Table of contents for November 2022 in Octane

THERE ARE CERTAIN classic cars we would all like to own, but the vast majority of us simply lack the courage. Ironically, this disease seems to be especially prevalent among motoring journalists, people who, even more ironically, spend their lives telling you what to buy and then get dissuaded from taking the plunge themselves by their own words and repetition of history’s dire warnings. Think Alfa Montreal and Citroën SM and most Lotuses, but most of all think Lamborghini Espada. I am as guilty as anyone, having backed out of a deal to buy one for £15,000 a good while ago after someone who checked it over for me mentioned that the possibly imminent engine rebuild might cost double that. I am delighted therefore that two of my kind – Octane’s…

YOU COULD SAY that people’s fascination with old bomber aircraft is a guilty pleasure. After all, these aircraft were built with one purpose – to cause maximum disruption and damage – but it has to be said that without Bomber Command, the result of World War Two could have been very different. Almost a million people from more than 60 countries were involved with Bomber Command, which lost some 8325 aircraft and 55,573 crew carrying out their duties. That was 56% of all aircrew, and with an average age of 22. A great proportion of bomber stations were in Lincolnshire and you can experience how life at one might have been at the Lincolnshire Aviation Heritage Centre. Walking through the entrance, the first sight is the Lancaster bomber Just Jane…

A SPECTACULAR 1956 Ferrari 250 GT Berlinetta Competizione has scooped the prestigious annual Best of the Best prize. Brian Ross’s car, which had taken the Best of Show trophy at Concorso d’Eleganza Villa d’Este earlier in the year to qualify for the competition, beat off challenges from seven other international concours winners to secure the accolade in the Peninsula Classics competition. Though usually announced at Rétromobile in February, for the first time the award was made at Quail Lodge on 14 August, before Monterey Week kicked off. A team of 25 judges – including Octane’s Jay Leno, Nick Mason, Ken Okuyama and Ralph Lauren – selected the Ferrari from a shortlist of 1957 Ferrari 250 GT Berlinetta Tour de France, 1974 Lancia Stratos HF Stradale, 1926 Suiza H6B Cabriolet, 1934…

I THOUGHT Octane readers might find the history of my 1987 Ferrari Mondial interesting. It was stolen in The Netherlands in 1994 and completely disappeared until 2020 when, by chance, it was found in the bottom of the river in Amsterdam during a training exercise for Dutch Army divers. Judging by its condition, it had likely spent all those intervening 26 years under water. Thanks to its backstory, when the Ferrari was pulled out of the river it instantly became very well known, and lots of collectors, enthusiasts and museums were keen to get hold of it. They were all thwarted by Dutch law, which deemed that it should be crushed, but in late 2021 I discovered that it might be possible to buy it and I didn’t hesitate. Rather than…

‘PORSCHE’S OWN AIR-COOLED MAESTRO HANS MEZGER WAS INVOLVED WITH THE ENGINE; RACER MARINO FRANCHITTI HONED IT TO PERFECTION’ As a plain English kind of guy, I often struggle in the modern world. And in particular with its current obsession with elevating everything to concepts, taking workaday products that do a job and substituting practical utilitarianism for a status wrongly thought to be loftier, an ‘idea’ or ‘vision’. Aren’t actual tactile, working things the very opposite of ideas? Surely the practical realisation of a vision is more impressive than the vision itself. I’ll admit that I struggled when Singer first burst onto the scene in 2009. There were just so many portentous words when ‘we’ve made a 911 much better’ would have done it for me, and so many strictures over…

Has there ever been a more universally adored – not to mention more versatile – van than the Volkswagen Type 2? The ‘split-screen’ bus isn’t just an automotive icon, but also a seriously important piece of cultural history. Its legacy remains powerful to this day, keeping the Volkswagen scene both vibrant and huge. Having said that, we’ve never seen one quite as versatile as this before. Say hello to the Half-Track Fox, described as ‘probably the most off-road-capable Bulli ever to be seen on the mountain slopes of this world’. Fresh from an extensive restoration, it currently resides in Volkswagen Commercial’s Hanover heritage collection and its restoration has been a labour of love for the team. Versatility was among the Type 2’s major selling points when Volkswagen launched the new…

