Inhoudsopgave van April 2025 - Octane

HOT HATCHES, RATHER like raves, 140bpm, glow-sticks and everything else that went with them, rather passed me by in period, even though, having been born in 1968, I should have been a prime target. No regrets. I realised this after much fevered debate with colleagues trying to draw the line in the sand from when hot hatch culture morphed into twocking and generally unpleasant larrikinism. We reckoned that as a cultural phenomenon the hot hatch probably peaked in the late 1980s and suffered its first death (of many) when big beasts Peugeot and VW failed to replace either 205 GTI or Golf GTI Mk2 to the satisfaction of their salivating audiences. Even so, by then the hot hatch genre had become part of the establishment, which is why manufacturers are…

27 February– 2 March Retro Classics Stuttgart Some 90,000 petrolheads descend on Stuttgart each year for this show, which welcomes everything from iconic racing cars to classic scooters. retro-classics.de 28 February– 2 March Sydney Harbour Concours d’Elegance Australia’s finest classics gather at Cockatoo Island, a UNESCO World Heritage Site close to the Sydney Harbour Bridge and accessible by ferry. sydneyharbourconcours.com.au 1 March VSCC John Harris Trial On the edge of the Peak District, members of the VSCC compete for the Dick Batho and Patrick Marsh trophies. vscc.co.uk 1-2 March ModaMiami Hosted by the Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables, Florida, and with a display of 100 rare supercars in addition to the concours field. modamiami.com 6-9 March The Amelia Visitors to the concours on Amelia Island will find 275 cars divided…

2025 highlights 24-26 April Manx Classic On the Isle of Man, roads are closed to allow competition on three hill-climb courses, each of them over a mile long. manxmotorracing.com 1-4 May Simola Hillclimb Furious hill-climbing fun in Knysna in South Africa. Classic cars take centre stage on 2 May. speedfestival.co.za 2-4 May Donington Historic Festival Expanding to become a threeday event this year, and with new grids including one for GT3 racers from the period 2006-2012. doningtonhistoric.com 2-17 May Best of Peru An unforgettable drive through southern and central Peru that includes stops at Lake Titicaca, Colca Canyon, the Rainbow Mountain and Machu Picchu. sceniccartours.com 3-4 May Audrain Veteran Car Tour Pre-1908 cars meet at the Audrain Automobile Museum for a 50-mile drive around Rhode Island. audrainmotorsport.com 17 May– 22…

SALON PRIVÉ London returns to the Royal Hospital Chelsea on 10-12 April for the fourth running of the event, with the popular Concours de Vente still at its core. The concours, in which all the 75 cars on display are for sale, has already attracted top-end dealers and specialists including Joe Macari, Fiskens, Simon Furlonger and Hilton & Moss, while the SL Shop is set to make its debut on the lawn. While all the cars will be for sale, they will still be judged by a panel that will include Amanda Stretton and Richard Hammond. As well as battling for the Prix d’Honneur, last year scooped by Vintage Bentley’s spectacular 1930 Speed Six, there will be the coveted Pensioners’ Choice prize, chosen by the famous Chelsea Pensioners, as well…

By the 1990s, the hot hatch had arguably become a victim of its own success, with many finding that punitive insurance premiums were punishing performance. Makers responded by turning out less overtly sporting products, cars that alluded to performance rather than properly possessing it, in a move typified by Volkswagen. Having done much to kick-start the craze in the first place, Wolfsburg’s 1990s GTIs were far less worthy of the badge. Improvements in refinement, passive safety and usability all added weight, initially without significantly increased horsepower. Sure, there were some fine offerings from the French– namely the Clio Williams and the excellent Peugeot 306 GTI-6– but to find this era’s true game-changing hot hatch, we have to look further afield. The first Honda Civic Type R (EK9 in Honda code)…

