Tabla de contenidos para April 2024 en Octane

WELCOME TO THIS special 250th issue of Octane. To mark such an auspicious occasion we have a superb selection of 250-themed articles, ranging from a unicorn Ferrari to a brace of more recent, more affordable powerbrokers, via what is to my mind the greatest and most beautiful front-engined F1 car of all. Sandwiched between them are articles on the race to build the first 250mph road car, the first people and craft to hit the magic number on land, sea and air (and two wheels – above), plus a 250cc hero and a host of other achingly desirable 250-related icons. We hope it is as much fun to read as it was to put together. Rest assured that there is also all the usual great Octane content, including a spectacular revisiting…

Rétromobile, 31 January – 4 February UK visitors returning from Paris were heralding this year’s outing for the French event as the best for years, possibly decades. The numbers for the 48th Rétromobile certainly back up that claim, 130,000 visitors dropping in on the 75,000m2 show during its extended run at Porte de Versailles. Special displays included celebrations of the centenaries of both the Montlhéry speedbowl in the Paris suburbs and British marque MG, with the famous EX181 record-breaker at its heart. As always, the range of priceless stock on dealer stands from Fiskens, Kidston, Girardo & Co, Joe Macari, Lukas Hüni, Gallery Aaldering et al was worth the entry on its own. CAVALLINO CLASSIC, 26-28 JANUARY For its 33rd year, the Ferrari-plus spectacular returned to Florida’s Palm Beach and…

THE LONG-PLANNED Mullin museum in the UK’s Cotswolds is still likely to go ahead despite the closure of the Mullin Automotive Museum in California and the imminent dispersal of 20 cars from it, key players close to the project have insisted. The £150m plans for a 160-acre automotive park near Chipping Norton have already had a rocky ride and, five years on from its announcement, building work is yet to begin at the old Enstone airfield. After initial plans were thrown out, Sir Norman Foster revised the proposal and it was eventually given the green light in March last year. At its heart would be a 60,000sq ft museum housing 70 cars, plus a speed-limited test track, while 56 homes targeted at wealthy enthusiasts would be built adjacent. Around 30 cars…

SALON PRIVÉ LONDON returns to the spectacular setting of the Royal Hospital Chelsea on 18-20 April. As with the first two outings for this innovative London event, the centrepiece will be the Concours de Vente, which showcases 75 of the rarest classic and performance cars for sale. Visitors can expect to see exceptional cars on offer from the likes of specialists Furlonger, Aston Workshop, Car Iconics, Hilton & Moss, RS Williams, Fiskens and P&A Wood. These beautiful cars always look right at home in the historical gardens on the banks of the Thames. The famous South Lawn is rarely permitted to be used for public events yet some 20,000 people, including Jenson Button and Richard Hammond, took advantage of the opportunity for Salon Privé London last year. And although the…

The trail of brake lights through Ramsbottom confirmed that ‘access only’ would have to be stretched to its fullest as I turned off and headed via Holcombe Hill in fresh, deep snow. It’d be a brass-monkeys five-mile plod in my wellies if the gamble failed, but such was winter life in the West Pennine Moors, where I grew up. Trusting in the grumbly torque of my dad’s Granada Scorpio, I left the selector in D and crawled up and over. Slowly. But surely. Though nobody followed in my tracks. Next day, after another dumping of the white stuff, I headed out in mum’s Austin Maestro to practise handbrake turns and low-speed drifting on the nearby industrial estate (don’t tell her). The folly of youth. Nowadays, snowy days where I live…

‘IT’S AS CLOSE TO ARTWORK AS YOU CAN IMAGINE – IT’S A CONNOISSEUR’S CAR.’ That’s the claim made by owner David Sydorick, and it’s a bold one. But who would dispute it? This Zagato-bodied Ferrari is one of the most gorgeous coupés to emerge from the 1950s, a fact that’s borne out by the steady string of concours awards it’s accumulated over the last 30 years. Fortunately, that doesn’t mean it never gets driven. On the contrary, Sydorick reckons that regular use has allowed him to evolve and improve the car to the point that it’s literally in as-new condition. ‘The guy who services it for me says that, of all the cars that come into his workshop, it’s the only one that doesn’t drip oil or water!’ he laughs.…

