Table of contents for Janauray 2020 in Octane

There seems To be a bit a backlash in the enthusiast car community at the moment over all those adverts that state that a car for sale ‘can only go up in value’. I can see why, of course, because it suggests the only reason anyone should be tempted by a car is with a cast-iron guarantee that there will be a return in it for them, that a potential profit is an essential precursor to purchase. Turn it around, though, and for me it sends a far more compelling message: ‘Can’t go down any further in value.’ That says: go on, here’s your chance, possibly your last depending on your circumstances, grab that dream and live it while you can. And that’s what car ownership is all about, isn’t…

30 November – 1 December KartMania Exhibitors from across the world of karting – manufacturers, championship organisers, clubs – will gather at Silverstone for the KartMania show, which, as always, will include a ‘Kart Boot’ sale. kartmania.co.uk 4-8 December Classic Sebring From the folks behind the Daytona Classic 24 Hour comes this event at Sebring, where the racing cars will be joined by a large display of vintage aircraft. hsrrace.com 6-8 December Retro Classics Bavaria The organisers of Retro Classics Stuttgart bring their brand of entertainment two hours east to the exhibition centre in Nuremberg. Expect themed displays, a large club presence, good grub, and many opportunities to lighten the wallet: cars, parts and automobilia will all be on offer. retro-classics-bavaria.de 7-10 December Le Jog The Land’s End to John…

Jaguar XKs circumnavigate Britain for charity Philip Porter’s now-annual charity drive around the coast of Britain has raised the total amassed for Prostate Cancer UK by his adventures to over £250,000. For 2019 the event featured Jaguar XKs (it alternates with E-types) and 50 cars took part over 18 days on either the entire 3400-mile route or smaller sections. It started and finished at Beaulieu’s National Motor Museum in Hampshire, the finishers flagged home by steam car Land Speed Record-holder Don Wales. Both Wales and Porter have been successfully treated for prostate cancer. Porter said: ‘For an event created as a one-off, it’s wonderful that the Round Britain Coastal Drive has continued to raise significant sums for charity four years later.’ Best of all, every penny raised for Prostate UK…

‘I wanted somethIng more interesting than a Mk3 Escort,’ he said. That’s fair, although building your own car was surely an extreme step. It’s one thing to assemble a Caterham Seven in a couple of weekends, but quite another to create your own car from scratch. Peter Vivian is a ‘maker’, however. He works in Bournemouth University’s product design department and wasn’t daunted by never having made a car before. ‘It had always been in the back of my mind to build something. I got a kit car magazine, no doubt one of Peter Filby’s, and saw plan-built cars for the first time.’ Inspired by the JC Midge, designed by John Cowperthwaite in the early ’80s and based loosely on the J2 Midget, he got himself a set of plans…

MASERATI GRANTURISMO If you prefer your GT with a little more restraint, Maserati has always been the Italian to go for. This classy and beautifully trimmed, if rather bulky, 2+2 uses the wonderful 4.2-litre V8 and six-speed ZF automatic transmission found also in the Quattroporte saloon. Now temptingly cheap, the earliest standard examples are available from about £20,000, but budget closer to £30k to get a slightly newer and more powerful 4.7-litre S with the all-important service history. There’s a lot of Ferrari DNA in the GranTurismo, especially in the engine, so be prepared for the bills associated with that. FERRARI 599 FIORANO A V12-engined Ferrari is always going to be a spectacular thing to drive, but the 599 is also one of the most rewarding to own. Servicing is…

‘19 YEARS AGO, A CAR LIKE THIS WAS CONSIDERED A REJECTED PROJECT’ Back in 1920, engineer Nicola Romeo added his surname to the company he’d just purchased – Anonima Lombarda Fabbrica Automobili – and created Alfa Romeo. But more than three decades passed before a group of Alfa Romeo technicians gathered in Paris – according to some at a bistro with a musician; others say that they were at a party with a Russian poet – and it was said: ‘So many Romeos, yet not even a Giulietta…’ And history was written. Only a year later, the Alfa Romeo Giulietta Sprint was introduced at the Turin motor show, in April 1954. Unusually, the first version was not a sedan but the coupé, designed by Franco Scaglione and manufactured at the…

