Magneto Magazine issue 9: Spring 2021

ISSUE

9 SPRING 2021

+ TOP 50 GREATEST DESIGNERS | DONALD CAMPBELL | FERRARI BB | 50 YEARS OF JAGUAR V12 | VATANEN’S ESCORT RESTORED | RILEY BROOKLANDS

MCQUEEN&LE MANS How Steve rebelled against Hollywood to make the ultimate authentic racing movie

£10.00 |

SPRING 2021

PRINTED IN THE UK

EDINBURGH Chisholm Hunter, Princes Street I GLASGOW Chisholm Hunter, Buchanan Street MANCHESTER Ernest Jones, St Ann Street I YORK Berry’s, Stonegate

We craft watches not to meet expectations, but to surpass them.

SeaQ Panorama Date Dive into the Original

LONDON Harrods, Heathrow Airport, Terminal 2 I Watches of Switzerland, Knightsbridge I Watches of Switzerland, Oxford Street I Watches of Switzerland, Regent Street I Wempe, New Bond Street

® The lights go green

The Vanwall 1958 car. Winner of the inaugural F1 World Constructors’ Championship Trophy.

Giuseppe Farina

Harry Schell

José Froilán González

Maurice Trintignant

Alberto Ascari

Mike Hawthorn

Stirling Moss

Ken Wharton

Stuart Lewis-Evans

Piero Taruffi

Desmond Titterington

Tony Brooks

Vanwall are once again building the 1958 race cars to grace the world’s tracks and collections.

Perfect tool-room copies, these continuation cars all come with a full race support package and FIA HTP. For collectors, a once off chance to capture a winning car from a glorious era. For accomplished racers of the great GP front engined pre-60’s, a car to match your ambition.

To find out more about the Vanwall 1958 car please contact: iain@vanwallgroup.com ®

vanwall_official www.vanwallgroup.com ® Vanwall is a registered Trademark. Photograph by Peter Harholdt for Revs Institute.

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16 COMING SOON Magneto’s selection of recommended events for the next few months

25 S TA R T E R HERO’s take on the state of the historic car world, what to make of the return of Coys, the latest books and a wintry journey on a surprising Japanese icon

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STEVE MCQUEEN’S LE MANS HITS 50

C E L E B R AT I N G JAGUAR’S V12

A R I VATA N E N ’ S R A L LY E S C O R T

DONALD CAMPBELL REMEMBERED

Magneto meets the people involved with creating the 1971 epic: racer, actor, stuntman, producer and McQueen’s son Chad

Half a century ago, one of the all-time great engines arrived. Its story involves design excellence, politics and a brush with death

WRC-winning Ford RS1800, now owned by its original co-driver David Richards, restored by its original mechanic

Alain de Cadenet on meeting the conflicted record-breaker – and recreating the Bluebird legend years later

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WWW.ECURIEECOSSE.COM/LMC

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SINGER 911 HE ADS OFF-ROAD

RILEY’S PLUCKY BROOKLANDS

AT T H E W H E E L O F L A N C I A’ S L C 2

TOP 50 CAR DESIGNERS

All-Terrain Competition Study has the attitude of a Dakar 959, power of a supercar and attention to detail of, well, a Singer...

Karl Ludvigsen on the British sports model that out-raced foreign rivals and put many great drivers on the road to success

It’s Lancia, it’s Ferrari, it’s Martini... it should be a legend, yet somehow it never sparkled in 1980s Group C racing. Why?

Renegades, trend-setters, introverts and showmen; we look at the legendary style leaders who shaped the automotive industry

173 NEW SECTION ACQUIRE Market intelligence from Hagerty and expert Dave Kinney, plus the iconic Heuer Monaco, Geo Ham’s motoring art, automobilia and all you need to know about buying a Ferrari Berlinetta Boxer

188 LEGAL: EXAMINING HISTORY

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190 COLLECTIONS: FRIENDSHIPS

192 HISTORIC RACING: F I T F O R C O M B AT ?

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194 BEHIND THE LEGEND: NORBERT SINGER MAGNETO

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W E LCOM E

Issue 9 On which side of the Steve McQueen Le Mans movie opinions do you fall? There are lovers and there are haters, but McQueen set out to make the most authentic motor-racing production ever – and as fraught with mostly self-inflicted difficulties as it was, it’s hard not to admire the lengths he went to in order to achieve exactly that.

So, 50 years on from the film’s premiere, we spoke to some of the surviving protagonists, from Derek Bell to Chad McQueen ( just ten years old when he spent his summer on set). Oh, the stories! Even now, a few aren’t printable. But what comes through is that amid the eye rolling at the lack of script and the off-screen antics, all involved are still amazed at the then-cutting-edge filming techniques, the 200mph-plus formation driving and the highly dangerous stunts that make the Le Mans action sequences so special.

If you haven’t watched it for a while, and feel jaded by the over-cited “Racing is Life” quotes and memories of the limited storyline, then take another view – and I challenge you not to be on the edge of your seat as you watch the 917s battle with 512s.

What else have we got for you? Only the biggest-ever issue of Magneto, now increased by another 16 pages! Only two new regular writers, Alain de Cadenet and Andrew Frankel! Only a new section on market intelligence, covering cars, watches, art and automobilia!

Yes, Magneto is doing well, so sincere thanks to everyone who has supported us: readers, advertisers and commercial partners.

David Lillywhite Editorial director

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© Pierre-Yves Riom

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Contributors ALAIN DE CADENET “What hasn’t Alain de Cadenet done in his life?” we asked. Photographer, sports car racer, team owner and constructor, collector, TV presenter, concours judge, columnist... “Hang on, he hasn’t written for Magneto!” But he does now, starting with his memories of Donald Campbell and reliving his Bluebird K7 experiences for the 1988 Across the Lake TV movie.

ANDREW FRANKEL Surely the UK’s leading motoring writer, equally known for new-car drives as for Historic tests and racing, we’re delighted to introduce Andrew as a new Magneto regular. With 30 years’ experience, 12 years as a European Car of the Year juror and several books to his credit, Andrew will bring authoritative, entertaining features, starting with 50 years of the Jaguar V12.

WILSON HENNESSY You’ve likely seen Wilson’s trademark colourful, graphic product photography at some point, whether it be of a new car, a razor blade or George Michael as a rubber duck... Thing is, Wilson is also an out-and-out petrol-head, so he was excited to be spending a day in one of the barns at E-type UK to bring an explosion of colour to a classic Jaguar V12 engine.

A motoring journalist since 1990 and a judge at Pebble Beach and Amelia Island, Matt is the authority on Steve McQueen.

He’s the author of McQueen’s Machines, McQueen’s Motorcycles and Bullitt, and is involved with the Steve McQueen Car and Motorcycle Show in aid of Boys Republic.

Matt writes the opening piece with Chad McQueen in this issue’s Le Mans epic.

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Contributors in this issue Daniel Ahlgren, Marshall Buck, Jonathon Burford, Simon de Burton, Alain de Cadenet, Joel Carlsson, Robert Dean, Dirk de Jager, Andrew English, Andrew Frankel, Rob Gould, Hal Hamilton, Sam Hancock, Wilson Hennessy, Richard Heseltine, Dave Kinney, Karl Ludvigsen, Debbie Nolan, Andy Reid, Clive Robertson, John Simister, Peter Stevens, Matt Stone, Rupert Whyte Single issues & subscriptions Please visit www.magnetomagazine.com or call +44 (0)1371 851892 For US orders or renewal www.imsnews.com/publications/motorsports/magneto or call 757 428 8180 Subscriptions managed by ESco Business Services. US subscriptions managed by IMS News

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Magneto [mag-nee-toh] noun, plural mag·ne·tos 1. Electrical generator that provides periodic high-voltage pulses to the spark-plugs of an internal-combustion engine, used mostly pre-World War One although still fitted for emergency back-up of aircraft ignition systems.

2. Fictional character appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics.

3. Great quarterly magazine featuring the most important cars in the world.

ISSN Number 2631-9489. Magneto is published quarterly by Hothouse Publishing Ltd. Great care has been taken throughout the magazine to be accurate, but the publisher cannot accept any responsibility for any errors or omissions that might occur.

The editors and publishers of this magazine give no warranties, guarantees or assurances, and make no representations regarding any goods or services advertised in this edition.

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Our motor car specialists are on hand to provide advice about buying and selling at auction, wherever you are Legends of the Road

MPH March

Goodwood Members’ Meeting

New Bond Street, London | 19 February 2021

Bicester, Bicester Heritage | 20 March 2021

Chichester, Goodwood | 16 May 2021

Les Grandes Marques du Monde à Paris

The Monaco Sale

MPH May

Online | 3 - 10 March 2021

Monte Carlo | 23 April 2021

Bicester, Bicester Heritage | 22 May 2021

ENQUIRIES +44 (0) 20 7468 5801 ukcars@bonhams.com bonhams.com/motorcars

To be offered without reserve at the Legends of the Road auction The ex-Sir Robert Ropner/Rodney ‘Connaught’ Clarke 1937 BUGATTI TYPE 57S £5,000,000 – 7,000,000

C O M I N G S O O N

BERNINA GRAN TURISMO September 16-19, 2021 Inspired by the races held in St Moritz during the 1920s and ’30s, the Bernina Gran Turismo is a hillclimb event staged on one of the world’s greatest driving roads – the Bernina Pass in the Swiss Alps.

The 5.6km ribbon of winding Alpine asphalt is closed to the public for this one special weekend of the year, allowing drivers and spectators to enjoy classic machinery to the fullest. The 70 entrants are an eclectic mix of vintage racing and sports cars, ranging from Fiats to Formula 1 and Le Mans icons.

Once the engines stop reverberating through the mountains, participants and guests enjoy Engadine hospitality at the La Rösa Clubhouse, before the final morning of competition.

The cars, setting and roads make the Bernina Gran Turismo a highlight of the automotive calendar, and a truly unique experience. www.bernina-granturismo.com

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DONINGTON HISTORIC F E ST I VA L May 1-2, 2021

ALAMY

Donington’s Historic Festival returns in May for its tenth anniversary. Since the inaugural event in 2011, the festival has become a highlight of the automotive enthusiast’s calendar.

It’s fitting that a circuit with as rich a history as Donington Park hosts such an eclectic mix of classic racing categories.

These include the Mad Jack pre-war sports cars, Historic Touring Car Challenge and Stirling Moss Trophy.

The undulating landscape of the Donington track makes it a great venue for spectators, who can see all the action from the surrounding banks.

The interludes between races offer the opportunity to explore the Trade Village, saunter through the open paddock or admire the surrounding classics. www.doningtonhistoric.com

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RÉTROMOBILE June 2-6, 2021

ALAMY

Rescheduled to June for 2021, Rétromobile returns to Paris for its 46th year running.

It has built a reputation as one of the largest and most eclectic events on the automotive calendar.

The indoor show takes place at the Porte de Versailles Exhibition Centre, and is famous for its varied array of cars and exhibits. The models on display last year ranged from expensive oddities such as the Ferrari Rainbow, to tanks and tractors. Another popular component of the event is an entire hall dedicated to sub-€25,000 classics.

Artcurial’s auction takes place on-site at Rétromobile, with lots including a 1972 Matra Le Mans racer, a Lancia 037 and an Aston Martin DB4GT. Bonhams and RM Sotheby’s are held nearby.

There is already an exciting selection of lots this year.

The icing on the cake? The postponement of Rétromobile means it now falls on the week before the Le Mans 24 Hours. Has there ever been a better excuse for a French summer holiday? www.retromobile.com

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BELOW London Concours in the city’s financial district.

SYDNEY HARBOUR CONCOURS D’ELEGANCE

SPA CL ASSIC

May 14-16, 2021

Back for its third year, this remains the premier concours in the Southern Hemisphere. Last year’s winners included a 1913 Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost and a 1949 Jaguar XK120. Can Sydney up the ante again this year?

Eau Rouge, Pouhon, Stavelot... is there anywhere else with more evocative corner names than Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps in Belgium? The Spa Classic sees the Heritage Touring Cup series take on the challenge of the misty Ardennes track.

Excitement is guaranteed.

www.sydneyharbourconcours.com.au

www.peterauto.peter.fr

LA JOLLA CONCOURS D’ELEGANCE

May 15-16, 2021

March 4-6, 2021

April 16-18, 2021 La Jolla will feature the finest European and American classics.

Past entrants have ranged from horseless carriages to sports cars. www.lajollaconcours.com

T H E S C O T T I S H M A LT S April 20-24, 2021 The rally’s 17th running will be held over a new route for 2021, meandering through spectacular Caledonian scenery. Visits to local distilleries over the five days make this rally a unique experience. www.heroevents.eu

GRAND PRIX DE MONACO HISTORIQUE April 23-25, 2021 The ‘Jewel in the Crown’ of the F1 calendar, Monaco’s layout remains largely the same as it was in 1929.

A fittingly poetic place to witness vintage GP cars race in anger. www.acm.mc

MEMBERS’ MEETING Goodwood’s renowned line-up of annual motor sport extravaganzas has been much enhanced in recent years by this addition. All 2020 tickets will automatically roll over and remain valid for the new dates, which is great news for all those who can’t wait to see competition vehicles from the dawn of motoring to the recent past in their full racing glory. www.goodwood.com

AMELIA ISLAND CONCOURS D’ELEGANCE May 20-23, 2021 Amelia Island in Florida remains a cornerstone of the international concours circuit. This year’s event (below) has been moved from its usual March date and celebrates racer Lyn St James, along with Weird and Wonderful cars. RM Sotheby’s holds the on-site sale, with Bonhams just down the road. www.ameliaconcours.org

VA L L E T TA CONCOURS D’ELEGANCE May 23, 2021 The baroque architecture of Malta’s capital hosts an extensive array of concours categories, from pre-war models to modern classics. The highest-quality cars are always present, so it’ll be fascinating to see what’s crowned this year’s winner. www.vallettaconcoursdelegance.com

CONCORSO D’ELEGANZA VILLA D’ESTE

May 28-30, 2021

Naturally, only the world’s most beautiful cars have graced the world’s oldest concours, on the shores of Lake Como. Previous winners include an Alfa Romeo 33 Stradale and Bugatti Atlantic 57SC.

LONDON CONCOURS June 8-10, 2021 Returning for a fifth year and with a new three-day format, this concours in the heart of London will bear witness to 80 exquisite cars. A traditional English garden party nestled in the Honourable Artillery Company’s grounds. www.londonconcours.co.uk

LE MANS CLASSIC

July 1-4, 2021

For the first time in three years, spectators will be treated to seeing classic cars tear along the Mulsanne Straight when the long circuit is used once again. An appropriate way to commemorate the tenth anniversary of this esteemed event. www.lemansclassic.com

www.concorsodeleganzavilladeste.com

MAPLE ROAD CLASSIC

HERO SUMMER TRIAL

September 15-October 3, 2021

To celebrate the E-type’s 60th, Blenheim Palace’s grounds will be packed with 2000 Jaguars.

This sets off in Telford before meandering down the Welsh Marches on a new route. Vehicles must be pre-1986 and are classed according to bodystyle. Entrants range from Vauxhalls to Porsches.

Autumn in Eastern Canada is a feast for the eyes, so classic car owners are in for an extra-special treat here. From Halifax, Nova Scotia to Montreal, Quebec, the rally will take place when the autumn colours are in full swing.

www.blenheimpalace.com

www.heroevents.eu

www.destination-rally.com

SUMMER JAGUAR F E ST I VA L May 14-16, 2021

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June 4-6, 2021

TERRE DI CANOSSA

STELLA ALPINA

CAVALLINO CLASSIC

DOLOMITES GRAND TOUR

RALLY OF ENCHANTMENT

FALL RALLY NEW ENGLAND

MODENA CENTO ORE

ARABIAN ROADS

April 15 - 18 2021 th

April 22

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- 25 2021

March and September 2021

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May 17 - 23 2021 th

June 18th - 20th 2021

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June 8th - 13th 2021

October 2021

November 2021 www.canossa.com

@canossaevents

Dates to be confirmed according to the pandemic situation

There’s no Road to Happiness Happiness is the Road

August 15, 2021 70th Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance

We can’t wait to start our engines, shift into gear, and gather with our friends again — and we will.

Stay connected with us through the Insider — our digital magazine sharing inspiring stories, insights and information about the Pebble Beach Concours and the collector car community.

Sign up at pebblebeachconcours.com/insider ©2021 Pebble Beach Company. Pebble Beach®, Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance®, and their underlying images are trademarks, trade dress and service marks of Pebble Beach Company.

S T A R T E R

52 Ice driving in Cyan Racing’s monstrous Volvo P1800. You wouldn’t catch The Saint in this

26 Jaguar’s new C-type | 30 The return of the Coys name | 33 HERO’s state-of-the-market survey | 34 Lola company for sale 37 Homage to Ecurie Ecosse | 38 In the workshop with Alois Ruf | 43 Mille Miglia turns around | 44 Amelia Island gets weird(er) 47 Porsche legend Vasek Polak | 48 Books, from Ford to XJR-15 | 56 Honda’s unlikely icon | 59 What price a replica Aston Martin?

60 Praga’s forgotten race history | 62 Callum R-Reforged Vanquish first drive | 64 Zagato’s Iso relaunch

S T A R T E R

JAGUAR LAND ROVER has announced that it is building eight C-type continuation cars to celebrate 70 years of the legendary British sports racer, while clamping down on the copyright of the C-type shape – despite a landmark US ruling.

The C-type continuation model comes after the successes of the recent Lightweight E-type, XKSS and D-type re-releases, and has been widely expected. As with its predecessors, the car will be assembled by specialist engineers at the Jaguar Land Rover Classic facility in Coventry, with certain components sourced from existing Jaguar specialists.

This C-type continuation will be built to identical specification as the car that Tony Rolt and Duncan Hamilton took to Le Mans glory in 1953. The C-type was also famously driven by Stirling Moss, who placed second in the same race, alongside team-mate Peter Walker. The 1953

car had innovative disc brakes at each corner, which were jointly developed by Dunlop and Jaguar.

The Le Mans-winning model also had a Weber triple-carb set-up feeding the 3.4-litre Jaguar XK straight-six. This gave more muscle than the original production C-types that were fitted with twin SU carbs.

Consequently, the continuation car’s 220bhp output boasts a 20bhp improvement in power.

The bodywork of the C-type was one of the first ever to be honed with aerodynamic efficiency in mind, and was fashioned from thingauge aluminium for a minimal weight penalty. The weight-saving measures were also aided by the installation of a fuel bag; this was inspired by aviation and was first used in racing by the C-type.

When undertaking this project, flawlessly recreating the iconic, streamlined bodywork of the C-type was imperative to Jaguar. To achieve

Jaguar releases details of its next continuation model The next re-release from Jaguar Classic will be the 1953 Le Mans-spec C-type, amid two very different verdicts on the legality of replicas

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ABOVE Jaguar C-types came first and second at the 1953 Le Mans 24 Hours, driven

by Rolt/Hamilton and Moss/Walker.

RIGHT C-type continuation can now be configured online – this is Magneto’s choice of colour, trim and accessories.

‘The C-type will be assembled at the Jaguar Land Rover Classic facility in Coventry’

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S T A R T E R

LEFT Re-creation fuses cutting-edge technology with traditionalism.

BELOW Various authentic colour and trim options are available.

this, the engineers scoured the company’s archives for engineering drawings and records from the original car’s development team.

These included the work of Malcolm Sayer, who designed the C-type’s bodywork, competition manager Lofty England, and engineers William Heynes, Bob Knight and Norman Dewis. Once acquired, the drawings were crossreferenced with a digital 3D scan of an original car.

The synergy of traditionalism and cutting-edge technology was taken a step further by the introduction of Jaguar Classic’s first online configurator. It allows prospective buyers to compare various authentic colour and trim options before deciding on the exact specification of their new investment.

Given the popularity of today’s various Historic racing series and the competitive heritage of the C-type, the continuation model is also available with modern FIAapproved rollover protection and harness-retention systems. These were luxuries unavailable to the works racers of the 1950s.

Some collectors reject the validity of continuation and replica cars, arguing that such machines de-value

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the historical significance of the surviving models. However, Jaguar’s forays into this market have been successfully followed by other ‘original equipment manufacturers’ (OEMs) including Aston Martin and Bentley. Shelby, Lister, Lola and other smaller car makers had also previously released continuations.

With the success of this project, Jaguar is now threatening to clamp down on replica manufacturers.

Last year Suffolk Sports Cars was liquidated, claimed to be due to impending legal action from Jaguar Land Rover over its production of

SS100 replicas. And more recently Jaguar Land Rover has won a landmark copyright-infringement case in the Swedish High Court, which confirms copyright protection of the shape of the manufacturer’s Jaguar C-type model.

The Scandinavian court found that the copyright in the external shape of the C-type was infringed by a car being built by lifelong Jaguar enthusiasts Karl and Ann-Christine Magnusson, the first of a number that they had planned to build and sell. The couple are expected to appeal against the ruling, which in

the most extreme cases could lead to the use and public display of replicas being made illegal.

Other replica companies are already taking legal advice, pointing out the age of the design and also the length of time those businesses have been manufacturing their replicas.

Proteus, for example, was building C-type replicas in the 1980s.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic in America, after five years of wrangling, the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has passed regulations to address the legality surrounding the sale and production of cars that resemble models produced by large OEMs 25 years ago or more.

Congress enacted a bill passing this into law back in 2015, but implementation was delayed while it was awaiting NHTSA regulatory approval. Now these regulations have been passed, it is legal for companies to produce heritage vehicles without the protestation of the original OEM. The enacted law decrees that small-scale makers can produce up to 325 replica heritage models per year, subject to federal regulatory oversight. A very different outcome to the current trend in Europe.

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S T A R T E R

IN APRIL 2020, Coys of Kensington Ltd went into administration, owing around £5.8 million. The previous year, one of the two then-directors, Chris Routledge, was led off the Techno-Classica Essen auction podium in handcuffs by German police, accused of fraud.

Many will recall that this wasn’t the first time a company bearing the Coys name had gone into administration leaving significant debts, mostly to customers who hadn’t been paid for sold cars.

Now the Coys name is back as an all-new firm, with no involvement from the previous directors and new investment from a family known for its connection to classic cars. But is it enough? And can the new company overcome the tainted history of the past two decades?

It wasn’t always like this. Much has been made of the long history of the Coys name, which originated as an antiques specialist in 1919.

Decades later it was taken over by Charles Howard, one of the first to see the potential in selling old cars as ‘classics’, and from 1981 it was run by Jeffrey Pattinson and Douglas Jamieson. Throughout the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s it was one of the leading classic car dealers and auction houses, working from a mews in Kensington, London. Many of the big names in the industry cut their teeth at Coys.

In 2003 a management buy-out took place, with Douglas Jamieson and Chris Routledge becoming directors of the subsequent new company, Coys Limited – later changed to Coys of Kensington Automobiles Ltd. Just over a year later the business went into administration, owing £1.65m.

A new company quickly emerged, called Coys of Kensington Ltd, again with Routledge and Jamieson as directors. The latter left the firm in 2010, and passed away in 2019 aged 66. When the company went into administration in 2020, the directors were officially listed as Chris Routledge and Ben Manch.

In June 2020 the new business was founded, Coys of London

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What should we think of the return of Coys?

An all-new company has taken on the historic yet tainted Coys name – but it won’t be able to help the former customers still owed money

Automobiles Ltd. Richard Calleri of Geolog was named as director and Luxembourg-based investment firm Kamri Invest as shareholder. Geolog, founded in 1982, specialises in surface logging for the oil and gas industry; Antonio Calleri and son Richard are known classic car collectors, with Antonio a long-time participant in the London to Brighton Veteran Car Run. Richard has appointed Nick Wells, a Coys consultant since 2010, as managing director.

So, the obvious question: why resurrect Coys? “Coys is an iconic, long-standing brand. However, the mismanagement and poor reputation it garnered over recent years represented a clear challenge to any potential new owner,” Dubai-based Richard tells Magneto.

“It won’t be easy. Our intention is to finally manage such an historic and well known classic car brand the way it deserves, and to bring it back to its original success and splendour.

The inappropriate activities that were apparently carried out by the former Coys owners shouldn’t have been allowed to take place, and they have unfortunately tarnished not only the Coys name but I also believe in a small way the antique car auction business in general.”

Nick Wells adds: “We want to offer good-quality cars, good service and excellent customer support, and not try to be the biggest auction house. We need to regain our ground in the marketplace.

“When we put the announcement out, we wanted to see what the reaction would be. There’s been a split: a backlash from creditors, which I fully expected, and some confusion, with creditors saying: ‘Well, if Coys is back up and running, can I have my money back?’ They had not understood that it’s a new business, and if the new ownership had taken on the old company’s liabilities then the name would just die.

“But there was also a real outpouring of affection for the brand, from people in the trade, from collectors, from those who remember it in its heyday of the 1980s and ’90s.

There will still be people who are

‘Coys must first win back the trust of customers. It won’t be an easy task, but we enjoy a challenge’

quite reticent, suspicious about how the current Coys will be from now on, but that will subside because there won’t be a story.”

Would it have been better to start afresh? Nick says not: “We ultimately decided that we should keep the name and restore it, as opposed to starting what is effectively a worldwide brand from scratch.”

The new company will, as in Coys days of old, split its activities between on-site cars sales from its refurbished base in Richmond, London, and “a handful” of auction sales in the UK and Europe, says Nick. These will include TechnoClassica Essen in April (an online event this year), Chiswick House, London on July 17 and the Royal Horticultural Halls in Westminster, London on December 8.

Anywhere else? Richard says: “Yes, in time. However, we must first rebuild in our home market and win back the trust of British and European customers. It won’t be an easy task, but we enjoy a good challenge.”

Questions have been asked of Nick’s involvement in the new company, as he worked for the previous iteration of Coys. But he says that he wasn’t involved in the day-to-day running, and is actually also owed money. He says: “It [Coys of Kensington Ltd] was getting into some trouble, which was worsening in the run-up to the COVID-19 breakout, which led to it going into administration. We were all surprised by the amount owed.

“I think Coys was always handed down from one person to another within the trade. It’s never actually been adopted by a corporate, and properly structured and funded.”

So, it’s clear – and legitimate – that the new firm, Coys of London Automobiles Ltd, has no liability for the money owed to creditors.

Administration of Coys of Kensington Ltd is still in progress, but the outlook for the many customers owed money isn’t promising.

Will that affect the future of the new company, Coys of London Automobiles Ltd? Only time will tell.

16 – 18 July Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire

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The surprising punch of the classic car industry HERO’s report on the UK movement confirms the sizeable economic impact of the industry, and how that could be used to protect against harmful legislation

BELOW Classic car industry brings billions into UK’s coffers.

TO OUTSIDERS, THE classic car industry might seem an esoteric, insular and small collection of enthusiasts. The truth, though, could not be further from the monochromatic stereotype.

A report recently conducted by Centre for Economics and Business Research (Cebr) and leading historic car event organiser HERO-ERA reveals that the historic and classic sector accounts for no less than 11.3 percent of the UK motor industry’s total employment. Due to the increased prevalence of electric vehicles, automation and emissions

regulations, this figure is climbing.

The survey similarly revealed the classic car industry’s GVA (Gross Value Added) sits at £8.7 billion.

This is higher than the UK’s music industry, the football Premier League and the fashion world. The classic car industry’s GVA also dwarfs the £446 million of UK fishing (Office of National Statistics).

A few more numbers for you: the Federation of British Historic Vehicle Clubs (FBHVC) estimates that there are currently 1.54 million historic (over 30 years old) vehicles in the UK. Cebr estimates that there are in addition 1.47 million vehicles that satisfy the HMRC definition of classic (between 15/20 and 30 years old), giving a total of 3.01 million classic and historic vehicles.

The overall sector supports the employment of 113,000 employees throughout the UK economy, and supports the generation of £2.9 billion per annum in tax revenues – mainly from VAT, income tax and National Insurance contributions.

The obvious question to ask at this point, is how can something as economically important as the classic car industry be so widely disregarded? One clear answer is

complexity. The old car industry extends into further reaches of the UK’s economy than one would initially estimate. It isn’t merely garages, parts shops and dealers; it also includes museums, events, hospitality, media, manufacturing, tourism and insurance, to name but a few. With this in mind, the classic car industry’s value doesn’t seem especially astounding.

The other crucial figure at the moment is to do with emissions, of course; the average classic is driven just 1200 miles a year, producing 563kg of CO2 equivalent emissions in a year. This, the HERO/Cebr report claims, is less CO2 than is generated by the typical annual use of a mobile phone.

Why go to so much trouble to research these figures? Cebr and HERO have sought to gather up enough ammunition to deal with future threats of regulation, which can often occur simply because politicians and civil servants can overlook the nuances of the classic car world in comparison with the modern automotive industry. The FBHVC has long done the same in the UK. This hard work will provide powerful data for us all.

WILL BROADHEAD/ALVIS

S T A R T E R

S T A R T E R

What does £7 million buy you in the racing world? In this case, the full assets of Lola, from name to fully operational wind tunnel

IF ALL THE recent relaunches of historic brands are piquing your interest, here’s some food for thought; Lola is for sale. Not just the name, either, but the brand, trademarks, Technical Centre, wind tunnel, technical archive, tooling and workshop equipment.

Lola is one of the most successful manufacturers of customer race cars of all time. The company was founded by engineer Eric Broadley back in 1958, starting with sports cars and moving into Formula Junior. Within four years it was producing the Lola Mk6, Ford’s inspiration and basis for the GT40.

When an ill-advised attempt to re-enter Formula 1 with the T97/30 went disastrously wrong, Lola went into administration, to be rescued in

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1997 by Irish businessman Martin Birrane, the then-owner of Ireland’s famous Mondello Park circuit. He brought the company back to life, and then some. He invested heavily in the team and facilities, and completed the project of installing an ex-BAE wind tunnel and sevenpoint chassis rig. He also made many other improvements and increased staff numbers.

As a result, Lola returned to the top of sports car racing in both Europe and the US, as well as achieved dominance in Champ Car. The company also came to prevail over one-make racing series such as A1GP, F3000 and Formula Nippon.

Ironically, Lola got into difficulties after another attempt at F1, although it wasn’t helped by the worldwide recession of the late 2000s. Martin (by then 78 years old) decided to step back in 2012, and stopped all race-car production. That wasn’t the end of the brand, however, because the Lola Technical Centre continued to provide wind-tunnel testing and associated services to race teams and road-vehicle manufacturers.

Martin Birrane passed away aged 82 in 2018 – just 13 months after Broadley died aged 88 – and his family has decided to offer Lola in its entirety, for around £7 million.

This includes intellectual property

ABOVE From the Nürburgring to Indianapolis, Lola has dominated numerous race series through the decades – and now a new buyer has the chance to continue the story. rights to all Lola designs, with a library of technical drawings – all since 1986 are on CAD. Crucially, the tooling for a T70 Mk3B continuation car is ready to go, as well.

The 10,500sq ft Technical Centre and wind-tunnel complex based in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire is part of the deal. Usefully, the tunnel’s clever modular design aids potential relocation. The seven-point chassis rig, wind-tunnel spares, tooling and equipment are also included.

And then there’s the potential spares and support business. It’s said that around 4000 Lolas were built through the years, across sports cars, Formula Junior, Formula 3, IndyCar, Le Mans, A1GP, Formula 1, Formulas 5000 and 3000, Touring Cars and many more.

