Octane October 2025의 목차

Megaphonics 2025 3 August Over 5500 people flocked to Boxengasse – an events venue near Bicester set up by Frank Cassidy specifically with Porsche meets in mind – for this Stuttgart-focused gathering. The numbers made getting in challenging, but what treats awaited once the queuing was over. As well as 60-plus exhibitors, in Boxengasse’s two main ‘boxes’ and courtyard there was a stunning display of no fewer than nine Group C 956s and 962s, a host of other delectable sports-racers including 904, 906 and 908, a 1974 Porsche 911 Carrera RSR 2.1 turbo and, to top it off, the famous Gulf-liveried 917K that was used in the filming of Le Mans. Megaphonics is one of those events where the private cars are almost as good as the displays, with everything…

BUGATTI HAS BECOME the latest motor manufacturer to offer a ‘bespoke’ programme, allowing wealthy customers to order unique cars for the ultimate in exclusivity. The news came as the company revealed the first fruit of the personalisation programme, the Brouillard, named after Ettore’s horse. The company has called its new programme Solitaire and, in its marketing, trades heavily on the fact that vintage Bugattis were often bodied in-house instead of coachbuilt elsewhere, as was the more usual practice. Dubbing it a ‘celebration of grace and elegance, rooted in the unique artistry and heritage of the Bugatti story’, the company likens the new scheme to Jean Bugatti bringing coachbuilding in-house. That led to the Type 57 Atlantic and variants on the same platform, such as Galibier, Stelvio, Ventoux and Atalante, offering…

A STELLAR LINE-UP of judges is being assembled for the 2025 International Historic Motoring Awards, Presented by Lockton. Already signed up by chief judge David Lillywhite are the likes of Jay Leno, Sandra Button, Amanda Stretton, Wayne Carini, Bruce Meyer, Carol Spagg and Christian Philippsen, with more to be announced soon. The judges will have the task of picking a winner for each of 14 categories – covering everything from rising stars to personal achievement, museums to motorsport – from shortlists whittled down from all the nominations by a team of industry experts. Two more trophies, for Car of the Year and the Lifetime Achievement Award, are decided by public vote and an expert jury, respectively. Last year readers of Octane and Magneto magazines awarded Car of the Year to Fritz…

TWO LETTERS in Octane 267 have prompted me to write: the first from Rody O’Grady about his £2400 Renault Megane 225, which highlights the broad range of cars that you feature, and Gerard McCartney’s about witnessing the Mille Miglia. Like Gerard and his wife, my wife and I travelled to Italy (in our 26-year-old, 110,000-mile MGF, ‘George’) to see the Mille Miglia and we chose to spend a day watching the cars on the legendary Futa Pass, where we enjoyed a wonderful reception, morning coffee and lunch on the terrace at the restaurant. It has been owned and run by the same family since 1890 and is a magnet for car and motorcycle clubs alike; scarcely a week goes by without some sort of event being held there. ‘George’ didn’t miss…

THE WORLD WAS a very different place when the Veyron was launched back in 2005, and I’m not just referring to the fact that it was delivered with an accompanying HP Palm Pilot to access its digital features. In so many ways Bugatti was a gamechanger in the rarefied hypercar and luxury car waters in which it preyed, both in terms of the rapid evolution of the Veyron itself and also in how it took to a new level the bespoke customer experience that’s now commonplace but was then embryonic. Even though Bugatti would build a total of only 450 Veyrons, it soon became clear that there was a demand for unique versions tailored specifically for special VIP customers. Ultimately, this would lead to no fewer than 20 special editions…

The 1920s were not easy years in Germany. World War One had left the country impoverished and economic inflation was rife. It was a time of consolidation, as the nation’s industrialists analysed the situation and tried to work out solutions for a more stable future. And that included the formation of Mercedes-Benz in 1926. Carl Benz’s Benz & Companie Rheinische Gasmotoren-Fabrik patented what became recognised as the first commercially available motor car in 1886. Daimler-Motoren-Gesselschaft was founded in 1890 by Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach and began to produce cars under the Mercedes name in 1902. Both had become fierce competitors, but the market wasn’t big enough for each to prosper and so, with the support of Deutsche Banke, the two firms began to talk and in May 1924 signed…

EVERY ARTIST HAS a period. Picasso and van Gogh each had a blue one… so why shouldn’t classic cars have theirs? In spring 2025 the Delbò fleet had its tyre period, with two of the Mercedes both needing new shoes. It was hardly a surprise; in fact, taking advantage of a show discount at Bologna Auto Moto d’Epoca, I’d placed my order with Musso Gomme of Turin last October. If you need a non-racing classic car tyre in Italy, this is where you go, and it proved a wise decision because I not only got the discount but avoided a price increase in January 2025, too. The reason for the delay fitting the tyres was my fault: too busy before the winter, and salt on the roads during it. Which…