WELCOME TO ZWICKAU, home of Audi. But isn’t Zwickau a town in the former East Germany? Home to the Trabant? And isn’t Audi based in Ingolstadt, 200 miles away in Bavaria? Well, yes, yes and yes. Ingolstadt’s Museum Mobile was opened to spectacular fanfare in 2000, but Audi has been based in Ingolstadt only since 1965. In fact, the Audi name reappeared at that time after 25 years’ absence, when Mercedes-Benz sold the Auto Union group to Volkswagen, which needed Ingolstadt’s plant capacity. It just happened to come with a brand new and soundly engineered saloon car that needed a suitable brand name. And Audi did the trick. If you want to explore the early history of Audi – and its founder August Horch, not to mention the Auto Union…

WITH THE ESPADA’S engine out and on the bench (see last month’s OCTANE), it’s time to delve inside and finally discover why it had an unsustainable appetite for coolant and why its crankcase was breathing so heavily. First job is to remove the cylinder heads. These have a habit of being sticky on a Lamborghini V12 of this vintage but we’re in luck because, when this engine was last rebuilt in the mid-’80s, all the cylinder studs had been liberally wiped in copper grease. So the heads slip off with little effort. It soon becomes clear that both head-gaskets are knackered, which is the cause of all the coolant issues. But instead of coolant leaking into the cylinder, combustion gases were leaking into the coolant passages under compression. That’s why…

THE BICESTER Heritage Sunday Scramble is one of the best events on the calendar, especially if you need an excuse to take your classic for one last run before it goes away for winter. This year’s final Scramble has been in my diary for some time, since sadly I missed the first-ever Super Scramble earlier in the year. And when the opportunity of arriving in something very special cropped up, it was a done deal. I usually go to catch up with colleagues and friends. This time, though, I had a more important job as a delivery driver for BMW UK, which had decided to arrange a small display at the show. The cars would come from its historic collection, including a328, an M1, a Z8 and a selection of…

‘RED ROBBO HAD CALLED WORKERS OUT ON 523 OCCASIONS. THE STRIKES HAD COST BL £200 MILLION’ On 1 nOvember 1997, Michael Owen Edwardes was handed the poisoned chalice of British industry that was British Leyland. In the preceding year BL had lost production of a quarter of a million cars through industrial disputes. Previous chairmen had failed to rein in the power of the trades unions that were crippling the corporation, and to rationalise the sprawling behemoth of companies and brands that constituted the conglomerate. Given that Edwardes stood a diminutive 5ft 3in, this truly pitched a David against a Goliath. Edwardes was born in 1930, in South Africa where his father ran a panel-beating and battery business in Port Elizabeth. The young Michael’s upbringing was one of tough love;…

1:43 scale 1946 Buick parade float By Autocult Price £156.95 Material Resincast In 1946, Detroit held a lavish automotive parade to mark its 50 years in the US motor industry, and one of the more spectacular exhibits was a dramatic piece of rolling sculpture that combined the front half of a Buick – loosely based on the 1939 Y-Job concept – with a massive representation of a Buick bonnet ornament. How the driver steered it or where he sat, we have no idea; perhaps his head poked up in the shadowy area beneath the car. Such alorry-sized object makes for a large model, even in 1:43 scale, so it’s something of a statement piece. Fortunately, the silver finish is immaculate, while the car – what there is of it –…

