TWO UNIQUE WONDERCARS!

THOMASSIMA III AND ISDERA COMMENDATORE

£5.50 / ISSUE 201 / MARCH 2020

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FRAZER NASH LE MANS REPLICA PORSCHE 909 AUDI IMPERATOR PEMBLETON THREE-WHEELER MASERATI CLASSICHE
● ● ● ●
The Aviation Pioneers Squad

Scott Kelly
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Luke Bannister
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 Issue 201 / March 2020

CONTENTS

9
 EAGLE
SINCE 1984

1965 Jaguar E-Type Series 1 Roadster Eagle No.20

NOW AVAILABLE

A rare opportunity to bypass the waiting list for a Eagle Dark Blue with Biscuit Trim
bespoke Eagle E-Type restoration. Highly specified Only 1,933 miles since Full Eagle Restoration in 2007
and low mileage, Eagle No.20 is now available with the Eagle SuperSport Specification
owner having just commissioned an Eagle Spyder GT. 4.7-Litre XK Engine
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+44 (0)1825 830966 Bespoke Air Conditioning System
sales@eaglegb.com Eagle Custom Sports Seats
www.eaglegb.com Featured at the 2018 Amelia Island Concours
 Issue 201 / March 2020

CONTENTS
60

130

FEATURES
911 or e-type?
page 60
Two icons, so different in appeal, yet so close
in launch date – time for a popularity contest!
PLUS experts reveal their choices

frazer nash le mans replica

page 76
Tragedy struck in this 1950s sports car.
Now the next generation gives it a chance

thomassima iii
page 86
Incredible story of one American’s obsession
86 120
with creating the perfect Italian GT

pembleton three-wheeler
page 96
A labour of love becomes a production reality

porsche 909 bergspyder

page 102
Ferdinand Piëch’s daring experiment returns
to the Alpine hillclimb it was designed for

the octane interview

page 112
Fabio Collina of Maserati Classiche

audi type r imperator

page 120
A trip round Berlin in one of eastern
Germany’s finest luxury cars

isdera commendatore 112i

page 130
Comeback time for the forgotten supercar

11
 Issue 201 / March 2020

CONTENTS
150
REGULARS
EVENTS & NEWS
Page 22
Latest events in pictures; diary dates; destination
Dresden; Bullitt Mustang sells for millions

GEARBOX
Page 44
Car accessory entrepreneur Chris Mitchell

COLUMNS
Page 47
Jay Leno, Derek Bell, Stephen Bayley and
Robert Coucher air their monthly laundry
22 156
LETTERS
Page 55
Heroes of Australian bush fires lose their classics

OCTANE CARS
Page 140
Mark Dixon buys back his old Model T; Aston DB5
and Porsche 944 could be on the move

OVERDRIVE
Page 150
Mercedes for all seasons and reasons; meet the
engineer who perfected his Jensen-Healey

GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN

Page 156
Industrial designer and car stylist Brooks Stevens

ICON
Page 158
Olympus cameras, marvels of miniaturisation

CHRONO
Page 160
1970s Timex that was the first watch for so many
162
BOOKS, GEAR, MODELS
Page 162
Beat the post-Christmas blues with a wish list

THE MARKET
Page 173
What’s sold and selling; buy a Fiat 130 Coupé

DAY IN THE LIFE

Page 242
TV classic car buyer/restorer Paul Cowland

12
 CALIBER RM 11-03

RICHARD MILLE BOUTIQUES

GENEVA PARIS LONDON MILAN MONACO MOSCOW MUNICH PORTO CERVO
ABU DHABI BEIRUT DOHA DUBAI ISTANBUL KUWAIT CITY JEDDAH RIYADH

www.richardmille.com

sam chick
eDitOr’S WeLCOMe
Decisions, decisions
Beatles versus stones, Bjorg against
McEnroe, Senna or Prost: every sphere seems
to have its premier league of eternal rivalries
that take competition to a new level. In the
world of classic cars there are loads, ranging
from Midget and Spitfire to 250 GT SWB or
DB4 GTZ, but pre-eminent among all battles
is 911 versus E-type. There is no denying that
they top the aspiration list for an astonishing
number of people, and have long done so.
I find that especially interesting because,
while they are clearly both brilliant and iconic,
other than that they actually have very little in
common in ethos, tech or appearance. Perhaps
the appeal is the breadth of model options, and,
of course, the commensurate price variation.
Running from substantially less than £50k (I
know someone who last year imported a near-
usable six-cylinder E-type from the States for
bang on £20k) to, well let’s say £250k if we
ignore the extreme competition models, the
911 and E-type are prime savings-squander
fodder at one end and, via a decent-sized
bathroom loan, work their way right up to some
major equity release at the other.
One thing is for sure: while everyone will
already have an opinion and a favourite, it isn’t
that simple. For example, it was E-type all the
way for me until a 2007 photoshoot when I
borrowed a 911S from Export 56 and drove
14
Issue 201 / March 2020
it to the Peak District in wintry weather for a
group test that also included a gorgeous E-type.
By the time I’d arrived and, for the first time,
had the chance to properly ‘learn’ the 911 and
its heating foibles, my head had been seriously
turned. And when I left two days later, it was a
done deal. The Porsche’s proportions and extra
grip were leagues better for pointing and
shooting over the narrow, twisty Peak District
roads, the wheel placement better poised on
slippery corners when the E-type could leave
your heart in your mouth. And that’s when you
could see through the constant mist on the
E-type’s screen. Even with the cars parked up
nose to tail, the unfussy profile of the Porsche
– not to mention its integrated rear lights – was
far more confidently and smoothly resolved.
Yet still… the E-type, though. It’s just more
‘special’, isn’t it? Read on and decide.
James Elliott,
editor in chief
featuring
sam chick
‘Crawling in a roof void high above the
studio floor gave me a unique perspective
on two iconic and uncompromising designs
that changed our collective culture. Forced
to choose? I’d stand with Enzo Ferrari: the
E-type is the most beautiful car ever.’
To see Sam’s beautiful 911 and E-type images,
turn to pages 60-72.
maurice Volmeyer
diederik Plug
‘In 2014 I got the chance to drive the elusive
Isdera Commendatore 112i. Before that, I
was convinced it didn’t exist. To take it for a
spin was a stunning experience. Now, years
later, I got to experience the car in its original
glory, after it was restored by its original
manufacturer. That felt like full circle to me.’
The forgotten supercar: pages 130-138.
andrew english
‘I’d discovered Pete Larsen’s Liberty Ace
three-wheeler, which went on to become
Morgan’s Three Wheeler, and hillclimbed a
Triking three-wheeler, so I was well-qualified
to test the Pembleton. It’s as much about
the construction, looks and love that’s gone
into it as that it has a wheel missing.’
See Andrew lose his grip on pages 96-100.
 NOW INVITING
CONSIGNMENTS

OFFERED WITHOUT RESERVE

1976 Lancia Beta Montecarlo
Chassis no. 137 AS 0001523

OFFERED WITHOUT RESERVE

1998 Porsche RUF Turbo R
2000 Ferrari 456M GT
Chassis no. ZFFWP44B000118679 Chassis no. WP0ZZZ99ZWS370295

OFFERED WITHOUT RESERVE

1976 Porsche 911 Carrera 3.0
Chassis no. 9117600379

27 MARCH

ESSEN
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GERMANY +49 (0) 800 000 7203

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NEXT MONTh EDITORIAL
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Mark Dixon
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in the alps! art editor

Robert Hefferon
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Matthew Hayward
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international editor
Celebrating 40 years of the legend Robert Coucher
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senior Contributor John Simister
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Issue 202 test driver John Barker

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K IDSTO N - THE MOST BE AU T IF U L

Illustrated 1973 PoRsche 911 Rs (known history from new)

K i d s t o n s . A . 7 A v e n u e P i c t e t d e R o c h e m o n t, 1 2 0 7 G e n e v A , s W i t Z e R L A n d
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tel +41 22 740 1939 FA x + 4 1 2 2 7 4 0 1 9 4 5 w w w. K i d s to n . c o m

IGNITION / Month in Pictures

IGNITION
E V E N T S + N E W S + O PI N I O N

Le Jog
7-10 December
Le Jog marked its 25th anniversary, predictably, by travelling 1500 miles in
75 hours from Britain’s most south-westerly point (Land’s End) to its most
north-easterly (John O’Groats). Some 82 cars, including eight vintageants,
started the gruelling epic, with 64 of them making it to the end. Even after
a generation of experience and tech advances, not to mention vastly better
and more scientific preparation for endurance events, it seems this one is
still a major challenge. Six crews received gold medals: Stuart and Emily
Anderson (Bentley 4¼), Paul Dyas and Martyn Taylor (Volvo Amazon),
Kevin Haselden and Gary Evans (Mini-Cooper), Stewart Christie and Andy
Ballantyne (MGB GT), Richard Boughton and Paul Bosdet (BMW 2002
Tii), and Eric Michiels and Aswin Pyck (Porsche 924S).
Image Will Broadhead Photography / HERO

22
23
 GOODING & COMPANY PRESENTS

THE
AMELIA f
florida

ISLAND AUCTION
FRIDAY March 6 11am

1969 LAMBORGHINI MIURA P400 S 1961 PORSCHE 356 B SUPER 90 COUPE

Exceptional Unrestored Example with Just Three From The Tommy Trabue Collection
Owners and Less than 18,000 Miles from New A Custom-Ordered Example with Numerous
Coachwork by Bertone I Chassis 4109 Special Features I Without Reserve

1961 PORSCHE 356 B SUPER COUPE
From The Tommy Trabue Collection I One of Five
356 B Models Built with Coachwork by Beutler
Displayed at the 1960 Geneva Motor Show
1914 ROLLS-ROYCE 40/50 HP SILVER GHOST
TORPÉDO PHAETON
First in Class and Best of Show Nominee at
the 2015 Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance®
Coachwork by Kellner I Chassis 67RB

1976 PORSCHE 934 I The First Example Built I Delivered New to Jürgen Kannacher
Raced at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1979 I Chassis 930 670 0151

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IGNITION / Month in Pictures in ASSOCiATiOn WiTH
egwu
PRIVATE BANKERS SINCE 1886

east african safari classic,

27 november – 6 december
First run in 2003, the event had a new
sponsor in Omologato watches for
2019, but still tackled 5000km of
car-killing terrain. Tuthill and kabras
Sugar Racing-prepped Porsche 911s
dominated the entry list – and the
results – with Ford escorts, a Datsun,
nissan, Rover and mazda in supporting
roles. kris Rosenberger and niki
Bleicher won in their 911 from Stig
Blomqvist and Jörgen Fornander.

m c klein

28
VIVA LES VOILES
ST TROPEZ, FRANCE
3 0TH S E P T E M B E R – 4TH O C T O B E R 2 0 2 0

This exclusive 5 day/4 night motoring tour includes spectacular driving routes through
Provence before arriving in St Tropez for the classic yacht regatta Les Voiles de St Tropez.

Meticulously planned routes through Provence

First class accommodation including two nights at Château de la Messardière in St Tropez
Relaxed lunch stops, gourmet cuisine and fine wines
Full programme of hospitality throughout the weekend
Limited to just 20 cars, classic and modern

For a brochure call Chris on 01635 867705 or email chris@v-management.com

IGNITION / Events Diary
COMING UP…
The VSCC pulls an all-nighter in Leicestershire,
and tractors are chic at Rétromobile in Paris
1 February
The Measham Rally
That date is slightly misleading,
because participants set off from
Bruntingthorpe Aerodrome long
after darkness has fallen and this
night rally actually finishes on
2 February. It’s what the VSCC
calls ‘the ultimate pre-war
motoring challenge’’, and if the
VSCC says that…
vscc.co.uk
5-9 February
Rétromobile
Tractors are set to take centre
stage at Rétromobile in 2020, the
organisers having gathered
together 30 rare and significant
machines in addition to the usual
array of outstanding classic cars.
retromobile.com
7-9 February
Boca Raton Concours
d’Elegance
All eyes will be on Duesenberg at
the 14th Boca Raton Concours as
the grand old American marque
celebrates (by one measure, at
least) its centenary.
bocaratonconcours.com
30
Retro Classics Stuttgart, 27 February – 1 March
8 February
Concours in the Hills
Fountain Hills, Arizona, has long
been known for its giant fountain,
which shoots water 170m into the
air. More recently it has gained
attention for this gathering of
around 1000 cars which last year
raised $155,000 for charity.
concoursinthehills.org
15 February – 5 March
Southern Cross Safari
The Southern Cross Safari will
take entrants on a 3600km
adventure through Kenya and
Tanzania. The schedule allows for
ten ‘game drives’, so crews should
meet all of the region’s four-legged
residents before flying home.
rallytheglobe.com
15 February – 8 March
New Zealand Classic
The Classic’s monster 7000km
route begins in Auckland and
finishes in Christchurch but will
take entrants all over the North
and South Islands via a handful of
racetracks and more than 50
regularity sections.
endurorally.com
Image: Messe Stuttgart
16 February – 5 March
The Maharajah Marathon
Much less strenuous than the
name suggests, this is a luxury tour
of Rajasthan featuring relaxed
driving days and excursions to
some of the region’s most famous
landmarks and historical sites.
rallyround.co.uk
20-23 February
London Classic Car Show
In 2020 the show moves from
London’s ExCeL to its new home
at the Olympia London, and the
venue will be filled with a fine
selection of high-end classics from
across the UK and beyond.
thelondonclassiccarshow.co.uk
21-23 February
Race Retro
Historic racing cars, historic
motorcycles and modern central
heating will again delight visitors
to Stoneleigh Park in
Warwickshire – but, with a wealth
of Group B machines in action on
the live rally stage, you won’t want
to stay indoors all day, whatever
the weather.
raceretro.com
21-23 February
ClassicAuto Madrid
First held in 2010, ClassicAuto
has grown from an industry event
into a bustling show just as
popular with enthusiasts.
classicautomadrid.com
27 February – 1 March
Retro Classics Stuttgart
Cars, bikes, commercials and
mountains of automobilia fill
140,000m² of space in south-west
Germany. A must-do for fans of
Youngtimers and modern classics.
retro-classics.de
28-29 February
Chester Rally Revival
Some stages of this event will be
open to entrants only, but those
wanting to see the pre-1999 rally
cars in action will be able to do so
at Rednal Circuit in Oswestry.
rallyrevival.co.uk
5-7 March
WinteRace
A field of 70 pre-1977 cars, an
expertly plotted route through the
Dolomites and some of Europe’s
most beautiful mountain scenery.
winterace.it
5-8 March
Amelia Island Concours
d’Elegance
Amelia celebrates its 25th
anniversary with honouree Roger
Penske, who remains a hugely
influential figure in racing.
ameliaconcours.org
5-8 March
Phillip Island Classic
The largest Historic meeting in the
Southern Hemisphere, held on
Phillip Island near Melbourne.
Grids are organised by the
Victorian Historic Road Racing
Register and cater for Touring
Cars, single-seaters, sports cars
and pre-war machinery.
vhrr.com
Phillip Island Classic, 5-8 March
Image: Philip Island Classic
 Copperstate 1000,
28 March – 1 April
Image: Tom Leigh
6-8 March
Antwerp Classic Salon
Abarth gets the VIP treatment in
2020, but the displays will be as
diverse as ever thanks to the
presence of 50 clubs from Belgium
and the Netherlands.
antwerpclassicsalon.be
14-15 March
British Cars & Lifestyle
The Dutch town of Rosmalen
welcomes all British classics.
britishbest.nl
22 March
Pioneer Run
The Sunbeam Motor Cycle Club
gathers more than 300 pre-1915
bikes, tricycles and sidecars in
Epsom before releasing them for a
trundle to Brighton. Nowhere will
you see so many early bikes.
sunbeam-mcc.co.uk
25-29 March
Techno-Classica Essen
‘Huge’ is the word most often used
to describe the annual German
show. It’s an accurate description,
but Techno Classica has more
going for it than sheer size, with
carefully considered displays and
plentiful support from both clubs
and manufacturers.
siha.de
27-29 March
NEC Classic Car &
Restoration Show
Birmingham’s NEC is the venue
for this spring extravaganza,
offering live restoration action,
restored cars and untouched
barnfinds, plus club stands, an
auction and a trade village.
necrestorationshow.com
28 March – 1 April
Copperstate 1000
Pre-1974 sports and touring cars
eat up 1000 miles of dreamy
desert tarmac, on a route through
Arizona and beyond. The money
raised supports both the Phoenix
Art Museum and the families of
fallen police officers.
mensartscouncil.com
28-29 March
Goodwood Members’ Meeting
World-class Historic racing on
Goodwood Circuit, and a
deliberately limited number of
spectators, meaning there’s no
need to sharpen your elbows.
goodwood.com
3-5 April
The Flying Scotsman
This year’s event begins near
Crewe and appropriately includes
two-dozen Bentleys. Ninety-six
cars will head into the Derbyshire
Dales and then north towards
Yorkshire and on to Gleneagles.
endurorally.com
3-5 April
Veterama Hockenheimring
The German circuit hosts an
autojumble that attracts some
20,000 visitors and 2500 traders.
veterama.de
4-11 April
Rallye TransMaroc
Beginning and ending in
Marrakesh, this rally takes
entrants over mountains and
desert. Don’t be daunted, though:
you can hire a 4x4 if you don’t
own one, and instruction will be
given to sand-driving novices.
zaniroli.com
Dura take inspirational home
garage design to Retro Classics
Dura Ltd will be inspiring
the international classic car
market, with their ‘Fitted
Garage’ concept when they
exhibit at Retro Classics 2020
for the first time.
As the originators of the
‘Fitted Garage’, Dura has been
transforming the interiors of
home garages into stunning
and practical spaces for
over 20 years. With the use
of their design expertise
and their unique modular
furniture system, Dura helps
homeowners to change an
under-utilized space into
a room that will become a
valuable part of the home.
Dura will be showing
classic car owners how they
can use the system to create a
professional workshop within
their home garage – providing
organized space and storage
Find Dura on
stand 10H03 at
Retro Classics
2020 in Stuttgart
27 Feb - 01 Mar +44 (0) 1280 706050
for maintenance work, as well
as creating a stunning room
– all in the colour scheme to
reflect their favourite classic
car marque!!
The team from Dura will be
available throughout the show
to advise and inspire visitors
and help them create their
dream garage – whether it be
as a workshop for restoration
and maintenance or as a
high-quality environment for a
classic car collection.!
From its UK design and
manufacturing base, Dura
has become renowned
for supplying high quality
modular furniture to the
service workshops of premium
automotive brands worldwide
and has won many national
and international accolades,
including the prestigious
Red Dot Design Award.
31
IGNITION / A place to visit this month
DresDen TransporT MuseuM
Exploring a lesser-known, once-hidden automotive world
Words Barry Wiseman
For generations, Dresden was famed
for its fine china. In February 1945 it became
even more famous for a shocking event, when
the Allies firebombed this seventh-largest city
in Germany and caused terrible death and
destruction. The very mention of Dresden
made people shudder.
The reasons for and against this attack have
long been argued. Much of the city was left
unrestored but now the citizens have rebuilt it,
resulting in the fine place – poignantly twinned
with Coventry – that it is today. The
Frauenkirche, on the city’s main market square,
was left in ruins for many years as a war
memorial until it was rebuilt after Germany’s
reunification, using as much original material
as possible, and reopened as recently as 2005.
A stone’s throw from the Frauenkirche on
Neumarkt Square is the Dresden Transport
Museum (Verkehrsmuseum). Soon after it was
founded in 1952 it was moved to its present
site, the Johanneum, another fine old building,
which dates back to 1586. There are exhibitions
of all forms of mechanical transport spread
over four floors. It’s a great place for learning
and understanding the technical history of the
old German Democratic Republic.
Automobile exhibits range from a copy of
AlAMy
32
Karl Benz’s 1886 patented motor vehicle to the
era of cars less familiar to us. For instance, there
is a magnificent Rohr 8 Type F, from 1933, a
reminder of the finely engineered cars from
pre-war Germany. The short-lived Rohr was
built by Dresden-based company Glaser.
The Simson-Supra S was a sensation in its
day, a high-quality car with a 1950cc engine
sporting twin overhead camshafts driven by a
vertical shaft. On display is a version with a
single camshaft, but the quality is apparent.
The Cold War forced East Germany to
produce new car designs of its own. The
museum has two smart IFAs, interesting cars
rarely seen in Britain. The F8 cabriolet with its
three-cylinder, two-stroke engine reminds us
that some IFAs were based on pre-war DKW
designs and built at the former Auto Union
works at Zwickau. Production ceased in 1956,
when the new Wartburg entered production in
its factory at Eisenach. A sleek IFA P70 coupé
is displayed, too.
Also on show is a prototype 1968 Wartburg
355 coupé with a glassfibre body, said to be a
first for the German car industry. Nearby is
another Wartburg, a Type 311 from 1955,
raising memories of the two-stroke smell and
haze that the marque created in Britain. On one
Clockwise from top
Saxon Muldenthal steam engine from 1861; AWE
Rennsport Klasse F from 1954; Eisenach’s car-making
story went from BMW to EMW to Wartburg.
occasion in Sussex, a drunken Wartburg driver
involved in a hit-and-run accident was located
by the police who were able to follow the
exhaust smoke trail…
BMW’s East German wing in Eisenach was
nationalised in 1945 but the BMW brand was
maintained. In 1952, the Soviets passed the
company to the German Democratic Republic,
formed in 1949. When BMW restarted West
German production that same year, the East
German company changed its name to EMW,
retaining the BMW roundel badge but with red
rather than blue segments. EMW produced
some successful sports cars, known as AWE
(AutomobilWerk Eisenach) Rennsports. The
museum has a very tidy example.
Dresden was the terminus of Germany’s first
long-distance railway line. On display is the
Saxonia, based on the English Comet and
Germany’s first working locomotive, along
with the 1861 Saxon Muldenthal. About eight
locos are on display, with more at another
branch of the museum. There is an interesting
aircraft section and the museum is proud of its
interaction areas, making it an exciting day out
for children as well as an excellent way for car
enthusiasts to explore a lesser-known world.
Verkehrsmuseum DresDen,
Augustusstrasse 1, 01067 Dresden, Germany.
hours: 10am-6pm Tuesday to sunday.
Admission: Adults €9, students €3. Tickets available
online. Good disabled access throughout.
 Carnet de Passages en Douane
Provided under agreement with FIA and AIT

Tel: +44 (0) 1284 333 812

Email: carnetservices@carseurope.net

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 .
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Cars that have starred in films can make big money at auction for three reasons.
One: average car in a great film achieves stardom. Two: great car in an average film is valuable
in its own right. Three: both car and film are great. So here are ten cars from ten films, and the
widely differing – although always considerable – amounts they achieved at auction.
1 1965 Aston
MArtin DB5
Goldfinger (1964) and
Thunderball (1965)
$6,385,000, RM Sotheby’s,
Monterey, August 2019
One of four Bond-personalised
DB5s used by Eon Productions
in period, and the first of the
two cars built post-Goldfinger
for promotion, rather than
filming, of Thunderball, it was
restored by Roos Engineering
with operational gadgets. In
2010 Rm Sotheby’s sold
another Bond aston (#1486R)
in london for what then
seemed a healthy £2,912,000.
alamy
6 De LoreAn
DMC-12
Back to the Future III, 1990
$541,000, RM Auctions,
Monterey, August 2011
Seven De loreans were
equipped with flux capacitors
by Doc Brown and converted
for time travel, visually at least,
and plenty more replicas have
been made since. By 2011 this
DmC-12 was one of only three
original cars that could still be
positively accounted for out
of those seven built for the
mammoth Back To The Future
franchise. It appeared in the
third and final film by director
Robert Zemeckis.
ten toP MoVie CArs
2 1968 ForD Gt40
ChAssis P/1074
Le Mans (1971)
$11,000,000, RM Sotheby’s,
Monterey, August 2012
Originally a streamlined-roof
mirage m1 – in which form it
won the 1967 Spa 1000km
with Jacky Ickx and Dick
Thompson for JWautomotive
– this car was converted back
to ‘lightweight’ GT40 form as
one of three such examples,
including the 1968 and 1969
le mans winner. It then had its
roof removed so it could be
used as a camera car in Steve
mcQueen’s film Le Mans.
7 1966
BAtMoBiLe
Batman the Movie, 1966
$4,620,000, Barrett-
Jackson, Scottsdale,
January 2013
This is the actual, original
Batmobile of screen and
TV-series fame, of adam West
and Burt Ward tight tights and
Biff! Bang! Pow! fame, the car
that legendary customiser
George Barris created from
the starting point of lincoln’s
1955 Futura concept car. He
completed the personality
transplant into the menacing
Batmobile in just 15 days,
at a cost of $15,000.
3 1969 PorsChe
908.02 LAnGheCk
Le Mans (1971)
£2,185,500, Bonhams,
London, November 2014
Unlike the GT40 (left), this
Porsche appeared in Steve
mcQueen’s Le Mans as a
‘competing’ car. It was hired
out to film-maker Solar
Productions by Swiss racing
driver Jo Siffert, who owned it
at that time. more than any car,
this one deserved its stardom
in Le Mans, having finished
third in the real race the
previous year in the hands of
Helmut marko and Rudi lins.
8 1976 Lotus esPrit
s1 suBMArine CAr
The Spy Who Loved Me,
1977
£616,000, RM Sotheby’s,
London, September 2013
lotus provided the Bond film’s
production team with two
normal Esprits and seven
bodyshells, most of them
chopped in various ways for
underwater filming, but one –
this one – was made into a fully
functional submarine known
on-set as ‘Wet Nellie’. It was
sold at auction in cosmetically
restored form, but whether it
has since ventured underwater
we can’t confirm.
4 1963 VoLkswAGen
BeetLe ‘herBie’
Herbie Goes To Monte Carlo
(1977) and Herbie Goes
Bananas (1980)
$128,700, Barrett-Jackson,
Palm Beach, April 2018
The movie-makers got through
over 50 Beetles in the course
of shooting the five films that
have made up the ‘Herbie’
franchise since the first film,
The Love Bug, was released in
1968. Remarkably, this car is
one of the few survivors and
appeared in two films, the
second of which involved 23
of that total bug swarm.
9 1965 sheLBy CoBrA
DAytonA CouPe
Red Line 7000, 1965
$7,685,000, Mecum,
Indianapolis, May 2009
Despite featuring the mother
of all stock-car-leaves-oval
crashes, this is not one of the
greatest motor-racing films of
all time, although Quentin
Tarantino declared himself a
fan. Howard Hawks directed
James Caan, among others, in
a tale of racing rivalry and
romance, crucially featuring this
fabulous Cobra, in which Bob
Bondurant clinched the 1965
FIa World manufacturers’ GT
Championship.
5 1956 FerrAri
250 Gt tDF
The Love Bug, 1966
$6,710,000, RM Sotheby’s,
Monterey, August 2012
Here’s another car that
featured in Herbie’s
adventures, this time only in the
first film of the series in which,
despite its magnificent V12
engine, it failed to prevail over
the mighty VW. In the real
world this early example of a
Ferrari Tour de France has led
a busy racing life, its value
when it first came to auction in
2012 attesting to that pedigree
rather than its movie cameo.
10 1955 FerrAri
750 MonzA
On The Beach, 1959
$2,530,000, RM Sotheby’s,
Monterey, August 2011
This Ferrari’s career began on
the racetracks of 1950s
america, but that changed
when Stanley Kramer bought it
in 1957 for his not exactly
upbeat film adaptation of Nevil
Shute’s unremittingly bleak
book about a post-World War
Three, post-apocalyptic world,
which starred Gregory Peck
and ava Gardner. Plus Fred
astaire as a non-dancing
racing driver who wanted to
run this Ferrari in a final race.
35
IGNITION / News

NEWS FEED
Let’s get ready to rumble; Arrow display boost; call for porridge; Droitwich hillclimb goes
downhill; massive model collection makes big bucks; meets and greets and Escort feats

Wood is good
After a one-year hiatus, the St John’s
Wood Car Pageant is back. The
event, a relaxed and informal day on
the High Street, was revived after
estate agent Knight Frank offered to
sponsor The St John’s Wood Society
and the Hospice of St John’s and
Impney cancelled Elizabeth. The pageant is on
The popular Chateau Impney Father’s Day (21 June).
Hillclimb has been called off.
Originally scheduled to take place
at the Droitwich hotel in July,
there is no suggestion that the
postponement is anything other
than permanent. The event, which
JOIN OCTANE ON TRACK AT GLORIOUS GOODWOOD revived a hillclimb that ran at the
The date has been set for the 2020 Octane Track Day at Goodwood spectacular estate in the 1950s,
Motor Circuit. The event, limited to 30 cars, will take place on Thursday had been going for five years and
3 September, just over a week before the circuit is swamped by the had recently scooped a major AOHE meetings
Revival Meeting. There is a generous 105-decibel limit so virtually all award. The absence of this unique The Association of Heritage
classics can be accommodated, plus there will be a restriction on the event will leave a hole in the Engineers has announced a pair of
number of cars on the circuit at any one time, meaning you won’t spend calendar that is hard to plug. Cars & Coffee events. The first, at
most of your precious track time battling to get past slower cars… or The Classic Motor Hub at Bibury,
fixated on your mirrors for fast-approaching quicker cars. is a ticketed event with a donation
Naturally, guests will be welcomed with breakfast, the day is to the Doddie Weir Motor
punctuated by a splendid lunch in the Jackie Stewart Pavilion, and Neurone Foundation and takes
refreshments will be available throughout the day. A single driver and car place on Saturday 14 March
ticket costs £369, with an additional driver £185 and hospitality tickets (tinyurl.com/wxdxa8f), while the
for non-drivers £99. Book your spot at octanetrackdays.co.uk Shuttleworth Collection in
Bedfordshire hosts the second on
Sunday 17 May (tinyurl.com/
Hope for the best yfwfhs8q).
Simon Hope, chairman and
founder of auction company
H&H Classics, has sold his
Matchbox 1-75 model collection
of nearly 3000 cars and trucks for
a premium-inclusive total in
excess of £300,000. The models
Golden slumbers Everyday heroes were collected over more than 60
Arts Council England has given Once common but now rare years and in terms of breadth and
The National Motor Museum at everyday classics from the 1960s, condition – pretty much Escort award
Beaulieu nearly £75,000 to ’70s and ’80s will form a new everything was mint and boxed! Bryn and Kath Jackson’s 1980
‘reinterpret’ the museum’s Land display at Beaulieu International – was one of the world’s finest Ford Escort RS2000 Custom was
Speed Record-breaking icon Autojumble in September. collections. The sale caused a awarded the Best of Boxing Day
Golden Arrow using computer- Owners who would like to take huge buzz in model circles and trophy at the Lakeland Motor
generated augmented reality and part with their 1960-1990 classic the collection was spread over Museum in Cumbria. More than
historic collections. With Major vehicles should get in touch with three different sales with specialist 100 classic cars, vans and
Henry Segrave in the driving seat, the Beaulieu events team. If toy auctioneers Vectis of motorbikes turned-out at the
Golden Arrow set a new Land accepted they will receive a pair of Thornaby, North Yorkshire. The museum for the final Drive &
Speed Record of 231.36mph and three-day entry wristbands for the most expensive model was a lime Ride In Day of 2019, with a
‘Golden Arrow – Shot from the International Autojumble. Call green ERF Dropside lorry that trophy up for grabs for ‘the most
Past, Aimed at the Future’ will 01590 614614 or see beaulieu. sold for over £7000, while a green interesting or unique’ vehicle.
feature a new display and co.uk/events/international- Ford Kennel Truck fetched £3200 The Escort’s trophy haul now
interactive area from March. autojumble. and a white Ford Mustang £2100. stands at nine in two years.

36
 07
THE FINEST CARS. THE BEST EXPERIENCE
SATURDAY

ASCOT RACECOURSE
MARCH THE ASCOT
CLASSIC CAR
AUCTION
1956 E.J.S. COVENTRY
CLIMAX SPECIAL
An exceptionally significant one-off
racing car created by Edwin Joseph
Snusher. FIA Historic Technical Passport
and valid for The Goodwood Revival.
Superb condition and an excellent
history file. £180,000-£220,000

VIEWING DAYS
Wednesday 4th March, 12pm-4pm
Thursday 5th March, 10am-8pm
A MAJOR AUCTION OF 180
Friday 6th March, 10am-5pm

SALE TIME
Saturday 7th March, 9.30am
Entry by catalogue on the day
FINE & VARIED CLASSIC CARS
Visit the website for full details of all entries and to register to bid
www.historics.co.uk

+ 44 (0)1753 639170 auctions@historics.co.uk www.historics.co.uk

IGNITION / News
1 2
3 4
5 6
7 8
Paris showdown to decide
the Best of the Best
Eight fabulous concours winners will be judged by an
expert jury of 25 leading collectors and specialists
Why WE LOVE…
Bayko building sets
With a Bayko set you could build remarkably
realistic model houses, creating as many
extensions and annexes as you like. You could
even have a garage, able to accommodate a
Dinky car in matching scale. Depending on when
the set was made, your house could be inter-war
suburban or post-war housing estate.
Bayko, devised in 1933 by one Charles
Plimpton, took its name from the Bakelite from
38
The eighT conTenders for the title of
greatest classic car in the world have been
announced. All of the finalists were winners of
major concours across the globe in 2019 and
now slug it out to be crowned The Peninsula
Classics Best of the Best.
Founded in 2015 by The Hon Sir Michael
Kadoorie, with co-founders William ‘Chip’
Connor, Bruce Meyer and Christian Philippsen,
this is the fifth time the competition has been
held and the winner will be announced at a
glitzy ceremony at the Peninsula Hotel in Paris
during Rétromobile on 6 February.
Sir Michael Kadoorie said: ‘Only eight
vehicles are selected from the world’s most
prestigious concours events to compete for the
title of most exceptional classic car. These
motorcars are works of art, each with a unique
history and provenance. Our esteemed panel
of judges have their work cut out this year due
to the incredible field of contenders.’
Last year’s award was scooped by David
Sydorick’s 1937 Alfa Romeo 8C 2900B
Berlinetta; this year’s eight finalists span nearly
40 years and hail from France, Germany, Italy,
the UK and USA. The winner will be selected
by a jury of 25 leading collectors and experts.
The contenders (with the concours they were
victorious at in brackets) are:
1. 1948 Talbot-Lago T26 Grand Sport Coupé
by Figoni et Falaschi (Salon Privé)
2. 1938 Mercedes-Benz 540 K Autobahn-Kurier
(Amelia Island Concours d’Elegance)
3. 1958 Ferrari 335 S Spyder by Scaglietti
(Cavallino Classic)
4. 1950 Abarth 205 Berlinetta by Vignale
(Goodwood Cartier Style et Luxe
Concours d’Elegance)
5. 1931 Bentley 8 Litre Foursome Coupé
by Freestone & Webb (Chantilly Arts &
Elégance Richard Mille)
6. 1919 Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost Torpedo
Skiff by Barker (Concours of Elegance,
Hampton Court Palace)
7. 1931 Bentley 8 Litre Dual Cowl Tourer
by Gurney Nutting (Pebble Beach Concours
d’Elegance)
8. 1931 Stutz DV32 Convertible Victoria by
LeBaron (The Quail, A Motorsports Gathering)
which it was made in red and white (the bricks)
and green (the woodwork and bases). You slid
the bricks and joinery between steel rods
inserted in a perforated base, perhaps with a
resin floor for the first storey. Bay windows,
pillars, chimneys: Bayko offered them all.
By 1959, Meccano controlled Bayko,
polystyrene had replaced Bakelite, joinery was
yellow, bases were grey, and pitched roofs had
replaced hipped, but Bayko soldiered on until
1967 when it succumbed to competition from
Lego et al. We love it for its intricacy and realism
– you could see how good your Dinky Triumph
2000 looked in the driveway. John Simister
 IGNITION / News

JUNIOR
JOHNSON
1931-2019
tHe reaL-LiFe inspiration for
the brilliant moonshiner-turned-
NASCAR-driver movie The Last

MArtyn goddArd
American Hero, Johnson was born
into a family of bootleggers (his
father spent a third of his life in jail)
and learned to race by evading the
police on North Carolina backroads in his hooch-packed Ford.
After he turned to motorsport, his glittering career of a decade
behind the wheel and another 20 as team owner and manager
culminated in his being named as one of the top 50 NASCAR drivers
of all time and being inducted into the US Motorsports Hall of Fame.
In 2007 his life seemed to come full circle when he helped to
launch a brand of moonshine!
Our next issue, Octane 202, will carry a fuller appreciation of
clIffhAllphotogrApher.coM

Johnson’s life in our Gone But Not Forgotten feature.

COLIN SEELEY
1936-2020
CLIFF HALL Having started with a single
motorcycle shop in Kent in 1956,

1926-2020
Seeley took on agencies for
marques such as Zündapp, NSU,
ShutterStock edItorIAl

AJS and Ariel. A keen competitor

in all variations of two-wheeled
motorsport (including sidecar
His dream was to market a neat city car racing), he was an Isle of Man
made by, and for, African-Americans regular before quitting racing to
build his own bikes. He steadily
on tHe one Hand Cliff Hall was a society photographer and built up a broad customer base and gained a reputation as one of the
socialite, on the other he was someone deeply concerned about best racing-bike builders in the world. He moved on to motor racing
social injustice and racial inequality in Los Angeles. So much so when old pal Bernie Ecclestone took him on at Brabham.
that he came up with the answer to all LA’s problems: a sports car
of his own design that would be ‘made by black hands in the black
community’. That way the car would provide jobs and incomes for
some of the most deprived communities in California, as well as an
end product that would put that community on an equal standing
mobility-wise with wealthier inhabitants of LA. With $100,000 of
SYD MEAD
backing from businessman Louis Corwin, Hall used the money to
build a pioneering small mid-engined wedge called the Corwin 1933-2019
Getaway. It appeared at the LA Auto Show in 1970. not someone you might
Despite support and encouragement from high-profile figures immediately associate with cars,
such as Muhammad Ali, Sidney Poitier and Marvin Gaye, Hall ‘neofuturist concept artist’ Syd
struggled to find further backing and the prototype of the spritely Mead was responsible for some of
Subaru-powered city car (which stood lower than a Ford GT40) the most familiar movie cars and
remained the only example. It was stored for decades before being vehicles from films such as Blade
getty IMAgeS

acquired by the Petersen Automotive Museum in the 1990s, and Runner, Tron and a host of others.
has recently been restored. The American industrial designer
Hall’s dreams may have foundered (although he remained started his career in Ford’s design
bullishly confident of the genius of his plan to the end), but he was studio in the late 1950s when he
not unhinged. Far from it: he was a sharp-witted and profound was recruited by Elwood Engle, but he moved on to movies after a
thinker who just happened to see the car as the solution to most of couple of years. Anyone interested in design, motoring or otherwise,
the world’s ills rather than the creator of them. would do well to seek out his autobiography, A Future Remembered.