WHOEVER COINED the phrase ‘don’t mix business with pleasure’ certainly wasn’t offered the use of a VW California Ocean for the week. Handily, that’s not a mantra I live by, and I was quick to point out to the Octane chaps that my bucket-list plan to roam around Scotland – home of wild camping and stunning scenery – qualified me best, therefore I should take one for the team. And so, with family on board, our rough plan soon becomes reality. An early start and the long slog from Northamptonshire gives me time to familiarise myself with the camper. I’m eminently aware that Octane regulars are more used to reading about long drives in cars tuned for the hairpins, twists and turns, a bit of heel ’n’ toeing and getting…

YOU WOULD BE forgiven for thinking that this black and orange Veyron was one of the five World Record Edition Super Sports (see feature, page 66). At a glance that’s exactly what it looks like, but delve deeper and it stands apart. Bugatti actually calls this a ‘one-of-one’ special commission, which was specified for a prominent Middle Eastern customer. The most obvious difference between this and the WRE cars is the matt carbon finish to the body, unlike the gloss carbon of the record cars. It’s fitted with the correct optional WRE wheels, which along with the contrasting sections of the bodywork are finished in orange. It’s actually a unique shade, slightly lighter than the cars that inspired it. The interior is a mix of black leather and Alcantara, with…

27-31 August Salon Privé At Blenheim Palace, and for the first time featuring a ‘concours de vente’ (at which all the cars are available to buy) in addition to the main concours d’elegance and a display of some 1500 sports cars and supercars. salonpriveconcours.com 29 August – 1 September Lime Rock Historic Festival The racing at Lime Rock Park in Connecticut is complemented by a concours and a massive display of cars and motorcycles. limerock.com 30 August Zoute NextGen Rally Running through West Flanders in Belgium, and for crews featuring at least one member aged 18-50. zoutegrandprix.be 30 August Rustival Rustival returns to the British Motor Museum, the organisers again welcoming ‘all vehicles of all ages in all conditions – from clapped-out to concours!’ britishmotormuseum.co.uk 30 August VSCC Mallory Park…

The inexorable rise of ‘bespoke’ is not a new phenomenon, those that can afford it have been craving individuality since time immemorial. It is one of the reasons why coachbuilding was so popular with customers in the first place – they could tailor a car exactly to their needs rather than buying the production car that most closely fit them – and even when virtually all motoring became ‘off the peg’ special editions, trim specs and any other factor that separated a car from the herd commanded a premium. Doubly so when cars started to become collectable. But the truth is that bespoke never really went away. Long after the demise of all but the hardiest of coachbuilders, names such as Ghia still resounded and added kudos and prestige to…

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DAMON HILL NEVER wanted to be a racing driver. He became one only to try to fill the shoes of his father, Graham Hill, whose luminous life was cut short, leaving behind a young widow, two daughters and 15-year-old Damon. Getting behind the wheel of a Formula 1 car – the place his double World Champion dad had called the office – was, he says, an attempt to connect with the life he knew before it was sent into a spiral by a newsflash 50 years ago, on 29 November 1975. Damon and his elder sister Brigitte were in the sitting room watching Saturday night TV at the family’s Hertfordshire home. Bette, their mother, was in the kitchen cooking dinner for her husband, who would soon be returning hungry from…

We didn’t see the blue flashing lights at first, but when we heard the sirens, we knew we were in trouble. We stopped and two Police Nationale officers came over. One tapped the bumper where a numberplate should be. ‘Où est la plaque d’immatriculation?’ It had started three weeks before when my friend Tony Heyworth sent me a link to an ad for a 1988 Lancia Delta HF Turbo and asked for my thoughts. We often discuss fantasy cars for our dream garages, and a non-Integrale Delta was an interesting proposition. This rare survivor looked good – though it was in Italy! The logic of location seldom enters our theoretical purchase debates. Yet this was different. Tony was obviously smitten as he asked Daniele Cherubini at Royal Garage for details…

It’s the sound that gets you. The deep burble of serious cubic inches loafing contentedly through England’s capital turns heads, eager to see what’s rumbling through the quiet, early-morning streets. Most people have never seen a Gordon-Keeble GK1 and this 1964 example in Iris Blue is one of the first of only 99 made up to 1967. As for this 1963 Rouge Vaumol Facel Vega Facel II, it may be one of 180 built but it’s still as rare as an uneaten French snail. Clearly both are strikingly attractive, having been beautifully styled by leading designers of the day. A young Giorgetto Giugiaro penned the very British Gordon-Keeble, conceived in Slough and built in Southampton, while the Facel II’s design was the work of Jean Daninos, carried out in the…