SILVERSTONE AUCTIONS has always managed to post a few surprise results at its end-of-year NEC Classic Motor Show sale, and this year it was the ex-works Triumph TR2, which sold for £258,750. It’s a unique car, that has been with the last owner for 47 years – and now holds the world record price paid for a TR2 at auction. Results generally were mixed, as expected, but sales totalled a respectable £5.8m with a 75% rate. Biggest surprise of the auction? The sub-7000-mile 1991 E30 BMW 325i Sport, which sold for an astonishing £51,188. A fluke? Perhaps, but the best youngtimers are still holding their own. The RM Sotheby’s London auction at Olympia was again a mixed bag, with sales totalling £9.4m. While some of the prices seemed on the…

FEW LIVERIES pack a visual punch like Jägermeister’s orange and white. Apply it to something as wild as this 1977 Kremer Porsche 935 K3 and not much will compete for presence. The Japanese operation BH Auction will offer this immaculate specimen at its Super GT sale, to be held at the 2020 Tokyo Auto Salon in January. Starting life as a standard 1977 Porsche 930, it was converted to fire-breathing Group 5 Kremer 935 K3 spec in 1981. In this final and most extreme incarnation of the 935, the bare monocoque was retained as per the regulations but the entire front end was swapped for a full spaceframe. This one featured the largest of rear wings, as well as the 3.0-litre Le Mans-spec engine. Although this 935 K3 didn’t compete…

A new British motor museum designed to be the antidote to priceless car collections that everyday motorists cannot relate to is to open in Derbyshire on 12 April. Uniquely for the UK, visitors will even have an opportunity to drive the car they always dreamed of on a private mile-long course. The Great British Car Journey museum, or exhibition as its founder prefers to call it, is the brainchild of Richard Usher, ex-Auto Windscreens boss and former owner of Blyton Park. His inspiration came when a regular visitor to the Lincolnshire track gradually hooked him on a very low-mileage Austin Maestro: ‘I realised it was something I had an enormous affection for – it was the first car to have a glued-in windscreen after all, so it was important to…

AFTER YEARS OF struggling by with poor-quality electrical components, classic car and bike enthusiasts have been promised a new range of authentic Lucas components, built to a higher quality than before. Launched at November’s UK Classic Motor Show, the Lucas Authentic Classic Range will be sold in the traditional 1950s-style red-and-black boxes. More importantly, it will be subject to much more stringent quality control than in recent years, according to the maker. Initially, the range will target three specific markets – Jaguars, Land Rovers and classic motorcycles – via three major specialists in those respective fields – SNG Barratt, Britpart and Wassell. Julian Parker is the Lucas product manager at SNG Barratt and explained to Octane how and why the motivation to revitalise the brand came about. ‘Lucas has an…

Bart Lenaerts’ story in Octane 198 about driving Bertone’s amazing Lancia Stratos Zero brought back vivid memories for me. I was lucky enough to drive it, too – while it was in Sydney, Australia, for a car show in 1972. I was editor of Sports Car World magazine and twisted the organiser’s arm to let me borrow it and the almost-as-radical Pininfarina Abarth 2000 he’d also imported. I drove the Stratos the length of one of Sydney’s main streets, increasingly enjoying the shocked looks on pedestrians’ faces as it glided past at little more than knee height. Then we took both cars 20 miles by truck to the old Warwick Farm race circuit to be driven in safety and photographed by Uwe Kuessner. Both cars ran without fuss, a reminder…

Conviction and self-confidence are admirable traits as long as they don’t slide into arrogance and hubris. But it was hard to be humble when your new motor car had just been lauded by The Autocar as ‘The Best Car in the World’. The first motor car badged ‘Rolls-Royce’ was the Rolls-Royce 10hp shown at the Paris Salon in 1904, sold by Charles Rolls and engineered by Henry Royce. Their new company, Rolls-Royce Limited, was founded in 1906 and commercial manager Claude Johnson persuaded the directors to concentrate on just one car. That was the upcoming 40/50hp model which offered an ‘adequate’ 7.4-litre in-line six-cylinder engine. Following that accolade from The Autocar, it soon took on the sobriquet ‘Silver Ghost’, after the famous silver Royce demonstrator, registered AX 201. It probably…

replicating the past to exacting standards is a welcome celebration of heritage. Even more so when that ‘replica’ is a toolroom copy of an aircraft that defended the skies over Europe. At the hands of your grandfather, 100 years ago. One you have flown in the same airspace in which it saw active service. And one endorsed by the family of its original maker and controlled by the same joystick and rudder bar that guided the original in grandad’s hands. That’s a boast David Bremner can make after the 68-year-old engineer from Shropshire, his brother Rick and friend Theo Willford recreated the 1915 Bristol Scout that David and Rick’s grandfather piloted over the eastern Mediterranean in 1915-16. Their collective effort took the best part of 13 years and was inspired…