Hard as it might be to swallow, 2008 was 17 years ago. Since the Megane R26.R was launched, the sector has continued to evolve, although fewer and fewer ‘traditional’ hot hatches have been released during that time. Four-wheel drive, greater complexity and seemingly silly horsepower figures have almost entirely replaced the simple and engaging delights of lightweight, front-wheel-drive hot hatches. It’s not so long ago that 200bhp seemed like a serious figure, yet one of the most potent of the current crop– the Mercedes-Benz AMG A45 S– easily doubles that with 421bhp. Mind you, at 1680kg it weighs nearly twice as much as a 205 GTI. Past masters such as RenaultSport are no more, having been closed and folded into Alpine. Ford has canned its Fiesta ST, and it looks…

Some years ago, on my annual visit to the sorely missed Geneva motor show, the Gumpert Apollo really caught my eye. Supercars rarely do that. Here was a no-nonsense instrument so focused on efficiency that it appeared almost austere, and made most of its rivals seem dainty and effete. It looked like a bulldog among Afghan hounds. I spoke with one of the Gumpert representatives on the stand, a bright young Czech racer called Gabriela Jílková. She seemed deeply impressed, rather than merely pushing a product. That piqued my interest even more. And then, in August 2009, the Apollo set a new Nürburgring Nordchsleife lap record, beating all comers at 7min 11.57sec. But how did Gumpert Sportwagenmanufaktur GmbH come to be? Roland Gumpert’s creation has an unusual back-story, as befits…

WELL, THAT TOOK a while. I spent an age trying to find a Moretti, bought this one in December 2018, but only in 2024 was it finally released from captivity. I had fly-tipped it with my mate Paul de Turris at DTR European Sports Cars, promising that I would pick it up in a few months. The better part of six years then passed, during which loved ones have been ill (and worse), not to mention the small matter of three house rebuilds. There was a time when there was more furniture in my garage than in my house. The Moretti is tiny, but nevertheless I was worried that it would be crushed by a tallboy. Then, finally, the furniture was gone. My garage still looked like landfill, but there…

‘HAPPY TO REPORT no holes,’ texted mechanic Pete Taylor after he’d finished undersealing my Mazda. Welcome news: Mazda RX-8s typically don’t fare well through British winters and a quick Google reveals all manner of complaints about poor factory underseal leading to crumbly under-bodies. My RX-8 certainly needed some significant treatment after more than 50,000 miles and my own three years of using it on the UK’s salted roads, even if it’d covered fewer than 2000 miles during that time. I already knew it was in a bit of a state underneath; then last summer RX-8 specialist Pete warned me ‘It’s getting crusty’ when he handed back the keys after a service. When the MoT tester gave me the exact same warning word-for-word a few months later, I knew I had…

I’VE LONG BEEN a bit of a Forester fan, ever since the compact Impreza-based original was launched in the late 1990s as more of an estate-car-on-stilts than the third-generation SUV we came to know a decade or so later. Now the sixth generation has arrived, not quite 100% new but significantly altered over the outgoing 2018 version, rather as the MkV Golf gently morphed into the MkVI. Frameless doors are long-gone, but the Forester is still exclusively four-wheel-drive and the flat-four remains, although these days it’s known as the e-Boxer. Yup, it’s a mild hybrid, not a plug-in, so we’re not going to bang on about range and so on since this is more the old re-gen and bit-of-a-boost; you only really notice it during low-speed manoeuvres, as the 2.0-litre…

NOTHING ON DISPLAY inside the 1910 Salon de l’Automobile in Paris would fundamentally alter either the look or technology of the automobile. Outside the Grand Palais, however, inventor and entrepreneur Georges Claude was showing off his latest gizmo. Stretching for 35 metres across the façade of the Palaisour were ‘fiery red’ glass tubes that he hoped might revolutionise the world of lighting. Although his invention didn’t replace the incandescent lightbulb, it did spawn its own industry, becoming a promotional tool that spread across the world’s urban landscapes from Times Square to Tokyo and arguably became the foremost vernacular art of the 20th Century. Neon, an inert gas, along with Krypton and Xenon, was first isolated from the air that we breathe by the eminent Victorian chemists Sir William Ramsey and…