‘The 250F was without a doubt the finest-handling front-engine F1 car I think built by anybody. My best race, I suppose, was probably winning Monaco in 1956. The reason was, the car handled so well. It was not as fast as the Ferraris but the balance of the machine was very, very important and they got it pretty right.’ These are the words of Stirling Moss, about a very special Maserati. As the world emerged from war in the late 1940s, attention in Europe returned to motor racing. In 1950, the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA) introduced the Formula 1 World Championship and, while entries came from several European countries, the fields were dominated initially by entries from three teams of Northern Italy: Maserati (Modena), Ferrari (Maranello), and Alfa Romeo…

If you, like me, watched the World Rally Championship during the 1990s, there are few sights more rousing in your rear-view mirror than a stickered-up Mitsubishi Evo Tommi Mäkinen Edition at maximum attack. Especially when it’s framed by the blue wing (and underpinned by the flat-four thrum) of a Subaru Impreza. They’re both undisputable legends, and experiencing either would be enough of an event today. Getting both together on the same stretch – with the hungry soundtrack of turbos spooling – feels like a jump back in time to a generation-defining moment in automotive history. Throughout the late 1980s, 200bhp was the sign of a serious highperformance car. The final roadgoing evolutions of Group A motorsportderived legends such as the Lancia Delta HF Integrale, Ford Sierra RS Cosworth and BMW’s…

THE FILES, NOW EMPTY, have covered the table. Precious correspondence, photographs, books, trophies and medals from Micky Pople’s racing years now form a large moving collage. ‘So much rubbish,’ chuckles Micky as he sifts through everything. Every now and then, he singles out a photo or a document to recount a tale. Names and anecdotes tumble from his lips. Dinner with Jochen Rindt. Golf with Douglas Bader. Chatting with Archie Scott Brown. Racing around Hyde Park with Jean Simmons and Stewart Granger in their Bristol 402s. Les Leston, Donald Healey, Stirling Moss, Reg Parnell and Fangio. The perils of drifting a Comet tank on cobbles… Born in Burnham-on-Sea, Somerset, Micky began his competition career in December 1949 at the Mendip Vale Hillclimb. He was 21 and driving his birthday present,…

OCTANE READERS are likely to be aware of Harry Schell, the first American to participate in the modern Grand Prix era (although he was born in France and lived most of his life there – see Octane 62) but few will know much, if anything, of his spirited mother, herself a Grand Prix driver, rally driver and race team owner in the 1930s. Lucy O’Reilly was born in Brunoy, south of Paris, in 1896. Her father Francis Patrick O’Reilly was the son of Irish immigrants and made a fortune in construction and investing in factories in his hometown of Reading, Pennsylvania. At the age of 46 he decided to devote the rest of his life to enjoying his money and travelling the world and, in 1896, while in Paris, he married…

ONE TO WATCH WHEN I STARTED work in an ad agency, we still marked up colour press ads on large boards rather than a screen and faxed the proofs to clients. If they wanted changes (and they always did), you had to literally cut and paste strips of new copy onto the boards and wrestle them through the fax again. No ⌘C and ⌘V for us. When was the last time you even saw a fax, let alone used one? The DBC-62 databank calculator watch comes from the same period and is just about as redundant, but a lot more interesting. If you were at school in the early 1990s you might have had one. If you were lucky and your teachers were more concerned about a coffee and a breaktime…

By KK Scale Price £87.25 Material Diecast Jaguar’s late-1950s super-saloon – and it was pretty ‘super’ by the standards of 1959 – has always been a popular classic and it’s sobering to remember that specialists such as Vicarage were offering upgraded versions an amazing 40 years ago. This handsome diecast model should therefore have plenty of appeal: less expensive than a resincast, more refined than an old-fashioned Bburago diecast, it’s very well-finished. This Mk2 is very much a display piece, with poseable front wheels and a limited amount of suspension travel its only working features. Besides the rather unsubtle green of our review model, it’s also available in the arguably more interesting colours of metallic grey or silver sand, but all three versions feature a superbly detailed interior and finely…