Dawn breaks over Hyde Park. Thankfully the weather doesn’t. There’s a perceptible sunrise and, although it’s chilly, it’s dry, and the forecast reckons it will remain so for most of the day. Which is nice. Ahead is a 60-mile drive. Doesn’t sound much: through Central London and out via the city’s southern suburbs, then into the wilder green yonder up and over the South Downs, finally into Brighton, by the sea. Given decent traffic in a modern car it’d be, what, 90 minutes? With the radio on, air-con keeping the ’screen clear, sat-nav sorting the best route. There was none of that in 1904. No roof, not even a windscreen. While this Vauxhall 6hp ‘light car’ was advanced for its age, you might better compare it to a park bench…

You have to look pretty closely to spot the ding in the bright-metal trim above the offside headlight. It’s a rare blemish on a car that otherwise appears near-concours in condition. But that ding has a story behind it: reputedly, Lotus boss Colin Chapman made it when driving too fast into one of the factory’s garages. For this is not just any Cortina; it’s not even ‘just another’ Cortina Lotus. This immaculate ’60s executive saloon was Chapman’s personal car, given to him by Ford in 1969, and one in which he racked-up some 14,000 miles. Rather fast miles, it seems: the story goes that the gatehouse guard at Lotus’s new Hethel factory would have to rush to lift the barrier whenever he saw Chapman’s Cortina approaching; if he was too…

THE PAIN OF selling a car that you don’t really want to let go can be mitigated if you know it’s going to someone who will look after it. And I’ve been lucky in that my two early three-door Discoverys are now in the best of hands. The two vehicles were recently reunited in Plymouth for the 30th anniversary celebrations of the launch of the Discovery in 1989. Back in those cash-strapped days, Land Rover chose Devon rather than Dubai or Dubrovnik to unveil its latest model to the world’s press – and one of my two Discoverys, G510 WAC, was part of the official launch at Plymouth. I found G510 for sale as just another secondhand Discovery in the late ’90s, and used it for a while as my…

IN A MONTH WHEN all other published and internal HAGI indices posted losses ranging from 1.56% to 5.61%, the Lamborghini Polo Storico (LPS) was the only market measure to make a gain in October – albeit a modest one of 0.37%. That’s just one shade of the difference between other marques and Lamborghini. Another is that this is the only marque index to encompass all of a marque’s models and sub-models, up to and including the Diablo. But even with October’s marginal gain, the LPS is also the only index that is down quarter-on-quarter, albeit by a marginal 1.92%. Such short-term variation, far from being unusual particularly in low- and negative-growth market phases, is a characteristic of the scope within the overall asset class of collectable cars. The quarterly bounces…

now that production of the GranTurismo has come to an end, the future of Maserati’s four-seater coupé is so far unwritten. Our attention naturally returns to some of the classics and, while the Biturbo might have been a guilty pleasure for many years, the best are starting to look fantastic. As the final and most extreme version of the model line – this side of the V8 Shamal at least – the 222 Racing got an uprated version of the 2.0-litre 24-valve V6 engine, with a lighter crankshaft, forged pistons, new con-rods and increased compression ratio. Along with modified turbos and Magneti Marelli engine and boost management, power was up to 283bhp, which (Maserati claimed at the time) made this the most powerful 2.0-litre production car. This was combined with…

