Table of contents for March 2026 in Octane

‘I NEVER HAD anything to do with the Miura – that was all Gandini.’ Those were the words of the great Giorgetto Giugiaro after he accepted his Lifetime Achievement Award at the International Historic Motoring Awards in November. It is not the first time this stance has been stated or reported, but it is the first time I have heard it from the horse’s mouth and it is something of a novelty, and a relief, to have such certainty applied to the subject. After all, it is a discussion that has raged in print (including in Octane) for decades, but how did such conjecture over authorship start in the first place and how was it allowed to simmer away for 60 years, to my mind besmirching the legacy not just…

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It’s a crisp, wintry morning here in West Sussex. It’s early. I just made a cup of coffee and watched some swans land in the estuary near the ancestral seat. I will never tire of living here. These little moments make life seem almost poetic. When you have spent most of your life bouncing off the rev-limiter, it’s nice to stop and appreciate nature in all its beauty. Well, that’s about as introspective as I get. I suppose I had better snap out of this reverie and get back to discussing motor racing. I hope you will forgive me tooting my own horn as it were because, by the time you read this, I will have been garlanded with a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Royal Automobile Club. I think…

IT’S 60 YEARS since my then 27-year-old father designed one of his masterpieces. Will this anniversary prove the occasion to end the so-called ‘Miura controversy’ once and for all? I hope so. Anyone acquainted with the facts – and anyone who knew my father – already knows that there is no question over the origins of this unique car, so I am amazed that there is a microscopic minority that even now distorts the facts without any foundation. I would like to end all the speculation with a fact that goes beyond the origin of the Miura: the essence of Marcello Gandini as a designer was never to copy, not even himself, and, as a human being, to live by principles of honesty and rigour that could never be negotiable.…

THE LAMBORGHINI MIURA really shouldn’t be as valuable as it is. It’s a 1960s Italian sports car, a group that has struggled to maintain values over the past few years as the Baby Boomers who remember them on the roads fade away. Like its direct Ferrari contemporary, the 365 GTB/4 Daytona, it packages a superb V12 engine (producing around 350bhp through a five-speed manual gearbox) in an undoubtedly beautiful body with a host of cultural references, but it has now outpaced its rival from Maranello in terms of price: the top-of the-range Miura SV is now 40 times its value in 1989; the Daytona just 2.4 times, below the rate of inflation (Chart 1, below). Some of that rise is due to the starting point: 1989 was an extraordinary time in…

I’m on the edge of a seaside town, confronting sand. Fine sand, suitable for making sandcastles with very precise detailing. The sand, though, has come not from a beach near Hastings (the Sussex town in question) but from Cheshire. It is very special sand. ‘Have you ever done this before?’ asks sandmeister Toby. No, I haven’t. ‘Well, it looks perfect.’ This thing I have never done before is to make a sandcasting mould for eight camshaft bearing caps destined ultimately for a Jaguar XK engine, and I’m told it’s good enough for castings to be made from it in a few minutes’ time. I’m chuffed to bits. The same casting session, using 170kg of LM25 aluminium alloy in total, will also create other parts for historic Jaguars: an XK engine…

JAMES ELLIOTT Editor-in-chief • 1965 Triumph 2.5 PI • 1968 Jensen Interceptor • 1969 Lotus Elan S4 ROBERT COUCHER Founding editor • 1955 Jaguar XK140 GLEN WADDINGTON Associate editor • 1989 BMW 320i Convertible • 1999 Porsche Boxster • 2001 BMW 525i Sport Touring SANJAY SEETANAH Advertising director • 1981 BMW 323i Top Cabrio • 1998 Aston Martin DB7 Volante MARK DIXON Contributing editor • 1927 Alvis 12/50 • 1927 Ford Model T pick-up • 1955 Land Rover Series I 107in • 1970 Rover 3500S • 1998 Isuzu Trooper 3.1Td ROBERT HEFFERON Art editor • 2004 BMW Z4 3.0i DAVID LILLYWHITE Editorial director • 1971 Saab 96 • 1991 VW Golf Mk2 GTI MATT HOWELL Photographer • 1962 VW Beetle 1600 • 1969 VW/Subaru Beetle • 1982 Morgan 4/4 BEN…

WATCHES ARE QUITE simple in principle. They need an oscillator, a display and a power source. Horophiles get very excited indeed about oscillators such as free-sprung balances, tuning forks and quartz crystals. In fact, the surest way to get invited outside at any watch event is to argue that a quartz crystal is actually just as interesting as a mechanical balance. The virtues of different types of dials and hands, not to mention digital displays, account for thousands of column inches. But what about the poor old power source – the bit of the watch without which nothing happens? You can probably tell me how many beats per hour your watch’s balance runs at, but equally not have a clue what torque its mainspring puts out. Mainsprings deserve better. As…