THE SEASON-OPENING auctions in Scottsdale and Paris act as a barometer for the general mood of the market on both sides of the Atlantic. The somewhat subdued Rétromobile-week bidding peaked with the 1960 Ferrari 250GT SWB Berlinetta Competizione sold by RM Sotheby’s (pictured above). At €10,158,125, it was the top seller of all three major auctions. The RM sale raised €36,893,900 in total, with 84% of lots sold. Aside from the top-selling Ferrari, other highlights included a 2007 Maserati MC12 Versione Corsa at €3,042,500, and a 1919 Hispano-Suiza H6 Torpédo by Duvivier, which sold for €522,500. Artcurial brought in €17,792,329 after its headline lot – a Ferrari 250 California Spyder – failed to sell. Instead, the sale was spearheaded by a 1955 Mercedes 300SL Gullwing at €1,427,440, which was closely…

Starting life as a concept car designed by Bertone’s Marcello Gandini for Expo 67 in Montreal, the production version gained a dry-sump 2.6-litre V8 engine developed from Alfa Romeo’s Tipo 33 sports racing prototype. Values began picking up in 2013, when Artcurial’s Monaco sale brought €72,199 (£62,000) for a restored example in Arancio Pastello (orange), followed by Gooding & Company a month later raising the benchmark to $99,000 (£78,000) with a car that had been expected to fetch $55,000-75,000. Gooding’s Montreal returned to the auction block in 2015 when RM Sotheby’s sold it for $110,000 (£86,500), and again in 2017 at €78,400 (£67,000). Gooding’s 2014 season-opening sale in Scottsdale set a new auction record (pictured) at $176,000 (£138,500), something of an outlier at the time, and the car was resold…

1984 Ford Capri Tickford Turbo Classic Car Auctions, NEC, Birmingham, UK 23-24 March, classiccarauctions.co.uk This glorious slice of the 1980s Ford scene sadly suffered an engine fire in 2019, but has since been treated to a bare-metal restoration, with bills said to total more than £50,000. The Tickford Turbo was based on a 2.8 Injection, gaining an IHI turbocharger and Garrett intercooler to generate 205bhp. The glassfibre bodykit apparently helped to reduce high-speed lift, too. It’s expected to sell for £45,000-50,000. 1976 GAZ-24 Volga Gooding & Company, Amelia Island, Florida, USA 29 February – 1 March, goodingco.com Very different in appeal from the beautiful and significant cars offered from the Mullin collection (see News), Gooding & Company is also offering this fascinating piece of Soviet automotive history at Amelia Island.…

HARRY HURST ‘Perhaps no other Formula 1 car better epitomises that era than the Maserati 250F, and it was driven by all the greats. More than anything, I think the shape – especially of the 1957 cars – is absolutely perfect and the definition of “form follows function”.’ Harry is Director of Programs for the Simeone Museum. Read his 250F story on pages 74-82. CHRIS MANN ‘The SS100 Jaguar looked like it was doing 100mph standing still and was the first high-performance sports car accessible to a wider demographic than the super-rich. Taking the wheel of two remarkable SS100s owned for decades by Michael Turner and John Guyatt was an honour.’ Find out more on pages 122-128. GERARD BROWN ‘I’d never heard of a Matra-Bonnet Djet but this bright yellow slice of…