A measure of Lola’s importance is its roster of former drivers, including Sir Jackie Stewart, John Surtees, Graham Hill, Mario Andretti and Nigel Mansell. As well as the Technical Centre and wind tunnel, the sale includes the Lola brand, Additional details can be found at www.lolatechnicalcentre.com.

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S T A R T E R

Ecurie Ecosse C-type returns Seven homages to the original seven cars of the famous Le Mans-winning Scottish race team are being built in Coventry under the historic name

THERE ARE FEW 1950s liveries as evocative as the blue of Ecurie Ecosse, the Scottish outfit turned giant-killer thanks to legendary team manager ‘Wilkie’ Wilkinson, founder David Murray and early team driver Ian Stewart.

UK company Ecurie Ecosse is using the historic name for the build of seven all-new homages to the team’s seven successful C-types.

The Ecurie Ecosse team won Le Mans twice in a Jaguar D-type, in 1956 and ’57, and secured no fewer than 59 podiums with the C-type.

The team name was resurrected in 2011, and this new car is intended to salute its successes.

The new car features a few choice mechanical enhancements, similar in spirit to the many restomods currently on the market. It will be hand-built in Coventry, as were the original C-types.

Malcolm Sayer’s innovative aerodynamic bodywork is faithfully recreated in thin-gauge aluminium and painted in the blue livery of the Ecurie Ecosse Le Mans cars, complete with airbrushed emblems on the wings. The panels envelop a steel spaceframe chassis, which shares its architecture with the genuine C-type.

The similarities don’t stop there, as there is still a twin-cam straightsix Jaguar XK engine beneath the

bonnet’s voluptuous curves. There are a few important differences, though. The engine now has a higher displacement plus fuel injection, which virtually doubles the old car’s power output from 160bhp to 300bhp. To deal with the additional muscle, the suspension and disc brakes have been upgraded and the chassis is stiffer and wider. The gearbox is now a five-speed manual to fully harness the extra power, too.

The diligent attention to detail and reverence for the past continue inside the cockpit. Its lightweight aluminium bucket seats are handcrafted and finished in blue leather to match the paintwork. In a final

nod to the car’s Le Mans heritage, Tag Heuer Master Time stopwatches grace the dashboard.

Ecurie Ecosse patron Alasdair McCaig says the seven new cars have been created to honour and celebrate the historic successes of the team’s old C-types. The first one has been completed and is awaiting a test drive from its new owner at the outfit’s Henley-on-Thames dealership.

There is no word on price so far, but judging by the quality of materials used and attention to detail, the remaining Ecurie Ecosse C-types seem likely to find buyers.

For additional model information, visit www.ecurieecosse.com.

ABOVE Just seven C-type recreations will be made to celebrate past successes.

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INTERVIEW

‘I just like driving at 300km/h’ Alois Ruf is a true automotive artisan, whose love affair with the 911 has evolved to a level where he builds his own bespoke models. We meet the man who says all he needs from life is an unrestricted Autobahn...

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S T A R T E R LEFT Alois Ruf and his skilled team still work from the premises his father set up in Pfaffenhausen, Bavaria in 1939.

centre, and 80 years on Ruf is still operating from the same premises.

“We had the first Porsche in our garage in 1963,” says Alois Jr. “We soon started noticing that Porsche drivers are willing to do more than other car guys to live their passion.

We were already catering for their needs in the 1970s through special models, but then word got out that Porsche was putting the 911 on death row. In five years from that time, it was said, the 928 would be the only alternative.

“It created a panic within the 911 crowd. All these people wanted was to be able to buy a new 911 every five years or so. I had customers begging: ‘Please Mr Ruf, can you get all the parts and build me a 911?’ That was when we decided to effectively build up our cars from a body-in-white we sourced from Porsche. We agreed with the manufacturer that our cars should be considered a separate entity, and we started giving them our own chassis numbers.”

‘Our company has always been about following a dream and living the passion’ Alois says Porsche, but he means the 911. For him, there’s been nothing else than this single model – a love affair that started on a rainy day on the Autobahn in 1964. “I was 14 at the time; it happened on the road to Munich. My father was driving our Opel, equipped with a very slow wiper. And this blue 911 – it was still called 901 then – came flying by, spraying a huge amount of water over our car. Our Opel was shaking from the wind blast the Porsche had created. And that sound... nothing sounds like an early 911. I think it

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DIRK DE JAGER

KEEPING UP WITH Alois Ruf is as difficult as trying to follow one of his cars. There are always more urgent matters to take care of and things to attend to, so during the course of our interview the energetic 70-yearold continuously hops in and out of his office in Pfaffenhausen, Bavaria.

It’s one of the consequences of a local craftsman operating on an international playing field. Alois employs no more than 60 people, but his is a household name with millions of fans worldwide, ever since a Ruf showed up in the first edition of Sony PlayStation’s Gran Turismo.

Ruf’s star power with Gran Turismo creator Kazunori Yamauchi was shaped by Faszination on the Nürburgring. In this epic 20-minute film, Ruf test driver Stefan Roser pushes the Yellowbird around the Nordschleife with total disregard for the rules of physics. He made the impossible look easy, and gave instant cult status to both the Yellowbird and white socks...

“It was Kazunori Yamauchi who insisted on us being in the game,” says Alois. Wife and business partner Estonia joins in: “It was never a case of: ‘Oh, Porsche can’t be in the game because of a licensing conflict, so we have to take the next best thing, Ruf,’” she says.

“Yamauchi insisted on having our Yellowbird – he was crazy about that car. When we went to negotiate the licence with Sony, the company was surprised to hear we had other cars as well. After the meeting, I was told: ‘You could have asked any money – Yamauchi wanted the Yellowbird, no matter what.’ Well, why couldn’t they have told me that before I’d signed the contract!”

Prior to Ruf gaining fame through Gran Turismo, the family firm already had a long history of upgrading Porsches. Alois’s father – also named Alois – opened a small garage and petrol pump on the approach to the Pfaffenhausen town

S T A R T E R

was in fact Mr Piëch’s car, an early prototype in Quickblau. From that day on, I was hooked on the 911.

“It wasn’t until 1977, when we came out with our first Turbo, that we were discovered by Germany’s leading car magazine, Auto Motor und Sport.” In 1984, a Ruf BTR driven by Paul Frère for a Road & Track test was the first production car to break the 300km/h barrier, at the Volkswagen track in Ehra-Lessien.

“They had a mechanical speed panel, which operated like the old airport destination boards. Only it had been a while since the ‘3’ had been used as a first digit. In fact, that hadn’t happened at Ehra since a Porsche 917 test. As it was, the ‘3’ had become rusty and got stuck. So we didn’t know. All we saw was ‘06.4km/h’. But Paul had kept an eye on the speedo, and said: ‘Oh, it was definitely 306.4km/h,’” Alois remembers with a chuckle.

That was to look slow compared with 1987, when Alois drove his

prototype of the first CTR to EhraLessien. This time in the hands of Frère and Phil Hill, the CTR blew the competition away, maxing out at 339.8km/h. Sticking out as the only bright-yellow car in the bunch, the CTR was nicknamed Yellowbird. A legend was born. Going forward, Alois was happy transforming Porsches, yet he grew ever more concerned about ballooning weight: “It seems nobody understands anymore that you cannot compensate for weight through horsepower.

“I’m just a guy who likes driving at 300km/h. For me, the driving feel is important; a car should feel like a part of my clothing, like my jeans.

Performance is everywhere. It’s in the suspension, the brakes, the steering feel, not just in the engine.”

A crazy plan developed, although Alois stresses: “There is no business plan; there never was. Our company has always been about following a dream and living the passion.” In 2017, Ruf surprised everyone at the Geneva

ABOVE AND RIGHT The driving force behind Ruf, Alois and his wife Estonia have big plans for the future.

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Motor Show with the concept for the CTR Anniversary. It looks like a classic 911, sounds like a 911, but is 100 percent a Pfaffenhausen product.

The engine, for instance, is a 3.6-litre Mezger-inspired flat-six, but fully manufactured in house by Ruf. The body is made in carbon, and the chassis is carbon as well, strengthened with a steel roll cage.

In the CTR Anniversary, the twin-turbo packs 710bhp for just 1200kg: “We had it up to 360km/h on the Autobahn recently. We think 365km/h is possible.” All 50 new Yellowbirds have been sold in the meantime, but there’s more to come.

Alois says: “This new chassis should keep us busy for the next ten years. We had the CTR, and on the same base we will be rolling out the normally aspirated SCR with 510bhp from a 4.0 engine. The chassis is rearwheel drive, but it can be changed to four-wheel drive. We definitely want to do that. Estonia’s Rodeo concept idea is a possible direction. And we

can change the platform towards a mid-engined layout just the same, so we have many options.”

Ruf’s own production predictions remain cautious. “But it is clear the demand is there,” Estonia says. Alois adds: “People have a special place in their heart for the way we do things.

If you see how much they are willing to invest in a car’s retro look, you can see there is a need.

“It is difficult to make our performance engines meet the regulations, but thanks to very good catalytic converters and other tech, we manage to do just that without compromising on the product.”

An old sticker on the door at Ruf says ‘50 Jahre Leidenschaft Heckmotor’, or ‘50 years of passion for the rear engine’. That is not about to change any time soon. Even when in Stuttgart the halcyon days of the petrol-powered engine are over, it’s clear that in Bavaria one man will hold the fort for the flat-six for as long as he can. Johan Dillen

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S T A R T E R

About-turn for the Mille Miglia

SALÒ

BRESCIA

DESENZANO VERONA

SIRMIONE

This year the famous road race will, for the first time in its history, follow an anti-clockwise route from Brescia to Rome and back again

PARMA

MODENA

BOLOGNA Passo della Cisa

Passo della Raticosa Passo della Futa

VIAREGGIO

PRATO

PISA

MONTEVARCHI AREZZO

ALL BEING WELL, the 39th reenactment of the Mille Miglia will start from Brescia on Wednesday May 12, head to Rome and then return to Brescia on May 15. So far, so good. But… for the first time ever in the event’s near-century-long history, the route will be anticlockwise rather than clockwise.

From Brescia, the cars will head towards the Tyrrhenian coast and stop in Viareggio, leaving the next day for Rome. The third leg will start in the capital, head north and end beyond the Apennines, in Bologna.

The fourth, and last, leg will finish with the traditional arrival in Brescia.

This time, too, the route takes in three mountain passes; the Cisa Pass on the first leg, and the Futa and Raticosa Passes on the third day.

Although the Mille Miglia route varies every year, some sections remain unchanged. By reversing the direction of the circuit, experienced crews get a new challenge, and the towns and villages through which the route passes experience the event in a different way.

Never before has the course run anti-clockwise; when it was devised in December 1926 by the ‘Four Musketeers’ – journalist Giovanni Canestrini, Regio Automobil Club

area secretary Renzo Castagneto, and enthusiasts Aymo Maggi and Franco Mazzotti – it was Mazzotti who realised that their new 1600km route corresponded to 1000 miles. They named it the Coppa delle Mille Miglia (Thousand-Mile Cup), and the basic route has been stuck to ever since.

The only exception was in 1939, when the event was temporarily banned, and instead a circuit between Brescia, Cremona and Mantua was lapped nine times and called the Brescia Grand Prix of the Mille Miglia.

Even on post-WW2 Italy’s wartorn roads, the Mille Miglia continued on its clockwise route, until two fatal crashes in 1957 saw it banned again.

An attempt to keep it going through 1958, ’59 and ’60 by sticking to legal speeds between closed-road and circuit stages failed, and it wasn’t until Alfa staged a re-enactment in 1968 that the old route saw action again.

In 1977 the event returned in the retrospective format we know today, and since 1987 it’s run every year – although the 2020 edition had to be delayed until October and run with reduced numbers. This year, the organisers are banking on 375 historic cars, followed by modern alternativefuel models on the 1000 Miglia Green.

More details at www.1000miglia.it.

CASTIGLIONE DELLA PESCAIA

GROSSETO

ORVIETO

ROME

MILLE MIGLIA SCHEDULE 1ST LEG / MAY 12, WEDNESDAY Brescia to Viareggio 2ND LEG / MAY 13, THURSDAY Viareggio to Rome 3RD LEG / MAY 14, FRIDAY Rome to Bologna 4TH LEG / MAY 15, SATURDAY Bologna to Brescia

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S T A R T E R

Amelia Island gets weirder...

Already known for its off-the-wall classes, this year’s Florida concours will star the one-off Tasco and other oddities over its rescheduled May 2021 weekend

WHAT DOES THE Amelia Island Concours d’Elegance do better than any other event? The weird stuff!

Past years have seen such curiosities as the Cars of the Cowboys and What Were They Thinking classes.

But for the 2021 Amelia Island – already made unusual by being scheduled for May 20-23 instead of the usual mid-March – one of the headline attractions goes straight to the heart of the matter with the

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Weird and Wonderful class. Its highlights will include the 1948 Tasco, TV star Wayne Carini’s wacky 1963 Corvair Futura and the remarkable 2008 Vetter Extra Terrestrial Vehicle.

The Tasco came about when a group of investors decided to build a suitable American sports car for a European-type racing event to be held at Watkins Glen, New York.

One of that group was automotive

designer Gordon Buehrig, who’s best known for his acclaimed designs of the Auburn 851 and the ‘coffin-nose’ Cord 810/812. He was responsible for the design and production of the prototype Tasco – an acronym for The American Sports Car Company.

Under the radical aluminium bodywork was a tuned 150bhp Mercury V8 engine sat in a highly modified 1947 Mercury chassis. Car design at the time was being inspired by exciting aircraft of the day, such as the Lockheed P-38 Lightning; it was also in 1948 that Cadillacs grew tailfins. Buehrig took the aircraft theme further, covering the Tasco’s front wheels with individual, steerable glassfibre fairings in the style of the 1932 Boeing P-26 ‘Peashooter’ fighter.

Meanwhile, the roof had a pair of transparent lift-off Plexiglass panels attached to a solid centre section – a T-top style that Buehrig went on to patent (to his financial advantage when Chevrolet introduced a T-top on the 1968 Corvette). Inside, the aircraft theme was continued with a binnacle and hand controls.

The development and production cost for the car was $57,000, and the production version had been

expected to sell for around $7500.

You won’t be surprised to hear that the project came to nothing, and Buehrig eventually distanced himself from the prototype, claiming that it was designed more by a “committee of investors” than his own hand, and joking that it was “my Edsel”.

This lone prototype is now homed at the Auburn Cord Duesenberg Automobile Museum in Indiana, US, and May’s event will mark its firstever appearance at Amelia Island.

Of the other confirmed class entrants, one of the weirdest is the Corvair Futura of Chasing Classic Cars’ Wayne Carini; a centre-steer predecessor to the mini-van based on a Corvair Greenbrier. And then there’s Florida’s own Extra Terrestrial Vehicle designed by Mike Vetter and consisting of bits of Chevy Cobalt, Cobalt SS and Aveo, Toyota Echo and MR2, Honda Insight and Porsche Boxster under the skin. It’s said to be more practical than it appears, even sporting a useful hatchback, but it does look… well, weird!

Amelia Island Concours d’Elegance is set to take place on May 20-23 at the Ritz-Carlton, Amelia Island, Florida, US. More on www.ameliaconcours.org.

PETER HARHOLDT

LEFT AND ABOVE Bonkers Tasco took styling inspiration from contemporary aircraft, but never made it beyond this prototype.

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INTERVIEW

Vasek Polak The Czech war hero and Porsche icon was worshipped in marque circles. Vasek Jr remembers his legendary father, who died in 1997

What do you view as your father’s greatest achievements?

Being a clever business man, having great knowledge of the machines he loved and being tenacious. He became the first Porsche-only dealer in the US – his greatest achievement, of which he was very proud.

My father’s accomplishments mesmerise me. In 1948, when the Communists took over in the Czech Republic, he departed for Germany thinking that the regime wouldn’t last. If things didn’t change, he had a plan to get us over. I was one year old.

I didn’t see him again until I arrived in Los Angeles on January 11, 1966.

We had communicated, and I was in awe at what he was doing. He was an incredible mechanic, and I was always intrigued by cars. And most sons follow their father’s footsteps...

Did you work for him immediately?

Yes. But like everybody else, I had to start out sweeping floors – even though I was a trained mechanic.

What were your favourite cars?

All of them! On the Porsche side, my 1957 Sunroof Coupé was a dream come true. I drove many 356s and 2.0L Carreras, and I had a 911R before joining the USAAF. Father sold it for me, and he replaced it with a 904-064 he acquired from

Sepp Greger. I loved that car dearly.

Spending many summers driving a 959S in Europe is the all-time high mark, and I cherish my brief go in a McLaren F1. I have driven a 550 Spyder, 906-powered Elva, 906, 908 and 910 – but never a 917...

Which race drivers did you like?

Our own Jerry Titus and Milt Minter were my heroes, as were George Follmer and Hurley Haywood, who are friends to this day. Before my time it was Jack McAfee, and in the CanAm days I truly admired Jody Scheckter for his fine abilities.

Did Vasek talk about the war?

Of course! He fought Hitler’s occupation in every way he could.

Near the end of the war, the resistance got word that all Prague bridges over the Vltava River would be blown up to prevent the Allies’ advance. Father drove a pyrotechnic specialist around the city, disarming these devices.

En route home, they continued on foot after encountering a tank. Yet while my father got safely across a road, his compatriot was shot in the legs. Father dragged him to safety, but the gunner spotted him when he went to seek help, and tore a fist-sized bullet hole in his back. Miraculously he missed all the vital organs, and both father and his friend survived.

Did his experiences affect him?

He was just happy to have survived, but he soon became frustrated by the oppressive Communists. The regime started to nationalise big companies, and worked through every layer of the then very productive economy, using fabricated reasons to confiscate everything. They’d jail people and take control of their businesses.

A spy told father that he was to be taken over next, so he prepared his escape to Germany, where he had many friends and trading partners.

How will you protect his legacy?

Our family has always contributed to the Porsche community, and the book we’re currently creating feels like the right contribution to make.

It’s also important to gather the stories and photos in one place, to pass the history to future generations.

A lot has been written about Vasek, but nothing from our perspective.

The new family-sanctioned Vasek Polak Collection (www.vasekpolak collection.com) changes that. We’re really enjoying producing products, engaging in collaborations and sponsoring events such as Taste of Motorsports. Plenty more projects will blossom from the book.

TOP AND ABOVE Polak was an icon in the Porsche world; son Vasek Jr will ensure his legacy lives on.

What did you learn from Vasek?

To never give up.

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BEST OF THE BOOKS

RIGHT Twovolume set is the most in-depth look at the legendary F1 GTR race car ever.

Our pick of the latest publications for your reading pleasure, from Formula 1 to ‘secret Fords’ PEKING TO PARIS: THE ULTIMATE MOTORING CHALLENGE

NORBERT SINGER: MY RACING LIFE WITH PORSCHE 1970-2004 His first job when he started at Porsche in the spring of 1970 was to perfect the 917. Next up for engineer Norbert Singer was the 911 Carrera RSR, then the World Championship-winning 935, the lightest and fastest 911 in history.

And then the Le Mans-winning 936, the Carrera Turbo RSR, the 935, the ground-breaking 956 and so on, until 2004. What a career!

So this superb 350-page book from Sportfahrer, written

by Wilfried Müller, is a must for any Porsche fan – or anyone who appreciates automotive greatness. www.sportfahrer-zentrale.com

You know those post-event publications that are great for those who took part, but no use to anyone else? This isn’t one of them! In fact, it’s one of the best books on an event we’ve seen.

Author Patrick Debusseré was a competitor on the 2019 Peking to Paris rally, achieving a long-time dream. But he went a step further by documenting the rally; not just the results, but the stories – from desert camping in a Ferrari 208GT4, to recovering from a nasty crash in a 911.

And then there’s the stunning imagery, pulled from a wide range of photographers rather than relying on just one or two.

The current edition is sold out, but there’s a new one on the way with extra rally information. www.peking-to-paris.com

BOOK REVIEW

FORMULA 1: CAR BY CAR 1990-99

MR LE MANS: TOM KRISTENSEN He’s won Le Mans nine times and has been racing for more than 30 years – but how much do you know about Tom Kristensen?

This very honest, thoughtful book gets to the heart of his psyche, talking of his battles and setbacks that sometimes seemed impossible to overcome, including his terrible accident in 2007. It was voted Sports Book of the Year when published in Kristensen’s native Denmark. Now it’s been translated into English, and is well worth a read. www.evropublishing.com

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No prizes for guessing what this, the latest in a series from Evro Publishing, is about... but the surprise if you don’t know these books is the depth they go into.

Formula 1 in the 1990s was generally calmer than in the previous decades, except for the terrible deaths in 1994 of Roland Ratzenberger and Ayrton Senna, which led to a much greater emphasis on safety.

All this is documented, along with the results and individual cars in a year-by-year format that suits the subject matter. The decade’s most dominant teams – McLaren and Williams – are covered in depth, but it’s interesting to see the more obscure outfits, such as Andrea Moda and Venturi.

A great book for the F1 fan, packed with information and more than 550 photographs. www.evropublishing.com

Definitive history of the ultimate F1 Peter Stevens, designer of the legendary McLaren F1, looks at the latest, greatest tome on the model’s hugely successful GTR racing variant

S T A R T E R

VERY SELDOM DOES one get the opportunity to review a book by the Mayor of Buckingham – particularly a title as important as this. Ultimate McLaren F1 GTR is only the second book specifically about the race version of the legendary and muchdocumented McLaren F1 three-seat road car, the first being Michael Cotton’s F1 McLaren GTR published in the late 1990s.

Author Mark Cole saw all of the F1 GTR’s race history both as a journalist and as a commentator and reporter for Eurosport’s coverage.

His book is on a much grander scale than Cotton’s – almost 650 pages as opposed to 170. His two volumes start with an historical account of Bruce McLaren’s journey from restoring a 1929 Austin Seven Ulster, to use in motor sport in his home country of New Zealand at the age of 16, to his successful racing career as both a driver and a constructor. Bruce’s ‘pet project’, the M6GT road version

of the glorious CanAm M6, is covered in some detail in the early chapters, too. I was lucky enough to travel back from the 1970 BOAC 1000km race at Brands Hatch as a passenger in his personal M6GT, and quite startling it was, too. Later on, having the opportunity to be part of the McLaren F1 project somehow seemed logical to me.

Every race the F1 GTR competed in is covered in detail here, and its remarkably successful racing career cannot be over emphasised – particularly the battles between the Ray Bellm/Michael Cane-run Gulfsponsored team and the David Pricerun West and Harrods-sponsored teams. The Price car won the 1995 championship driven by Thomas Bscher and John Nielsen, and the Gulf car won the 1996 series driven

by Bellm and James Weaver.

The opposing teams took rather different approaches to development, some of which the author’s research

‘Cole saw all of the GTR’s race history both as a journalist and as a Eurosport commentator’ manages to reveal. He even gets to the bottom of the clutch-release issues encountered by most McLaren entrants during the 1995 Le Mans, when the Paul Lanzante-run Ueno Clinic car scored a remarkable victory in one of the wettest races ever seen at the historic La Sarthe circuit.

Ultimate McLaren F1 GTR is copiously illustrated with great images, many from John Brooks. He attended every race, and somehow always seemed to be at the right place at the right time. The second volume of the book covers the history of every race car, each of

the competing teams and all of the drivers, with great quotes from the personalities involved including Ron Dennis. He comes across as genuinely surprised by how well the car was received and how successful it was. Jeff Hazell, who ran the customer programme for the F1 GTR, told Dennis and Gordon Murray he expected five customer cars might be sold. The total turned out to be 27, built between 1995 and 1997.

The book’s production is up to the great standard that Porter Press is well known for, and while the price is quite high for the standard edition, at £450, the binding is lovely, the paper and printing are high quality, and the slip case that holds the two volumes makes it a fine buy for any enthusiast of this period of endurance racing. A very special £1500 limited edition is aimed at owners past and present, libraries and museums, as well. www.porterpress.co.uk

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BOOK REVIEW

Fords that didn’t make the cut In Secret Fords, author Steve Saxty shows models we never got to see on the road. A fascinating read and a feast for your eyes, as well

THIS BOOK IS a concept you could create for any car brand.

But it’s probably unique to the Blue Oval that a stroll through the archives’ design proposals results in a two-volume set, focusing solely on the work at Ford of Europe from the 1960s onwards.

Secret Fords, Volume One, brings both good news and bad over its 306 pages. We should count ourselves lucky that we never had to see some of the design proposals pop up in a showroom. On the other hand, it also brings us some real gems that we would have loved to get our hands on. A full-blown RS version of the first Fiesta, anyone?

Former Ford product designer Saxty has excelled himself in making this one-marque-only book interesting for car lovers in general,

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talking us through the decisionmaking processes that resulted in legendary models such as the Fiesta, Escort, Sierra and Scorpio, with input from all involved.

Saxty was given access to the Ghia archive, documenting how the once-famed Italian design house was primarily occupied with creating the wildest concepts under Ford ownership. Different proposals to take the Capri to a new level prove interesting, even though the Blue Oval eventually never followed up on them. This was the case with most of the Ghia projects, such as the GT70 or a 1978 proposal for an Escort-based MPV – a visionary idea in retrospect.

Saxty also relates the story of one of the most famous ‘should have happened’ Fords in a bit more detail,

bringing plenty of background in words and pictures to the Escort RS1700T. Surprisingly, the Sierra RS500 Cosworth and the RS200 feature only briefly, however.

Secret Fords, published by Seven Spoke, is a thoroughly researched, well documented account of Ford of Europe’s workings from the end of the 1960s through to the end of the 1980s. For £39.99, it’s incredible value for money. The Collector’s Edition expands with an extra booklet containing even more unseen photos in a boxed and numbered set. Priced at £69.99, this is still good value. Volume Two will follow shortly in 2021, covering the more recent Ford proposals from the 1990s and early 2000s. www.stevesaxty.com Johan Dillen

ABOVE Unseen Capri and Escort RS1700T are among the ‘should have beens’ explored in new book.

Nothing is off-the-shelf when it comes to Rodin. And that includes the fasteners. From individual rods of titanium, each bolt that goes into a Rodin megacar has been carefully designed to ensure the highest quality finished product. Not only the lightest but also aestheticaly beautiful, each piece is a part of a work of art.

The individual attention to detail doesn’t stop there. Each Rodin vehicle is setup with the owner present at our state-of-the-art facility in the picturesque New Zealand hinterland, ensuring the perfect partnership with their new performance machine.

EVEN THE BOLTS ARE MADE BESPOKE FOR EACH VEHICLE.

Ultimate ride comfort and optimum performance are the Rodin focus. Drive style, seating position, even the exterior finishes are all considered and adjusted to match owner preference.

You wouldn’t just buy a suit off the shelf, so why would you purchase a car that wasn’t made to fit you perfectly. This is your life. Take control of the wheel.

Start your journey today at rodin-cars.com .

RODIN-CARS.COM

S T A R T E R

FIRST DRIVE

Sideways engineering This is how the Volvo P1800 always should have been; kicking, screaming, sliding endlessly between snowbanks. At least, that’s according to Cyan Racing...

THE FIRST THING you hear is the whooshing turbo. Then the growling engine, whose abrupt peaks make it clear that the rear tyres are losing their battle to match 410bhp to the icy surface. A blue dot is quickly growing, trailing a cloud of powder snow. One Scandinavian flick sets up the P1800, followed by a long drift over the hill before seamlessly transitioning into the next corner.

We have come to Åre, Sweden’s St Moritz, but not with skiing in mind.

We’re with touring car specialist Cyan Racing. This is the first time Cyan has let its Volvo restomod out on the ice. Before 2015, the company was known as Polestar. From racing Volvos in the Swedish Touring Car

Championship, the team evolved until it campaigned C30s and S60s for the factory. Polestar also created performance parts for road cars.

In 2015, Volvo bought all nonracing activities and the Polestar name, only to spin it off as a standalone, luxury electric-car brand. The race team continued as Cyan Racing, bringing home a WTCC world title in 2017. Then Volvo pulled out...

Cyan’s general manager Hans Bååth says: “In addition, the switch from WTCC to WTCR meant we moved to much more fixed and less challenging regulations, leaving some of our engineers with nothing much to do. CEO Christian Dahl decided to explore new ways of generating

OPPOSITE Cyan P1800’s handling is beautifully benign but great fun – particularly on snowy surfaces.

FROM ABOVE Beefy restyling, a reworked 420bhp 2.0-litre engine and a tastefully enhanced cabin.

DANIEL AHLGREN/JOEL CARLSSON

an income for Cyan. He’d always believed we should have our own income to finance racing, and not depend on constructor money. With the Polestar programme for Volvo’s road cars, we had just that. Now, we needed something new; a road car of our own to sell. We settled on the P1800, Swedish icon par excellence.”

“We wanted to keep as much as possible from the 1964 donor car,” says lead engineer Mattias Evensson.

“But we couldn’t reach our targets for performance and driving fun.”

Instead, Cyan decided to do a restomod – a modern make-over.

The result carries a recognisable P1800 shape but retains hardly any original parts. Says Bååth: “We keep the underlying roof structure, floor panels and VIN. The state of the donor car is irrelevant; you can find crappy ones in Sweden for €5000.”

All the outer panels are replaced with carbon versions, bonded to the chassis. The floor is reinforced with high-tensile steel. All the chrome details look original, but are machined out of aluminium and polished.

Cyan opted to tweak the P1800’s design. The wheels are moved slightly forward and a shorter rear overhang moves the cabin back visually. With the bigger wheels, the central crease now runs between the arches, and chrome trim is visible only on the rear shoulder line. A quick filler in

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the bootlid is beautifully crafted.

Underneath, suspension is now double wishbones front and rear.

Even with all the strengthening, the resultant 990kg bodyweight is 80kg less than for the 1964 P1800.

With a dry click, Evensson pulls open the hood to display the crown jewel – essentially the touring S60’s four-cylinder: “We know it by heart; we’ve been racing it for ten years.”

Here, it’s grown from 1.6 to 2.0 litres.

The air intake’s been modified for a retro look, individual throttle bodies have been made, there’s a four-intotwo Inconel exhaust, a Motec enginemanagement programme was written and, of course, there’s that BorgWarner turbo, maximum boost 1.7 bar. The result: 420bhp at 7000rpm and 455Nm at 6000rpm. The rev limiter cuts in at 7700rpm. It’s quite a jump from the original’s 105bhp.

Power is transmitted to the rear via a carbon prop. Moving the wheels forward has had other benefits as well: “We are looking at near-perfect 47/53 weight distribution.”

No electric? “It would’ve weighed 1500kg, and was not the car we wanted to do,” says Bååth. “We want

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to celebrate the culmination of the classic powertrain.”

Surprisingly, there’s no strippedout cabin here. On the contrary, the level of refinement is astonishing.

The mix of leather and felt on the dash brings feelings of Scandinavianstyled understated luxury. But the racing genes are equally clear in the rear roll cage, two bucket seats, fourpoint harnesses and compact threespoke Momo steering wheel. All the buttons look classic yet are brand new. Keeping the original look of the P1800 clocks and Swedish script just adds to the cool. The gearlever is in the original position, but it operates a dogleg five-speed Holinger made just for this car. It’s one of the besthandling manual gearboxes ever.