‘If Heaven will afford me five more years,’ muttered Hokusai on his deathbed, ‘then I’ll manage to become a true artist.’ The Japanese painter and printmaker had in his own estimation created nothing of note until late in his career, and it was in 1831 at the age of 71 that he produced an artwork that would become one of the world’s most famous: The Great Wave. The piece was warmly received by the Japanese public, and it is thought that some 8000 impressions were made by Hokusai’s publisher in period. Of those, around 130 survive. They vary not only in condition but in fidelity: the hand-carved wooden blocks used to make the image became worn with time, resulting in a variety of minor printing flaws. All surviving impressions, however,…

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SMALL-VOLUME British car manufacturers have called for more clarity about the future of propulsion in the wake of Lister’s abandonment of plans for a new Knobbly. In late January, Lister CEO Lawrence Whittaker (pictured far right, below) announced that plans for a new road car had been cancelled after eight months of development due to uncertainty over whether exemptions for low volume vehicles to the Zero Emission Vehicle (ZEV) mandate would continue past 2030 or 2035. We spoke to Lawrence directly after he posted his concerns on social media. ‘When the previous Government announced the ZEV mandate, it was quite a long way in the future, so it wasn’t much of a concern,’ he said. ‘The previous Government extended it to 2035, but the current Prime Minister wanted to bring…

It’s a tale that’s been told many times, so let’s not dwell on the out-of-hours work of a band of VW boffins, headed by PR wizard Anton Konrad and engineer Herbert Schuster. All you really need know is that a supposed six-person team toiled at Wolfsburg– presumably to the sound of Kraftwerk’s Autobahn– to produce the ‘Sports Golf’, turning the pedestrian Beetle replacement into a totemic trailblazer. A production run of just 5000– plus a thought-to-be-detrimental price– was agreed by VW suits and, after a genius decision to swap the prototype’s dual-choke Solex carburettor for Bosch K-Jetronic fuel injection, the Golf GTI went on sale in the summer of 1976. In case you hadn’t guessed already, that projected figure was a little pessimistic: more than 2.3million GTIs have since been…

With its World Rally Championship-inspired looks, and the rekindling of a much-loved moniker, the original Focus RS had a lot to live up to. Several of Ford’s earlier fast front-draggers hadn’t quite managed it, but the RS required little defending. Its expensive branded underpinnings– Sachs dampers, Brembo brakes and Quaife differential– didn’t disappoint. Ford claimed around 70% of RS components were either beefed-up or bespoke. Its 2002 arrival also helped popularise the new ‘super hatch’ sub-genre. The mid-engined Clio V6 got there first (in 1998) but, shortly after, we were treated to barely restrained beasts in the form of the Golf R32 and Alfa Romeo 147 GTA. Due to the unrelenting work of chassis guru Richard Parry-Jones and well-honed multi-link rear suspension, the Focus took a prodigious dynamic leap forwards.…

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THE LEGEND OF the greatest motoring adventure was born in the mid-1970s when French motorcyclist Thierry Sabine got hopelessly lost in the Libyan desert during a rally and decided the best way to mark his near-death experience was to share it with the world. In 1979, the first Paris-Dakar was held over a route that made its way 10,000km from the French capital to Senegal. Some 182 vehicles set off, of which only 74 survived to the end. The enormity of the challenge, the otherwordliness of the landscapes and the sheer thrill of the danger made it an instant hit, not only with legions of amateur rallyists and professional playboys but with works teams, too. By 1984 entries were close to 500, with classses for bikes and cars, and the 1982…

