsche, to name a few. Range Rover, though, was one of the first to blend supercar performance with SUV usability with the Sport SVR in 2014. Beneath its muscle-bound bodywork was a monstrous 5.0-litre supercharged engine that shot the SVR to 62mph in just 3.8sec and on to 180mph. Bathed in the Portuguese sunshine, the SVR’s successor, the Range Rover Sport SV, is far more subtle – its smooth lines unsullied by uncouth wings, vents and angles. The engine beneath its carbonfibre bonnet seems a little more grown-up, too. Here, you’ll find a sophisticated BMWsourced 4.4-litre twinturbocharged V8 in place of the fire-and-brimstone 5.0-litre. Despite its more subtle…

THE AUDIENCE LIGHTS go down and the spotlight swings round. The host of Which Watch, ITV’s new Saturday night gameshow blockbuster, turns to you: ‘Name as many models of vintage Omega as you can in 30 seconds.’ Barely a moment, you’re straight in. ‘Speedmaster, Seamaster, De Ville…’ You might manage Flightmaster, Marinemaster and a couple more before you grind to a halt, but the chances of you choosing ‘Chronostop’ are slim. It’s not surprising. Omega made comfortably fewer than 200,000 Chronostops in the watch’s brief life from 1966/7 to 1970. Given the firm has shifted more than 1.5m Moonswatches since March 2022, it’s clear that the Chronostop was hardly one of its big sellers. It makes plenty of sense on paper: 35mm case (tiny by today’s standards but neat and unobtrusive);…

WITH TWO RIVAL auction houses – RM Sotheby’s and Broad Arrow Auctions – holding event-headlining sales at exactly the same time, nobody was quite sure how the Amelia Island/ModaMiami results were going to pan out. As it happened, both posted pretty solid results: with a few post-sale deals for both, RM announced a $50m-plus total at its newly established event, while Broad Arrow’s larger catalogue raised a little over $63m. In fact, the combined $186.9m figure posted by all four auction houses toppled last year’s Amelia record $178m. Despite RM and Broad Arrow going toe-to-toe, it was Gooding & Company’s slightly earlier auction that snatched the top spot, with total sales of $67.3m. Gooding also boasted the most valuable single car result of all the Florida sales, thanks to the…

Handbuilt from 1995 to ’98 as a hardcore homologation special to enable Porsche to compete in the GT2 class of endurance racing: this is the ultimate iteration of the air-cooled line. The best road-going 993 GT2s were a rare sight at auction in the early 2010s; the main result of note came at the RM Sotheby’s London sale in October 2012, where a two-owner example with 16,000km fetched £324,800. RM made headlines at the same event four years later, its 12,730km GT2 in sought-after Riviera Blue (right) the subject of fierce bidding, smashing its £750-850k estimate and finally being hammered away at £1,848,000. The result was seen as an outlier at the time and, unsurprisingly, it prompted a raft of consignments with higher estimates. A more realistic indicator of where…

1997 Vauxhall Vectra SuperTouring 24V Manor Park Classics, Runcorn, Cheshire, UK 13 April, manorparkclassics.com You wouldn’t generally find much love for the Vectra within the Octane office; however, this ‘SuperTouring’ special edition – one of only 500 built – celebrates a very special period of BTCC history. This is the top-spec V6 version, which was specified in the same Glacier White colour as John Cleland’s Touring Car. It’s been well looked after and not ruined like most were, which is why it’s expected to sell for £7000-8000. 1961 Citroën DS19 ‘Le Caddy’ by Chapron Osenat, Fontainebleau, France 22 April, osenat.com Henri Chapron built only 34 examples of the ‘Le Caddy’ DS cabriolet in the Levallois factory between 1958 and 1968. This 1961 example features the revised dashboard and engine fitted…

ECURIE ECOSSE MIGHT best be known for winning the 1956 and 1957 Le Mans 24 Hours with a D-type – as well as racing in one of the most recognisable blue liveries – but Scotland’s worldbeating privateer racing team had plenty of previous success with racing Jaguars. Ian Stewart was one of the team’s original owner-drivers, and in 1951 his XK120 was the first car to wear the metallic blue paint that the team would become known for. Stewart’s many great results were soon noticed by Jaguar’s Lofty England, who offered him one of the first three customer C-types to be built – XKC-006, the car pictured here. After Stewart sold the XK120 and took out a loan, the C-type was bought and promptly driven to the Jersey Road Race…