Starting is via a classic twist of a tiny key. The engine note is present, invigorating but not aggressive. Just like in a Ferrari, the gears click into place with a distinct metallic sound.

Travel between the ratios is quite long, but the guidance is spot on.

Here in Sweden, winter nights set in shortly after lunch. My left foot searches for the high-beam button… which has limited effect. Cyan wanted

‘Just epic! It serves as a reminder that driving fun has nothing to do with being the quickest’ to keep the experience analogue, so no trick LEDs here. And no ESP or traction control to keep me off the snowbanks, either. There is not even ABS – just spikes on the tyres, a Holinger-developed limited-slip diff and a long-travel throttle pedal.

Even at 3000rpm, the rear spikes give in, sending the P1800 sideways on the straight. Care is needed, but two things are clear. The front spikes do find grip, leading to easy turn-in.

And the handling is beautifully benign – no sudden movements, and all the time in the world to react. Don’t slide into a corner? You just need a bit of throttle to get the rear out of shape, and from that moment on, you decide how sideways you want to continue.

There is plenty of lock left on the electrically powered steering, yet the

feeling is direct. Even before you have reached the apex, you’re fully steering on the throttle. This car is just epic. It serves as a reminder that driving fun has nothing to do with being the quickest. Cyan has not yet timed the P1800, but 0-100km/h is expected to dip below five seconds, with a c.240km/h top speed.

As is to be expected with a car from a race team, the owner can adapt settings of the Öhlins dampers, change the brake balance in the pedal box or even opt for different gearbox ratios. And at the same time, you can hop in the P1800 for a quick trip to the grocer’s. It is no more difficult to drive around town than a Honda.

The only real downside is the starting price – even though $500k doesn’t actually seem like much taking into account the amount of work and the thoroughness of the transformation. But this is definitely new territory for a Volvo. Cyan currently has two orders and can build up to ten cars per year if the demand is there. Specs are, of course, completely individual. First deliveries are expected towards the end of 2021.

Johan Dillen

1 – 4 SEPTEMBER 2021 BLENHEIM PALACE

S T A R T E R LEFT Still a legend after all these years, Honda’s modern-day Super Cub reflects its tiny ancestor’s irresistible spec.

The small bike that made a big impact A mighty heart beats inside Honda’s diminutive Super Cub – the tiny two-wheeler that conquered the world. Andrew English reports on the everyman classic’s history and resurrection

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SOICHIRO HONDA DIDN’T hold with the Super Cub, the world’s bestselling, powered, wheeled vehicle. It was his money man and business partner, Takeo Fujisawa, who recognised the potential of a simple, but robust and reliable, motor scooter when he toured Europe with the racing-obsessed Soichiro.

The latter was a mess of contradictions. He was driven, of course (as one former Honda boss once told me: “He ruled by fear”).

Yet he was also surprisingly mindful of his race-team riders and drivers, as well as being willing to change his mind and get on board. That’s exactly what he did with the Super Cub. Fujisawa’s original spec was irresistible: a toe-and-heel gearshift that wouldn’t scuff the toe caps of a Japanese businessman’s shoes, a

semi-auto transmission to remove the terror of a manual clutch, leg shields to keep mud off trousers, and one-handed operation so that a tray of soba noodles could be carried.

Not that this was a throwback to a pre-World War Two motorcycling idyll. The use of polyethylene plastic for the panels was a first, large 17inch wheels gave stability, and the engine and transmission mounted centrally on the frame gave better ride and handling compared with the more common practice of placing them on the rear suspension, which added unsprung weight.

That accurately produced, pressedsteel unitary frame (called step-thru or ‘underbone’) was strong and quick to build, while the 4.5bhp, 50cc, OHV, four-stroke engine was quiet and clean compared with a two-stroke. Its low compression made it easy to start and allowed it to run on reduced-octane fuel.

Then there was the huge Suzuka facility, with a capacity to build 50,000 Cubs a month. This was risky but genius, with economies of scale that at full capacity were said to save up to 18 percent on production costs.

Honda wasn’t the first to target a new motorcycling audience, upon the Super Cub’s debut in 1958. The British and Italian bike industries had been struggling with the same issues for years. BSA chairman Edward Turner thought (wrongly) that the new generation of small-motorcycle owners would graduate onto bigger machines. He also believed Honda had gambled too much with the Super Cub, and that Suzuka was a huge risk. Honda, however, had the high-quality, innovative product to back up its claims and ambitions.

“You Meet the Nicest People on a Honda” ran Grey Advertising’s cutesy copy line (lifted from a UCLA student’s project paper), and it worked. With more than 100 million sales over 63 years, the Super Cub was, and still is, a phenomenon.

Even in the UK, at its peak, Honda was selling 20,000 C50, C70 and C90 derivatives a year. Students, char ladies, gardeners or company directors... they all rode a Super Cub. The Mini was considered classless transport, but the Honda was just transport for everyone. Throughout the 160 countries in which it’s been sold, you’ll find the Super Cub used for everything from carrying entire

‘With more than 100 million sales over 63 years, the Super Cub is a phenomenon’ families, ladders, straw bales, potbellied pigs and other livestock, to setting Bonneville speed records and pulling ploughs. It’s been converted into taxis, or just been used and loved, proving the efficacy and strength of its trademarked design time after time.

Not that Honda envisaged the Caterpillar Challenge in its brief for the reloaded retro model we have here. The event sees 14 engineers and friends from the eponymous company, mounted on tiny, old and underpowered machines in an annual challenge of tackling some of the toughest roads available, from the Isle of Man TT course to the Yorkshire Peaks and the flat, sandblasted roads of Normandy in France.

The most recent was a traverse of the Derbyshire Peak District. I took

part on a pearl Niltava Blue example of the retro C125 reintroduced into Britain a while ago after a sales lacuna of 20 years. It might look like the original, but it’s comprehensively updated. The 125cc, single-cylinder, air-cooled, SOHC, two-valve engine is shared with the Honda Monkey and Grom, and delivers 9.5bhp at 7500rpm and 7.7lb ft at 5000rpm.

There’s a four-speed gearbox with a centrifugal clutch and 67mph top speed – if you are flat over the bars.

There’s even a keyless smart-key setup, although it takes a bit of learning.

It has anti-lock cycling for the front hydraulic disc brake, and there’s a rear drum, LED lights, telescopic forks and a twin-shock rear. The seat height is 780mm, so most can ride it comfortably, and its 109kg weight makes it simple to tug onto the centre stand. With economy comfortably over 120mpg (I even saw 160mpg), you’ll get at least 110 miles out of the 3.7-litre tank, despite the wildly pessimistic fuel gauge.

The tank under the red saddle is accessed via a hidden button, which also reveals the catch for the hinged side panel. One startling omission is a pillion-seat option. The £3499 Super Cub hasn’t been homologated with a pillion, in spite of the fact that the steel frame has the drillings to accept one. In fact, the only extra you can buy is a £100 luggage rack.

London’s M25 motorway is an unforgiving place to start any trip. In the Friday dusk, with lorries hauling home for the weekend, the little Honda felt tiny and vulnerable. Extra visibility from my Dainese suit gave scant peace of mind, and I latched onto the back of a pallet artic, getting an aerodynamic draught round to the A1 heading north. When I arrived at my brother’s house in Rutland, the first beer didn’t touch the sides.

The following day I was on a more suitable route, winding along tiny, charming roads through Rutland, Leicestershire and Derbyshire to Castleton in the Peak District. With fine views and decent weather, the little Honda was in its element. Most vehicles have a best speed range – the Super Cub’s is 45-55mph; the engine makes a kite-string thrapp, while the skinny tyres keep an intimate contact with the road, with no threat from the “skid demon” on the “grease mud” invoked in the translation of the 1962 Honda guide

for US riders. I didn’t meet the “festive dog” or “wandering horse”, either, although there was a young woman on a huge Clydesdale that looked as though it could stamp my mighty Super Cub into oblivion.

Yet modern roads can be cruel to these tiddlers. Derby, for example, where doctrinaire road building and cretinous town planning funnel roaring traffic onto massive concrete junctions where tiny two-wheelers can be eaten alive. The trouble with taking the least travelled routes is that they aren’t signposted, and even my Beeline sat-nav doesn’t like using them. On this trip, I found that entrances to ancient roads had been disguised with cloned housing estates and cankerous retail parks; others had been converted into wide trunk roads. The Honda didn’t seem to mind as I rode round searching for unmarked turnings, though.

A day in the Peaks proved the Super Cub to be up for any challenge, even the lung-busting Winnats Pass.

Following a second night in the Castleton Losehill Hall Youth Hostel, I was up with the sparrows, heading back down South. En route, I discovered the delights of the A515 rising from Buxton 1300ft above sea level onto Sterndale Moor.

Thrapping along at steady speeds, the views were rapturous; brumalhued copses and spectral mist rose out of valleys stretching as far as I could see. Entering Staffordshire, I stopped to admire the architecture at Yoxall on the River Swarbourn, but then the route became victim to a band of architects who should be corralled into soulless estates of their own devising to suffer the affront of ugly brickwork and roof tiles, and lack of humanity and community.

The Super Cub held on gamely against buffeting from Birmingham motorway traffic. Upon arriving home, I brewed a tea and sponged down the little machine. It had earned its stripes over 650 miles in three days – even if my back was aching.

Super Cubs have ridden the banks of the River Musi in Hyderabad, buzzed along the Silk Road thoroughfares of Samarkand and cruised the campuses of Californian universities. You name the place, and this little Honda will have been there, just doing its job, its nobility confirmed. So, salute the Super Cub; it truly is the people’s motorcycle...

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When copies become classics

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT DP214, DB4GT and DB6 Short-Chassis Volante replicas will be coming up at auction in April.

How do you value honest replicas of very special cars? The sale of these three Aston Martins will reveal how the market reacts

‘None of the cars is what it initially seems – but all of them are honestly documented’

IF THERE’S AN argument for replicas, recreations, copies – call them what you like – it is the enjoyment that long-time UK classic dealer Martin Brewer has had from these three Aston Martins. None of the cars is what it initially seems – but all of them are honestly documented.

The most valuable of these is the replica of the famous DP214 project car. The real thing was the third Aston project model to be built in an (unsuccessful) attempt to win Le Mans again, along with DP212 and DP215. Just one example each of 212 and 215 was built, but two DP214s were made and raced. One crashed at the Nürburgring in 1964, killing driver Brian Hetreed; subsequently, it was destroyed by the factory.

During the 1980s, an American collector claimed he had restored the remains of the crashed DP214.

This was soon proven to be untrue, but the car was later sold as a replica.

Its panels and chassis had been created on the original buck, and

one further body was made at the same time. It’s this second body that formed the basis of Martin’s car.

He bought it in a still-unfinished state in 2005. He completed the build, prepared it for competition and gained HTP papers. It has a correct DB4GT engine with 12-plug head and 50 DCOE Webers, DB4GT brakes and Borrani wheels.

Martin has raced his replica for the past 14 years at the likes of Le Mans, Spa, Paul Ricard, Pau, Dijon, Laguna Seca and various British circuits. It’s also been displayed at many concours, taking second place at the 2007 Aston Martin Concours.

What do you supplement a DP214 with? How about a DB4GT copy…

This one was a French-registered DB4, which in 1992 was shortened to DB4GT length by Aston specialist Bodyline. When Martin bought it five years ago he had it completely rebuilt, and had the standard DB4 reworked to 4.2-litre GT spec, again including the 12-plug head. It was

fitted with GT seats, long-range fuel tank and Borrani wires.

The third car, belonging to one of Martin’s customers, is a copy of the DB6 Short-Chassis Volante, of which 37 were produced. These were built on remaining DB5 chassis during early DB6 production, and ended up as looking mostly DB5 but with DB6 bumpers, rear lights and upholstery. This car started life as a DB6 saloon, and was converted

by Goldsmith & Young to accurate Short-Chassis Volante specification.

Martin’s now decided to sell the trio to fund his semi-retirement. The Astons will be offered for sale by Historics Auctioneers at its collector car auction in Monaco on April 23.

The DP214 is estimated at €1-1.3m, a fraction of the value of the real thing; the DB4GT at €675,000-815,000, a third of the value of a true GT; the Volante is at €650,000-785,000, half the value of one of the original 37.

See www.historics.co.uk for full details and bidder registration.

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LEFT Praga Super Piccolo last raced in 1934, but a direct line can be traced to today’s hi-tech R1.

Praga’s back – but it never went away While you might not have heard of it, the Czech race winner has an automotive history that dates back to 1907. Now it’s got a new UK base...

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AMIDST THE MANY niche supercars and track-day weapons that spring up periodically around the world, some never to be seen again, you might have noted the Praga R1 over recent years. Having dominated Britcar Endurance racing last year, a new version is about to be released – so it’s in the news once again.

Maybe the name rings a bell? In fact, Praga was a mighty presence in Central Europe during the first half of the 20th century, and dates back to the late 1800s as a heavy industrial manufacturer of everything from bridges to steam trains. It moved into vehicle production in the early 1900s, making its first car in 1907 and becoming a significant manufacturer of cars, motorcycles, commercial vehicles and aircraft.

Praga-built trucks in particular dominated the roads in the firm’s native Czechoslovakia. However, the company also developed a wide range of passenger cars, especially during the 1930s. These included the sporting Super Piccolo, which was last raced in 1934.

Production declined after World War Two, though, and government control during the 1960s dictated that Praga concentrate on making transmissions rather than complete vehicles. Skoda, instead, was favoured as the country’s car manufacturer of choice, with Tatra instructed to build luxury cars and trucks.

With the fall of Communism in Czechoslovakia in 1989, Praga no longer had to answer to the government’s policies – but its management had no experience of reacting to consumer demand, because for years it had been told what to produce. The company was still a massive presence in and around Prague, however, and gradually its automotive side recovered, finding new products to market.

In the mid-1990s it introduced a range of off-road motorcycles, which

was followed in the early 2000s with specialist go-anywhere trucks (a Praga finished fifth in the truck category of the recent Dakar Rally), and then in 2009 by racing karts.

Unsure of the car market, it stayed away until 2012, when it launched the R1 and R4S race cars, followed by the street-legal R1R. Current engineering director Jan Martinek is a graduate of the UK’s Brunel University and a former suspension engineer at Skoda Motorsport. He joined in July 2013 to help develop the R1 for the road.

“Praga was huge when I grew up in the 1980s,” he says. “It had multiple locations around Prague, one of which was at the end of my street. Everyone knew Praga, especially because one truck, the V3S, had been manufactured here for almost 40 years. Tens of thousands were made worldwide.”

Now Praga is opening a new operations HQ in the UK, halfway between Manchester Airport and Oulton Park Circuit, to act as a

‘The focus is clearly on the racing, but another road-legal Praga R1 would be a logical development’ gateway for Praga to the Middle East and North America, as well as a base for its race team. The latest R1, developed and built near the Slovakia Ring, uses the same 365bhp Alpine four-cylinder turbo engine and carbonfibre monocoque, but has been extensively revised, giving 15 percent more downforce and five percent less drag.

What next? The focus is clearly on the racing, but another road-legal R1 would be a logical development.

MYANMAR (BURMA)

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FIRST DRIVE

Spot the difference Ian Callum was never happy with his Vanquish design; now he’s fronting this redesigned, re-engineered version

AH, THE VANQUISH. Styled by Ian Callum, launched in 2001 as Aston Martin’s flagship model, but now a little overlooked and misunderstood.

Callum, though, has decided to give it a second life, rectifying the bits he never liked. And since leaving Jaguar, he too is enjoying a second life at the Callum design agency, free of corporate speeches and having to manage a design team of 400.

So this is the Callum Vanquish 25 by R-Reforged, a Swiss-based engineering company that Callum’s outfit is linked with. The ‘25’ is the maximum number that will be built.

“I have a passion for the Vanquish, but it was designed in just 15 weeks and we only had one design review, with Jac Nasser and Bob Dover,” Ian recalls. “I was always unhappy with the DB7 lamps at the front, and we had to put indicators in the front ‘sugar scoops’. The rear venturi was all wrong, and we had to add rear reflectors at the last minute. The side window graphic was made up of chopped pieces of XK window surround. The stance is wrong, the wheels are too small and the interior wasn’t what I wanted.”

Although Ian’s name is above the door, the Callum company is run equally by Ian Callum (“my job is to

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sketch ideas”), Tom Bird on the commercial side, David Fairbairn as the programme director and Adam Donfrancesco on engineering. There are also alias modellers, a wealth of engineers and a small trim shop.

Many staff are ex-Jaguar Land Rover.

So onto the new car... and it’s clear how much better the stance is, with a wider track, sitting on much bigger wheels. The sills are new, there’s a front splitter and larger rear diffuser, fresh mirrors and window surrounds, plus new front and rear lamps.

It could have looked gauche, but it works. Inside, the difference is even more marked; every panel has been changed, the seats have been redesigned, a luggage tray replaces the rear seats and the thinner-rimmed steering wheel is repositioned.

The re-engineering is extensive.

Bilstein dampers, regraded bushes, stiffer anti-roll bars, a 10mm-lower ride height, up to 60mm-wider track, specific Michelin Pilot Sport tyre compounds and carbon-ceramic brakes. Very few people have driven this car, but we’ve got it for a few hours. It’s a six-speed manual, one of three options available – the others are a tweaked version of the original love/hate automated manual or an eight-speed GM auto.

ABOVE In red, the result of 20 years’ more design experience over the original below; note the front lights, the wheels and the stance.

It feels a good place to be sat in – very different from an original and with modern-day luxuries such as Apple CarPlay. Out on the road it burbles unobtrusively, riding the bumps in a way the Vanquish never did from new. Push it harder and it takes off with a sharply metallic note to the exhaust; the 5.9-litre V12 has been tweaked for an extra 60bhp, taking it to 580bhp, via engine management, new exhaust manifolds and a bit of cylinder-head work.

Where the real difference shows is the composure at speed, and when driven really hard. Accelerate and it squirms so satisfyingly, but driven more sensibly it feels stiffer and more manageable than the original Vanquish but more comfortable, too, which is a good trick.

All this could feel like an assassination job on the original. It’s not – the Vanquish is a fine car.

But the Callum R-Reforged version is better to drive and live with – as you’d hope for £550,000 – although with less of what may become the ‘period charm’ of the original design.

THE MONACO CLASSIQUE A MAJOR SALE OF 120 FINE COLLECTOR CARS

23 APRIL

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Entries include this celebrated 1999 ASTON MARTIN DP214 RECREATION Full FIA papers, impeccable credentials and excellent competition history Estimate: £925,000-£1,000,000 / €1,035,000-€1,118,000

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THE FINEST CARS. THE BEST EXPERIENCE

S T A R T E R

The return of a legend Zagato takes inspiration from classic 1960s supercar to create the 195mph Iso Rivolta GTZ – complete with carbonfibre body and Corvette Z06 drivetrain

COACHBUILDER ZAGATO HAS unveiled its latest creation, and in doing so has resurrected the historic Iso marque. The new model is called the GTZ, and pays homage to the Iso A3 from the 1960s.

The A3 became an automotive icon after scoring class victories at Le Mans in 1964 and 1965, but it is remembered most vividly as a lynchpin of exotic period styling.

Tellingly, American designer Mike Robinson (who penned cars for Bertone), described the original A3 as the forerunner to the Alfa Romeo 33 Stradale and Lamborghini Miura. One example was also famously owned by French rock star Johnny Hallyday.

This new Iso Rivolta GTZ undoubtedly captures the essence of 1960s glamour, but if you think the car is simply a wistful styling exercise then you’re sorely mistaken.

The GTZ’s retro design belies its lightweight two-piece carbonfibre body and Corvette Z06 drivetrain.

The supercharged LT4 6.2-litre V8 has been bored out to 6.8 litres here, propelling the vehicle from 0-60mph in just 3.7 seconds and on to a top speed of 195mph. All this means the newcomer’s performance belongs firmly in the 21st century.

This muscular nature of Zagato’s latest work is one more attribute that will endear the brand to a younger audience. The quest for new fans began with the 2017 release of the Zagato Vision GT for the Gran Turismo video game. This put the brand in front of more than 100 million players, many of whom are millennials.

Iso and Zagato each have long,

LEFT Only 19 examples of Corvette Z06propelled Iso Rivolta GTZ are planned.

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illustrious histories. Both are still owned by the descendants of their respective founders, so the fact that their legacies continue to be nurtured and built upon today is hugely positive.

Zagato is one of Italy’s oldest surviving coachbuilders, having been founded in Milan in 1919 by Ugo Zagato. It is responsible for designing iconic models such as the Alfa Romeo GT Junior and Aston Martin DB4GT Zagato.

Meanwhile, Iso was started in 1939 by Renzo Rivolta, and is famous for the 1950s Isetta bubble car and, of course, the A3. Renzo’s granddaughter Marella Rivolta now describes the GTZ as: “A tribute to my grandfather… a car like the A3 reflected his passion.”

Interestingly, both Iso and Zagato also have previous links to US auto makers, compounding the ItalianAmerican Iso Rivolta GTZ’s doff of the cap to their respective histories.

Similar to the modern machine, the 1960s A3 used a modified Chevrolet 5.4-litre V8 powerplant. This could propel it to 171mph – a staggering figure for the period.

Zagato, on the other hand, previously shaped Dodge’s aggressive Viper ACR-X into the curvaceous Alfa Romeo TZ3 Stradale. The colossal Dodge 8.4-litre V10 engine was detuned to a ‘mere’ 600bhp in this application, topping out at a heady 202mph.

The Iso Rivolta GTZ represents an amalgamation of two influential Italian automotive manufacturers, and with only 19 planned for production it is likely to become highly sought after by collectors.

PHOTOGRAPHY

AU T O S P O R T S I N C A R C H I V E

WOR D S

M AT T S T O N E

Steve McQueen’s motor sport magnum opus turns 50 this year, but opinions on it are still divided. Does it matter that Le Mans was out of control and lacking in storyline? Or is it the greatest racing movie ever made? The people involved – racer, stuntman, actor, producer and McQueen’s son Chad – tell their stories

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‘Every day, I thought I was gonna get killed out there’ 70

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ABOVE The ‘Porschola’ stunt car, radio controlled from the top of the van in the background, is smashed into the barrier as members of the film crew look on nervously.

‘This sort of camera rigging was unheard of for 1970’

M A K I NG

“EVEN AS HE was filming Bullitt in 1968, my dad already had visions of an epic racing film in his head, a super-realistic, immersive, visual experience,” recalls the now-60-yearold Chad McQueen, his father Steve and mother Neile’s only son.

True enough, about the same time as James Garner was in production of Grand Prix, McQueen and director John Sturges were at work on a film to be called Day of the Champion, also about Formula 1. GP’s production schedule was slightly ahead of Champion’s, and that movie would have certainly hit the big screen first. McQueen’s producers didn’t want to be entering the market second with a film too similar in nature and concept, so the project was scrubbed. But McQueen never lost the taste, and it was inevitable that he’d revisit the racing-film concept when the time was right.

By 1969-70, it was certainly the right time; Steve was at the very height of his star powers and had by then become a formidable sports car racer. Instead of another focus on the open-wheelers, McQueen cast his considerable attention (and that of his Solar Productions company) to international endurance racing.

The Ford GT’s well earned days in the sunshine of four overall wins in a row at Le Mans had just about passed. The 917 had arrived, and it was clear that Porsche and Ferrari would battle royale for supremacy in France (and Daytona, and Sebring) in the big-game long races.

His plans went well beyond starring in the film – he not only wanted to talk the talk, but he intended to walk the walk by racing at Le Mans, teamed with incomparable F1 champion Jackie Stewart, who was at the very top of his game in the early 1970s. McQueen was thoughtful and philosophical about his chances of competing at Le Mans that year: “Well, I don’t know if I’m good enough. It’s awfully fast, about 160mph average. I think we’ll try to get me in Le Mans practice and see how I go…

“Also, my dignity is at stake. I can’t have somebody powder my nose, and then jump up in front of 500,000 people and get into the car. We can put on some of our [scripted] race ourselves, but other parts will have to be with all those people [in the pits and in the stands]. I want to see if I’m quick enough to practice for Le Mans, and if the drivers will LEFT McQueen sits on the Ford GT40 camera car with visual designer Nikita Knatz (wearing a black jacket) stood behind and soon-to-resign director John Sturges on the left in the glasses.

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accept me. I’d like to run in the [1970] race.”

To get a feel for what it took to capture the action, Steve sent his Solar Productions film crew to Le Mans to observe and shoot the 1969 race. And as a further tune-up for himself, he did a lot of racing in his own Porsche 908 Spyder, most particularly successful in the 1970 Sebring 12 Hours enduro teamed with Peter Revson. Even though the tidy eight-cylinder 908 was a fast and sweethandling machine, it was seriously outgunned by a considerable Porsche effort in the new 917s, not to mention a battalion of 512s entered by the Ferrari factory.

Yet the Solar Productions Racing team-mates drove a tidy race in Florida, and it took nothing less than a flying Mario Andretti to beat them by mere seconds for the overall win. Revvy and McQueen – who was racing with one foot in a cast due to a recent motorcycle accident – finished a commendable second overall to the faster 5.0-litre factory Ferrari; clear evidence to potential naysayers that McQueen could in fact pedal front-line sports racers.

For a variety of reasons, it was decided that McQueen would not actually run the 1970 race; ultimately Stewart didn’t, either. John Sturges – who was particularly good at directing action films, and also type-A male actors – was on to direct the new movie, and would begin by filming the actual Le Mans race, with fill-in and story shots to be captured at La Sarthe afterwards. As a bit of a compromise for not being allowed to compete in the genuine event, McQueen would instead work as one of the high-speed action and stunt drivers for all of the post-race footage to be filmed. The intent was that this sort of driving – often at speeds well over 200mph – would help slake his thirst for the speed and competition.

For this, Sturges, McQueen and Solar Productions put together a formidable roster of cars, several of which competed in the 1970 race, and professional drivers to drive them for the camera. McQueen would star as American factory Porsche 917 pilot, Michael Delaney. The character came to the story, which was sorely lacking in the script and writing department at that time, with outstanding talent and more than a little personal and racing baggage.

A variety of handsome Europeans made up the balance of the team drivers for Porsche and Ferrari. Blonde-haired, blue-eyed, European actresses Elga Andersen and Louise Edlind portrayed wives and love interests. Of critical MAGNETO

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importance was to accurately and dramatically capture the sound, feel, speed and sensation of the racing action. To facilitate this, the camera crews used a variety of kit, and innovated a considerable roster of specialist rigs, mounts and equipment needed to get the cameras up close and personal with the cars, drivers and competition. To this end, at least three camera cars were employed; one during the ’70 race itself, and two others for the staged, although real-time, actual-speed, post-race action.

Among them were McQueen’s own exSebring 908 Spyder, which, fitted with three different cameras, actually ran the race. Its bodywork was configured to shield the equipment, up front and aft. These somewhat bulky-looking enclosures surely didn’t aid the Spyder’s aerodynamics, significantly reducing its top speed, and the need to change film dictated the flat-eight Porsche’s pit-stop schedule more than did fuel fill-ups and tyre changes. No matter, the 908, ably driven by Herbert Linge and Jonathan Williams, more than kept up with the action, stayed clear of trouble, and finished an amazing ninth overall – although it technically was an unclassified finisher due to its not completing enough total laps to be officially ranked.

Among the trio of Porsche 917s that Solar Productions had under its command for postrace filming action, one served as a high-speed camera car, fitted with an utterly unique articulated rig that could be swung from side to side depending upon the angle of the action that needed to be captured. This mechanised rig was utterly unique and innovative for the time, allowing the cinematographers to capture high-speed, close-up action with the fastest of the cars. Today this sort of camera rigging is common for action filming, and is often remote controlled. It was unheard of for 1970.

A Ford GT40 was used by director John Frankenheimer as a high-speed camera car during the filming of Grand Prix. Interestingly enough, a differently configured GT40 was also used by the Solar crew to chase down and photograph the panoply of Porsches, Ferraris, Corvettes, Alfa Romeos, Chevrons and others that appeared in the Le Mans post-race action sequences. A considerable amount of the Ford’s bodywork was removed, temporarily turning it into an open roadster, and it too was equipped with a variety of different cameras and rigs to capture the action.

Chad McQueen remembers every minute of his summer in France, with his sister and parents on the Le Mans set, surrounded by so many great cars and legendary drivers.

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filming the movie before we [Chad and sister Terry] got out of school. Mom took us to Europe on the SS France. Dad sent a plane for us upon our arrival at Le Havre [harbour], which then landed at the Le Mans course near Solar Village, a compound that was set up

by Solar Productions to house the cars, race drivers, crew and equipment.

“That first day when we arrived at La Sarthe, they were shooting near the Indianapolis corner. I couldn’t believe my eyes. One of the first things I saw, which just blew me away, was one of the long-tail 917s. There were four 512s on one side of the circuit and a row of Gulfliveried 917s on the other. Lola T70s, 911s and a strange blue car called a Matra. I didn’t know what that was at first, but later I learned it made the most glorious noise – ever. I thought: ‘This is going to be one bitchin’ summer.’”

As we all know, it’s amazing that Le Mans was ever completed, given a somewhat troubled production. Filming began with very little in the way of a script, so scenes were being written and rewritten every day, on the fly. McQueen and director Sturges were constantly at odds; so much so that one day, relatively early in the process, Sturges called a halt to his involvement, and quit.

Lee Katzin was brought in to replace him – a solid enough, if not at first logical, choice because most of Katzin’s more significant credits involved television, not feature-length films. But he had a good eye for actionphotography sequences, and an easy style that likely disarmed McQueen. The production was over budget, and behind schedule, while it’s no secret that during this time, Steve’s marriage to first wife, singer/dancer/Broadway star Neile Adams, was disintegrating. Le Mans was successfully completed and released primarily due to McQueen’s sheer force of nature, will and commitment to the project.

Chad recalls one particularly dark day: “My dad wasn’t afraid of the risks involved in any type of racing, but he was well aware of them, and took it all very seriously. He’d drive those 917s at racing speeds for weeks on end, and once told me: ‘Every day, I thought I was gonna get killed out there.’

“I arrived late at the Solar compound for lunch one day, and all of a sudden there was a weirdness in the air. I heard there was a crash near the White House corners complex, and of course I so hoped and prayed it wasn’t my dad.

About 15 minutes later, he pulled up on his Triumph and said: ‘Come here. I want you to see what can happen in racing.’ It was David Piper, one of the pro drivers working on the film. I saw what was left of his 917, which was in

many pieces. I remember seeing a wheel, with its A-arms still attached, sitting out in the cow pasture next to the course, a long way from the accident. Thankfully David survived, but he later lost his foot due to an infection stemming from the crash. For a ten-year-old kid, it was all pretty mind blowing.”

Equally mind blowing is the roster of thencurrent pros who served as action and stunt drivers in the production; they included 1970 race winner Richard Attwood, Jürgen Barth, Derek Bell, Paul Blancpain, Vic Elford, Masten Gregory, Jacky Ickx, Jean-Pierre Jabouille, Gérard Larrousse, Herbert Ling, Herbert Müller, Mike Parkes, David Piper, Brian Redman, Jo Siffert, Rolf Stommelen and Jonathan Williams. Imagine how many millions of dollars it would take – today – to put together a cast and stunt team with this level of talent, name recognition and racing accomplishments among current pros.