THE SUCCESSOR TO the Seiko 7T27-7A20 - Gen 2 Chronograph, the civilian Pulsar V657 is as near-as-spit identical to its RAF-issued brethren. The main differences are the missing pheon (the broad arrow denoting Government property), issue numbers on the caseback, and the lack of a circle containing the letter L (for Luminova) on the dial. The Seiko V657 movement is best described as ‘workmanlike’. OK, that’s a lie: it’s so ugly you’ll need dark glasses to change the battery (a SR920SW or a standard 371, since you asked) and counselling afterwards. Yet it does have the virtue of being able to take a fair bit of hammering without throwing the histrionics other, prettier movements might. The X063 does all the usual, useful chronograph things, with the 12 o’clock subdial measuring tenths…

A Mustang what? Ford never produced a station wagon version of its massively popular Mustang – presumably because that niche was already covered by the Fairlane – but designer Robert Cumberford and a couple of associates had one built privately by Costruzione Automobili Intermeccanica in Italy. Sadly, it disappeared a long time ago, but its elegant looks have inspired several replicas since. Chinese maker Cult Model has based its tribute on photos of the original, in the correct dark green with New York plates; it’s also available in red with gold centre stripes, which is more eyecatching but arguably detracts from the design’s handsome simplicity. The model itself is relatively simple, too – posable front wheels are the only ‘feature’ – but it’s nicely finished and reasonably priced. 1953 Frazer…

PROPELLING MANY gentlemen racers to victory during the early days of motorsport in the USA, Mercer quickly gained a reputation for building fast, competition-ready cars. Although the company had roots going back to the early 1900s, its first car arrived in 1910. These were expensive machines, marketed as ‘the Steinway of the automobile world’. Quite a statement, but it’s backed up by the number of enthusiasts who bought them. The Mercer didn’t just offer speed, but agility, too. It was a winning formula on the racetrack. Fittingly, this 1920 Raceabout will be offered at Bonhams’ Audrain auction, which is held in Newport – the birthplace of US motor racing. One of the most impressive models built, this is a late example of the long-stroke L-head Raceabout, which first appeared in…

HUNDREDS OF classic car events suffered during the pandemic through cancellation, postponement or constraints that changed their nature in a fundamental way, but for hardcore enthusiasts few left a bigger hole in the calendar than September’s traditional Beaulieu International Autojumble. As one of the oldest and most loved events in the diary, its cancellation in 2020 and significant depletion in 2021 were disappointing, so its bustling energy and buzz for its 55th year on 10-11 September seemed to symbolise a return to normality. More than 26,000 people turned out to buy, sell, meet old friends, socialise, enjoy the special displays and attend the Bonhams auction. Most noticeable was a huge increase of international traders and visitors over 2021, many spending two or three full days seeking out tools, parts, automobilia,…

Paradise is a word used promiscuously by travel magazines, but this may well be it. There’s an azure sky, tufty clouds, and fields of wild flowers stretch into the distance to complete the masterpiece. More importantly, though, the scenic vista is dissected by smooth asphalt, a series of long straights connected via flowing corners. Perfect. Then our featured cars hove into view, though their V12 powerhouses have already trumpeted their arrival. Not that they’re anti-socially loud; no, here we have the muted bark of a chain-driven Italian V12 of the old school, tickled along rather than redlined, overlaid with the voice of another. It’s the sort of noise that echoes a vanished time, of beautiful people heading to beautiful locales in their beautiful Italian GT cars. Make no mistake, the…

IT TOOK A CREW of three men, a tracked Kubota skid-steer and nearly eight hours of grunt to unearth a long-forgotten automotive marvel from the frozen soil of Brooklyn Park, Minnesota. Buried for years among the elements under rubber sheeting and engulfed by trees and shrubs, an original surviving example of Strother MacMinn’s incredible Le Mans Coupe was finally exhumed. It was Marvin Horton’s 1960 round-tube-chassis car, inexplicably found to be in solid condition. It is significant that the Le Mans Coupe was designed by Strother MacMinn, an American designer whose impact on the automotive world was a result not of his own creations, but rather his influence through thousands of students during his long tenure (1948 to 1998) teaching at ArtCenter College of Design. The string of MacMinn disciples…