Driving the unique Franco Scaglionedesigned 3500GT Bertone Issue 252 on sale 24 April PLUS Run for cover! Dodge Vipers let loose From the 1970s into the 1980s: why the G-series are the 911s to buy now Mumbai to Abingdon in an MG YT The Octane Interview: legendary Jaguar designer Keith Helfet (Contents may be subject to change) Get 3 issues of Octane for just £5! To take advantage of this month’s special offer and get three issues of Octane for £5, either visit octane.co.uk/subscribe or call +44 (0)330 333 9491 and quote code DMAR24 Buying your issue of Octane – new and old PRINT ISSUE 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…

FERRARI HAS LAUNCHED an official tour of the Dolomites in the Autumn solely for owners of the 272 examples of the Pininfarina-styled twin-turbo V8-powered 288 GTO. Built for three years from 1984, the model is celebrating its 40th anniversary in 2024 and the sub-€30,000 (for a car and two people) driving experience will take place on 1-5 October. The event will be Maranello’s second ‘legacy tour’, following an F40 jaunt last year in which 39 cars wound their way from Forte dei Marmi through the Apuan Alps and Tuscany to Maranello. The GTO Legacy Tour will start from Val Rendena and finish in Maranello, where the cars and crews will be welcomed to the factory by the Ferrari Classiche team as well as members of the original GTO team. The…

It’s that tricky time of year: bit of daylight left as you leave the office, early flowers blooming, birds singing in the trees, though still chilly and plenty of propensity yet for frost, snow and salty roads. Even so, those glimmers are enough to make worthwhile the effort involved in getting your pride and joy out of the garage and going for a spin on one of those ‘crisp’ (read: cold!) blue-sky days. I’ll be honest: I gave up properly hibernating my old cars a few years ago. Sure, it saved a few quid on road tax but often did the opposite elsewhere. Cars being tucked away for three months have cost me a master cylinder, a clutch slave cylinder, more than one brake caliper, a heater blower and countless…

More people have walked on the moon than driven a Schuppan-Porsche 962 CR in anger. For a brief time the world’s fastest and most expensive car – a snip at $1.5-1.9m according to authority Karl Ludvigsen – this remarkable Porsche-powered machine rose to prominence in the early ’90s. Outlandish looks, otherworldly performance and exotic construction ensured it stole headlines and captured imaginations, yet the project collapsed with just a handful of cars built. In the three decades since its troubled existence and premature end, the Schuppan-Porsche 962 CR has attained cult status. Shrouded in mystery and denied the chance to deliver on its abundant promise, the story reads like a bestselling novel: the bold dream of Australian former Porsche factory driver and 1983 Le Mans 24 Hours winner Vern Schuppan…

In the early 1900s, Fiat cars were a roadgoing status symbol. Their trademarks were state-of-the-art engineering and craftsmanship, and their status was enhanced by success in racing. Today we take the idea that competition improves the breed with a pinch of salt, but back then it was absolutely true, even in that pioneering era. The company – Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Torino – was established in 1899 by incorporating Giovanni Battista Ceirano’s business Accomandita Ceirano. As early as April 1900, its 6HP Corsa (powered by a twocylinder 1082cc engine) won on its debut in the Torino-Asti race. Three were built for the works team, and the company established its tradition of creating a special vehicle dedicated to racing (hence the ‘Corsa’ name). The car was very good indeed, the creation of…

Nearly 80 years on, we still associate Bentley with Crewe, in north-western England. It wasn’t always thus; the hulking Le Mans racers of WO Bentley’s era were Londoners and, following Rolls-Royce’s take-over in 1931, Bentleys were built at the parent company’s works in Derby. From that point and up to 2004, all Bentleys were based on Rolls-Royce underpinnings and, until the advent of BMW V8s and V12s in 1998, shared only Rolls-Royce engines, too. They were marketed under the epithet of ‘the silent sports car’ and, when the first of these appeared in 1933, even WO himself declared: ‘I would rather own this Bentley than any other car produced under that name.’ Praise indeed. While today’s VW-owned Bentley might cite the R-Type Continental Fastback as its greatest inspiration (and who…