40
IGNITION / News
Man & MaCHInE
A very English hot rod
Henry Harris’s Forrest special, built in 1960 by
an RAF officer, is an Austin Seven like no other
Words and photography Paul Hardiman
A modsports sAloon before its time,
this radical lightweight was created in 1960 by
RAF officer Michael Forrest. It’s dripping with
ingenuity: the engine is used as a stressed
member to stiffen the chassis and the steering
box is mounted centrally between the track
rods, eliminating the drag link. The body, flush-
glazed in Perspex, is chopped and sectioned so
the roof is almost 2ft lower than it was in 1932,
and the steering column is almost horizontal. It
has never been on a weighbridge but it feels
lighter than a Caterham to push.
It’s got ‘impecunious men in sheds’ running
all the way through it – except that it sports
expensive cast-alloy Speedex wheels and a
Speedex bucket seat, and Forrest used to tow it
to events behind a Rolls-Royce 20hp.
Long-time A7 enthusiast and racer Henry
Harris acquired it 30 years ago but he’s only just
resurrected it, ready for the 750 Motor Club
test day at Curborough in March. ‘Forrest ran it
in the 750 Formula and came third in the
championship,’ says the former film art director.
‘The next name in the logbook is DA Brodie.’
Dave Brodie went on to saloon-racing fame in
his ‘Run Baby Run’ Escorts and founded Brodie
Brittain Racing, still operating as BBR GTi.
The windows and rear structure aren’t riveted
but are secured by hundreds of 6BA screws and
locknuts. ‘Probably from the Air Ministry. I
42
think he built the car on a base – he was an RAF
officer at a Thor missile site during the Cold
War and nothing much had been happening.
‘He wrote up all his developments for the
club magazines, such as the twin-SU manifold
and the rear damper mounts, all still on the car.
He got rid of the dynamo and ran the distributor
straight off the nose of the camshaft.
‘The steering box ended up in front of the
split axle – it moved all over the place when he
was developing the car. The dampers are Morris
8 – they cost 2/6 each – and he experimented
with different oils to alter their characteristics,
from 10 to 140-weight. The engine is a bit of an
unknown, with a Dante alloy head which bolts
back to the bulkhead. It’s still a two-bearing
crank with Forrest’s own camshaft and
followers. He balanced everything on knife-
edges, but I’ve only used 4000rpm so far.’
Harris has no shortage of Sevens. His daily
driver is a saloon he’s owned since the ’60s, but
the Forrest special had been out of sight for 40
years. ‘Austin Seven racing recommenced
around 1978 and people were getting all sorts
of stuff out of the woodwork. A friend had
bought this and did nothing with it, so I bought
it. I’ve only done three laps of Donington with
it so far, in a 750 Motor Club demonstration.
It’s incredibly noisy inside, with the open side
exhaust, and it has very direct steering.’
In tHIs MontH: 4 MaRcH 1950
Rover runs JET 1, the
first gas turbine car
Most of the modern cars we now own are
piston-engined. Some, increasingly, are
hybrid, fully electric, maybe even fuelled by
hydrogen. But back in the late 1940s the
British Rover car company thought there
might be a different way to propel the family
car of the future: with a jet engine.
Rover, a rather staid and predictable
manufacturer of cars for the middle classes,
made quality saloons that bank managers
would aspire to own but not to covet. It’s
remarkable, then, that in ravaged post-war
Britain this carmaker decided to change not
only how people perceived its own image
but the whole idea of car ownership.
During World War Two, many car
manufacturers stopped producing vehicles
for domestic use and turned to war
production. Rover was no exception, and its
resources were called upon by Frank Whittle
to work with his Power Jets company on jet
engine development. Rover chief engineer
Maurice Wilks refined Whittle’s original
design, and the collaboration interested
Rover’s management so much that, once
hostilities had ceased, work began on a gas
turbine engine to power road vehicles. Here,
the powerful exhaust gases would power a
further turbine to drive an output shaft.
In 1945 Rover lured engineers Spen
King and Frank Bell away from Rolls-Royce
so they could start working with Wilks.
Despite fairly limited post-war resources, by
1949 the team had produced a turbine that
could run on paraffin, diesel oil or petrol and
produce 100bhp.
Rather than running as a single-shaft
turbine, the automotive engine would need
to be a two-stage design. In essence it had
an ignitor turbine running at 50,000rpm and
a power turbine, to drive the wheels, that
would run between 13,000 and 26,000rpm.
Many test engines later, the final version –
designated T8 – was installed into a
cut-down Rover P4 body. This prototype,
bearing the JET 1 number plate, first ran on
4 March 1950 and was demonstrated to the
press five days later. Two years on, with
power then at 230bhp, it reached
151.96mph on Belgium’s Jabbeke Highway.
Neil Godwin-Stubbert
IGNITION / Gearbox

1. Racer Robin Sturgess took me on in

CHRIS MITCHELL
This motoring accessory and marketing guru sold us Bond
bullet holes, Backflashes and Arthur Daley products, as well
as popularising Waxoyl, Hammerite and Slick 50 in the UK
Interview and photography James Elliott
1 2
1962 when he opened a motor accessory
shop in Leicester, and RSA Factors grew
to 35 staff and two huge depots. The very
first thing we launched was James Bond
bullet hole transfers; they were a massive
success, largely thanks to the News of the
World condemning them as irresponsible!
2. In 1977, I set up Mitchell Marketing
and took on Hammerite and Waxoyl for
Finnigan’s. We changed everything and
sales rocketed from half-a-million to seven
million. I expanded into things like the
t went in
pular in
the 1980s. It cost 77p to make and we set
the retail at £7.99: that alone put both my
daughters through boarding school.

3. I later took on the UK rights for Slick 50

and it took off like a rocket. It was simple:
the more you spent on advertising, the
more it sold, so we kept doing that until
UK sales overtook North America. In 1992,
the Americans bought me out entirely,
4 stopped all advertising and in two years
the brand was virtually dead in the UK.

4. I was two when my father Arthur died in

WW2 and this train was the only thing he
made for me before leaving for Italy as an
infantryman with the Royal Warwickshire
Regiment when he was just 30. Apart from
a few photos, it’s all I have of him.
5 5. Sponsoring the BRSCC Roadgoing
Saloon Car Championship gave Slick 50
enormous exposure for very little money,
with all the cars from Golfs to Rover SD1s
wearing our branding. They gave us this
trophy for supporting it for five years.

6. I’d have kept my E-type S2 4.2 fixed-

6 head coupé forever; it was like wearing a
glove. But in 2007 an uninsured mechanic
rolled it over during a service. He paid me
for the wreck, but I’d rather have the car.
The steering wheel is a constant reminder.

7 7. An uncle gave me this when I was 13

and I paid half-a-crown to join the Eagle
Club. As Vol 1 No 1, it’s probably rare now.

8. I mainly competed in Minis (I’ve had

nine), but this whisky miniatures set was
8 from doing the very first Classic Malts
Rally with co-driver Richard Iliffe in my
E-type. We were so green we didn’t even
have a stopwatch before the start. I also
did the Three Castles Rally in that car.

9. For a US trip in 1977, I persuaded my

co-directors to book Concorde. The cost
was ten times that of a normal flight and it
9 was such a big deal I wrote an article on it
for the Leicester Mercury. Then, in 2018,
I went up in the Grace Spitfire (ML407),
a wonderful but terrifying 26 minutes.
It was very moving because my father
helped supervise Spitfire assembly at
Castle Bromwich before going to war.

44
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FOR SALE

1953 GOODWOOD NINE HOURS

JOHN MELVIN
FRAZER NASH TEAM CAR

AS RACED AT MILLE MIGLIA, LE MANS CLASSIC, GOODWOOD REVIVAL, GOODWOOD MEMBERS’ MEETING, MONACO GRAND PRIX HISTORIQUE

JAY LENO
The Collector
F
or most of my automotive life I have been a rear-
wheel-drive guy. I knew that all-wheel drive or
front-wheel drive provided better traction but,
having grown up in New England where snow lay
on the ground for at least four or five months of the
year, I reckoned rear-wheel drive was just more fun.
Doing donuts in a deserted supermarket car park on a
Sunday morning, after a Saturday night snowfall, was way
more fun than snowboarding or skiing. It’s why I chose
the McLaren P1 over the Porsche 918. Hanging the tail
out is one of driving’s greatest pleasures. I was well into
adulthood before I got near a front-wheel-drive vehicle.
In America back then, front-wheel drive was more for
economy and practicality than anything else. The first
post-war American car to feature front drive was the 1966
Oldsmobile Toronado, and what an
impressive debut it was. At a time
when Italian manufacturers said
you could never put more than
‘dOING dONuTs
IN AN EmpTY
225bhp into the front wheels
because of torque steer, the
Toronado’s 7-litre V8 had 375bhp. cAr pArk AFTEr
And the fact it was the fastest stock
car at the 1966 Pikes Peak Hillclimb A sNOwFALL wAs
helped to seal the deal.
This radical automobile made me wAY mOrE FuN
want to learn more. I set out to find
myself the last great American ThAN skIING’
front-wheel-drive car: the Cord 810
and 812 from 1936 or 1937. It, too, had a V8 engine. In
stock form it made 125bhp but you could have it with a
supercharger. I found myself a 1937 Cord 812, naturally
aspirated. It was transformed with modern radial tyres,
feeling and driving more like a car from the 1960s than
the 1930s. The electric pre-selector gearbox is mounted
in front of the engine so there’s a flat floor, freeing up
more passenger room in the cabin.
What killed it, besides gearbox problems, was that
American cars at this price range were huge. This was the
first ‘personal-size’ luxury car, and you seemed to get a lot
more car for your money if you went the traditional route.
My next front-driver was a 1972 Citroën SM, Motor
Trend’s Car of the Year. Rumour says the editor got fired
because Citroën didn’t take out huge full-page ads logging
its accomplishments like American carmakers did.
Every enthusiast should drive an SM before they die. It
has sleek aerodynamics, oleopneumatic suspension,
quick power steering and the finest five-speed gearbox I
have ever used. Driving in the rain was especially
IGNITION / Opinion
pleasurable because when you hit the brakes the rear end
would go down rather than the front end, like a speedboat
slowing down in the water. And the unique aerodynamics
made the windscreen wipers almost superfluous.
The excellence of this car made me check on Citroën’s
earlier offerings. I soon acquired a 1971 DS21, the most
comfortable car in the world. And a 1949 Traction Avant
15 Six, its six-cylinder engine better for today’s roads.
Another great front-drive French car is the Panhard
PL17. It’s way more fun to drive than a Beetle, with only
two cylinders but almost twice the power (60bhp for the
Tigre model against 36 in a VW) from just 850cc. It
weighs 1830lb [830kg], has a Cd of just 0.26 and can do
nearly 90mph. It’s always more fun to drive slow cars fast. Jay leno
By far the strangest front-wheel-drive vehicle I have is Comedian and talk show
a 1911 Christie fire engine. At the legend Jay Leno is one
of the most famous
turn of the last century, fire engines
were still horse-drawn because fire
departments didn’t like combustion
entertainers in the USA.
He is also a true petrolhead,
with a huge collection
engines, considering them less of cars and bikes (www.
reliable than horses. Walter jaylenosgarage.com). Jay was
Christie’s first pumper, built in speaking with Jeremy Hart.
1899, was a horse-drawn unit.
As engines gained favour,
Christie came up with a two-wheel
tractor with a 20-litre, four-cylinder
engine and a two-speed gearbox to
take the place of horses while
pulling the same pumpers. It was
much cheaper to operate than a team of horses because
you didn’t have to feed the engine when it wasn’t running.
Christie built about 800 of these until the early 1920s,
when purpose-built fire engines finally took over.
My strangest front-wheel-drive encounter happened
recently, when I went skid-plate racing. If you’ve never
heard of skid-plate racing – invented by a man named
Robert Rice, aka Mayhem – don’t feel bad. Neither had I.
You start with any legal front-drive vehicle, remove the
rear tyres and weld a skid plate to the rear end. You’re
dragging and sliding your rear end around corners, and
it’s harder than it looks. Above 40mph it gets extremely
tricky because you’re constantly steering and counter-
steering. In the first ten minutes I spun at least six times.
When you come to a corner and feel the tail coming
round, there’s almost nothing you can do. Unlike losing
an early 911 in a corner, which happens so quickly you
don’t realise it, this happens so slowly that you’re laughing
the whole time as you try to save yourself. Who knew
front-wheel drives could be so much fun?
47
 1988 Toyota 87C-007
E X- WORKS WI TH LE MANS, IMSA & J SP C HI STO RY
Perfect for the best Historic Group C racing
events, this stunning Toyota is armed with an
enormous spares package and amazing history.
£8 95, 000
1988 Porsche 962-200
H IGH LY D EV ELOPED ‘RLR’ 962 – BA RE TUB REB UIL D
Derek Bell’s Le Mans and lead team car in 1988–
89. The most highly developed Group C 962. Full
works ‘89 spec rebuild. Ready to win in historics.
£985 , 000
2002 Peugeot 206 WRC
ASTOUND ING CA REER & DRIV EN B Y WRC LEG ENDS
Incredible ex-Monte Carlo Rally 206, driven by
Champions Salonen and Vatanen in their last WRC
rallies and by Works drivers Panizzi and Rovanperä.
£325 ,0 00 + VA T
Discover more than thirty
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1988 Ferrari 328 GTS
A MONG THE B EST THERE IS & WITH ONLY 2,039KM S
historicclassics.com
+44 (0) 1825 831 028 One owner for 25 years and in a prominent
collection since. This is a perfect original Ferrari,
team@historicclassics.com having covered 1,267 miles from new.
£1 25, 000
1992 Porsche 911 Carrera RS
A P O TENTIALLY UNIQ UE O P PO R TUNITY
With just one owner until 2014 and only 27,008
kms (16,781 miles) from new, this stunning 964
Carrera RS is a ‘time-warp’ collector’s dream.
£285,000
1992 Jaguar XJ220
JAGUAR’S ULTIMATE SUPERCAR
Original European example and later certified for
the USA, before joining an unrivalled supercar
collection in the UK.
£450,000
1988 F1 Arrows A-10B BMW
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Experience F1 at its most exciting with a turbo
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£275,000
1966 Jaguar E-Type Series 1 4.2
JUST PROFESSIONALLY RESTORED
A highly desirable black 4.2-litre Coupe fresh from
a professional total restoration. The beautiful red
leather complements the classic Series 1 lines.
£2 95,000

DEREK BELL
The Legend
T
he New Year’s Honours List saw the usual array of
politicians and civil servants receive gongs. The
same, too, for sportsmen and women. Of course,
January wouldn’t be the same without editorials
lamenting what they see as arcane throwbacks to
the days of the Empire and so on, while others will openly
wonder why such and such wasn’t garlanded.
I am very much in the ‘pro’ camp when it comes to the
honours list, but then I would be because I was awarded
the MBE in 1986 for services to motor sport. I was
immensely proud to receive such an honour, although I
do appreciate that some are less keen and turn down such
accolades. That is their prerogative.
I must admit that I was surprised that Lewis Hamilton
didn’t receive a knighthood this year. Sure, he was
similarly granted an MBE back in
2009, but that was when he was a
‘mere’ one-time Formula 1 World
Champion. Now he has bagged six
‘I was suRpRIsED
ThaT hamILTON
titles and his tally of race wins
makes him by far and away the most
successful racing driver the UK has DIDN’T REcEIvE a
ever produced, if only in terms of
Grand Prix racing. What, I wonder, KNIGhThOOD ThIs
does he have to do to ‘earn’ himself
a knighthood? yEaR. whaT DOEs
Gary Lineker tweeted about this
last November. He wrote: ‘It’s hE havE TO DO?’
actually extraordinary that he’s not
already been knighted, especially when you consider
some of those who have been honoured in sport.’ He
went on to describe Lewis as being perhaps the greatest
sportsman the UK has ever produced. I think that is a bit
of a stretch, but he is surely a candidate.
But then I could never work out why my former
employer, John Surtees, never received a knighthood
either. After all, he was a World Champion on two and
four wheels, a feat that is unlikely ever to be repeated.
It was only when I spent a few moments idly looking
into the subject that I learned that only three racing
drivers have ever been knighted for their on-track
achievements: Stirling Moss, Jackie Stewart and Jack
Brabham, heroes all. What’s more, each received their
honours after they had retired from active competition.
Perhaps when Hamilton has racked up his seventh title
(or more) and hung up his helmet he will join this
exclusive club and make it a ‘gang of four’.
Looking ahead, I expect Hamilton and Mercedes-
AMG will remain the benchmark driver and team
IGNITION / Opinion
respectively in this year’sFormula 1 World Championship.
I am not in the least bit impartial, though, as I adore the
‘red cars’ for no reason other than that I am a romantic.
I would love to see Ferrari on top after years of false
dawns and pratfalls, and I expect Charles Leclerc to be a
thorn in the side of his team-mate Sebastien Vettel once
again. You get the impression that a changing of the guard
is afoot in ‘Eff One’ and the Frenchman is making a good
job of upsetting the established order. The same is true of
Red Bull’s Max Verstappen, and I also expect Alex Albon
to shine in his sophomore season. This British-Thai driver
was one of the real standouts last year. I suspect he
exceeded everyone’s expectatons, including his own.
As for me, 2019 was barely over before I was at a circuit Derek Bell
for the ‘Roar Before The Rolex 24’ meeting at Daytona. It Derek took up racing in
was held on the first weekend in 1964 in a Lotus 7, won
two World Sportscar
January and was a great event, a sort
of dress rehearsal for the endurance
classic that kicks off the sports car
Championships (1985
and 1986), the 24 Hours
of Daytona three times (in
calendar at the historic Florida 1986, ’87 and ’89), and Le
venue. It offered race fans a chance Mans five times (in 1975,
to get close to the action, to see and ’81, ’82, ’86 and ’87).
hear the cars on track and also meet
the star drivers. And it was
wonderfully informal.
From my side of the fence, it was
great catching up with old friends
and having a good gossip about the
season ahead. I am really excited
about the 24 Hours, a race I won three times, not least
because there’s such a huge amount of talent among the
runners and riders for what will be the 58th staging of
the endurance classic. More than 40 teams have entered,
several of them manufacturer-backed. I will be particularly
interested to see how my friend and protégé Tristan
Nunez fares. He has matured into a sports car ace par
excellence in recent years, driving for Mazda Team Joest.
As for the rest of the year, I seem to remember writing
12 months ago that I was going to wind things down a
little. I would take my foot off the gas and have a little
time to myself between engagements. That lasted all of
two minutes, for no other reason than I really enjoy what
I do, even if I am notionally retired.
I relish getting my bum into something seriously quick,
new or old, or travelling to somewhere I haven’t been
before. I also enjoy meeting people. This year, I will
refrain from making rash promises. I’d like to catch my
breath a little but I expect – I know – that I will be out and
about a lot in 2020. And I can’t wait to get cracking.
49
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Organisé par
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9-11 OCTOBER 2020

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STEPHEN BAyLEy
The Aesthete
A
s a boy, my co-ordinates of desire were, at least
until I discovered girls, described by points on the
map of car culture. I wrote earnest letters to sales
and marketing departments everywhere and got
fabulous glossy brochures in response. These I
dutifully indexed and filed, building up a mental library
of seductive imagery that’s still with me today.
My favourites came from GM. The Pontiac Division
eschewed banal photography (perhaps because the
camera has this thing for the truth) and instead employed
an illustrator called Art Fitzpatrick, whose insanely
glorious gouache renderings gave an already low and
wide Bonneville the proportions of a tennis court. And
the cars were placed in settings that were, to a suburban
provincial youth, impossibly glamorous: beaches,
country clubs, swaying palms, white
clapboard Colonial-style houses.
Fitzpatrick’s passengers were
handsome couples – he with a
‘ArT fITzPATrIck’S
rENdErINGS GAvE AN
cravat, she with a headscarf – always
seemingly poised on the abyss of
crazily tumultuous sex on the ALrEAdy LOw ANd
pleated Naugahyde wipe-down
front bench-seat. wIdE BONNEvILLE
While Art was stirring his pots of
paint and using bizarre proportions THE PrOPOrTIONS Of
and expensive Kolinsky sable
brushes to extend our range of A TENNIS cOurT’
imaginative possibilities, the future
novelist Elmore ‘Dutch’ Leonard was writing advertising
copy for trucks in the GM Building on Detroit’s West
Grand Boulevard. Oh, pleasant exercise of hope and joy.
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.
But does anyone produce brochures any more? Are
genius crime novelists writing Silverado HD copy? An
earnest fellow in the retail motor trade recently told me,
not without enthusiasm, even as I was yawning within,
that nowadays ‘pre-purchase data-gathering is all online’.
In any case, the young are not interested. A smoking gun?
A smoking exhaust pipe is now damning evidence of
social irresponsibility.
It seems to me that, if you read the signs, car culture is
coming to its end. I have always thought of car design as
essentially similar to art: a professional activity with its
disciplines, techniques, traditions, studios, maestros and
apprentices, all bent on providing aesthetic rewards for
customers. But that version of art is over as well. Or do
you know anybody who gives a toss about The Turner
Prize, an institution laughable but not funny?
IGNITION / Opinion
For example, although it took me a while to notice, the
‘sportscar’ is in a death spiral. In the US, the Ford Mustang
has not excited national outbreaks of hysteria. In fact,
they are hard to sell. Meanwhile, the blobby Macan is
easily Porsche’s most popular product. We have watched
the gradual popular acceptance of the SUV, but without
realising that this format is now the norm and everything
else, especially an open two-seater, is an aberration.
The entire German industry is in an existential crisis.
Do you continue to invest in old-fashioned expertise to
develop internal-combustion engines, but starve EV
research? Or do you commit to electricity and undermine
the precious essence of your hard-won brand values,
making redundant all the wonderful stuff you have spent Stephen bayley
the last century promoting? Audi and Daimler say ‘Don’t SB is the individual for
know’ but have laid off tens of whom the term ‘design
guru’ could have been
thousands of skilled workers in any
case. Tell me if you know of anyone
planning a new V12.
coined. He was the
founding director of
London’s Design Museum
I believe that great cars of the past and his best-selling books
have almost always been inspired by include Sex, Drink and Fast
a designer’s response to a power Cars and Taste: the Secret
Meaning of Things.
source based on cams, gears, cranks,
valves and chains, creating a living
thing of smells, heat and noise. The
aesthetics are as much felt as seen, a
symphony of disparate elements. In
a mystical sense the dense assembly
of beautifully conceived and finely
executed mechanical components creates a settled gravity
that, experience tells us, people enjoy.
EVs have far fewer components than ICE cars. They are
like fridges. I don’t see anyone getting incontinently
excited by a charmless 23GWh cell supplied by
Panasonic, Contemporary Amperex Technology, BYD,
Optimum Nano Energy or LG Chem.
The problem here is that complaining too much about
evolution makes you look pre-Darwinian and, as a
(bruised) modernist progressive, that’s not a look I care
for. Nor do I own a gorilla suit and drag my knuckles. And
it’s chastening that the only pro-ICE campaign I know
of is from the intellectually inelegant Alternativ für
Deutschland party whose pro-diesel rants might as well
be pro-coal or pro-slavery.
I am afraid the old car culture really is at death’s door.
No-one is going to write ‘We’ll have fun, fun, fun ’til
daddy takes the Tesla away’. No-one writes that sort of
song any more. But this simply means that the treasures
car culture once produced now become more precious.
51
IGNITION / Opinion
ROBERT COUCHER
The Driver
T
he E-type Jaguar and Porsche 911 are as
diametrically opposed as classic cars can be.
Apart from both being powered by six-cylinder
engines – and how different can they get, one a
traditional water-cooled straight-six, the other an
air-cooled flat-six – each one’s approach from creation to
design to execution is as divergent as it can possibly be.
Can you imagine each engineering team getting their
hands on the other’s creation, and wondering why the
hell they did it like that?
Yet the E-type Jaguar and the Porsche 911 are two of
the most desired classic cars. Surprisingly, many
enthusiasts own both and even more have owned one or
other at different times. And because they are so different,
you can enjoy the positive attributes of each while driving
around the negatives.
In today’s world of bright, shiny
and mass-produced consumer
products, including increasing
‘IN 1961, pEOplE
dROvE BEIGE CaRs
ranges of ever more bling motor
cars, it’s difficult to imagine the
impact that the E-type had at its HappIEsT aT 30-
1961 Geneva motor show launch.
Back then, apart from the 50mpH. THE E-TypE
occasional Aston, Bentley, Jaguar
XK or Austin-Healey, people drove mIGHT as wEll
beige or grey cars from Austin,
Morris or Ford that were happiest HavE BEEN a UfO’
when travelling between 30 and
50mph. The E-type might as well have been a UFO.
Here was a sports car that could do twice the speed
of the average saloon, a kind of primordial McLaren F1.
Even more shockingly, it was priced within reach of the
middle classes. It was a flying machine for the reasonably
well-off, not just the extremely wealthy. The M1 having
opened in late 1959, real-world enthusiasts could drive a
sports car with impeccable racing pedigree as fast as they
liked on the unrestricted motorway.
Jaguar’s reputation was still riding high, its C- and
D-type racers having won Le Mans five times up to 1958,
and the E-type was sold as the roadgoing version of
Malcolm Sayer’s and William Lyons’ race weapon. It had
new-fangled disc brakes, independent rear suspension,
beautiful streamlined bodywork and the promise of a
150mph top speed. Science-fiction became reality for
£2096, half the price charged for its more exotic rivals.
With its incredible looks, the E-type soon became the
car of choice for racing drivers and celebrities. I’ve never
owned one but I have enjoyed driving many, and my
52
father had an early 3.8 roadster in the ’60s when I was
young. I vividly remember the impact it had on everyone
who saw it or heard it. People would stop in their tracks,
and when he sometimes dropped me off at school the
metallic silver-blue Jaguar would be mobbed by excited
schoolboys. On one occasion a very attractive woman
jumped into the passenger seat and asked father ‘to take
me to the cleaners’. She meant the laundromat, which
must have been a bit of a comedown.
The Porsche’s evolution was very different. As lore tells
us, the 911 evolved out of the preceding 356. That had
itself begun as a light and nimble sports car in 1948,
borrowing humble but effective mechanicals from the
‘people’s car’, the Volkswagen Beetle. Unlike the robert coucher
spectacular impact of the E-type at launch, that of the Robert grew up with classic
911 two years later was met with cars, and has owned a
Lancia Aurelia B20 GT,
very mixed reactions from
Porschephiles. The new model was
too complex and too expensive,
an Alfa Romeo Giulietta
and a Porsche 356C. He
currently uses his properly-
they said, so in 1965 Porsche sorted 1955 Jaguar XK140
launched the 912: a 911 with the as his daily driver, and is
four-cylinder 356 engine and a a founding editor of Octane.
much lower sticker price.
The whole point of the 911 was
that less is more. It was an evolution
of the quirky 356, brought up to
date and less costly to manufacture.
Its new SOHC flat-six was light
years ahead of the perfunctory old
pushrod unit created to provide the masses with cost-
effective motoring. Once driving enthusiasts accepted
the 911’s quirks and learned how to drive it, especially
in motorsport where its sharp and responsive nature
immediately brought victories, it took up the 356 baton
and soon became the drivers’ car of choice.
The E-type’s shooting star began to fade after the late
1960s. The 4.2-litre version, launched in 1964, had been a
marked improvement with its all-synchro ’box and better
engine cooling, but the best ‘E’ was the Series 2 of 1968
with seven years of customer ‘development’ behind it.
The 911 developed, too. Porsche tried to quell its
wayward handling by adding weights to the front bumper,
then extended the wheelbase by 2.3in in 1969. It also
increased the flat-six’s capacity every couple of years, so
the two-litre screamer morphed into the torquey 2.7 RS.
So, Jaguar E-type versus Porsche 911? Improbable, but
not impossible. These two protagonists took different
paths when new but have ended up nose-to-nose. As an
Octane reader, you’ll relish the dichotomy.
 23 - 27 June 2020
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 IGNITION / Letters

Letter Brief encounter

Derek Bell’s column in Octane
of the 198 about how, when he was a
month schoolboy, he sat through a talk
by BRM proprietor Sir Alfred
Owen reminded me of my own
encounter in the late ’60s.
While studying at King’s in
London, I was informed that
I had won a science prize at my
former college in Aylesbury, so
I travelled down with a friend on
a train from Marylebone. I said
to him that the prize was to be
presented by Sir Alfred Owen.
‘Who is he?’ asked my friend.
‘I don’t know, but anyone
connected with motor racing and
especially BRM must be a good
bloke’ was essentially my answer.
During his introductory talk
the great man reflected that
on his train journey down to
Aylesbury from Marylebone he
was pleased to note that he was
described as ‘a good bloke’. He
must have been in an adjacent
seat. Thank goodness that I had
been complimentary.
Peter Bunyan,
British Columbia, Canada

Sacrifice and spirit in the Bush

BUSHFIRES have ravaged some Sandman panel van [above I am aware that in this
of the most beautiful parts of left], normally a valuable and community there is one reclusive
Australia, in New South Wales, collectable vehicle due to its chap who, as a result of disability,
Victoria and South Australia. rarity and surf cult popularity. is wheelchair bound. The Bodacious booty
One of the most amazing I also met a gent who had a townspeople went to his home Regarding Delwyn Mallett’s Icon
observations in the aftermath collection of over 30 Japanese and ensured his evacuation to a piece about ‘Dagmars’ in Octane
was how capricious the fires were, classic road bikes [top right] that boat. I am certain that some of 198, a modern equivalent
reducing some homes to ash and were reduced to a molten mess. those who lost their classics were developed after IndyCar added
leaving others completely The treasured Holden Torana among these rescuers who rear wheel surrounds in an
untouched, sometimes even [above right] that belonged to sacrificed their treasured cars attempt to prevent another tragic
in the same street. his mother is now a twisted and and belongings to help him. incident like Dan Wheldon’s fatal
I was today in Lake Conjola burnt-out wreck. The end of the Such is the Australian crash at Las Vegas in 2011. The
NSW and saw that classic vehicle Australian car industry last year community spirit. My heart goes bodywork was meant to prevent
owners were not spared. An only makes these vehicles more out to them all. a trailing car from becoming
MGB [top left] was completely precious and their loss more Rody O’Grady, airborne after touching the rear
gutted, as was the Holden heartbreaking. New South Wales, Australia wheel of a leading car.
Around the paddock, the
bodaciously bulbous bodywork at
Letter of the Month wins a car cover worth £250 the rear end became known as the
‘Kardashian’. I snapped the photo
For more than 45 years, Confezioni Andrea Group has produced protective covers for [above] of Will Power’s Team
the world’s major automotive, motorcycle and aircraft manufacturers. It has over 5000 Penske car during the 2016 Indy
individually tailored patterns for vehicle covers in its CoverCar range, and the writer of
Octane’s Letter of the Month can choose from an indoor or outdoor car cover to suit their qualifying weekend; the
vehicle – or, in the event that it does not feature in that 5000-strong list, they can opt ‘Kardashian’ bodywork went
instead for a £250 voucher redeemable against any CoverCar product. CoverCar will away with the 2018 aero refresh
also apply an appropriate marque logo free of charge to the winner’s cover, if requested.
Any Octane reader can claim a ‘car show’ discount if they mention the magazine when of the current Indy car.
ordering a CoverCar cover; see www.covercar.com for full details of the range. Bo Gray, Kansas City, Kansas, USA

55
IGNITION / Letters
Credit where credit’s due
How wrong Neil Godwin-
Stubbert is to say in Octane 198
that sponsorship first appeared
in Grand Prix racing in January
1968. Full commercial
sponsorship arrived well
before 1968, in fact nearly
a decade before!
Eager to raise the profile of
a small company in the highly
competitive world of hire
purchase, three brothers met
with the team manager of a racing
team part-owned by Alfred Moss,
father of Stirling Moss. The
Samengo-Turner brothers offered
Stirling’s manager, Ken Gregory,
£40,000 to run his team. This was
unprecedented at a time when
very limited funds were available
from trade suppliers and from
start and prize money.
Such sponsorship made Ken
Gregory and Alfred Moss’s
British Racing Partnership the
envy of the paddock. The team
was rebranded the Yeoman Credit
Racing Team, the first fully
sponsored Formula 1 Grand Prix
team, in 1959-60.
Ken Gregory bought the cars
(1959 Cooper T51s) and any
equipment he needed. Whatever
Ken bought under the agreement
would be the Samengo-Turners’
56
property but the team retained
all the start and prize money, as
well as the trade payments. In
addition, Yeoman Credit paid
£20,000 for the team’s annual
running costs.
Ken had full responsibility for
the selection of drivers and the
cars remained in the BRP
meadow green but with the
introduction of a red nose and
stripe [above] – red because of
the Samengo-Turners’ Italian
heritage. A Yeoman Credit sticker
was placed on each side of the car.
Colin Chapman and Lotus
brought tobacco sponsorship into
Formula 1, but not until 1968…
nine years later.
Jeremy Samengo-Turner, Hampshire
Teenage dream realised
I’ve been a classic car fan since I
was 15 and lots of cars have been
and gone over the last 30 years
– including a Triumph Herald
convertible that I restored with
my best mate Tony while we were
at university – but a Jaguar E-type
3.8 FHC was always my dream.
On my wall at university was a
poster, now residing in my garage,
that describes the differences
across the different series.
Tony and I have co-owned
a few cars since then and we’ve
recently found a rather sorry-
looking 1962 FHC with an
amazing history. It was supplied
new by Coombs in ’62 and then
again in ’65 to the second owner,
who used it for 35 years until he
passed away. His son then took
custody and it hasn’t moved a lot
since but it came with a mountain
of paperwork and period pictures.
The E-type appears to have
some Coombs modifications,
such as a gas-flowed head with
higher compression, tubular
manifold, air trumpets, lightened
flywheel and so on. The first
owner was Harold Samuel – who
in one of your previous articles
you note as part-exchanging our
car for a Ferrari 500 Superfast –
and the second was Peter Vose.
It retains its original registration
number, 3071 PK.
As we begin a sensitive
restoration I want to see if I can
find any more details about the
car or its history, so if any of your
readers remember it I would
be delighted to hear from them.
The photo [below left] was found
in someone’s archive from 1962!
Gareth Richardson, Surrey
Marvellous Mercedes
I was delighted to read Glen
Waddington’s article in Octane 200
about the W201 190E Cosworths
used in the famous May 1984
Nürburgring Race of Champions,
which the great Ayrton Senna
won. It was such an exciting time
to have Mercedes-Benz properly
back in competition.
I was lucky enough to team
up with Ian Taylor and Martin
Carroll, when Martin wanted to
use the car as an entry in the 1985
Willhire 24 hours at Snetterton.
He managed to procure a standard
LHD car just in time; we were
bolting on the parts as we entered
the paddock but finished second,
with Mike Wilds, Mike Knight
(of Winfield Racing School fame),
Martin Carroll and yours truly as
the driving team. If it weren’t for a
broken left rear shock-absorber…
We rebuilt the car for 1986 and
won the Uniroyal Production
Saloon Car Championship
[below] with Ian Taylor, and
Martin won the Esso Production
Car Championship the same year.
The Peter Hass-built engine
covered two 24-hour races and
the two National Series without a
single failure – a great testament to
the design and integrity of the car.
Gerard Sauer, West Sussex
Write to
Octane Letters
31-32 Alfred Place
London
WC1E 7DP
letters@octane-magazine.com
Please include your name, address
and a daytime telephone number.
Letters may be edited for clarity,
and views expressed are not
necessarily those of Octane.
 Ferrari 288 GTO
Completed in December 1984 it left the factory with the full, and almost essential options, of full “Lusso” leather interior, air conditioning
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Ferrari 275 GTB/4 (LHD)
This totally-restored and matching numbers 275 has a
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Ferrari 275 GTB (LHD)
Completed at the factory in April 1965, this 275 GTB
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This ex Kirk F. White GTB/4 Ferrari ‘Daytona’ Competizione
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Porsche 911 GT3 RS 4.0
One of just 27 RHD cars delivered to the UK and perhaps the
finest and most unmolested of those. Inside this RS benefits
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MYANMAR
(BURMA)
MYANMAR
(BURMA)
Jaguar e-type vs porsche 911

PoPularity
contest

60
E-type and 911: so different yet each with one of the biggest fan-bases in
the classic car world – and they were born within two years of each other.
Stephen Bayley discusses style, Glen Waddington their concepts,
Robert Coucher the driving: which one takes the crown?
Photography Sam Chick