Chad McQueen has countless fond memories of his ‘ultimate summer vacation’ at Le Mans – but among them, two in particular stand out.

One was competing in – and winning – his first motor race. At La Sarthe, organisers hosted a Mini Le Mans race, on a small course set up from haybales. The cars were small-scale gokart-style machines fitted with roadster bodies resembling the Ferraris, Porsches and GT40s.

Chad was running in second, when he closed in on the leader; they came together, sending his rival into the haybales. It was all fine, fun and fair, and the two young competitors spoke and shook hands post-race – Chad is justifiably proud of, and still has, this trophy.

The other is his first time at the wheel of a 917, there at Le Mans. “My dad put me on his lap in the Porsche, and he of course shifted and worked the pedals, but I had my hands on the steering wheel, with his just ‘ghosting’ mine. I was guiding the car, but his hands were right there ready to step in if needed. We ultimately hit 100mph, and I’ll never forget the sound, smell, sight and feeling of that moment, driving a 917 with my dad.”

How to best sum up Le Mans? No matter the issues or quibbles some might raise with the plot or storyline, nobody questions that the cars, the times and the cinematography of the endurance-racing action is among the best ever put on film. Derek Bell summarises it all succinctly: “Le Mans is a bit like a bottle of really good French wine – it may have been a bit tart when first vinted, but it’s grown and aged memorably with time, thus is great to enjoy over and over again.”

So, let’s raise a glass to Steve McQueen, his son Chad and the most memorable cast and times of Le Mans – has it really been 50 years?

‘I thought: “This is going to be one bitchin’ summer”’

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I N T E RV I E W R I C H A R D H E S E LT I N E

Le Mans featured a host of contemporary racing drivers to help create authentic circuit action. Derek Bell recalls those heady times – the thrills, the spills, his friendship with Steve McQueen, and the accident that could have ended his career

The racer

ABOVE Derek, Steve and Richard Attwood relax, John Sturges looking on.

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WHEN YOU’RE YOUNG, you don’t tend to look back. You’re orientated towards the future.

I know I was. When I was asked to be involved in the making of Le Mans, I never for a second thought I’d still be talking about it half a century later. I just wanted to race cars. It is only in retrospect that I think about what a wonderful opportunity it was, and how happy it makes me to have helped create such a classic film. That, and for getting to know Steve McQueen.

In these celebrity-obsessed times, it’s hard to comprehend the sheer magnetism of the Cooler King. These days, a star’s day-to-day life gets picked over, pulled apart and commented on by the media – social or otherwise. However, go back to the 1960s and ’70s and it was still possible for a silver-screen idol to maintain an aura of ambiguity; the person you thought you knew was merely a construct. This was certainly true of Steve. He was his own man and knew his own mind. Nobody else could have persuaded a major studio to back a film such as Le Mans, of that I am sure.

Steve’s determination to make what appeared

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on screen authentic stretched to the involvement of people such as myself. There had been a glut of motor-racing movies during the run up to Le Mans, most of which anyone who knew about the sport – and cars – sniggered at. Steve didn’t want that to be the case with his film. The rivalry between the Porsche and Ferrari teams that the movie immortalised was rooted in the rival marques’ battle for supremacy in 1970.

Jacques Swaters of Ecurie Francorchamps had been asked to supply his 512S because Scuderia Ferrari wouldn’t help. It was the car I’d driven in my first-ever proper sports car race – the 1970 Spa 1000km, but repainted red from yellow to looks like a works car. I was brought on board to drive it and double for one of the actors.

It was a tremendous experience. For almost two months, Steve’s family and mine shared a little chateau. Much has been written about him having a dark side, but look close enough and everyone has a skeleton somewhere in the closet. He had a reputation for being hard on those he worked with, and while he may have been that way with others, he got on extremely well with – and was well liked by – the many motor-racing people involved during filming.

Steve was a racer and loved cars. He even tried out my Brabham BT30 on the Bugatti Circuit.

The film was infused with his own sweat and tears. He had an innate grasp of why the 24 Hours mattered. Indeed, at one point there had been talk of Steve doing the race proper, sharing a car with Jackie Stewart no less, but for whatever reason that never happened. It was left to Jonathan Williams and Herbert Linge to drive the Porsche 908 entered by Steve’s Solar Productions company in the 1970 race. It was fitted with cameras front and rear.

By the time they had finished, there was 22 hours of footage for the editors to sift through.

For continuity purposes, we had to recreate certain sequences while on set. This was incredibly difficult, because cars would set off from various points around the circuit and we’d have to arrive at the correct spot at the same time while maintaining a similar gap from the actual race footage – all this at race speeds, or thereabouts. I felt for the original director, John Sturges, because there was only the bare bones of a story and I don’t think any of us were aware of what the storyline was meant to be.

That said, I think it was clear to Steve and John that I was keen to get more involved, so I soon found myself in charge of marshalling the cars and drivers for the required sequences.

There were loads of us: Jo Siffert, Gérard Larrousse, Richard Attwood, Masten Gregory, and so on. I had to co-ordinate them, which was great fun, but the hanging around between 78

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set-ups was painful. It could be very dull. There was a degree of friction behind the scenes, too, with Sturges departing the production, which was a shame because we got on very well.

I’ve no idea who did what behind the scenes.

Why would I? I have my theories, and have obviously heard and read things, but it isn’t my place to comment. I liked John, though. I remember him saying he would rather have used some of the drivers as actors in starring roles.

He reckoned the actors didn’t have much to say in the story, anyway. What’s more, they had to have professional wheelmen on hand to stand in for them during the live sequences behind the wheel, so we may as well have done both.

The race cars were kept and maintained at a garage near Arnage. They were driven out to the circuit at around 8.30am each day. There was a fair amount of standing around, not least because the crew would spend a few hours setting up a scene. Theirs was a different world to guys like us. Talk about detail; those guys would spray the cars with dirt and apply bugs by hand. They were obsessive – in a positive way.

Steve himself was really gutsy. One time, I was in the Ferrari, and Jo and Steve were in 917s. We had done about five takes for a scene, and boredom was setting in. We’d been taking it easy, but we’re racing drivers so the pace started hotting up. Here we were, about three feet apart, and I didn’t back off when we got to Maison Blanche. Neither did ‘Seppi’. Poor Steve; sandwiched between us, he had no choice but to run through there at 155mph. When we got to the end of the shot at the Ford Chicane, his face was as white as his balaclava. He got out of the car trembling but with a broad smile on his face. He said: “What the hell were you bastards doing to me out there?” We just laughed. He promised to get back at me, and he did.

A while later, Steve and I were messing about on Husqvarna trail bikes. He was, of course, mad about motorcycles and rode them superbly. We were having a ball catching air over the sand dunes just before the pits. He disappeared over the top of one, and came back a few minutes later. He said something like: “This is OK, you can really gun it from here.” I launched myself off this slope, and was soaring majestically when I noticed that beneath me was a rubbish dump. I had been duped. It was payback time.

I came crashing down amid heaps of garbage, which stank to high heaven. Steve stood at the top of this hillock laughing uncontrollably.

It wasn’t all smiles, though. One of the great ironies of my life is that during the course of making the film I was involved in the worst accident of my career, at least to that point.

Steve and I were shooting a sequence in which

we’d go thrashing after the camera car – a specially adapted Ford GT40 with its roof removed – and it would pick us up as we blasted past. We were doing 130mph and the camera car 80mph. We had just completed a run to the Ford Chicane from Mulsanne when I realised that the Ferrari’s clutch had packed up.

I can recall what happened next as clearly as though it was yesterday. I tried to change down and there was no clutch pressure, but I was able to stop, turn around and head back after Steve to our starting point for another run. He was in the 917. I was taking it easy doing clutchless changes when I arrived at Indianapolis, obviously from the wrong direction. Just as I came out of the corner, there was an eruption. The Ferrari went up in flames in a heartbeat. I was wearing an open-face helmet with a Nomex mask. I was never afraid of much when I was racing, but fire…

I applied the brakes, but I thought the Ferrari was never going to stop. I undid the belts, tried to unfasten the door, but on the 512S there was a clip on the door as well as a strap. You had to turn the clip and then pull the strap down.

Eventually I was able to get out, and I was acutely aware that my face was starting to hurt.

The camera car zoomed past, and I just stood there while the Ferrari burned to the ground, although I gather it has since been resurrected.

Eventually, an ambulance arrived, complete with Sister Bridget, a Roman Catholic nun who appears in the film. The driver let in the clutch, the old Renault bunny-hopped off the line, and the rear doors flew open. My stretcher shot out...

You couldn’t have scripted it. When I eventually got to the hospital, the doctor put some cream on my face and then vanished. Everybody did. It was lunchtime. I had no idea how bad my burns were, and I was worried about my then-wife Pam and my children, Justin and Melanie. They were at the track and had no idea what was going on.

Steve was, I gather, a reassuring presence.

Shortly thereafter, I flew to Enna to do a Formula 2 race during a gap in the filming, and the volcanic dust around the track aggravated my wounds. I still bear slight scars.

Despite what happened, I was glad to have known Steve. I met him for dinner in Hollywood not long after the film came out. He was with his new bride Ali MacGraw. We then drifted apart, until one day in 1980 when I received a message that he’d phoned. He hadn’t left a number, but I assumed he’d call back. He never did.

Had I known he was dying of cancer, I would have moved heaven and earth to locate him. He died four months later, and I guess he was calling to say goodbye. I don’t know. One thing I do know for sure, though, is that even in death Steve McQueen remains larger than life.

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BELOW & RIGHT Radio-controlled ‘Lolarri’ smashes through the trees, controlled from the tower (right), after an earlier, almost lethal mishap...

BOTTOM A young Peter Samuelson on set, brought in for his French skills but promoted to take on ever-more responsibility, to his consternation.

M A K I NG

BACK THEN, IF you got into Cambridge, they’d tell you in January but you couldn’t go until October. So I had this ten-month period to fill. Through my family’s business I met Bob Relyea, a producer of the Le Mans film, who said: “I hear you speak French?” I said yes, which was slightly ambitious because most of my French was mediaeval French. He needed someone to come and be the unit interpreter, so at the age of 17 I found myself in Le Mans.

It was one of those very dysfunctional films, where a lot of people got fired. Every time someone was fired, I got promoted. It was really three cultures clashing and trying to get done what they wanted to get done. One was a great big Hollywood production; around 150 filmmakers with the goal of completing a movie, but challenged by the fact that there never really was a completed script.

Then you had the motor-racing people, because we hired major drivers who had first-class careers to come and drive the cars. We also had a lot of Le Mans-series cars with us, and we brought in not just the cars but also all the mechanics. A lot of them

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brought their wives and girlfriends. So there’s a whole story around that.

And then the third culture was the local people. Le Mans in 1970 was a pretty sleepy, provincial French town. They’d never seen anything like this, and they rapidly realised they could make a lot of money in a short period of time, both by renting stuff to these people and, in some cases, by being exploitative.

We had terrible trouble with farmers whose land abutted the Mulsanne Straight. The gendarmes would close it down for us to film, but then some farmer would move his tractor into the middle of the road and demand money in order to drive away.

Steve McQueen’s interest was to make the best almost-documentary coverage of motor racing that had ever been done – I think we accomplished that – but he was vastly less interested, and frankly less adept, in the interpersonal relationships between the characters, the story and the narrative. He was a very proud man, yet insecure in some ways.

He had really worked hard in club racing, and was no slouch. He did almost all of his own

The producer I N T E RV I E W DAV I D L I L LY W H I T E

Now a successful Hollywood filmmaker, Peter Samuelson’s first job in the movie industry was on the set of Le Mans, aged 17, while waiting to start at university. It proved to be a life-changing experience

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driving – far more than you would ever ask a regular actor to do.

So, it was an adventure! I was 17 years old.

I was naive in every possible way; I knew everything about mediaeval English literature, and I knew absolutely nothing about large Hollywood films. I thought it was normal that you didn’t know what would be filmed when you went to film it, and that the writer would come running out of his caravan waving pages of script he’d just typed out. The actors would receive those pages for the first time, they’d do a bit of rehearsing and then we’d film it.

We wouldn’t know what order the cars should be in for a shot. So we would do it 12 ways. We’d have number three in front of number four, but then we’d do it with number two in between them, that kind of thing. One can directly point the finger at the lack of planning for really catastrophic accidents that happened on the track. When David Piper crashed and was trapped in his car, the fire engine had been told that it could only drive clockwise around the track. So even though they [the firemen] could see the smoke and the fire, they followed instructions and drove the long way around; it took them many minutes to get back around to where David was trapped in his car, and he ended up losing part of his leg.

There were other things. We had a radiocontrolled car, the ‘Lolarri’, that was supposed to go off at the Indianapolis corner. As a launch ramp, we replaced all but a little bit of the sand on the outer circumference of the left-hand corner with concrete, and then covered it with sand. The car was supposed to go smashing off through the air and into the trees behind.

In the event, the guy controlling the car sitting up on his tower with his little toggle switches screamed: “I can’t control it, I can’t control it!” To our horror, because there were a lot of us standing at the bottom of the tower, the car did a U-turn and came back towards us.

And we all thought: “Oh shit, this is it.” This is when you know you’re going to die. Then at the last minute it veered off and crashed into the right-hand guard rail.

It turned out that the frequency of the radiocontrol system was the same as the frequency in France for radio-controlled model aircraft, but no one had checked. And there was a Le Mans model aircraft society event going on over the hill. They were all standing there with their toggles, and they ended up sending our car 180 degrees back towards us.

It was decided that one of the problems with track safety was that the person in charge of it couldn’t speak French. So they said: “Oh well, Peter will do it.” And I, by then at the age of 18, 82

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was put in charge of track safety, which was completely mad. I was barely an adult!

So, for example, it was me standing in the middle of the track at the end point of a shot with a bloody great flag, a walkie-talkie and a loudhailer. Because Le Mans isn’t a closed track, we could only use it in sections. As you always have to film things more than once, the cars – there could be 20 of them – would get to the end point and then have to turn round and go back.

The last thing I wanted was for a car to start back to first positions while the last car was still arriving, and have a head-on collision, so my job was to stand in the middle of the road and stare them down. There was no problem with the professional drivers, but Mr McQueen would go nuts and shout obscenities at me.

I remember also having to bail out one of the car mechanics, who had decided that it would be really clever to take his new French girlfriend for a spin in a racing Ferrari through the centre of Le Mans in the middle of the night. Somehow they caught him, and there he was behind bars.

Another funny thing that happened; we were filming in the pits and we filled the grandstand with 1000 extras. For every university student in Europe, it seemed this was a preferred summertime way to get paid while camping in a tent. So I said, in English first, into the microphone (which came out of every speaker in the grandstand): “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re ready to shoot again. Please put on your caps.”

And I then said the same thing in French, except instead of saying kepi I said capote, which means condom. I told 1000 French people to put on their condoms, which then caused a kind of mass hysteria. Some of them fell on the ground laughing, which then caused the American and British crew to get quite angry. I had to explain the mistake I’d just made, which they then thought was very funny. I felt about six inches tall.

I thought the racing drivers were fantastic. I couldn’t believe what they were able to do in precision driving, sometimes at over 200mph down that straight. And we had them doing things where normally a driver would make their own decisions about where to put their car against the others, but we were saying to them: “After you get onto the straight, accelerate to full speed. And then number three go in front of number two and number four.

And number five jockey for position, and then five wins that and then goes past and takes the lead.” In a race, the driver would be making those decisions moment to moment, but we were giving them instructions, which they were extraordinarily good at executing.

These days when someone makes a film

with fast cars in it, a lot of that is done with computer-generated images, CGI – or visual effects, as we call it. It’s less expensive and nobody gets hurt. We didn’t have any of that, so we had to actually film it. We did it by bolting on cameras, sometimes on long arms anchored at three points to the side of racing cars. And we had them at speeds in excess of 200mph, with a camera hanging five feet off the side of a racing car, affecting its handling, and with other cars whizzing by. And this with the serious risk, which never happened thank God, that the camera – which weighed 40 or 50lb – if it wasn’t properly attached, or there was a bump or a collision or something, could fly off and go through someone’s windscreen behind and kill them.

We also took a Ford GT40, and the rigging department built a dome in the middle, behind the heads of the driver and the codriver. In this case, the latter was the camera operator, sat in that semi-reclining seat in a four-point harness, with – as I remember it – bicycle grips and foot pedals which controlled the camera. The car was going at speed, and he was able to control (and also, on a monitor, see through the video assist) the Arriflex 2C camera inside that dome. He could turn it on and off, but he could also pan and tilt it, and I think he could zoom it as well with a little stepper motor on the side of the lens. That was unprecedented at the time. That’s what’s extraordinary about Le Mans, and I think it is a high watermark in motor-racing stunts.

When the production started going over budget, people started descending from CBS; McQueen viewed that as interference, and he would refuse to work, and would not come out of his trailer. His whole goal was to make them go away. They were going to close it down, and then an agreement was made; he was made personally financially responsible for a big part of the overage.

And in the end we did finish it, and there is some semblance of a story. I think it’s a mustview for anyone interested in the astonishing art, technology and skill of motor racing. I was very sad when I had to go back to start at Cambridge that October; I’d made so many friends and I’d learned an enormous amount.

When I drove to Le Mans, I was a child. And when I came back, I was an adult.

Peter went on to work on One by One and Return of the Pink Panther, and become a producer of more than 20 films including Revenge of the Nerds, Wilde and Arlington Road. He’s CEO of PhilmCo Media, and Founder-President of the First Star charity, helping foster youth into post-secondary education. www.firststar.org, www.firststaruk.org.

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From struggling actor and part-time racer to milling around on the set of a major Hollywood production, Hal Hamilton shares his behind-the-scenes perspective on McQueen’s legendary movie

WOR D S H A L H A M I LT O N

The actor

ABOVE Hal Hamilton, who played Ferrari 512S driver Chris Barnett in the film.

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LONDON, EARLY SPRING 1970. I was dressed as an American Indian in front of a panel of executives, auditioning for an advertising role. After 15 years of theatrical experience, and with several TV performances under my belt, it had all come down to this.

“Hau!” I shouted, right palm aloft.

Sadly, I didn’t get the part.

I returned home to my long-suffering wife, who greeted me at the front door.

“Steve McQueen called,” she said.

“You’re joking?” I replied.

As it turned out, she was deadly serious. The following day I met Steve; he wanted to know about my racing experience. I told him that I had raced an MG TD in America and was the youngest member of the California Sports Car Club. I went on to explain that I once raced James Dean in a Porsche Speedster 1500S. “Pack your helmet,” McQueen said.

In the early days of Le Mans production, spirits ran high after filming was done. We had a fleet of Peugeot 504s to use as transport, and one such vehicle was crashed in a back lane and nearly rolled, thanks to our extracurricular

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activities. The driver of the crashed Peugeot appeared to be a press officer, who was subsequently seen wandering about with his arm bandaged and in a sling. I later discovered it was in fact Steve who had crashed the car, while in the company of a young lady. He had simply elected to pass on the blame.

On the first day of principal photography, executive producer Bob Relyea issued us with instructions via a bullhorn. A glittering armada of Le Mans cars assembled on the Mulsanne Straight, with the fastest at the front.

Meanwhile, Porsche factory driver Herbert Linge spat on his hand and held it above his head, checking the direction of the wind; he was well aware he would soon be travelling at over 200mph. Bob made our instructions clear; the take was to be a duplication of lap one of the Le Mans 24 Hours: “Everyone keep your station! No racing, there is to be no racing!

Start your engines!” he yelled.

A mighty roar erupted as the cars’ powerplants burst into life. The pack accelerated down the pit straight, followed by a Ford GT40 camera car. Take one was soon completed, capturing the colour, action and spectacle for which Le Mans is justly famous.

Next was take two – more of the same. This time, the camera car was to run alongside the pack. Then, Masten Gregory’s Alfa Romeo Tipo 33 darted onto the grass, flicking stones and grass everywhere, and overtaking several machines in the process.

“Cut!” Bob Relyea shouted.

He paced towards Gregory’s now stationary Alfa, seething with rage, bullhorn in hand.

“Goddamn it! What part of the instructions don’t you understand? You could be responsible for shutting down the entire film!”

“Ah, just wanted to show them what real racing is all about,” the bespectacled American nonchalantly replied, showing no sign of repentance whatsoever.

Not long after filming had started, the movie faced a major problem when director John Sturges chose to leave the production. He had previously directed The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape, but on the set of Le Mans he was fed up with the script and Steve’s antics.

Steve demanded that his gym equipment plus various motorbikes and firearms were all shipped from California, so he felt right at home. One morning, I recall him emerging from the unisex showering facilities with just a towel around his waist. He waved an enthusiastic welcome to the incredulous passengers of a passing bus, only to retreat back into the steam from which he had emerged.

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people around him, who had little to do with completing the film. There was celebrated hotrod artist and pin striper Von Dutch, several striking women, and a man dressed in safari gear claimed to be the company drug dealer.

Mandatory appearances on set each day clad in full racing gear allowed us to make our acquaintance with the cars assigned to us. In my case, it was a Ferrari 512S – a real brute that exuded the strength and purpose of the legendary Scuderia Ferrari. Other than this, it was a matter of ‘hurry up and wait’.

We all loitered with intent day after day, waiting to be given instructions. Now and then a photo shoot would break the monotony. One day, Paris Match magazine descended on us, interviewing each actor and taking a group portrait that never came to print. Alas!

One day, the equally bored Masten Gregory approached and asked whether I would teach him chess. I obliged, and showed him the fundamentals. Soon enough he’d bought five books about chess, and I went from teaching a total novice to countering the Sicilian Gambit.

Jean-Claude Bercq, who played PaulJacques Dion in the film, decided to take up glider lessons. If he was needed on set, his orange jacket was placed upon an agreed bank and he would come down to act. His ploy was soon discovered by an officious assistant to the director, who unsurprisingly freaked out over the arrangement.

By August, things quickly started to develop.

We finally had an official script that dovetailed with Steve’s vision, thanks to the incessant work of John T Kelley – who could usually be found in his mini trailer amid a fog of tobacco smoke and the fumes of Irish whiskey.

However, the script wasn’t the only good news. One day, a limo rolled into view, and it seemed Sturges had returned to direct the film: “Mr Sturges is back!” Angelo Infanti shouted, in a thick Italian accent. This turned out not to be the case, though; out stepped Lee Katzin, donning sunglasses and a golf visor, with a pipe clamped in the corner of his mouth.

Steve screeched onto the scene seconds later, in a Porsche 911S. He shook hands with Katzin and ushered him into the 911’s passenger seat. Tightly belted in and understandably nervous, Katzin was about to undergo his rite of passage; a ride around the track.

The 911 started fishtailing as the rear tyres clawed for grip, leaving thick black rubber marks up to the Dunlop Bridge. The 911 then plunged down to the esses, right on the limit.

Four minutes later the flat-six became audible once again as Steve finished the lap, coming to a halt at the exact spot where Mr

Katzin had climbed into the car. McQueen then sprang from the driver’s side and opened the door for his traumatised passenger, who did not appear to move.

Katzin needed help unbuckling his harness.

Finally he got to his feet, white faced and supported by the Porsche’s door: “Oh man, that was awesome, unforgettable! Steve, you can really drive – but I don’t think I would like to do it again.”

The surrounding crew burst into laughter.

Katzin had no motor sport inclinations, and was pitched into close proximity with Steve, who was addicted to the allure of speed.

This became very apparent one day late on in filming, when Katzin tried to ingratiate himself with the drivers.

“Why? Why do you guys do it?” he asked, hoping for profound insight.

“I don’t know – but if I did, I wouldn’t tell you,” replied Mike Parkes, who had been driving a Ferrari 512S. Katzin’s instructions to the numerous extras in the pits and grandstands would advise them to “take it up” or “take it down”.

He had a session with Steve that included dialogue. McQueen never cared for it, and preferred to express the appropriate look in the moment. Standing between the star and his vision was pointless, as Katzin soon discovered. Steve snapped and picked Lee up by his necktie, screaming that he was being “pimped like a dummy in Macy’s window”.

Enough was enough.

“Nobody gets inside my melon!” he shouted, referring to Katzin’s desire to understand his motivation. Steve then added a number of observations about Katzin’s ancestors and his professional abilities.

According to Jonathan Williams, who witnessed what happened (and drove the Solar Porsche camera car in the real race), a great shout of protest erupted from the French technicians over the brutality displayed. The set was shut down, producers were alerted.

Panic stations for Bob Relyea.

Finally, 24 hours later, sanity prevailed.

Steve agreed to work with Katzin, and the completion of Le Mans was in sight. Filming finally finished in November, when the weather was cold and we had to paint some of the trees green for the sake of continuity. Even so, somehow, we’d managed it.

Driving back to London on a grey winter’s day, a rich sense of melancholy descended.

Acting for me was finished. Three months later, I was driving a mini cab in London to support my family – and that’s when I began my quest to become a filmmaker.

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Es t a b li sh ed 19 89

I N T E RV I E W SIMON DE BURTON

The mechanic

Haig Alltounian was chief mechanic for the Le Mans film and personal technician to Steve McQueen. The now-78year-old motorcycle restorer came away from his time in France with two very special gifts...

M A K I NG

WHAT SOME PEOPLE may not realise is that it was originally intended for Steve McQueen to drive in the actual Le Mans race. In 1969 I was working with Porsche looking after Jo Siffert’s 917PA CanAm car, when Steve’s company, Solar Productions, purchased a 908 that we were asked to prepare and maintain.

As a result, McQueen did several SCCA races with the car in early 1970, which is when I first got to know him.

After the SCCA races were over, he entered the Sebring 12 Hours in the 908 with Peter Revson as co-driver, and damn near won it overall [the race was famously close-run towards the end, and Mario Andretti eventually took victory for Ferrari]. It was at this point that I was propositioned by Solar Productions to be Steve’s chief mechanic.

We bonded very early on – almost instantly, I would say. He recognised my qualities, and we immediately had a great mutual respect for one another. What many people find surprising is that he could very clearly communicate what a race car was doing, which made it much easier for us to make the right adjustments. My estimation is that he would have been way above average had he become a professional racer. He didn’t want for courage, that’s for sure.

I was stationed at Le Mans for almost seven months, right from before the start of filming in June until the deconstruction of the Solar Village in December. In fact, I started work on the film even earlier, because I was sent to John Wyer’s in Slough, England [JWA] to help convert the Solar Productions 908 and a Porsche 917K to camera cars.

Once at Le Mans, I was personally responsible for looking after that 917 and the two others that were used in the film, and

I can only describe the time as like going to work at a race every day for months and months on end. It was a monumental task and, because of the considerable responsibility, I had almost no time off.

I’ve never disclosed what I earned from working on the film, but I will say that it was the first time in my racing career that I actually made what I thought I was worth. I was able to send the whole lot back to the US, too, because there was a clause in the contract ensuring that absolutely all expenses would be paid for.

At the time I was 27 years old and not long married to my first wife, who accompanied me to Le Mans. For the first three months we stayed at the Chateau de Segrais a few miles from the circuit, where we were given a beautiful suite. Later, we fancied a change and moved into an apartment in the city of Le Mans, where there seemed to be plenty going on – but I was never really able to see much of it, because there was so little free time.

We kept the cars outside Arnage, so at the end of each day we would have to drive the 917s the few miles back to the garage and do whatever work was needed. We’d then return to the garage for around 6.30am in order to get back in the cars and be escorted to the circuit by the gendarmerie, ready for the call to go on set between 8.00am and 9.00am.

On one occasion, one of the 917 Gulf cars dropped a valve during some high-speed filming. Part of the deal with Porsche was that we would be supplied with all the spares we needed, so we had an extra engine back at the shop – but the 917’s frame is fitted so tight around the motor that you need a shoehorn to get it in and out. As a result, we had to work all through the night in order to get the car back out for filming first thing in the morning. And

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then start the ‘normal’ day’s work...

When the last day of shooting with the cars came to an end, they all drove into the pits and lined up. Steve got out and was greeted by his family; it was all very emotional. Then he walked to the back of the car, unstrapped the watch he was wearing – one of the Heuer Monacos that had been supplied to Solar – and, with a sheepish grin and a chuckle, he handed it to me: “This is to thank you for keeping me alive all these months,” he said.

At first I was reluctant to take it, but he said it was too late – he had somehow managed to have the back engraved: “To Haig, Le Mans 1970.” Later, when he was packing up to leave, he showed me three motorcycles he had been given – two Triumph Bonnevilles and a Norton Commando. He knew I loved motorcycles, so he pointed to them and said: “Take your pick.”

I said well, since you’ve got two Bonnevilles I’ll have one of those. But he said: “No, you have the Norton!” And I still have that Norton today.

Steve and I stayed in touch for a couple of years, and I went for dinner at his home in Brentwood, California and visited his retreat in Palm Springs. But then we gradually lost contact, he became ill and I never saw him again. Yet being so deeply involved in an epic movie that, even today, captures motor racing at its pinnacle in a way that no other film ever has was undoubtedly the experience of a lifetime. I will cherish it until the day I die.

Last December, Alltounian consigned the Heuer Monaco to a Phillips auction in New York. He had worn it occasionally during the first two years after McQueen gifted it to him, but then he stored it in a safety-deposit box. Still in excellent, original condition and sold with its authentic packaging and a letter of provenance, it realised $2.2 million – a record price for any Heuer watch.

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The author Nearly 30 years after photographing the 1970 Le Mans, Michael Keyser wrote A French Kiss With Death, about the Le Mans movie. It became one of the most successful motor-racing books ever

I N T E RV I E W

I PHOTOGRAPHED THE 24 Hours race in 1970. I positioned myself just up from the startline, shot there for a while, then wandered along the pits, taking a shot of the Solar Productions camera car, the Porsche 908.

McQueen was there, wearing a tie-dye T-shirt.

I wasn’t too involved with racing again until 1995, when Brian Redman asked me to help him promote the Jefferson 500 Vintage race.

And I said: “I’ve got a lot of photographs from back in that era. Maybe I’ll do a poster.”

So I started putting together the Battle of the Titans [poster of 24 of the 1970 Le Mans cars], and I thought I’d get as many drivers as possible to sign it. I set off to Europe to get the signatures, then I went to the UK where I got David Piper, Alistair Walker, Richard Attwood and David Hobbs together [25 drivers signed 200 posters].

But before I went to the UK, I drove from Paris to Hendaye, on the border of Spain and France, where Jonathan Williams was on vacation.

Jonathan had driven the Porsche 908 camera car in the race, and he drove the GT40 camera car on the movie set. He didn’t like driving the Ford; they’d cut the top off it to get the cameras in, so it didn’t handle, and he had to drive at racing speeds next to the other

cars. Jonathan signed the 200 posters I had, and we started talking. I said: “You know, I’d like to do a book about the 1970 race and the film.” He put me in touch with many of the people involved with the movie. I went out to LA and interviewed Lee Katzin, the director, and Bob Relyea, who was one of the producers.

I wanted to interview Bob Rosen, but he was the guy who blew the whistle on the production when it went out of control. I sent him some of my interviews; when it grabbed him that he was the bad guy, he didn’t want to be interviewed.

I also interviewed Steve’s son, Chad McQueen. We became good friends, and later on I helped sponsor him when he was racing.

He had a bad accident in 2006 at Daytona; broke his neck and leg, and kind of a lot else.