Barry Sheene by Emma Capener Another impressively detailed pencil drawing from Emma Capener, this time of the beloved motorcycle racer who became 500cc World Champion 50 years ago. Sheene’s triumph seems almost miraculous in retrospect: Suzuki Japan, hard-up having poured money into the development of the GS750 road bike, gave Sheene no support in 1976, and so his crew consisted of his elderly dad and an electrician. Several times that year, potentially disastrous errors were made in setting up his Suzuki RG500; Sheene was fortunate to walk away from a crash at Snetterton caused by someone forgetting to fit his brake pins. He had a working bike for the six Grands Prix he entered in ’76, though – and six were all he needed to secure the title. He concluded…

THE 1895 PUNCH cartoon showing a curate telling his bishop that his bad egg was ‘excellent in parts’ is a great analogy for the classic and collectable car market in 2025. Just 22% of models covered by the UK Hagerty Price Guide rose in value in the 12 months to December, with the remainder split evenly between fallers and those that remained static. Some British marques suffered double-digit mean percentage falls in value, notably Jaguar, Frazer Nash and Bentley, and transatlantic classic car shipping, UK to US, was down by 14% from 2024 to a six-year low. Dealers across the price range have been reporting a very odd year, with some months setting sales records and the next almost dead. British auctions, especially at the top end, have struggled to…

Not much to look at, if you ask us, but when a photo of this small sketch of a foot was sent to Christie’s via its online ‘Request an Estimate’ service, Old Master Drawings expert Giada Damen sat up and took notice. She quickly booked a plane ticket to the West Coast of the USA to visit the owner, who knew little about the picture – executed in red chalk on paper – except that it had been in his family since the 1700s. The picture was brought to New York to be examined and researched, and, after a round of infrared reflectography and a comparison with works held by The Met in New York and the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Damen was able to identify it. Our West Coast…

As with so many Porsches, there are myriad permutations of the 944, but, once you’ve got your head around that, the Turbo S coupé adds up. In the last five years it’s outperformed the collectable Porsche market segment by a factor of two, yet can still be considered an inviting value proposition. With a water-cooled front-engine/rear-transaxle layout and near-perfect weight distribution, the 944, which appeared in 1982 and evolved out of the earlier entry-level 924, handled sublimely. The 944 Turbo arrived in 1985, but here we’re talking about the 944 Turbo S, which appeared in 1988 and then, for 1989 through to 1991, dropped the S designation but retained the S specification. The reason for the narrow focus is that the 1988 Turbo S and succeeding Turbo models pushed out…

WITH MORE THAN 15 years of classic car auctions behind me and a buoyant end to 2025, I am cautiously optimistic about the year ahead. We’ve all endured a tough 18 months, aside from the market’s characteristic ebb and flow. It’s not as strong but it is firmly back in collector and enthusiast hands. More than ever, cars from our childhood memories are proving to be highlights. Think fast Fords, Renault 5 GT Turbo, Honda NSX and so on. Mileage is a defining factor in terms of appeal, but it means that higher-mileage classics can represent astounding value. Speaking of which, a current winner has to be the Jaguar E-type, particularly the Series I, which I am confident will return to the forefront of collectors’ garages – the XK120 is…

I DIDN’T TAKE a conventional route into the motoring museum world. I’ve always been a geek, and I’ve also always been interested in transport and industrial history. I left school at 16 and did a BTEC in Automotive Engineering at Chichester College, then joined the family business – my father’s garage. Dad took it on from his father, who took it on from his father, a millwright who bought the property to set up his workshop, but turned to bicycle, motorcycle and car repairs before World War One. My father worked on pre-war cars, so among the Sierras there would always be the odd Model T, Austin Seven or Rolls-Royce 20. But by the mid-’90s I had become disillusioned with how the industry was going. Rising costs meant fewer people…

MARK DIXON ‘They say you should never meet your heroes, but driving a Miura for the first time was an exception to the rule – it was everything I’d hoped for, and has instantly gone into my personal top ten after nearly 37 years of writing about classics.’ Our Lamborghini Miura 60th anniversary celebration begins on page 54. DAVID BURGESS-WISE ‘It’s so refreshing to encounter a Bentley that retains its original Jazz Age bodywork and colour scheme. Not all vintage Bentleys were Vanden Plas-style tourers painted British Racing Green.’ David uncovers the incredible history of this Art Deco 3 Litre ‘Boat Tail’ on pages 74-82. SIMON ALDRIDGE ‘For a kid from the suburbs of London, the Carrera Panamericana seemed so exotic. Bill Stroppe, Chuck Stevenson, Clay Smith – I just…