61
Jaguar e-type vs porsche 911
N
o-one ever thought
the Porsche 911
‘beautiful’. Yet it
looks likely it will
be a joy forever, as
beautiful things are
said to be. The end
of production is not nearly in sight. On the
contrary, the original design has shown itself
capable of continuous evolution: proof of
conceptual excellence.
The Jaguar E-type, however, has often been
described as the most beautiful car ever made.
Not least by Enzo Ferrari, never a designer
himself, but an agitator of men and padrone
of more mechanical beauty than anyone else.
There is an E-type in the permanent
collection of New York’s Museum of Modern
Art. Meanwhile, there are waiting lists for
the latest 992. Compared even with the
contemporaneous Porsche, the Jaguar seems
an antique, a museum-piece King’s Road
chariot of the 1960s for men with flares and
women without bras. Yet its haunting
loveliness has hobbled every subsequent
Jaguar designer, none of whom has quite
been able even to approximate such ineffable
62
beauty. I don’t think you will find waiting lists
for the F-type.
‘Zeitgeist’ is the term philosophers use to
describe how contemporary products and
events mystically share characteristics that
bind them to their moment in history. But
‘the spirit of the age’ is not a useful device for
explaining these different cars.
They leave any analytical methodology
floundering because each was the result not
of a dedicated research programme, but of a
sequence of accidents and opportunities. And
market research played no part. Instead, it was
what the poet called ‘the madness of art’.
Graf Albrecht von Goertz, a slightly dodgy
‘Count’ who had worked for the genius/
charlatan/hustler Raymond Loewy in the US
and, on the side, designed the BMW 507, is an
important source of the 911. On his return to
Europe, he worked as a consultant for Porsche
on a replacement for the 356. His proposals
were rejected as being too Goertz-bling and
not enough Porsche-matter-of-fact.
But Goertz later persuaded young
Ferdinand Alexander ‘Butzi’ Porsche to leave
Ulm’s Hochschule für Gestaltung, sacred
source of ‘systematic’ design, and to join the
family business. The shape of the 911 is his
work. Clearly, he acknowledged history
because its lines reflect Erwin Komenda’s
original Volkswagen profile.
But it is a more athletic, racing beetle, even
if photographs of the 1963 original sitting
high on its thin tyres give more an impression
of a family limousine than a racing car. Indeed,
the original brief insisted the 911 should have
space for a bag of golf clubs.
Artistically, the essence of Ferdinand-
Alexander’s design is geometry, a discipline
revered at the Ulm school, which also
produced Dieter Rams whose Braun electrical
products later so inspired Apple’s Jony Ive.
Start doodling with overlapping ellipses for
roof- and hip-lines and with semi-circles for
the wheelarches and you will soon have your
own drawing of a 911’s profile.
There is a BMW connection for the Jaguar
as well. The lines of the XK120, the car that
established the firm’s reputation for dangerous
proto-MeToo! suavity, were borrowed from
the pre-war BMW 328. And here we must ask
where, in the case of the heroically
opportunistic William Lyons, inspiration
ends and plagiarism begins.
 But when the aerodynamicist Malcom Sayer
began to exert his influence in Jaguar, other
factors became involved. And they were not all
sourced in the wind tunnel. Sayer admired the
1952 Alfa Romeo Disco Volante by Carrozzeria
Touring of Milan. This is another astonishing
composition of segments and sections of
circles. Indubitably it influenced the E-type.
The Porsche and Jaguar engines are, in
aesthetic terms, both deeply revealing of
contrasting national preoccupations. In the
German car, the engine is as anonymous and
as unobtrusively functional as a fridge motor,
but the Jaguar’s is theatre and the stage curtains
are that enormous, sculpted bonnet. Opening
it is a process of concealment-and-display and, ‘The Jaguar
if that is sexually suggestive, then so much
about the E-type’s aesthetic is. E-type has often
been described
It was an engine designed to be admired:
look upon those three SU carburettors, the
polished cam boxes and the very self-conscious
triangular air filter and don’t despair, but thrill.
The exhausts, like the power bulge, were
as the most
artistically emphasised to create drama.
In plan form the Jaguar, so often described
beautiful car
as ‘phallic’, is a flat rectangle. And it has not
so much a very long bonnet as a very short
ever made’
cabin, an arrangement that creates startling
63
Jaguar e-type vs porsche 911
‘The Porsche and the Jaguar have much
in common, aesthetically speaking’
proportions. From front three-quarters, it’s
evident that those voluptuous wings are
nearly pure cylinders. Ian Callum once told
me: ‘Malcolm Sayer designed by geometry…
It is not free expression.’ In Callum’s analysis,
the trailing edge of the E-type bonnet is a
pure radius with a known mathematical value.
The Jaguar has better details than the
Porsche. There is that power bulge, a
sculptural device that adds an irrational
complexity to the geometry of the bonnet.
The chrome bar splitting the perfectly
proportioned air intake has nothing to do
with aerodynamics and everything to do with
a stylist’s genius. Both Porsche and Jaguar
have wrap-around rear bumpers, but the
Jaguar’s are somehow more lascivious. Callum
said: ‘It’s all about putting just enough style
into a car to make it fascinating.’
As we look at these old cars, it’s impossible
not to reflect on how little is ever truly new
in matters of design. Some early 911s had
engines related to Hitler’s wheezing and
puffing Volkswagen. And those distinctive
horizontal rear lights on the E-type? They are
similar in design to the Jaguar Mk10’s, where
they were deployed vertically.
Despite their differences, the Porsche
and the Jaguar have much in common,
aesthetically speaking. In each, the details are
in harmony with the whole: you can instantly
recognise a 911 or an E-type from a fragment
alone. Rather like an organism, the entirety
of each car evolves from its elementary parts.
‘Classic’ means the best of its kind, which
is why major golf and tennis tournaments are
64
called classics. It takes time to become a
classic. Anyone talking about an ‘instant
classic’ has inhaled too much PR. It took the
911 and E-type decades.
I do not think the Porsche and Jaguar
designers were aiming at timelessness, even if
that is what each achieved. But time is a cruel
mistress: the beautiful E-type is dead while
the more matter-of-fact Porsche lives on.
Stephen Bayley
StEPHEn MEntIonED the 356. And the
XK120. He didn’t mention that they were
both launched in the same year: 1948. nor
that, although there was a price disparity in
the Jaguar’s favour, the XK120 was powered
by a 160bhp 3.4-litre straight-six that made it
the fastest production car of its day, while the
356 puffed out its air-cooled pecs to summon
35bhp from 1131cc. Different beasts, though
with similar enthusiast longevity, and both
were initially built in tiny numbers in
aluminium before serious production began.
Then it happened again. not quite in the
same year this time; these introductions, two
years apart, were divided by the release of
Love Me Do, The Beatles’ first hit. That was in
1962; the E-type preceded it famously, thanks
to norman Dewis’s flamboyant blast from
Coventry to Geneva. All that raises an
enthusiast eyebrow about the 911’s carefully
orchestrated presentation at the Frankfurt
motor show in 1963 was that it narrowly
missed being a 901. Peugeot had objected.
The Beatles set the new scene evolving.
Rock ’n’ roll was more than merely a blend
of jazz, gospel, blues and folk music: it had
been influencing lifestyles, fashion, attitudes
and language. Radio Caroline (from 1964;
the same year Beatlemania went global)
broadcast it straight to the hearth. And the
E-type landed straight into Carnaby Street, at
the heart of this swinging new world,
swaggering with its 265bhp 3.8-litre triple-
carb straight-six. Rock ’n’ roll on wheels.
Amazing to think it did this after a gestation
in Coventry, of all places. Led by Sir William
Lyons too, a man already into his 60s, and in
memoirs of whom I don’t believe references
to Chuck Berry are prevalent. But this wasn’t
fashion designed-in. This was a team
of talented men seeking to build the best
sports car Britain could offer. And you can
forget any notions of a crude chassis and
live axle wrapped in sexy tinsel. The E-type
was prescient. And proper.
Its construction was clever, a mix of
monocoque (body tub) and spaceframe (to
carry engine and front suspension), with a
sophisticated independent rear suspension
assembly mounted on a subframe – the
monocoque’s construction technique owed
more to aerospace technology than car-
building. And as Jaguar’s development
engineer Brian Martin once told me: ‘That
suspension offered much better roadholding
than anything we’d designed before. It was
Jaguar’s first in a production car and went on
virtually unchanged to 1989 in the XJS.’
The E-type was an incredible achievement
for a company run by only 15-20 senior
people; the suspension alone took five years
 Below
911 is an arresting shape, to such
a degree that after 56 years the
latest generation is merely an
evolution of it. Same goes for that
rear-mounted flat-six, now larger,
turbocharged and water-cooled.

1973 Porsche 911 2.4S

Engine Rear-mounted 2341cc air-cooled flat-six, OHC per bank, dry sump, Bosch mechanical fuel injection Power 190bhp @ 6500rpm
Torque 159lb ft @ 5200rpm Transmission Five-speed manual, rear-wheel drive Steering Rack and pinion Suspension Front:
MacPherson struts, lower wishbones, torsion bars, telescopic dampers, anti-roll bar. Rear: semi-trailing arms, torsion bars,
telescopic dampers, anti-roll bar Brakes Vented discs Weight 1075kg Top speed 145mph 0-60mph 8.5sec

65
Jaguar e-type vs porsche 911
to develop and employed fixed-length
halfshafts sprouting either side of the diff,
sprung by paired coils and telescopic dampers.
The XK twin-cam straight-six had been
around since 1948 but was good for nearly
three more decades. Eventually the V12 came
along, an incredible engine that calls to mind
the Supermarine Spitfire’s Merlin in its
character and scope – but Jaguar lengthened
and rationalised the E-type around it, spoiling
its purity and diluting its sporting nature.
Maybe that’s what Stephen means when he
says that time is a cruel mistress. But in terms
of engineering rather than style, and with the
zeitgeist in mind, the E-type was bang-on. On
the ‘b’ of the bang, in fact. A shortlived
explosion, but one from which the ripples are
still felt. People want an E-type, nearly 60
years on. And the snarl of its engine and the
way it flows down the road have defined the
best of the marque ever since.
66
The initial impact of the 911 might have
been less obvious, but its influence is greater.
Any manufacturer that designs an upmarket
sports car has the 911 in mind as its
benchmark, and will have done so for years.
While those other cars have come and gone
– including the E-type – the 911 has evolved.
It remains relevant, whether in original form
(small, lightweight, practical, as well as
thrilling) or as a new car, with styling,
engineering and conceptual ethos that can all
be traced linearly back to 1963. Only it’s no
longer a 2.0-litre straight-six with just over
100bhp. These days it’s 3.0 litres, twin turbos,
and 364bhp. In base trim. Not a world away
from the techno-overload of the 959 in 1986.
And in these pictures, you’re not looking at
the earliest car. This is a 2.4S from 1973. Best
of breed, if one turns away from the more
hardcore, much more valuable Carrera RS
2.7. More of a match for the E-type in power,
not dissimilar in terms of market value. The
one you’d hanker after, just as Mr Jag-Fan
would want an early 3.8 fixed-head E-type.
So, that rear-engine thing. Keeps the
steering light and pure, enables efficient
packaging (so you get rear seats), makes for
great traction. As for the handling… Well, all
the greatest drivers love a 911. The challenge
is to defeat understeer and master the
transition to oversteer: few cars are as throttle-
adjustable. The problem is that it takes skill
and nerve to master. It’s a car you can spend
a long time learning to drive, but over-
confidence could see you off in short order.
It’s also famous for the wail of that air-
cooled flat-six, itself a masterpiece, more
advanced at launch than the Jaguar’s bigger,
brawnier straight-six. All-aluminium and with
a dry sump to keep its mass closer to the
ground, it featured overhead camshafts and
hemispherical combustion chambers: the
kind of spec that would otherwise grace a
racing car. And though it started with a ‘mere’
130bhp (good for a 2.0-litre in the early
1960s), increases in capacity and changes in
tech followed, so the 930 Turbo 3.3 offered
300bhp, and even the base 993 Carrera of the
mid-1990s pumped out 272bhp.
But what really sets the 911 apart is its
sheer non-conformity. There just isn’t another
sports car like it, nor has there ever been. It’s
the imposter here; the E-type is simply a
superbly executed example of a comparatively
conventional car.
But the passage of time is significant. The
fact that the most sought-after E-type is the
earliest is also important. It started at its best
and went into gradual decline. The 911 began
modestly – then developed. The basic original
car underwent significant change only with
the arrival of the 964 in 1989, and the original
side glazing, doors and dash were still in place
when the water-cooled 996 finally took over
from the 993 in the late 1990s. That’s one hell ‘While other
of a lifespan. And it’s perhaps why it seems
strange that these two legends hail back to cars have come
within two years of each other.
If the E-type embodies the shouty pout and gone –
and swagger of Mick Jagger, then the 911 is
the music of Paul McCartney: considered,
studied, more intrinsic genius than showman
including the
chutzpah. Whether or not that makes it a
better car is another story, surely one rooted
E-type – the 911
in the way they drive. And now it’s over to
Robert Coucher for that. Glen Waddington
has evolved’
soME MIghT sAy that we are not
comparing like with like here and, in this first
sentence, I can tell you that the Porsche 911
2.4s is a more resolved proposition than the
Jaguar E-type 3.8-litre FhC.
But that’s not why we love and desire
classic cars: we want ones that stir the soul,
67
Jaguar e-type vs porsche 911
and these two do exactly that. This E-type is
an early and desirable 1962 example so it has
the rev-happy 3.8-litre engine and rugged
Moss gearbox as well as the rather frightening
Kelsey-Hayes brake servo, which only really
operates at high speeds. The straight-six was
claimed to produce 256bhp in its day, but
let’s be kind and credit it with an honest
200bhp. That’s still enough to propel the
Jaguar to 145mph on period-correct skinny
tyres; 60mph should be clipped in around 6.5
seconds, so plenty fast enough for a 59-year-
old classic. The E-type evolved over the years
into the 4.2-litre, with many improvements
exacted, including more torque, better
cooling, better brakes and greater reliability.
Even so, this early 3.8-litre is the purest E-type
iteration, so it’s the most desirable and
many of its foibles can be sympathetically
engineered out these days.
This 1973 Porsche 911 2.4S swings the
other way, if you know what I mean. It’s the
last of the line for the original-style 911,
which ended with the limited-production
homologation 2.7 RS in 1973 before the
impact-bumper cars were introduced in 1974.
68
So the Porker has everything: a stroked,
big-bore, 2.4-litre air-cooled flat-six with
mechanical fuel injection, good for 190bhp,
with a five-speed gearbox of conventional shift
pattern, and disc brakes all-round. It too does
145mph and the 0-60mph dash in 6.5 seconds.
The E-type coupé driver’s door is small and
you have to wriggle into the cockpit, but what
a joy once you’re ensconced. The dash is
fabulous, with the big Smiths instruments and
toggle switches. The original E-type steering
wheel is one of the most emotive in the
motoring universe and you sit low in the
minimal early leather bucket seat, looking out
over a bonnet that’s long and curvaceous.
The 3.8-litre engine starts quietly on the
button and the SU carbs afford a gentle idle.
You ease away from rest as you’d expect with
260lb ft of torque from the long-stroke six,
though it really deserves a five-speed gearbox,
with synchromesh on first gear!
The controls are weightier than you might
anticipate but the rack-and-pinion steering Above and right
E-type’s flight-deck dashboard is almost as
lightens up on the move, even if the iron-age sexy as that iconically curvaceous body,
Moss gearbox needs a good warming through and the venerable XK straight-six offers
before it starts to co-operate. The FHC power and vocal prowess to match.
 1961 Jaguar E-type
3.8 FHC
Engine 3781cc DOHC straight-six,
triple SU HD8 carburettors
Power 265bhp @ 5500rpm
Torque 260lb ft @ 4000rpm
Transmission Four-speed manual,
rear-wheel drive
Steering Rack and pinion
Suspension Front: double
wishbones, torsion bars, telescopic
dampers, anti-roll bar. Rear:
fixed-length driveshafts, radius
arms, lower transverse links,
twinned coil springs and telescopic
dampers, anti-roll bar
Brakes Discs Weight 1220kg
Top speed 145mph
0-60mph 6.5sec

69
JaguaR E-TyPE vs PORsCHE 911
THE EXPERTs’ CHOICEs
Time to get partisan. Who prefers which?
Peter Stevens, car designer
‘It has to be the Porsche 911. It was a design
that did not draw on anything except its own
company’s history, such a unique form that it
has outlived all its competitors; not because
Porsche dislikes change but because it was
so immediately right. It’s not a brilliant
aerodynamic shape but it expresses its
function with every carefully modelled surface.
I never once looked at an early 911 and thought
“I wouldn’t have done that piece like that.” On
the other hand, when I look at an E-type I think
“I wish the windscreen had a little more rake,
I wish the tail-lights were better integrated, or
the wheels were not buried within the wheel
openings.” As a form, the sight of a bodyshell
just after having been painted is like looking at
a beautiful piece of sculpture, but as the detail
parts are added the magic is diluted. With a
classic object we must love the whole – so for
me the Porsche is the true classic.’
70
Jay Leno, TV legend and
Octane columnist
‘Which to choose? Dfficult but not
impossible. Let’s start with the 911, a car
that was evolutionary rather than
revolutionary. Each version just a little bit
better than the last. The fact that they do
their job so well is what makes them
desirable. Fast, efficient, reliable, equally at
home at a track or on a soccer run, the 911
is the car you marry and remain happy with
for life. The E-type is the lover you equally
can’t forget and, at the same time, wish you
had never met. A 911 seduces you with its
driving abilities, the E-type seduces you just
sitting in your driveway. A car that is so
achingly beautiful that, at least in my eyes, it
was the first sports car where the coupé
was more beautiful than the convertible. The
E-type was a really good sports car, but
as a classic it is unsurpassed.’
James Turner of
911 specialist Sports Purpose
‘I am afraid that I will always come down in
favour of the 911 – it’s just a far better car. The
E-type is exquisite and you feel a complete
rock star driving one, but I just never think that
a standard one works well enough – I’d want
an Eagle and they are a bit dearer. I picked up
the 911 in these pictures in London, slightly
unexpectedly, on a wet Friday afternoon; drove
it out in traffic and up the M40 – fast. It hadn’t
been out of town for a while yet just hummed
along. So there is usability. Then there is the
driving experience, which is always truly
special. Finally, there is the fashion aspect –
I really think Porsche moved with the times
(and continues to) in a way that other
manufacturers do not. My choice? The 2.4S
is great but the original short-wheelbase
2.0S has still to be properly appreciated
as one of the truly great 911s.’
 Gregor Fisken, racer and
historic car dealer
‘If I had to choose between an early E-type or
a 911 I would be happy with either, but on
balance it would have to be the Series 1
E-type for me. The coupé would be my first
choice. I remember the first time my father
brought one home and I couldn’t believe that
we had this thing that looked as good as any
Ferrari (possibly better!) – and we could afford
it. Being something of a steam train enthusiast,
which I also got from my father, I remember
looking at the rear of it, which reminded me of
the streamlined front of an LNER A4 Pacific,
which for those that don’t know is the model
that holds the world steam speed record. The
combination of that and the wonderful XK
3.8-litre engine left such an impression that I’ve
never been without an E-type since, and I’ve
even had the privilege of racing and selling
almost every one of the 12 Lightweights.’
Gordon Murray, road and
racing car design engineer
‘I love both the early 911 and the E -type for
different reasons, and they both have their
special place in sports car design history.
The 911 is a mixture of good and bad: clean,
iconic styling, small footprint, characterful
engine and a truly engaging driver experience.
But the engine hangs out behind the rear axle,
placing the 911 on the “impure” side of the
sports car engineering line, and it has taken
years of development (and ESP) to make the
on-limit handling acceptable. The E-type is also
iconic, delivered with its sporty straight-six, and
soon became the sports car to aspire to. Its
construction was unique and advanced, and
the driving experience matched its beauty even
if it couldn’t deliver the perfection of an early
Lotus Elan. For me the E-type wins because it
changed our automotive world forever and
it didn’t have the early 911’s vices.’
Oliver Winbolt of Jaguar
E-type restoration specialist
The Splined Hub
‘When we started our company, I had a clear
mandate: decide on a marque and do the
best job you can in accurately restoring your
car of choice. Interestingly, my two options
were the Porsche 911 and the Jaguar E-type.
Both cars are iconic in their own way, and
both cars had a very pure focus on their own
brand of engineering. The thing I love about
the E-type is that it evolved from some very
obvious race pedigree, but essentially is very
pure and simple. Most of the parts can be
found on any number of more mundane
Jaguars and yet the combination of a
beautiful shape and a pile of off-the-shelf
components has resulted in a car for all time.
A freshly built E-type is a joy to behold and a
joy to drive. So for me, taking everything into
account, I have to choose the Jaguar E-type.’
71
Jaguar e-type vs porsche 911
‘The front of the 911
moves about and you guide
it with your fingertips –
and your bum, too’
remains quiet and refined throughout, while
the engine is remote and muted on gentle
throttle. But when the roads open up the big
six takes a breath and the Jaguar lunges.
Being narrow and well-mannered, it is
quick and corners with accuracy and
assurance. The independent suspension is soft
and long-travel by today’s standards but it
soaks up country roads with aplomb. The
steering is accurate and, though you are aware
of a heavy engine up front, the E tends towards
polite understeer. Its twin-cam straight-six
engine is superb, with a sweet and revvy
nature aligned to creamy, ample torque. It’s
quiet and civilised when pottering, but takes
off, snarling, when you depress the throttle.
In contrast, the 2.4S has a large German-
sized door so ingress is saloon-car simple.
Simply twist the ignition key and the
mechanically fuel-injected flat-six starts
instantly; you modulate the idle speed as it
warms up via a lever located between the
seats. It reacts with alacrity to the throttle
thanks to its light flywheel, while the clutch
pedal is soft and the gearshift slips about the
gate with long movements. It has a normal
H-pattern with fifth on a dogleg; the type-915
gearbox slots cleanly into first gear.
Pull away and the 911 instantly feels light,
its engine eager and raspy – these early air-
72
cooled flat-sixes emit a wonderful cacophony
of mechanical sound. The crankcase is made
of exotic magnesium to keep the weight down,
adding to the exciting resonances.
The next sensation to enjoy is the steering:
the unassisted rack-and-pinion set-up is
delightful, full of feel: the narrow six-inch
front wheels are lightly loaded and the steering
feels laser-accurate via the thin-rimmed
wheel. With the engine located in the rear, the
front of the car moves about and you guide it
with your fingertips – and your bum, too. The
short Porsche seems to swivel from the base of
the seat. Its minimal weight is set low in the
chassis and the mechanical grip available at
the rear is great and allows you to slingshot
the car deftly out of corners.
The hot S model has vented disc brakes but
no need of a servo. So the brakes – again – feel
mechanical and more than powerful enough
and, with its uprated suspension, the S feels
super-sharp and reactive. On the open road
the little Porsche zips along with vigour, the
lusty six providing more than enough power
to go for any gap. No surprise because the 2.4
S is really the factory hot-rod.
Yet it does not behave errantly at all. The
well-damped ride is superb and absorbs the
worst of British roads. All the controls feel
well-oiled and beautifully made, working
together in syncopation. Pulling easily and
cleanly away from standstill, the car operates
as one: clutch, gearshift, brakes and steering
are light, balanced and in tune. There’s no
transmission snatch nor are there any rough
edges in any of the dynamics, and it has a
tight, muscular feel of deeply resolved quality
thanks to its decade of 911 evolution and
development. And that free-revving, yowling
engine is one of the best-sounding ever.
There are deep reserves of concentrated
German engineering and nous in the highly
developed 911 2.4S. On a tight and tricky
country road, the 11-years-older – and rather
more gran turismo – Jaguar coupé would not
keep up. But the 911 driver might have to be
judicious in not overcooking things and
letting the back end get away from him, while
the Jaguar driver would be looking on from
behind with amusement, in an albeit slightly
less nimble motor car but one that remains
a quick and on-side cohort.
So while I stand by everything in that first
paragraph, force me to choose and I’ll say that
the E-type’s effortless charm beats the 911’s
capable cool – though I could hardly blame
you for disagreeing. Robert Coucher
Thanks To Sports Purpose, sports-purpose.
com, and The Splined Hub, thesplinedhub.co.uk.
 horses
The moTorsporT careers of the E-type
and 911 depended almost as much upon
each marque’s attitude to competition as
for
they did upon the respective abilities of the
cars themselves. Take Jaguar, which should
have found itself in the pound seats as
the 1962 season approached. The World
courses Sportscar Championship was morphing
into the International Championship for GT
Manufacturers and, as Autosport magazine
stated: ‘Britain’s hopes are as bright as they
The E-type and 911’s motorsport could be, for the new Jaguars should be more
than a match for the previously pre-eminent
skirmishes were surprisingly rare. 250 GT Ferraris.’
James Page explains Such optimism was justified. This was a car
that had won first time out at Oulton Park
in April 1961 and, even with minimal
development, had impressed throughout
that season. Bruce McLaren had raced Peter
Berry’s E-type and wrote in Motor Racing
74
magazine that: ‘I can see great potential in
this motor car, and I am sure that it can be made
to go considerably faster than at present.’
Unfortunately, that potential was never truly
realised at the highest level. There were various
reasons, some of which were out of Jaguar’s
hands. For a start, the appeal of the International
Championship for GT Manufacturers was
diluted by the fact that many organisers
continued to allow sports-racers to enter their
events, and they hoovered up overall victories
and most of the headlines. Then there was the
fact that Ferrari countered with the 250 GTO;
Maranello was fully committed to competition
in a way that Jaguar – at that time – simply
wasn’t. Most of the Coventry marque’s
resources were tied up in getting production of
the E-type road cars and the Mk10 under way,
and Sir William Lyons had shown himself to be
reluctant to officially return to racing unless
 Jaguar could be confident of repeating its
(surely unrepeatable) 1950s level of success.
Despite that, Briggs Cunningham-entered
E-types won their class at Daytona and Sebring
in 1962, and the American, sharing with Roy
Salvadori, finished fourth overall at Le Mans.
The 1963 introduction of the Lightweight
briefly allowed Jaguar to offer a genuine threat
to Ferrari, but throughout this period entrants
from John Coombs to Peters Lumsden and
Sargent too often found themselves frustrated
by the factory’s ‘we know better than you, old
boy’ attitude towards development.
And yet E-types won around the world. Bob
Jane enjoyed considerable success in Australia,
as did Peter Nöcker in Germany, while the likes
of Peter Sutcliffe, Roger Mac, Dick Protheroe
and the aforementioned Lumsden and Sargent
kept the flag flying in the UK and Continental
Europe. Phil Scragg proved that it could make
a highly effective hillclimb weapon, too.
There was even a last hurrah in SCCA racing.
Joe Huffaker and Bob Tullius each developed
a V12 Series 3 racer, Huffaker campaigning his
on America’s West Coast (with Lee Mueller
driving) and Tullius doing likewise on the East
Coast. Having narrowly missed out on the
1974 National Championship, Tullius made
no mistake in the 1975 run-offs and defeated
the massed ranks of Chevrolets.
Porsche, meanwhile, had emerged as sports
car racing’s dominant force as the 1970s
approached. In that context, it’s easy to
overlook the fact that many of the 911’s early
successes came via rallying. Vic Elford finished
third on the 1966 Tour de Corse, then led the
following year’s Rallye Monte-Carlo before
PORScHE AG
Above and right
Elford and Stone guide 911
to first in class on the 1967
Monte; Jaguar entrusted
E-types to Graham Hill and
Roy Salvadori for the
model’s maiden outing at
Oulton Park in 1961. It won.
slipping to third in the event’s closing stages.
‘Quick Vic’ was impressed not only by the
911’s bulletproof reliability but also by
Porsche’s enthusiastic, thorough and proactive
approach to all forms of motor racing. In 1967
he won the European Rally Championship,
Pauli Toivonen repeated that success in 1968,
and the 911 took a hat-trick of victories on the
Rallye Monte-Carlo between 1968 and 1970.
Even if you looked no further than its rallying
results, the 911 would have earned its place in
motorsport history, but it was nothing if not
versatile. In 1967 it swept aside Alfa Romeo
in the American Trans-Am Championship’s
Under 2-litre category, then did it again in 1968
and ’69. In those same three years it also won
the Spa 24 Hours, and Gérard Larrousse took
a 911 R to victory in the 1969 Tour de France.
By the early 1970s this consummate all-
rounder had become the privateer’s weapon of
choice, and development continued apace. In
1973 came the RSR, which won both Daytona
24 Hours and Targa Florio outright that year.
A turbocharged variant followed – it not only
finished second overall at Le Mans in 1974, it
also laid the foundation for the über-successful
forced-induction Porsche racers that followed.
Raced in far greater numbers than the E-type
and constantly updated by Porsche to keep it
competitive, the 911 propped up many a grid
during the 1970s. At the 1975 Le Mans 24
Hours, for example, no fewer than 24 of the 55
starters were in some sort of 911. Surely its
greatest attribute, however, was that it was
equally at home at La Sarthe as it was in the
Sicilian countryside or on American road
courses and Alpine passes. End
frazer nash le mans replica

the nash
equilibrium
This historically notable Frazer Nash
Le Mans Replica is currently bewitching
a second generation of the same family
Words James Elliott Photography Alex Tapley

It’s a summer’s evenIng in 1981 and a father and son are

travelling home after a tough day’s racing for the former at Donington.
Like every proper clubman, he is blasting down the motorway in the very
same car that he has been competing in, for many the very epitome of a
British 1950s drum-braked sports car, a Frazer Nash Le Mans Replica. As
the sun dips over the horizon, he turns to his car-mad, freshly road-legal
17-year-old son and says he is tired and that the boy should drive the
muddied ’Nash the rest of the way home to Norfolk. And so the youngster
(who until then had piloted only the family Allegro) does, relishing and
revelling in its fizzing charms as he chases the dying embers of daylight in
his dream machine, experiencing the sheer exhilaration, his father gently
dozing (as best he can) in the passenger seat. It truly is one of those
moments that create a memory to cherish forever.
This idyllic journey became all the more important, all the more
poignant, a couple of years later when that young man’s life was shattered
by the death of his father racing the very same car at Silverstone. With the
family’s life turned on its head, the repaired Frazer Nash was sold on after
the tragedy. Now, though, it is back with that son, fully reconciled and a
popular sight at two concours in Summer 2019 – The London Concours Main image
and Concours of Elegance – even winning an award at one of them. Octane’s editor at the wheel of
This is the story, then, not only of a great car, but of how a child robbed the Frazer Nash Le Mans Replica,
of his father found equilibrium over 30 years, reconnected with the car in campaigned widely by Roger Joice
(top left), who won a VSCC
which his father died, and turned painful memories into a positive Pomeroy Trophy in it; son Charles
embodiment of what makes our relationships with cars so special. reacquired it for the family in 2018.

76
77
frazer nash le mans replica
‘It set a class record
at Montlhéry of 120.13mph
averaged over 200 MIles’
The Le Mans Replica was the post-war vision of HJ Aldington, who
had taken over AFN from Archie Frazer-Nash not long after its 1920s
inception and ran it with his brothers, keeping it in the family until John
Aldington sold out to Porsche in the 1980s. Equally well known as a
BMW importer as a manufacturer, AFN sold limited numbers of high-
performance sporting cars based around other people’s engines and
transmissions. Up until WW2 you could have an Anzani, Meadows,
Blackburne, BMW or even Gough-engined ‘chain gang’ and afterwards
you could buy, chronologically and ignoring the one-off front-wheel-
drive two-stroke DKW and two-off V8 Continental, a Bristol-engined Le
Mans Replica, Mille Miglia, Targa Florio, Le Mans Coupé or Sebring.
The Bristol engine, of course, was the BMW 328-derived 1971cc straight-
six of which AC and Cooper also made such good use, and, considering
the impact these cars had and their desirability, it is a shock to realise that
fewer than 100 Frazer Nashes were manufactured post-war before the
Falcon works in Isleworth fell silent in 1957.
All the models are special, of course, but the allure of the Le Mans
Replica, of which only 21 MkIs like this were built, costing £3500 in
period, has entranced everyone from Kjell Qvale and Briggs Cunningham
to Sir Stirling Moss and ‘Fearless’ Frank Sytner (who once told me over a
random coffee in Nice airport that it should be the first car in any serious
collection). Originally called the High Speed Competition, it earned its
more common sobriquet after the 1949 Le Mans at which Aldington and
Norman Culpan came third overall on debut. The little sports car – its
wheelbase is less than 2.5 metres – went on to shine at Sebring and the
Targa Florio in the early ’50s. Remarkably, its star has never really waned
since and it remains highly competitive in Historics to this day.
This example, 399 FXB (chassis 421/100/155, engine FNS1/24), was
notable long before it settled in to the Joice family. It was supplied new, in
Bristol maroon and registered PPG 1, in 1951 to Le Mans Rep devotee
Tony Crook. In 1952 it was the Earls Court Motor Show car and in
Crook’s capable hands – it wasn’t all cabbage patches at Castle Combe for
the cantankerous Bristol owner – it won the 1951 production car race at
Silverstone, set a new sports car best at Shelsley Walsh and, most
impressively of all, a class record at Montlhéry of 120.13mph averaged
over 200 miles. After Crook’s tenure it went through a coterie of owners
who continued to compete in it and even had a decade-long spell in
South Africa before being repatriated and re-registered as 399 FXB,
almost inevitably, by Frank Sytner in 1972.
It was put back on the market by Sytner two years later with an asking
price of £8900, and Norfolk farmer Roger Joice bought it eight years after
that for the princely sum of £25,000. A rather touching insight into what
Le Mans Replica ownership is all about came via a note from then-seller
Robert Cooper. He wrote to Roger: ‘I am very loth [sic] to sell the car but
I really do mean it that if I did not believe it was going to absolutely the
right home I would not have done so.’
Car fanatic Joice certainly was the right home. He had really got going
motoring-wise in the early 1970s after restoring a succession of XK
Jaguars with farm mechanic Michael Goodey, working his way up to the
ex-Le Mans XK140 (Octane 164, February 2017). Roger was sprinting,
hillclimbing and racing throughout and then got into Frazer Nash via a
Le Mans Coupé, actually the prototype and Le Mans class-winner,

79
frazer nash le mans replica

1951 Frazer Nash Le Mans Replica MkI

Engine 1971cc front-mounted straight-six, pushrod OHV, four-bearing crank,
cast iron block and crankcase, alloy head, three downdraught Solex carburettors
Power 120bhp @ 5500rpm Torque 125lb ft @ 4500rpm
Transmission Four-speed manual (synchro on second, third and top),
rear-wheel drive Steering Rack and pinion Suspension Front: semi-
independent, overhead transverse leaf spring, lower wishbones, hydraulic
dampers. Rear: live axle located with torsion bars Brakes Hydraulically operated
drums Weight 673kg Top speed 120mph 0-62mph 8.5sec

bought from the US in the late ’70s. By the early ’80s he was running two
Frazer Nashes and a Cooper-Bristol, having bought and sold a 328, too.
‘There was a Chain Gang at some point, but he was a real enthusiast of
the Bristol-engined cars and this was the one he spent most of his latter
years racing,’ says son Charles Joice. ‘He won the Pomeroy Trophy in this
car in 1983.’ Chillingly, that was just two months before that fatal accident
at Silverstone. Charles adds: ‘Prior to college I was working on farms in
Germany and Austria; I came home for Easter in 1983 and during that
week my father went off to Silverstone and didn’t come back. I was meant
to go off to Brands with him the following week, but that never happened.
‘Life went into a bit of turmoil, we umm’d and ah’d about keeping it,
but just couldn’t, so it was repaired and then sold in 1986 to a family in
Yorkshire who kept it until I bought it back in 2018. It was spooky, almost
as if they had just been looking after it until I was ready.’
That’s quite some emotional rollercoaster that Charles has been on,
but made slightly easier in that it came in stages, first looking for a Le
Mans Replica and only by chance ending up with the car. ‘That car has
always been at the back of my mind; I’ve always thought “maybe one
day”,’ he explains, ‘so even though I was still very committed to “the
bashed Nash”, the family Le Mans Coupé that I had done so much with
[four Mille Miglias, Le Mans Cavalcades, Goodwood and more], I didn’t
hesitate to sell that to buy back our Le Mans Replica.
‘I had been keeping an eye on them for years and had come close to
buying a couple of times, but then I saw an Automobiles Historiques
advert in Octane. It clicked straight away that it was our Le Mans Rep and
that changed everything. I rang Vanessa Marçais straight away to go and
have a look. I wasn’t a buyer at that stage, I just wanted to see it.
‘We went for a drive and I just got a feel for it, then I went back again
and suddenly I felt reconciled to it. Boy, there were a lot of competing
emotions to deal with, but I discussed it with my family – the first thing I
did was ask my mother Catherine’s thoughts and feelings because she is
obviously very sensitive to its past – but they could all sense that I needed
to do this. My wife Josie was especially sympathetic.
‘I finally decided I should embrace it rather than push it away, that
though some might baulk at the idea, actually there was no better
memorial to my father than that embodied by this car and I should keep
it as close as I could. Once I made my mind up, I was pretty emotional,
but Vanessa and Flavien were wonderfully empathetic.’
Charles sold the Le Mans Coupé – the decision helped by the fact that
all three of his kids (Emily, Tom and Ted) are over 6ft tall and really
struggled in the low-roofed coupé – and bought the Le Mans Replica in
autumn 2018. It went through the workshop with meticulous guidance
from Andrew Mitchell of Mitchell Motors Restoration in Chicklade,
Wiltshire and was pressed into action properly in 2019, the summer
culminating in the Le Mans Replica being called up for an RAC Club
Trophy award at the Concours of Elegance at Hampton Court. On that
occasion it was Charles driving with his own son Tom accompanying
him and the correlation between that day and that memorable trip with
his own father in 1981 was not lost on Charles. ‘It was then I knew
beyond any doubt that I’d done the right thing.’
Even without such touching history, this car looks and feels special,

80
Clockwise from top left
Virtues of the Solex-fed Bristol
‘six’ hardly need extolling; this car’s
interior is beautifully worn and comfy
like your favourite armchair; the
Nash’s simple symmetry beguiles.

81
frazer nash le mans replica

82
 Clockwise from main image
Nash’s impeccable road manners
are anachronistic for a car that was
wilfully vintage in ethos; rear is a
near-perfect sphere; Charles Joice
has been on an emotional journey.