29 February – 3 March The Amelia This year’s concours on Amelia Island will boast 35 classes featuring everything from vintage Bugatti GP racers to Japanese performance cars of the 1990s. ameliaconcours.com 29 February – 3 March ModaMiami Hosted by the Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables, Florida, this new event promises a concours field of over 150 cars, plus a separate display of rare supercars and an RM Sotheby’s auction. modamiami.com 1-3 March Sydney Harbour Concours d’Elegance Australia’s finest classics and supercars gather at Cockatoo Island, a UNESCO World Heritage Site close to the Sydney Harbour Bridge. sydneyharbourconcours.com.au 3 March Coffee & Classics Cars and motorcycles head to Bibury for the Classic Motor Hub’s season-opener. classicmotorhub.com 7-9 March WinteRace A field of 70 pre-2000 cars; an expertly plotted, 420km route…

UK enthusiasts have been left reeling after a series of high-profile events announced their cancellation for 2024. The reasons vary but legislation and insurance woes loom large, presenting an ominous outlook for other diary dates. Among the biggest to bite the dust is MG Live! at Silverstone, all the more shocking as it comes only a year after the record-breaking and award-winning MG (and Triumph) centenary gathering in 2023. A statement from its organiser said: ‘The MG Car Club Council reluctantly took the decision to cease arranging race meetings because of the increasingly serious financial risks involved.’ The annual festival was not deemed viable without the track action. Of other casualities, the enormous Dorset Steam Fair squarely blamed the inability to get suitable insurance for the event, while the Bromley…

THE FIRST 250MPH production car was the Bugatti Veyron EB 16.4, right? You might even have seen it on an episode of Top Gear, when James May clocked an officially verified 253.2mph. Check Wikipedia, though, and you’ll see that the Dauer 962 Le Mans got there first, recording 251.4mph way back in 1993. Really? Welcome to the contentious and occasionally contradictory world of production car speed records. In truth, it has ever been thus. Back in the 1980s, Ferrari stole Porsche’s thunder by claiming that its F40 was capable of 201mph, just pipping the 198mph 959, but no independent test verified Ferrari’s claim. Jaguar made a bid for the record with the XJ220 but had turned up the wick another 50bhp, so that didn’t count. RUF’s CTR held the record instead,…

Jaguar built its legend through competition success and the production of elegant highperformance cars that also offered incredible value for money. The business was established as the Swallow Sidecar Company in Blackpool, 1922, by William (later Sir William) Lyons and William Walmsley. Gradually it branched out into the production of stylish bodywork for massproduced chassis such as the Austin Seven, aimed at buyers on a budget who wanted something a little more exotic. Lyons was ambitious, though, keen to become a car manufacturer in his own right. In 1934, and without Walmsley, he launched a new range of cars with the style and performance of contemporary Bentleys but much more affordable. They were marketed as SS Jaguars – the first use of the Jaguar name. After World War Two, Lyons…

KINETIC SERIES 2 PRINTS BY GUY ALLEN Collectors of Guy Allen’s work will soon need to find a load more room on their walls, because the British artist has just completed a second set of drawings for his ongoing Kinetic project. Featured this time are the Alfa Romeo Alfetta, the Lotus 25, the Ferrari 312T and the McLaren MP4/4, the cars together representing the first four decades of the F1World Championship. £75 each, or £265 for the set of four. guyallen.co.uk NAIM NAIT 50 AMPLIFIER Outwardly at least, this limited-edition bit of hi-fi kit is straight out of the ’80s. It looks almost identical to the famous NAIT of 1983 – a product that gave rise to a series of modest but musical integrated amps described by one reviewer as…

RECORD-BREAKING cars are always something to be celebrated, but the story of this 1904 Napier Samson L48 is particularly special. The L48 was the first car to break the 100mph barrier on US soil, achieving a speed of 104.651mph on 25 January 1905 at the Ormond and Daytona Beach races. Although the original car was dismantled a few years later, this incredible recreation makes use of the actual record-setting 15-litre straight-six Napier engine that powered the original car to its record. The immense power unit eventually made its way to Australia, where it was installed into Nautilus 2, a record-breaking speedboat. It was owned by a pair of industrialist brothers, the Cornwells, who won many races throughout 1914 and 1915. After the boat was broken up, the engine sat in…