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‘Mystery surrounds the disappearance of Gerry McGovern.’ Had I been a tabloid headline writer, that would have been irresistible. In December, an excitable Times of India story said Britain’s most famous car designer had been ‘escorted’ from the JLR building. This has since been refuted, but quite a lot of mystery remains. On a matter unrelated to JLR or even the motor industry, I have been trying to get in touch with Gerry (whom I have known for many years) via a shared acquaintance. No-one is saying where Gerry is or what he is doing. Informed speculation says ‘leave of absence’. That may be a euphemism, but it begs a significant question: why would you sack the man responsible for one of Britain’s best ever products? Why would you let…

‘When the owner came over to Italy and saw the finished car, we surprised him by having Valentino Balboni come and drive him in it. That was quite an experience for him, to have his freshly restored Miura demonstrated by the most famous Lamborghini test driver of all time. And Valentino wasn’t hanging around. To him a car is just a car. If he saw an overtaking opportunity, he’d go for it, and to hell with worrying about stonechips.’ Marcus Willis, the chief operating officer of UK-based classic car specialists Girardo & Co, is recalling the moment when the American owner of this Miura P400 SV took delivery of a car that had been three years in the restoring. He’d tasked Girardo with overseeing a project to Pebble Beach standards…

MY NAME IS Mark and I have a confession. I’ve never driven a Miura. Or, at least, until a couple of weeks ago I hadn’t. While that may seem like a ridiculously pretentious statement, as a time-served classic car journalist I’ve always found it slightly embarrassing that I’d never been behind the wheel of the original supercar. I’ve driven just about every other iteration of older Lamborghini – 350 and 400 GTs, Islero, Countach, Jalpa – hell, I even co-owned a lovely 1970 Espada for a while with fellow Octane contributor Richard Heseltine – but never a Miura. Oh, the shame. But then… what it if didn’t live up to the hype? Would it be better to live in blissful igorance, rather than finally drive a Miura only to find…

‘There’s a company that can convert my BMW 525i’s factory stereo to Apple CarPlay. Great – only I’ve also found loads of ancient tapes, so I’ve been revisiting old musical tastes. Plus the Japanese sat-nav thinks I live in Nagano City, which is a giggle’Glen Waddington ‘The BMW 323i Top Cabrio is back with totally rebuilt Recaro seats – after a six-month delay and at twice the price that I’d been quoted. Ouch!’Sanjay Seetanah ‘When its automatic handbrake failed, my daily driver VW Golf rolled into my 1962 Beetle and left a nasty crease in the engine lid – now beautifully repaired by craftsman Bruce McCloud’Matthew Howell ‘My Triumph has been doing all the heavy lifting this winter, as usual. New Year’s resolutions are to get the Elan and Interceptor…

WE’LL LEAVE THE ‘fire up the Quattro’ jokes for another day – in part because Chopard is deadly serious about its four-barrel calibre 1.98. And it has every reason to be. Not only do you get Poinçon de Genèveworthy finishing, but it will run for eight days without needing a wind. This is what would have happened if Mercedes had asked a watchmaker to translate the M198 3.0 straight-six that powered the 300SL Gullwing into movement form. Nearly 2m of mainsprings, split across four barrels running in series, means a more precise movement because the energy from the four barrels is more evenly distributed.…

23-30 January Broad Arrow Auctions, online 27-31 January Mecum, Las Vegas, USA (motorcycles) 28 January RM Sotheby’s, Paris, France 29 January Gooding Christie’s, Paris, France SWVA, Poole, UK 30 January Bonhams, Paris, France 31 January WB & Sons, Killingworth, UK 31 January – 1 February ACA, King’s Lynn, UK 4-6 February Mathewsons, online 13-14 February Manor Park Classics, Runcorn, UK 14 February RM Sotheby’s, Boca Raton, USA 18 February Brightwells, online 21 February Morris Leslie, Errol, UK 21-22 February Iconic Auctioneers, Stoneleigh Park, UK 27 February RM Sotheby’s, Miami, USA 5-6 March Gooding Christie’s, Amelia Island, USA 6-7 March Broad Arrow Auctions, Amelia Island, USA 7 March Barons Manor Park Classics, Southampton, UK Historics, Ascot, UK 8 March Hampson, Tattenhall, UK 11-13 March Mathewsons, online 12 March Charterhouse, Sparkford, UK…