83
an irresistible mix of patina and restoration, the hand-painted
numberplates and wheels, the worn hints of the remnants of engine
turning on the dash making it a true time machine. The starkly vintage
(in ethos) Le Mans Replica has a curious beauty, all those shapes not
necessarily meshing in some eyes, but the simplicity of the ladder-chassis
’Nash is beguiling. The engine is mated to a Bristol gearbox and there is
BMW suspension and Bristol rear axle located by an A-frame, but it really
is greater than the sum of its parts. Shaped like a lozenge, or a bit like a
belly tank, its snub nose is hardly the aerodynamicist’s dream, but it is a
sports car that looks like a racing car thanks to its low shape slung
between the tall, exposed wheels.
From the driver’s seat, as well as spotting elements of the exposed
frame, you notice that the pedals are scattered high and low like a Morris
Minor’s, while the thick steering column spears off to the left, exiting the
cockpit above the clutch (ride your foot too high on the clutch and you
get the eerie sensation of the column turning on the top of your toes).
With its myriad kinks hammered out, the gearlever might be as long as I
am tall. The dashboard spreads the width of the narrow cockpit and is as
minimal (oil temperature and pressure gauges, fuel level is for guessing),
red arrow tips to the needles on the dial conjuring memories of schoolday
beakers and bunsen burners.
Fire it up and you are treated to that crackling Bristol drumroll,
sounding tightly wound, but always entrancing and urging on the driver
as it gargles and spits through the pipe running alongside you. Then the
’Nash comes alive as the trio of downdraught Solexes dripfeeds the
motor. That long lever operating the four-speed ’box is perfectly placed
for unexpectedly fingertip changes. It is close to the driver, though; in
fourth you can touch the gearknob with your hands still on the wheel.
84
You can double-declutch if you want to, but there is no real need. Yes,
it is easy to beat the synchros with steadfastly single-movement changes,
but make it two movements via even the most imperceptible pause in the
neutral plane – seriously, we are talking milliseconds – and it’s as smooth
as you like. What looks like a widely spread barchart of a pedal layout is
actually perfect for heel-and-toeing, especially when you have the
confidence to give the initially stiff pendant throttle a bit of welly.
The sense of vulnerability engendered by the low-cut doors washes
away as you experience the advantages of the superb visibility. It is almost
unsurpassed for placing the car and, even if the mudguards rob you
slightly of that true zenith of sports cars, that sense of driving a single-
seater, the sidelights on top do make sure you can safely tuck down below
the aeroscreens without losing any of your cornering accuracy.
The steering, too, is near-faultless (even though it comes with a poor
turning circle) and all the better when the initial temptation to wrestle
the three-spoke wheel (and lean dramatically in the surprisingly deep
and comfortable seats as you turn, natch) is supplanted by the realisation
that there is simply no need. In fact, all that dispels the sense of serious
prowess is the brakes, the pedal sprouting through the bulkhead going
maybe three-quarters of its travel before biting.
That period-correct braking is the only real qualm, though. Otherwise
the Le Mans Replica really is an astonishing piece of engineering, a
swift, simple and precise instrument that drives clinically, yet instantly
feels like an extension of the driver in its operation and road manners.
At the end of the day, though, the true highlight of the Le Mans Replica
is the wonderful poise accorded by its light weight, plus the combination
of a low centre of gravity, perfect proportions and square-ish footprint
on the road. It is wonderfully balanced… a bit like its owner. End
thomassima iii

maximum
dose
The Thomassima III is an exotic Italo-
American hybrid of almost mythical
reputation, but Octane has tracked
it down and can tell its story
Words Marc Sonnery Photography Piotr Degler

86
87
thomassima iii

88

Above and top right
Voluptuous curves hide
Ferrari 250 GT PF engine and
underpinnings – though not strictly
a Ferrari, the car was eventually
displayed at the Galleria Ferrari
museum in Fiorano.
ot many people get to build their own car. Fewer still
enlist their coachbuilding help in Modena – supercar
central – or use aristocratic 1960s Ferrari components
as their foundation. The late Tom Meade did, though,
and the swooping style of his Thomassima III is
evidence that he had an eye for stunning bodywork.
Meade’s is a fascinating story. Born in 1939 with
no father on the scene, he spent his childhood in
Australia and his teenage years in Hawaii before his
mother re-settled to Los Angeles. Four years in the
US Navy as an electronics engineer in aviation then
developed a can-do attitude alongside his ever-
growing – rapidly becoming all-consuming – interest in cars.
A watershed moment came when Meade saw a Ferrari 500 TRC being
worked on in Costa Mesa, and it sparked an incredible odyssey. Meade
spent many hours admiring it, the owner regaling him with tales of an
Italian warehouse full of the cars, going cheap. And so the youthful Meade
set off for Italy in the autumn of 1960. Suffice to say that when he finally
wound up in Rome – after hitch-hiking to New Orleans, peeling potatoes
on a cargo ship to Norway, hitch-hiking down to Spain and eventually
boarding a ship bound for Italy – this Aladdin’s Cave proved to be a myth.
But he was in Italy! There he met – and worked as an extra for – film
director Dino de Laurentiis, then rode a decrepit motorbike to the
Maserati factory in Modena where he bought a tired 350S chassis
(#3503) and bodyshell from a startled Aurelio Bertocchi. Next Meade
rented space at a farm and bought a racing Corvette engine from Lucky
Casner, whose trailer had overturned, wrecking the car. With the help of
Carrozzeria Fantuzzi, engine and 350S came together – Meade may have
been sleeping on haystacks, but he was every inch the playboy driving his
‘new’ car around Modena. When he headed back to the US, though, this
car was promptly crashed by a friend. He sold off the remains.
89
 Above, left and right
Gullwing doors lift to
reveal a buttoned velour
interior with reclined
seats and a bespoke
deep-dish wheel;
sidewinder tailpipes
sound suitably loud;
early photos probably
date from 1970.

90
 Cue episode two. A year later, in 1961, Meade went back to settle in
Modena for the long term, renting a workshop with apartment above it
and near the aerautodromo. There he started buying parts and reselling
them, eventually buying used Maseratis and Ferraris and then selling
them on while conceiving and eventually starting his first design. His
favourites were the 315S, the 500 TRC and the GTO 64. All the while he
could be seen zooming about Modena on his Vespa with his German
Shepherd, Pig, along for the ride.
Meade’s driving force was to create the curvaceous body shapes he had
in his mind; everything else was just the means to that end. Putting to
good use what he had learned with the 350S, he procured a Ferrari 250
GT and worked with a mannequino (a skeletal wire body buck) designed
by him with help from local craftsmen. Showing impressive flair for form
he created an alluring – and never christened – shape: let’s call it
Thomassima Zero. It had a nose which was like a 275 GTB’s but more
pointed, gill-like side vents, and a roofline that seemed to melt into the
trunk, a straight line from windshield top to trailing edge. It made the 275
GTB – which itself premiered at about the same time – look comparatively
demure. Meade’s dramatic creation pushed Italian sports car design to its
limit without falling into the realm of absurdity.
That was the car that set the tone for his future designs. He drove it to
the Netherlands, where he had been asked to create a body for a Maserati
Birdcage chassis, and it attracted much attention. Then he met Leon
Barbier at Garage Francorchamps in Belgium, who had a client
for a Maserati Tipo 63 rear-engined Birdcage – one of which Meade
had back in Modena, where his rent had gone unpaid for six months.
Barbier whipped out a cheque that allowed Meade to start buying cars
again, planning to sell them to Northern Europeans and in the US.
Alas, his own car was destroyed in the great flood of Florence in 1966
– Meade had left it there for a forthcoming exhibition. He sold the
dismantled remains, and then a series of incredible cars passed through
his hands, including a 250 LM and a 1964-bodied 250 GTO (#4091GT),
which he used as a daily driver for some time – back then, market
speculation and a vintage racing class for such cars did not exist, so they
were of little value relative to today. He also modified Ferraris, with nose
jobs for Lussos and additional side vents for 250 GTEs.
In the industrial alley workshops, cafés and hotel bars of Modena,
Meade would run into Alessandro de Tomaso, journalist Peter Coltrin
(who wrote a cover feature on him for Road & Track in 1970), the author
‘the velour seats seem as though plucked
from a las vegas house of ill repute’
and wheeler-dealer Hans Tanner, and Count Volpi, who had his own
fledgling car manufacture not far away, and for whom Meade crewed
at Le Mans one year.
It was a creatively fertile time in Modena and in bar conversations
with Carroll Shelby there was talk in 1968 of Tom handling design
and production of the next Cobra – but then the tall Texan told him in a
telegram that he had sold out to Ford. Meade was then the mastermind
behind the three Nembo Spyders and one Nembo coupé, all on 250 GT
chassis. The Spyder #1777GT is considered by many to be one of the
all-time-great designs, and is believed to have inspired Luigi Chinetti
to order his 275 NART Spyders.
Meade was then approached by a Swiss Baron, angered that his
Corvette was outperformed by Shelby Cobras. He commissioned what
became Thomassima I, nicknamed by Meade the ‘Anti-Cobra’. As he told
me in Los Angeles in 1996: ‘It was very exciting for its day;
it had removable Gullwing doors and it turned into a Targa. The whole
top came off: you just put it in the trunk. No-one had thought of it before.’
Then came the Thomassima II. ‘It originated when I asked my client
Harry Windsor from San Francisco what lines he preferred. He replied
that he loved the look of the Ferrari P4 and I said I will build you a car
more beautiful than the P4. It wasn’t really an inspiration from the P4, it
was my idea of what the P4 should have looked like.’ The Thomassima II
had a longer nose and more muscular haunches than a P4 and was indeed
more pleasing to the eye. It was also 250 GT V12-powered, with a chassis
that according to various opinions was partly Cooper, partly built from
scratch. But Meade was only interested in the design; the underpinnings
were for him vulgar necessities, a means to an end.
That car went on to win a class award at Pebble Beach in 1968, soon
after its arrival Stateside. ‘Ironically, Harry put a Ferrari badge on it so I
did not get the recognition I might have otherwise,’ said Meade. The car
was later crashed and, after many years in limbo, restored. It was shown in
2015 at Monterey’s Concorso Italiano, where it was the star and poster
car, another confirmation of the status by then attained by Meade’s work.
Back in ’68, however, Meade’s crowning achievement was still to come.
As the basis for the Thomassima III, he had sourced a 1958 250 GT PF
coupé (#1065GT), finished at Maranello and delivered not to Chinetti as
some records state but, according to historian Marcel Massini, to Luciano
Ravina in Genoa, Italy, finished in Bianco Savid with a black interior.
Meade’s design pushed the Thomassima Zero theme further but in a
91
thomassima iii

more mature way, its nose and haunches fuller and again with gill-like
side vents and gullwing doors. Huge exhaust sidepipes, like twirling
snakes, are reminiscent of US hot rods’.
‘Wherever
‘The finish on this car was probably better than that of every Ferrari
that had ever been made: everything on the car was fitted by hand,’ he meade took
told me. ‘If you look at the trunk and the doors there was a millimetre or
two all the way round and even after this car was driven the finish was still
100%. It was done on a combination of 250 GT chassis and parts. I left
the car,
the chassis alone, used a 250 GT engine but had a five-speed gearbox and
special brakes with vented discs.
on-lookers
‘I entered it in a lot of shows; it won first place at Modena and Turin.
Then I shipped it to California, I had it in Newport Beach and showed it Were slack-
jaWed and
in various events. Shirley Guggenheim, one of the nightclub owners
there, thought it was the most beautiful car she had ever seen and asked
me to build her a car.’ It didn’t happen: Meade did not feel ready to start
building a production version, yet.
As you can see in these pictures, the cockpit is even more outlandish
than the body. The deep-dish steering wheel is a bespoke casting and
speechless’
features the Tom Meade Modena Italy lettering. The gauges are buried in
the plush dash like the eyes of seals in their fur, and the velour seats –
originally red, now blue – seem as though plucked from a Las Vegas
house of ill repute. They are comfortable, but what astonishes is the
laidback inclination they offer while travelling in a high-speed boudoir.
Louche? No, they allowed a lower, more aerodynamic roofline.
Any danger of falling asleep at the wheel would be conveniently
dispatched by the racing-car decibel level generated by the spaghetti
pipes, from which came the sort of menacing howl normally reserved for
the Mulsanne Straight. The centre-lock wheels have huge, bespoke-cast,
long-eared spinners with the Meade script – and his logo, the standing
goat. The trunk is wholly taken over by the huge spare.
Wherever Meade took the car, on-lookers were slack-jawed and
speechless: it was like a fantastic creature visiting from another dimension.
Bona fide fame beckoned. Coltrin wrote the Road & Track story about it
and the US TV network CBS carried a special report on Meade in which
the car appears to run flawlessly and boisterously at the Modena
Aerautodromo. Remember, he was only 31 years old and had already
created four complete cars to his own design and restored several before
that. There is no denying Meade’s amazing energy, desire and talent.
‘There were at least 20 to 30 people who wanted to buy this car but I
loved it and wanted to keep it to show my expertise,’ he told me. ‘I just
used it for auto shows; it has never really been used very much.’
One respected collector claimed to have paid Tom for the car, railing
that he had never received it: Virginia’s Norm Silver, who owned many
Below and right
great Ferraris from the 1960s to the ’80s, including the Thomas Crown
The late Tom Meade in
Affair 275 NART Spyder (see Octane 191). Its Virginia plate lends California in 1996, when
credence to that but the problem was not Meade at all. A notorious interviewed by the author;
scoundrel, the late Gordon Tatum, had positioned himself as Silver’s his creation today, now
agent, took his money, went to Italy, spoke with Tom, reported the car as owned by his adopted son.
acquired to Silver… but kept the money. He later did similar with funds
another American gave him to buy the Ferrari 250 GT Breadvan in the
UK, using the money to buy it for himself. And when respected Belgian
importer Claude Dubois was in charge of selling a Bugatti collection,
Tatum showed up to buy the most important one for Bill Harrah, whose
museum he then curated. Months later Dubois confirmed to the FBI that
Tatum had declared a price to Harrah of which he had paid only 25%,
pocketing the rest. Tatum later went to jail for fraud.
And Meade’s dream had ground to a halt. ‘I had started to do the
convertible Thomassima IIII, and then, in the early 1970s, everything
sort of came to a standstill and I had to stop because nobody wanted
to buy a Ferrari anymore, be it by me or standard. Money ran out.’
The 1973 oil crisis, ever-increasing regulation, speed limits, and a
swelling opinion that sports cars had become politically incorrect
together caused a traumatic shift in the market, but there was another
problem. Tom had begun to annoy the powers that be around Modena,

92
93
thomassima iii
‘sh0cking or not, the
rebel had been recognised
and welcomed to the palace’
who resented the publicity he was getting, and so craftsmen were
encouraged not to collaborate with him any more.
That’s nothing new under the Emilian sun: ask Ferruccio Lamborghini
how the sudden and suspicious cancellation of a huge South American
tractor order in the late 1960s jeopardised his accounts and had a
disastrous effect on his business empire, including the sports car factory
that had been irritating the established order. Or, three decades later,
consider the saga of Romano Artioli, the investor behind the Bugatti
EB110, who was suddenly no longer welcome around Modena, his vision
snuffed out by silent external forces.
‘I opened a restoration shop in Milan, restored cars, manufactured
components, did castings for small racing shops all over northern Italy
and got busy fabricating parts,’ said Meade. There he was close to Carlo
Chiti, who then ran Motori Moderni in Varese, and both considered
further projects such as a new type of valve.
During the late 1980s there was potential for another run of
Thomassimas when a Texan investor wanted to buy ten Testarossas and
have Meade rebody them in his distinctive style. The bold and sensuous
Meade DNA was clearly recognisable on a body that had sharp 1980s
lines but retained roundness. It would have had six headlights and been
built in aluminium. Alas it was not to be: the money-man went bankrupt.
Eventually, Meade felt the need for a change of scenery and departed for
Bali, no doubt nostalgic for his surfing days in Hawaii. It wasn’t all beach
time, though; he was the subject of a large article in a newspaper in Brunei
but this failed to attract business from the Sultan. After a few years there
Tom moved back to California to take care of his ailing mother. I met him
in Santa Monica in May 1996, and his mother passed that summer.
Many believed that Tom had not kept any of the cars, but he had
actually bought back the Anti-Cobra in period, damaged in an incident
then badly repaired, and he had clung on to the Thomassima III. He even
94
had the body bucks for the Nembo Spyders and Berlinetta, plus numerous
parts and a few other cars such as a timewarp 250 California Spyder
(#1951GT), which he later sold in a hush-hush 2009 trade.
Tom Meade passed away in August 2013. It was therefore a great
shock, in the year that followed, to find out that the Thomassima III was
not merely a long-lost dream but was actually displayed in a museum. Not
just any museum, mind you, but the Galleria Ferrari museum in Fiorano,
right by the Maranello factory. Shocking or not, the rebel had been not
just acknowledged, but invited into the palace.
Today the Thomassima III is in the protective hands of Meade’s
adopted son and is kept in northern Italy. As its sub-300km odometer
reading shows, the car has not run in decades, but to see it as it was in
period – save for absent exterior mirrors and the different seat colour –
remains awe-inspiring. Its shape is very much organic, the ultimate
rendition of the 1960s front-engined Italian sports car ethos. That Tom
Meade showed up in Modena just at the right time and did so with pluck
and talent was just meant to be, hence the name Thomassima: massima
means ‘maximum’ in Italian.
In some ways the Thomassima III story is rather like that of the
Breadvan, which symbolised the rift between Enzo Ferrari and the
youthful Count Volpi but was recognised decades later by the factory,
which created for it a special ‘Modification made in period’ classification.
The fact that the Thomassima III was displayed for more than four
years in the Galleria Ferrari museum is sweet posthumous recognition of
Tom Meade’s role in Modenese lore. Yet while the Thomassima I
Anti-Cobra and the P4-like Thomassima II were defined and thus
restrained by client requests, the Thomassima III – presaged years
earlier by the sadly shortlived Thomassima Zero – stands as Meade’s most
significant and groundbreaking design. Its time in the spotlight was
very much deserved. End
Everything a Jaguar
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The cars we build perform beautifully and are built to

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THE

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HUB Telephone 01832 275457 www.thesplinedhub.co.uk info@thesplinedhub.co.uk
pembleton v-sport

IT COMES
frOM
MalvErn
…but it’s not a Morgan, despite appearances.
The Pembleton V-Sport has 2CV-based kit-car
roots but comes fully built, with Moto Guzzi power
Words Andrew English Photography Andrew Crowley
Turn The key and there’s an instant
crackle, biff, batt-batt. The little car shakes gently
as it warms. There’s vee-twin power at the front
and, although Phil Gregory and his son Guy
have signed an agreement not to reveal its
source, it’s obvious that a Moto Guzzi unit
is powering their £26,394 three-wheeler.
Ironic, this. While this air/oil-cooled vee-
twin is most usually found sitting across the
frame of Guzzi’s elegant motorcycles, the
Giulio Cesare Carcano-designed unit first saw
service in the ’60s powering a weird Italian
Army tricycle, the Autoveicolo da Montagna.
The engine was heavily revised by Lino
Tonti for use in the first V7 Sport motorcycle,
and in various forms it’s been in production
ever since. Tough, reliable, free-revving and
powerful, it makes a great legislation-
compatible engine for kit-car builders.
Not that the Pembleton is a kit car (well, not
unless you live in America and you plead with
the Gregorys), although it did start that way.
When I tested every single three-wheeler on
sale in the UK a few years ago, the Pembleton,
created 20 years ago by Phil Gregory to
circumvent the price structure of the Dún
Laoghaire ferry, was one of the most charming.
‘My wife noticed that motorcycles and trikes
went free, so she said I should build one. It was
after a few ciders,’ he admits. ‘I ordered the
steel, and we called it Pembleton after the name
of the caravan we stripped for the aluminium.’
Gregory, one of those wonderfully
instinctive engineers who often get left on the
fringe of industry, had already built a Ford-
based mid-engined coupé kit car with his
brother, Roger. The first Pembleton, using
chassis and drivetrain parts from a Citroën
2CV, also used that car’s flat-twin, air-cooled
engine designed in the 1940s by Walter Becchia
and Lucien Gerard, together with its four-
speed gearbox driving the front wheels. It was
known as the Pembleton Grasshopper Super
Sport, and 450 examples were sold in three-
wheel Grasshopper or four-wheel Brooklands
kit form over two decades. Most were powered
by Citroën engines, though owners also built
them with Guzzi and BMW units.
‘It was only supposed to be for fun in the first
place,’ Gregory says. ‘I wanted to make
something a good hands-on guy could make
a lovely car out of.’
Gregory was far from the first to discover a
use for rusted-out 2CVs in kit cars. Chris Rees’
book, Three Wheelers A-Z, is full of them,
though few sold as well as the Pembleton
Grasshopper. And that’s where it could have
remained, marooned up a charming motoring
cul-de-sac, were it not for Gregory’s son, Guy,
who between college and university decided to
build his own version of his father’s car. That
got him thinking harder about what it could be.

97
pembleton v-sport

2018 Pembleton V-Sport

Engine 744cc 90º vee-twin, pushrod OHV, electronic engine management Power 51bhp @
6200rpm Torque 44lb ft @ 4900rpm Suspension Front: leading arms, horizontal longitudinal
coil springs and dampers actuated by pullrods and bellcranks. Rear: coil-sprung trailing arm
Brakes Discs Weight 298kg (dry) Top speed c100mph 0-60mph c6sec

Clockwise
from above
V-Sport is beautifully
made with laser-cut
panels; name came
from a caravan;
roomy cockpit is
ultra-simple; Guy
Gregory (on right)
has re-imagined
original design of
father Phil (on left).

98
pembleton v-sport

Left from top

Not much roll stiffness with only
one rear wheel; plenty of space
under the bonnet, and rose-jointed
gear linkage gives precise shift.

you can always get out, lift up the rear of the car
and walk it round, as Guy demonstrates.
The ride feels sensational, floating gently
over bumps and undulations, but the rear will
occasionally bunny-hop over sharper bumps,
which is a feature of all three-wheelers with the
single wheel at the back. As they say, if you
don’t hit the pothole with a front wheel, you’ll
get it with the rear.
And so to the handling, about which Tony
Divey, the late Triking designer, once observed:
‘All three-wheelers are unstable. It’s how you
use the instability that’s the important thing.’
Rear-drive three-wheelers such as Morgans
and the Triking can be steered on the throttle
by spinning-up the rear tyre, but the
Pembleton’s front-drive layout rules out that
possibility. This does make the behaviour more
predictable for drivers raised on front-drive
hatchbacks, though. Body roll is the main issue
with three-wheelers, as the vehicle rolls onto a
wheel and tyre that simply aren’t there. In the
softly sprung Pembleton that tendency seems
more pronounced if you go looking for it by
waggling the steering wheel about, but if
you don’t and simply get on with the business
of driving, it’s not an issue.
That said, you need to understand what it
can and can’t do. You can’t just barrel into a
corner, hot-hatchback-style, and sort it out
when you get there. You have to concentrate
and drive properly with anticipation. I’ve raced
and hillclimbed various three-wheelers over
the years, and I never once felt anything less
than full confidence in the Pembleton.
It’s been a couple of months since I drove
this car and yet it hasn’t left my thoughts. I
recall my ears glowing glacially, cold seeping
like fog through my clothes, and road-repair
debris flying up to cut my cheek. I remember
gunning the engine for the sheer hell of it and
wondering if I thought it possible to have more
fun even in a car costing ten times more, with
ten times the engine power and six times the
weight. I decided I didn’t. I still don’t.
Initially I’d thought I’d want a hood (one is
on its way), but a decent tonneau and
waterproof jacket would be better. I’d certainly
take the sports suspension of the show car I
drove, and that vulnerable bare-aluminium
floor should have the option of tailored rubber
mats as well as the (£284) optional carpets.
I also think that Guy and Phil are missing a
trick in not offering decent-quality branded
jackets, helmets and goggles. They might also
consider selling ointment for the aching cheek
muscles you get from grinning so much. End

For more information, see pembleton.co.uk.

100
 storming

the
Most believed that Porsche’s extreme
909 Bergspyder would never run again. But
it did – and Octane was there as a witness
Words Berthold Dörrich Photography Katja Dalek

mountain

again
102
103

T
he famous factory colours are unmistakeable, as
is the heart-palpitating flat-eight yowl echoing
around the Austrian Alps, rustling the trees that
cling to the mountainside and sounding so
fierce that it might carve through the solid rock
and slice the tops off the peaks. The shape
spearing up the hill is also familiar, having that
slightly amorphous front end of so many 1960s Porsches –
yet it’s possible you’ve never heard of the 909 Bergspyder.
Built specifically for hillclimbing, the stop-gap racer is
one of those whose importance has taken two generations
to be properly acknowledged. It may have been shortlived,
but it was a technical tour de force that represented a
watershed for Porsche, an object lesson in weight-saving.
In perhaps belatedly recognising that significance, Porsche
allowed the Bergspyder a blast up the Gaisberg hillclimb.
For old times’ sake and all that.
For those unfamiliar with Gaisberg, a hillclimb that has
slipped under the radar almost as much as the 909
Bergspyder, it is close to Salzburg and used to be the
Austrian leg of the European Championship. A fearsome
course that winds its way 672m up the Alps over 8.6km, it
was peppered with enough straights and short-blast sections
that it had the quickest average speed in the Championship.
Despite hosting its fair share of accidents, it is lesser known
perhaps because it didn’t claim the lives of any household
names. Similarly, picturesque though it is, this hillclimb
rises to a mere 1300m, so it’s tree-lined to the top – it
doesn’t disappear into the clouds as more famous ‘hills’ do.
Speaking of which, Porsche has also enlisted a very
special pilot for the day. From 1968 to 1970, Austrian driver
Rudi Lins competed three times each at Le Mans and
Sebring and raced for the Porsche works, sharing with the
likes of Elford and Attwood in the World Sportscar
Championship. But it is not for his endurance racing
prowess that Lins was selected for this gig. He may be as
unfamiliar to British readers as the 909 and Gaisberg, but
in the 1960s Lins was Austria’s king of the mountains three
Left and far left
Rolf Stommelen gets
ready to storm the
hillclimb in the 909
Bergsypder at Gaisberg
in 1968, where it made
its debut; hillclimb great
Rudi Lins (not pictured)
drove it for Octane.
years running and in 1967 won the European Hillclimb
Championship. In a Porsche 906 Carrera 6. At Gaisberg.
Lins, like many in Austria, got into hillclimbing by
default. ‘Up to and including 1968 there were no permanent
racetracks in Austria,’ he explains. ‘It was only possible to
drive hillclimbs and airfield races. Since hillclimbs were
usually only 40-50km per weekend, depending on the
length of the track, the financial expenditure was also
manageable. So this way was actually favourable.’
With his vast experience in Porsche competition cars,
Lins’ views on the 909, which he is driving for the first time,
will be illuminating. But first, the car.
The 909 Bergspyder might never have won a major event,
but it is a wonderful laboratory of a vehicle, with not all of
those experiments successful. It was born in a crucible of
regulation changes that got rid of the minimum weight
requirement and on a battlefield that had been dominated
by Porsche and Ferrari. Actually, mainly Ferrari. And that
was the problem.
In Ludovico Scarfiotti’s hands, Maranello’s F1-derived
V6 Dino 206P had been unassailable, while the hardly
overweight Porsches lagged behind. In fact, a Porsche-
engined Elva was as close to the Ferraris as anything the
factory produced. Unsurprisingly, this did not please
Ferdinand Piëch, Porsche Racing’s newly appointed head
of development. Piëch was not a man to take a challenge
lightly and, on hearing that Ferrari had a new, improved
212E in the pipeline, he created a superlight rolling
laboratory with which to experiment and showcase his and
senior race engineer Peter Falk’s more outlandish ideas.
For a start, in order to get more weight over the front
axle, the engine and gearbox were moved far forward, aided
by the then-groundbreaking move of placing the differential
behind the ’box. This in turn pushed the driver massively
forward until their legs were well ahead of the front axle –
the anti-roll bar is said to have run above their thighs – and
left seriously exposed in the event of an accident, protected
only by a cigarette paper-thin glassfibre skin. Piëch, of
105
porsche 909 Bergspyder
‘the 909 Bergspyder was claimed to Be the most
uncompromised racer porsche had ever Built’
course, saw this as an advantage, as he wrote in his
autobiography: ‘If someone has his feet so far forward, he
will make every effort to avoid an impact.’ Well, quite.
Thanks to its lightweight glassfibre body, which led to it
being dubbed the plastic Porsche, plus the titanium
suspension and aluminium chassis that set the template for
the more successful models that followed, the 909 weighed
in at just 385kg. Stripped of unnecessary extravagances
such as an alternator and a proper battery, and with lighter
silver replacing copper in the loom, it was powered by the
venerable 275hp 2.0-litre Type 771 flat-eight. The 909’s
power-to-weight ratio was simply shattering and this
ferocious beast could allegedly sprint to 100km/h in under
2.5 seconds – scary in normal circumstances, terrifying in a
shortened and widened car with almost square track and
wheelbase. Then there were the beryllium brake discs: they
were a fraction of the weight of conventional items, but
spewed off plumes of carcinogenic dust…
At the time the 909 Bergspyder was claimed to be the
most uncompromised racer Porsche had ever built and
none had a greater singularity of purpose. As Piëch said:
‘We went further in mountain racing than aerospace,’
referring to his use of titanium springs, while steel was
considered good enough for the Lunar Rover’s wheels.
106
The 909 took its public bow at Gaisberg on 8 September
1968, where spirits were dampened following the loss of
Scarfiotti when his lightweight 910 flew off the course and
into the trees during practice at Rossfeld. The remaining
team consisted of Gerhard Mitter and Rolf Stommelen.
Sadly, its challenge was ended almost before it had
started by one of Piëch’s weightsaving innovations. For the
sake of saving six kilos, the conventional fuel tank and
electric pump were done away with in favour of a nitrogen-
pressurised titanium ball inside which was a rubber balloon
filled with 14 litres of fuel, just enough for the event.
Pressure in the space between the bladder and its cover
forced fuel from the tank to the injection pump. It was a
smart idea, but it didn’t work and was blamed for causing
running problems that blighted the entire weekend. Falk
remembers it well: ‘Ah, what should have been the highlight
unfortunately did not become the highlight. It was an
extremely expensive piece that Mr Piëch absolutely wanted
because it was his idea!
‘The design failed several times because either a valve in
the titanium ball failed or the rubber bladder stuck to itself
and became impossible to fill. Even though tests after the
race were inconclusive, the system was obviously suspect,
so it was abandoned after that one outing at Gaisberg.’
107
 The 909’s rather uninspiring debut also turned out to be
its penultimate outing as, with the championship under its
belt, Porsche promptly pulled the plug on hillclimbing to
focus on endurance racing. In doing so it consigned the 909
to history, but not before its second run at Mont Ventoux
with Stommelen (Mitter was given a 910), then fitted with
a conventional fuel pump – much to Piëch’s annoyance.
Falk recalls: ‘He was convinced his idea had to work. But
it was clear to us that you couldn’t fix it in the two weeks
between races. We would never have received permission
from him to install a petrol pump instead, so we didn’t ask.’
That was the end of the road for the 909: a third place at
Gaisberg and a second at Mont Ventoux, then Porsche
quitting before the 212E even came on stream. Ironically,
with the playing field to itself, the Ferrari that the 909 had
been created to beat dominated the 1969 season.
Chassis 909 002 languished in silence in the Porsche
collection for nearly half a century until the museum’s
then-director Klaus Bischof, aware of the car’s significance
to Piëch – he had described it as a ‘delight in technical
tinkering’ – had it restored for his 70th birthday in 2007.
No-one expected any more than that but, obscurity
be damned, here it is back at Gaisberg with Lins at the
wheel more than 50 years on. It is Lins’ first experience of
the 909 in its proper habitat and he is impressed, despite
having to take it relatively easy (by racer standards; we all
know that they consider 98% ‘relatively easy’). ‘It was an
emotional experience to drive the 909, which was
109
porsche 909 bergspyder
technically revolutionary in its day. Driving it 51 years after
its last race, I couldn’t go at full racing speed, but I was still
excited by the enormous acceleration.
‘The car is like new. As the gear ratios are very short, the
acceleration surprised me a lot; into fourth gear it was
sensational. The engine was only good over 4500rpm, but
then impressive due to the low vehicle weight and the short
gear ratios. At higher speeds the car was very unstable,
depending on the road conditions, and the handling on the
partly uneven road was pretty nervous.’
This reinforces what Lins was told by team-mates in
period: ‘Rolf Stommelen, who had driven Gaisberg and
Mont Ventoux, told me at the time that the car felt very
nervous, which was normal in my opinion due to the road
conditions and the short wheelbase.’
Having won his championship in a 906 and also
campaigned a six-cylinder 910 Spyder, how did the 909
compare? ‘You have to allow for the fact that the 909 was
built exclusively for the European Hillclimb Championship,
so it was obviously perfectly made for this.
‘It was a completely new car, from the seating position
of the driver to the different materials used; everything
was new, the car was unimaginable at that time.’
‘We Will never knoW hoW good the
909 might have been, but it certainly
had the potential to be a Winner’
110
We will never know how good the 909 might have been,
but it certainly had the potential to be a winner. ‘Mr Piëch
was a fantastic technician for whom only success counted,’
adds Lins. ‘He wanted a car as light as possible and the
909’s fuel system was just a detail of that. He had pursued
uncompromising goals and was extremely successful, but it
was hard to keep up with him. I can imagine that he already
had the 908/3 in his head at the time of the 909.’
The 909’s short competition life was matched by Lins’
own, the Austrian unexpectedly retiring in 1971. He
explains: ‘When I started racing it was unbelievable that I
would one day drive for the then most successful team in
endurance racing. But for me the limits were reached with
the 917 and I didn’t want to change to any other race series.’
So he walked away – though he found time to cross the
Sahara a few times in Porsche, Audi and VW factory cars,
and also to drive from the northernmost city of the world,
Hammerfest, to the southernmost, Ushuaia on Tierra del
Fuego. Oh, and a couple of times around the world, first in
a Porsche 924 and later with the 4WD VW Bulli.
Lins’ competition career may have been brief but, like
both the 909 and Gaisberg, he deserves to be better
remembered. They were quite a trio to bring together. End
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Fabio Collina interview

112
 THE OCTANE
INTERVIEW

Fabio
Collina
The enthusiastic head of Maserati’s
Classiche department tells Octane
about the rich mine of information
on offer to owners and restorers
Words Marc Sonnery Photography Bruut Collective

Deep in Maserati’s headquarters in

Modena, Fabio Collina is the guardian of
Maserati Classiche – a vital link between
owners of classic Maseratis and the crucible of
the Trident flame. Collina is the man who
enables someone who has recently purchased a
past Maserati to find out as much as possible
about the exact specifications of his or her car,
as identified by its numero di telaio or chassis
number. He does this with boundless
enthusiasm, as a true believer and passionate
devotee of the marque’s history.
Collina has taken over from Ermanno Cozza
who, having launched Maserati Classiche in
2010, created and then nurtured a heritage
department with an unusually informal, open
and helpful service. So, when Cozza was to
retire after 66 years at Maserati, the quest began
to find a successor with similar appreciation of
the company’s values, who cares just as deeply
about its rich history and who would continue
in the same vein. Fabio Collina was that man.
‘I started to work with Mr Cozza six months
before taking over from him, during my
previous position in Maserati,’ Fabio tells us.
‘On some afternoons, when I was responsible
for the academy, I went to Ermanno in order
to better understand the work to come.

113
Fabio Collina interview

‘if we give them the

information, they can
then restore the car
exactly as it was born’

‘Ermanno is a fantastic man, unbelievable.
His nickname is “Ironman” – he is 85 years old
and still incredible . He has a terrifying memory
and a very impressive passion for the Trident.’
For Octane’s interview, we met Mr Cozza
and his protégé in the client office lobby as we
had a photo crew with us and needed space. In
previous meetings I had sat in the Classiche
office upstairs in the round tower built during
the factory reconstruction in the late 1990s.
Cozza is a genuine legend, also known as la
voce di Maserati. I believe his longevity is due to
the fact that there is not an ounce of negativity
in him, not that he does not speak his mind if
necessary. He has devoted his life to the Trident
with great efficiency while being impervious
to stress. He’s been personally dealing with
enquiries about classic cars since long before
Classiche existed, 1964 to be precise, and his
generosity is only equalled by his extraordinary
memory – meeting him is always a great piacere.
Fabio Collina is warm and enthusiastic. He
has an easy way with people and, crucially, is a
true enthusiast: it would have been a disaster
if Fiat had assigned this role to some drone.
Having been installed at Maserati Classiche, he
found himsef with a lengthy to-do list. ‘The first
mission asked for by CEO Mr [Harald] Wester
was to preserve the historical archive. This is
because it is enormous, full of original papers
and documents, starting with the first Trident
badge made by Mario Maserati. This appeared
on the Tipo 26, the first Maserati, in 1926.
‘So the first goal was to create a project to
digitise the archive, which is what we are still
doing at the moment. We are talking about
350,000 original documents on paper. We
started this some years ago with an expert
supplier, and we have now reached about
100,000 digitised documents. Our goal is to
have the historical archive preserved and the
digital historical archive available.’
The archives are housed in a remote part of
Maserati’s HQ – which I am not permitted to
pinpoint – under triple lock-and-key with high-
quality fire suppression systems. At first there
appears to be plenty of space but the sheer
quantity of documents gathered over a century
means that it was always going to be tight.
Since his first day, Fabio has been on the
look-out for somewhere larger yet less
cavernous, part of which might become a
museum. If he succeeds, the logistics of moving
such an enormous archive hardly bear thinking
about. It is difficult to comprehend the sheer
scale of it all. Some of the files are so ancient
that they bring a feeling of awe and both men’s
pride was obvious: this was really visiting the
holy of holies and few get to do so.
It was a dream I’d had since my first factory
visit in 1999 and, amazingly, my 2004 fax
telling Cozza of the purchase of my Khamsin,
AM120US1242, was right there in its file. It is

114
Fabio Collina interview
but it was still an individual car’s technical
production sheet.’
It didn’t end there. Once the car was
completed and had been tested on the road, it
entered the ‘finishing line’, as the cars still do.
There they receive the final touches and
adjustments, some aesthetic, some based on
the comments from a test driver.
‘This document, now fully filled in, was the
car’s concluding production document. It’s an
important one because we have the car’s birth
date. Next, the car was shipped out so this
Avviso di Spedizione [shipping delivery notice]
was created to confirm the car’s exit from the
factory. All these documents include the
chassis number, so they are dedicated to a
single car.’
Collina stresses that the research is free: ‘We
give the client a list of all documents available,
what they contain and what they cost, and they
are free to choose: buy nothing, buy them all or
just one or two. I try to do what’s best for the
company but above all what is good for clients.’
Other services offered by Classiche include
a verified certificate of origin, a summary of
technical specifications with the original paint
codes and leather codes, and a summary of the
car’s build and sale.
116
Clockwise from top left
Factory showroom has cars
and bikes; classic Maseratis
all start with a build sheet;
Cozza shows photograph of
Ghibli Cup racer; atmospheric
drawings of pre-war cars.
There is a constant and time-consuming flow
of enquiries from owners, but this doesn’t faze
Collina. He loves communicating with them,
but just wishes he could dedicate as much time
as he would like to every one of them.
He also prefers written communication, which
some owners probably take as being stand-
offish, but that couldn’t be further from the
truth: ‘It’s absolutely crucial for us to preserve
every bit of history of every classic Maserati
that is still alive now. If I speak with an owner
on the telephone, nothing of that call remains
for the future, for the records. This is why
I usually work by email.’
For the record, contact from owners of Orsi
and Citroën-era cars far outweighs that from
the much more productive De Tomaso years.
‘I receive about 80 or 90 emails per day with
various questions and requests, often enquiring
whether a specific car was a prototype or
displayed at a motor show. During the holidays
when a normal office will receive about 20
emails a day, because my clients are on holiday,
they open the garage and all sorts of thoughts
come into their minds, all sorts of questions
they suddenly need to ask me…’
He does very fervently believe, however, that
original is best: ‘A car is like a painting and it
would be wrong to alter its history. A car has a
soul; some will say not but I say it is true. You
can’t alter its history on the grounds that you
would like something else.’
Given the vagaries of motor manufacture in
the 1950s and ’60s, deciding what is original or
not is often easier said than done, but thankfully
that massive archive can come to the rescue, as
Fabio recalls with one specific case.
‘Photos of a 3500 GT arrived showing
numerous narrow vents in the bonnet. I asked
myself, what on Earth happened here?
Someone, God knows who, wanted this
fantasy bonnet and must have modified it at
home or in a garage.’ Before he took action,
though, he made sure he did his homework
first: ‘In the archive I found three documents.
On one of them, the large data sheet, I found
the client had specifically requested “Vents as
used on Jaguars”. Indeed, Jaguars often had
these narrow louvres on their bonnets. If I had
not done the research, I would have told the
client this bonnet was wrong and he needed
to re-do it as a standard bonnet.’
Such cases are surprisingly commonplace:
‘A client requested for his Mistral Spyder the
side vents that normally were used only on the
coupé. I found the note with his request in the
 CARS, MOTORCYCLES

AUTHORISED
DISTRIBUTOR

117
FABIO COLLINA INTERVIEW

file. So the car was built with them. And I found

a Ghibli coupé which the client had requested
in pink – shocking! It was a gift from the client,
an industrialist from Milan, to his wife. He was
a bit strange. Decades later, when I informed
the collector who had bought it, he wanted to
shoot himself!’ Did he not restore it in pink?
‘I’ve no idea,’ smiles Fabio.
Such is his enthusiasm for the subject that
you detect a genuine relish in dealing with the
entire archive, but surely he has favourites?
‘One special example is design number one,
done by Alfieri Maserati, which shows the
engine head cover of the Tipo 26. It is drawn on
a type of paper that is not that near-transparent
paper typically used for such drawings, which
did not exist back then. It’s almost silken,
almost made of cloth, truly very strange.
‘There is so much in there. In the file for the
Shah of Persia’s 5000 GT file we have the notes
written by Omar Orsi when he met the Shah
in Livorno. The Shah had requested a meeting
as he had test-driven a 3500 GT but wanted
a more powerful car. So the Persian Embassy
in Rome contacted Maserati and arranged a
meeting with his Imperial Majesty in person.
In the file we have Mr Omar’s leaflet on which
he wrote notes while the Shah spoke!
‘I also found a photo of a 3500 GT owned
by a gentleman who often visited the factory,
showing him with Guerino Bertocchi. On the
photo he had written: “Thank you, Maserati, This picture and below
for the first 680,000km behind the wheel.” Six Cozza reminds Collina
hundred and eighty thousand kilometres! where the drawing for the
250F’s spigot bearing is…
That’s mindblowing! probably; proud owner of
‘I’ve been going to the archive daily since 680,000km 3500 GT poses
2010 and every single time I get emotional. My with engineer and chief test
passion is not just for Maserati’s history, but for driver Guerino Bertocchi.
each and every car. Perhaps it is because I do
not – yet! – have a classic Maserati of my own.’
The documents may constitute about 99% of
the archive Collina curates, but there are also
large clay models from various eras as well as
other items. Like the documents, these
artefacts are in very good hands. Ermanno
Cozza certainly thinks so: ‘Collina was already
passionate about Maserati history when he was
ten’. Well, if it’s good enough for the man who
started when the Maserati brothers were still
on board (if not at the helm), who laid the
seeds for the archive when saving reams of
documents from the skip after the Citroën
takeover, and who still comes in to help once a
week, then that’s good enough for us... End

Marc Sonnery’s new book

on thee world’s best classic
Maserrati restorers, with a
lot moore from Cozza and
Collinna, is on sale now. It
is pricced at €95 and
detaills can be found at
www.classichemasters.
com/tthe-book.