AS WAS OFTEN the case during the late 1950s, the Gordon-Keeble story began with an idea sparked by a private individual’s desire to shoehorn a large American engine into a British car. In this case Rick Nielsen, a US fighter pilot based at RAF Bentwaters, enlisted automotive engineer Jim Keeble to fit a small-block Chevy V8 under the bonnet of a Peerless GT. With the work taking place at the Peerless factory in Slough during 1959, company MD John Gordon quickly took a liking to the project, and commissioned Keeble to design an all-new car to make better use of the Chevrolet power unit. Giorgetto Giugiaro, at the time working at Bertone, styled the bodywork, with a completed prototype shown to the public at the Geneva show in March 1960.…

YOU MIGHT THINK we’ve chosen the 250SL simply because it fits with our Issue 250 theme, but it’s a car we’ve been pondering for quite some time. The W113 ‘Pagoda’ is an undisputed all-time great, of course, and there’s a disparity in price between the early 230 and the final 280. The market favours the 280, which leaves the 230 as the best-value offering. The 250 is a third, often overlooked option – and might just be the pick of the bunch. Designed by Paul Bracq (see Octane 248), who was part of the Mercedes-Benz design team directed by Friedrich Geiger, the Pagoda helped to evolve the company’s design from the swoopy cars of the 1950s into a new, much sharper style for the ’60s and beyond. The 230SL was…

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 DFEB24 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 Travel. You can order the latest magazine or a back issue, delivered direct to your door, by visiting magsdirect.co.uk and searching for ‘Octane’. 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 (order…

21-25 April California Mille Just as the original Mille Miglia inspired today’s regularity race, the regularity race inspired this US event. The route for 2024 runs from La Jolla to Westlake Village. californiamille.com 21-27 April Tour Auto One of the great driving events, starting in Paris and finishing this time in Biarritz, and featuring four track races in-between, at venues including the Bugatti Circuit. peterauto.fr 25-27 April Manx Classic On the Isle of Man, roads are closed to allow competition on three hillclimb courses, each of them over a mile long. manxmotorracing.com 28 April Audrain Veteran CarTour Pre-1908 cars from across the USA meet at the Audrain Automobile Museum for a 50-mile drive around Rhode Island. audrainmotorsport.com 28 April – 26 May Trans-Africa Rally Following a horseshoe-shaped, 4750-mile route through…

Bluebird K7 finally goes ‘home’ The long-running legal wrangle over the future of Bluebird K7 has been resolved, with Donald Campbell’s record-breaking jet hydroplane set to return to the Ruskin Museum, Coniston. There it will go back on display alongside its original engine in the museum’s dedicated Bluebird wing. Bluebird K7 – in which Campbell died in January 1967 – was recovered from Coniston Water in March 2001 and the Campbell Family Heritage Trust donated it to the Ruskin Museum in 2006, so it could be returned to its former glory and put on permanent display. Gina Campbell, daughter of Donald Campbell CBE, said: ‘We are delighted Bluebird K7 is coming home. It has taken many years of hard work by The Ruskin Museum to achieve our original gift of…

OH MY WORD! Central accelerator pedal, crash gearbox – learning to drive a vintage Bentley, my first ‘proper’ old car, was certainly a challenge. I’d had a lesson with an expert after buying the Bentley but it and its two sister cars were due to be shipped out to Mongolia quite soon, so we probably put in only about 100km practising on local roads in the UK. The reason for the trip was that my father, Jim Ratcliffe [founder and CEO of the INEOS Group, which makes the Grenadier 4x4], was coming up to his 70th birthday and we wanted to celebrate it in style. We’d already done a couple of marathon motorbike journeys: for his 60th, about 15 friends and family rode across Africa, doing as much off-road as possible…

IT WAS A PLEASANT surprise to find the story of Aston Martin DB2 ‘VMF 65’ in Octane 245. It took me back more than 20 years to when my friend Jerry [above, on right], who lives in Los Angeles, phoned me in New Zealand and asked if I was interested in doing the 2001 Mille Miglia as his navigator in two weeks’ time. His entered companion had pulled out. I told him that I would love to but I find it difficult reading in cars as it gives me motion sickness. He told me not to worry about that because ‘We don’t have to win the thing – oh, and by the way, I’ve entered an Aston Martin DB2 Le Mans car.’ Now, while I knew Jerry owned an Aston Martin…