The ability to find pleasure in driving any car, no matter how humble, is surely what defines a real petrolhead, and no-one epitomised that more than the late and much-missed Tony Dron. A contributor to Octane for many years, he described back in early 2011 what it’s like to race a unique Drogo-bodied Ferrari 250GT SWB Competizione at the Goodwood Revival; a few pages further on, he was writing enthusiastically about his latest car purchase, a barn-find Austin Seven saloon. Tony bought his first Seven at the age of 11, which he planned (but failed) to turn into one of the Specials that were hugely popular in the 1950s. His first actual road car was a 1932 Seven Box Saloon, purchased for £30 in 1964. His final classic was also…

CHROMIUM IS A chemical element occurring naturally in many forms, but in hexavalent form it’s toxic and carcinogenic. And it covers significant parts of an old car, including bumpers, doorhandles and windscreen surrounds. Funny thing though, as Nigel Hayward, production manager at S&T Electroplating, points out: ‘We don’t use a lot. In fact, the chromium is really just a thin lacquer to seal in the nickel-plate underneath.’ I could have kept Trixie-the-Triumph GT6’s bumpers as they were, but there was a dented front blade and in original chrome-plated steel these Mark 1 GT6/Spitfire units are that dread acronym NLA (No Longer Available). You can get them in stainless, but that yellow-tinged polished metal finish is incredibly vulnerable to scratches and the wrong colour, which will look terrible against Trixie’s clotted-cream…

IT MAY SHOCK YOU, but these pictures aren’t of me pottering in the GR Supra: an ‘inquisitive’ daughter wiped my pictures out and the normal stock shots were no good because this was the specific edition of GR Supra that I had. It’s the 3.0 Jarama Race Track edition, yours for a smidgen under £55,000. Naming any car after a racetrack can bring with it a level of obligation. And risk. The last thing you want to do is create something too track-focused for the road, or too soft for the track, and there is a thin line between achieving both or neither. Such risk can easily be avoided, however, by completely ignoring that obligation. With only 30 scheduled for the UK out of a total build of 90, the…

ELIZABETH ALEXANDRA Mary Windsor ascended to the throne at a time when the nation was still scarred by bomb sites, wartime rationing had not fully ended, working women were frowned upon and footballers’ ‘wages’ were capped at £14 a week. Television was a luxury that few could afford and, if they could, the black-and-white image on a tiny 10in screen was frequently a fuzzy grey. Few then could have anticipated the reign of Queen Elizabeth II would be so long but, remarkably, she delivered on her pledge to serve until she dropped. Despite her obvious frailty she accepted the resignation of her 14th Prime Minister and the appointment of the 15th on her last Tuesday. She died on the Thursday. No-one under 70 had known any other monarch. Footballers’ ‘salaries’…

Book of the month Marcel Pourtout, Carrossier JON PRESSNELL, Dalton Watson, £110, ISBN 978 1 85443 286 5 As coachbuilders go, Pourtout was far from being one of the biggest and yet it was an amazing survivor, in business from 1925 until 1994. Even today, one of the Pourtout descendants keeps the family trade alive with a small body repair shop in the Parisian suburb of Rueil-Malmaison, to where the carrosserie moved in 1936. Pourtout is best remembered today for its glory years in the 1930s, when it employed the talented Georges Paulin as its designer. This was the era of the stylish Peugeot Darl’mat roadsters and coupés, and luxury commissions such as the spectacular Delage D8-120s and the Embiricos Bentley. It’s amusing to learn that Paulin worked only part-time…

1972 Mercedes-Benz 600 RM Sotheby’s, Monterey 18-20 August The 600 is big, outrageously over-complicated, expensive to fix and, in essence, a personal (or even governmental) limousine in an era when only sports cars bring huge money. They were technologically advanced when made and built like the proverbial bank vault on wheels. Anyone who was anyone owned one. Every dictator, almost every rock star and bunches of preachers, high-profile businessmen and assorted other crooks and characters owned them in the day. So why would you want one now? The other side of the coin is that they were, and are, a stuck-in-time high-tech wonder from the dawn of the Space Age, built like no other car will be again. Almost handcrafted, using the very best materials available, only 2190 were created over…