FAMILY AND FRIENDS are flagging us away. It’s 8am as we set off with the roof down in the tropical heat. The car is a 1967 Jaguar E-type roadster, imported from the USA, restored here in Malaysia (I’ve been living in Asia for 28 years) and converted to right-hand drive. Paul, an old university friend from Colorado Springs, USA, was keen to join me and is unfazed by the prospect of two months and more away. Our destination is the UK, 14,500 miles distant, via South-East Asia, China, Central Asia and over the Caspian Sea to Azerbaijan– current conflicts and travel advisories rule out Myanmar, Russia and Iran. After Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey, we’ll take our pick through Europe. The car has been in regular use for six years since…

In the clutch of despair 1946 Tatra T87 Delwyn Mallett A BRIEF RESUMÉ. Tatra is dispatched to the professionals to remedy fuel feed problems, dodgy front brakes and mysterious clunk from nether regions. All the above are addressed and remedied, and to all intents and purposes the beast seems ready to be retrieved. A trip to Lewes for a road test and hopefully a leisurely clunk-free cruise home is scheduled. It was not to be. After a few miles it became apparent that what started as mild clutch slip in top gear was getting worse, the car wouldn’t accelerate and it clearly wasn’t up to a 70-mile journey home. Mission aborted. Called the AA. Towed back to base and a conversation with a somewhat despondent mechanic, Janos. Was it merely…

THERE HAVE BEEN a couple of notable firsts for the Triumph since its return (I imagine that, like saying ‘Happy New Year’ in January, there must be a time-limit on how long I can keep referring to that). One of them was (whisper it) my first ever Bicester Scramble. Lord knows why I have never made it to one before– probably because I only wanted to go when I had an appropriate car to turn up in– but, boy, did I pick a Duesie. With dire weather forecasts, and gritters out in force distributing their payload of Triumph dissolvent, it didn’t look promising as I battled through the freezing fog and rain from London to Bicester, nor as I queued in dense fog to get into the site, or even…

I USED TO own a Mazda MX-5. A Mk1 in black that looked a bit like this one. I’d had the suspension tweaked and a ruder exhaust fitted, but one thing it lacked: torque. Something this one has rather more of. Electrogenic has created a conversion kit that swaps the Mazda’s venerable twin-cam for battery power. The clever bit is the way in which the new parts have been integrated. In place of the engine (front) and petrol tank (rear) are batteries, good for a realistic 150-mile range. It produces 160bhp (up from 116bhp in the original), peak torque is up to 229lb ft, and it weighs only 100kg more, around 1100kg. Weight distribution remains identical, while the power-to-weight ratio is improved by 21%. Think 0-60mph in around 6sec, top…

THAT WATCH ON your wrist– whether it’s a £50 Seiko you picked up at a boot-fair or a £5m Patek Grandmaster Chime (it’s a watch, honestly, not a lederhosen-clad Swiss rapper)– has the toughest of lives. The balance wheel in most modern watches runs at around 28,800bph. That may only be 480rpm, but it means, each year, the balance will oscillate just over 252m times. In the five or so years between services, that’s more ticks than most calculators can handle. Your watch also has to deal with the constant expansion and contraction of its metal components and changes to lubricant viscosity because of temperature variations. Gravity and even air resistance play hell with the balance’s desire to oscillate evenly. The movement is constantly fighting the effects of you just living…

Museum cars make €86m and re-write the top 10 RM Sotheby’s sells Stromlinienwagen and 250LM for benchmark figures in Europe EUROPE HAS BEEN buzzing with excitement this month, thanks to RM Sotheby’s achieving two landmark results. Five days ahead of its Paris auction, it offered the 1954 Mercedes-Benz W196 R Stromlinienwagen from the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum to a room of private bidders in Stuttgart. With a final bid of €51,155,000, it became the most valuable Grand Prix car ever sold, and the second most valuable car ever sold at public auction– right behind the Uhlenhaut Coupé sold by RM in 2023 for €135million. RM then sold the second car offered from the Indy museum– the Le Mans-winning 1964 Ferrari 250LM– for €34,880,000 in Paris. That was not only a…