Then I tracked down photographer Nigel Snowden. Because he was on the production he had massive amounts of film that he’d shot, including the famous two-fingers picture – later, I actually bought all the negatives from Nigel.

The job of the book itself started with a section on McQueen. Then, how do you tell the story of the Le Mans 24 Hours? That was a difficult chapter. I got into the 1970 race that I’d covered, and then I got into the actual film

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DAV I D L I L LY W H I T E

ABOVE Jonathan Williams in the 908 camera car; Michael’s first brush with the Le Mans movie.

itself, all these stories – the mayhem when they didn’t have a script and McQueen wanted more racing and they wanted less... And there were all of the sexual shenanigans going on. The nurse was very busy giving people shots; she was one of the most popular people on set.

And so I wrote back and forth with Jonathan and with actor Hal Hamilton, cobbling this thing together. I knew nothing about designing a book, so I got hands-on instruction from a very good designer, Alex Castro. It didn’t take long to find a publisher, and I went to see the book coming off the press. We didn’t go on much of a signing tour; after that, it was up to the publisher to promote it.

Jonathan sadly died in 2014. He’d started writing his own book, which I finished. It’s called Shooting Star on a Prancing Horse.

More recently, I got a call from Steve’s ex-wife Neile McQueen. She said: “I just now got around to reading your book, and I want to tell you how much I enjoyed it.” And I’m thinking: “What the hell? It’s been 20 years!” We talked about Chad and how he was doing, and then she said: “You know, it wasn’t a very good time in my life.”

Le Mans posters, prints and books are available on Michael’s website, www.autosportsltd.com.

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The car “THE GULF 917 was always the pin-up car for me – the car on my wall,” says Historic racer Shaun Lynn. “I was only a kid at the time that the Le Mans film came out, but it became my dream to buy a Gulf 917. The first part of this car’s life was as a Gulf 917K in the 1970 Le Mans race and it’s in the movie, and it is actually the car that ‘wins’ in the film – race number 22. So I had to find a way to get this car.

I’d have sold my kids if I could!”

Shaun’s 917 started life as chassis 026, completed on May 13, 1970 for John Williment Automotive Engineering (JWAE) as the third car in its Le Mans line-up. It was a fourspeed, 4.5-litre version, fitted by JWAE with its own specially developed ‘Kurzheck’ tail. It weighed just 845kg and was geared for a top speed of 208.5mph – not as quick as the 4.9-litre 917s, but hardly slow...

“You know, you sit there and there’s this huge cacophony of noise behind you. It’s just amazing,” says Shaun, one of the UK’s most successful Historic racers, with experience in Group Cs, GT40, Cobra, Porsche 911 2.0 92

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and more. “It feels daunting because of the history of the car, and the myths and the truths about 917s. But because the bodywork and aerodynamic set-up of my car was the last iteration, all the hard work had been done.

It’s actually quite planted, it’s very controlled; it’s not unwieldy or violent.

“It’s not a difficult car at all. It doesn’t step out, you don’t get messy oversteer/understeer.

It’s telling you what it wants to do. Of course, you have to treat it with respect; you can’t take the engine over 8200rpm and you’ve got to be very careful on the downshift. Yet it’s very easy to drive, very flexible, with wonderful synchromesh.”

Racing driver Dario Franchitti echoes this, having driven Shaun’s car at Brands Hatch.

He is best known for his four IndyCar championship wins, as well as victories in the Indy 500 and at Daytona. However, he has also driven plenty of Historics, including the Ferrari 250GT SWB and Cobra at Goodwood.

“With the 917, there’s absolutely the case for it being the greatest racing car of all

PHILIP NORTON @ ZERO10NE7

Historic racer and McQueen fan Shaun Lynn owns the ‘winning’ car from the movie, which he handed to Dario Franchitti for a test drive.

Together they describe the unique feeling of piloting this famous 917K

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ABOVE Dario Franchitti tackles Brands Hatch in the Le Mans movie’s ‘winning’ Porsche 917K.

time. Certainly top five, maybe top three,” says Dario. “The motor is just exceptional – of any period. You look at the chassis tubing and you realise that the guys who drove these cars in period at full noise were a special breed. It’s the speed first of all, it’s what everyone talks about, the 250mph top speed... there’s no compromise at all.”

Of course, the 917’s nemesis in Le Mans is the Ferrari 512S, which Shaun’s raced extensively, along with a Lola T70 Mk3B: “The 917 is nicer to drive than the 512S or the T70 in my view.

The Lola is much more aggressive in everything: the handling, the engine and the gearbox, which is like a truck’s in comparison [with the 917’s].

“The 512S is quite a tricky car. It has a wonderful engine; the noise is ear splitting, while the 917 has a much lower, resonating sound. The Ferrari has great power, especially at the top end, but it doesn’t like low revs at all, while the Porsche just sits there ticking over.

The 512S, with its fuel injection, doesn’t like ticking over, doesn’t like anything below 3000rpm; you have to keep it moving. There’s quite a bit of chassis flex in the Ferrari, too.”

Shaun has spoken with several 917 drivers 94

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about the cars – including David Hobbs, who was paired with Mike Hailwood in 917-026 for the 1970 Le Mans 24 Hours. Hobbs agrees that the 917K was well sorted by then, saying he “didn’t find it a scary car to drive at all”.

In qualifying, Hailwood managed a quickest lap of 3:29.6, which put him tenth on the grid, but it was Hobbs who started the race, running in the top six during his first two-hour stint.

Soon after Hailwood took over from him it began to rain, causing four of the leading Ferraris to crash out of the race. At his first refuelling stop Hailwood was in third place, but he chose to stay on intermediates rather than wet tyres. By the time he rejoined, the rain was much worse, and he spun at Dunlop Bridge and slid into the back of Carlo Facetti’s stricken Alfa 33/3. It was race over for Hailwood and Hobbs.

By that point, Solar Productions had already captured significant amounts of footage of the Hobbs/Hailwood car, race number 22. So, despite 917-026 not finishing the real race, in the movie it wins. It was too badly damaged to be used for the post-race filming, though, so chassis 024 was leased and made up to look like 026 – so race number 22 in the film is a

mix of Shaun’s 026 and Jo Siffert’s 024.

Back in real life, the damaged 917-026 was rebuilt by JWAE with chassis 917-031 to become known as 917-026/031. In this guise, it finished second at Le Mans in 1971.

Meanwhile, the damaged chassis of the Hobbs/Hailwood 917-026 went back to Porsche, where it was repaired and fitted with spyder bodywork and the 5.0-litre powerplant from chassis 031. This car in turn became known as 917-031/026. It finished second in the 1971 Nürburgring 300km, and went on to have a long career as a spyder, before being rebuilt to 1970 Kurzheck spec in number 22 Gulf livery. That is how you see it here, now owned by Shaun.

“This Porsche is just the pinnacle for me,” he says. “How often do you get to see actual footage of your own car racing, especially in a movie – and a movie you’ve watched forever, so many times? You get the start, you get a lot of the overtaking, a lot of the scenes from the early part of the race, and that was cut into the movie, which is just amazing!”

Thanks to Sports Purpose Porsche specialist (www.sports-purpose.com). It’s producing a film of Shaun’s car with Dario Franchitti at Brands Hatch.

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The Le Mans cars

A range of legendary road and race machines were the vehicular stars of the 1971 movie, but not all of them survived the thrills and spills of filming. Where did they end up? Matt Stone reports

PORSCHE 911S In the opening passages of Le Mans, Steve McQueen as Michael Delaney drives this car through the French countryside and a local village. Along the way he drives by the scene of a previous racing accident, and also eyes the widow of a former competitor as she purchases flowers. These scenes are elegant and haunting.

Porsche provided the 911 to not only feature in the film, but for McQueen to use as his personal and family transport while in France. Steve ended up with it post production, and ultimately sold it to an LA-based attorney, who kept this highly original, well optioned car in near secret for three decades, and built a considerable file of paperwork and documentation. In more recent years it passed through several owners, selling in 2011 at RM Sotheby’s for $1,375,000.

PORSCHE 917LH ‘HIPPY’ Gerard Larrousse and Willy Kauhsen took this multihued long-tail to second place overall in the 1970 Le Mans. Porsche’s 1-2-3 podium sweep saw the factoryentered no.23 short-tail 917 being driven to its first overall victory

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by Richard Attwood and Hans Herrmann. All four drivers stayed on in France to participate in the subsequent filming of Le Mans.

The Hippy 917 was one of two long-tail models that ran at Le Mans that year, the other being the white no.25 of Vic Elford and Kurt Ahrens, which did not finish. Post its distinguished racing career, the colourful no.3 917 found a very good home joining the collection and museum of noted sports racing car collector, and devoted preservationist, Dr Fred Simeone.

Today the car can be viewed in his Pennsylvania museum in largely original and unrestored condition.

likely the 917 that McQueen spent the most time driving, and today it lives high and well at the pointy end of the desirability stick as the centrepiece of Jerry Seinfeld’s considerable Porsche collection.

Chassis 024 was purchased in 1970 by Jo Siffert, and was leased to Solar for the production to stand in for the damaged 026 (see previous pages). Among its many roles in the film was serving as primary high-speed camera car; a year later, it sadly headed up Siffert’s funeral procession in Switzerland, which was attended by around 50,000 people. After a distinguished history as a front-line racer, the 917 (pictured left) has now retired to the Brumos Collection, located in Jacksonville, Florida.

PORSCHE 917K GULF A trio of Gulf blue and orangeliveried short-tail 917s – the cars you’ll recognise as numbers 20, 21 and 22 – play starring roles nearly equal to that of McQueen himself. Mark Finburgh’s 917 is both chassis 013 and/or chassis 034. This car (then chassis 013) is the one crashed by David Piper, and all but destroyed. Piper lost part of his leg in the accident, and the car needed to be entirely rebuilt using a spare chassis, which was numbered 034.

Chassis 022 – the 917 we know best as Michael Delaney’s original chassis assignment in the film/ race, car number 20 – is unique among these machines, in that Solar Productions purchased it in 1970, factory direct, for use in the film. As such, it was ostensibly owned by Steve McQueen. It is

PORSCHOLA AND LOLARRI Le Mans wouldn’t be as impactful were it not for the pulse-pounding on-track accidents portrayed.

It made no sense (financial and otherwise) for the production to crash and burn a real 917 or Ferrari 512S at the time, and of course there was yet no such thing as CGI (not that McQueen would have allowed it). Consequently, two Lola prototype racers from David Piper were rebodied and liveried to look like the no.20 Gulf Porsche and a blazing-red 512S. As the cars destroy themselves in the action sequences, a little freeze-framing will evidence some original bits of the Lola bodywork beneath the glassfibre skins. Both cars were radio remote controlled,

and in spite of what was likely somewhat rude and crude technology, they performed their self-destructionary stunts admirably. Both cars were handily written off, and it is believed that neither is extant in any form.

FIAT BARTOLETTI 306/2 TRANSPORTER The Ferrari race transporter seen in the paddock during the opening stages of the film was originally commissioned in 1959 by playboy Lance Reventlow for his Scarab racing team. When his Formula 1 programme failed mid-season, the transporter was used by Lotus for the remainder of 1960 and 1961.

Camoradi Racing later commissioned modifications, which it was then unable to pay for, and in 1964 Carroll Shelby bought the vehicle to use in Europe to transport Cobras and Daytona Coupes.

Between 1965 and 1967 Alan Mann Racing used it to take GT40s to Le Mans. It then went to John Woolfe Racing, but broke down in the middle of a snowstorm and was abandoned, to eventually be bought by David Piper. When McQueen hired David as a driver for Le Mans, he also asked Piper to bring a couple of Lola T70s (left) in the transporter, which was then repainted in red to represent the Scuderia Ferrari Fiat in the film. It was later restored to Shelby spec (above), and now resides in the ChromeCars collection in Germany.

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Fifty years ago, one of the all-time great engines, the Jaguar V12, was launched.

R O AT R PE O Its story is one of engineering excellence, let-downs, politics and a brush with death

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A BENTLEY IN the 1920s may seem a strange place to start a story about a Jaguar engine designed in the 1960s, but bear with me, just for a few lines. This stuff is important.

It’s June 2, 1926. Said Bentley is not only astonishingly ugly, but it’s hammering around the Montlhéry track outside Paris. It has already completed 12 hours at an average speed of over 100mph. The plan is for it to become the first car with an engine displacement of less than 3.0 litres to maintain a triple-digit speed for 24 hours.

All is not well. This is the third attempt; the first two were scuppered by mechanical malady. Now the car is running fine, but it’s the frailty of the drivers in the face of horrendous weather that threatens the attempt. The first, Captain Woolf Barnato – soon to start his stillunapproached Le Mans record of three wins from three attempts – is spent. Just keeping the Bentley from flying off the banking has brought him to the point of clinical exhaustion.

So now George Duller, a former Champion Jockey, is at the wheel. But when he spins the streamlined brute through 360 degrees, he too has had enough and brings the car into the pits.

Yet Barnato has gone to find food, and unless someone gets in the Bentley, the attempt will be over. So a young mechanic, just five weeks past his 21st birthday, steps forward and bravely climbs into the streamlined machine, which is so hideous it is known as the Slug.

WO Bentley always considered it to the mechanic’s credit that the young man hung onto the Slug for fully one-third of a lap before flipping it, end over end, into a ditch. When the crew found his body under the wreckage, the consensus was that the mechanic was dead; only when the corpse groaned were they disabused of that notion.

The irony was that even if he’d not crashed, the record attempt was over the moment an unregistered driver got behind the wheel. As it was, the young Wally Hassan spent the next three weeks convalescing in an American hospital in Paris. Yet it was in such unprepossessing conditions that the

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fine for generating the low-down torque needed for Jaguar road cars, but rather less good at providing the top-end power for the marque’s racing models. So by joining two XK engines on a common crank, retaining their 83mm bore but reducing the stroke from 106mm to 75mm to give a 4870cc capacity, a new V12 could be achieved with largely known, tried-and-trusted components, complete with the desirable oversquare internal dimensions that were required for racing.

It was a good idea, yet Jaguar was discovering not only untapped development potential in the six-cylinder motor, but also that whatever its racing cars lacked in power was offset in considerable part by the slipperiness of their bodies. This was thanks to the ground-breaking work of aerodynamicist Malcolm Sayer, especially around the ultra-fast Le Mans circuit, after which all other races were almost as nothing to Jaguar. The brand withdrew from racing as a works team at the end of the 1956 season, and the idea of the V12 was quietly shelved.

But it didn’t quite go away, and once Hassan was back on board with Mundy in tow, with all their Coventry Climax knowledge, they and Baily were tasked with creating a new V12 for use in both race and road applications. The idea was that the former variant would compete at Le Mans for the first time in 1965, and that the street version would equip the XJ6, due to be launched in 1968. Which isn’t what actually happened. At all.

It seems that a V8 was at least evaluated in the early stages, before being abandoned partly because of carburation worries resulting from the firing order of the necessarily cross-plane crankshaft design. But nor is there any question that a V12 would not only be smoother and more powerful than a V8 of the same capacity, but also give a 50 per cent increase in cylinder count over what was regarded as the norm in the crucial American market.

The engine would still displace 5.0 litres, and while it’d be an all-aluminium design whereas the old XK motor had a cast-iron block, some elements of its predecessor, particularly in the basic arrangement of its twin-cam heads, were retained. The engine now had an 87mm x 70mm bore/stroke ratio, and in race spec gave 502bhp at 7600rpm, just squeaking over the 100bhp per litre mark. However, in a technical paper published years later, Hassan did feel the need to point out perhaps a touch ruefully that the shortstroke 3.0-litre XK race engine developed for 1958 produced 312bhp at 6750rpm, giving it a higher specific output than the V12. Its penchant for unstitching itself went unmentioned, though...

As is well known, the competition twin-cam

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career of one of Britain’s great automotive engineers was forged.

Spool forward 45 years, and the by-now rather portly and extremely eminent Walter Hassan (soon to be OBE) is standing alongside fellow Jaguar engineer Harry Mundy, next to an enormous, complex powerplant. TV presenter, commentator and former Spitfire pilot Raymond Baxter is interviewing them.

They are explaining the thinking behind Jaguar’s newest engine – one with no fewer than 12 cylinders that, just like its straight-six forebear, will go on to power everything from limousines to Le Mans winners.

After the crash, Hassan had stayed at Bentley until it went into liquidation in 1931. Then, after developing the Pacey-Hassan and BarnatoHassan Bentley specials, he joined first ERA before being recruited by Bill Heynes to the fast-growing SS Cars in 1938. He was seconded to the Bristol Aeroplane Company during World War Two, returning thereafter to what would soon be renamed Jaguar Cars. With Heynes and Claude Baily, he helped design a new 3.4-litre, twin-cam straight-six, which probably needs no further introduction here.

He left Jaguar in 1950 to become chief engineer at Coventry Climax. There, with Mundy, he was instrumental in the design of such legendary motors as the FW fire-pump engine, the FPF unit that powered Jack Brabham to back-to-back World Championships in 1959-60, and the FWMV which when installed in the back of a Lotus drove Jim Clark to both his titles, too.

But in 1963 Jaguar bought Coventry Climax, and Hassan and Mundy found themselves back with their old employer. Alongside Heynes and Baily, they turned their attentions to the realisation of a project already many years in the contemplation.

Astonishingly, the plan for a V12 Jaguar engine can be traced back at least as far as 1951 – the year in which the company won Le Mans for the first time, and fully 20 years before the finished result would make it into production.

The truth is that the XK powerplant was always designed primarily for road use, and although wonderfully reliable (until forced by rule changes to race at a 3.0-litre capacity in 1958), it was too small and short of cylinders to match the muscle of the V12 Ferraris that were its principle opposition for most of its career.

So the idea of a V12 was hatched, but using as much of the XK engine as possible. The opportunity would also be taken to correct its undersquare dimensions, conceived at a time when cars were still taxed on the width of their cylinder bores. The long-stroke XK motor was

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5 19 V12 never raced, nor did the XJ13 car for which it was designed and whose story is surely well known to most reading this. Briefly, and thanks to a number of different factors including the inertia that was increasingly endemic within the British motor industry in the mid-1960s, it was delayed into obsolescence. All I’d say is that it’s at least interesting to speculate what might have happened had the XJ13 been ready for Le Mans in 1965 as planned. This, after all, was a race won by a private 3.3-litre Ferrari 250LM producing around 320bhp.

With Sayer aerodynamics and 500bhp-plus, the XJ13 would surely have had the Italian’s measure, were it still around at the end.

In the meantime, Hassan was not in the least happy with the V12’s suitability for its perhaps more important road-going role in life.

What he wanted was a quiet, smooth engine laden with low-down torque for effortless throttle response. What he had was a madas-hell race motor that needed thrashing to give its best. And that wasn’t all.

He and Mundy had reservations about both the complexity and longevity of the four-cam V12, not to mention the noise of its chaindriven camshafts, although in the event the very different engine that resulted did at least 104

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retain this feature. There were also concerns about the ability of each twin-cam head to fit under the bonnet of the XJ6 once wet-sump lubrication had added to its overall height.

They needed to find the best way to proceed when the end goal is not a Le Mans-winning race car, but a luxury limousine. The head design was crucial, and debated right down to whether the twin-overhead-camshaft design should even be retained. If not, was a traditional ‘bathtub’ head adequate? Would a wedgeshaped head as favoured by the Americans be a better option, or was there something in the flat head design where combustion takes place within the crown of the piston?

Hassan and Mundy had been working on exactly that conundrum at Coventry Climax, and were keen to explore its potential further. A series of single-cylinder test-bed engines were built to evaluate all options, and in particular provide the answer to the critical question of what, exactly, did twin overhead camshafts with hemispherical combustion chambers bring to the party that was vitally important to this kind of car? And the answer that came back loud and clear was: ‘not much’.

In Hassan’s words: “The results demonstrated that the single-camshaft flat head was superior

to the twin-camshaft hemispherical design in all respects at engine speeds up to 5000rpm.”

Which is some statement.

The advantages were not just dynamic. He estimated the single-cam drive saved 7.3kg per head, the camshaft drive system was simpler and its noise level was lower. The additional space provided room for a 12-cylinder distributor, while the air-con compressor between the cylinder heads and the reduced width of the engine provided a tighter turning circle for the fatter tyres that were becoming fashionable at the time.

Together, these factors presented a compelling argument for the single-camshaft approach. The news that the engine was certainly not going to be required for competition purposes any time soon secured it, complete with an expansion in bore size from 87mm to 90mm to provide the 5343cc capacity to which it stuck right into the 1990s.

At the other end of the engine an aluminium block wasn’t a given, even by the mid-1960s. As ever Hassan’s chief priority was refinement, so an iron block was cast, too – and, at a huge 55kg weight penalty, installed in a Mk10 test hack. It was discovered to be no quieter at all. In the end, the only significant use of iron in the engine

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was for the caps of its seven main bearings.

You might think fuel injection would by now be the obvious way forward for what would be the world’s first mass-produced V12. Indeed, Hassan’s early investigations had explored using Lucas mechanical injection similar to that which had proven so successful on his world-beating Coventry Climax 1.5-litre F1 V8. But while achieving the desired power and torque was easy, getting the mid-range driveability and the increasingly important low emissions was not.

Although Bosch injection did find its way onto the engine in 1975, the first motors came with two Stromberg carburettors per bank.

These had to be mounted on the side of the engine, because there was insufficient underbonnet clearance to put them on top. This necessitated the use of long inlet pipes, but as these also promoted low and mid-range torque, Hassan was quite happy with them.

As to how much power resulted depended on where you bought the car. Hassan produced a chart showing outputs for no fewer than four different compression ratios. He started with 10.6:1, which gave around 290bhp at 6500rpm on 99 octane fuel. However, the emissions issue forced this down first to 10.0:1 and around 285bhp at 6000rpm, before finally reaching production at just 9.0:1 on 97 octane to give 272bhp back up at 6500rpm. But if you were buying in the US, a 7.8:1 ratio was used to cope with 91 octane fuel, in which case you’d be lucky to see 255bhp at a rather modest 5500rpm.

The engine intended for the XJ6 actually made its debut in the E-type in 1971; the renamed XJ12 was launched the following year. Yet save for the aforementioned adoption of fuel injection in the middle of the decade, the motor was developed very little other than a

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briefly raised compression ratio back to 10.0:1 in mid-1980. Come 1982, though, the need to deal with the powerplant’s appalling thirst resulted in the only other significant development in the first dozen years of its life.

This was a complete reworking of Hassan and Mundy’s flat cylinder-head design which, while being simple and great at producing power, had poor part-throttle efficiency. Swiss engineer Michael May produced an all-new head that moved combustion from the now flat-topped pistons into the head, where the charge was encouraged to swirl around recessed valves. With it came a leap in compression ratio to a fairly stratospheric 12.8:1 (I wonder how many other engines have had such a wide range of ratios without the addition of forced induction?) and a power hike to 302bhp. But really that was just a happy side effect; the real gain was an improvement in cruising fuel consumption of up to 50 per cent.

There would be more changes, too, including an expansion in capacity to 5993cc in 1989 and ultimately a 333bhp power output. And, of course, there were the race motors which, it is interesting to note, all used Hassan’s flat head design and not the May ‘Fireball’ head, because it was better for ultimate power. The engine first saw significant competition success in 1975, when Bob Tullius’s V12 E-type roadster took the SCCA championship in America. It was Tullius, too, who built the first V12-powered Jaguar prototypes, with the IMSA XJR-5 in 1982.

By then, Tom Walkinshaw was embarking on what would turn out to be a three-year campaign to win the European Touring Car Championship with the XJ-S. And it was on the back of this success that TWR got the job to develop a car that could win the World Sports

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Car Championship and Le Mans. The XJR-8, with the V12 now both bored and stroked out to displace 7.0 litres, delivered the former in 1987, its XJR-9LM successor the latter the following season – just 23 years after what Jaguar had hoped would be its first victory with the engine in the world’s greatest race. There would be another triumph, too, in 1990 for the XJR-12LM. In that, ultimate, racing 7.0-litre form, the V12 delivered 730bhp. This sounds impressive, but in terms of specific output it’s only a tiny fraction better in horsepower-per-litre terms than had been the twin-cam 5.0-litre V12 designed for the XJ13 a quarter of a century earlier.

As with all great Jaguar engines, the V12 soldiered on. The 161,583th and final motor was fitted to a blue, long-wheelbase XJ12 saloon on April 17, 1997. The car survives today as part of the Jaguar Heritage collection.

Walter Hassan retired in 1972 and was awarded his OBE. He did not quite outlive his engine, but he got close. The young lad WO Bentley presumed dead under the wreckage of the Slug lived for another 70 years after the crash, finally passing from this world to the next on July 12, 1996 at the fine age of 91. And to this day, every time I see an XJ-S, a V12 E-type or any one of the myriad road and racing cars powered by that motor, I think back to that dark and dismal day in 1926, how easily it could have had a different, less happy outcome, and how much poorer would have been the history of the British motor industry as a result.

Thanks to E-type UK in Kent for the use of the V12 for photography. The company believes the E-type S3 V12 is under appreciated, and upgrades everything from brakes to engines. It recently launched a bespoke V12 to show the versatility of the final E-type series. www.etypeuk.com.

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frontengine rear-wh drive

OLDSCHOOL WORLD CHAMPION

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What do you get when two World Championshipwinning co-drivers, one championshipwinning car and the mechanic who originally built it come together?

A spectacular restoration,

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RIGHT The 1981 championshipwinning Escort RS1800, restored to original spec; even the livery is period correct hand-painted rather than vinyl.

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IT’S 1981 AND there’s a World Rally Championship battle going on between the front-engine-rear-drive traditionalists, wild midengined specials and Audi’s still-developing fourwheel-drive newcomer. In the old-school camp the Escort RS1800 looks strong against the Opel Ascona 400, Fiat 131 Abarth and Sunbeam Lotus – but surely even Ford’s well proven weapon won’t be a match for the Renault 5 Turbo or Lancia Stratos, let alone the Quattro?

Oh yes it will! And although Ford (which had launched the front-wheel-drive Mk3 Escort the year before) had stopped supporting the Escort RS1800 entries, the Rothmans-liveried example of Ari Vatanen and David Richards takes the championship, having won three rallies outright and been on the podium for two more. It’s a spectacular achievement.

In the following years, despite a terrible accident on the 1985 Rally Argentina, Ari Vatanen goes on to win the Paris-Dakar (four times!) and Pikes Peak, before becoming a European member of parliament. David Richards shelves his pace notes and forms Prodrive, later becoming chairman of Aston Martin for six years. Rear-wheel-drive Escorts remain the clubman tools of choice, despite the four-wheel-drive onslaught in the World Rally Championship.

And the winning Escort? Well, in fact, there were four of those for the 1981 season. One was destroyed, one was pushed off the line of the final rally to be preserved in its original state at the UK’s National Motor Museum, Beaulieu, and the other two continued rallying. One of those is the car you’re looking at; DKP 191T,

the most successful of the four, having won the Acropolis and the 1000 Lakes, along with a seventh place in the Sanremo rally.

It had been built by Rothmans team mechanic John O’Connor at David Sutton Motorsport, which had taken over the preparation of WRC Escorts when Ford’s Motorsport division at Boreham pulled out.

While we’re tying up loose ends, it’s interesting to note that David Sutton later moved onto running Audi Quattros in the WRC. Much later on, O’Connor went to work with Phil Mills, the 2003 championshipwinning co-driver with Petter Solberg in the Prodrive-run Subaru Imprezas – but now a Ford Escort rally-preparation specialist.

So… let’s take a deep breath here as we slide sideways into the 2010s, when the collectability of old Subaru rally cars is on the up, and Prodrive opens a restoration department. Boss David Richards, already a big classic car fan, eyes up the newly shiny examples of his early Prodrive days, and starts to hanker for his old 1981 championship-winning Escort. You can see where this is going now, can’t you?

So David mentions the Escort to Phil Mills, who happens to know the locations of the two ex-Vatanen/Richards cars still in action. But neither owner is interested in selling. Until…

“It [DKP 191T] was in private hands,” says Phil, “and had done the Roger Albert Clark Rally, Goodwood, all those. I asked the owner many, many years ago if he would sell. He said: ‘No, I never will.’ And then I had a phone call out of the blue one day: ‘Are you still interested in the car? I might sell if we can come to an

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ABOVE Exactly how Vatanen and Richards knew it: correct seats (found in a loft!), switches and tripmeters.

Seatbelts were custom made to the original style.

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ABOVE David Richards in the co-driver’s seat in 1981; several years before Prodrive, Aston Martin and F1. Note the two wristwatches...

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Will Ari be allowed to drive the Ford?

Of course!

Well... carefully!

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arrangement.’ I phoned David straight away, and he said: ‘Yes, I’ve got to have it!’ It was as simple as that.”

Let’s fast-forward the story to late 2020, at the ever-expanding Prodrive HQ in Banbury, Oxfordshire. The 25th anniversary of Colin McRae’s era-defining championship win has only recently passed, and the Escort is nestled between a McRae car and a newly restored Solberg/Mills 2004 Impreza. In the background, Prodrive’s all-new Dakar Rally cars are being readied for shipping the following day. The Escort looks small but stunning in this sea of hi-tech.

Despite all that’s going on, David is completely focussed on the Ford: “I’ve got great, great, great affection for this RS1800 because it served us so very well,” he says enthusiastically. “The factory team had stopped in 1979, and David Sutton took over in 1980. I negotiated and took the funding from Rothmans to sponsor the team. And that’s how we managed to keep going.

“The car was built in a bit of a hurry by John O’Connor. He wasn’t allowed any more than a month to build it, because we were in such a rush to get it in time for the Acropolis Rally.

“Acropolis was one of our favourite events.

We won the rally, quite comfortably on this occasion [the previous year they won despite several punctures]. It was probably the last time when two-wheel-drive cars were capable of winning; the Audis were about to take over. And

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then we went to Finland [1000 Lakes] with this very same car; home territory for Ari. We had finished second twice there, always to Markku Alén. We sat down and analysed exactly where we lost the event, and decided that we’d lost in the first four or five stages – Markku got away from us there.

“So [in 1981] we said let’s go for it on the first four or five stages this time, we’ll go flat out and see if we can reverse the roles on Markku. And

by I think the fifth or sixth stage Markku rolled, and we got the upper hand and went on to win the event. For Ari, the 1000 Lakes was the event to win. Quite frankly, it is frighteningly fast; I can’t even describe the speed over those roads.

It is just mind boggling what you can do on a gravel road in one of those old cars.

“The same car was then rebuilt in Tarmac spec for the Sanremo rally, which in those days started off with a long drive from Sanremo down to Pisa, and then into gravel stages around Tuscany. And then the rally came back up to Sanremo, and did the asphalt roads behind Sanremo. Our biggest competitor at this point was Michèle Mouton, who was leading the rally when we came back into Sanremo.

“The championship was in my eyes, but Ari just wanted to win the event. There were two loops at the stage that night around the back of Sanremo, and we agreed that for the first loop we would push hard, see where we were after the end of that loop and, if we were still in touch, we might have a go [at winning the event]. So we set off like a scalded cat. And

ABOVE Vatanen and Richards on the way to winning the 1981 Acropolis in this very car.

LEFT Even the oil cap of the rebuilt Cosworth BDA has the correct sticker, for engine builder Terry Hoyle – better known now for his Ferrari units.