WHEN THIS XK150 rolled off the Browns Lane production line in 1958, it was destined to live out its days in Johannesburg. The South African climate is generally very kind to cars, at least when it comes to rust, but this XK150 didn’t just survive – it thrived. It was owned by an architect and then passed to his nephew in 1960, who used the car for many years. It was then sold to Dennis Cronje, a 747 pilot with South African Airways, who restored it to a high standard in the early ’90s. At that point the colour was changed to Sherwood Green from Pearl Grey, and it was given a triple-carb S-spec cylinder head. The current owner bought the car in 2008, and decided to take the upgrades…

FOR MOST OF us, recordings of early morning TV’s V8 Supercars provided a healthy dose of exciting Australian racing saloon action. The sight and sound of these big-inch bruisers thundering around Mount Panorama is not easily forgotten and, thanks to Vauxhall’s clever use of badge engineering, our daydreams of attacking The Esses and The Dipper could be fulfilled behind the wheel of the VXR8. Vauxhall had previously imported and re-badged the Holden Monaro Coupé to good effect. This was very much an old-school, 6.0-litre LS-powered muscle car (also sold in the US as the Pontiac GTO), which was very appealingly priced below £30,000. It was never a huge seller, but it found a solid number of enthusiast owners – many of whom added a supercharger for dramatic effect. As a…

1 October Swiss Classic British Car Meeting More than 1600 British cars and bikes head to Morges on the shores of Lake Geneva, along with some 25,000 visitors. Rolls-Royce is the featured marque this year. british-cars.ch 1 October Rendez-Vous Riviera Coinciding with classic yacht regatta Les Voiles de Saint-Tropez, this event sees classics and modern hypercars gather at Saint-Tropez Polo Club, where guests will also enjoy culinary and musical treats. rendezvousriviera.co.uk 1-2 October Ardennenrennen Classic VWs and Porsches are hustled from Liège to Bastogne and back, following a route that includes many stretches of road that featured in races of old. ardennenrennen.be 2 October Pioneer Run The Sunbeam Motor Cycle Club brings together over 300 pre-1915 motorcyles for a trundle from Epsom down to Brighton. sunbeam-mcc.co.uk 2-7 October Modena Cento…

Festival for the motoring arts The UK’s first ever motoring, literary and arts festival will take place on 6 November. Arranged by Porter Press International, the event will boast a range of speakers from Lord Hesketh and Peter Stevens to authors, drivers, engineers, designers and collectors. It will also have exhibitions by motoring artists and photographers. The motorsport-themed venue for the festival is Whittlebury Park, close to Silverstone, and organisers hope it will echo the likes of the Cheltenham and Hay literary festivals, but with a single, motoring focus. Former F1 entrant Lord Hesketh – who launched the career of James Hunt – will talk candidly about his heady and hedonistic team in the mid-1970s, while Stevens will share insight on his creations that include the XJR-15 and McLaren F1.…

‘TO LOSE ONE parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness,’ as Lady Bracknell had it. My year of living carelessly was 2020, which was a pretty rotten 12 months all round, I think we can agree. And for me 2021 wasn’t shaping up to be a whole lot cheerier, with the small matter of an impending 60th birthday on the horizon. Now, events like this can cause a chap to reflect a little, and the upshot of my ruminations was a resolve to crack on with life, and not to put off a moment longer all the things I’d been wanting to do. Uppermost on the list was to buy a sports car, and, thanks to a modest inheritance, I reckoned I could afford…

Jennie Taylor is the owner of this fabled 1934 Alfa Romeo Tipo B ‘P3’. It belonged to her late husband, the long-term Alfa Romeo collector Hugh, from 2005, and Jennie is committed to furthering his passion for chassis 50007, ensuring it continues to remain in the public eye. ‘The car is loved everywhere,’ she says. ‘In 2019 I took her to Cavallino Classic in Florida and people were so excited to see her that they couldn’t stop thanking me for bringing her “back home” to the USA, as they said, as she was famous for her Indianapolis days. In March 2020 we went to the Amelia Island Concours and had a wonderful show there, too.’ Jennie is rightly proud, because her P3 was campaigned in both Europe and the USA…