As close to a 911 GT3 RS as you can get in a factory-built hot hatch, and Renaultsport built only 364 of them. This one is in beautiful condition and has covered 47,700 miles. tieroneautomotive.co.uk (UK) Thought to be the only NB ever fitted with this Airline coupé coachwork, it was fully restored and painted in this charming two-tone colour scheme in 2000 and scarcely used since. hymanltd.com (US) Delivered to its first owner in the UK, before heading to the US in the 1980s, this S3 finally settled in Australia in 1988. A six-year restoration was completed in 2021 and it looks beautiful. classicthrottleshop.com (AUS) Although the Giugiaro-styled Panda stopped coming to the UK in 1995, it soldiered on for some time in Europe. This 2000 model has covered…

Share your motoring stories and you could win a bespoke, personalised document case for your classic (worth £400), plus an invitation to the Wilton Concours des Légendes and the opportunity to be featured in Octane magazine. As part of Octane’s partnership with the new event, we’ll be featuring the best car stories every month in the magazine: all you have to do is share yours and tell us why it should be among them. When we say stories, it could be about your own background and involvement with classic cars, obstacles you have overcome, or your family’s motoring history. Equally, it could be your car’s history before you even became its custodian – what made it special. Best of all might be your own history with that car, your adventures,…

We all enjoy driving our vintage vehicles as well as living vicariously through the pages of this magazine, as gifted journalists put the pedal to the metal on the German autobahn or tear up the Tail of the Dragon as they speed through the Tennessee/North Carolina border. What we don’t often hear about are vintage accidents. These are accidents that, either through better engineering or safer design, don’t really happen anymore… like the one I had last week. I’m the proud owner of a 1961 Jaguar MkIX. The great thing about this car is it’s one-owner with original black paint and fabulously original red leather interior. Only 51,000 miles. If you didn’t know, you’d think it was only two or three years old. The downside is it came with the…

‘The cars weren’t built by gods, but by mere kids like us,’ said the languid Bob Wallace, Lamborghini’s legendary test driver and development engineer in the ’60s and ’70s. Wallace had an uncanny ability to determine a car’s foibles and sort them out effectively. And he had his hands full with the Miura P400. With its Giotto Bizzarrini-designed V12 mounted amidship, the world’s first supercar looked like a knockout. It embraced pure technical innovation, and its engineering was on a different level to that of the local competition. Trouble was, at launch, the Miura was woefully underdeveloped, suffering from severe front-end lift, violent oversteer at the limit and a penchant for catching fire. Things were remedied to some extent with the later SV model with its sturdier chassis, revised rear…

Hard to believe that the Lamborghini Miura is turning 60. But yes, this revolutionary model was launched at the 1966 Geneva motor show, and its principal architects were only in their 20s. This, for them, was a brand new vision of the future. ‘We didn’t intend to create something legendary, we simply wanted to go racing,’ says Ingegnere Giampaolo Dallara. Then just 29 years old, he was technical director of Lamborghini. ‘What would be christened “Miura” was simply our way to try to force Ferruccio to go racing. And when I say we, I’m referring to my partners in this crime: the late Ingegnere Paolo Stanzani and test driver Bob Wallace.’ Stanzani, like Dallara, was 29; Wallace was just 27. The genesis of the Miura was simpler than many thought.…

MIURA P400 (1966-1968) After the Miura’s bare chassis made a splash at the 1965 Turin motor show, the production-ready P400, clothed in delectable Gandini-penned bodywork, stunned the automotive world a year later. In this original form, it was powered by a 345bhp version of the transverse-mounted 3.9-litre V12. It was good for a claimed 172mph – although the front end of the car was notoriously light at speed. Just 265 P400s were produced, making it the rarest of the ‘standard’ Miuras. MIURA SPIDER (1968) Unveiled by Bertone at the 1968 Brussels motor show, the Miura Spider was a striking one-off shown with no real intention of reaching production. Based on the P400, the car lived an eccentric second life after being repurposed by the International Lead Zinc Research Organization to…

THE CLASSIC CAR world sometimes behaves as if Friedhelm Loh has come out of nowhere, an unheard-of collector who has burst onto the scene since Covid, waving around wads of cash and buying up all the significant cars for his new museum. Nothing could be further from the truth, on either count: Prof Friedhelm Loh is just discreet. Even now, being interviewed in his huge office at Nationales Automuseum – The Loh Collection, a pained expression crosses his face as you say the name in full. He reddens slightly and then holds forth with a cocktail of awkward shyness and masterful authority. ‘When we were debating what the name of the museum should be, I was happy with the Nationales Automuseum. I didn’t want ‘The Loh Collection’ because I just…