“

Anyone who drives an old car quickly is quite frankly a legend in their own right, wherever they come in the race!

Patrick Blakeney-Edwards

Creating Motor Racing Legends of Tomorrow motorracinglegends.com

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there was one little wall sticking out, and Ari must have been 5cm wrong with the car. We clipped the wall and broke a track-control arm.

We limped out of the stage having lost a couple of minutes, and eventually finished seventh.

“What actually sticks in my mind is the prizegiving at the harbour. Everyone went up for their prizes; we went up for seventh overall, and by seventh all the spectators have usually gone, but there was a little old man cheering and clapping us. We went to speak to him; in broken English he explained that he thought we were real sportsmen because we could have cruised around just to take the points for the World Championship, but we went to try to win, and he thought that was really sporting.”

David grins at the memory. It’s clear just how much that era, and this Ford, mean to him despite all the successes since. And surely that explains what he chose to do with the Escort once Phil had secured it for him.

This was a car that, despite being rallied for years, had been looked after with an eye on its provenance. It had been returned to its iconic Rothmans livery some years before, and most of the unique parts had been retained. But it wasn’t exactly to original specification, and it was battered as only a rally car can be. So David commissioned Phil to fully restore it, aware of the secret weapon at Phil’s Viking Motorsport workshop; John O’Connor, the very man who had built the Ford in the first place.

“The team stripped the car completely, shot blasted it back to bare metal and started again,” says Phil. “It was a massive job. The main thing was how straight it was; it didn’t need [new] chassis legs or anything, and there was no rot.

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back to what it should have been. A lot of hard work and old-fashioned panel beating.

“The devil was in the detail as they say.

There were quite a few bits that weren’t quite as they were back in ’81; silly things like the ignition pack – we managed to find one of those in Germany. And some of the switches on the dashboard had been changed from the originals… We spent a year trying to source bits that you could hold in the palm of your hand!”

David Richards smiles at this. “At one point I rang up and said: ‘Phil, can you please explain what the hell’s going on; we’re now a year in and I don’t see any signs of it coming together.’

He said he was just waiting for some rivets for the fuel tank! They’re not the same, the modern versions anymore, so they were trying to find some of the original old rivets...

“This was the meticulous detail that they went to. John O’Connor even found some of the original David Sutton stickers at home, and his old notebooks with every last detail of what he had done on the car and how to set it up from 1981. He’s a bit of a hero.”

Phil Mills agrees: “It was like a dream come true; the original creator of the car restoring it. He was incredible. He’s got all these original build schedules and pictures in his filing cabinet.”

“It was quite amazing to be rebuilding a car that I originally built way back in 1980 – 40 years ago!” confirms John O’Connor. “I had to scratch my head a few times trying to remember all the small things and details we used to do back then, but I got there in the end.”

The team stripped down all the mechanical parts, including the period-correct Cosworth BDA engine, five-speed ZF gearbox, Atlas rear axle and ZF limited-slip differential, finding that all were in good condition – but of course

all were fully rebuilt anyway. Even the door locks were stripped down and rebuilt.

There were more lucky finds, too, as Prodrive Legends’ Andy Brown explains: “It actually had different seats when Viking Motorsport got it.

We were looking for months trying to find original seats, and by chance someone spoke to a guy who said he had a couple in the loft.

He had bought one of the sister cars in period, and didn’t like the seats.”

The finishing touch was the Rothmans livery. “All the stripes were painted on in period, they weren’t stickered on,” says Phil.

“There were no stickers [on the exterior] at all.

We found a local guy who sign-writes a lot of lorries and the like; it was jaw dropping to watch him hand paint the Rothmans and Duckhams logos as it would have been done in period. You can see the brush strokes in places – that’s exactly how it should be.”

Now the finished car sits in the Prodrive HQ, so recently finished that David hasn’t even had a chance to drive it, only sit in it. “It’s got that smell about it,” he says. “Smell is one of those senses that we underestimate; it brings back a lot of incredible memories. I can’t wait to try the car.”

Is Ari excited about it? “I haven’t told him yet! Usually he comes over and stays with us a couple of times a year. I’d intended to take him down to Phil Mills’ place and surprise him, but of course I haven’t been able to – I hope to be able to do so very soon.”

And will Ari be allowed to drive the RS1800?

“Of course!” says David. “Well... carefully!

And only on Tarmac roads!”

Thanks to Prodrive (www.prodrive.com) and Viking Motorsport (www.vikingmotorsport.co.uk). The Escort is a finalist in the Royal Automobile Club Historic Awards, results unannounced at the time of writing (www.royalautomobileclub.co.uk).

SPEEDMASTER

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

1976 TYRRELL P34 FORMULA 1 CAR We have been heavily involved in the commissioning of this iconic 6 wheeled F1 car.

Made famous by Jody Scheckter and Patrick Depailler during the 1976 season including finishing 1-2 at the Swedish GP and 2nd at Monaco. Officially licensed by Tyrrell Promotions Ltd and painstakingly constructed to original drawings, this car is the only running example of the early and more successful narrow track P34. For further information on this project or to discuss similar projects please contact James Hanson.

LEYTON HOUSE CG901 We are pleased to offer this 1990 Leyton House March F1 Car for sale.

Designed by Adrian Newey, powered by a 3.5L Judd EV V8 engine and driven by Ivan Capelli and Maurizio Gugelmin, the design and build detail of this iconic F1 car is spectacular.

Offered freshly rebuilt and in running condition ready to be driven at some of the world’s best motoring events or enjoyed as the ultimate automotive artwork...

BEING DONALD

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This year marks the centenary of Donald Campbell’s birth. Alain de Cadenet recalls meeting the conflicted recordbreaker just before that fatal accident at Coniston, and describes helping to recreate the Bluebird legend years later

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ABOVE Campbell with Leo Villa after damaging K7’s Orpheus engine on November 4, 1966.

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DESTINY, BY DEFINITION, is what will occur to a person in the future, determined by previous events. Some believe that it is all beyond human control. This is perhaps when fate tangles with destiny to produce undesirable results. Donald Campbell CBE (1921-1967) certainly qualified as a man with a destiny. He knew from an early age, having witnessed his father Sir Malcolm Campbell pursuing his racing and record-breaking career, that he would be following in those footsteps.

During 1966 I was taking on consignments as a freelance photographer in an attempt to pay for motor racing. It’s hardly surprising that when I was asked, in late October, whether I’d like to go up to Coniston Water to take some pictures of Donald and his Bluebird K7 jetpowered boat, I couldn’t wait to get there. I jumped into my race car, the ex-works demonstrator AC Ace-Zephyr. With enough space in the boot for my borrowed Hasselblad and lenses, plus my trusty Leica III and a few rolls of film, it doubled as my daily transport.

I got to the Sun Hotel rather late and checked into the only room available – which was furnished with a stiffly sprung ex-army bed. I was amazed to find that Donald’s team of helpers were, mostly, more of a family of useful dedicated workers rather than pure professionals. Leo Villa, master mechanic and fixer, who had of course orchestrated all of Sir Malcolm’s numerous attempts to set world records on both water and land, was in attendance and very much in charge. He and Donald already had seven Water Speed Record attempts under their belts, with the most recent at 276.33mph taking place in Western Australia on the last day of 1964. Donald had also achieved the world Land Speed Record in Western Australia on the Dumbleyung salt lake the previous July, thereby becoming the only person to reach both milestones in the same year.

Seeing K7 under its makeshift awning at Coniston, watching the team at work and being shown around the encampment was the most inspiring thing I’d ever seen at that time. K7 was comparatively naked; unclothed enough to see through open panels into the Orpheus engine bay. Initially designed by the Norris brothers Ken and Lew for a lesser-powered Metropolitan-Vickers Beryl gas turbine, the craft had recently been fitted with a Bristol Siddeley Orpheus from a Folland Gnat that produced a good 20 percent more thrust.

I duly completed my photographic task, and spent some time over lunch talking to Donald.

What I learned was that his whole team totally believed in what he was doing, and that the

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record could and would be broken. It would need clement weather and attention to every detail for success. I also learned that record breaking was something that, once started, was all but impossible to stop. Donald was the most patriotic man I’d ever met, and utterly pragmatic about the task in front of him. I subsequently discovered that he was highly stressed out by the press and others continually harassing him to ‘get on with it’.

None of which helped.

There was also the cost factor. He was in need of success to carry on. I suspect he could find a little peace only when he climbed into his Bluebird Blue Jaguar E-type and headed off for a drive around the lake. It’s difficult to be phlegmatic about the job when you are surrounded by emotion, pressure, well-wishers and a rookie with a camera asking daft questions.

You know what happened next. January 4, 1967 was the worst day. Donald’s initial run went well and he was clocked at just under 300mph on the out run. Anxious to get the record achieved, he opted to do the return run without either refuelling or waiting for the surface shock waves to completely subside.

With just a few hundred yards to complete the run, the Orpheus jet likely flamed out, which resulted in the fatal crash.

What I had learned in the couple of days I spent at Coniston was instrumental in how I then tried to go about running my own racing activities. The idea of having an all-British racing machine started to appeal, even if the first effort with a home-made Martin V8 stuffed into a Diva Valkyrie didn’t work. As with Donald, one just keeps at it until the team around you believe in what you’re trying to do.

Together, you get the job done.

But imagine my surprise 20 years later when filmmaker Tony Maylam asked me to construct a life-size replica of K7 for a forthcoming BBC TV movie to be made about the last 60 days of Donald’s life. Tony was to direct Across The Lake, written by Roger Milner, who had also written BBC’s The Speed King about Sir Malcolm’s life. Tony had signed up Anthony Hopkins to play Donald.

Fortunately Jack Lovell, who’d cast all of my prototype racing-car bodies in glassfibre in his Battersea premises, had also worked in the movie industry. He was more than confident that he could get this built. Armed with photographs, films and copies of the original drawings, archived in London’s Science Museum, he commenced the reconstruction of a movie version of Bluebird K7.

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studios of Blue Peter, and thence went to the London Boat Show, where it had a whole stand to itself. We then installed the two power units. Firstly, the full-size replica of the Bristol Orpheus jet engine, which fitted in just behind the cockpit. This was followed by the actual motive power unit, which was a 200bhp Mercury V6 outboard fitted on the transom into its own well. It was connected via cables to the steering wheel, which had its own starting button and ignition in the cockpit.

‘D-Day’ for launch approached, and the site chosen was the Princes Water Ski Club lake at Feltham in Middlesex. Movement and floatation tests were carried out with the help of 28lb stage weights to achieve the correct trim line.

Plenty of tubes of silicone RTV were needed to seal leaks, and expanded polyurethane gave buoyancy around the engine bay.

Coniston Water in February can be very unpleasant indeed. Cold, windy conditions with snow and hail are the norm, and Maylam was quite apprehensive about his chances of keeping to schedule. However, the production was blessed with the best weather any of the locals could remember. We all felt that Donald was up there, ensuring the right buttons were pressed to help us.

The props department had faithfully recreated the boat ‘house’, launch rails and ramp, and our ’Bird was on its trolley for the press launch on time. Anthony Hopkins came out to meet the media in his blue overalls, RAFstyle flying helmet and oxygen mask. Everything was so convincingly represented that one

observer, who’d been there for the original run, said it could have been 1966 all over again.

The following four weeks saw our creation working hard for its money. Not just for static shots, but on the move for several hours. Some of the techniques used to achieve results were novel for those very much pre-digital and CGI times. Other than fuel, the only consumables were more tubes of RTV and plenty of hot tea.

Recreating Donald’s exact motions from that fateful day felt eerie. No more so than when I had the ’Bird at the end of the lake in the original start position. I looked through the canopy and saw what Donald had seen; the long expanse of water that stretches away into the hills at the southern end of Coniston Water. The order to start the engine and give it full throttle came through my headphones.

But I was mesmerised.

I suddenly realised what it was all about; it was all very emotional. I told Maylam afterwards that it was perhaps just as well that I didn’t have a live Orpheus in the back, because I would surely have wanted to do a run for real.

And that’s knowing once you start, you can never stop. Donald Campbell lived a life on the edge, determined in his own bloody-minded way to get the job done. Just looking at the Pathé news footage of K7 flat-out on the lake, over 300mph, with only its three points skimming the water surface in the most delicate balance, is evidence that he was right.

Perhaps it compares with the Charge of the Light Brigade. The survivors had to know it could have been done, too.

PHIL EVANS, ALAIN DE CADENET

of the boat, to give an accurate threedimensional impression of the complete craft.

Full-size cross-sectional drawings were created and pasted onto plywood, and then cut to size with a bandsaw and jigsaw. These sections were next assembled onto a wooden keel to give an outline overall shape. They were then covered with lath-like strips of wood, and plastered over and styled to the original finish.

The BBC was most particular about the detailing, because every rivet had to be accounted for on the original buck. The sponsons on our drawings were the 1955 style, and we needed the 1966 version, which were different. Several days of consternation and midnight oil were burnt altering them.

With the major constituent pieces now prepared, Jack and his crew put it all together – and we had our life-size K7 replica. Moulding came next, after hours of rubbing down and release waxing to ensure the moulds would come off smoothly. GRP panels were produced from these moulds and gel coloured with the correct Bluebird Blue pigment supplied by the same firm who’d made the paint for Donald. The boat was then bonded and screwed together with marine-ply floor and cockpit reinforcement.

The see-through canopy was tricky to reproduce. The only specialist that could do this had produced the Harrier Jump Jet canopies, and it worked with 3/8in polycarbonate.

It did a brilliant job, even informing me that I might like to know the unit was bulletproof and virtually indestructible.

The new ‘Bluebird’ had its first airing in the

ABOVE FROM LEFT Anthony Hopkins on location at Coniston with the faithfully recreated Bluebird, during filming for 1988 TV production Across The Lake.

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The attitude of a Dakar 959, the power of a supercar and the attention to detail of, well, a Singer...

W O R D S DAV I D L I L LY W H I T E

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IMAGINE THIS. A Singer client requests a 911 that will be capable of serious off-road events.

Not just little road rallies, not gentle jaunts through the countryside. He wants to tear across the desert in one of the myriad off-road races in the US, typified by the Baja 1000.

Anyway… said Singer client’s request is greeted with an unequivocal ‘no’. If there’s anything we know about Singer Vehicle Design it’s that whatever it does, it does really well – and offroad 911s was not something it knew about.

But you don’t have to be especially deductive or eagle eyed to realise that ‘no’ turned to ‘yes’ after a while, because here in front of you is the All-Terrain Competition Study. As with every Singer restoration, its basis is the 964-era 911, chosen because it was the first model to swap torsion-bar suspension for coils and struts, and yet retain the air-cooled flat-six and trailingarm rear end that gives that familiar 911 feel.

And so, the All-Terrain Competition Study is conceived around a strengthened 964 shell, fitted with an FIA cage, into which is slotted a twin-turbo, 3.6-litre air-cooled motor, currently at 450bhp and 420lb ft torque. It’s hooked up to a sequential five-speed transmission, powering

ABOVE Bodywork hides bespoke suspension, twin spare wheels and long-range fuel tank.

permanent four-wheel drive via front, centre and limited-slip differentials. Already we’re deviating from Reimagined Singers, which are strictly manual, although some are at least four-wheel drive. Then there’s the bespoke twin-damper (per corner) suspension, with “dramatically increased ride height, suspension travel and overall strength” as Singer puts it.

And all this is topped off with quickly removable carbonfibre body panels. These do look recognisably 911, with more than a hint of the 1984 Dakar 953 or the 959s that followed, but are also utterly unique and frankly bonkers.

So, what turned no to yes? Richard Tuthill did. Now, if you know your Porsches you’ll probably have heard of Tuthill Porsche. Started

by Francis Tuthill after success on the 1977 London-Sydney in a Beetle, the UK company is now looked after by son Richard, and is the place to go for the preparation of Safari Rally 911s, among other things. Richard helped with testing, mostly sideways, of the Dynamics and Lightweighting Study (DLS) ultimate road 911,

SYDNEY AUSTRALIA

350 OR 400 PORSCHE OR FERRARI

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so when the off-roader was requested, the initial refusal turned into a “I wonder what Richard would say?” Next thing you know, Singer’s off-road-curious client had supplied not one but two 964 donors – and the AllTerrain Competition Study was born.

This is the most radical example of Singer’s progress over the past decade. In 2009 the first Reimagined 911 was shown, a two-wheel-drive 964 coupé with reworked running gear and eye-popping attention to detail.

As Singer’s Alex Cox explains, the next stage was a customer asking if one could be restored for more wintry climes, with four-wheel drive.

Then came a request for a Targa, which resulted in Singer re-engineering the Targa roll hoop because originals weren’t up to its standards.

The message is that clients can create bespoke cars, from simple trim tweaks on the Special Wishes programme to the high-profile Study cars – although all have to meet the approval of founder and style-master Rob Dickinson.

Where Singer doesn’t have its own expertise, it works with the very best technical partners.

For DLS, that’s Williams Advanced Engineering, Michelin, Brembo and Bosch. For the AllTerrain Competition Study: “Richard Tuthill’s

outfit was the piece of the puzzle that we didn’t have at Singer, to go from a 964 to the car that you can see 6ft in the air with Richard behind the wheel,” says Alex. (On that note, be sure to find the video of Richard hooning the new car off-road – it’s spectacular.)

The clients contribute significantly towards the development costs of the radical Study cars, on the understanding that more can be commissioned. For the DLS that’s a maximum of 75 cars; for the off-roader no limit has been set so far. There’s a clear market for the latter in the US, and perhaps also in the Middle East.

Singer CEO Mazen Fawaz competes in US desert racing himself, so knows exactly what’s involved. “There’s a race called the NORRA 1000 which, because the client is in California, would be the natural first outing.”

Of course, there’s been speculation about the Dakar Rally. “As a target, that would be super cool,” says Maz. “There are considerations in the car for things like air-conditioning of the highest level and carrying equipment – the car is relatively small – but it’s absolutely doable.”

BELOW FIA seats and roll cage, pro navigation system, sequential shift, hydraulic handbrake...

However, the All-Terrain Competition Study has been extensively tested on the forest roads of Wales, which has revealed that for road rallying where surfaces aren’t as rough, its extra-long-travel suspension, high ride height and large tyres are overkill.

So how about a semi-Tarmac-spec version?

Still rally capable but more suited to, say, Targa Tasmania? This is where the second of the two 964s delivered by the client comes in, with a yet-to-be-revealed All-Terrain Competition Study in red, likely without twin dampers and with a lower centre of gravity, but with enough ground clearance to keep it out of trouble.

This is what has been missed by many in the internet adoration of Singer’s new All-Terrain Competition Study. It’s not just a plaything – a full-size Tamiya off-roader with particularly neat detailing (our favourite is the Rothmanshomage artwork under the rear bodywork); it’s a full-on competition weapon. As Maz puts it: “It has all the bells and whistles needed for motor sport,” plus event-support packages available from Singer and Tuthill.

Like the DLS, the off-roaders will be restored in the UK, masterminded from a new Singer HQ at Bicester Heritage. Exciting times.

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The

From a freshly launched family car, engineer Reid Railton fashioned a sports model that out-raced Continental rivals and put many great drivers on the road to success. Karl Ludvigsen explains how Riley’s plucky Brooklands flew the flag for Britain at home and abroad

LUDVIGSEN ON: THE RILEY NINE BROOKLANDS

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Seated here to flaunt the Riley’s lowness, Reid Railton drove the prototype to victory in a two-lap handicap race at Brooklands on September 17, 1927, lapping the Outer Circuit at 99mph.

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Carrying the Riley Nine engine were rubber bushings on a tube running through its crankcase.

Notable features were its twin, high-placed camshafts and overhead valves, vee-inclined at an included 90Âş.

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Sammy Davis’s enthusiasm for his Riley Brooklands shines from the cockpit during preparations for the Brooklands six-hour race on May 12, 1928.

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First appearance of the definitive Riley Brooklands was in October 1927 at Olympia.

A key feature was its completely new frame, underslung at the rear.

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A design team led by Percy Riley created a landmark small-car engine in the 1.1-litre four, powering the Riley Nine introduced at Olympia in 1926.

Details of its rugged two-bearing crankshaft were laid bare by master cutaway artist Max Millar.

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LONDON’S 1926 OLYMPIA Motor Show witnessed the unveiling of a completely new car that would win praise and profits for its maker in both commerce and competition.

The car was the Riley Nine, and its racing counterpart was the Riley Speed Model Nine, soon to be known – and famous – simply as the Riley Brooklands.

The Nine was the latest product of William Riley’s five sons, who had been making cars in Coventry since the turn of the century.

Among them, Victor and Percy stood out – the first as a manager and the second as an engineer. “It was their work,” wrote Kenneth Richardson, “which enabled the firm to enjoy an unrivalled reputation for producing cars which combined an economical price with a touch of quality such as the ordinary production models could not give.”

Early in the Riley saga, Percy set up a separate Riley Motor Company to build engines for the brand’s cars. After the Great War, Percy and brother Stanley began planning an all-new 1.1-litre 9hp car, the ‘Nine’. Although noted for its low build and clean lines, the Nine was innovative above all under its bonnet, with an engine thought through from first principles.

Featuring a cylinder bore of 60.3mm – a scant 2.4 inches – to bring it into the RAC’s 9hp tax category, the Nine’s 95.2mm stroke gave it a capacity of 1087cc. Its small bore was exploited to the maximum by grouping the cylinders close together with no cooling water between them. Thus it was short enough, Percy reckoned, to need main bearings only at the front and rear of its crankshaft.

For stability, these main bearings were exceptionally long – the rear by almost twice its diameter. Where a centre bearing might have been was a substantial bob weight as a balancing mass. It had no main-bearing caps as such, the crankshaft being inserted from the front of the engine into the deep crankcase and secured by a cover containing the front main bearing.

Most radically, the power-producing top of the engine resembled that of the latest racing Alfa Romeos, Fiats and Millers, with veeinclined overhead valves at an included angle of 90º for maximum gas flow. The spark plug was vertical at the side of each chamber, the latter machined to a smooth hemisphere.

Instead of the overhead camshafts that usually accompanied this arrangement, the Riley brothers opened the valves by rocker arms and short pushrods from twin camshafts placed

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high in the crankcase just below the water jackets. Driving these were helical gears at the front of the engine.

Close-grained grey cast iron was the material of both the one-piece cylinder block plus crankcase and the cylinder head, with a finned aluminium sump at the bottom. The exhaust manifold was smoothly formed, and the castaluminium inlet manifold was water warmed to improve fuel vaporisation. Weighing 195lb, the Nine developed 28bhp at 4000rpm. Percy Riley’s experiments with alcohol fuel and suitable modifications revealed the little four’s full potential: 99bhp at 6300rpm.

No sooner was this remarkable Riley revealed to the world than work was underway to make a super-sports edition. The cue for this was its engine’s size, for its swept volume fitted it neatly into the 1.1-litre class that was internationally recognised for racing and record breaking. A meeting in 1926 between Percy and Brooklands tuner-racer JG Parry-Thomas led to the latter being commissioned to start work on a version of the Nine that would make it suitable for sports car competition. Depending on the prototype’s performance, decisions would be taken about the car’s future.

After Parry-Thomas’s untimely death, Riley had no hesitation in transferring responsibility for the barely begun project to his successor business Thomson & Taylor (T&T), with ParryThomas’s former colleague Reid Railton at the technical helm. Reid took up the challenge.

“By verbal instructions to mechanics,” said T&T designer Reg Beauchamp, Railton “cut and re-welded an existing Riley frame.” This shortened the wheelbase to 91.5 inches from the standard 106.5 inches.

The aim of this frame modification was to achieve an ultra-low design for the sports Nine.

The concept underpinning this, said author William Boddy, was that: “At the time it was thought a very low centre of gravity was essential for fast cornering, and that the best aerodynamics were achieved by having the undershield as close to the ground as possible.

The current Grand Prix Delage and Talbot cars adhered to this line of thought, and so did the Thomas Specials and the Eldridge Special.”

Railton’s initial scheme for lowering the lines of the sports Riley Nine was to submerge the driver and notional passenger as deeply as possible inside the frame’s perimeter, sharing the cockpit with the torque tube to the rear axle. Their aluminium seats were a scant six MAGNETO

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inches above the road. With the bonnet right down atop the engine, and a scuttle height of only 36 inches, a shorter radiator was fabricated and inserted behind a modified front crossmember. By maintaining the standard Nine frame height Railton could retain the model’s unique engine mounts, which were atop the frame at the ends of a rubber-mounted tube through the crankcase.

Outfitting and proving the sports Nine prototype included an aluminium body that left the frame exposed back to the cockpit cut-outs and shrouded it to the rear, where a six-gallon fuel tank sufficed for initial trials.

Mechanical brakes and 19-inch wire wheels came from the standard Nine model. The spiral-bevel final-drive ratio rose from 5.25:1 to 4.77:1, while gearing in the four-speed transmission was shortened.

For the project, Percy Riley supplied one of the engines from his initial ‘Model X’ prototype series of 1924-25. Instead of the later, one-piece iron block, this had an aluminium crankcase topped by a separate iron cylinder block. Replacing the standard Nine’s thermosyphon cooling was a water pump driven from the nose of the crankshaft, where the dynamo usually lived. This was omitted as not being required with magneto ignition and a pump to pressurise the fuel tank.

Tuning measures on T&T’s newly installed Heenan & Froude dynamometer included valves enlarged by 1/16 inch to 13/8 inches and camshafts with more racy timing. Twin 26mm Solex carburettors fed the mixture, while freshly fabricated steel tubing sped the departing exhaust. Higher crowns on new pistons raised the compression ratio. The result was an output of 50bhp at 5000rpm – almost twice the power of the original production Nine. The weight of the car it had to propel was some 1100lb.

“Great interest was aroused,” said Reg Beauchamp, “when, on its first outing, a maximum speed of 103mph was attained when driven by Mr Railton himself. This was a notable performance for an 1100cc car, and ensured the continued support of Mr Victor Riley. This design and development work led to the arrangement and marketing of two stages of tune that any private owner could purchase for the improved running of the now-famous Riley Nine.”

The 103mph speed had been achieved in private, so when Victor entered the prototype in the 90mph Short Handicap at Brooklands on September 17, 1927, its form was unknown.

“It caught the handicappers completely napping,” wrote William Boddy. “Although not 1 3 8

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ABOVE T&T’s Ken Taylor observes from the doorway as Reid Railton prepares to exercise one of the sports Rileys prepared by the company for the 1928 Tourist Trophy race in Ulster.

a racing driver, Railton elected to drive the little red car himself.” In the 11-entry field for the two-lap race, he was given a 48-second start from the scratch Bugatti, with Frank Ashby’s 1.5-litre Riley five seconds behind him and a similar Riley 11 seconds in arrears.

Railton quickly caught the Morris that started 17 seconds ahead: “From this point onwards, the race became a mere procession,” said The Motor. “Railton went on to win in absurdly easy fashion by one-and-a-half miles.

For the class of race, it was the fastest event ever run at Brooklands, the winner lapping at 99mph and averaging 91.37mph.”

“Everyone concerned must have been absolutely delighted with the new Riley’s performance,” remarked Boddy. “Victor Riley was so impressed, that at a Charity Meeting in November George Duller drove the red car for him and lapped at 100.01mph, gaining a second and a third place. Thus was Britain provided with a 1100cc-class sports model capable of standing up to the strong prevailing competition from Salmson, Amilcar, BNC, Vernon-Derby, Sénéchal and others.”

Behind the scenes Reid Railton had been busy, for he decided to go back to the drawing board to create an entirely different chassis for the sports Riley Nine. Having proven the concept’s merit, he wanted to design bespoke

‘When the prototype was entered at Brooklands in 1927, it caught the handicappers completely napping’

underpinnings for it that did not rely on cutting and welding Riley Nine frames. Nor had the first frame been ideal, because the fitting of its rear leaf springs below tapering side members caused the springs to bind and stiffen uncontrollably.

Railton’s new design had the immense advantage that it placed the frame’s main weight at the very bottom of the vehicle, further contributing to the low centre of gravity that was the design’s objective. He also lengthened the wheelbase to 96.0 inches – 6.5 inches less than the standard Nine and 4.5 inches longer than the prototype.

Reid accomplished this by leaving the frame at a high level in front, to suit the mountings of both suspension and engine, then sweeping it down just before the firewall to the lowest-possible level. From there the frame went straight back to curve gently inward at the rear. At its extremity, a tubular crossmember extended out to the rear pivots for the axle’s semi-elliptic leaf springs, now mounted externally and shackled at the front. The frame went beneath the axle in the ‘underslung’ manner, another major change from the prototype.

Crucial to rigidity was the section that curved downward from the high front rails to the main frame at the rear. Through the same area it also made a transition from a narrow frame at the front, to suit the suspension and engine mounts, to maximum width to allow the occupants the same ultra-low seating as in the prototype. On the inside of the curving portion, known as the ‘swan’s neck’ to sports Riley intimates, Railton boxed the channel-section frame for greater stiffness. Always leery of weight, he punctured the added steel with lightening holes.

Described as “a last-minute arrival”, the first car to use this new chassis specification was an attraction for the Riley stand at the 1927 Olympia Motor Show, which opened to the public on October 13 – while the prototype was still flaunting its speed at Brooklands. Clearly prepared in haste by T&T,

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it sported a fabric-covered main body and steel bonnet. Its cycle wings were unsprung, attached to the brake backing plates in Aston Martin style.

“Perhaps the centre of attraction,” vouchsafed The Autocar, “is an exceedingly low-built twoseater sports 9hp car with a graceful fabriccovered open body, finished in blue with white wings, wheels and deck. The chassis is a replica of one that astonished the handicappers at Brooklands by showing a speed of 99mph when winning its first race – an amazing performance for so small an engine without a supercharger.” Although it was anything but a ‘replica’ of the car Railton had driven on that day, this legend best suited Riley’s propaganda.

Including a guarantee of 80mph speed, the new model’s price was announced as £395, against £298 for the touring Riley Nine and £285 for the fabric-bodied Monaco saloon. The car was originally launched as the Speed Model Nine, but in view of its exploits in Surrey it was soon known as the Brooklands Speed Model.

Soon enough this was shortened simply to ‘Brooklands’. Although many cars had claimed fame over the Weybridge oval’s 20 years, this was the first production model to be named after the circuit itself. Created by Hugh Locke King as a facility that would improve the breed of Britain’s automobiles, the Brooklands track had achieved this with its eponymous Riley Nine.

Now the Brooklands Riley needed a powertrain. Versions also had to be created that were appropriate not only for racers but also for those who wanted a fast road car, because Victor Riley wanted to amortise his investment over more than a handful of two-seater Nines. This meant retaining the ability to drive a dynamo from the nose of the crankshaft – essential for the starting and lighting of road-equipped cars.

Eliminating as this did the drive of a water pump by the crankshaft, a new location for the pump was needed. This was found at a downward extension of the vertical shaft, skew-gear driven from the inlet camshaft, that turned the magneto or distributor. At the bottom of the shaft, the pump delivered cooled water to the exhaust side of the cylinder block.

While road cars had cast-iron exhaust manifolds, those for racing had multi-tube steel manifolds to Brooklands silencers if required.