THEY SAY THAT records are meant to be broken, and few knew that better than Harold J Brow. On 2 November 1923 the naval aviator set a new airspeed record of 259.16mph at Mitchel Field on Long Island, New York – only for Alford J Williams to set a new mark of 266.59mph two days later. Still, Brow’s record is in the history books as the first officially to surpass 250mph. The previous benchmark of 236.587mph had been set earlier that year by Russell Maughan in a Curtiss R-6. During the early ’20s, the New York-based company enjoyed a great deal of success in events such as the Schneider Trophy, which it won in 1923 and 1925, and the Pulitzer Trophy, a time trial over four laps of a 32-mile…

TAKING OFF Concorde A Cessna can take-off at a speed that a Morris Eight can reach, a 747 lifts at 184mph, but Concorde, history’s most insanely brilliant piece of Anglo-French engineering, needed to do 250mph to get airborne. Never mind the fact that only 100 people at a time could experience the 38,000lb of thrust from the four Rolls-Royce/SNECMA Olympus 593s, or that they could bring only 2.5 tonnes of luggage between them: this was the greatest passenger aircraft of all. ON TWO WHEELS Royal Enfield Continental GT Born into a tumultuous time for the British motorcycle industry, this sprightly 250cc motorbike was a victim of factors beyond its control. The single-cylinder 135kg flyer had barely been in production a year when Royal Enfield ditched all single-cylinder models and its…

YOU PROBABLY WOULDN’T be surprised to learn that Yuri Gagarin, Russian cosmonaut and the first human to journey into outer space, was gifted a car in return for his extraterrestrial endeavours. A shiny black Volga was quite a commodity in the Soviet Union. Yet it wasn’t Gagarin’s only car. Perhaps rather more surprisingly, his adventurous spirit and courageous acts earned him a sporting little French number. One at the cutting edge of technology, being the first mid-engined production road car – an innovation of this world, rather than out of it, but a remarkable machine nonetheless, and presented to a remarkable man. Yet the reason goes beyond a hero’s reward, and beyond the fact that the René Bonnet Djet was such a forward-thinking piece of engineering. You see, although the…

Suddenly it doesn’t feel like tourist Japan anymore. We are far from the dominant shadow of Mount Fuji, well away from the constraints of Tokyo and its head-rule-heart Expressways, and chasing car designer Ken Okuyama’s pokey little hardtop racing Frogeye through a network of deserted private toll roads. At every tollbooth we are told that the car in front has already paid for us. Classy. Especially as Okuyama had a traumatic start to this event, his Corvette C2 failing on the Expressway out of Tokyo and causing a big tailback. He dashed home, picked up his Frogeye to rejoin the rally, then that Frogeye ran out of fuel in a long mountain tunnel and had to pull over into an emergency layby to await a top-up. And all this while…

IT ALL STARTED when I went to do the Gearbox piece on John Simister for Octane 246. Actually, it all started when I collected my car in November 2022, when booting it at speed revealed a hesitancy that I presumed to be fuel-supply related. I ignored it, of course (for good reason, as will become clear), but it gradually worsened over the months until the point where, unless I was pottering around at 30mph locally (which I largely was, to be fair), I needed to do something about it. Cue Simister announcing as I was photographing his favourite things that he still had an alloy tank from when he had been an Elan owner; apparently inspired by one of my earlier examples, a yellow S2 that I ran for a decade…