WHEN THE RUF CTR was crowned the world’s fastest car by Road & Track in 1987, the magazine also gave it the nickname ‘Yellowbird’– for obvious reasons. Contrary to assumptions at the time, even then the German manufacturer was rather more than ‘just’ a tuner. Using the 911’s narrower body style for outright top speed capability, the 930 running gear was significantly modified and fitted with a six-speed gearbox of Ruf’s own design– to give it longer legs, and comfortably take the strain from the 463bhp, 3.4-litre flat-six. Although already a legend, the Yellowbird also found fame in the form of a VHS tape released by Ruf in 1989, named Faszination on the Nürburgring. If you haven’t seen this epic ten-minute video of Stefan Roser effortlessly sliding the CTR around the…

NOT ALL SIBLINGS look alike, and despite this Aston Martin racer’s traditional ‘racing car’ appearance, it is chassis 1916, the sister car to the ground-breaking ‘Razor Blade’ (see page 76). This chassis was the first Aston Martin built for public sale, and its first track outing was at Brooklands in 1923. Its story really began the following year, when it was crashed by the first owner and bought by Major Frank Halford. Halford fitted new bodywork and experimental 1.5-litre six-cylinder engines with an alloy block, twin overhead camshafts and even turbocharging. It later raced with a supercharger. Sold in 1928, it was dismantled and the engines found homes elsewhere. After a significant period of inactivity, the chassis was rescued and restored during the 1970s by its current owner, who managed…

MY INTEREST IN cars goes back to my childhood. I’ve loved cars since I was a kid: the Lamborghini Miura, classic cars with wire wheels, unattainable cars. It was all about the sound, the design, the thrill of racing– a much more dangerous sport then than it is today. My plumber father and I went to the Anderstorp circuit to watch racing. When Ronnie Peterson came along, he became an idol for motorcycling Swedes. In 1978, when I was in London to buy guitars for my band Gyllene Tider, we passed an electronics store with ten television sets in the window. All of them showed Ronnie Peterson’s crash. That’s how I found out he was dead. The Ferrari Dino was an early dream car. As a little boy, I saw…

2025 Rolex 24 at Daytona 25-26 January The 63rd running of one of the greatest spectacles in motorsport, and one of the most coveted crowns in endurance racing, was set on its way by British hotshoe and 2025 Grand Marshal Jamie Chadwick. As often happens, the 61-car marathon turned into a mad sprint for the frontrunners in the closing stages. The upshot was a second consecutive victory for a Penske Motorsport Porsche 963, marking the 20th win for the German manufacturer. After 781 laps, the winning Nasr/Vanthoor/Tandy car was followed home by the Rosenqvist/Dixon/Braun/Blomqvist Acura Meyer Shank Racing ARX-06, with the Estre/Campbell/Jaminet Penske Porsche 963 coming home in third. Rolex/Stephan Cooper/Jensen Larson Salon Rétromobile 5-9 February The vast indoor show at the Paris Expo in Porte de Versailles was really…

2025 highlights 24-27 April Anantara Concorso Roma A new concours d’elegance for 2025, held in Rome’s historic centre and open exclusively to Italian cars. anantaraconcorsoroma.com 25-27 April La Jolla Concours d’Elegance A picture-postcard venue on the seafront north of San Diego, and a good variety of classes, including one this year for ‘Iconic American Hot Rods’. lajollaconcours.com 2-4 May The Greenbrier Concours d’Elegance Ferrari is to be the featured marque at the West Virginia concours this time round. greenbrierconcours.com 3-4 May Keels & Wheels Beautiful old cars and boats share the limelight at Lakewood Yacht Club just outside Houston, Texas. keels-wheels.com 16-18 May Cavallino Classic Modena A small but perfectly formed concours d’elegance for Ferraris, held in Enzo’s hometown. cavallino.com 17 May Aston Hill Climb 100 A century after it…