118
 1973 PORSCHE 911 2.7 CARRERA RS LIGHTWEIGHT
Chassis no. 911 360 0365

Number 50 of only 200 original factory M471 ‘Lightweights’, conceived for customer racing
The first of only three ‘Lightweights’ specified from new with factory-fitted sunroof
Original colours: light yellow with black interior and left-hand drive
Retaining its original 911/83 Porsche engine
Major service and inspection by Autofarm in November 2019

Also available: 1971 Ferrari 365 GTS/4 ‘Daytona’ Spider | 1969 Lamborghini Miura P400 S | 2002 Ferrari 360 GT

PASSION. CARS. EXPERTISE.

UK +44 (0)203 621 2923 | Italy +39 02 36003241 | info@girardo.com

Girardo.com
121
audi imperator in berlin
ere in the rural hinterland
south of Berlin there are no
Trabants in evidence and
not a single Wartburg is to
be seen. In fact, the only
curious vehicle spotted so
far is a 1957 IFA P2M
jeep, and that belongs to
Peter Spillner, proprietor of
senow, the subject of Day in
the Life in Octane 195. No, here the roads are filled with
the products of VW, Mercedes-Benz, Opel, BMW, just
like the rest of Germany. And Audi too, of course –
including the 1929 R Type Imperator restored by Herr
Spillner for the Audi Museum Mobile in Ingolstadt, now
being rolled out from his workshop. It’s a huge and
imposing symbol of Audi’s late-20s might and technical
expertise. Seems Vorsprung durch Technik goes way back.
This Imperator is reckoned to be the sole survivor of
145 built. And those 145 were built at Zwickau, the
town further south in eastern Germany where August
Horch first set up a car-building company in his own
name, before having to re-establish his business with the
Latin translation of his surname (audi means ‘hear’; the
German equivalent is horch).
Regular readers will know about the origins of Audi
already, especially those who’ve read about the August
Horch Museum in Octane 199. So they’ll also know that
Zwickau became synonymous with the Trabant during
the era of the German Democratic Republic, and that
demand for smoky two-strokes fell away in favour of the
VW Golf and its ilk as soon as the Berlin Wall fell.
This 1929 car is significant in many respects, not least
the fact that it’s one of very few indigenous cars to be seen
in this region, and that it serves as a reminder of an era
when Audi was not an icon of Bavaria. That, indeed, is
a more modern construct that came about only when
122
Volkswagen bought Auto Union from Mercedes-Benz
in 1964, mainly for its production capacity. With it came
a modest middle-class saloon with the need for an
identity. Thus the Audi name was revived, and only in the
past couple of decades has the four-ringed badge once
more come to adorn limos with big-capacity eight-
cylinder engines.
Which is what we have here, although it redefined
vorsprung in the process, seeking a larger audience by
being a less complex car than its Type M predecessor.
Bear in mind the era: the Type R took over from the Type
M in 1928, not long before the Wall Street Crash and the
Great Depression. The luxury car market was already in
decline, and Audi was already in the arms of Danish
industrialist Jörgen Skafte Rasmussen, owner of
Zschopauer Motorenwerke, which produced DKW
motorcycles. By 1932, Audi had joined DKW, Wanderer
and Horch as part of Auto Union, second from top
(beneath Horch) in the brand hierarchy. The Type R,
with its 4.9-litre straight-eight, marked the end of an era.
This is a big car, rebodied by Spillner in touring
limousine style, but we’ll come back to that. For now, it’s
time to get on board and get acquainted. There’s a simple
painted dash panel with a small group of instruments
dead centre, dominated by a clock and speedo and splayed
around the ignition and light switches. Turn the key, press
the starter, and that big straight-eight churns into life and
settles to a rumble-and-chuff idle. Accelerator, brake and
clutch pedals are where you’d expect, and there’s a long
central gearlever to control the three-speed ’box, with
first down to the left on a dogleg.
Moving off, everything feels as heavy as you might
imagine: a weighty clutch, steering that’ll almost have
you standing up when parking, and the brakes need a
shove. A big shove, frankly, if you need to haul down the
best part of three tonnes in a hurry. There was less traffic
in the Imperator’s day. Thankfully, the country road away
audi imperator in berlin
from Herr Spillner’s workshop in Glienick is pretty quiet,
especially at this early hour, and we have a few miles
during which to become accustomed before we tackle the
city of Berlin.
First is dispatched quickly, used mainly for manouevring
or steep hill starts, so soon it’s ger-dunk-dunk-dunk into
second. That straight-eight is stoic, deep-voiced,
somehow military in tone, not unlike the doppel-sechs
engine of a Maybach from the same era, though the Audi’s
engine is considerably smaller and four cylinders down.
Roof-down, in the sun, along a straight and tree-lined
lane, it’s easy to think you’ve travelled 90 years back in
time. And that sensation continues as we approach
Mittenwalde, the name of which translates as ‘middle of
the forest’. It’s a picturesque village, and the car is
attracting much attention, though people are surprised
to find out that it’s actually an Audi.
The village is dominated by the 25m-high Pulverturm
(‘powder tower’) and the Berliner Tor: the gate that
serves as the entrance to Mittenwalde at its intersection
with the road to Berlin. Both were part of the settlement’s
medieval Stadtmauer (defence wall). Bearing in mind our
location and our destination, we’ll be driving from one
Brandenburg gate to another.
Back on the highway, with confidence building (not
least because I’ve successfully negotiated several tight
manoeuvres in the tiny streets of Mittenwalde), I pull
away serenely, shifting gears with languid precision
via that long lever, ultimately into top and settling into
124
a long-legged cruise: 50mph keeps pace with the traffic,
at which speed the ride is settled, sheer mass doing much
to smother disturbances. The steering wheel needs hands
on at all times, though for a car of this era it is surprisingly
accurate, and it lightens up as soon as you have tarmac
passing beneath the wheels.
Country roads give way to leafy boulevards as we enter
Berlin, and I swap places with the Audi Museum Mobile’s
archivist and restorations manager Ralf Hornung, who
gives me some background while he refamiliarises himself
with the controls. ‘The car was found in the 1990s,’ he
tells me. ‘There was no body: just the chassis, engine,
bulkhead and fenders. It had possibly been used by the
fire brigade, as such cars had often served as a basis for
conversion to service vehicles in early post-war times. For
them, fuel consumption and tax were not an issue.
‘This was a few years before the Audi Museum Mobile
opened. The Type R was safe, though we had no budget as
yet for its restoration. But we wanted the Type M and the
Type R ready for the opening. The Type M would be
prepared as a cutaway exhibit, so that visitors could see its
overhead-cam engine and its hydraulic brakes. It really
was an advanced car. The Type R was Audi’s first with an
eight-cylinder engine. That would be restored for driving.’
All of which is where Peter Spillner enters the tale, but
we’ll be meeting him again later. For now, it’s time to soak
up the sense of occasion, playing passenger in a car that
represents an era in which Audi made a bid to lead the
German luxury car market, the decade before Auto Union
audi imperator in berlin
dominated Grand Prix racing. ‘We were more successful
than Mercedes-Benz, you know,’ says Hornung.
Suddenly tHe Brandenburg Gate dominates the
view. Parking isn’t allowed in this part of Berlin, so we
take advantage of the glorious early morning sunshine
and enjoy a guided tour of the city’s most famous sites.
This 18th Century neo-classical monument is today a
symbol of peace in europe, though it suffered considerable
damage during the final battles between German and
Soviet troops in World War two. It was patched up
during the Soviet era, but properly restored only as
recently as 2002, at a cost of €6m.
down Strasse des 17 Juni through the tiergarten, from
the rear seat of this imperious limousine I can see into
leafy surroundings and marvel at the fact that much of
the woodland was used for firewood in the British-
occupied sector, while the land was turned over to the
production of crops. That former use contrasts sharply
with the Soviet monument to fallen soldiers of the Red
Army, built in 1945 and which still survives. More recent
monuments include a memorial to the homosexuals
persecuted by the nazis.
Possibly even more poignant is the street we turn onto,
renamed in 1995 to comemmorate the passing of Israeli
President yitzhak Rabin. He was known as a ‘fighter for
peace’, and the comemmoration took place during an
international conference on anti-Semitism, held in Berlin,
and which remembered the city’s 50,000 Jews who died
in the nazi concentration camps during World War two.
Though the war began in 1939, much of the groundswell
before it occurred very much in the era of the Audi type
R. yitzhak Rabin Strasse provides a new perspective not
only on Germany’s past but also its present, quite literally
in the vista it affords of the Reichstag. Following the
reunification of Germany in 1990, it was rebuilt and
reopened as the seat of Germany’s government in 1999.
Feeling rather as though we’re impersonating
dignitaries of another era, we pass by this impressive
edifice, follow the block around and find ourselves in
Pariser Platz, where we pull up outside the Hotel Adlon.
126
The modern building was completed in 1997 in the style Clockwise from right
of the original, which dated back to 1907 and was Type R is in its element
on the tree-lined country
destroyed in 1945, bar a small wing that remained
roads of eastern
in service until 1984. Germany, but equally at
lorenz Adlon was a restaurateur who ran several coffee home amid the splendour
houses in Berlin. He convinced Kaiser Wilhelm II that of Berlin; genteel Dahlem
Berlin needed a luxury hotel to rival those in Paris and district; Pariser Platz’s
historic Hotel Adlon.
london, and the Kaiser cleared the way for Adlon to
have the historic Palais Redern demolished to make way
for his venture. during the 1920s, the Adlon hosted
celebrity guests such as Charlie Chaplin, Albert einstein
and Marlene dietrich, and it remained a social hub
throughout the nazi period. It is certain that this is not
the first time an Audi type R Imperator has caught the
eye of its doormen.
Moving away from the historic centre of Berlin, we
head across town to the Olympiastadion. It was completed
in 1936, in time for that year’s Olympic Games, and
Werner March’s architecture – in essence a modern vision
of Rome’s Colosseum – is the perfect foil for the
Imperator. It certainly attracts curious eyes here, the day
after a concert held by Rammstein, one of Germany’s
biggest rock bands.
The stadium housed the British military occupation
forces from 1945, and only after reunification did
Berliners have the chance to decide what its future
would be. In the end, it was restored and reopened in
2004, and one of its early uses was as a venue during
the 2006 FIFA World Cup.
I’m getting used to this: pad along some cobbles, then
scatter traffic like a shark in a sea of squid, before spying
another piece of eastern Germany’s great past that’s been
brought back to life – rather like the Audi, in fact. next
stop, the Haus des Rundfunks, completed in 1929 – the
same year as this type R.
Its tiled façade conceals a triangular plan, designed by
Hans Poelzig and built under the auspices of master
planner Max H Berling. It’s one of the earliest buildings
of its type, created to house Germany’s state broadcasting
corporation, and it remains the home of the Berlin
Radio Symphony Orchestra. The main broadcasting halls
‘I’m gettIng used to thIs: pad along
some cobbles, then scatter traffIc
lIke a shark In a sea of squId’

127
audi imperator in berlin
are built on foundations separate from the rest of the
building, and the editorial offices feature movable walls,
so that the number and size of rooms can vary according
to need. It was a forward-thinking building that still
serves its purpose eloquently, following restoration
in 1987. Apparently it sounds as good as it looks.
With that, we’re nearing the end of our Berlin tour,
heading back to Glienick via the Art Deco apartment
buildings of Dahlem, known as ‘Berlin’s Oxford’,
traditionally one of the most affluent parts of the city and,
as home to the Freie Universität Berlin, a centre for
academic research.
‘ThIs Is The Only car for which I have built a body
from nothing,’ says Peter spillner. ‘I went to Ingolstadt to
see what they had and what they wanted. Ralf hornung
had a drawing for the wooden frame. The rest we had to
build. no roof, no windscreen. so I sat down with my
coachbuilder and we worked out a plan.
‘The wood gives the shape, then you wrap the metal on
the wood. All the work is in the little things. even the
doorhandles we cast ourselves, and the brackets for the
windscreen. Ralf had a ’screen from another car; we
borrowed that. Getting it right mostly involved looking
at pictures of an original car.’
128
The whole project took 2½ years from start to finish. Above
‘That’s very quick for a project like this,’ says spillner. ‘The Waddington plays
passenger as Audi
engine and transmission were complete; we stripped Tradition’s Ralf Hornung
them, fitted new bearings, pistons, and it all went back pilots the Type R
together. The wooden wheels we contracted out to a Imperator into Strasse
specialist. The interior was very similar to a horch’s, so des 17 Juni, by the
Brandenburg Gate.
we could compare it with one, though it isn’t like getting
parts from a catalogue.’
The biggest difficulty was the hood. ‘We took
measurements, applied them to a computer and used
CAD to draw how it would operate. Then we made
sections in wood, and applied trial and error until it
worked. Then we talked to the upholsterer, talked about
how the hood would fit the frame.’
The finished car is a triumph, even down to its tread
strips, inscribed with ‘Rosenow-Wagenbau, Glienick’.
There simply wasn’t another coachbuilder spillner could
have attributed.
And with that ends a long and fascinating day. The Audi
Type R Imperator is in so many ways a metaphor for the
land from which it hails: eastern Germany. A region as
advanced as any in europe but which got overtaken by
events, languished for decades, and then reasserted itself.
As has the Audi, restored in the land of its forebears, and
now a unique survivor. End
 The vehicle registration BE 1 was issued by Lincolnshire County Council in 1903

The Heritage Collection

AG
1925
I FJ
1904
I HR
1919
I KP
1928
I PO
1929
I VU
1930
I
AN
1904
I GE
1928
I HZ
1944
I LK
1913
I RK
1922
I WR
1912
I
BE
1903
I GF
1930
I IT
1903
I LN
1906
I TN
1925
I WS
1904
I
BV
1930
I GL
1932
I IY
1903
I LO
1915
I TP
1924
I YE
1927
I
CL
1904
I GY
1932
I JN
1930
I LS
1903
I VE
1928
I YG
1932
I
DL
1903
I HD
1913
I KE
1920
I LZ
1947
I VP
1928
I YH
1927
I
FH
1903
I HH
1904
I KO
1927
I MO
1922
I VS
1904
I YJ
1932
I
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131
IsDera CommenDatore
espite its obscurity,
many people from
my generation drove
the 1990s Isdera
Commendatore 112i
on a regular basis. In
a computer game,
that is. It was one of
the supercars you
could select in the
1997 racing game
Need for Speed II.
I never drove the car
in that game, although I did spend many hours
tearing up the virtual roads in anything from
a Lotus Esprit to a Ferrari F50. Back then, I
wasn’t interested in this unknown German
supercar, mainly because I didn’t believe it
really existed. I found out many years later that
it did, and I finally got to drive it. In real life, on
a sunny day in 2014. The memories are vivid.
‘Every time I accelerate, my scalp bangs viciously
against a little metal bar in the roof, a few inches
behind my head. The noise of the engine is
overwhelmingly loud, the heat in the cabin almost
unbearable – the air-conditioning doesn’t work
and my sweat-soaked back sticks to the backrest of
the cramped racing seat, while the Mercedes V12
behind me pumps ever more hot air into the cabin.
Somewhere under the dash a nagging buzzing
sound distracts me while I try to keep this beast in
check. There’s no time to find out what the sound
signifies, no time for anything other than trying
to keep the vehicle in front in view. And that’s a
Lamborghini Aventador LP700-4.
‘In this area of Switzerland, near Lake
Constance, there are not many main roads. Our
route takes us along twisting lanes with tight
corners, potholes, big differences in height between
the road surface and the soft shoulder, villages,
hamlets or oncoming traffic that suddenly appear
after a bend and require lightning-fast braking.
As I try to stay with the Aventador, it becomes
painfully clear what a difference two decades of
technological advancement makes.’
It had taken most of a year to arrange a meeting
with the owner, a rather secretive Swiss
businessman. He sent his 20-something son to
meet us – the Lambo was his – and a friend
brought the Isdera. The son, although helpful,
wasn’t impressed with the Isdera. ‘It’s old, it’s
noisy, everything feels way too heavy and
it’s not really comfortable. It’s just not my kind
of car,’ he explained, handing me the keys.
The Commendatore story goes back to 1968,
when German engineer Eberhard Schulz (born
in 1940) built his first car in the laundry room
132
of his parents’ home. The Erator GT looked like
a Ford GT40 but was designed and built from
scratch by Schulz, who joined Porsche’s design
and development department in 1971. He
worked there until 1982, then founded his own
automotive design and consultancy business,
Isdera (Ingenieurbüro fur Styling, DEsign und
RAcing), in Leonberg, near Stuttgart. It built
wind-tunnel models, concept cars, mock-ups
and prototypes, and did aerodynamic research
and design jobs for customers. Cars it created
for other brands included the BMW E30-based
Baur TC3 Coupé and the Irmscher GT.
In 1983 Schulz launched his first sports car
under the Isdera label, the Spyder 033i/036i, a
mid-engined roadster with a Mercedes engine
of either four or six cylinders. One year later,
Isdera introduced the Imperator 108i, a mid-
engined supercar with gullwing doors and a
AMG-tuned Mercedes V8. The Imperator
echoed the famous Mercedes C111 prototype,
of which Schulz designed his own interpretation
supposedly with the tacit blessing of Das Haus.
Both Isdera models stayed in production for
several years; the Imperator was facelifted in
1991 and had numerous engine updates, but
no more than a few dozen of either were built.
In 1993, at the Frankfurt auto show, Isdera
showed the Commendatore 112i, a car
originally intended for the Le Mans 24 Hours.
Its heart was – again – a Mercedes engine, this
time the 6.0-litre V12 from the W140 Mercedes
600 SEL. Reinforced glassfibre and carbonfibre
Left and main image
Eberhard Schulz with the
Autobahnkurier 116i, a
twin-V8, retro-look coupé
he created in 2006; Isdera
Commendatore 112i of
1993 remains the only one
of its type to be built.
133
ISDERA COMMENDATORE

This page and opposite

Instrument panel is from a
W140 Mercedes 600 SEL;
rear lights, by Hella, were
more commonly used on
tractors; V12 engine shares
dial pack’s S-class origins.

bodywork clad a lightweight tubular chassis.

The V12 was mounted longitudinally just in
front of the rear axle, the six-speed Getrag
gearbox behind it.
Intended as a ‘practical supercar’, more GT
than street-legal Le Mans prototype, the
Commendatore 112i had a large 120-litre fuel
tank, a 200-litre luggage compartment at the
front, and a cramped but comfortable cabin
with leather racing seats, air-conditioning and a
high-end audio system. It featured ABS, ASR
and a system that automatically adjusted the
ride height, lowering the body by up to 3in at
autobahn speeds. Pièces de résistance were the
automatic airbrake on the tail (the
Commendatore was the first car to have this
feature) and Schulz’s trademark roof mirror.
Its top speed was quoted at 340km/h
(211mph), helped by a very low drag coefficient
of 0.306 and that 414bhp V12. But the 1575kg
Commendatore 112i never made it to Le Mans,
or into production for that matter. Isdera had
secured financial backing from a Japanese
‘When the Isdera investor but funding dried up when Japan’s
economy went into crisis in the early 1990s.
reappeared, all Isdera had to cancel not only the
Commendatore project but all its car
the logos had development programmes. Eberhard Schulz,
always a man to shun the limelight, returned
been changed to to his core business in relative anonymity.
The one and only Commendatore vanished
little Mercedes from view. For years its whereabouts was
roundels’ unknown and, while there were rumours about
a second Commendatore, reliable information
was hard to come by. When the Frankfurt show
car reappeared, it was no longer in its original
state. The distinctive roof mirror had been
replaced by two wing mirrors to make the car
road-legal in Switzerland, the bespoke BBS
rims had been swapped for something more
mundane, and all the Isdera logos had been
changed to little Mercedes roundels. And it was
painted in silver-grey, not the Porsche ice-blue
metallic it had worn at its launch. The air-
conditioning didn’t work, the passenger door
could not be opened from the outside and the
automatic ride height system was broken.
How our host’s father had obtained the car in
the first place, he couldn’t tell us. ‘I think he got
it as a payment for a business deal,’ he told us.
Some business deal. At the time, the car was for
sale for €1.2m. Back now to the drive.

‘At the end of every straight, just when I’ve

managed to reel it in, the Lamborghini rounds the
next corner as if it’s a Scalextric car. The Isdera

134
135
Isdera Commendatore
Peters, puts the mystery to rest: ‘A German
customer of Schulz already had two Isderas and
wanted his own Commendatore. He owns a
chassis but, as time went by, he planned to
change the car in some significant ways. As we
own the rights to the Isdera brand, we have told
him he can build his car in any shape or form he
likes, he can call it a replica, but we won’t allow
him to call it an Isdera. Our Commendatore
112i will remain the only one built.’
‘In every gear the V12 pushes the Isdera forward
as if a giant is using it as a football. The stiff
suspension and the low, wide tyres make the
steering very susceptible to the smallest change of
road camber; every pothole becomes a ravine,
every speed bump a mountain. Sometimes the
steering wheel tries to wrestle itself from my grip
like a hyperactive puppy. Everything feels heavy:
the gearshift, the steering, even the accelerator. The
Brembo brakes require a lot of pedal pressure but
the stopping power is phenomenal. Confidence
builds as I get into a flow; I’m not allowed to
explore the car’s full potential, even if the road
permitted it, but I’m still enjoying myself.’
After that drive, the Commendatore vanished
from view until 2016. That’s when Isdera
138
bought it back and had it restored. Technically
it’s totally original apart from a new exhaust
system – installed to solve some overheating
problems and which makes the engine sound
even more hilariously aggressive – and a new
Momo steering wheel. The automatic
suspension has been repaired, the roof mirror is
back, and the BBS rims have been re-cast as the
originals were lost. It even has the original Sony
stereo. The odometer shows 9852km, only
around 300km more than it showed in 2014.
Isdera, now backed by Chinese investors,
still specialises in consultancy, research and
design. In 2018 it introduced the all-electric
Commendatore GT at the Beijing auto show.
Like the original Commendatore, the fully
functional and road-legal GT is primarily a
showpiece, a way of showing potential
customers what Isdera has to offer. Designed
in-house, with technical support from various
German partner companies, the GT features
several design features from its predecessor:
the side window profiles, the roofline, the short
nose, the gullwing doors. Inside, it’s a 2+2 with
a modern interior and a full digital dash.
The all-wheel-drive GT is powered by a
105kWh battery pack which feeds a pair of
electric motors. Total output is rated at 815bhp
and 781lb ft of torque. Isdera claims 0-62mph
acceleration in 3.7sec, 0-124mph in 9.8sec and
a governed top speed of 187mph. Two have
been built with no plans to produce more,
although Stefan Peters doesn’t rule out the
possibility. Isdera’s production facilities can
build small runs of up to 700 units.
And the original Commendatore 112i? It’s
now used as a showpiece, a reminder of Isdera’s
heritage and the impressive cars the company
once built. I cherish the fact that I once had
the chance to drive it, but that of course was
a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I’ll have
to make do with my memories.
‘This old-school supercar still gets from a standstill
to 200km/h in 11sec, and even if that’s not within
my reach the car feels incredibly quick – the
sensation of speed is overwhelming. I love the
mechanical feel of this car, its power when
accelerating from a corner, the brute force it takes
to make it do what I want it to do, and above
all the primeval force of that magnificent engine.
It’s completely different from its contemporaries,
a one-off in every sense.’ End
Thanks To Weltkulturerbe Völklinger Hütte
for the photo location.
S
O

139
by Octane staff and contributors

OCTANE CARS
OW N I N G + D R I V I N G + M A I N T A I N I N G

Back
home
for ‘T’
1927 FORD
MODEL T
MARK DIXON

MR SOD HAS yet again proven

the validity of his well-known law.
Last year I had a sudden craving to
find and buy back the 1927 Model
T pick-up that I used to own. It
seemed to have dropped out of
sight, however, and eventually I
gave up and bought the Alvis
12/50 described in Octane 199 –
which, of course, was the cue for
the ‘T’ to turn up on eBay just
three weeks later.
I’d always felt that the ‘T’ and
I had unfinished business. To be
perfectly honest, I think I was a
little bit afraid of it; a ‘T’ is so
unlike any other car to drive that,
on the few occasions I took it out,
I’d first have to Google ‘How to
drive a Model T’ to remind me.
But I also remembered how well it
went for something so basic – it
would positively leap away in top
gear – and felt it would make a
great shopping car in my present collect the car for me and give it a the worn ball-joint at the front of the car its proper maiden voyage
rural neck of the woods. check-over. I was pretty confident the axle tube to get rid of some to January’s Sunday Scramble at
The eBay vendor, bless him, it would be OK; the ‘T’ had hardly transmission shunt, took some Bicester Heritage, in convoy with
reckoned I was ‘the right person’ been used since I sold it and was slack out of the steering, adjusted him driving his ‘T’ tourer, his
to have it and put his listing on still wearing the same layer of dirt the handbrake and checked the partner Jude in her Austin Seven,
hold while I scraped together the as when I bought it nine years ago! bands in the epicyclic gearbox. and friend John in his own ‘T’.
money. Meanwhile, I contacted My faith in ‘T’ reliability was After chaperoning me on a test That sounded an excellent idea!
Richard Rimmer of Oxfordshire- rewarded, although Richard found drive – which also proved how A mate of mine, Iain Hancox,
based The T Service Ltd (www. several minor jobs that did need much better it performed after his agreed to ride shotgun – he has an
tservice.co.uk) and asked him to doing. For example, he shimmed ministrations – he suggested I give early Land Rover, so freezing

140
OCTANE CARS / Running Reports

OCTANE’S flEET
These are the cars – and
motorbikes – run by our
staff and contributors

SAMANTHA SNOW
Advertising account manager
l 1969 Triumph Herald

13/60 Convertible
l 1989 Mercedes-Benz 300SL

jESSE CROSSE
Contributor
l 1968 Ford Mustang GT 390

l 1986 Ford Sierra RS Cosworth

DAviD BuRgESS-WiSE
Contributor
l 1903 De Dion-Bouton

l 1911 Pilain 16/20

l 1926 Delage DISS

MARTyN gODDARD
Photographer
l 1963 Triumph TR6SS Trophy

l 1965 Austin-Healey 3000 MkIII

Parting is such sweet sorrow
get-rich-quick ’80s was falling cars. Another best day was when
DElWyN MAllETT around our ears and DB5s were my daughter took the wheel.
Contributor
1965 ASTON still rare, but available. I heard They’re all best days in an Aston
Gobbo before I bought her, twice. but I have to admit that, while the
l 1936 Cord 810 Beverly

l 1937 Studebaker Dictator

MARTiN DB5 First, as Fairburn gunned her costs have risen, my income hasn’t.
l 1946 Tatra T87 Andrew english
engine as he headed up to Glasgow Writing about cars never really did
l 1950 Ford Club Coupe

l 1952 Porsche 356

l 1955 Mercedes-Benz 300SL
l 1957 Porsche Speedster
l 1957 Fiat Abarth Sperimentale
l 1963 Abarth-Simca
l 1963 Tatra T603
l 1992 Alfa Romeo SZ
TONy DRON
Contributor
l 1932 Austin Seven
SARAH BRADlEy
Contributor
l 1929 Ford Model A hot rod
l 1952 Studebaker Champion
l 1956 Chevrolet 3100 pick-up
‘I’m not In love, so don’t
forget it,’ sang 10cc, in their
eponymous 1975 number-one
single; and I was beginning to feel
the same way about Gobbo, my
Aston Martin DB5.
I’d almost decided to sell the old
girl and had squared my conscience
with the idea of parting with the
‘family heirloom’, as my wife puts it
on the good days. But then I saw
the new Bond No Time To Die
trailer, which is book-ended by his
Silver Birch DB5 roaring and
after taking a class win at the
AMOC Wiscombe hillclimb.
Second, when a friend raced
Gobbo past my house on open
exhausts, the rev-counter yowling
past 6000rpm. I lifted my head and
entered the fantasy world that the
impoverished Aston Martin owner
must keep one foot in.
In the meantime she’s been
raced and hillclimbed but always
as a standard car. She’s done
countless high days and holidays
and school proms, and had money
poured into her slightly faster than
stretch to running a classic Aston,
but these days it’s quite impossible;
rates haven’t risen for over a
decade. Gobbo really should go to
someone with the wherewithal to
keep her in the manner to which
she’s become accustomed.
Trouble is, as soon as you
announce that such an unmolested
prize – she’s never been totally
apart – is for sale, you are
descended on by an army of the
most deluded Walter Mittys. ‘Just
put a bloody advert in the paper:
it’s simple,’ said Talacrest’s John

l 1969 Plymouth Roadrunner

l Various motorbikes
MATTHEW HOWEll
Photographer
l 1962 VW Beetle 1600
l 1970 VW Beetle 1300
HARRy METCAlfE
Contributor
l 20 cars and 15 motorbikes
To follow Harry’s adventures with
his cars and bikes, search for
Harry’s Garage on YouTube.
sliding, battered but unbowed and
firing its chain guns (yes, forget
those Brownings). It’s the sort of
film that makes you wonder
whether you really want to
relinquish one of the loveliest
things you’ve ever owned.
She’s been in my hands for
many years now, though the Aston
Martin Owners’ Club people
still call her ‘Bob Fairburn’s Old
Car’ or ‘Gobbo’. I bought her just
as the tumbling masonry of the
you can pour it out of a two-gallon
can. Two engine and complete
drivetrain rebuilds, countless
suspension and brake refurbs, and
paint – oh, the paint that car has
had in my tenure.
Best event was undoubtedly the
1400m Mont Ventoux hillclimb in
southern France, where we were
gate-crashers on part-entry fees
and were asked by the organisers
to slow down as we were upsetting
owners with potentially far faster
Collins a few years ago, when I
interviewed him about selling a
Ferrari GTO. According to my
friend Andrew Mitchell of body
shop and restoration specialist
Mitchell Motors in Wiltshire,
however, now is not a good time to
offer Gobbo up for sale. ‘If things
pick up, try the Spring.’
Good advice – but if you’re
interested, get in touch anyway.
To use that time-worn phrase:
please, no time-wasters…

142
Reality check time
1983
Porsche 944
Glen WaddinGton
work has started on my
home office, so I need to face
facts. When it’s finished, I’ll have
only one parking space. And my
BMW E30 Convertible returns
from storage in Spring. Yes, I’ve
put my name on the waiting list
to rent a garage locally, but I’ve
heard nothing further since. And
this is a car that I’ve always kept
indoors. There’s nothing else for
it. I think it’s time to find the 944
a new home.
So, a little history for you. My
944 has been appearing on and
off within these pages for about
7½ years now. It has typically
covered 1500-2000 miles per
year in my hands (the odometer
currently reads 74,000, and the
MoT history suggests that’s a real
total), often taking me to the
kind of work-type stuff where
turning up in the family wagon
just wouldn’t be appropriate. A
400-mile round trip into
Somerset for a photo shoot a
couple of summers ago was a
particuarly memorable drive,
and it’s always been an absolute
hoot on the winding country
roads I’m fortunate enough to be
surrounded by.
On the whole, it’s been
impressively reliable. Yesterday
(at time of writing) I drove it the
100-mile round trip to attend
HÖDLMAYR CLASSIC CAR CENTER
this issue’s cover shoot, its first
time out since its MoT before
Christmas, which it flew through
with no advisories. About seven
months ago it gained a new,
bespoke stainless steel sports
exhaust, which sounds just
fabulous, and while it was on the
ramps I had a good poke around.
It really is impressively solid selec ted f ine
underneath. The tyres are about
3000 miles old, the vital renewing
of cam-and-balance belts took
rarities
place around 8000 miles ago
(and, according to my local guru You are looking for the unknown?
Stuart Templeton, of Templeton’s
Garage, they have plenty of life A sk for our of f-mar ke t range. Rar ities never
left in them yet). And regular before openly of fered on the mar ke t
readers will know all about the
are waiting to convince you. We are looking
electrical refit of 18 months ago!
There’s room for improvement, for ward to hear ing from you!
of course. The black cookie-
cutter alloys have polished rims
that needed refurbishing when I
bought the car: they haven’t
deteriorated further, but they
still could do with that sparkle.
There’s a tear in the fabric of the
driver’s seat base that I’ve been
protecting with a vinyl cover. The
paint polishes up really well, but
look closely and you can tell that
not all of it was applied at the
same time. And the bodywork
bears the odd tiny bubble and
chip, but no ripples or dents.
The best of these are being
offered for £8000 and more. This
944 is solid and tidy, rather than
concours, and the seller is
motivated, if obviously rather sad From our current stock list:
at the prospect. So if you’d like to
find out more, please email me at Bugat ti EB 110 | Ferrari F 40 | Lamborghini Gallardo
glen@octane-magazine.com. GT3 FL2 “ready to race” | Maserati 4CLT/48
“ready to race” | Maserati A6 1500 | Maserati 5000 GT
“Allemano” | Mercedes 300 SL Gullwing
Mercedes 300 SL Roadster | Maserati Ghibli Spyder
Lancia Flaminia Zagato II | Maserati Sebring Serie II
Ferrari 365 GTB/4 Day tona Plexi | Alfa Romeo Giuliet ta
Sprint Speziale | BMW 3200 V8 Super
“Das Autenrieth Cabrio” | BMW “M” 635 CSi “Protot ype”
DKW Puma | Riley 14/6 “Alpine Trial” …
w w w.classiccarcenter.at
Poneggenstraße 1, 4311 Schwertberg, Austria
mark dixon
Tel +43(0)7262-660-29011, classiccarcenter@hoedlmayr.com
143
OCTANE CARS / Running Reports
Meeting the Hunt master
1955
JAGUAR XK140
ROBERT COUCHER
Just when I thought my
fuel leak problem had been
rectified with the fitment of a new
fuel line, things got worse. When
I checked under the bonnet the
other week, I noticed that the rear
SU carburettor was weeping.
Hoping it was just a dry gasket, I
nipped up the brass hex nut
underneath the fuel bowl – but no,
fuel was still coming out.
Burlen Fuel Systems posted me
an SU carb gasket kit and I duly
fitted a new float-chamber gasket.
A quick test drive revealed the
same leak. Blast. It was clearly
coming from deeper within the
carb, which would have to be
removed and stripped. This was
not something I wanted to attempt
144
myself on the side of the road or in
my garage.
But some good news has come
out of all of this. My friend and
top-end car dealer, Graeme Hunt
(www.graemehunt.com), has just
moved his ‘works’ to my manor.
When I told him of my carb
dilemma he said: ‘No problem,
bring the Jaguar over and we’ll
have it fixed.’ A three-minute drive
to the mews and chief mechanic
Gary Puxty was waving the XK
into ‘The Garages’ in this discreet
location. Talk about an Aladdin’s
Cave – the vast garage is full of gaskets from the rebuild kit, Clockwise from top
wonderful classics of all reassembled the carb and then set Graeme Hunt and colleagues
human and canine pose by the
descriptions. up the many linkages and adjusted now leak-free Jaguar; aristocratic
Gary is a racing-car mechanic the idle. SU dribbled copiously; cause was
and preparer and has been The XK is once again fuel-tight split cork gasket but rebuild kit
rebuilding and tuning SUs for and purring contentedly, and it’s provided a new one.
decades. He soon had the such a relief to have a classic expert
offending carb off and stripped in the neighbourhood. The carbs
and the cause of the leak was were rebuilt not that long ago so I
obvious. The cork gasket that fits can only assume this is another
on top of the jet was perished and indication that old-tech cork seals
broken. He fitted all the new don’t get on with modern fuels.
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OCTANE CARS / Running Reports

Starlight not-so-express
impetuous and somewhat naïve, I
like to think I was never stupid.
for parts. I’ve scored some fabulous
‘hen’s teeth’ NOS stuff, including
a complete grille, further chrome
accessories, a White Onyx steering
wheel and the supposedly correct
Edmunds twin-carb manifold that
Clockwise from far left
Body and chassis separated for
restoration at Marshalls Fins’n’Chrome;
happy Sarah on the day she bought
Studebaker in 1993; sorting parts ready
for 2019 restoration; 1993 again, and
Sarah is taking her Stude to bits.