‘A SUMMER OF excuses’, I predicted. And sure enough, at every opportunity I’ve enjoyed a blast in the Boxster – when I haven’t been using my BMW Convertible, that is. But I bought the Porsche with the intention of pressing it into regular service rather than saving it for Sunday Best, and since the last instalment there have been a few longer trips, not least to Scarborough with Mrs W for a rock concert, and a hugely enjoyable foray to my folks in Lancashire via the Peak District, achieved in less time than it’d usually take via the M6. This car was made for a quiet evening on the A515, revelling in the twists out of Ashbourne and the spearing straights en route to Buxton. Then came a call from my…

‘GOOD VALUE AND a brand they’re not embarrassed about’: sounds as if Guy Pigounakis, commercial director of MG UK, isn’t aiming very high. But then he talks about how MG is currently the 12th best-selling carmaker in the UK (ahead of Land Rover and Skoda; behind Nissan) and there’s a suggestion of bullishness in his hopes for the future. Reaction to the brand new MG4 has been ‘better than we’d dared hope’. This is how far MG has come since its ignominious days as part of the Phoenix Consortium, which ended debt-ridden in 2005. China’s Nanjing Automobile Group bought it out and restarted production of the MG TF in 2007, then merged with China’s largest carmaker SAIC and launched the new (and now largely forgotten) British-built MG6 saloon in 2011.…

WHAT DO YOU DO when you’ve got £9.61 in the bank, it’s Friday night and there’s nothing to eat in the house? If you’re the irrepressible Shami Kalra, the man behind Omologato watches, you sit down, design a watch and start your own business. He explains: ‘We’d been making watches for other people for years, but we’d had a downer of about 12, maybe 13 months. And it got worse and worse and things were getting pretty compromised financially. My wife and I sat at the kitchen table that Friday night with less than a tenner between us and I thought “I’ve got to do something.” So, being a motorsport guy and somebody who designed watches, I put the Gulf Martini stripe on the right-hand side of a navy Breguet…

930 TURBO BY ANTOINE DUFILHO French artist Antoine Dufilho found success with sculptures of cars made using precision-cut, closely spaced metal cross-sections. The effect is neat: familiar shapes and lines are thrown into sharp relief one moment and vanish the next as your vantage point changes. Recently, though, Dufilho has produced a handful of pieces using metal tubing instead of sheet metal, returning to an idea he had previously deemed too difficult to execute well. And this tube-section rendering of the original Porsche 911Turbo is great fun – less enigmatic than the sculptures made in the usual manner, but brilliant as an exercise in conveying a sense of speed. £POA. antoinedufilho.com ‘ENDURANCE 24’ SWEATER BY T-LAB Ahead of Jack Frost’s inevitable return to the UK, Cheshire-based outfitter t-lab has expanded…

AN OVERALL FIGURE of $469m, as reported by Hagerty, puts this year’s Monterey auctions as the biggest – in terms of total sales – of all time. It smashed the previous 2015 benchmark of $394.5m by an almost 19% margin. Within this landmark result, a total of 113 cars surpassed the $1m mark. RM Sotheby’s promised a record-breaking auction and that’s exactly what it delivered, with a staggering $239,258,340 tally over three nights. The top seller for RM – and for the whole Monterey Car week – was the 1955 Ferrari 410 Sport Spider by Scaglietti (pictured above), which brought $22,005,000. There were plenty of exceptional results, but one of the most eye-opening was a 1995 Porsche 928 GTS, which sold for $406,500, more than double the previous record for…

THE BAHAMAS Speed Week quickly became one of the most exciting and hard-fought racing events of the calendar during its 12-year run from 1954 to 1966. As well as attracting cars and drivers from all over the world, there was a fair share of locals taking part. The first owner of this competition-spec E-type was one such driver. Mr Hans Schenk of the Bahamas took delivery of this distinctive E-type from East Bay Service Ltd of Nassau on 29 September 1961. It was bought with the sole purpose of entering – and winning – the Speed Week. Schenk was something of a celebrity chef in the Bahamas, but had also become an accomplished driver, racing competitively since 1957. Preparation for its first event included the addition of a black nose…