THE WINNER OF THE tenth annual Peninsula Classics Best of the Best Award– revealed and crowned in a special Paris ceremony on the eve of Rétromobile– is Chris Cox’s stunning 1964 Ferrari 250LM. One of only 32 produced, this LM had an accomplished on-track career from 1965 to 1967, and it lined up at the 24 Hours of Daytona in 1966 and the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1968. Acquired by Cox in 2018, it was showcased at the Enzo Ferrari Museum in Modena, Italy, as part of the ‘Ferrari Forever’ 75th anniversary exhibition in 2022 and has also been displayed at Pebble Beach. It earned its spot in the Best of the Best by scooping Best of Show at the 2024 Palm Beach Cavallino Classic. Cox said: ‘I…

Letter of the month ROBERT COUCHER mentioned in his column in Octane 261 that he might have an interest in a Lister XJ-S, presumably a UK version. In the 1980s, my company GW Bartlett modified new XJ-Ss to our own Lister specs in the USA. In the early’ 80s I was buying ‘Lister’ components for new XJ-Ss from BLE Ltd (Ron Beatty, John Lewis and Ian Exeter) in Birmingham. Exeter and Lewis grew tired of losing money on their Lister programme and offered to sell the company to me, so I bought it with the blessing of Brian Lister. The photo [above] shows him sealing the deal with me outside the RAC in London. I changed what BLE was doing with their car in the hope of making some money. I…

By the mid-1980s a new wave of even hotter hatches had crested. Boasting either 16 valves or turbochargers, they forced rivals and newcomers into a rethink. Peugeot launched the 205 GTI into a trough between the first-and second-generation swells. The 205 was met in February 1983 with a more muted reaction than many care to remember. Models supplied to journalists at the international press launch in Morocco weren’t heaped with universal praise. The majority admired Gerard Welter’s neat exterior styling, plus its airy cabin– the work of Paul Bracq– yet Car of the Year’ 83 went to the Fiat Uno. Test drivers in the North African heat did, however, see the car’s go-faster potential, something that hadn’t escaped Peugeot’s attention, and the GTI joined the range 12 months later. It…

The phenomenon of the track-day came to prominence around the new millennium. Nürburgring lap times replaced horsepower bragging rights as ride quality took a back seat in pursuit of the sub-eight-minute. Among myriad models thus developed, some when shown a British B-road would cause their owners to call the chiropractor. Very few achieved circuit star status without punishing elsewhere. In 2008, RenaultSport’s decision to put its already excellent Megane R26 on a crash diet resulted in the R26.R. Outwardly and conceptually extreme, the R26.R would have been a tough sell at the best of times, and it was launched straight into the jaws of a global financial crisis. The Dieppe factory curbed its already modest plans to ship 230 examples to the UK (of 450 total) to just 159 yet,…

Aerodynamic drag. The less of it a moving object has, the faster it will go on a given amount of power. So if you want to break a speed record, reduce the drag. That drag is the product of a shape’s drag coefficient (the ‘Cd’ much vaunted by many a maker after Audi displayed ‘Cd 0.30’ on the rear side windows of its thirdgeneration 100 in the early 1980s) multiplied by the frontal area. A 1920s open-wheeled racing car is unlikely to score well on the Cd bit, detail smoothing notwithstanding, but there were exciting possibilities with the ‘A’ part. The car you see here, hailed as the thinnest racing car ever made, is the result. Seen from above, it resembles a blade. If you view it from the rear…

A BIG OLD black leather jacket lives in the Porsche’s boot. It carries the aroma of spare coolant and screenwash, and the must of boot lining and old cleaning cloths, but it really comes into its own on those cold, crisp, blue-sky winter days, when you go for an impromptu blast with the roof down, enjoying the Boxster’s excellent heater so your feet are toasty. There’s nothing worse than suffering numb toes when you’re making the most of twisty roads. We’ve had precious little of that this winter. Plenty of cold but rather too much wet, grey and dark. Yet that’s when the effectiveness of the Boxster’s roof proves itself. I’d always fancied a Cayman and I have the BMW for roof-down fun, so the fact that the Boxster’s roof goes…