1952 STudEbAkER
ChAmpiON
Sarah Bradley
All good things come to
those who wait – and I’m delighted
to report that, at last, there has
recently been forward movement
in the decades-long restoration of
my 1952 Studebaker Champion
Starlight Coupe. The half-renovated
car had been mothballed for well
over 20 years, gently taunting me
from the corner of my garage. Now
things are finally happening, and I
couldn’t be happier.
I bought the Starlight in the
early 1990s. Extremely rusty and
painted black with a custom flame-
job, it was hardly a pristine
example of Studebaker’s design
classic – but it captured my heart
and it was what I could afford on
my meagre salary. And I did have
a ‘plan’: while I was just 21,
I painstakingly stripped the car may require some ‘encouragement’
and labelled, bagged and boxed to get it to fit.
all the parts. Calling in the The Stude’s body has come off after all these years in storage
professionals, I got a long way into the chassis, which has been blasted needs more work than I’d hoped.
the restoration – body panels and repainted before undergoing a Still, if you’re gonna do it, you’ve
sorted, turquoise respray carried nut-and-bolt rebuild. At time of gotta do it properly…
out, straight-six flathead rebuilt, writing, the engine is in and the Is this the end of the beginning,
chrome redone, even the Philco platform is days away from being or the beginning of the end? Who
Starline valve radio made to work driven around the yard. Next up is knows? These are exciting times
– before life took over. I bought a the body, which unfortunately and I’ll keep you updated.
house (also needing renovation),
followed by a small fleet of further
classic cars and motorcycles. As
my project pile grew, the likelihood
of the Stude ever being finished
shrank exponentially.
But I’ve worked hard and saved
hard, and at last I have a
professional restorer to continue
the job; I was never going to find
the space or time to do it myself.
Marshalls Fins’n’Chrome in
Titchfield, Hampshire, is currently
working its way through the
rebuild, while I’m project
managing and scouring the web

146
One of only 187 examples, this Flaminia SuperSport by Zagato combines charming early history (delivery by road and sea from
Turin to Chicago by its first – female!
f – owner, Lancia author Geoffrey Goldberg’s mother) with a recently finished nut and bolt
restoration.Winning “Best of Show” at Brussels Interclassics 2019, this truly is the best example to be found on the market.
Price: 388.000 Euro

Fiat 508C Barchetta ex-MM - 1937 Fiat 508C Barchetta by Bidée - 1938
Authentic four time Mille Miglia participant with fully One-off by Brussels coachbuilder Bidée, perfect Mille
documented history.
y Price: 575.000 Euro Miglia entrant. Price: 255.000 Euro

Aston Martin V8 Volante LHD - 1982 Lancia Flaminia Conve

n rtibile by Touring - 1961
Rare (216 ex.) LHD & carburettor version. Low-mileage Expertly restored by a passionnate Flaminia
car restored in Switzerland. Price: 222.000 Euro connoisseur. Price: 168.500 Euro
OCTANE BIKES / Running Reports
1960s FrEddIE
GruBB BIKE
harry Metcalfe
Why do us blokes hang onto
stuff, even when we never intend
using it again? I’ve had an old
Freddie Grubb race-bike frame
hanging on the wall of the farm
workshop for decades. It dates
from the ’60s and I’d bought it
from an old family friend for £10
when I was 13. My first proper
bike, it had five gears, racing
wheels with quick-release hubs, a
Brooks saddle that nearly ended
my breeding potential even before
I’d got started, and a frame painted
a strange but appealing green hue.
Its arrival triggered a short but
frantic period in my life competing
in 10- and 25-mile time trials in
the under-16 class, with the odd
Welsh hillclimb thrown in as well.
148
Bike to basics
I soon upgraded to an RJ Quinn
bike frame for racing duties,
demoting the Freddie Grubb to
‘hack’ status for training rides
only. Then, aged 17, I discovered
motorbikes and cars, and my bike
racing career ended as abruptly as
it had started. The RJ Quinn was
sold but, as the Freddie Grubb
was a bit tatty and next-to-
worthless, I ended up keeping it
for the next 40 years.
A couple of years ago my son
fancied a ‘fixie’ for his short
commute to university and
spotted my old bike in the
workshop. He also found a
specialist (Argos Cycles in Bristol)
who restore old bike frames to
better-than-new condition for
approx £350, including transfers.
I thought the frame was too far
gone but apparently not: they’d
seen much worse.
A few months later, it was ready
for collection. It looked stunning,
way better than it had ever been in
other
news
‘I’ve just added an
eBay-find 1920s “Pilot”
badge from Newcastle
Aero Club to the
dashboard of my ’26
Delage, as the car’s first
cHarlie metcalfe
known owner learned
to fly there in 1928’
David Burgess-Wise
its previous life, and ready to be
built back up again using my old ‘Eight years of DB7
components, many of which I’d
attacked with a drill to ‘add ownership now, and it
lightness’, as was the fad back then.
The day it was finished was
hasn’t cost a fortune
sunny with no wind to speak of, so – but I need to fit new
perfect for a first ride. It proved to
be amazing, the bike skimming
engine and gearbox
silently down the lane thanks to its mounts, and cure an
single-speed, fixed-wheel gearing
– and it was comfortable too. I’d
annoying rear axle leak’
Sanjay Seetanah
jettisoned that Brooks saddle
decades ago, while the generous
amount of ‘rake’ on the front forks ‘No compression on one
added a welcome degree of
suspension forgotten about on
bank of my 1936 Cord
today’s super-stiff carbon frames. 810’s Lycoming V8
I’m so glad I kept the Grubb
frame all those years. I knew there
means that exploratory
was a reason and this first ride was surgery is imminent’
it. It was perfect in every way. Delwyn Mallett
Above and below
Harry re-lives his early teenage years
on his ‘first proper bike’; frame was
‘The Sierra RS
tatty but sound; now restored but Cosworth is slowly
Harry’s weight-saving stays intact.
building miles on its
rebuilt engine, and
a drive out to
Caffeine & Machine
in Warwickshire was
a great excuse to
add some more’
Jesse Crosse
 HALL & HALL

1974 Lotus 76 DFV

The ultimate development of the iconic Lotus 72.
Driven by Ronnie Peterson and Jacky Ickx
An ideal entry for Monaco next year

www.hallandhall.net
Email: vince@hallandhall.net
Tel: +44 (0) 1778 392562
Rick Hall: +44 (0) 7710 971277
Rob Hall: +44 (0) 7770 845554

The 4x4 of choice?
Mercedes-benz
G-waGen 350d
mark dixon
OF THE THREE Mercedes
featured on this spread, I most
wanted to try the G-Wagen, for the
all-too-obvious reason that it’s the
one most like a Land Rover. And,
while I feel a little disloyal to the
green oval for saying so, I came
away afterwards thinking that this
was the ‘new Defender’ that so
many enthusiasts were hoping for
but didn’t get.
By which I mean that it’s a
curiously appealing mix of the
traditional and the contemporary.
You get those ’50s design cues –
flat windscreen, boxy body – with
a modern drivetrain that includes
selectable driving modes. Air
suspension helps mitigate the
limitations of a live rear axle; it
may look like a Defender, but it
rides like a P38A Range Rover.
150
todor slavchev
Despite its looks, the G-Wagen
was introduced as recently as 1979
– and this all-new version less than
two years ago! The current UK
line-up offers either 282bhp
straight-six diesel or bonkers
577bhp twin-turbo petrol V8. Our
test car has the former and it
proves well suited to the job:
almost petrol-like in its refinement
yet with welcome diesel torque.
There’s a lot to like here. Loads
of space up front, and acres of
headroom; comfortable leather
seats; and, of course, a driving
position that makes you feel like a lot of punishment. And the doors vehicles to choose from. I found
a very superior kind of white-van need a really hefty slam to close. the tech’s complexity frustrating,
man. Although, with its flat screen, But is that a flaw, or is it character? not to mention dangerous.
clamshell bonnet and massive Biggest gripe for me, though, is Until a few months ago, there
wing-mounted indicators, driving the uneasy combination of trad wasn’t much cross-over between
the G-Wagen is more like piloting switchgear and 21st Century the Defender and G-Wagen
a scaled-down US truck. touchscreens. Call me an old fart, markets, simply because the
There are also a few things not but I firmly believe that controls German vehicle was so vastly
to like. Doors that drip water onto for basic functions such as more expensive. The playing field
the front seats after rain, despite ventilation and air-con should be has now shifted, and you can easily
their complex seals, for a start. immediately intuitive – especially spend the £94,000 cost of a 350d
Getting up into those seats is never with high-end motors such as this, on a well-specced New Defender.
easy, even for a tall bloke like me – which may be infrequently driven For the first time, some old
the outer bolsters are going to take by owners who have a range of loyalties may be seriously tested.
Personally perfect
Mercedes-AMG
e53 coupe
glen waddington
Big, fast, luxurious two-
door cars. The Americans used to
call them ‘personal coupes’. And
they loved them: Cadillac
Eldorado, Buick Riviera, Lincoln
Continental, Olds Toronado and
more. They reached their epic
zenith in the 1970s, then
everything got downsized in
subsequent decades and people
stoppped caring.
That left a gap for Europe to fill.
Yet it seems strange that, while a
certain 4.0-litre twin-turbo V8 is
available in so much of the
Mercedes-AMG range, if you
go for the two-door E-class (which
is something of an ultimate in the
modern iteration of the personal
coupé), you’re denied that fire-
My plan had been to spend a
weekend away with wife and kids
and see how practical a full-size
two-door with a decent boot can
be – who needs a G-Wagen,
anyway? But then it became my
personal coupé as my dad fell ill
and I dropped everything to blast
up north for a couple of days.
Fact is, though this is a sizeable
car (4.85m long, 1900kg), it feels
intimate inside. Spacious, yet
cosy. It’s also extremely light on its
feet and rapid, too (0-62mph in 4.4
seconds). There’s a lovely creamy
snarl from under the bonnet and,
in Sport mode, a fruity exhaust
note to match. Extremely
satisfying, but it’ll also cruise the
motorway in silence while the
computer suggests mpg in the low-
30s, which is pretty remarkable.
Rather like those old Yanks, the
steering is somewhat light and
lacking in feel, which is typical of
modern electric racks, but it’s
genuinely the only demerit. And

power. So this 429bhp twin-turbo
straight-six with 48V mild-hybrid
boost technology rules the E-class
coupé roost.
glen waddington
then I filled it with family and bags
when it came to transporting dad
back from his brief stay in hospital.
He loved it. Glad I got to share it.

Electric
barry hayden / mercedes-benz
reality
Mercedes-Benz
eQc 400
glen waddington

it’s a four-wheel-drive
SUV, but there any similarity with
the G-Wagen (left) ends. This is
Mercedes’ first electric-only
vehicle, not simply an electrified
version of another car, though in
reality it shares some architecture
with the GLC-class. That means
you get a cabin that’s spacious for
five and boot space for matching
luggage. You also get 402bhp and
561lb ft, so it accelerates from rest
to 62mph in a very sporting 5.1
seconds, yet promises a range of
230 miles or so between charges.
Of course, that range will vary
according to how you drive, and
once you’ve launched yourself at
full pelt a few times, you’ll find
yourself exploring the range of
drive options, which can optimise
performance or efficiency with
degrees in-between. It soon
becomes just as diverting working
out how much range you can re-
gain with some judicious throttle-
off regeneration.
This is a refined, useful, practical
vehicle that doesn’t shout its ‘EV-
ness’ in quite the same way as
some of its rivals. Sure, its
range and sporadic UK
infrastructure mean you’ll have to
factor in the odd break on longer
journeys, yet still this feels like
evidence that the EV game is
moving, if only incrementally. It
costs from £65,000, is a very
enjoyable drive, and happens to
emit nothing from its tailpipe.

151
A case of what might have been
MODIFIED
JENSEN-HEALEY
& LOTUS ELITE
JAMES ELLIOTT
AS ESTABLISHED in the last
issue, I like ‘sets’ of cars. One set I
often toy with is the ready-made
Jensens for all occasions: Jensen-
Healey, Jensen GT and Interceptor.
One of the reasons I have never
followed through on the latter is
simple: federal bumpers, the
scourge of the 1970s. They are bad
enough on the J-H but on the GT
they are hideous.
Anyway, when I received an
email out of the blue from a like-
minded soul who had homebuilt
a ‘slimline’ Jensen-Healey without
the heavyweight bumpers, I was
intrigued. When I wrote back that
I was fascinated in part because I
spent years of Wedge Elite
ownership badly photoshopping
off the impact bumpers and he
responded with pictures of his
152
own Elite wearing cut-down Viva
bumpers, I hotfooted it up to
(very) rural Lincolnshire to meet
my new soulmate.
The man in question is 67-year-
old Dik Stapley, a former engineer
and parking manager for Kingston
upon Hull City Council who
retired 12 years ago and moved
to Lincolnshire seven years ago.
He and wife Kay are both from
a hot-rodding and biking
background – he’s served on
the committee of the National
Street Rod Association and was
a custom painter with a hand
in the Hull Street Freaks; she’s a
prize-winning airbrusher and
they once convoyed their Gileras
to the old factory at Arcore – but
there has been a sea-change in his
tastes more recently.
Despite a car history that started
with a Morgan three-wheeler and
encompassed everything from
Austin Somerset to Ford
Thunderbird, Dik has latterly
focused on Vauxhall and Luton-
related products. That, of course,
includes the Vauxhall-based Lotus
900-series slant-four that powers
both the Elite and the Jensen-
Healey. Don’t believe the hype:
keep ahead of the belts and this is a
great motor.
In Dik’s four-berth steel-framed
Ove Arup Arcon MkV prefab
when I visit there is a wonderful
Riley, a Victor estate being
converted to Buick V6 power for
Continental cruising, and a
gorgeous Viva born an 1800 auto,
but now being prepped for
competition with a 200bhp-plus
version of the Vauxhall-derived
engine that is also in the Lotus and
Jensen-Healey.
Dik’s work on the Lotus shows
that my own grand plan could have Clockwise from top left
worked. The back – formerly Jensen-Healey now looks as editor
James thinks it should, thanks to
obscured by a mass of black plastic modifications by owner Dik Stapley;
– is pretty much there, though he Stapley’s Lotus Elite is a work in
has added Vauxhall Viva HA progress, though chrome bumpers
taillights. At the front a chrome are already in place.
piece from the DS fits perfectly
inside the ‘mouth’. Even more
interesting is what he is doing
inside, making twin fuel tanks for
 ‘DIK HAS BUILT FROM SCRATCH AN EYECATCHING FRONT END FOR THE JENSEN-HEALEY’
the sides and introducing a sliding
rear deck and Scimitar fold-down
seats to turn it into a ‘proper’
estate. Can’t wait to see it finished.
On to the reason for my visit.
Dik has done an eyecatching job of
building a front end from scratch
for the Viva-underpinned Jensen-
Healey. He says: ‘I’ve been bleating
about Ralph bloody Nader and
federal bumpers since about 1975;
many years ago I even had a go
at “correcting” an Oldsmobile
Cutlass. With the Jensen-Healey
the rear was straightforward, but
the whole front end had to be
constructed, influenced by the
Frua-styled AC 428.
‘Once you take the front
bumper off, from the lip of the
bumper down to the side of the
wing there is nothing, just a big
gap, and I had to design how to fill
it. All metal: I hate glassfibre!’
The results you see here have
been achieved using 1mm mild
steel sheet and period parts, give
or take a year or two, with the
exception of the front sidelights
that are Bosch generic ones. The
basic body shape, including
bonnet lip, remains intact.
‘The bumpers are from a
Vauxhall Chevette, unmodified
except for a little grinding on the
inside corners of the rear one. The
over-riders are Viva HC after-
market items. The chrome strips,
front and side, are luggage skid
strips from the rear floor of a 1969
FD Victor Estate. The chin spoiler
is the stainless steel top trim from
the original ugly bumper. I cannot
determine the origin of the front
valance as I took it from my
dwindling stash of discontinued
car panels I acquired 30 years ago.’
The Aston-style side vents?
Because he wanted to. He has
adopted the hot-rod term
‘phantom cars’ for his two projects,
refering to something that the
factory might have made in
period… but didn’t.
I have considered Jensen-
Healeys many a time, but came
closest to actually buying one
when I was intrigued by a £2k
example that was always parked
just off the Fulham Palace Road
when I moved to London in the
early 1990s. It was solid enough
(sorry-looking only in the sense
that it seemed a bit neglected) and
I was entranced on the first
viewing, but it lost me when it
wouldn’t start on the second.
No such problems with Dik’s,
which fires up on first turn of the
key. Despite the unfamiliarity of
my surroundings – he has
customised/modernised the dash
because he hates fake wood, and
the doorcards and rear bulkhead
are in blue and black snakeskin
(see it before you judge it) –
everything soon comes flooding
back. Not least what a lovely, easy
car a Jensen-Healey is to drive,
with its comfortable driving
position, perfectly placed gearlever
and sporty change. As we potter
around Dik’s local test route, I
recall that it may not deliver edge-
of-seat point-to-point thrills like a
Lotus Elan, but you could happily
throw in a small travel bag and
head across Europe (with a spare
timing belt, naturally). And
everything is so smooth.
To be fair, the driving experience
was no different from any good
and properly sorted Jensen-Healey
(this car was bought directly from
marque guru Bob Cherry, so
expectations should be high), but
it was well worth the trip to see it
(and the Elite) in the metal and to
meet a fascinating enthusiast in
Dik. His next project is a Viva HC
van with a Chevy Vega nose, but I
will be sending him pictures of
Jensen GTs in the interim, hoping
that he won’t be able to resist…
153
OVERDRIVE / Other Cars
Going out on a high
BMW M8 COupé
matthew hayward
look back through
BMW’s history of big sporting
coupés and the V12-powered 850
CSI remains a high-point. It put
the German marque into the
realms of Bentley, Porsche and
even Ferrari, yet it sits in the
shadow of celebrated M Sport cars
of the same era.
We never got an ultimate M8
version in the 1990s – although a
prototype was built. Now BMW is
putting that right with its latest
flagship, the M8 Coupé and
Convertible. Taking the twin-
turbo V8 and four-wheel drive
system from the current M5, M
Sport has developed what it calls
its first luxury high-performance
coupé. BMW insists that luxury is
key to the M8, so it isn’t focused
only on performance but also
comfort and refinement.
Power has been increased to
616bhp, with torque peaking at
553lb ft. That makes it the most
powerful production car BMW has
ever sold. It’s also the fastest, with
the coupé hitting 0-62mph in 3.2
seconds and a top speed of
189mph, if you’ve got the optional
M Driver’s Package. The M8 starts
at £123,435, which puts it in the
mix with serious cars from Porsche,
Mercedes-Benz and Aston Martin.
That package adds £20,000…
We’re just outside Malaga for an
early-morning departure into the
hills. I’m not one for playing with
drive settings, especially when I’m
getting to know a car, but there are
two pre-set M driving modes that
are easily accessible via steering
wheel buttons. The first firms up
the suspension, adds weight to the
steering, and sharpens the throttle
and gearbox maps. The second,
track-only mode ramps up stiffness
and aggression fully – and switches
to rear-wheel drive only.
The more you work the M5’s
slightly anodyne-sounding engine,
the better it gets. Traffic is a little
busier than I was expecting, but
that 616bhp makes overtaking on
these glorious Spanish roads
effortless. I can’t fault the
surprising compliance of the ride
either. Given the standard 20-inch Above and below It feels big, even on these wide
wheels, it does a good job of Top of the 8-series range, this is roads, but it does a very impressive
BMW’s most powerful car, and it
cosseting its occupants in its features uprated M5 engine and
job of disguising its significant
comfort mode. The M8 is fast drivetrain. The emphasis is on 1885kg weight. Grip and traction
without being too unruly. luxury as well as a sporting drive. are unrelenting so you’ll never get
near its limits on the road. Selecting
M Dynamic Mode sends up to
70% of torque to the rear, without
disengaging DSC, giving you a
noticeable shift in attitude. It’s fun,
but somehow throwing the M8
around feels slightly inappropriate.
It demands a more grown-up
attitude, which is something those
more aggressive driving modes
contradict. Just because you can,
doesn’t always mean you should.
Like almost every other
manufacturer, BMW is putting
huge resources and time into
developing its electrified models
for the future. There will
undoubtedly be more powerful M
cars in years to come, but it’s
unlikely that any of them will be
purely petrol-powered. I find the
idea of a 616bhp luxury super-
coupé refreshingly traditional –
and this might be the last one
BMW builds.
Gone but not forgotten
Words DeLwyn MaLLett
Brooks stevens
This dandy of a designer created objects both influential
and execrable, and coined the idea of planned obsolescence
SUVs. Love ’em or loathe ’em, either way your
thanks or opprobrium for their ever-increasing
presence can be heaped upon pioneer industrial
designer Brooks Stevens.
In a prescient 1942 article in Mechanix
Illustrated, Stevens speculated on the form that
the post-war car might take, highlighting
among many other things the advantages of a
rear engine location and the efficiency of small
air-cooled engines. American manufacturers
were not persuaded, but Stevens must have
enjoyed ‘I told you so’ satisfaction after the
phenomenal success of the VW Beetle. In the
same article he also outlined how the Willys
Jeep, the ultimate no-frills utilitarian vehicle,
might be transformed into a stylish post-war
‘victory car’. In this case the management of
Willys-Overland did take note.
Demand for military Jeeps collapsed after
the war but Americans were clamouring for
new cars. So, in 1946, Willys engaged Stevens
to turn his ‘victory car’ idea into metal.
Clifford Brooks Stevens, known as ‘Kip’, was
born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1911. As a
child he contracted polio and, while he was
confined to bed, his father encouraged him to
exercise his affected right arm by drawing. Like
156
many a youngster, Stevens became obsessed by
automobiles. So much so that when studying
architecture at Cornell University, he spent
more time sketching cars than designing
buildings and didn’t graduate.
Back in Milwaukee, Stevens put his graphic
skills to work designing logos for local
businesses, and eventually set up shop in
1934 as Brooks Stevens Industrial Design. His
pre-war projects, mostly executed in the
prevailing design idiom of ‘Streamline
Moderne’, encompassed subjects as diverse as
the one-off, articulated, 35ft Zephyr Land
Yacht for wealthy socialite William Woods
Plankinton Jr, and the Edmilton Petitpoint
clothes iron with its stack of horizontal cooling
fins. An example of the iron, as aesthetically
satisfying as an Italian Futurist sculpture,
resides at MOMA. He also introduced the glass
porthole into clothes driers.
Like many of Stevens’ commissions, the
Willys job came with a caveat: limited funds.
Willys-Overland did not produce its own
bodies and could not afford deep-draw tooling.
Stevens’ solution was to use shallow pressings
which mimicked the wooden frame of
conventional station wagons but avoided major
Brooks Stevens in his office, circa 1970. Photograph
from the Brooks Stevens Archive at the Milwaukee
Art Museum, a gift from the Brooks Stevens family
and the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design.
curves. This allowed the body to be built by
suppliers more used to stamping refrigerators.
The 1946 Jeep Wagon, the first all-steel
station wagon, sowed the seeds for what
eventually became the Sport Utility Vehicle
market. Stevens also designed the Jeepster, a
roadster closer to his ‘victory car’ vision, but it
was his 1962 Wagoneer that truly caught the
public’s imagination. Gone were the military-
style front wings and radiator grille, replaced by
a full-width face and a civilised interior. The
Wagoneer stayed in production for 29 years.
As a designer, Stevens was full of
contradictions, his output oscillating from the
refined to the outrageously vulgar. Among the
3000-plus designs that issued from his studio
there were bound to be a few turkeys, the
bizarre 1955 Cadillac Die Valkyrie with its
astonishingly aggressive nose a prime example.
Another weirdo is the Gaylord, commissioned
by Gaylord brothers Jim and Ed and intended
to compete with the best from Europe. In
styling terms it was the automotive equivalent
of the duck-billed platypus, a baffling collection
of mismatched parts.
This is surprising, given that Stevens was a
connoisseur of fine automotive metal, with his
own motor museum to house his large
collection. How someone who owned cars as
exquisite as the ex-Mille Miglia Alfa Romeo 8C
2900B and a 1929 Cord L29 roadster could
produce an execrable pastiche of a Mercedes-
Benz SS called the Excalibur SS (not to be
confused with his very butch 1951 Excalibur J
racing roadster) is baffling indeed. He can
however be forgiven for his involvement in the
Wienermobile, a witty piece of motorised
promotional kitsch in the form of a hotdog,
produced for the Oscar Mayer meat company.
David E Davis Jr, the editor of Automobile
magazine, best summarised Stevens when he
wrote: ‘He was a fine industrial designer, but he
had quirky ideas about cars. He said he was a
friend of sports cars, but I said if you have a
friend like that, you don’t need enemies.’
Always elegantly attired, Stevens was a true
gentleman and a founding member of the
Industrial Designers Society of America. While
far from the first to coin the phrase, he is
also credited with embedding ‘planned
obsolescence’ into the marketing lexicon
during a speech he delivered in 1954.
It was the concept that drove Detroit.
Stevens defined it as ‘instilling in the buyer the
desire to own something a little newer, a little
better, a little sooner than is necessary’. It was a
credo that also defined his professional life.
 PAUL-STEPHENS.COM
+44 (0) 1440 714 884
Icon
Words and photography delwyn mallett
lympus
ameras
Smaller and cleverer than rivals, they
set trends and wowed the professionals
The Japanese have a particular fondness
for miniaturisation, whether it be the ancient
craft of bonsai or the myriad tiny kei cars that
dash around their cities. ThThrrough
h the 1950s
and ’60s, the Japanese camera industry moved
from the flagrant copying of German cameras
to original designs that soon dominated the
world markets. One of the most innovative
manufacturers was Olympus, which carved a
niche for itself by producing a range of 35mm
cameras that were considerably smaller than
their competition.
Olympus was formed as the Takachiho
Seisakusho Microscope Company in 1919. It
introduced the Olympus brand name for its
optical products two years later and launched
its first camera, the Semi-Olympus, in 1936.
This folding design, using 120 film, was a copy
of a German camera but it carried a high-
quality lens of Olympus’s own manufacture –
the first of the famous Zuiko range.
Camera production recommenced after
World War Two with the company’s first 35mm
example, the Olympus 35, which was sold
mainly to the US occupation forces. Then, in
1949, the company name changed to the
Olympus Optical Company.
In 1956 Olympus hired the man who was to
do more than any other to propel the company
into the front rank of innovative manufacturers.
Yoshihisa Maitani was only 23 years old but he
158
was a man on a mission. ‘My uncompromising
philosophy… was to create cameras that didn’t
previously exist,’ he declared many years later.
His fifirst camera for Ollympus was the half-
frame Pen introduced in 1959, so named
because it was as pocketable as a pen. Half-
frame cameras were not new, but the simplicity
of use of the Olympus Pen, and its quality,
triggered a Japanese boom in the format.
Maitani’s next camera, launched in 1963,
was a masterclass in original thinking. The Pen
F, the world’s first half-frame single-lens reflex,
turned camera design, if not exactly on its
head, at least on its side. In conventional SLRs,
light enters through the lens onto a 45-degree
mirror which projects it upwards into a
pentaprism. This deflects the light a few more
times before it exits through the eyepiece.
Professionals and amateurs alike were moving
inexorably towards SLRs but, with a projecting
pentaprism on top and greater mechanical
complexity, they were substantially larger and
heavier than rangefinder cameras.
Maitani succeeded in designing an SLR that
was actually more compact than most
rangefinders. By using two Porro prisms, in
conjunction with a reflex mirror that swung
sideways rather than vertically, he managed to
eliminate the SLR bulge completely. In
addition, the camera used a rotary shutter that
allowed flash synchronising at all shutter
‘depth apart, the
olympus xa rangefinder
was no larger than an
audio cassette’
speeds. The slimmer reflex mirror also allowed
the body to be considerably shallower than a
conventional SLR’s. All in all it was a remarkable
piece of packaging.
The Pen F was soon followed by the full-
frame OM series. More conventional in design
but scaled down in size, the OM-1 weighed half
as much as a Nikon F and its success prompted
the competition to follow suit.
In 1979 Maitani surprised everyone by
producing yet another miniature marvel, the
Olympus XA. This was a 35mm full-frame
rangefinder camera whose sliding clamshell
front not only protected the lens but acted as
the on/off switch. Depth apart, the XA was no
larger than an audio cassette.
Olympus took its first step into the digital
world in 1996 and has continued to innovate
since then, even launching a digital version of
the famous Pen F. Not everything has been
small in the world of Olympus, however. In
2011 a scandal erupted that eventually
demonstrated that the company’s board had
conspired in the largest financial cover-up in
Japanese corporate history.
On a lighter note, British readers of a certain
age will surely remember Olympus’s ‘David
Bailey, who’s he?’ advertising campaign.
Featuring the fashion photographer and his
camera, it ran in the 1970s and ’80s and made
household names of both.
Chrono
Words mark mcarthur-christie

the dawn
of our time
For many of us our first
watch was a tough, simple
Timex. Still got yours?

in nOVEMBER last year, the $17.8m Paul

Newman Rolex Daytona passed the title of
‘most insanely expensive wristwatch’ to the
Patek Philippe Grandmaster Chime. Despite
sounding like a rapper’s scone-loving uncle, it
sold at Christie’s for £24.3m to an anonymous
bidder. It’s a boggling amount for a watch.
What was it that started this collector (or,
quite possibly, investor) on the journey towards
this remarkable horological zenith? If the Patek
is his or her latest watch, what was their first?
For a whole generation of boys – and more
than a few girls – it was the watch you see here.
If you remember I-Spy books, Stretch
Armstrong and Clark’s Wayfinders (the shoes
with a compass in the heel), then you were
probably one of them. It’s a Timex model
23571, and in the 1970s it seemed as though
almost everyone under the age of 18 got one as
a ‘significant’ birthday present.
And what a first watch to be given! Despite
being (relatively) cheap, Timex clearly thought
about the design of the 23571. It was modelled
as a sort of universal military watch, with a 24-
hour inner dial, clear white Arabic numerals on
a black face and a red sweep-seconds hand.
Two words on the dial caused huge
excitement: between seven and five o’clock was
printed ‘water resistant’. This led to endless
playground debates over whether ‘resistant’
really meant ‘proof ’. Frome’s now defunct (and
unheated) Victoria Baths were the site of at
least two highly unscientific tests. Both proved,
comfortably, that a Timex would take a dunking
and still be ticking, even if it did steam up a bit
afterwards. And you soon learned you could
polish the scratches from the pool edge off the
Perspex crystal with a rag and a dab of Brasso.
If you risked injury from the seemingly
always much sharper small blade of your Swiss
Army knife to open the caseback, though,
you’d be disappointed in what you found. The
movement is a Timex M25 base-metal unit
with no jewels, no fuss and no ornament.
Instead, the pinions run in wartime-developed,
hard-alloy ‘Armalloy’ bearings. It was small,
too, necessitating a translucent white plastic
spacer to fill the gap between the movement
and the case. There must have been more than
one Timex owner disappointed that the engine
left too much empty space under the bonnet.
But what it lacks in elegance it makes up for in
robustness, accuracy and function.
The escapement is a cheap, stamped pin-
pallet arrangement that replaces the usual lever,
with its jewels and their troublesome shellac
anchoring, with two fixed, vertical metal pins.
These pins control a flat balance that is also
stamped from a sheet of nickel, which beats at a
steady and unremarkable 18,000 vibratons per
hour. There is no shock-absorbing system,
probably for the same reason that Kalashnikovs
don’t bother with one either. It’s a watch you
could service with a hammer and it would still
run afterwards.
The M25 differed from its predecessor, the
logically-named M24, by way of the added
sophistication of a date and that central
seconds hand. But both movements would
have been quite at home queuing for bread in
some dreary, grey, concrete Soviet-bloc city.
You hand-wound your 23571, and around 30
turns of the crown would run the watch for
around 42 hours. That was more than enough
to get you through several bouts of double
maths, a few PE lessons and a couple of Silk
Cut behind the bike sheds.
Best of all, the hour and minute hands, and
the outer dial plots, were luminous. Thousands
of pre-teens would hold their watches over
their bedside bulbs to charge the lume, eyes
closed the better to see the green glow from
their new Timexes when the lights went out.
Today there seems to be nothing remarkable
about this little (30mm, since you asked)
Timex, yet in the 1970s pretty much every
classroom was full of them. Until push-button
LEDs sent them the way of the dinosaurs.
Getting your first watch was – and still is –
a rite of passage. You had the double
responsibility of making sure you weren’t late
and looking after the precious, tiny mechanical
universe ticking away happily on your wrist.
No longer did someone else have to tell you the
time; you were in charge of your own destiny
and being home before it got dark.
The nation’s junk drawers are, most likely,
hiding a few thousand of these old Timexes.
They’ll never be worth much but, if you have
one, go and find it. Give it a few winds and a
pound to a penny it’ll still be working. There
aren’t many things that don’t just tell you the
time from more than 40 years ago, but which
transport you straight back there, too.

160
TEST YOUR CAR’S AT THE GLORIOUS
GOODWOOD
LIMITS ON TRACK MOTOR CIRCUIT
THURSDAY 3 SEPTEMBER 2020
Fuel up with a delicious breakfast, a hot two-course lunch and refreshments throughout the day.

Individual / Main Driver Ticket: £369 Additional Driver Ticket: £185 Hospitality Ticket: £99

BOOK NOW
octanetrackdays.co.uk
Books
REVIEWED BY OCTANE STAFF AND CONTRIBUTORS
Sharknose V6
JÖRG-THOMAS FÖDISCH & RAINER ROSSBACH, McKlein, £125, 978 3 947156 24 5
Mention the word ‘sharknose’
and most of us will think of
the Type 156 Ferrari, the car
that dominated the 1961
Grand Prix season – and
which so inspired the
musician Chris Rea that he
wrote a film about it, La Passione, for which he also
composed the soundtrack. Since none of the original
cars survive, Rea even had a replica built for the
movie. More on that later.
‘Sharknose’ can also refer to the fully enclosed 246
and 196 Sports Prototypes that evolved after the
156, so they are also covered in depth here. It’s not
an all-encompassing soup-to-nuts history, however.
The workshop pictures shown on the picture-spread,
below right, are very much the exception to the rule.
This is primarily a chronological record of the
Sharknoses’ competition history, race by race, and
there is little about the back-story of how the car was
initially developed – despite a foreword by Mauro
Forghieri himself, who joined Ferrari in 1959
and was made head of its competition
department in October 1961, aged just 26.
Then again, maybe ‘despite’ should be read
as ‘because of ’, since Forghieri clearly had
no love for his sacked predecessor, Carlo
Chiti, stating that ‘Chiti did not care about
the opinion of others, especially not an
inexperienced team member like me’.
If that makes the book sound flawed, it
isn’t – not when it’s stuffed throughout
with superb photos, both colour and
black-and-white, by the incomparable
Bernard Cahier. Many of them have not
162
Book
of the
month
been published before and they are without doubt
the book’s biggest selling point. Reproduction is
superb and the pictures are used bold and big,
effectively relegating the text to a supporting role.
The latter is in both English and German; while very
readable and well researched, it definitely plays
second fiddle to the pictures.
Diving straight in with the 1960 preliminary
events for the 1961 Grand Prix season, the book
charts every competition outing through to the 196
and 246SP’s final appearances in the Euromontagna
hillclimb series of the summer of 1963. There are
also chapters on Sharknose drivers, constructors,
engineers and more – including the two Type 156
replicas that have been built in recent years.
Neither of these is the Chris Rea car, which
was more an evocation, but both feature genuine
drivetrains; one was rebodied from an already
spectacular Jim Stokes Workshops creation so that
it could be more authentically re-made, using alloy
hammered over a wire frame rather than shaped on
an English wheel – surely the ultimate expression of
one besotted enthusiast’s dedication.
Bugatti Type 35 Grand
Prix Car and its Variants
LANCE COLE, Pen & Sword,
£16.99, ISBN 978 1 526756 76 3
The Type 35 is probably the
best-known and most often
revered of Ettore’s creations, yet
this is one of only two books on
the subject currently in print –
and the other is a workshop
manual. It’s also egalitarian: the
cars are worth a fortune, but
this A4-format softback retails
for less than 17 quid. It isn’t
exactly lavish, but there’s plenty
on the 35’s race history (past
and recent) and mechanical
spec, plus lots of detail shots.
Curiously, more than a third
of its 64 pages are devoted
to scale model versions. GW
KTM X-Bow
THILLAINATHAN PATHMANATHAN
& ANNE CHRISTINA RECK, Veloce,
£50, ISBN 978 1 787114 33 3
A passion for the unique and
groundbreaking KTM X-Bow
was enough to drive the two
authors – eye surgeons by day
– to research and produce this
hardback. It’s a fascinating
MD machine, especially from a
technical standpoint, and this
book covers it in incredible
detail. There’s input from
everyone involved, from
conception, engineering and
production. The writing is dry,
and it often strays a little too far
off topic, with meandering
metaphors and deep dives into
areas that bear little relevance.
Overlook this; it’s actually
an authoritative read. MH
 w w w.hortonsbooks.co.uk

Collector’s
Jaguar XK120 The Cobra-Ferrari Wars book

Supersonic by Ghia MICHAEL L SHOEN, CFW, 1990, value £550

RICHARD HESELTINE, Porter Press The recent 85,000-word hardback that

International, £35, ISBN 978 1 907085 82 6
This is the opening salvo in a new
series of books on coachbuilt cars
by Porter Press. Written by
Richard Heseltine, this tall and
slender hardback focuses on the
well-known Jaguar-based car, but
also covers the Supersonics that
Ghia built on other chassis –
namely Fiat Otto Vu and Aston
Martin DB 2/4. If that doesn’t
seem quite enough for a book,
there is a brief history of Ghia,
plus excellent chapters on both
designer Giovanni Savonuzzi
and engineering wizard Virgil
Conrero, as well as shorter
efforts on Ghia boss Gigi
Segre and Mario Boano.
In fact, apart from opening
with a gorgeous studio shoot,
you are up to page 66 (of 108
including index, contents,
foreword et al) before you get to
the Supersonic. Even after that it
is filled out with other, unrelated
Italianate Jags and such-like.
Truth be told, there is not that
much here that ardent enthusiasts
won’t have read over the years via
a range of magazine articles and
auction catalogue descriptions.
What they won’t have seen is
all that info in one place and so
lavishly illustrated. A tough brief,
entertainingly fulfilled. JE
release of
the movie
Le Mans ’66
(titled Ford
v Ferrari in
the States) is
bound to whip up interest in
this classic work – not that it
needs further promotion,
since it’s arguably one of the
top 25 motoring books ever
published.
Michael L Shoen was not a
professional historian but was
inspired to start researching
The Cobra-Ferrari Wars after
he bought a redundant Cobra
Daytona Coupe from Carroll
Shelby in 1969. Over the
next 18 years he interviewed
51 people who were involved
with the story back in the
day, and the result was an
was also notable for its
plentiful inclusion of period
colour photos. A nice touch
was that you could buy it with
a blue canvas binding if you
were a Ford fan, or a red one
if you preferred Ferrari!
The book was reprinted
once, but from scanned pages
after the original printing
plates were lost, so the first
edition is better quality and
worth a lot more; typically
£500 upwards, as opposed to
£150-200 for the reprint.
Ben Horton

Healey, the Men & the Machines

JOHN NIKAS with GERRY COKER, Herridge & Sons Ltd, £50, ISBN 978 1 906133 82 5

It is perhaps foremost a Coker is joined in the writing duties by the

Driving the Silk Road
DOUGLAS MCWILLIAMS, Whitefox,
£20, ISBN 978 1 912892 71 6
Author McWilliams and his
brother tackled the 16,000km
‘Peking to Paris’ endurance
rally in a Bentley S1, but this
isn’t merely a recollection of
that odyssey. Of course, yes,
there are plentiful pictures of
the incredible scenery they
traversed en route, and
accounts of derring-do
(imagine driving a car built
more than 60 years ago more
than 600km across Kazakhstan
in a day). But McWilliams is
an eminent economist, so here
he also considers the shift in
economic power from the West
and the impact of that on the
countries he drove through.
Fascinating. GW
comment on my advancing much-published John Nikas, an American who has a
years that my major bugbear thing for British cars. Heavens knows how such a
with this book is that the text is workload breaks down, but you suspect Coker did
too dense to make it an easy the remembering and Nikas did much of the rest.
read for me. The way so much is The result, and it bears saying again, is brilliant.
crammed into 320-odd pages – Healey, The Men & The Machines feels as if it is
without the modern luxuries of brimming with new material and photos, has
‘white space’ or pictures being used over more than a appendices to make any nerd’s mouth water and, at
quarter of a page – looks and feels very ‘old school’. £50, is great value in this day and age. In fact, if they
As a reader you will realise that first impression is would just redesign it into a beautiful multi-volume
spot-on when you encounter the first numeric work, spread out the words and reproduce the
pointers to the barrage of subnotes that ends each pictures far bigger, I’d buy it all over again. JE
chapter. One chapter alone has 130 of them covering
more than five pages! Yes folks, this book is clearly
a serious historical matter of record rather than a
mere distraction; it is far from the glossy coffee-table
overview that has become the norm.
Actually, it is a masterwork, one that the
involvement of Healey veteran Gerry Coker has
done nothing but enhance. Coker joined Warwick in
1950 and is credited with designing both Healey 100
and ‘Frogeye’ Sprite as well as the Land Speed
Record cars. As such, few people can offer more
insight into the business in those crucible 1950s
years before he upped and offed to Chrysler in 1957.