IT WAS A case of right place, right time. I was driving back from London on the M40 when a friend called to say that what looked like a half-reasonable 1934 Sunbeam 25 Touring saloon had popped up for sale on a well-known website. I stopped at Oxford Services and called the number. Blow me down, the seller lived only four junctions further north. Even better, he was home, and yes, even though it was a Sunday, he was more than happy for me to view the car. It was love at first sight. I looked across a disused barn and immediately knew we would be spending the rest of our lives together: long bonnet, low-cut windscreen, a pair of front-wing-mounted spare wheels, and chromium-plated headlamps the size of dustbin…

IT’S FAIR TO say that we’ve all become a little desensitised to extraordinary auction results, but sometimes they still catch us off-guard. A weekend message from James Elliott, showing a picture of a relatively normal-looking Mk2 Ford Escort along with the caption ‘just sold for £242,000 on the hammer, £276,848 with fees’, did just that. After a quick double-take, and a grumble about ‘crazy Ford prices’, I tried to figure out what was going on. The Escort – sold by Historics Auctioneers during its £3.6million Summer Serenade auction – is a particularly rare RS1800 road car, with 25,000 miles and press fleet provenance. A very special car for the right buyer, clearly, but the final price was still over £100k more than top estimate – setting a new benchmark. With…

IN THE WORLD of regular Ferraris, there was a time that any classic model painted in Rosso Corsa was worth a marked premium over a similar model painted in any other shade. In recent years, the market has shifted to favour cars in ‘unusual’ factory colour schemes – which is why a ’70s model in Viola or Verde Germoglio will now cost you more than a red one. With only 36 factory GTOs, those in the market probably aren’t too fussy about colour – yet this car’s unique factory Bianco paint is an important part of its story. Mecum will be offering chassis 3729GT – the only 250 GTO painted white at the factory – at its Kissimmee sale next year. Delivered new in May 1962, it was ordered by British…

I WAS 11 WHEN I got into motorsport. Nobody in my family was really into it, but I started watching F1. My hero was Gilles Villeneuve. At that time you couldn’t race karts until you were around 12 or 13 – now you can start much earlier. I was 12 when my father got me my first one, and a year later I started competing, nationally then internationally. I did that for ten years, but it’s expensive, and one day my father told me I needed either to find a sponsor or stop racing. I didn’t find a sponsor but I still had this huge passion for motorsport, so I decided to study mechanical engineering. Before I finished my studies I went for an interview with Pirelli – they were looking…

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WHAT IS BEING billed as the most decadent motor car ever created is expected to be one of the star cars as Concours of Elegance returns to Hampton Court on 5-7 September. The one-off 1926 Rolls-Royce Phantom I, known as ‘The Phantom of Love’, was ordered new by Woolworths UK finance director Clarence Gasque as a gift to his wife, heiress to the Woolworths fortune, and is an extraordinary motoring love letter. Taking nine months to complete and costing a then-astronomical £6500 (at a time when the average UK house price was just £500), it is fabulously original and features a Marie Antoinette-inspired Rococo interior with Aubusson tapestries, gilt decoration and porcelain vases. The event, presented by A. Lange & Söhne, will also feature an off-the-radar private collection of legendary…

Fact 1: Lotus never made a works racer out of the Seven. Wrong. Although Team Lotus generally left Sevens to the clubmen, it did dabble in a few stealth ‘factory’ cars, namely the early ’60s car known as the 7½ and the late-1960s S4-based 7X, plus, pretty much halfway between them, one other. Fact 2: all Lotus models are known by their type numbers as they are written as well as their names, so Elan is Type 26, Europa is 47 etc. Wrong again. There is a single car that usurps both these commonly held beliefs and, though currently something of a footnote in Lotus history, in period it was considered significant enough to be assigned a type number all of its own, and it also dominated the Clubman’s championship.…

HENRY FORD IS supposed to have proclaimed more than a century ago that ‘history is bunk’. There’s some doubt as to whether he actually uttered this pithy remark, but what we do know is that, when it comes to old vehicles, many owners and collectors reckon you can never have too much history. Whether your old car is worth a few grand or a king’s ransom, why wouldn’t you want to know whether it is what it purports to be? Tracing the minutiae of a car’s past is something that Julian Radcliffe now specialises in. His own past is as a specialist in art fraud, and with the Classic Car Register he aims to piece together as much history on as many classic cars as possible, from across the globe.…