Eighties revival 2024 Toyota Land Cruiser Mark Dixon THE PICK-UP truck in front of us is a proper working vehicle. Ifor Williams top, mud tyres, Welsh hill farmer at the wheel. We’re on an old drover’s road, a rocky track in Carmarthenshire, Wales. The Romans used it first, and if you know where to look you can still see the earthworks from a couple of their marching camps. This is the steepest part of the route, where strata of bedrock have been pushed almost vertically to the surface, creating miniature mountain ranges with gravelly valleys. The pick-up has four-wheel drive but it struggles to find traction as a front wheel paws the air, until the driver’s sheer determination powers it forward. We’re in a new Toyota Land Cruiser on road…

IT WAS A speech that would come back to haunt him. Virgil Exner enlivened the 1948 American Society of Body Engineers gala by railing against what he saw as ‘Buck Rogers’ automobile design hokum, perpetuated by ‘… the table-cloth artist, the air-brush expert and the plush scale-model stylist’. His concerns centred on how the industry’s integrity would be lost forever if Detroit’s susceptibility to whimsy was allowed to prevail. Today’s designers clearly had talent, he insisted, but what about good taste? Fast-forward a decade and ‘Exner look’ Chrysler products were synonymous with excess, but then the tail-fin king was nothing if not a contradiction. Seemingly blessed and cursed in equal measure, Exner’s life was rarely dull. Born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on 24 September 1909, he was an unwanted child.…

PETE LYONS, Evro Publishing, £70, ISBN 978 1 910505 87 8 In 1975, Formula 1 ace Jackie Stewart wrote to Autosport magazine to compliment the writer of its Grand Prix reports. ‘I think we are very lucky to have Pete on this side of the Atlantic,’ he stated. ‘No other writer at this time gives the atmosphere and feeling to the Grand Prix scene as he does.’ Sir Jackie has been a lifelong friend of Pete Lyons ever since. In one respect that’s only natural, since Lyons supported Stewart’s call for greater safety in motor racing– but the fact that Lyons was also good friends with Denis Jenkinson, despite the latter’s angry retort that making motor racing safer would take the excitement out of it, is testament to how well-liked…

NOBODY WAS READY for the Brawn GP team in 2009. Thanks to a clever ‘double diffuser’, the start-up rising from the ashes of the old Honda GP team, and led by technical director Ross Brawn and CEO Nick Fry, powered to a surprise championship win. With Mercedes power, the experienced pair of Jenson Button and Rubens Barrichello guided the team o that Constructors’ title, and Button took the Drivers’ crown too. Three cars were built: Mercedes has one, Ross Brawn the second, and this car– chassis 001– was given to Jenson Button at the end of the season. It remained in his personal collection until 2024, and will be offered by Bonhams in Miami. bonhamscars.com 1994 Mercedes-Benz S72 AMG Broad Arrow, Amelia Island, USA 7 Mar, broadarrowauctions.com There are two…

THE LINE BETWEEN pleasure and pain is always fuzzy when it comes to old Italian cars. While often delivering the highest of highs, they have also been known to cause untold heartache. It’s fair to say that, in the case of the Lancia Gamma, the scales were never tipped in its favour. The Italians have always struggled to sell executive cars in other markets, especially the UK. And the Gamma suffered with tales of snapped timing belts and terminal corrosion after just a few years. Even the most committed Lancia fans were hesitant. The Gamma Berlina appeals as a classic buy, though, and offers plenty of positive attributes that are often glossed over by those keen to make a joke at its expense. Launched in 1976, the Gamma had started…