163
Gear
COMPILED BY CHRIS BIETZK

JAGUAR E-TYPE TOOL KIT

Owners of Series 1 and Series 2 E-types can turn off their eBay notifications for
‘original E-type tool kit’. Jaguar has at last reissued that most essential of accessories, having
remade each tool according to the specifications listed in the factory records.
£732. parts.jaguarlandroverclassic.com

ASTON MARTIN & GRRC MEMBERS’ PORSCHE DESIGN

AVON TYRES T-SHIRT
Aston Martin’s racing cars ran Avon
tyres from 1953 to 1959, winning
Le Mans and the World Sportscar
Championship – as celebrated with
this limited-edition t-shirt.
£25. amht.org.uk
UMBRELLA
Racing season is suddenly just around
the corner, and Goodwood’s
Italian-made brolly will ensure that
showers don’t dampen your enjoyment
of the first meetings of 2020.
£175. goodwood.com
VOYAGER 2.0
A laptop conveyance par excellence,
made from soft leather and boasting
multiple internal compartments, and
styled as smartly as anything to
come out of Zuffenhausen.
£670. store.porsche.com

164
 PILOTI JH-11
James Hunt famously refused to accept a clause in his contract with McLaren that
required him to appear suited and booted at public events. He would no doubt have
approved of these comfortable, casual shoes, designed by Piloti in his honour.
£158. pilotiuk.co.uk

GSM FLAMINGO PRINT BY SENTIMETAL

Sentimetal’s Heritage prints shine a light on machines seldom seen
outside South Africa, including the GSM Flamingo, a fun, Ford-powered
rarity that deserved to be made in far greater numbers than it was.
From R199. sentimetal.shop

BOMBER / BENTLEY
BLACK DIAMOND 84
Bomber and Bentley worked together
on these new skis, which were apparently
inspired by the EXP 100 GT. Obviously
LEGO 1989 BATMOBILE
they demand a bit more user input than Michael Keaton’s absurdly proportioned runabout must have been a devil to
the latest self-driving concept car, but render in plastic bricks, but the folks at Lego have managed to capture every mad
they’ll do pretty much anything your curve and flourish – and the pop-up machine guns, too. They needed 3306 pieces
feet ask of them on-piste. to pull it off, though, so the resulting kit will take you at least a day to assemble.
$2750. bomberski.com £219.99. lego.com

165
Models
REVIEWS AND PHOTOGRA
A PHY MARK DIXON

Classic model
WORDS AND PHOTO: ANDREW RALSTON

Jeep Cherokee
by Tonka
So many toys were originally
made as a sideline by
companies that specialised in
some other product, only to find
1:18 scale that the toys sold much better.
Take, for example, those big

1990 Jaguar XJR-15 Tonka vehicles that children love

to play with outdoors. Streater
Industries of Mound, Minnesota,
By Cult Model Price £171.95 Material Resincast
was in the timber business and
It’s taken 30 years, but the ‘forgotten’ Jaguar has finally celebrated most by Cult’s ‘kerbside’ model. The XJR’s made some wooden toys during
come of age. As described in our feature on the XJR-15 in 450bhp V12 is only sketchily represented and it’s hard to World War Two; it also
Octane 197, this ‘Group C car for the road’ could be picked make out detail in the interior, but neither is much of a experimented with a metal
up back in the day for a relatively modest £80,000; now criticism when this 2kg chunk of handcrafted resin retails steam shovel and crane but lack
you’d need more than ten times that amount. for a comparatively modest 172 quid. of interest from the trade meant
Although it was inspired by the XJR-8 and XJR-9 Le If dark metallic blue is too understated for you, the model that production never got going.
Mans cars, the XJR-15’s body was redesigned to make it will also be available in a far more striking metallic orange Then a new company called
more practical, not to mention beautiful. Peter Stevens did with black roof – and you get a 5% discount if you Mound Metalcraft took over one
of Streater’s plants with the
a superb job here, and his curvaceous creation is what’s pre-order it; see below.
intention of making household
items such as garden tools. It
also negotiated to buy the
tooling for the metal toys – this
time the toys caught on, and
soon there was an extensive
range of trucks available.
Rather than using traditional
tinplate or diecast metal,
however, Tonkas were made of
heavy steel similar to that used
in the real car industry. Kids
could play with them in sandpits
and even sit on them. Soon they
became the typical all-American
toy and by 1965 annual sales
were in the region of $22 million.
20 Fe errari F8 Tributo 1964 Meyers Manx 1964 Ford GT40 Thereafter, the story followed
BBR £144.35 Spark £58.95 Spark £58.95 a familiar pattern. Tonka was
Handbuilt in Italy from resin and metal Immortalised in The Thomas Crown A very handsome model of the Masten
bought by Hasbro in 1991 and,
parts, this is an appropriately high-end Affair, the Meyers Manx is ‘the’ dune Gregory/Denny Hulme car that retired
seven years later, production
rep
plica of Ferrari’s 488-based sup percar. buggy, modelled to perfection by Spark. from the 1964 Le Mans 24 Hours.
transferred to China, with later
Tonka products having more
plastic in their construction. Big
Tonkas were supplemented by
lots of Small Tonkas, which
didn’t have the same appeal.
At nine inches in length, this
Jeep Cherokee fits somewhere
between these two sizes. Made
in 1979, it’s an updated version
of earlier Tonka Jeep models,
though the chunky wheels are
less realistic. Plenty of them
survive but mint examples are
193 berg M del J 1972 Ford Escort RS1 1600 1970 McL Laren M8D D getting hard to find.
Neo £102.9 95 Troféu £69.95 Marsh Models £215.95 And the Tonka name? It’s
It verges on the garish, but Neo’s Most cars look good in Gulf colours, Handbuilt in England, just 25 replicas of thought to be derived from Lake
Derham-bodied Duesy ‘Tourster’ has and we love this fine model of a BSCC Hulme’s 1970 Edmonton Can-Am winner Minnetonka, near the factory
a superb finish and ultra-fine detail. support race entry from Brands in ’72. have been produced; quality is excellent. in Mound that made the toys.

166 Models above are to 1:43 scale. All on this page are available from Grand Prix Models, +44 (0)1295 278070, www.grandprixmodels.com
 Toyota Le Mans Winners

Having won the prestigious Le Mans 24 Hours in 2018, Toyota finished the
2018/19 World Endurance Championship in perfect style, Alonso, Buemi and
Nakajima once again winning the great race and the title.

Recently released by leading resin model makers Spark,

this historic machine is now available in both 1:43 and 1:18 scales.

1:43 £53.05 - 1:18 £129.55*

*RRPs, £58.95 & £143.95. UK postage £3.25 & £6. Overseas at cost.
Quote voucher code OCTLMWIN19 when ordering.

To view these and many more Le Mans related items, why not visit our Banbury show-
room which is open one Saturday per month 12 noon-5pm
Next open Saturdays - February 1st, March 7th & April 4th
Grand Prix Models
4 Thorpe Close, Thorpe Way
Banbury, Oxfordshire, OX16 4SW, UK
Tel: 01295 278070 Fax: 01295 278072
mail@grandprixmodels.com

www.grandprixmodels.com

with

Period style seat belts for pre-1973

vehicles, not forgetting your
modern classic post-1973

• Seat belts and harnesses supplied and fitted • Bespoke service • Original belts refurbished
• New original equipment available on certain vehicles

T: 0208 206 0101 E: sales@quickfitsbs.com W: quickfitsbs.com

167
INTERNATIONAL CAR SALES CONCOURS WINNING
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 FINE MOTOR CARS

1966 Frua Jaguar

An exciting and unique opportunity to purchase a one-off design study by Frua. Supplied by Jaguar as a rolling chassis to the
Milan Jaguar agent, Fattori & Montani and commissioned by Studio Technico Pietro Frua of Turin in December 1965. This
fabulous bodied Jaguar was the main exhibit on the Frua stand at the 1966 Salon de Genève. A recent entrant at Blenheim
Concours d ’élégance , thus in pristine condition. An inspired and truly unique Jaguar that drives perfectly too.

1937 Frazer Nash-BMW 328

Delivered new to prominent pre-war ‘gentleman-racer’ Hugh Hunter in July 1937. Extensively and successfully campaigned
throughout the pre- and immediate post-war years, including eighteen 1/2/3 podium finishes and a win at the first Goodwood
Meeting in 1948. Hunter’s racing trophies and memorabilia preserved in ‘Racing Driver’s Study’ at Brooklands Museum. Fully-
documented ownership from 1937 to the present day. Considered to have the most extensive history file of any the Frazer
Nash-BMW 328s, including the original 1937 AFN order and invoice, servicing and other correspondence between Hunter and
AFN, RR Jackson of Brooklands and others. Massive archive of period photographs. Actively rallied through the UK & Europe
by current owner who has beautifully maintained #85.087 for the last 20 years.

+ 4 4 ( 0 ) 7 7 8 8 8 6 5 7 0 0 G u i l d f o r d , S u r r e y, E n g l a n d
w w w. j u l i e n s u m n e r . c o m
 Edited by Matthew Hayward

MARKET NEWS BU Y I N G + S E L L I N G + A N A LY S I S

TOP 10 PRICES
DECEMBER 2019

£2,367,000
1961 Aston Martin
DB4 GT Lightweight
Bonhams, London, UK
7 December

£644,583
1939 Frazer Nash-BMW 328
Bonhams, London, UK
7 December

£575,000
2001 Ferrari 550 GTZ
Bonhams, London, UK
7 December

£339,250
2017 Ferrari F12 Berlinetta 70th
Anniversary ‘The Scaglietti’
Bonhams, London, UK

Time to tot up this year’s totals

7 December

£324,300
1988 Aston Martin
A look back at 2019’s challenging climate ahead of a busy 2020 V8 Vantage X-Pack
Bonhams, London, UK
DECEMBER IS USUALLY a quiet month for dollar-plus cars. It managed this with just three US 7 December
auctions, so it’s a great time to reflect on 2019. There’s auctions, although it plans to hold its first UK auction
no way to sugarcoat what was for many sellers a in April, taking the total to four sales in 2020. Its top £235,750
lacklustre year. The challenging market conditions seller was also at Monterey, the $9,905,000 1958 1994 Aston Martin
continued to disappoint in many areas, while growth Ferrari 250 GT LWB California Spyder. Virage Volante
– where it can be found – has been small. As the We’ve seen significantly more volume and interest Bonhams, London, UK
HAGI index (next page) shows, values of various in online auctions this year. New launches such as the 7 December
market leaders have continued to slip back and, Collecting Cars platform are showing much potential,
though the top end of the market is still very much its while established player The Market reported its best £197,800
own entity, 2019 has recorded fewer blockbusters. ever year in 2019, with £3.6 million in total sales. In 2013 Alfa Romeo 8C Spider
As the year progressed, we started to see slightly the USA, Bring a Trailer remains a dominant force Bonhams, London, UK
lower estimates, sensible reserves and, as a that often surprises with hugely interesting cars. 7 December
consequence, far fewer ‘no sale’ results. Cars started November brought one of just 15 Austin Mini beach
to sell at more realistic values, which helped to give a cars, which sold for $230,000. £188,000 ($247,500)
clearer picture of where the market really is. It turns As for 2020, the Arizona sales are underway as we 2005 Ford GT
out that cars are very much still in demand, but it’s go to print, so we’ll have the first 2020 results next Mecum, Kansas City, USA
definitely a buyers’ market, and those buyers are not month. You can, however, read the full story on the 5-7 December
willing to pay top prices for anything but the best. $3.74m Bullitt Mustang sale on page 34.
This year’s most valuable auction car was the ‘LM £175,500 ($231,000)
Specification’ 1994 McLaren F1, which sold for 1969 Ford Mustang Fastback
$19,805,000 at the RM Sotheby’s Monterey sale. RM Mecum, Kansas City, USA
sold a total of 69 cars above the $1m threshold in 5-7 December
2019, contributing five of the most valuable top ten
cars sold at auction. This put its global sales total ‘over £147,333
$400m’. Its high of $526m was in 2017. 2010 Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG
Gooding & Company ends the year with sales Bonhams, London, UK
totalling $147 million and contributing 32 million- 7 December

173
 THE MARKET / Reports

DAVE KINNEY’S CAR OF THE MONTH BARGAIN OF THE MONTH

1964 Mercedes-
Benz 220 SE
Mecum, Kissimmee
1982 LINCOLN MARK IV
5-7 December Mecum, Kissimmee, Florida
If you are wagering a mate over when
American cars reached peak kitsch,
FAMOUSLY WELL BUILT and ‘over
here is Exhibit A, a 1980s Bill Blass
engineered’, the 220 SE Coupé was also Designer Edition Lincoln complete
expensive when new: $8761 in the US, or with wire wheels and a 302 V8. The
about three times the price of a well- faux-convertible vinyl roof even has
equipped Ford Mustang (albeit not fake external top bows. One of a
necessarily that Mustang, sold at the same series of Designer Edition cars, they
were trendy, then tacky, and are now
Mecum auction). So the $17,600 paid for
just plain fun. At a bargain price of
this example 55 years later seems to $3850, it’s a fabulous land yacht
represent conspicuously good value. that almost anyone could afford.
It features a sunroof, a four-speed
manual gearbox and tan leather
upholstery, and the catalogue described it SURPRISE OF THE MONTH
as a ‘no rust’ car that retains its original
engine – a 2308cc OHC straight six. The
odometer of this European-spec car (no
US-mandated sealed-beam headlights
here) reveals under 67,000km, said by the
seller to be genuine. The interior appears
original as well. It’s no show car but rather
a driver-quality Benz with good integrity
in its bones, the basic structure of these 1978 RANGE ROVER
Mecum, Kissimmee, Florida
often rust-prone autobahn cruisers. Ths Range Rover is from the year
Few cars are better suited to the classic the model first went on US sale. It
rally circuit then these 1960s S-classes, had a respray less than a year ago,
and even fewer look as good in the role as features a recent custom interior
the coupé. Easy to drive, and advanced for in black leather, and it’s hard to miss
its time with disc brakes and fuel injection, the chassis lift it has also acquired.
‘Vintage’ SUVs have been among
a well-maintained Mercedes-Benz 220 SE the hottest sellers at auctions this
is just the arrow you might want in your last decade, but this custom Range
automotive quiver. Rover is not everyone’s cup of tea.
A great restored example can sell
Dave Kinney is an auction analyst, an expert on the US market scene and publishes the Hagerty Price Guide. for multiples of this one’s $14,850.

HAGI TOP INDEX THE HAGI TOP overall investment-grade

market measure ended 2019 in the red,
outperformed Ferrari by 8%, or less than 1%
per year, which is barely significant.
shedding 6.69% over the year. That’s better Nevertheless, there have been periods when
than Ferrari managed on its own, which fell short-term variations have been nothing short
210
back 11.73%, but weaker than both Porsche of dramatic. For example, in the peak-growth
and Mercedes-Benz. They both came close to year of 2013, Ferrari gained a spectacular
205 ending 2019 all-square, with marginal drop-offs 62.14%, while Porsche trailed on a ‘lacklustre’
of 1.05 and 0.97% respectively. Indeed, the 24.48%. It’s interesting that individual marques
200 only marque index to end up in credit was have their own dynamics, entering and
Lamborghini, which scored a 1.88% gain. emerging from phases at different times. In
195 You may, if you’re that way inclined, the short term, too, some marques’ dynamics
compare any of those numbers with global are more volatile than others.
190
equities, which gained 25% over the year (S&P Now the Top is back where it was in
185 Global 1200). But that tells you only that October 2016 as the overall market plays out
external forces are a factor here, as indeed a mean-reversal phase following peak-growth
180 they always are. years. And as for the really big picture, the
As for our particular field of interest, your HAGI Top has posted long-term annual
Nov-16
Jan-17
Mar-17
May-17
Jul-17
Sep-17
Nov-17
Jan-18
Mar-18
May-18
Jul-18
Sep-18
Nov-18
Jan-19
Mar-19
May-19
Jul-19
Sep-19
Nov-19

curiosity may be drawn to the variations in
performance. The Top is currently on an index
MONTH/YEAR level of 334, Ferrari on 309. That means that
Vertical axis is based on a benchmark of 100 set at 31 December 2008.
The HAGI Top index charts the prices of key collectable prestige cars. since index inception in 2008 the Top has
average growth of 12.3% since 1980.
In other words, buy what you like…
See www.historicautogroup.com for more.
Dave Selby

174
STOCK WANTED, SELL TO US OR CONSIGN WITH US

McGurk.com • Sales@McGurk.com • 01926 691 000

THE MARKET / Auction Previews

A very patient Lotus

Silverstone Auctions, Race Retro, Stoneleigh, UK 22 February
SometimeS it can take years to prepare
a car to go racing, but this Lotus 19 hasn’t
turned a wheel in anger for 55 years. Now’s
your chance to change that.
Silverstone Auctions will offer this 1960
Lotus 19, one of the most significant of the
type, at its Race Retro auction on 22 February.
Stirling Moss played such a vital role in the
19’s development that it was nicknamed ‘Monte
Carlo’ following his F1 victory the same year.
Powered by a relatively modest 2.5-litre
Coventry Climax engine, this particular 19 was
an effective racer in the hands of Moss, winning
on its debut at Karlskoga in Sweden.
Innes Ireland and Graham Hill competed in
chassis 953 during 1962, winning six of seven
races. Hill also managed to lap Snetterton at an
average of 100mph – a first for a sports car.
Moss drove it at a Goodwood test session in
1963 to assess his racing fitness following his
1962 accident there – after which he announced
his retirement from racing. Innes Ireland then
took 953 to third place in the Lavant Cup. It
also made its mark in North America, with class
wins at Laguna Seca in 1961 and a win at the
Player’s 200 at Mosport Park in Canada.
After finishing fourth in the 1963 Guards
Trophy at Brands Hatch, the 19 was put up for
sale. Privateers raced it successfully until a crash
in 1965 took 953 out of action. Then, in 1966,
a workshop fire ended its career.
It was rescued in 1996 and restored by Ken
Nicholls of Nike Cars, who was involved in
building 19s in period. A plan to enter it in the
Goodwood Madgwick Cup never materialised
and it was sold to Paul Matty, who had specialist
Andrew Tart finish the recommissioning.
Bought by the vendor in 2017, it has been
prepared for competition by Tart and is finally
fighting fit and ready to race again. It has, after
all, waited long enough for the opportunity.
silverstoneauctions.com

Alerte Générale Bonhams, Paris, France 6 February

the French military certainly passed between various Citroën

knew how to travel in style. This
beautiful 1959 Citroën DS
Prestige originally served as an
attaché’s official car in Rome.
Only 350 Prestige models were
built by Chapron, and it’s thought
that this is the earliest of around
60 survivors. The Prestige was the
most luxurious of all the Ds, and
this is the only one known to have
been bought by the French Army.
We all know the importance of
looking good in Italy…
After its military service it was
sold into private hands, and
collectors in France.
It’s now owned by a UK-based
DS expert and a minor restoration
was carried out in 2019. It received
a rebuilt gearbox, a new clutch,
overhauled brakes and many other
bits. Safeguarding this Citroën’s
uniqueness was a priority, but the
original bonnet – which features
its military number painted on the
underside – is not fitted. It is
included in the sale, however.
This DS is difficult to value, but
the estimate is €60,000-90,000.
bonhams.com

176
 QUICK GLANCE AUCTION DIARY

31 January
SWVA, Poole, UK
2 February
Charterhouse, Shepton Mallet,
UK (motorcycles)
5 February
RM Sotheby’s, Paris, France
6 February
Bonhams, Paris, France
7 February
Artcurial, Paris, France
SPYKER C8 LAVIOLETTE LAGONDA V12 DROPHEAD COUPÉ 8 February
RM Sotheby’s, Paris, France H&H Classics, Duxford, UK Mathewsons, Thornton-le-Dale, UK
5 February, rmsothebys.com 18 March, handh.co.uk 9 February
RM hopes to reprise last year’s successful Youngtimer A prime example of one of Britain’s most advanced Charterhouse, Shepton Mallet, UK
sale during Rétromobile week with 11 modern classics pre-war cars, estimated at £300-400k. This 1939
heading under the hammer in Paris. One of the most Lagonda was bought in 2006 by the previous owner and, 15 February
intriguing is this Spyker, a Dutch supercar that after its 40-year lay-up, was treated to a thorough Richard Edmonds, Allington, UK
resurrected an ancient marque and was made in very low overhaul. It had a full engine rebuild – including an (motorcycles)
numbers. This was the original factory demonstrator, unleaded conversion – along with structural, cosmetic 17 February
powered by a 4.2-litre Audi V8 engine and sporting every and mechanical rejuvenation. The current vendor has Shannons, Sydney, Australia
option. It’s estimated to sell for ¤200,000-250,000. ensured that everything works and all details are correct.
22 February
Coys, London, UK
Morris Leslie, Errol, UK
22-23 February
Silverstone Auctions,
Stoneleigh, UK
25 February
Barons, Sandown Park, UK
29 February
Classicbid, Stuttgart, Germany
2 March
Shannons, Melbourne, Australia
INTERMECCANICA INDRA BENTLEY CONTINENTAL GT 4 March
Classicbid, Stuttgart, Germany Morris Leslie, Errol, UK Brightwells, Leominster, UK
29 February, classicbid.de 22 February, morrisleslie.com 4-6 March
It’s not often that you see one of these notchback Even at £30k the Continental GT is good value, but if Russo & Steele, Amelia Island,
coupés, given that just 40 were made. Powered by a this example goes for anywhere near its £16,000- USA
5.3-litre Corvette engine and also using parts from Opel, £18,000 estimate someone is going to get an absolute
the Indra was one of the lesser-known Italian ‘hybrid’ bargain of a very capable grand tourer. Originally silver, 5 March
sports cars. There’s a fascinating story behind these this car is currently wearing a white wrap, and has Bonhams, Amelia Island, USA
machines, which died a premature death when GM covered 69,000 miles with eight previous Bentley 6 March
stopped supplying the parts. This older restoration is services. We’d want to give it a thorough check, but it’s a Gooding & Co, Amelia Island,
offered at the Retro Classics auction in Stuttgart. good reminder of how cheap these cars can now be. USA
6-7 March
RM Sotheby’s, Amelia Island,
USA
7 March
ALSO LOOK OUT FOR… turns out he had managed to come
by a piece of genuine late 20th-
the video game industry.
Its historical value is clear, its
Historics, Ascot, UK
Anybody who has watched TV’s Century treasure: a Nintendo monetary value less so, but, given 11-14 March
Storage Hunters knows that bidding PlayStation prototype. that Diebold has turned down an Mecum, Phoenix, USA
blind on the contents of a cardboard Conceived in the late 1980s as a offer of $1.2 million, we can expect 15 March
box tends to be a poor financial joint venture between Nintendo and some big bids when Heritage Aguttes, Paris, France
decision, an investment pretty much Sony, the console was essentially a Auctions offers the console at its
18 March
guaranteed to return paint tins, a Super Nintendo with a CD-ROM Dallas, Texas, sale on 5-7 March.
H&H, Duxford, UK
broken printer or a prosthetic leg. drive. It was announced in 1991, but
Just try convincing Terry Diebold just a day later the agreement 19 March
that it isn’t worth a punt, though. between the two companies was off DVCA, Henstridge, UK
When the banking firm Diebold thanks to a dispute over financial 20-21 March
worked for went under in 2009, he terms. Sony instead decided to RM Auctions, Palm Beach, USA
paid the princely sum of $75 for develop the PlayStation on its own.
21 March
some boxes containing assorted All the prototypes were thought to
unidentifed items. Among those have been destroyed, making the fully Bonhams MPH, Bicester, UK
boxes were the bits and bobs swept operational machine Diebold Mathewsons, Thornton-le-Dale, UK
from the shelves in Ólaf Ólafsson’s recovered from his $75 boxes the In association with
office. The Icelandic businessman only known physical evidence of an
had previously worked at Sony and it episode that changed the course of

177
THE MARKET / Showroom Stars

SHOWROOM BRIEFS

1990 Nissan NPT-90

POA from Canepa, California, USA

1961 Lancia Flaminia Touring

Convertible, ¤168,500
Sold new in California, this
Flaminia was imported to
Holland in 1998 in good
condition, and restored. It still
. presents very well today and
apparently drives even better.
marreyt-classics.com (BE)

d well-preserved condition. Competing in the

al half of the 1990 season and throughout
91, it racked up a number of podium finishes
th Geoff Brabham behind the wheel, helping
secure two further GTP titles. Allthough it was
ired from service at the end of the season, a
ies of accidents took Nissan’s newer chassis
t of the running. Chassis 01 was brought up 1962 Holden EJ Premier
AUS $29,999
fully updated 1992 specification and took a The luxurious Premier was the
ther five podium finishes for the team. flagship of the Holden range,
Thanks to a global recession and poor results and this EJ-generation is a
1992, Nissan shut down the NPTI team at the relative bargain next to the more
. nn ng . r e final popular facelift EH models,
The team and the car evolved th each year cha er o an ex usually twice the price.
collectableclassiccars.com.au
getting s i y ventur on .c m

1971 Ford F-350 transporter

£20,950
There are few cooler ways to
transport a Historic racer than
on the back of a classic
transporter. Especially one with
a 5.7-litre V8. Restored in the
UK in 2017, it’s ready to haul.
mathercollectables.com (UK)

1964 Alvis Graber Super

POA
Graber-bodied Alvis TEs are
very rare and exceptionally
beautiful. The first of seven
coupés built, this French
example has an extensive
history and shows 105,771km.
christophgrohe.com (FR)

178
 HENDON WAY MOTORS
EST. 1952

For Collectors of Modern Art,

experts in Ferrari, Porsche, Jaguar, and AC Cobra

W: www.hendonwaymotors.com T: +44 (0)20 8202 8011

THE MARKET / Buying Guide
Fiat 130 Coupé
Rectilinear or ravishing? This capable and overlooked GT is both
As it HeAded into the 1970s, Fiat needed a luxury
car to rival Mercedes, BMW and even Lancia. The
highly advanced 130 Berlina, launched at the 1969
Geneva motor show, was that car. It was the spiritual
successor to the 2300, but it moved the game on with
independent rear suspension, four-wheel disc brakes
and a new, 2.8-litre, quad-cam V6 engine. Handsome
if understated, it led the way to an even more upmarket
Coupé version in 1971.
Styled (and built) by Pininfarina, the Coupé bears
little visual resemblance to its four-door sibling. Its
styling is elegant, simple and angular, resembling
other Pininfarina designs of the era such as the Lancia
Gamma Coupé and even the Rolls-Royce Camargue.
Some would say the Fiat is the best of the lot.
Road tests of the earliest Berlina considered its V6’s
140bhp output inadequate for such a large car. A
gutsier 3.2-litre version of the Aurelio Lampredi-
designed engine was developed for 1971, upping
power to 165bhp. The Coupé had this engine from
launch, coupled either to a three-speed automatic
gearbox or an optional combination of a five-speed
manual and a limited-slip differential.
Performance is more adequate than blistering, but
the engine suits the Coupé’s character. It’s smooth and
torquey, the only criticisms in period being poor fuel
economy and a little too much of the actually rather
pleasant engine noise.
Underpinning the 130 is an absolutely great chassis,
with MacPherson struts and torsion bars up front and
a clever interpretation of the Chapman strut at the
180
THE LOWDOWN
WHAT TO PAY
If you’re willing to look around,
and to go for a usable example
rear. It was much praised when new, and when set up rather than concours, 130
correctly it can still give impressive handling and a Coupés can be had for under
great ride today. £10,000. Tidy examples are
nearer £15,000, but be sure
One of the main areas of improvement over the
you’re not buying a car that just
Berlina was the cabin. Pininfarina re-styled most of looks good on the outside.
the interior, and added a new adjustable steering Manuals carry a slight premium
column and a set of incredibly plush velour seats. Fiat over the three-speed automatic.
incorporated some of these changes into the regular The number of solid cars in
Berlina after 1971. the UK is small but there is a
fair supply of unrestored cars in
Sadly, sales figures didn’t live up to Fiat’s
Europe, where even the best
expectations. After a high of 1746 cars in 1972, sales examples rarely exceed
quickly dropped below 1000 units per year. ¤25,000 unless exceptional.
Production ceased in 1977, after just under 4500
Coupés. Build quality was variable, as with most WHAT TO lOOk OuT fOr
coachbuilt Italian cars from this period. The Coupés Rust is inevitable on all but the
very best examples, so a full
were also very badly rust-proofed so most right-hand-
structural assessment should
drive UK cars rusted away many years ago. A few have be carried out. If it’s rusty,
survived thanks to a small but loyal following. restoration costs will quickly
Pininfarina showed two-door shooting brake outstrip the car’s value.
(Maremma) and four-door saloon (Opera) versions Many parts are shared with
of the Coupé at the 1974 Geneva show. Despite a very other more exotic Italians, which
can make them painfully
positive reaction and strong support from Gianni
expensive. Parts unique to the
Agnelli, Fiat decided it had lost enough money on the 130 Coupé are even more so, if
130 and chose to sanction neither. Three Maremmas they are available at all…
are thought to have been built, though, one The suspension is very
commissioned by Agnelli for his own collection. sensitive to camber and toe
The Fiat 130 Coupé is still affordable today, and if adjustment. Fresh dampers will
make the most of the great
you want a big, comfortable Italian grand tourer it’s
chassis. The engine and
hard to beat this chiselled Pininfarina rarity. Finding a gearbox are quite tough if well
good one might take some time, though. maintained, but check for oil
Matthew Hayward leaks and healthy oil pressure.
 PETER BRADFIELD LTD

1928 Bentley 4½ Litre

Chassis AB 3357 is a very attractive short chassis Birkin spec Le Mans style Bentley. Originally supplied as aVanden Plas Sports
Tourer it retains a high level of originality including the desirable long bonnet. Significantly the car has Pre-War Race history
and competed in the Donington 12 Hour Race in 1937.The car has a freshly rebuilt engine with Phoenix crank and rods and
accordingly runs cool and smooth. As well as its matching engine the car retains its original C Type gearbox which is quiet
and easy to operate. In addition a modern overdrive and and servo brakes make this an ideal car for touring and rally use. It
comes with a weighty history file, fully known provenance and has been with its current owner for over 10 years and with the
previous owner 61 years.
Also available:
1964 Shelby Cobra • 1952 Bentley R-Type DHC with Graber body
See website for more details

8 REECE MEWS KENSINGTON ONDON SW7 3HE

peter@bradfieldcars.com Tel: 020 7589 8787 www.bradfieldcars.com
1958 Jaguar XK150S – FIA Eligible £110,000
Recently arrived, a fabulous fully race prepared XK150
to 3.8 S specification, FIA eligible and ready to take to
the track.
 1978 BMW 320 GROUP 5
Supplied by the factory to Gustav Fischer in 1978 and raced extensively in DRM and the World Sports Car
Championship – Freshly restored and eligible for CER and Le Mans Classic – complete with original paperwork

DRIVING HERITAGE

Car of The Month
1958 Aston Martin DB MKIII LHD
We are delighted to offer for sale this stunning Aston Martin
DB MKIII which is ONE of just 83 factory LHD MKIII’s.
Having recently undergone a bare metal respray by Aston
Workshop in 2015, this MKIII is finished in Pewter Grey
£299,950
1960 Aston Martin DB4 Series II
Finished in Royal Claret with
Magnolia interior, we’re delighted to
offer this beautiful 1960 DB4 for sale.
£349,950
2000 Aston Martin DB7 Volante
DB7 Vantageg Volante in Antrim Blue
adn pparchment leather interior.
Manyy options
p included such as
Satnav, Sports exhaust,Aircon &
more.
£36,490
1991 Aston Martin Virage Auto
We are pprivileged
g to offer this
stunningg 1991 Virage
g for sale.
Viewingg recommended with test
drives available on request.
£49,990
2013 Vanquish 6.0 V12 2+2
Morning Frost White with Red Hide.
Only 24,370 miles with full Aston
Martin service history.
£99,990
2008 V8 Vantage Coupe
Aston Martin V8 Vantage in Grigio
Titanio Ferarri Silver and Caspian
Blue Leather.
£29,990
Aston Martin Specialists
Sales | Restoration | Parts | Servicing | Enginology
+44 (0)1207 233 525
www.aston.co.uk
Established over 30 years ago, Aston Workshop has become
internationally renowned for its award winning engineering and
restorations. Our team of over 30 specialist workshop staff undertake
some of the most well regarded and bespoke Aston engineering
globally available. The culmination of which has led us to create
bespoke cars such as our authentic DB4 Zagato recreations.
With over 260 years of collective knowledge in the business we are
an internationally prominent independent Aston Martin specialist
with many unique products for the enthusiast marketplace. These
include right and left hand drive conversions, European and tropical
air conditioning systems, 6 speed automatic gearbox conversions
and a comprehensive suite of warranty backed engine upgrades,
re-engineered parts and enhancements - all developed in house over
decades. A vast number of our products are only available from Aston
Workshop. This combined with our depth of expertise in bodywork,
paint, trim and chassis work ensures we occupy a most highly regarded
position in the world of independent Aston Martin specialists. No
task on your Aston is too big or too small, and with so many years of
experience at your fingertips, using Aston Workshop makes a smart
choice. Our North East base also makes us ideally placed to offer
competitive prices.
Located in the quiet County Durham countryside, our world class
restoration and servicing facility works consistently to develop new
and innovative engineering solutions alongside our sales team which
operate from our 45,000 sq ft Aston Workshop complex.
The team strive to ensure buying a car from us delivers our customers
both peace of mind and the dream Aston Martin experience. The
cars we offer have been subject to a comprehensive programme
of workshop inspection. We are happy to discuss all aspects of the
vehicles history and condition to both experienced enthusiasts and
those customers new to the brand.
If you are thinking about selling your Aston Martin we are keen
to speak with you. Even if your car needs restoration, mechanical
attention or has been unused in its recent history we would welcome
a no obligation conversation. We offer professional nationwide
collection using our in house covered transport service. We are happy
to work around your personal requirements and can offer a variety of
solutions for customers within the UK and worldwide for both right
and left hand drive examples. We have a large database of customers
actively looking for all models of Aston Martin to purchase across
all eras of production. From concours winning cars to unfinished
restorations and barn finds, we are interested in your vehicle.
For a professional and confidential sales discussion call Francine on
07787 407 113 or Alex on 07827 353 195.
 1991 Brun C91 JUDD
Chassis C91-001, a unique car in the world
Developed by Walter Brun's Swiss Team
3.5-litre Judd engine, carbon-fiber tub
Only 2 owners, kept for 25 years by its current owner
Eligible for many prestigious races

Come and visit us Hall 1 Stand M027

www.ascottcollection.com
Xavier Micheron
Phone: + 33 (0) 9 67 33 48 43
Mobile: + 33 (0) 6 17 49 42 50
Email: cars@ascottcollection.com
Paris - France

1 9 5 5 CO OP E R T4 0 / 195 5 L I S T E R KN O B BL Y / 19 72 S U RT E E S TS 9B F 1 / 1977 ALPINE A31 0 GTP / 198 2 AT S D 5 F1 /

1984 VOLVO 240 TURBO GROUP A / 1987 PORSCHE 962 CK6 / 1988 MARCH BUICK 86G / 1989 TIGA GC 289 C2 /
1990 SPI CE S E90 C / 199 6 V E N T U RI 6 00 L MS / 200 0 L O L A B 2K/40 / 2 009 OR EC A FLM -09
 19 62 ASTON M A RTIN D B4 GT Z AG ATO R ECR E AT I O N
A stunning example presented in black pearl with soft tan leather. An original matching numbers DB4 was used as
a donor car for this recreation project which included fitting a twin plug head engine upgraded to 4.7 spec and took
over four years to complete by marque experts Spray-tec, Bodylines and R.S. Williams. A comprehensive history file
accompanies the car with extensive restoration details and photos.