I HAVE DONE the Hope Classic Rally at least three times, but never previously in my own car. Embarrassed about the condition and lowly status of my classics, I once borrowed a lovely sidescreen TR from Hurst Park, while last year I leapt at the organisers’ kind offer to drive an Aston Martin DB6. Who wouldn’t? When the lovely Marina Hamilton asked this year if I wanted to tag along, I tentatively asked if my Triumph would be appropriate: partly because it is now so much nicer post-resto by JGD Classic Services and Peacock Prestige; partly because I can’t get enough of driving it and had a secondary mission later that day; and partly because I reasoned that taking my own car would leave one more car for the charity…

REGULAR READERS might remember that my Boxster’s electric hood became a bit erratic last summer. Happily, a replacement header-rail microswitch fixed it, plundered from a used latch module that had gleaned some central locking sensors for another lucky owner, all sorted by my mate Stuart Templeton (templetonsgarage.co.uk). All was well for months, then just a couple of times I had an issue with the windows, which would drop in preparation for the roof to be lowered without me even touching the hood latch. I also had a cracked windscreen and an impending MoT. No problem, insurance to the rescue. For an additional excess, my RH Specialist Insurance policy allows me to go via a local specialist – except that mine called back to say he was struggling to source the…

I TEND TO sort emails like someone ripping defective products off a conveyer belt at blur speed. If it’s selling, yelling or not compelling, it’s instantly deleted. ‘Subject line: Ferraris to Le Mans’ was cause for pause. I’d been to Le Mans ten years prior and had driven Ferraris before, the first being the ‘last of the manuals’ California, and most recently, six older wonders from the Classiche fleet. This, though, would be a first taste of Maranello’s current crop. Assembling at Ferrari UK’s office in Slough, we’re handed keys to a Roma Spider. Finished in Celeste Metallizzato over Cuoio Toscano leather, it’s a visual treat. Bar the crisp edges of the ‘power’ bonnet, the body’s comprised entirely of large-radius curves, with voluptuous rear haunches filling the mirrors. Planning some…

LEO THE LION, perhaps the most enduring Hollywood creation, announced his movie debut in 1917 not with a roar but a look of feline indifference. Samuel Goldfish was born Szmuel Gelbfisz in Poland in 1879. A glove-maker and salesman, in 1913 he formed a film production company with his brother-in-law Jesse Lasky, a vaudeville producer, and the aspiring director Cecil B DeMille. They started shooting the first full-length movie to be made in Hollywood, an obscure outlier district of Los Angeles. Goldfish left in November 1916 and hooked up with Broadway producer brothers Edgar and Archibald Selwyn in another production venture, which they named Goldwyn Pictures by amalgamating their surnames. Sam was so taken with the company name that soon after he legally changed his own name to Goldwyn. Howard…

Ferrari 275 P 0816: The Only Ferrari To Have Won Le Mans Twice Producing a large-format and premium-priced book about a single car is never an easy task, however meritorious the subject. Porter Press has plenty of experience with this genre, however, and the team of author Keith Bluemel, editor Lianna Bruhlman – who between them sourced all the images – plus, of course, designer Martin Port are to be congratulated on creating something that doesn’t feel the slightest bit stretched to fill its generously sized pages. It does help that Ferrari 275P, chassis 0816, has a unique claim to fame as being the only Ferrari to have won Le Mans twice, and in successive years. In fact, in its three outings as a works entry during 1963-64, it won all…

IF YOU’RE A regular at the major historic events, then you have likely seen ‘13 COB’ being driven in anger. A legend in the world of competition Cobras, it really made its mark during the 1970s and ’80s, when it was campaigned by Martin Colvill of sports car dealer Bell & Colvill. Competing in over 100 races, ‘13 COB’ took 12 outright wins and 44 class victories. Perhaps even more significant is the fact that the chassis that underpins this ’66 car – CS 2131 – was originally the one found under AC’s 1963 works Le Mans entry. It’s expected to fetch £1.5-2million at the Bonhams Revival sale. cars.bonhams.com Also Look Out For… After being included as a discretionary sport at the 2020 and 2024 Olympics, skateboarding will formally become…

THERE ARE FEW Porsches that go more unsung than the 968. As the final incarnation of the transaxle lineage, it’s an incredibly well-sorted drivers’ car that was known for out-handling the 911 when it was new. It didn’t sell in huge numbers, however, and although the lighter Club Sport made a fairly inexpensive track-day car for a while, nicer examples have now become seriously collectable. Tracing its roots all the way back the 924 of 1976, the 968 was the third and final incarnation of the four-cylinder transaxle model line – consisting of a front-mounted, water-cooled engine and rear-mounted gearbox for almost 50:50 weight distribution. As the 924 evolved into the 944, and the car became more powerful and better developed, it soon gained a reputation as one of the…