Nobody caN deNy that Gullwing doors are extremely cool, and they were absolutely key in securing funding for entrepreneur Malcolm Bricklin’s sports car project. The wow-factor of these doors was just what the 1970s American car market wanted, and the sharp-looking, V8-powered SV-1 could have been a serious rival to the Corvette. Roughly $23m of funding was secured from the Canadian province of New Brunswick, which saw the opportunity to bring much-needed employment to the area. Bricklin not only wanted to take on the Corvette, but also to create the safest car in the world with the SV-1 (for Safety Vehicle One). This two-seater sports car would feature a V8 engine from AMC, a strong glassfibre bodyshell with a steel rollover structure and 5mph impact bumpers, all integrated into the…

Red Dust Revival 12-16 September A dust cloud rises into the clearblue sky as everything from Ford ModelTs to Rolls-Roycesthunderacross a distant outpost ofWestern Australia. The venue is Lake Perkolilli: not a lake, but a shimmering red claypan, billiard-table smooth and rock-hard thanks to a high gypsum content in the clay (the same stuff used to make plasterboard). This 4.25km oval track is 600km east of Perth, close to the remote Kalgoorlie goldfields (well, 40km from them) and has been hosting motorsport and speed records for more than a century. Organised by the Lake Perkolilli Motor Sports Club, which was formed after the venue’s 100th anniversary in 2014, the 2019 Revival featured 100 pre-war cars and bikes. Hero of the event was Ted Mumme, who drove 3400km from Darwin on…

Maybe these pages should be in monochrome. Our two cars are both painted in metallic grey, and the sun is so strong that colour seems almost bleached away as our eyes overload. Here at Octane, mostly we feature properly old cars in our major stories. Mostly. But such cars would lose some of their appeal on a day like today; occupants would burn or melt, engines might overheat, starting might become difficult as fuel vaporises in the wrong parts of the pipework. But for this tale we’re moving with time, comparing two blue-chip classics-in-waiting, noting that they are both well into their second decade and, currently, are temptingly affordable. Even better, serendipitous as it suddenly seems, both have first-rate air-conditioning. Heated seats too, which is worth remembering as you may…

I feel somewhat bereft this evening. My final autumn drive was to take the BMW to its winter storage location. My garage will soon be a building site, as part of it is converted into a home office. And RH Classics (rhclassics.co. uk), based near Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire, kindly offered the BMW a winter home at its expanding storage facility. I got very lucky with the weather. Not warm, but bright and crisp, so I gave the E30 a wash and buff-up, lowered the roof and headed out on the 40-mile drive. It’s at times like this that I’m glad the first owner shelled out for heated seats – and that I shelled out for a new blower motor a couple of years ago, when the original packed in. With…

My dad was always a fan of the Citroën CX yet he drove a succession of Fords. And when the time came to replace my mum’s Renault 14 in the 1980s, he ducked out of the Citroën BX I’d suggested and bought her an Austin Maestro. Which was rusty within two years. Yet these days he’s a Citroënist. And so’s my mum. It goes back 20-odd years to when I bought an AX and dad was so impressed he bought mum one too. Which was handed on to my sister when mum got a Saxo. And when dad retired, he waved goodbye to his company Scorpio and bought a C5. These days he’s on his second C4 Cactus (just bought, on the new-fangled suspension), and mum has possibly the lowest-mileage…

Avid motorcycle enthusiast Murray Walker put into words the essence of the Sammy Miller Motorcycle Museum Trust when he said: ‘As I walk in here, it is like a starving man walking into Harrods Food Hall.’ He was talking about a collection of around 400 motorcycles, many of them prototypes or sole remaining examples. And with a handful of exceptions, one of which is built totally from wood, they all run. Ulsterman Sammy Miller MBE is the complete motorcyclist, as the cases containing hundreds of his trophies testify. He raced on roads, then tackled trials, motocross, grasstrack and sand racing. Now he gathers and restores motorcycles from all over the world at his workshop adjoining the museum. The standards of restoration are astonishing, and once on display the machines benefit…