I HAD HOPED to start this update by reporting that the RS had provided me with the perfect Christmas present and fired up. Unfortunately, that longed-for moment has had to wait. The good news is that there are no major problems, just several assorted jobs that needed addressing. My last report showed a table covered in a miscellaneous assortment of parts all looking the worse for wear, but which have now either been refurbished or replaced with new parts. Anti-roll bars have acquired a fresh coat of paint and new bushes, while the sidelight clusters looked shabby against the gleaming white body colour and had a few minor cracks, so new ones have been fitted front and rear. The smart new ‘salt ’n’ pepper’ carpets have been installed as well…

Track-bred, road-ready 2025 Kalmar 9X9 Glen Waddington I’M NOT SURE Denmark is big enough for the Kalmar 9X9. I meet Jan Kalmar at the impressive My Garage, a petrolhead destination in Jutland. Jan is proudly Danish and, as it turns out, the rural roads close to Vejle Fjord twist and turn and rise and fall like English country lanes. His talk of the car setting a sub-7-minuter on the Nordschleife has made me pensive, given that this is the ‘hardcore’ driver-focused version. It’s chilly and damp; some of the corners out there look as though they could launch an incautious driver into the wintry fjord water. Yet Jan is clear that the 9X9 has to be enjoyable on the road; its track capabilities are simply an alternative realm. ‘We wanted…

£18,980,530 ($25,317,500) 1994 McLaren F1 RM Sotheby’s, Abu Dhabi, UAE, 5 December £8,606,556 ($11,480,000) 2026 McLaren MCL40A RM Sotheby’s, Abu Dhabi, UAE, 5 December £7,594,461 ($10,130,000) 2006 Pagani Zonda F RM Sotheby’s, Abu Dhabi, UAE, 5 December £5,696,783 ($7,598,750) 2027 McLaren United AS WEC Hypercar Team RM Sotheby’s, Abu Dhabi, UAE, 5 December £4,220,811 ($5,630,000) 2025 Gordon Murray Automotive T.50 RM Sotheby’s, Abu Dhabi, UAE, 5 December £2,965,951 ($4,007,500) 2022 Bugatti Chiron Super Sport Bring a Trailer, online, USA, 23 December £2,913,522 ($3,886,250) 1990 Ferrari F40 RM Sotheby’s, Abu Dhabi, UAE, 5 December £2,533,986 ($3,380,000) 2014 Ferrari LaFerrari RM Sotheby’s, Abu Dhabi, UAE, 5 December £2,316,853 ($3,119,500) 2015 Porsche 918 Spyder Weissach Bring a Trailer, Online, 30 December £1,901,427 ($2,536,250) 2022 Ferrari Monza SP2 RM Sotheby’s, Abu Dhabi, UAE, 5…

LAUNCHED IN 1993, the A80 was the fourth generation of Supra and, although usually described as a ‘JDM’ (Japanese Domestic Market) car, it was sold in the US and the UK, where the Turbo version’s 2997cc twin-turbo straight-six pushed out 326bhp (plus 325ft lb of torque) and achieved a 0-60mph time of 4.6sec. Yet it didn’t sell well: just over 45,300 were built in nine years, the vast majority (31,701) for the Japanese home market. US sales stopped in 1998; only around 650 were sold in the UK. Unusually, the car was given a second wind thanks, at first, to the release of the 2001 movie The Fast and the Furious in which the protagonist Brian O’Conner (Paul Walker) uses a Candy Orange Supra prepared by The Shark Shop in…

WHAT TO PAY Early Pre-HE models are rare, and prices for well looked after and presentable examples are likely sitting in the £15,000-20,000 region; manual cars (rarer still) can fetch a premium. HE models are a slightly cheaper V12 experience at £10-15k. Straight-six models offer the best value and slightly more reasonable running costs at £7500-12,500. A later 4.0-litre is the pick of the bunch; you’ll pay £15k-plus. Convertible variants of all versions tend to carry a 20% premium over a similar coupé. For an XJR-S, expect to spend closer to £30,000 for a tidy example, although the best command more. LOOK OUT FOR Buying a bad XJ-S can quickly become ruinous, even to those with deep pockets, so tread extremely carefully. Look for a car with the best possible…