For a company that has been building cars for 96 years, it is amazing how late in the day BMW forged its own identity and direction. Some would argue that it was really born only with the Neue Klasse. They’d be wrong, of course, but between the 328s and Baroque Angels, the company does have a rich history of advancing itself via the work of others. It started at the very beginning with the Austin Seven/Dixi, its financial fortunes were revived post-war via Iso’s Isetta bubblecar, but when it tapped into the creative stream of Glas after buying the company in 1966, all it did was rapidly wind down operations – including Glas’s much-admired range-topping V8 coupé. Why? Well, perhaps because it had only recently euthanised its own V8 coupé…

1971 SAAB 96 V4 & 1996 SUBARU IMPREZA TURBO DAVID LILLYWHITE I’VE JUST LOOKED up my last Octane Cars instalment; it was in the October 2017 issue, and I was about to leave for what ended up being a year’s stint launching a new website before co-founding Hothouse Media. Now Octane is a part of Hothouse Media and, I hope you won’t be too horrified to hear, I’m back, this time as co-owner and editorial director. Back in that last Octane Cars, I was a little over-excited to have four out of six vehicles on the road: my then-daily transport 1996 Subaru Prodrive Impreza Turbo wagon, my 2001 Porsche 996 Carrera 2, my 1971 modified MGB GT, and the 1995 Range Rover 4.6 HSE that I’d bought for £1000 for a…

2004 BMW Z4 3.0i ROBERT HEFFERON IT WAS EITHER the best time or the worst time to decide to service the car myself. Fear had been holding me back. Maybe a spark plug will get stuck or snap; what if I over-tighten the sump plug? The fear of being without my car lingers in my over-active imagination. It’s half-term and my son is off to Ypres with Scouts, while my younger daughter and wife are heading to Norfolk in the family car, with the idea that I and the boy will join them mid-week. I need to drop him off early Saturday morning and collect late Sunday. The car needs a big service and I decide Saturday is the better option, as more shops will be open. It should all…

IN AUTOMOTIVE TERMS the Surrey town of Farnham, if thought of at all, is usually associated with Britain’s first Formula 1 World Champion, ‘Farnham Flyer’ Mike Hawthorn. Abbott coachworks may also strike a chord, with its elegant bodies on Lagondas and Bentleys as well as a series of Zephyr and Zodiac Farnham estate cars for Ford in the 1950s and ’60s. Less well-known is that the first petrol-fuelled British car was built in Farnham by John Henry Knight, and that it was he who committed the first motoring offence. Born into a well-to-do Farnham family of local bankers, farm and brewery owners in 1847, Knight completed an apprenticeship with marine engineers Humphrey & Tenant in 1868 and built his first steam-powered horseless carriage the same year. Other steam vehicles followed,…

YOU REALLY ONLY have two options when you’re collecting late-1970s and ’80s Heuers: spend the next 20 years cramming about the almost infinite variations between pre-TAG, transitional and post-TAG models, let alone dial and case variations, or just buy what you like the look of. The 980.013 (and its variants) fits the second approach. It’ll never be worth millions and isn’t particularly rare, but it has that certain something a well-designed vintage diver should have. At first look, you may think the 980 was intended to be a poor man’s Sub, but not a bit of it. A plain, no-date Sub may have cost over £250 more when it was new in 1981, but the Heuer still weighed in at £108. And it’s worth remembering that the Rolex was far from…

Enzo Ferrari was not renowned for his infectious good humour but even he must have cracked a smile when three of his cars – led by the first-placed 330 P4 of Lorenzo Bandini and Chris Amon, depicted here – finished the 1967 Daytona 24 Hours side-by-side, mimicking the famous one-two-three finish of Ford GT40s at Le Mans in ’66. It’s said that the Daytona photo hung in his office for a long while after. Werk83’s model – made for the company by Ixo in Bangladesh – is in diecast metal, so it feels satisfyingly robust, although it has no opening panels: you can turn the front wheels and that’s it. Conveniently, the winning P4 was the spyder version – the secondplaced Scarfiotti/Parkes P4 was a berlinetta – so you’re allowed…

I CAN REMEMBER like it was yesterday. It was 1948, I was three years old, and we were having to move because they were about to extend the Philadelphia Airport runway right through our house. My father stopped for directions at one of these old-time American car dealerships, with a little wooden office, the strings of lights over the forecourt, and they had a black, a red and a green MG TC parked outside. I thought ‘Wow!’ I remember asking my father what those cars were, and he said they were MGs. Years and years later, he offered to buy me a new car for my 16th birthday. Then I found out it was going to be a Volkswagen Beetle… I wanted one of those old MGs! My father was…