BROMPTON EXPLORE EDITION Brompton’s folding bicycles have always been more capable than most people assume, and the new Explore Edition, which comes with low-ratio six-speed gearing and a raft of spares, is designed to encourage commuters to take the scenic route home. £1525. brompton.com GYEON Q2 ANTIFOG Generally we enjoy old cars for all the things they can do and forgive them the things they can’t, but we’ll admit there have been many damp mornings when we’ve wished for a windscreen demister. This stuff is the next best thing, and, according to Gyeon, one application should prevent fogging for at least two months. £8. polishedbliss.co.uk 500 COLOURS BY GUY ALLEN Guy Allen points out that, despite this limited-edition print featuring colours from period Fiat charts, it should not be used…

In the late 1970s, the Swiss watch industry was getting beasted. Those nasty, rough lads from the Japanese quartz-movement factories had climbed over the playground wall and were duffing up anything Swiss and mechanical they could find. Almost overnight, the 90,000-strong skilled Swiss workforce making cases, movements, dials and watches turned into 40,000 and a very long dole queue. Japanese quartz was reliable, highly accurate and getting cheaper by the day. Worse, it represented a new and exciting future, not the safe, slightly dull, fusty wind-up past. Yes, at the start the new watches went ‘beep’ a lot, needed batteries to light up their little red LED faces and were a tad arriviste, but soon the Japanese makers were turning in some properly remarkable watchmaking. For example, in July 1978…

REPLICA CARS ARE easy to dislike. They are often poorly built and they rely on others for many of their parts, often including the engine. Owners of the ‘real’ examples often shun them, and some replicas are so poorly executed that they are not thought of as proper cars. Except, that is, when they are done well. Then they can serve a purpose: to be a tribute to the real, often unaffordable thing. The Glen Pray cars were built in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, during the mid-1960s. Pray knew his market, and he knew the original cars built by Cord in the 1930s. He owned the originals, he fixed the originals and he was a parts resource for the originals. The model name ‘8/10’ is a neat tribute to the earlier…

SEEING JUST ONE of these beautiful Delahaye 135s should be enough to brighten anyone’s mood, but the complete trio of Cabriolet, Coach and Roadster might just take your breath away. Thanks to RM Sotheby’s you will have the opportunity to bid on all three at next year’s Paris auction – the trio (complete with a huge stash of spare parts) is being offered from the Dayez Collection. The late Jacques Dayez was a collector known for his absolute approach to the correct maintenance and restoration of his cars. This 1939 Delahaye 135 Roadster, the last of the 13 examples built, was the crown jewel in his collection. The build started in 1939, but this wonderfully evocative Art Deco machine wasn’t completed until 1947 due to the outbreak of World War…

Nobody was more bullish on the commercial potential of the Apple-1 than Steve Jobs, but even the man hailed as a visionary could not have predicted that examples of his company’s first product would one day change hands for hundreds of thousands of dollars. The Apple-1, designed by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, was comically underpowered by today’s standards but, as the first pre-assembled personal computer to come to market, it was a landmark achievement. It was launched in 1976 and sold briskly at a retail price of $666.66 ($3000 in today’s money) but, because Wozniak was the only person who could provide tech support to Apple-1 users, customers were encouraged to trade their Apple-1 for an Apple II when the latter became available in ’77. The returned computers were destroyed,…

I’m In the uk every July and August when I rent out my home in Spain. It’s five minutes from the coast. The Crayford Convertible Car Club also has a summer get-together in Westerham where our works used to be, and where I still have an apartment. Quite a few Cortinas, Minis and others turn up. The owners are a wonderful bunch. They think I’m some sort of God – I’ve even autographed some of the cars. Trouble is, I’ve forgotten why we did certain things and when they ask me I don’t always have the answers. My family’s from Belfast. My father was in the RAF, Fighter Command mostly, based at Biggin Hill during the war. My mother brought us here to be near him and we’ve been Kent-based…