Road-car induction equipment was twin SU or Solex carburettors. For racing, a ‘Plus’ version carried an adapter plate to which four Amal motorcycle-type carburettors were attached, each directly feeding one inlet port. While an electric fuel pump was fitted to road cars, racers still preferred air-pressurised delivery. The standard fuel tank carried ten Imperial gallons, while the diameter of the brakes – initially 140

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‘For a host of the greatest names in motor sport, Riley was the oasis on the barren road to success’ 10⅛ inches – was increased to 13 inches in the main production of the Brooklands. Road cars had sloping front wings and racers had cycle wings, now fixed to the chassis.

Racing in 1928 led to several improvements in the 1929 models, which cost £420 in touringcar form and £395 if stripped for competition with larger fuel tanks. Replacing the right-hand gearchange was a central shift gate on a rearward extension from the transmission’s top cover.

This was the first ‘remote’ shifter, setting a pattern for all future sports cars. All-weather kit was improved, required as it was in some races for use in the early laps. Production cars and some racing models had steel bodies over ash frames. From 1929, works racing versions were doorless with aluminium over steel framing.

The Riley Nine Brooklands was not cheap compared with its rivals. French sports cars in its category were the Amilcar Grand Sport at £285, Salmson Grand Prix costing £248, Sénéchal at £250 and Vernon-Derby at £275.

But for the serious British sportsman, its attributes were hard to resist. So enthusiastic was the reaction to it at Olympia in 1927 that Victor Riley decided to transfer its production from T&T to the Riley works. Dealers began receiving cars from Coventry toward the end of 1928. With total Brooklands production estimated at 110 examples, T&T may have made the first score before Riley got into gear.

Preparing for 1928’s Brooklands six-hour race, Sammy Davis said: “I had a really beautiful light-green Riley Speed Model with a long, graceful tail – one of the handiest and most comfortable little cars that ever Thomson & Taylor’s built for a race. With Head as mechanic and under the immediate supervision of RA Railton and the great Taylor himself, we worked day after day on that car, being more than usually anxious to do something good with it because everyone concerned, from Victor Riley downwards, was so enthusiastic.”

Although two of the Riley entries failed in the race for reasons that were rectifiable, a third Brooklands placed fourth overall and first in class. Later in 1928 the same car, entered and driven by Kenneth Peacock, won its class in the Tourist Trophy in Ulster, Northern Ireland, in

which no fewer than ten Riley Brooklands took part. In 1929 George Eyston won his class in the Irish Grand Prix, and Sammy Davis scored a class win in the TT; the first unsupercharged car home. With seven Brooklands entered, three took the top class places.

Weakness in the crankshaft led to a revision by engineer-racer Ernest Eldridge. Overcoming the objections of Percy Riley, who considered his engine to be perfect, Victor insisted that the Eldridge design be used for competition after some racing accidents were traced to vibrations caused by the standard crank. It became the basis of the Nine’s racing crankshaft.

In 1930, Victor Gillow entered his ‘somewhat modified’ Riley Brooklands in the 300-mile event for 1.5-litre sports cars at Dublin’s Phoenix Park on July 18. Open to all types including supercharged models, the race attracted entries from Alfa Romeo, Aston Martin, Amilcar and Lea-Francis. With only 1.1 litres, Gillow “was getting his Riley round at an astonishing speed,” thought Motor Sport, “but seemed rather to be tempting Providence as his margin of safety (if any) was very small. Unofficial timing showed him to be lapping at over 75mph, truly a wonderful performance for an unsupercharged 1100cc engine”. He defeated 24 other entrants at a speed of 72.2mph, faster than 1929’s winning Alfa Romeo. Gillow also broke the unlimited lap record at 76.7mph.

Loyal to Brooklands since 1929, Cyril Whitcroft reaped the benefit in the 1932 Ulster TT. To be sure it was a handicapped event in which the Rileys were judged favourites, but Whitcroft did well to finish first after nearly five hours of demanding racing. Second in another Brooklands was George Eyston. One was also driven by a newcomer who led much of the race, Freddie Dixon. Having raised the class lap record to 76.84mph in “a marvellous display of driving”, Dixon was tipped as a man to watch.

He would do wonders with Rileys in the future.

Wrote Riley historian David Styles: “The Brooklands’s factory swan song was the 1934 Le Mans 24 Hours, in which it took the RudgeWhitworth Biennial Cup and played its part in securing the Team Award, as well as winning the 1100cc class. For a host of the greatest names in motor sport, Riley was the oasis on the barren road to success. Surely Riley was to Britain what Bugatti was to France and Ferrari to Italy.”

Although Rileys had raced before, the Nine Brooklands was a stunning breakthrough that would lead to further competition machines. It was the pure-bred creation of Percy Riley and Reid Railton, and its place in history is assured.

Thanks to Bonhams auction house for the use of its studio images, www.bonhams.com.

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L ANC I A LC 2

D I R K D E JAG E R JOHAN DILLEN

PHOTOGRAPHY WOR D S

ROTHMANS

VERSU MARTINI

It’s Lancia, it’s Ferrari, it’s Martini... all combined in the same car. It should be a legend, yet somehow it never sparkled. Just why did the Lancia LC2 fall so short of its tobacco-liveried Porsche rival in 1980s Group C racing?

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I HAVE BEEN here before; in a Porsche 962 moreover. This is Most Autodrom in the Czech Republic. It’s a fine circuit, with one big downside: following a fatal accident, the first corner after the straight has been altered to a dead-slow chicane. As you roll out of the pitlane, this is where your first impressions happen. You hit the brakes and switch down the gearbox for the first time. This is where you find out – and in the 962 on cold tyres, it does exactly what you’ve read countless times before; it tries to go straight on. It’s your wakeup call. Be careful, show some respect.

So, when the time comes to take the 962’s most important contemporary rival for a spin on that same Most track, you find yourself wary when you come up to that chicane once more on your first run. Only this time, the Lancia LC2 turns in beautifully when asked.

And that Ferrari 3.0-litre V8 pulls nicely through with torque to spare, where the Porsche stuttered at low speed.

What’s this? How come this car never managed to beat the factory Porsches in a straight fight in the 1980s Group C days? “It’s a mix of factors,” explains Gianni Tonti, now 78, and at the time technical director for motor sport activities through Lancia’s Squadra Corse HF. Tonti’s CV for the brand includes

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work on the Fulvia HF, Stratos, 037 and Beta Monte Carlo Turbo, LC1 and, finally, LC2.

Having dominated in rallying with the Stratos in the 1970s, Lancia diversified its motor sport efforts, and through clever reading of the rulebook it managed to bag some impressive results with both the Group 5 Beta Monte Carlo and LC1. The latter was nothing more than a Dallara-built barchetta with the Beta’s 1.4-litre turbo. It was running as a Group 6 car in Group C, and thus was not eligible for points in the Constructors’ Championship.

Yet Riccardo Patrese found himself in the running for the drivers’ crown right up to the final lap of the final race of the 1982 championship. So when Lancia decided it was going to take Porsche head-on for ’83 with the LC2, a real Group C prototype, things looked promising. “It’s just… Porsche had taken its time to develop its Group C car,” recalls Tonti.

“On the other hand, the Fiat board only instructed me to start work on a Lancia Group C rival in July 1982. I had just months to come up with both a new car and a new engine.”

Considering the time frame, you could have understood if Tonti would have simply opted for an Italian copy of the Porsche 956. He went the other way. “My goal for Lancia’s first big Group C effort was to create a car that was both

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BELOW Magneto writer Johan Dillen clambers out of the LC2; how did it compare with his previous 962 drive?

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ABOVE Lancia LC2 relives its 1980s Group C days at Most Autodrom in the Czech Republic.

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more aerodynamically advanced and more driveable than the Porsche,” he explains. Just as with the LC1, Tonti turned to Dallara to help produce the LC2. “Like with the Beta Monte Carlo and LC1, my Reparto Corse (the racing division) at Lancia made chassis, suspension and bodywork proposals. For the Beta, we went to Pininfarina’s wind tunnel. For our aerodynamic studies on the LC1 and LC2, we used the Fiat wind tunnel in Orbassano. The result of our work was transferred to Dallara.”

The result was a Kevlar-clad aluminium monocoque. The LC2 weighed 810kg, only ten kilos over the Group C allowed minimum and, more importantly, 30kg lighter than the 956.

Because the rule-book stipulated some form of link with a production engine, an historic partnership was brought back to life. LanciaFerrari, famous for the 1956 Formula 1 world title with Juan Manuel Fangio. Lancia-Ferrari, renowned for the Dino-engined Stratos in the 1970s. And now, ready to add another glorious chapter to that book in Group C in the 1980s.

But Tonti is quick to downplay the Ferrari influence in the development of the engine. “I chose Ferrari strictly because it was the only company technically capable of producing a new motor within the limited time frame.

Normally, you would have to count six months just to get cylinder heads cast. Only Ferrari had

the knowledge and the equipment to produce a fresh powerplant in just three months. It was the preferred subcontractor for this matter.”

To comply with the rules, a link was established with the 3.0-litre V8 in the 308, but Tonti stresses that this was merely there to please the rule-makers: “The engine, a 2.6 V8 that grew to 3.0-litre capacity as per the 1984 season, was only manufactured in Maranello.

We used the Ferrari equipment, but all the engineering was done by Lancia technicians in Turin. We went to Maranello a couple of times per week to check on proceedings. Just one of the finished engines was tested on the bench in Maranello; the others went back to Turin for further development.”

With over 600bhp from the twin-turbo V8, the LC2 looked every inch the serious contender for the Porsche brigade. Rothmans versus Martini – this was to become a battle of iconic liveries just the same. Says Tonti: “But because of our tight schedule, we got barely any testing done prior to the first race of the 1983 WEC season, at Monza in April. With a new car and a new engine, you can always expect some problems to occur. With hardly any testing, we had to find everything out during the racing season, which caused us some issues.”

That first outing brought some very good news… and some troublesome tidings. “We

came with a new car, and Piercarlo Ghinzani instantly put it on pole position. So, it was clear we had the speed.” But bad news was around the corner. Just as had happened in testing, the LC2’s specifically designed Pirelli radial tyres would blow out at high speeds. “It was so bad that during the race we had to pit for new tyres every eight laps. Normally, we were supposed to do a 29-lap stint between fuel stops. The tyre situation rendered us powerless,” recalls Tonti.

Things took a turn for the worse at the next race in Silverstone. “Pirelli had promised us it had got on top of the situation, only for the tyres to blow out again. I had no option other than to stand in line at the Dunlop truck and buy some regular customer rubber for our cars.

Dunlop was working actively with the Porsche factory team to develop the tyres, but private customers would have to wait a year before they saw the benefits of this development appear in the products they bought. So basically, we were running year-old tyre technology against Porsche.

“On top of that, we had specifically designed the suspension for the Pirelli radial tyres. This caused a misalignment on our cars that we had to figure out. Since we were just private clients for Dunlop, no help was coming from that front. We had to find a solution on our own.”

With the tyre problem at least under control,

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reliability was the next issue on the agenda. No one would argue that the LC2 wasn’t fast, it just wasn’t there when the finish flag was waved.

New cylinder heads were introduced midseason, but problems kept popping up; troubles with the Hewland gearbox, turbos that went pop... It wasn’t until the last race on European soil for the 1983 World Endurance Championship that the LC2 finally scored a first honourable result – fourth in the hands of Riccardo Patrese and Michele Alboreto.

Two more races were to follow in this first full LC2 campaign. But both the Imola and the Mugello venues counted for the European Endurance Championship, not the WEC. Consequently, no factory Porsches figured on the entry lists. Private teams were to defend the honour of the 956. At Imola, the LC2 scored its first victory, in the hands of Teo Fabi and Hans Heyer. In the final WEC round of the season, in Kyalami, South Africa, the LC2 put in an excellent second place behind the works Porsche. Things looked good for 1984.

“We ironed out the problems with the LC2 in 1983,” says Tonti. “For 1984, we came back with what seemed like an evolution of the 2.6-litre V8. In reality, this was a completely new 3.0 V8. Mechanically, the LC2 was now fully ready.” One issue remained unresolved: tyres. “At Lancia, you had pretty much two camps. One was the rally division, the other was the ‘pista’ division. Marketing always favoured rally. You could say, if the

rally guys received five euros, we at pista had to make do with one euro.

“At that time, the rally division was supported

by Michelin. When I went round there, it said: ‘We would be happy to help out, but we don’t have a Group C programme for the moment.

We could not give you a good tyre before 1985.’

So I went back to Dunlop, which said: ‘Sure, we can work out a development contract where we would adapt the tyres to your needs. But this would be a big investment for us, so we would need a commitment on your part for three years.’ I could not get this kind of investment greenlighted by our board, so for 1984 we were stuck with the regular Dunlops.

“Now, to win in Group C in those days, you needed two things; a good aero package, and the best possible tyres. We never got that second part right. For me, it was a motivation to switch to Alfa Romeo in Formula 1 during the 1984 season. The LC2 performed well at first during ’84, but then things came adrift.”

A highlight for the new 3.0-litre LC2 was pole position at Le Mans; in the hands of Bob Wollek, the Lancia was a full nine seconds faster than the nearest 956. But the race would bring only eighth place, even if the LC2s led for a long time.

There was a first victory for the car as well, at the Kyalami 1000km. But the Lancia one-two gives the game away; just as was the case in Le Mans, there was no sign of the Porsche works squad.

For 1985, Claudio Lombardi overhauled the LC2 and Michelin finally gave the Lancia the

LEFT Ferrari V8 was made in Maranello but refined in Turin

by Lancia’s own technicians.

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This LC2 started life as chassis 003 in 1982, entering its first race in the Silverstone 1000km in May 1983. Piercarlo Ghinzani and Teo Fabi qualified fifth, but retired due to overheating in lap 54. Le Mans was next, with fourth place in qualifying for Ghinzani/Fabi, partnered by Hans Heyer. Yet fuel-pressure issues led once more to a DNF. The Spa 1000km brought the first result – tenth at the finish.

And in the Imola 1000km, counting for the European Endurance Championship, 003 scored a first pole position (Beppe Gabbiani/Alessandro

Nannini). Chassis 003 was updated for the 1984 season, with second spot in qualifying at Le Mans as the highlight for Mauro Baldi/Heyer/Paolo Barilla.

The next year was 003’s best, with pole position at both Monza and Silverstone for Nannini and Riccardo Patrese. The ’85 Spa 1000km was 003’s last outing in the factory Martini colours, seeing victory in the shortened race due to Stefan Bellof’s fatal crash. For 1986, 003 was transferred to the private Geest team. The original tub was written off in a big smash at the Brands Hatch 1000km (Andrea de Cesaris/Bruno

Giacomelli), and replaced by this 003/B tub in time for the next race at the Nürburgring. Meanwhile, 1987 brought just one event. In 1988, 003/B ended a long career with a fourth participation at Le Mans in West colours, under the Dollop Racing banner (Ranieri Randaccio, Jean-Pierre Frey and Nicola Marozzo, DNF) and a last Nürburgring 1000km (DNF).

Between 1995-2005, 003/B appeared regularly in historic racing in Martini livery. It competed in the early 2010s as well. It currently resides with a private owner, who occasionally takes it out on private track days.

MOTORSP ORT IMAGES

LANCIA LC2 003/B

ABOVE LC2 003 in action at the 1983 Le Mans 24 Hours, here leading the Rondeau M842.

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rubber it needed. Just one more moment of ‘glory’ was to come, if you could call it that.

For this, we have to turn our attention to the car we have with us today.

This example is chassis 003/B in a series of just eight. For 1985, Lombardi had kept the tubs but changed the body styling, enlarging the LC2 to the maximum authorised two metres. For the sprint races, the LC2 received a sharper front end, with small headlights taken from a Fiat 127. In the meantime, the engine was putting out 850bhp at 1.7 bar boost. At Silverstone, Riccardo Patrese qualified it on qualifying tyres with the boost on 2.6 bar, averaging almost 150mph (240km/h) for the lap. He was nearly 2.5 seconds quicker than the first factory 956.

Yet again, at the finish, it was a Porsche victory.

In 1985, the Weber Magneti Marelli injection turned out to be every bit as efficient as Porsche’s system. Yet results failed to come in what was the crucial season for the LC2. At Monza, there’s every chance the car was robbed of a first outright victory when a fallen tree stopped proceedings altogether. At the Spa 1000km, this chassis would finally score a first overall victory in the hands of Patrese, Wollek and Mauro Baldi. Of course, Spa 1985 ended prematurely after Stefan Bellof crashed fatally at Eau Rouge, so this wouldn’t count as a victory in which one takes pride. Anyway, by this time, the Group C programme already looked beyond saving.

The LC2 is mesmerising to behold, with the Martini colours draped like an admiral’s shoulder boards over its flanks. Standing in the company of a Group C prototype is always special. But when I lower myself into the Lancia and see ‘Martini Racing’ reflected in the sunband in front of me, I know I’m privileged. This isn’t just any competition car – this is the final chapter of a long history of road-racing Lancias.

I am actually feeling very comfortable.

Compared with the 956 and 962, it seems like I’m sitting further back in the LC2, making me feel less vulnerable. On top of that, I have a good view from the mirrors. An update brought a rear-facing camera as well, so I have a clear look at what’s coming up behind. A big rev counter takes central place, with water and oil temperature gauges to my right and the boost adjustment to my left. Today, I stick to ‘rain’, and leave ‘race’ and ‘quali’ settings to the owner.

Answering a push of the starter button with a big bark, the engine comes alive. It produces a more delicate, and definitely more musical, note than the Porsche. Well, this is an Italian V8, after all. The LC2’s take-off is very smooth, as well. It has a surprisingly longtravel clutch pedal. I need to give it a good kick of revs to get it going without stalling, 1 52

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‘How different would Group C have looked if this Lancia had managed to break the Porsche dominance?’ however. But unlike the Porsche, the Lancia shows some signs of compassion for a driver looking for his marks. Already in the pitlane, it pulls nicely without the classic bucking. The LC2 is an instant confidence-builder.

The Hewland five-speed ’box is less precise, but I can take my time getting used to it. Contrary to the Porsche, I can count on a lot of torque to pull me out of the corner. As I grow more confident, I start to feel it through my fingers and backside. This car is waiting eagerly for me to really start doing my job. It seems like it’s begging for the opportunity to let me experience what the Group C turbo era really felt like.

When the needle climbs over 6000rpm, the turbo feels at its mightiest. OK, this is a ‘baby’ setting, but I still get a decent kick in the butt as the turbine wail becomes more prominent.

This is not the on/off feeling I experienced in the 962. The LC2 prefers the fast-forward approach: x2, x4, and all of a sudden it’s time to hit the brakes again. The engine does not sound overpowering. Unlike many Ferraris, it feels like it is just one part of a package designed for ultimate speed.

As I start taking a bit more speed through the corners, the LC2 only seems to indicate that there is room for more. The steering remains

crisp. Not once do I get the feeling that I am fighting for control. This is a masterpiece, this is the scalpel of Group C; light, agile and sharp.

What it must have been like to speed this beauty down the Mulsanne Straight with 956s filling your mirrors, I can only imagine.

As I return to the pitlane, so many ‘if onlys’ are occupying my thoughts. How different would Group C have looked if this Lancia had managed to break the Porsche dominance?

How differently would we have looked upon Lancia’s commitment to both rallying and racing at the top level in the 1980s? How different would things be for Lancia now?

“The problem was, Fiat never had a longterm vision for Lancia in racing,” Gianni Tonti concludes. “It was always last minute, and we never got the permission to evolve in the directions I wanted. Horsepower wasn’t important in Group C. In 1984, we had 1000bhp on the bench from the 3.0-litre V8. But extracting horsepower from a turbo engine is easy.

“Group C was about combining performance with fuel economy. So for me, mid-range torque was of bigger importance than outright power.

We needed to extract as much performance out of the package while consuming the least possible fuel. I wanted the engine to be as driveable as possible from low revs onwards.”

He continues: “Meanwhile, I was trying to convince the board that diesel tech made much more sense for the Group C regs. It was the most frugal solution. If you wanted to extract the most performance out of one litre of fuel, diesel was your answer. I made a theoretical exercise of a diesel LC2, but I never got the programme greenlighted by the board.” Another ‘what if’.

What if Tonti’s diesel Lancia had stunned the world at Le Mans, 20 years before Audi did it?

“I also wanted to create a full carbon tub after I had seen John Barnard’s tub for the McLaren in Formula 1, but again the board decided against it,” Tonti says. In the end, it all boiled down to choices. “Lancia was no longer the dominant force in rallying, on account of the Audi Quattro. So, to turn that situation around, all efforts went into the Delta S4 to get Lancia back on track. In a way, you could say that the S4 kneecapped the LC2’s career. I think there was still a lot left in that car.” Another ‘if only’.

In 1986, the Martini Racing LC2s appeared for the last time. But after an accident in testing killed driver Giacomo Maggi at the La Mandria circuit in June, Lancia decided to withdraw from Group C. The LC2s were sold to private outfits, who soldiered on with no more success than the factory team.

Our thanks to Czech Republic’s Most Autodrom (www.autodrom-most.cz/en) for the track time.

Moto

HISTORICS Specialists in race car preparation and restoration

T: 01372 729192 • M: 07917 767558 • E: info@motohistorics.co.uk • W: www.motohistorics.co.uk

THE TOP 50 CAR DESIGNERS

Renegades, trendsetters, introverts and showmen...

We pay tribute to the legendary style leaders who shaped the automotive industry WOR D S R I C H A R D H E S E LT I N E I L L U S T R AT I O N S PETER ALLEN

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J A S O N C A S T R I O TA

ONCE something of a young man in a hurry, this New York-born artiste has quite the résumé. Following an internship at Pininfarina, Castriota remained with the Turin styling house and helped pen everything from the Ferrari 599GTB Fiorano

and Maserati GranTurismo production cars, to the unique Rolls-Royce Hyperion. He also fashioned two of this century’s most memorable one-off supercars so far: the Maserati Birdcage 75th and the Ferrari P4/5 by Pininfarina (to give it its full name).

49 48 H OWA R D ‘D U TC H’ DARRIN

ORIGINALLY a coachbuilder, Howard Darrin reinvented himself in the post-war era as a freelance stylist to industrial giants such as Crosley and Kaiser Industries. He is perhaps best remembered for shaping the Kaiser Darrin, one of the first sports cars ever made in North America and the only one with sliding doors. It should be pointed out that kit-car pioneer Bill Tritt played a not-inconsiderable role in creating this car, but Darrin was nothing if not a self-promoter (itself something of a trait in this company). He was still touting designs into his ninth decade.

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PIO MANZÙ

HAD he lived past 30, this brilliant Italian would no doubt be further up the order. The son of sculptor Giacomo Manzù, the Bergamo-born designer is recalled as much for his idiosyncratic furniture as for penning the influential Fiat 127. His first automotive project was a striking AustinHealey-based GT that was shaped in collaboration with Michael Conrad. The duo went on to form a design consultancy, which in turn led to such concept cars as the Autonova Fam and Autonova GT. These helped spawn the well received Fiat City Taxi prototype, prior to Manzù’s untimely death in a car accident.

ABOVE Jason Castriota helped pen the Ferrari 599GTB Fiorano during his time at Pininfarina.

47 KEITH HELFET

WHILE comparatively less well known than other designers in these pages, this South African talent enjoyed a lengthy career. At Jaguar he shaped the XJ220, the stillborn XJ41/42 that ultimately morphed into the Aston Martin DB7, the XK180 show-stopper and the F-type concept. The latter could, conceivably, have been Jaguar’s response to the Porsche Boxster had it reached production. As a freelancer, projects stretched to a design for the Morgan Aero 8 (his bid lost out to Charles Morgan’s). More recently, he has turned his hand to designing an array of innovative bicycles.

LUIGI RAPI

ENRICO FUMIA

ONE of the unsung heroes of car design, Luigi Rapi’s been poorly served by history. He is primarily remembered, if he is remembered at all, for shaping the Fiat 8V. ‘Rapi Body’ became shorthand for the factory outline as opposed to coachbuilt offerings from the likes of Zagato. Ironically, Rapi had no input into the much-lauded Zagato 8V, but collaborated with the coachbuilder around the same period on a variety of cars that bore his ‘Panoramica’ roof-styling treatment.

The long-time Fiat design director also shaped the remarkable Turbina turbine car, the Isotta Fraschini Tipo 8C Monterosa and the Autobianchi Bianchina.

THIS outspoken former Pininfarina man was – and remains – a highly inventive stylist. He embarked on his design odyssey as a teenager, his first attributed outline being the Siata Spring (strictly speaking, only the front end). He would, in time, go on to shape such memorable production cars as the Alfa Romeo 164 and the 716-series Alfa Spider/ GTV, the latter borrowing much from his earlier Audi Quartz concept. He also shaped the attractive Lancia Y, the Ferrari F90 show machine and projects for the Chinese Cherry brand.

44 MARC DESCHAMPS

ATTEMPTING to step into a legend’s shoes is no easy task, but that was what was asked of Marc Deschamps after Marcello Gandini departed Bertone in 1979. The ex-Renault man joined the Turin firm as chief designer, one of his earliest gigs being the one-off Lamborghini Athon concept car. He became the go-to guy for show-stoppers while at Bertone, over time shaping all manner of concepts for Alfa Romeo, Volvo, Mazda and beyond. Deschamps also designed prototypes for Bugatti and (unofficially) for Lotus (the Emotion concept car was rather similar to his Bugatti renderings…). He subsequently joined Heuliez, for whom he shaped the Pregunta supercar.

LEFT Enrico Fumia’s Alfa GTV. BELOW Keith Helfet shaped the Jaguar XJ220.

43 42 HENRIK FISKER

PETER SCHREYER

FISKER was garlanded during the middle years of his career as a designer. At BMW, the Danish-born artiste shaped the E1 city car concept, and the Z07 roadster that evolved into the Z8. He was also part of the team that came up with the X5 ‘sports activity vehicle’.

At Aston he spearheaded the DB9 and V8 Vantage concepts, and as head of Global Advanced Design Studio in California he oversaw the creation of several show cars, not least the Ford Shelby GR-1. His departure from the Blue Oval was abrupt, but Fisker has since reinvented himself as an entrepreneur.

WITH his thick-rim glasses and omnipresent black garb, Schreyer looks as though he has just emerged from central casting for the part of ‘designer’. Nevertheless, the Bavarian veteran more than lives up to the role. While at Audi, he shaped – or at least helped shape – numerous production models including the A3, A4 and A6. He was also one of a cast of thousands to whom the TT’s outline has been attributed.

Schreyer’s greatest achievement, however, was in affording Kia mainstream credibility – thanks in no small part to the power of attractive styling.

ABOVE Peter helped shape TT concept.

LEFT Yoshihiko Matsuo’s 240Z gave Datsun a sportier image.

41 YO S H I H I KO M AT S U O

LEGENDARY in his homeland, but less so elsewhere, Matsuo suffered like so many other Japanese designers from appropriation.

By that, we mean his work was often credited to others.

At Nissan, he pushed the conservative management to chase a sportier, more aspirational image, which led to the Datsun Fairlady/240Z. It’s just that this was around the time that Japanese brands turned to European designers, if only as consultants, and Count Albrecht von Goertz was cited in various western publications as having authored the first of the Z-cars. The BMW 507 stylist didn’t exactly bat away the suggestion, either.

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RIGHT Ford Indigo was Claude Lobo’s take on a road-going IndyCar.

37 TREVOR FIORE

40 39 JAN WILSGAARD

FREEMAN THOMAS

WHILE perhaps not known for creating sexy outlines, this Brooklyn-born Swede of Norwegian extraction nevertheless produced memorable ones. As chief designer at Volvo, he shaped umpteen variations on the Amazon theme, before taking a turn for the cubist with the 145, 240, 760 and 850-series models. He also penned the highly regarded (if only in period) 164, and reworked the P1800 coupé to create the 1800ES shooting brake (many design cues from which are employed on current production models).

Few designers have left such an indelible mark on a brand’s identity, Wilsgaard’s philosophy being: “Simple is beautiful.” It’s hard to argue to the contrary.

ANOTHER American great, Thomas embarked on his design career with Porsche in 1983. Within the VW Group, he would shape the Concept 1 alongside J Mays (it ultimately morphed into the ‘new’ Beetle). He can also claim partial authorship of the Audi TT, his lovely TTS Spyder Concept design sadly not making the leap to series manufacture. While at Chrysler, Freeman penned the North American Sedan concept that foretold the 300C, and also conjured the incredible Dodge Tomahawk motorcycle while he was at it. As a freelancer, he is credited with styling the Panoz Roadster.

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38 CLAUDE LOBO

THIS Frenchman was variously a racer (he competed in the Le Mans 24 Hours) and a concours organiser. As a designer, he was a Ford lifer, being involved in shaping everything from the first-series Capri to the less lovely seventh-gen Mercury Cougar. He is best remembered, however, for shifting the Blue Oval’s design direction into a different orbit with the original Ka and Focus models. At a stroke, Ford became a global leader rather than reactionist. This was a bold move, but it paid off.

And how. Lobo also penned such concept cars as the Indigo, his take on a road-going IndyCar.

SOMETHING of an enigma, this Englishman was born Trevor Frost. He adopted his mother’s maiden name because he reasoned that he would have greater credibility within the design community if he had a more exotic-sounding handle.

As an independent, he seemingly came out of nowhere in the 1960s and penned everything from the TVR Trident to the gorgeous Elva GT160. His later efforts spanned at least partial authorship of the AlpineRenault A310 and the Monteverdi Hai, not to mention rather less exotic fare for the likes of DAF. He later became head of design at Citroën, for whom he created the extraordinary Karim concept car.

36 J M AY S

ONCE hugely influential in the car-shaping world, the latter-day Whirlpool design czar spearheaded the retro-futurism fad. Whether this was a good thing rather depends on your aesthetic sensibilities, but the success of cars he penned – or project managed – speaks volumes. The Audi Avus concept from 1991 (left) foretold his preoccupation with the past influencing the future, and he would collaborate with Freeman Thomas on what ultimately morphed into the ‘new’ Volkswagen Beetle prior to becoming boss of bosses at Ford. The forename-deficient Oklahoman was responsible for the design direction of eight brands within the Blue Oval portfolio prior to his departure in 2013.

LEFT BMW’s fabric-skinned Gina sports car was the brainchild of Chris Bangle.

33 CHRIS BANGLE

ONCE considered the enfant terrible of car design, Bangle has been variously described as a nonpareil genius and the antichrist. At Fiat, he project managed the divisive Coupé, its styling being loved and loathed in equal measure. In retrospect, it is widely lauded as a masterpiece. The same may one day be true of the many BMWs shaped by him – or under him – from late 1999 to early 2009. Random creases and ‘Bangle butts’ became the norm, and his work hasn’t been without influence among younger designers. Oh, and contrary to popular belief, he didn’t coin the phrase ‘flame surfacing’.

32 PHILIPPE CHARBONNEAUX

AUTO design formed only a small part of this brilliant Frenchman’s repertoire, but his automotive work wasn’t without influence. In addition to shaping all manner of coachbuilt offerings, which included cars created for presidential use, he designed mainstream models such as the Renault 8 plus the influential 16 (alongside Gaston Juchet) and 21. The self-taught designer also claimed to have played a part in what became Chevrolet’s Corvette, following a brief sojourn to the US. Later on, he collaborated with Franco Sbarro and prototyped cars with elliptical wheel patterns.