19 6 3 ASTON M A R TIN D B4 GT R ECR E AT I O N

An original matching numbers DB4 Series V Vantage was used as the donor car for this DB4GT recreation project. The work
was carried out over a 4 year period by marque experts Spray-tec, Bodylines and R.S. Williams and included fitting the
correct twin plug head engine upgraded to 4.7 spec. Presented in black pearl with soft tan leather this is a stunning example
and a wonderful driver. A comprehensive history file accompanies the car with extensive restoration details and photos.

T H E L E A D I N G S P E C I A L S I T S I N S O U R C I N G T H E R A R E A N D U N O B TA I N A B L E
+44 (0) 1772 613 114 | www.williamloughran.co.uk | sales@williamloughran.co.uk
 TA L A C R E S T
th e wo r l d ’s nu mbe r one c l a s sic f e r r a r i d e a l e r

blues on parade
If you really want to stand out from the ‘Rosso Corsa’ crowd, we suggest you go for something a little different...

1951 Ferrari 212 inter aigle

o t h e r F E R R A R I c l a s s i c s av a i l a b l e

1950 ferrari 195 inter coupe 1969 ferrari 365 GTC 1952 ferrari 212 europa CabrioleT

W W W. TA L A C R E S T. C O M
+44 (0)1344 308178 | +44 (0)7860 589855 | john@talacrest.com
 POA

192
 Our passion is classic competition cars
1970 PORSCHE 911 2.3 S/T 1973 PORSCHE 911 CARRERA 2.8 RSR
(911 030 1151) (911 360 0756)
P.O.A. P.O.A.
• M491-OPTIONED FACTORY S/T • ONE OF JUST 55 RSR 2.8-LITER BUILT
• THE ONLY REMAINING REPSOL 911 • 4TH OA AT 12 HRS OF SEBRING 1973
• FIVE OWNERS FROM NEW • ALL NUMBERS CORRECT AND ORIGINAL
• VERY WELL DOCUMENTED • ON-THE-BUTTON AND WITH CURRENT FIA HTP
• EXTREMELY ORIGINAL • WELL DOCUMENTED WITH FACTORY DELIVERY NOTE

1970 Chevron B16 (DBE-15) 1990 Spice SE90P Chevrolet (013)

One of 23 genuine B16 built with continuous history. Well documented and 1990-91 USA Works C1-class Spice with excellent history. Front running car
race-ready w/ current FIA HTP and good spares incl. 2nd engine. P.O.A with extensive spares freshly prepared for the 2020 Group C season. P.O.A

(#4) 1979 BMW M1 Procar (4301016)

Ex-Oliver/Redman. 100% race-ready with fresh DFV, crack-test, etc. Iconic Ex-Walter Wolf & Schnitzer M1 Procar. 100% race-ready with fresh engine &
high-airbox UOP Shadow and very eligible for 2020 Monaco HGP. P.O.A gearbox. 2019 FIA HTP. Ready for 2020 season. P.O.A

We have a wider variety of great cars for sale. Please call or visit our web-site for more information.
www.rmd.be - salesinfo@rmd.be - +32 (0) 475 422 790 - Schoten, Belgium
 STUTZ AVIONS-VOISIN

ALVIS LANCIA
CADILLAC LANCIA
DELAHAYE PANHARD-LEVASSOR
FIAT
ROLLS-ROYCE

WWW.CHRISTOPHGROHE.COM

194

Car of The Month
1968 Jaguar E Type Series I Semi-Lightweight
We’re delighted to offer for sale this re-creation of a factory
racecar from the swinging 60’s! With a lightweight aluminum
bodyshell, and a rebuilt 4.2l 5 speed 286bhp engine, this will turn
heads on the driveway as well as the track!
£139,990
1976 Triumph Stag MKII
This stunning MKII Triumph Stag has
been lovingly restored throughout
including a full bare metal respray and
engine rebuild.
£27,990
2003 Porsche 911 C4S
We are delighted to offer for sale
this stunning Porsche Carrera 4S
tiptronic. Finished in Arctic Silver
Metalic and Black Leather interior.
£24,990
1970 Fiat 500L
We have the pleasure to offer for
sale this very fashionable
and appreciating classic 1970
Fiat 500L in Positano Yellow.
£9,950
1998 Mitsubishi Jeep 2.7 TD (J55)
JDM special! This is a rare and
sought after ‘Final Edition’ J55 model
with an uprated 100bhp engine.
£13,950
1965 Ford Cortina GT MKI
We are delighted to offer for sale
this stunning Ford Cortina GT Mark
I with a cosworth tuned 1.5l engine.
£18,990
Classic Car Specialists
Sales | Restoration | Parts | Servicing | Enginology
+44 (0)1207 288 760
www.carbarn.co.uk
Since opening its doors for the first time in 2012, Car Barn has
earned a robust reputation for dealing in a huge variety of classic and
exotic vehicles. Nestled in a quiet rural part of County Durham, our
bespoke facility comprises a peaceful showroom with a countryside
outlook and a thriving restoration and service workshop.
We are proud to offer a friendly and approachable service for both
UK and international customers and offer a variety of sale and
purchasing options to suit our customer’s individual requirements.
We strive to provide a diverse portfolio of high quality cars for sale
in our showroom to ensure we can offer our customers both their
dream purchase and a robust investment to cherish.Whether you are
a first time classic buyer or you’re looking to expand your collection,
we are well placed to help you find the right vehicle.
If you are looking to sell a classic or exotic vehicle, whether it be
left hand or right hand drive, a restoration ready barn find or an
all original gem, we would love to hear from you to discuss your
requirements.We have an extensive customer database and a
significant array of sales and marketing options at our disposal.
Call Alex on 07827 353 195 for a confidential and professional
response to your enquiry.
Car Barn sales are supported at our class leading facilities by our
team of skilled long serving technicians. Our experts bring with them
a vast knowledge and experience of historic cars of all marques.The
team regularly care for a variety of models for customers throughout
the country. Our fully equipped workshop offers everything from
health checks, regular serving and repair through to full restorations
including upgrades and bespoke works. No task is too big or too
small, and with so many years of experience at your fingertips, using
Car Barn makes a smart choice. Our North East base also makes us
ideally placed to offer competitive prices.
For routine same day servicing or repair work why not take
advantage of the award winning restaurant the Black Horse Beamish,
only 100m from our doors and pass the time whilst our technicians
care for your vehicle?
Please call Peter on 01207 288 760 to discuss your individual
workshop requirements.
WWW.HISTORIKA.COM
instagram.com/historika911
facebook.com/historika911
twitter.com/historika911
YOUTUBE.COM/HISTORIKA911
Call 07836 384 999 or 07717 212 911

PHOTOGRAPHY: Robert Cooper

Historika currently have three

RHD SWB Porsche 911’s
undergoing restorations at
present. The main objective
with our restorations is to
return the car to the condition
it would have left the factory
with all ‘period correct’
details. All work is carried out
in-house by our experienced
master craftsmen.

The devil is in the detail.

Y e s t e r d ay ’ s P o r s c h e s . P r e s e r v e d f o r T o m o r r o w. E n j o y e d T o d ay.
FI NE C A RS / / res to r ation // r ace prepa r at i on / / R AR E parts
1978 ASTON MARTIN V8 VANTAGE ‘BOLT ON’ £249,950
Supplied when new to its first owner by a 25-year-old Aston Martin salesman Nicholas Mee, four decades and a superb
restoration later, we are delighted to be reunited with this exceptional early V8 Vantage. Benefitting from a highly detailed
and complete history file, of some four volumes dating back as far as 1978, this rare and exceptionally well-restored
example, retains its original matching numbers engine and components. Driven in period by Derek Bell and Roy Salvadori,
this car, road tested by Autocar magazine, has been last owned for some 25 years and is surely the best early Vantage
available today.

1964 Aston Martin DB5 (Restored) 1996 Aston Martin Vantage V600 2001 Ferrari 550 Barchetta
£POA £295,000 £285,000

2017 Aston Martin DB9 GT ‘Last of 9’ 2004 Aston Martin Vanquish 2003 Aston Martin DB7 GT
£195,000 £84,950 £54,950

Nicholas Mee & Co Ltd, Essendonbury Farm, Hatfield Park Estate, Hertfordshire, AL9 6AF
0208 741 8822 info@nicholasmee.co.uk nicholasmee.co.uk

CAR SALES & PURCHASES, SERVICING & MAINTENANCE, RESTORATION, PARTS & MERCHANDISE, TRIM & UPHOLSTERY, TRANSPORTATION & STORAGE
 The one-off Lamborghini Pregunta Speedster V12
Certified by Polo Storico as an important part of Lamborghini History
(Paris Motor Show 1998, Geneva 1999)
1998. Swan song of the Lamborghini Italian era, an outrageous V12 concept-car is presented in Paris: the Pregunta Speedster. Based
on a factory development car, the Pregunta - a Spanish name, in the Lamborghini tradition - is an aesthetical breakthrough that inspired
Supercars of the XXIst century.
The Pregunta is one of the extremely rare Classic Lamborghini one-offs. Engineered and hand-made in Italy this open-top spectacular two-
seater is ready to shine in any important Collection and in famous Concours d’Elegance like Villa d’Este, but also to be driven fast, with a
claimed top speed of 333 km/h. Autodrome Paris bought the Pregunta Speedster from those who made her. An unrepeatable opportunity to
own a piece of History of a legendary constructor.

One-of-one, fully functional, never privately owned, the Pregunta is exhibited in the Sant’Agata Lamborghini Factory

AUTODROME PARIS
Lamborghini Specialist — www.autodrome.fr
ml@autodrome.fr - Tel.: +33 (0)630 096 491 or +33 (0)686 699 827
 At Paragon, we have superb in-house workshop and preparation facilities. Each car is supplied fully serviced with a new MOT
and our 12-month/12,000-mile comprehensive parts and labour warranty.

911 RS Touring
Jet Black • Black Seats • Manual
Gearbox • 15” Fuchs Wheels • Fully
Restored • Matching Numbers
1973 (L)
911 Carrera RS (964)
Maritime Blue • Leather Bucket Seats
Manual Gearbox • 17” Magnesium
Cup Wheels • Rear Roll Cage
96,328 km (59,855 miles) • 1992 (J)
911 GT2
Polar Silver • Black Leather Sport
Seats • Manual Gearbox • Porsche
Ceramic Composite Brakes • Sports
Exhaust • 21,725 miles • 2003 (03)
911 Carrera Sport Targa
Grand Prix White • Dark Blue Leather
Seats • Manual G-50 Gearbox • 16”
Fuchs Wheels • Fully Electric Seats
22,373 miles • 1988 (F)

£574,995 £209,995 £129,995 £84,995

911 GT3 (996)
Guards Red • Black Leather Bucket
Seats • Manual Gearbox • 18” Sport
Design Wheels • Air Conditioning
29,552 miles • 1999 (V)
911 GT3 Clubsport (996)
Guards Red • Black Nomex Bucket
Seats • Manual Gearbox • Porsche
Carbon Ceramic Brakes • Rear Roll
Cage • 43,336 miles • 2004 (53)
911 Turbo (996)
Seal Grey • Black Leather Seats
Tiptronic S Gearbox • Satellite
Navigation • 18” Turbo II Wheels
59,354 miles • 2004 (53)
911 Turbo (996)
Lapis Blue • Dark Blue Leather Seats
Manual Gearbox • 18” Turbo II Wheels
Fully Electric Seats • 75,992 miles
2002 (02)

£79,995 £74,995 £44,995 £39,995

See more of our current stock at paragongb.com

01825 830424 sales@paragongb.com

PARAGON GB LTD FIVE ASHES EAST SUSSEX TN20 6HY

 T:

911R

1967

204
 SYDNEY AUSTRALIA

1957 Alfa Romeo Giulietta Sprint - restored, Mille Miglia eligible 1971 Porsche 911 T - orig. RHD, restored, Signal Orange, full history

1963 Porsche 356 B - totally original, Australian delivered, history 1989 Porsche 911 Speedster - original 23,000 kms, superb condition

1966 Aston Martin DB6 Mk1 Vantage - match. numbers, fully restored 1977 Lamborghini Espada S III - orig. RHD, fully restored, low miles

2018 Porsche 911 GT3 - PTS Miami Blue, manual, low kms, superb 2016 Porsche 911 991 GT3 RS - rare Ultra Violet, mint condition, low kms

2007 Aston Martin V12 Vanquish S ‘Ultimate’ - one of just 20 RHD 2016 Porsche 911 R - PTS Fashion Grey, only 1,100 kms, stunning

2012 Lexus LFA - 1 of just 500 cars, immaculate, 5,500 kms 2019 McLaren Senna - 88 kms, 789 HP, one of 16 Australian cars

Australia’s Number One Classic Car Dealer

BAYS 3&4 50-64 PACIFIC HIGHWAY NORTH SYDNEY AUSTRALIA T +61.2.9922 2036 F +61.2.9922 4594
Central London’s Largest Classic Car Showrooms WE HAVE MOVED

1955 Vincent Black Prince - Fully Restored Condition

1957 Ford Thunderbird 1957 Bentley S1 Continental Fastback

Full restoration to original specification by HJ Mulliner

1949 Bentley MK VI Oxford by Mallalieu 1967 Bentley 2 door by Mulliner Park Ward

www.graemehunt.com
+44 (0) 20 7937 8487 mail@graemehunt.com
 L E E D S

•
•
•
•
•

£31,950

£23,950

208
FOR SALE

£199,000

UNIQUE OPPORTUNITY TO AQUIRE THIS
1970 ‘VELAR’ PRE-PRODUCTION
RANGE ROVER
Sympathetically restored retaining many of
the original features. One of only 26.
Guarantees VIP entry to all of this year’s 50th Anniversary
Range Rover Celebrations.
All of us at Kingsley share a common love for classic Range
Rovers and Land Rovers having grown up with them around us.
We have been restoring, creating ‘Ultimate Classic Rangies’,
and supplying parts and upgrades for more than 20 years
to clients around the world.
Please see our website for full details of this vehicle and our other
classic Range Rovers for sale.
Tel: +44 (0)1865 884 488 www.kingsleycars.com

209
CHARLES PRINCE Worldwide Collector Car Sales

1930 Bentley 4.5 Litre. Chassis No FS3601.

A superb Elmdown rebuild carried out some years ago with invoices for extensive recent
mechanical work. Le Mans Coachwork. Overdrive. Self wrapping brakes with Alfin drums.
A desirable late heavy chassis car ideal for international rallies and events.

1924 Bentley 3/4.5 Litre. Chassis No 387.

A full rebuild with long distance international rallies in mind. Fully equipped with shell bearings, Arrow
rods, uprated lubrication, overdrive,
alternator, uprated diff etc. Full history from new.

All cars shown are available to be seen tried and tested

by appointment. Full details on request.

charlesprinceclassiccars.com sales@charlesprinceclassiccars.com Int T 0044 (0) 79 85 98 80 70

 Est
1986

Lotus Carlton £119,995

The legendary 176mph super-saloon “Too fast for British roads” in immaculate condition thanks to just 4,500 miles.
Supplied with original accessories and correct numbered book from 1991. Surely one of the finest remaining in existence.

Land Rover Defender
Adventure
One of 600 produced and with the
150bhp factory upgrade. Only 6,300
miles from new complete with original
roof rack, ladder and snorkel. £45,995
Porsche 911 2.7 MFI Targa
One of just 6 UK delivered 1975 2.7 MFI
Targa’s. A stunning, matching numbers
example in concours condition with a
comprehensive history.£149,995
Mercedes C63 Black Series
2012 in Iridium Silver, SLS performance
in a C Class body! Full Mercedes service
history with just 21,800 miles. VAT Q.
£70,829.16 + VAT
Lotus Elise Series 1
Unrepeatable 1997 Elise S1 MMC
with just 1600 miles from new. A true
timewarp car with excellent service
history. The definitive Lotus. £29,995

Alfa Romeo Guilia NRING
2019 with delivery miles. Finished in
unique Circuit Grey with a black and
red contrasting interior. One of only 12
RHD UK cars. VAT Q. £POA
Lamborghini Aventador
LP720-4 Anniversario
One of a limited edition of 100 units
built for the marques 50th Anniversary.
Perfect condition with just delivery
miles. VAT Q. £208,329 + VAT
Caterham Seven Sprint
60th Anniversary
British racing green with scarlet
upholstery, one of just 60 made in
immaculate condition and just 760
miles. Pure, unfiltered fun. £27,995
Safir GT40 MK V Continuation
Only 7,800 miles with an exceptional
history file. One of just 40 official
continuation cars built by Safir and JW
Engineering. £299,995

All of the above vehicles, and many more, are shown on our website with full details and photographs. You can also keep up-to-date with our latest stock via social
media. Established over 30 years ago, Park Lane (UK) Ltd has built a reputation of integrity in the global trade of motor vehicles. Wherever you are in the world, we
will be able to assist in the purchase of your next vehicle. We are always on the look-out for similar exceptional vehicles to purchase. Please do call us.

+44 (0)1420 544300 • parklaneuk.com • sales@parklaneuk.com

@parklaneukltd @uk.carsltd @parklaneuk

Park Lane (UK) Ltd . Unit 9 . Alton Business Centre . Omega Park . Alton . GU34 2YU
 Vintage Specialists

£375,000

ebe

212
 Brand new... just completed.
AUD $300,000*

61 2 9313 7866 sales@paradisegarage.com.au www.paradisegarage.com.au

DL13746

PH | EMAIL | WEB |

*Excluding taxes, duties, delivery and on-road costs

WinSpeed

213
 Mme Curiestraat 8 +31 252 218 980
2171 TW Sassenheim info@vsoc.nl

www.vsoc.nl

214
 Sherwood Restorations Ltd Established 1966
Established as one of the leaders in the field of vintage and classic car sales and restoration,
with over 200 years of combined experience, winners of many major Concours d’Elegance Awards

PRE SEASON SPECIALS

NOTHING HAUNTS US
LIKE THE THINGS WE DIDN’T BUY

1994 PORSCHE 968 SPORT LUX – 6 Speed MANUAL
Speed Yellow with Black Interior. Aesthetically and
mechanically Superb. Modern Classic that is tipped as one
to buy whilst still affordable. RHD – was £25,995 NOW
£22,995
1955 AUSTIN HEALEY 100/4 BN1.
Old English White with Red Trim, Hood and Tonneau. A
matching numbers example and in truly outstanding
condition throughout. Complete ground up restoration to
the very highest of standards. An appreciating asset that is
quickly catching up its 3000 litre stable mates in value and
desirability. RHD – was £69,995 NOW £54,995
1994 PORSCHE 968 CABRIOLET – TIPTRONIC
Grand Prix White with Black Hide and Hood. True Modern
Classic. Has been used for touring at home and abroad
and maintained to the highest standards regardless of cost
RHD – was £21,995 NOW £18,995

1973 TRIUMPH TR6 – 5 SPEED
Sapphire Blue with Black trim. Restored and uprated.
Just re-trimmed including hood. Mechanically enhanced
to provide a little more enjoyment.. RHD – was £26,995
NOW £22,995
1961 MGA Roadster Mk2
Chariot Red with Black trim. Bob West restoration some
years ago and still stunning throughout.
RHD - was: £36,995 NOW £34,995
1989 JAGUAR XJS V12 CONVERTIBLE AUTO
Westminster Blue with Magnolia Hide. Magazine featured
with comprehensive specification and history. Grand Tourer
ready to be enjoyed once again. RHD – was £22,995 NOW
£19,995

1959 AUSTIN HEALEY FROGEYE SPRITE.
Blue with White Hard Top. Totally restored by us, from a
bare shell, some 20 years ago! Subsequently modified to
provide the ultimate driving “Frogeye’’ by BRDC member.
Not one for the purist, but once driven you would never go
near a standard Sprite again!! Simply sensational!!
RHD – was £29,995 NOW £27,995
1987 PEUGEOT 205 1.9 GTI
Cherry Red with Grey/Red interior. A truly stunning
example with just 28,000 recorded miles from new!!
Complete and total history from day one. This multi-award
winning example is absolutely superb throughout.
One of the very best!!
RHD – was £31,995 NOW £26,995
Glacier White with Black trim. Retaining its original
registration ‘OOB 21G’. Sympathetically modified with
‘touring’ in mind. Comprehensive history. So nice, so
original and so understated. RHD – was £31,995 NOW
£27,995

Upton Fields Garage, Upton Road, Southwell, Notts. NG25 0QB. Tel: 01636 812655/812682/812700
www.sherwoodrestorations.co.uk | sales@sherwoodrestorations.co.uk
 | |

www.odclassics.com | info@odclassics.com

1959 AC ACECA “BRISTOL 100 D2”

BLUE/BLACK RH 1986 RED / BLACK FACTORYHARDTOP, RHD 1958 SILVER / BLACK, RHD

BLUE / BLUE INTERIOR, RHD, MATCHING NUMBERS, GRAPHITE BLUE METALLIC, 13,900 MILES, GRAPHITE BLUE / GREEN / GREEN TAN INTERIOR RHD
FULLY RESTORED CRAYON TWO TONE LEATHER INTERIOR, PORSCHE SERVICE
HISTORY MOT JULY2020, GEN II, HIGH SPEC
Web: www.redlinepe.co.uk Tel: 01932 875435 Email: info@redlinepe.co.uk

SALES | RESTORATION | MECHANICAL REPAIRS | SERVICING

216
 SPEEDMASTER SPECIALIST IN HISTORIC AUTOMOBILES
Tel: +44 (0)1937 220 360 or +44 (0)7768 800 773
info@speedmastercars.com www.speedmastercars.com

1973 FERRARI DAYTONA

Originally delivered to the UK in Rosso Chiaro with Black leather seats and still in the same colour
combination. A fantastically well documented 17000miles from new.
Excellent history - 22 years servicing at the same Ferrari Dealer
including fresh engine rebuild, and Classiche Certified.
Please call for more information.

217

Lamborghini Murcielago LP670-4 SV
Ceramic brakes, High level rear wing small decal
option, 600 miles, 2009, £POA
Lamborghini Murcielago LP670-4 SV
Ceramic brakes, high level rear wing, large
decal option, 8,000 miles, 2010,
£379,990
Lamborghini Aventador LP 750-4 SV Roadster
Carbon exterior upgrade, carbon interior,
carbon fixed air intake sensonum sound system,
250 miles, 2017, £359,990
Lamborghini Huracan LP 640-4 Performante Spyder
Branding pack, Front end Xpel PPF protection,
Gloss black Narvi alloy wheels, Lifting system,
Magneto - Rheologic suspension, 800 miles,
2018, £219,990
Lamborghini Aventador LP 700-4 Roadster
Branding pack, Clear engine bay cover, Dione
forged alloy wheels, Lifting system, Multi-function
steering wheel, 11,000 miles, 2014, £195,990
BUYING OR SELLING LAMBORGHINI MOTORCARS
T +44 01580 714 597 E sales@vvsuk.co.uk W www.vvsuk.co.uk
(
(Viewing by appointment onlyy) Address: VVS UK LTD PARK FARM, GOUDHURST ROAD, CRANBROOK KENT TN172LJ
www.lamborghinibuyer.com
The UK’s Premier Lamborghini Specialist
Lamborghini Aventador LP 770-4 SVJ
Branding pack, Carbon fibre interior package,
Carbon fibre mirror casings, Lifting system, Style
package, Transparent engine cover, Yellow brake
callipers, 2,000 miles, 2019, £399,990
Lamborghini Aventador LP 770-4 SVJ
20/21 inch Leirion gloss black alloy wheels, Carbon
driving zone, Lifting system, Magneto-rheological
suspension, Multi-function steering wheel, Satellite
Navigation, 30 miles, 2019, £379,990
Lamborghini Aventador LP 740-4 S
DAB Radio, Lifting system, Magneto - Rheologic
suspension, Transparent engine cover, Branding
pack, Carbon fibre interior package, 3,000 miles,
2017 £235,990
Lamborghini Aventador LP 700-4 Roadster
Branding pack, Dione forged alloy wheels,
Reverse camera, Satellite Navigation,
Transparent engine cover, 12,000 miles, 2015,
£199,990
Lamborghini Aventador LP 700-4
Dione forged alloy wheels, Front and Rear parking
sensors, Full electric heated sport seats, Parking
camera, Sensonum premium sound system, Transparent
engine cover, 10,000 miles, 2014, £189,990
Additional Websites: www.justlamborghini.com
Lamborghini Aventador LP770-4 SVJ
Matte carbon fibre exterior pack, Carbon
fibre kick plates with illumination, Comfort
seats, Branding pack, Full carbon fibre interior
package, 50 miles, 2019, £389,990
Lamborghini Aventador S LP 740-4 S
5th Year warranty, Carbon exterior pack, Carbon
fibre engine bay trim, Sensonum premium sound
system, Transparent engine cover, 3,000 miles,
2018, £269,990
Lamborghini Murcielago LP640 Roadster
Q-citura stitching, Hemera alloy wheels,
Ceramic brakes, Lifting system, 5,000 miles,
2009, £219,990
Lamborghini Murcielago LP640 Coupe
Q-citura stitching, Hemera alloy wheels, Ceramic
brakes, Lifting system, Branding pack 5,000
miles, 2009, £199,990
Lamborghini Aventador LP 700-4
Carbon fibre engine bay trim, Carbon fibre
exterior pack, Carbon fibre interior package,
Lifting system, Style package, 13,000 miles,
2013, £184,990
 C M
AS Motorsport ltd

ASM hand build bespoke versions of the R1 roadster, inspired by the Aston Martin
race cars that won Le Mans and the world Sportscar championship in 1959.
Contact us for details of commission builds and stock.
copleycars@gmail.com Poplar Farm, Bressingham, Diss, Norfolk, IP22 2AP
Tel: 01379688356 • Mob: 07909531816
www.copleymotorcars.com Web: www.asmotorsport.co.uk
Email: info@asmotorsport.co.uk

219
CARS FOR SALE
OCTANE
MARKETPLACE
Browse classic cars for sale or reach a huge international classic
car market to sell yours with a free advertisement in Octane –
go to subscribe.octane-magazine.com/classifieds
Octane cannot endorse any cars for sale in classified advertisements and recommends
that you meet the vendor and are satisfied with the car before parting with any money.
Race Proven Parts
Tel: +44 (0)1543 472244
www.bighealey.co.uk
1961 Austin-Healey Frogeye Sprite
Ex-US car virtually unused since total restoration.
Upgraded 1275cc engine and gearbox, stainless steel
tubular manifold and sports exhaust, 123 electronic
distributor, front disc brake conversion, servo,
£30,000. +44 (0)1723 361227, info@murrayscott-
nelson.com, www.murrayscott-nelson.com (T).
220
ADVERTISE
IN-MAG FOR FREE!
PRIVATE SELLERS ONLY
,
LIMITED SPACES
AVAILABLE
1955 Austin-Healey 100 BN1 project
UK RHD car built 11 January 1955 and delivered to Cadillac 1959 Convertible De Ville
Car Mart Limited of London. Complete and €POA
original, it has been in dry storage for 35 years and For more information please contact me,
owned by notable figures in the worldwide Healey FRANK KENNIS +31 622 420 766
community and concours scene. Body panels are info@KennisCars.nl www.kenniscars.nl
original with factory stamped numbers, all cockpit
trim numbers match, all original instruments are
present, engine number is a factory stamping. Rare
opportunity to build a car to your specification,
concours-correct or highly upgraded. Please
call or email to view and discuss specification.
POA. +44 (0)1420 23212, Sales@RawlesMotorsport.
com, www.RawlesMotorsport.com (T).
Austin-Healeys wanted, all models!
We are seeking all Austin-Healeys for purchase or
brokerage sale, especially 100/4, 100M, 100S and
3000 MkIII. Contact us today for the best deal for your
1972 Ferrari 365 GTC/4 -
car from the most experienced Healey sales specialist. bare metal restoration, Rosso
+44 (0)1420 23212, Sales@RawlesMotorsport.com, Cordoba, tools
www.RawlesMotorsport.com (T).
1963 Austin-Healey 3000 MkIIA BJ7
Rare home-market RHD UK-supplied car. Major
refurbishment in the mid-90s. Structurally excellent
throughout with particularly good chassis. British
Racing Green, black leather trim, black hood,
silver-painted wire wheels, overdrive, £47,500.
+44 (0)1723 361227, info@murrayscott-nelson.com,
www. murrayscott-nelson.com (T).
1964 Austin-Healey 3000 MkIII BJ8
Project for full restoration to your specification by 1993 Jaguar XJS
Rawles Motorsport. Built 22-26 May 1964 as RHD, Fine example of a le -hand-drive, black-on-black,
home-market car sold through Stewart and Ardern six-cylinder coupé. Car is located in Montreal, Canada.
Limited of London. Desirable wind-up windows US$14,500. Contact Guillaume at +1 514 984 9844
model, retains original engine, body panels and reg no. or guillaume.le_nigen@hotmail.com.
POA. +44 (01420 23212, Sales@RawlesMotorsport.
com, www.RawlesMotorsport.com (T).
1926 Bentley 3 Litre Speed Model
First Registered January 1927 to Captain WG Horne.
Originally a Weymann saloon by Gurney Nutting, re-
bodied post-war as unique streamlined two-seater
with single dickey seat for owner’s daughter. Drives
exceptionally well with good braking. Very well-
known car with BDC race history. Bare chassis/body
restoration just completed to the highest standard.
New wheels, Blockley tyres and shocks, re-nickelled.
Owned for many years by current BDC member.
Engine bay and interior sympathetically restored. Car
affectionately known as ‘Little Jo’. Private sale on
behalf of the owner. £285,000. +44 (0)7867 506140
or +44 (0)1621 773913, steveyd47@gmail.com.
 Sales, Service & Restoration
Ferrari Specialist
1984 Ferrari 308 GTB QV

Nash 1962 Metropolitan Coupe

€12.900
For more information please contact me,
FRANK KENNIS +31 622 420 766
info@KennisCars.nl www.kenniscars.nl

Red-one of just 40-with beige hide. History from factory gates to date. £59,990

1965 MG 1100 Sport Sedan -

very original, same owner for last
50 years 2016 Porsche 911 R -
530 kms, immaculate, one of 2002 360 1983 308 1999 456 M GTA
991 cars worlwide Modena GTB QV 4,500 miles
£59,990 £67,990 £78,990

2004 360 manual 1995 456 GT 1998 550 Maranello 1973 246 GT
Spider £79,990 £49,990 £69,990 £call

Experience the Experience.

1972 Mini 1275 GT Motorshow photos wanted www.rardleymotors.com

Concours a er £33,000 bare-metal restoration. Amateur photos from motorshows of the 1970s and Sales: 01428 606616 Service: 01428 606606
Standard early ‘dry’ car, ready to drive/show. 88,000 1980s wanted, by post or email. Visit my website and
miles, four previous owners. Exceptional. £29,995. share photos. 250SWB@motorshowphotos.co.uk,
+44 (0)7584 059300. djdbcooke@gmail.com. https://motorshowphotos.co.uk.

Porsche 993 Cabriolet Aston Martin DB7 V12 Volante

£59,995. 1997, Arctic Silver, blue leather. Varioram engine, £49,995. 2002, Skye Silver. Only 13,100 miles.
six-speed manual, Cup alloys, air conditioning. Only Beautiful condition and driving perfectly thanks
45,000 miles and a stunning history. to a £16,000 recommissioning by HWM.

01420 544300 www.parklaneuk.com

ALEX TAPLEY

1983 Porsche 944 Coupé

As featured in Octane Cars, belonging to Octane’s associate editor Glen
Waddington. More details on page 143. Email glen@octane-magazine.com.

221
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 T
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TS C
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Browse services for you and your classic car, including insurance,
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230
 Marque Specialists

THE FINEST CARE FOR YOUR MERCEDES-BENZ CLASSIC

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231
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on the very best terms
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we shop: www.scparts.co.uk
Tel: +44(0) 12 93 84 72 00
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Leaping Cats Ltd.

THE XK SPECIALIST

FOR SALE - POA - XK 120 DHC 3.4 1953

All matching numbers • Upgrades include: Electric power steering, Uprated frt &
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16 SCHOOL ROAD, BULKINGTON, NR. NUEATION, WARKS CV12 9JB
www.leapingcats.co.uk

234
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236
 Garage Equipment

Car Lifts for home

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E4G MR10TD Portable
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241
Day in the life
INTERVIEW MATTHEW HAYWARD
PAUL COWLAND
The PR man has become
a TV star in the unfaked,
jeopardy-free series, Salvage
Hunters: Classic Cars
IT’S AN OLD CLICHÉ, but no two days are
ever the same. My day-to-day automotive PR
business is based at the workshop in
Netherfield, Nottingham, close to where I grew
up. My team sits on the mezzanine floor, which
looks down over my car collection below, the
toy box as I like to call it.
I grew up around Nottingham, and all of this
started in 1994 when I joined Beechdale Saab
in Nottingham as a junior salesman, working
for a very nice man selling very nice cars to very
nice people. I had a real love for Saab, too.
I’m not actually in the office that often. What
I’m doing most of the time these days is
directing and producing my own videos for the
automotive brands I work with, such as
Autoglym, Bilstein and Pioneer. Every single
day, whatever we do, it’s always around cars.
We’re doing photoshoots for them, magazine
placement, web content, that sort of thing.
A lot of time is spent filming Salvage Hunters:
Classic Cars with my good mate Drew Pritchard.
We were friends for about five years before the
show started, after meeting at a Discovery TV
party. He was doing Salvage Hunters and I was
doing another show called Turbo Pickers. I
always thought that he was an antiques guy, but
the second I spoke to him I realised that he was
a car guy using antiques to fund his habit.
After a while he asked if I wanted to do
another car show with him. We sat down and
said, let’s do a car show that’s got no fake
jeopardy, no fake deadline, just a gentle
plodding hour doing what we do anyway –
looking at cars, fixing them up. Keep some of
them, sell some of them. It takes roughly a year
to create ten episodes, made up of three
different types of filming days: car-buying days,
visiting specialists and selling the car.
We start with a list of cars that we’d love to
have in the show, which goes off to the
producers. From around 50-60 cars they come
back to us with about five cars per series. When
we go to look at one, we know what we’re
buying and the basic information, but that’s it.
We don’t know anything about the owner, the
condition of the car or what else might be
there. The moment when we open a garage
Octane, ISSN 1740-0023, is published monthly by Dennis Publising (UK) Ltd, 31-32 Alfred Place, London WC1E 7DP, UK. The US annual subscription price is $99. Airfreight and mailing in the USA by agent named WN Shipping USA, 156-15,
146th Avenue, 2nd Floor, Jamaica, NY 11434, USA. Periodicals postage paid at Jamaica NY 11431. US Postmaster: Send address changes to Octane, WN Shipping USA, 156-15, 146th Avenue, 2nd Floor, Jamaica, NY 11434, USA.
Subscription records are maintained at Dennis Publising (UK) Ltd, 31-32 Alfred Place, London WC1E 7DP, UK. Air Business Ltd is acting as our mailing agent.
242
door is genuinely exciting. The chit-chat
between two friends is all genuine. Whatever
our reaction, good, bad, indifferent, it’s real.
Of course there are a few tests and re-takes,
just to get different camera angles. Then there’s
the test drive, which is an awful lot of fun.
I’ve had no training at all, just a lot of
practice. After a while you get used to the
camera being there and even begin to ignore it.
We have a very talented crew on the show, too.
We spend a lot of time in hotels together, eating
together, breakfasting together, so it’s just like
spending time with your mates.
‘PEOPLE HAVE TRIED TO GET
ME INTO THINGS LIKE GOLF, BUT
I’M NOT INTERESTED UNLESS
IT COMES FROM WOLFSBURG’
At the other end is the sale or reveal, which
normally means driving the car to some nice
location such as Caffeine & Machine or a great
car show – things that Drew and I would be
doing on a normal day anyway.
In between we meet some incredible people.
We try to make it less about us and our
processes and more about the individual
artisans and amazing businesses. Everyone was
worried about what was happening in the UK
with Brexit, but we still have an incredible pool
of little specialists and businesses who make
things, fix things and restore things, and we
want to highlight the work they’re doing.
Paul Cowland, on
right, has teamed up
SALVAGE HUNTERS
with antiques expert
and closet car-nut
Drew Pritchard.
That section of the programme is meant to
teach people and inspire the next generation of
wheel-repairers, paint specialists and trimmers.
That’s what we’re trying to do with the show:
tell everybody, whatever your thoughts on
Brexit either way, that it’s going to be okay.
We’ve got three series ready to go, one
started on 8 January, and we’re making the next
three currently. That’s six series in three years.
It’s going to be a deluge; we hope people like it!
I could fill Octane with my car collection.
There’s often no reason for any particular car.
My first was a 1972 Beetle, so I will always have
aircooled cars. I’ve got a split-screen
15-window, ’80 Westfalia, ’72 Beetle and ’57
Beetle. My Saab connection means I’ve got a
900 Carlsson, a 9000 Carlsson and a 99 Airflow.
We often find cars while out filming, such as
the Pontiac Tojan prototype I bought last year.
Other than football practice with the kids
and family time in the evenings, I’m either
working in and around cars, reading about cars,
on the internet looking at cars or buying things
on eBay for cars. People have tried to get me
into things like golf, but I’m not interested
unless it comes from Wolfsburg.
I’ve spent my entire working life around cars,
but it never gets stale. On my first day in the
garage trade as a fresh-faced youth, all the old
boys who’d been there too long told me I
wouldn’t be smiling after 20 years. Twenty-
seven years later, I love it more than the day I
started. It’s a fabulous industry to work in.
Salvage Hunters: Classic Cars airs at 9pm from
Wednesday 8 January, exclusively on Quest.
FROM THIS...

1999 BENTLEY CONTINENTAL T 420BHP 24,000 miles, wonderfully maintained

...TO THIS...

2004 PORSCHE CARRERA GT German supplied example, 2,500 miles

...TO THIS

2009 FERRARI 16M 1 owner, UK RHD, 5,000 miles from new

Quality contemporary and classic sports cars to fuel your passion

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