AS THE PYTHONS once said: ‘And now for something completely different…’ If you’re bored of Porsche 911 restomods, this radically transformed 914/Cayman 987 mash-up from Fifteen Eleven is the antidote. Fifteen Eleven is an offshoot of Peak District-based Mellors Elliot Motorsport, a stalwart of the British/International rallying scene. Specialising in restoration work, recent projects include recommissioning Alan Jones’ 1979 Championship-winning Williams FW07 and restoring the Salon Privé runner-up Maserati 3500GT Inezione. Ben Mellors decided on a more leftfield entry into the Porsche restomod scene. The result owes a lot to both Ben and father Chris’s rallying background. The headline is 914/Cayman 987, the reality goes way beyond. Indeed, the only tangible 914 elements are the doors and windscreen. Think GpB tarmac rally car and you’re not far off, because what…

UNLESS YOU’RE FORTUNATE enough to have a watch with a manufacture movement (one made in-house), yours will be an ébauche; an engine made by a specialist maker and bought-in by a watch firm. If it’s a chronograph, chances are there’ll be a Valjoux 7750 behind the caseback – hence the old Swiss saying: ‘Vous n’êtes jamais à plus de 1.83m d’un Valjoux 7750.’ It’s probably the single most common mechanical chronograph movement. It very nearly wasn’t like this. When the 7750 started life as a young movement back in 1973, the watch industry had hit a peak of craftsmanship, tech and materials quality. It meant Seiko, Zenith and an alliance of Breitling, Buren and Heuer were all able to claim the release of the first automatic chronograph movement within a…

Book of the month The Last Eye Witness DOUG NYE, Porter Press International, £195, ISBN 978 1 913089 91 7 ‘John Moore-Brabazon… became the first resident Englishman to make an officially observed flight, at Shellbeach, Isle of Sheppey, in May 1909. That November saw him take livestock aloft, contained in a waste-paper basket, just to prove that “pigs can fly”.’ Besides being the world’s pre-eminent motorsport historian, Doug Nye also has a knack for writing informative and frequently witty captions. The John Moore-Brabazon mentioned here – after whom the ill-fated Bristol Brabazon airliner would be named – is pictured in this book, sliding a Minerva around the 1907 Circuit des Ardennes. Elsewhere, Nye describes a riding mechanic in the 1904 Gordon Bennett Cup, swaddled in a voluminous smock and bonnet,…

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Giovanni Moretti primarily made motorcycles, starting in the 1920s, but cars and small vans became part of the mix: Fabbrica Automobili Moretti SpA was established in Turin in 1945, and built cars until December 1989. Almost all of those made after the late 1950s were based on Fiat platforms and were often sporty coupés, such as the 1969 500 Coupé you see here. They cost double the price of their Fiat donor, and were largely handbuilt and quite distinctive. The market for such cars was small, and Moretti remained a specialist manufacturer until the end. This example is believed to be one of fewer than 50 produced, and is an exceedingly rare survivor. It was finished in teal with a red vinyl interior, and its motor has been upgraded to…

ALTHOUGH NOT KNOWN for keeping his cars very long, Peter Sellers apparently rather enjoyed having this 1960 Bentley S2 Continental around. He owned it from November 1961 until July 1966, during which it was used regularly for commutes to the film set of The Wrong Arm of the Law. You might notice the unique front end – with an extra pair of headlights and reprofiled front wings – which was something that Sellers commissioned Bentley specialist Jack Barclay to undertake. It’s one of a few unique features that makes this an interesting piece of history. Coming to market from a large Bentley collection, it’s offered in largely unrestored condition. While in need of some work, it currently retains much of the character and patina gained during Sellers’ time with it There’s…

TITLES DON’T EXCITE me, the things that make me feel amazing are what drive me, and racing makes me feel invincible. I suppose it’s cool that I’m the world’s first female tetraplegic racing driver, and it was nice to get a Guinness World Record for it in 2023, but I didn’t do it to be the first: I just followed something I was passionate about. When I think about growing up, I see it as before and after I broke my neck in a car crash on 16 September 1999. I was 16 and a passenger in my friend’s car. No-one did anything wrong, it was just wrong place, wrong time. Before the accident, I’d been a bit of a tearaway. I’m from Bridlington, in East Yorkshire, and used to…