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MICHAEL ROBINSON

35 FILIPPO SAPINO

NEVER a ‘name above the title’ star among such contemporaries as Marcello Gandini and Giorgetto Giugiaro, this likeable Italian embarked on his design career at Ghia. His first gig was a Renault 8-based coupé, with further one-offs including a shadowy Shelby Cobra 427based roadster. He then jumped ship to Pininfarina, for whom he created one of the all-time great concepts; the Ferrari 512S Speciale. He also designed the 365GTC/4, prior to returning to now Ford-owned Ghia in the early 1970s. He went on to reclothe an AC 3000ME and partially shape the Ford RS200.

34 WAY N E C H E R R Y

WHILE his name isn’t uttered with the same awed tones as Bill Mitchell and Harley Earl, Cherry was a legend at General Motors. He joined the biggest of the Big Three in 1962, and retired in January 2004 as president of design.

In the UK, he’s perhaps best known for his Vauxhall division work, for whom he project managed concepts such as the SRV (with Chris Field). He also created the greatly admired Equus roadster with Robert Jankel, for whom he played a largely uncredited role in styling the Panther Six. One of his last projects prior to retirement was the Cadillac Sixteen.

THIS charismatic American was inspired to wield Magic Markers after discovering a poster of the Bertone Stratos Zero as a teenager. Decades later, he’d become design chief at this storied styling house.

In between, Robinson would assume various roles, such as Fiat design director. Among his concepts was the Lancia Diàlogos, which morphed into the daring Thesis saloon.

Poetically, one of the last cars designed under his watch at Bertone was the Nuccio concept – a modernist take on the Stratos Zero. Robinson was a great motivator; many of his protégés went on to run design departments for major brands.

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30 LUIGI COLANI

HE was the agent provocateur of the design world. Either that, or a savvy huckster. It all rather depends on whose estimates you credit. Self-professed stylist Luigi Colani was a man apart in his chosen field, a perennial outlier who preferred it that way. With his Zapata moustache and perma-white garb, this castle-dwelling German of Kurdish and Polish descent had designer affectation down pat. He believed what he was selling, even if he rarely told the same story the same way twice.

Colani packed a lot into his 91 years, that’s for sure.

He designed everything from spatulas to aeroplanes, but cars were his great love. The Berliner originally trained as an artist in Paris. However, he cut short his studies and returned to Germany to become an industrial designer. He would go on to work with numerous mainstream manufacturers, but none of his designs was ever adopted for volume production. His influence, though, was palpable, not least in the amorphous forms that became prevalent across the board during the 1980s.

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ABOVE William Towns’s ‘wedge’ Lagonda saved Aston Martin.

BELOW Patrick Le Quément’s Twingo helped Renault become a style leader.

TOM KAREN

THIS likeable artiste’s rise to prominence wasn’t without drama. The man who shaped everything from the Bond Bug to the Raleigh Chopper was born into wealth, but was forced to flee his native Czechoslovakia for the UK as the Nazis marched on Brno.

How he came to arrive in Britain reads like something out of a World War Two thriller, and must have been every bit as harrowing, but fast-forward to the mid-1950s and he was one of three new boys at Ford GB’s nascent Dagenham design department.

However, Karen didn’t exactly endear himself to his immediate boss Ron Haynes on beating him to the prestigious IBCAM (Institute of British Carriage and Automobile Manufacturers) design award in 1958…

Several years later, Karen stepped into the breach at Ogle Design following the untimely death of its founder, David Ogle, in a car crash. He remained with the firm for 37 years, conceiving vehicles as diverse as the influential Reliant Scimitar GTE and the Aston Martin ‘Sotheby Special’ via Popemobiles and some sadly stillborn Rolls-Royces.

WILLIAM TOWNS

28 PAT R I C K L E Q U É M E N T

THIS amiable Frenchman enjoyed some measure of success at Ford long before he famously rehabilitated Renault’s ailing design department. He was one of the key players behind the ‘jelly mould’ Sierra, a car that seems positively orthodox now, but which wasn’t warmly received in 1982 (mostly by those who preferred their saloon cars to be saloon shaped). The Sierra made the outgoing ‘three-box’ Cortina MkV look like an antique.

Scroll forward to 1987, and following a spell with VW in the US, Le Quément was

hand picked by Renault’s then-CEO Raymond Levy to shake up the firm’s design philosophy. He was given carte blanche to do as he saw fit, the upshot being that outside consultancies were ditched, the team doubled in terms of stylists, and he was answerable to nobody but the chairman. Design took centre stage, and Renault’s dowdy image was overturned by the Twingo and the firstand second-gen Mégane, not forgetting the remarkable Vel Satis and Avantime.

Renault went from playing catch-up to leading from the front. Job done.

DURING a career that spanned almost 40 years, Towns designed products ranging from bicycles to hearing aids, but cars were his first love. He penned several landmark classics, too, along with many weird and wonderful fringe offerings.

Towns began his design odyssey as an apprentice with the Rootes Group, joining the firm in 1954 aged 18. It would be a further three years before he was allowed to sketch an entire car, the Hillman Hunter being the only one to make the leap from rendering to three-dimensional reality.

The Midlander would go on to style the Rover-BRM turbine car, before famously shaping the Aston Martin DBS. Sadly, his 1970s work with Jensen was undone by the company’s parlous state, but a commission for the Jensen Special Projects department – a utility vehicle for the Third World market – ultimately became the first Hustler, which Towns marketed himself. Over time, there would be 72 variants…

Arguably his most memorable creation was the ‘wedge’ Lagonda, the supersaloon that saved a pauperised Aston – and more than once.

24 A L D O B R OVA R O N E

26 G E N E B O R D I N AT

HIS name has been largely forgotten by history, but Eugene Bordinat Jr deserved better. As head of Ford Motor Company’s design department for the better part of two decades – a spell that lasted longer than for any incumbent before or since – he oversaw the creation of some of the most profitable cars ever made by the Blue Oval. Nevertheless, he remains in the shadow of period rivals such as Bill Mitchell and Virgil Exner Jr. The thing is, unlike many of his contemporaries, he wasn’t a fame chaser. This in itself goes a long way to explaining why he is now barely remembered by all but the most devoted of marque fans.

During the 1960s alone, Bordinat (pronounced Bord-in-ay) signed off the first-generation Mustang, the original Mercury Cougar and the Lincoln Continental Mk3.

He personally styled the 1965 Ford Galaxie (with input from Gale Halderman), and also reclothed two Shelby Cobras, allegedly for personal use.

According to those who knew him, Bordinat expected Ford products to appeal in an instant. He had no interest in designs that would ‘grow on people’.

25 BRUNO SACCO

WHILE perhaps not lauded as highly as other MercedesBenz designers such as Paul Bracq, this talented Italian fashioned several landmark models. Ironically, he moved to Germany only because none of the local styling houses was in a hiring mood.

And even then, he viewed his German adventure as merely a short-term move. On being accepted by Daimler-Benz in 1968, he would rise through the ranks until he replaced Friedrich Geiger as styling chief in 1975.

He remained in the position until his retirement in 1999. During this time, he

BELOW Bruno Sacco’s MercedesBenz C111 never made it into production.

variously designed, project managed or oversaw the styling of every Mercedes car, van, lorry and bus. He shaped three generations of S-Class, the R129 SL drop-top, the CLK and SLK roadster, and a significant portion of the W123-series line, which remain the bestselling Mercedes models to date. His personal favourite among his back catalogue was the 190 saloon, which also did wonders for the firm’s balance sheet. Our choice, though, is the C111 supercar, which sadly never made the leap from concept/recordbreaker to production reality.

WE live in a world where instant validation is expected, but it wasn’t always thus.

Take the great Italian styling houses. Their car designers were once mere worker bees, invisible to all except those who sought them out. Few outlines were ever attributed to any individual, rather the plaudits were conferred on the employer. Brovarone, who spent 35 years at Pininfarina, was of pensionable age before his name was linked to the landmark classics he’d shaped.

Born outside Turin in 1926, his gradual rise to prominence began in Argentina after he found work hard to come by in post-war Italy. He was employed by Siam Di Tella, which made white goods and later BMC products under licence. Becoming embroiled in Cisitalia’s Argentine adventure ultimately led him to return to the firm’s Italian arm. At Pininfarina, he shaped everything from the Peugeot 504 to the Lancia Gamma Coupé, via the Ferrari 365P Tre Posti, which foretold the Dino 206.

23 RICHARD ‘DICK’ TEAGUE

DICK Teague knew how to make a little go a long way.

He rarely had a choice. This dapper artiste could rustle up a new model armed with little more than a vivid imagination and access to a parts bin. Often on the back foot, and starved of finance, he invariably came through.

On September 3, 1959, this former child actor accepted the position of assistant director of styling at American Motors – and almost wished he hadn’t.

The Wisconsin firm’s output suffered from a dreary image, something that came home to roost when Teague’s youngest son demanded he be dropped off a couple of blocks from school; he was mortified at the prospect of being seen in his father’s Rambler company car.

Teague would alter that perception, being named styling director within three years and vice president of AMC after five (a position he’d hold for 23 years, an industry record). Under his watch, AMC unleashed everything from the Pacer to the AMX/ Javelin ‘pony cars’. Sadly, his pet project – the AMX/3 supercar that was engineered

by Giotto Bizzarrini – was annulled at the last gasp.

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BELOW ‘Coffinnosed’ Cord 810 is among Gordon Buehrig’s iconic early designs.

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22 PAOLO MARTIN

CRIMINALLY underrated, Paolo Martin is another name that doesn’t tend to be uttered in such reverent tones as other Italian design silverbacks, but he was among the most original stylists of his generation.

Born in 1943, the Turinese began his career at Studio Michelotti while still in his teens. He became Giovanni Michelotti’s protégé, learning the ropes before being tempted away by Bertone in 1966. He would jump ship to Pininfarina a year later, his first effort for the firm providing a foretaste of the battles that lay in store; the Ferrari Dino 206 Berlinetta Competizione concept was altered by general manager Renzo Carli, who decked it out with huge spoilers.

Then Martin pitched what became the Modulo concept, and was drowned out by a chorus of disapproval. The car was eventually built, despite grave reservations from Sergio Pininfarina, and went on to win 22 design awards… Martin’s résumé also includes the sublime Fiat 130 Coupé, the ridiculous Stutz Blackhawk Royale and the so-so Rolls-Royce Camargue.

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THIS industrial design colossus was proud to have coined the legend ‘planned obsolescence’. In recent decades, it has become a term of derision; where consumers are compelled to replace items sooner than they otherwise might in order to stimulate and perpetuate consumption.

In his mind, it meant: “Instilling in the buyer the desire to own something a little newer, a little better; a little sooner than is necessary,” which is less cynical. Except this great visionary didn’t actually come up with the idiom – he merely appropriated it and used the term in a speech in 1954.

It became his catchphrase, and few designers were more adept at teasing open purse strings than Clifford Brooks Stevens. Cars were his great passion, and he styled everything from Studebakers to VWs, and boutique offerings such as the Gaylord Gladiator to the 1946 Jeep Station Wagon proto-SUV. Ironically, for a man steeped in pushing the boundaries of auto design, he’s perhaps best remembered for ushering in the classic replica movement via the Excalibur marque.

BONHAMS

BROOKS STEVENS

20 GORDON BUEHRIG

ANOTHER pioneering American designer, Buehrig (bee-ur-rig) was, by his own admission, not a great artist.

He did, however, have an inherent sense of style; he knew what worked and what didn’t. He was also preternaturally lucky in that he always seemed to be in the right place at the right time.

He became chief designer for Duesenberg when he was just 25 years old.

One of his most celebrated offerings was the Model J. That, in itself, would be sufficient for him to appear in a list such as this, but on moving over to Auburn he fashioned the time-defying 851 Boattail Speedster (which owed some of its architecture to prior work by Alan Leamy, who died aged

just 33). On top of that, Buehrig is also widely credited with penning the fabulous Cord 810/812 (Alex Tremulis was somewhere in the mix, mind…). If these three US icons alone were not enough, he was employed by Ford from 1949-65 and, during this time, he spearheaded the Lincoln Continental Mark I and Mark 2 range-toppers.

SOMETHING of a cuckoo in the nest here, Jaguar legend Sayer was as much an engineer and aerodynamicist as he was a designer. Even then, making something pretty wasn’t particularly important when, say, you were shaping racers such as the C- and D-types. After all, prettiness doesn’t make a model go faster. Equally, you couldn’t say attractiveness in Sayer’s output was a happy by-product. He knew what worked stylistically, and was a close collaborator and foil to Sir William Lyons – who couldn’t sketch but understood style instinctively.

You certainly wouldn’t dare label Sayer a stylist, though, because he reputedly hated the term; he would utter something about it being an acceptable handle for a hairdresser, but it didn’t exist in his world. Yet regardless of titles, Sayer – with input from Lyons – also shaped the E-type. The irony is that despite his grounding in aerodynamics, this sliver of sports-car fabulousness didn’t cleave the air particularly well (a bluff-fronted Austin A40 Farina had a better drag coefficient). But who cares when something looks this good? As for the XJ13 (below), hold us back…

BELOW SM stylist Robert Opron also co-authored the Alfa SZ ‘Il Mostro’.

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PAUL BR ACQ

ALEX TREMULIS

THIS American of Greek extraction was one of the first true car stylists. Largely self taught, a teenage Tremulis embarked on his career upon landing a job with the Auburn-Cord-Duesenberg Company in 1933. He’d go on to collaborate on all manner of products including Cord’s ‘coffin-nosed’ 810 before being made chief stylist at 22.

Tremulis then worked with firms as diverse as GM and American Bantam, while also dreaming up coachbuilt exotica. He also played a significant but largely unheralded role in shaping the influential 1941 Chrysler Thunderbolt concept car.

Tremulis is best known for penning the Tucker 48 – the boldest immediate post-war American car, if not the most commercially successful (see 1988 film Tucker: The Man and His Dream). He’d also design several concepts while at Ford, and among his final freelance offerings was the Subaru BRAT.

17 ROBERT OPRON

THE SM experiment was an unqualified success, if only for its architect. An idea that was two parts passion, one part inspiration, the Citroën has acquired an almost cosmic gravity among chin-stroking design pseuds.

Defiantly French and utterly fabulous, it was, nonetheless, a commercial failure. To its stylist, the lack of sales success was due entirely to outside forces rather than the automobile itself.

Opron remains passionate about the SM, but it is only one design among many

from this compact Frenchman. Growing up in central Africa, he collected models of WW2 fighter planes and dreamed of flying. However, cars began to exert an even greater pull, and he embarked on his design career with Simca for whom he penned the barking Fulgur show queen (picture a grounded UFO). At Citroën, he shaped the GS and CX (which Leonardo Fioravanti claims were ‘inspired’ by his BMC Aerodinamica designs), before moving to Renault. As a freelancer, he and Antonio Castellana co-authored the fabulous Alfa SZ ‘Il Mostro’, his final offering being the delightful Ligier Dué.

AS with his former mentor Philippe Charbonneaux, Bracq was a superb artist and illustrator. And, like his countryman, Bracq was also highly inventive. Following a three-year hiatus performing military service, he joined the Daimler-Benz studio in Sindelfingen, where he would remain from 1957-67.

Initially he produced renderings for marketing campaigns, but he would go on to style the 600 Grosser, the achingly chic Pagoda Roof SLs (although Giovanni Michelotti had trialled just such a roof treatment on an OSCA design), the W108 and W114-series coupés, and loads more besides.

He subsequently changed tack and returned to France, and was part of the design team at Brissonneau et Lotz behind the high-speed TGV train. He also worked for the automotive arm of this industrial giant, although his Simca and BMW-engined sports car prototypes weren’t adopted for production.

In 1970 he jumped ship to BMW, where he spearheaded what became the 7-series line. His gullwing-doored Turbo concept model from 1973 (two of which were made in Italy) established styling themes that were later transposed onto the M1 supercar.

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THIS fame-shunning genius shaped the Cisitalia 202 coupé and 202 CMM Nuvolari Spider. Nevertheless, his role has often been underplayed in print. Given that most immediate post-war sports cars were reheated pre-war models – often with cycle wings and square-rigged bodies – the fixed-head Cisitalia in particular was breathtakingly advanced.

Numerous coachbuilders were approached with a view to transforming Savonuzzi’s sketches into a 1:1 reality, with most baulking at the complexity. Pinin Farina was chosen, this landmark design prompting jaws to collectively drop on its release in 1947.

Nevertheless, it was the coachbuilder who got the plaudits. Savonuzzi not only penned the car’s outline, he also mapped out the mechanical layout and even acted as test driver. He then went on to shape the remarkable Supersonic line of exotics in collaboration with Ghia on Fiat 8V, Aston Martin and Jaguar platforms, plus the Gilda and a raft of other 1950s show queens. He then headed to Detroit and played a significant role in Chrysler’s turbine programme.

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LEFT Peter Stevens styled the McLaren F1, and a whole lot more besides...

14 VIRGIL EXNER

MIDWAY through 1949, this former Raymond Loewy studio alumnus joined the smallest of the Big Three as Advanced Styling Studio chief. The fact that there was no real studio to speak of at Chrysler Corp was of little consequence. Within a decade, Exner created a powerbase and was given the freedom to realise his design philosophy of simple outlines with minimal embellishment (as with all philosophies, his was open to interpretation…).

Ever since the disastrous Airflow of the mid-1930s, Chrysler bosses had baulked at anything remotely novel, but ‘Ex’ pushed the boundaries, trawling Italy’s carrozzerie for artisans to fashion his ‘idea cars’.

Eventually he chose Ghia.

The alliance would result in a raft of show queens that would help propel Chrysler to the forefront of the 1950s Detroit style wars. With the likes of the Forward Look 1955 Chrysler C-300 raking in the plaudits, Exner gradually took over responsibility for the Dodge and DeSoto lines (not to mention the hand-built Imperials – which he instigated). In later life as a freelancer, he effectively, if unwittingly, ushered in retro auto design.

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PIETRO FRUA

ONE of the all-time styling greats, Frua’s gruff manner masked a shyness that stopped him short of receiving wider recognition.

The Piedmontese worked with numerous mainstream manufacturers and, for much of the 1960s, he was second only to Giovanni Michelotti in terms of prolificacy.

A former alumnus of Stabilimenti Farina prior to WW2, Frua’s first solo design was a monocoque scooter – La Moretta – which failed to take flight. It did, however, provide inspiration for the original Vespa. Frua’s first car built under his own name is widely believed to be a Fiat 1100 Sport-based roadster.

It emerged in 1946, and appeared strikingly modern.

This in turn led to a raft of cars for Maserati, which included the sublime A6G/54, not forgetting the Mistral or first-gen Quattroporte.

However, by the early 1970s Frua could no longer keep pace with younger, betterfinanced operations. He would continue to work with small start-up marques such as Ligier and Bitter, and his final production model design was the Maserati Kyalami – essentially a light reworking of the Tom Tjaarda-styled De Tomaso Longchamp.

PETER STEVENS

12 L E O N A R D O F I O R AVA N T I

IN one sleep-deprived week, he created a masterpiece.

Fioravanti shaped what in time became the Ferrari 365GTB/4 Daytona as a pet project; one that ultimately wowed Enzo Ferrari to the point that it became a production model in 1968.

This brilliant Italian then bottled lightning a second time with the 365GT4 BB, by which time he was only in his mid-30s. Fioravanti’s name is inextricably linked with Ferrari, and with good reason.

On joining Pininfarina in 1964, his first task was to revise the 250LM Stradale Speciale’s roofline. He

followed through with the Dino 206GT, refining existing concepts into an exquisitely proportioned whole before conjuring the P5 and P6 show-stoppers. Made director of design in 1972 he oversaw a staff of talented artistes, but he was no mere manager; he alone penned the 308GTB that helped establish Ferrari as a volume manufacturer.

A decade later he was appointed MD of Pininfarina, but again he wasn’t about to hang up his Magic Markers.

It was during this period that he styled the Testarossa and the 288GTO, and also co-authored the F40.

IF you were to name the most beautiful supercar of the past three decades, the Jaguar Sport XJR-15 has to be a candidate. The fact that it’s not particularly nice to drive is neither here nor there. It looks amazing. If Stevens had only ever penned this car, his name would probably sneak into this list. However, this affable artiste also styled the McLaren F1, even if his name tends to get drowned out by the reverence afforded to its envisager, Gordon Murray.

Then there was his work at Lotus, which spanned the M100-series Elan and the third-gen Esprit – a masterful reworking of the angular ‘Giugiaro’ design that came before it. And don’t forget he played a significant role in making the Subaru Impreza a performance-car pin-up via his work with Prodrive. His involvement went well beyond ‘just’ styling treatments. It’s easy to overlook that Stevens also enjoyed a parallel career devising liveries for motor sport programmes. His blue-and-white Parmalat scheme for Brabham was appropriated wholesale by BMW on its return to F1 with Williams in 2000…

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ERCOLE SPADA

BELOW Federico Formenti, designer of Alfa’s stunning Disco Volante, is criminally unsung.

T O M TJ A A R D A

STEVENS Thompson Tjaarda van Starkenburg had no plans to be a designer despite his Dutch-American father John (né Joop) having penned the Briggs prototype that ultimately morphed into the Lincoln-Zephyr. It was only while studying to be an architect that his interest turned to styling cars, and even then he had to be pushed by his tutor. In the summer of 1958, he arrived in Italy for what was meant to be a six-month gig at Ghia. He never left.

Tjaarda’s first design was what became the Innocenti 950S, while future designs for Ghia, Pininfarina and as an independent included the De Tomaso Pantera, first-series Ford Fiesta, Ferrari 365 California (the first model to feature semi-conical side scoops, which became a marque constant for decades), and Rayton-Fissore, which was a template-setting SUV. Then there was the one-off Corvette Rondine, which impressed Fiat bosses to the point that the outline was scaled down for what became the 124 Spider. He worked with marques as diverse as Aston Martin and Zastava, Bitter and Bugatti, even if his name wasn’t always prominent.

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FEDERICO FORMENTI

TO be filed under ‘greatest designer you have never heard of’, Formenti was the resident stylist at Carrozzeria Touring from the immediate post-war years until the firm closed its doors in January 1967.

During this time, he created outlines for, among others, the Ferrari 166MM coupé and open barchetta, Pegaso Z-102, Aston Martin DB4 (and DB5), Alfa Romeo 1900 C52 Disco Volante, Alfa 6C 2500 Ville d’Este, Maserati 3500GT, Lancia Flaminia (GT Coupé and open

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variant), Jensen Interceptor, and heaven knows what other models besides.

Sadly, having tooled up to mass produce Rootes Group products in Italy, the firm tanked for reasons too lengthy to go into here.

Formenti wasn’t out of work for long, though. He spent the next two decades as a designer within the Alfa Romeo Centro Stile department. According to those who knew him, he was a quiet and unfailingly polite man who hated being the centre of attention.

Even so, it is a tragedy that his name isn’t better known outside the Italian design community.

AFTER studying at the Technical Institute of Milan, and following national service, Ercole Spada was interviewed by Gianni Zagato for a role in the family carrozzeria – one that lacked much by way of definition.

Only two things mattered: did he possess a driving licence, and could he draw?

That was in 1960. His first design for the firm was the ‘production’ Bristol 406 Zagato, an evolution of an earlier one-off commission for marque principal Tony Crook. Spada was just 23 years old at the time.

His second effort set the bar impossibly high for future efforts; the Aston Martin DB4GT Zagato. The 1960s also witnessed him shape the Alfa Romeo TZ and TZ2 GT racers, the Lancia Fulvia Sport Zagato and Alfa Junior Zagato production cars, and a lot more besides.

He departed the Milan coachbuilder for Ford in 1969, penning an outline for the ill-starred GT70 along the way. On jumping ship to BMW, he styled the E32 7-series and E34 5-series.

After a spell with the IDEA Institute, he collaborated with Zagato once again on the one-off Ferrari FZ93.

BELOW DB4GT Zagato set the bar high for Ercole Spada’s future creations.

CA R DE S IG N E RS

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BILL MITCHELL

HE was as large in life as he was big in stature.

Bill Mitchell was a design colossus who bestrode the American motor industry during an era when anything seemed possible. According to legend, he was a born showman who had no time for the ordinary. This was reflected in the cars created

by General Motors under his watch as design czar – not least the C2 Corvette Sting Ray and, his personal favourite, the first-gen Buick Riviera. The biggest of the Big Three sold 72 million cars shaped or signed off by him over a 19-year period, let’s not forget.

That said, according to some accounts from those who worked under him – and accounts aren’t difficult to come by – Mitchell was also boorish and bigoted, a womanising lush whose outsized ego crushed all before him. Tellingly, there are just as many who recall a generous leader of men who looked after his troops.

And the truth? As with many successful men, he was a walking contradiction, beloved and besmirched in equal measure. What is beyond doubt, however, is that Mitchell loved cars.

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FRANCO SCAGLIONE THE limelight-shunning Florentine was late to car design, having been interned during WW2 before going on to work in aeronautics. He also dabbled in the fashion world. On joining Pinin Farina in 1951, the then 34-year-old

walked out after just two months following a clash with his boss, ‘Battista’ Farina. This would become a familiar theme over the course of his career.

Some historians claim Scaglione’s wartime trauma affected him profoundly, his spell at Bertone being curtailed by one too many disappearing acts. He was clearly not afraid of bucking the herd, though, being an original thinker rather than a plunderer of ideas. If his résumé included only the trio of Alfa Romeo BAT cars (below), he’d be high on this list. However, it also incorporated everything from the Alfa Giulietta Sprint to the Tipo 33 Stradale, via the NSU Sport Prinz and Lamborghini 350GTV. His final design was the 1972 Intermeccanica Indra. He died broke and in obscurity two decades later.

FLAMINIO BERTONI IF he had only the Citroën DS (below) on his CV, Bertoni would – and should – be deified as a design god. Given that this brilliant former sculptor from Varese also shaped the Traction Avant and the 2CV, it should come as no great surprise that he features so high up the order here. Remarkably, Bertoni had mapped out ideas for what in time became the DS as far back as 1938. It was originally intended to be a reworking of the Traction Avant, but was spun off in a different direction even before the start of WW2.

Bertoni – working in lockstep with brilliant engineer André Lefebvre – took the shape of a drop of water as his inspiration for the model’s outline. The result was a car that looked as though it had crash landed from the future when first revealed at the 1955 Paris Motor Show.

Bertoni was, however, not entirely happy with another strong-selling Citroën styled under his watch, reckoning that the Ami appeared to have been involved in several accidents while standing still. He had a point.

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G I OVA N N I M I C H E L OT T I IF this was a list of the most prolific designers, ‘Micho’ would win hands down.

From the 1940s through to the early 1980s, he was beyond productive. His name is inextricably linked with British brands, not least Standard-Triumph (right) for whom he styled several members of the TR family, the Herald/Vitesse, the Spitfire and the Stag, plus various saloons. At the same time, he was also creating mainstream production

models for marques as diverse as Hino and DAF, and that’s before you factor in the firms he worked for that made rather less of a fuss of his input. BMW in particular did little to talk up his contribution in the 1960s.

He also worked hand in glove with numerous rival concerns. He was a friend and ally of fellow former Stabilimenti Farina alumnus, Alfredo Vignale. Accordingly, he shaped many one-offs and small-series offerings, often under the Ferrari title, for Vignale. As such, deciphering the precise narrative of who did what is not always easy.

Michelotti also contributed designs to Bertone, Ghia, Ghia-Aigle and Allemano – and, again, glory was conferred on his paymasters.

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MARCELLO GANDINI PLACING Gandini so far up the order will please many but irritate more. However, bear with us. In our opinion, this painfully shy artiste was arguably the most original thinker of his generation – arch-rival Giorgetto Giugiaro included. The only reason why he is relegated to the number-three spot is that his productivity and originality seemed, outwardly at least, to tail off following his rather acrimonious split with Bertone in 1979. This may be an unfair assessment, but it’s hard not to look at his early work with jaw-slackened awe yet consider his freelance efforts to be a bit… samey.

Mention of Giugiaro is inevitable, given that they’re about the same age and their names seem to be perennially uttered in the same breath.

Much has been made of Giugiaro vetoing Gandini’s appointment at Bertone in 1963, and the debate over who shaped the Miura, Gandini having belatedly

joined the firm in 1965 after Giugiaro left for Ghia. The truth is, neither man is what you might call bitchy, so it rather depends on whose estimates you credit. What is beyond doubt is that Gandini shaped the Countach, Urraco, Espada, Jarama and more for Lamborghini. He also penned the Lancia Stratos (the Zero concept, above, and production car), the Maserati Khamsin, the… He was the go-to guy for exotica.

The funny thing is, Gandini was rather more interested in practicality than flights of fantasy, and it’s worth remembering that it wasn’t all supercars with silly doors in highlighterpen hues. He also styled the original BMW 5-series E28, Citroën CX, Autobianchi A112 hatch and brilliantly chic yet compact Innocenti Mini 90/120. The man himself insists: “True innovation is the fruit of a single mind.” Who are we to argue?

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2 HARLEY EARL

IT is hard not to wax lyrical about Earl’s contribution to auto design, not least because he was arguably the first professional car stylist in the accepted sense. He was unquestionably a pioneering studio head. Prior to him persuading a sceptical board at GM to form the Art and Color Section, there had never been a styling studio of any description.

Of coachbuilding stock, yet not a designer per se in that he rarely drew anything, Earl was astute enough to realise that style mattered. He and his ‘pretty-picture boys’ were widely mocked within GM, but not for long. He craved cars that were longer, lower and sleeker than the sit-up-and-beg archetypes that represented mainstream fodder, and he fought every inch of the way to make it so.

Earl also ushered in the concept car as we know it, via the Buick Y-Job (although some historians have lately

taken to claiming that Auburn got there first with the 1929 Cabin Speedster).

Designed in 1938 by George Snyder, the Y-Job caused a furore. Earl was also responsible for instilling planned obsolescence at GM, or rather the desire in customers to own something from the latest model year. He also popularised the tailfin, which led to the style wars among the Big Three during the 1950s. Whether that’s a good thing is a moot point.

What matters is that where Earl led, other designers in the US – and many in Europe – followed. He pioneered clay modelling, the wraparound windscreen and two-tone paint as well. He also did much to ensure GM remained involved in motor sport after the pan-industry ban in 1957, even if it was via the back door. In short, he not only influenced an industry, he inspired a nation’s hopes and aspirations.

LEFT Earl oversaw the creation of countless models, including GM’s 1953 Firebird I concept car.

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GIORGETTO GIUGIARO

ABOVE RIGHT BMW M1 and VW Golf were two landmark models to emanate from Giugiaro’s pen.

WAS the identity of the winner ever in doubt? How could it not be Il Maestro?

Giugiaro is the designer’s designer; a man whose reputation proceeds him, yet whom wears his status lightly. He is a delightfully uncomplicated individual, the irony being that he had little interest in cars prior to becoming a designer. Born in Garessio in northwest Italy on August 7, 1938, Giugiaro displayed artistic flair from a young age. He joined Fiat in 1955 after a teacher suggested he take the job in order to gain experience as a draughtsman before committing to life as a jobbing artist.

However, he soon became disillusioned with Fiat and left in December 1959 to join independent styling house Stile Bertone. Giugiaro had produced some renderings for the firm in order to raise the money to buy some skis. Studio owner Nuccio Bertone, who had a fractious relationship with his chief designer Franco Scaglione, hired Giugiaro as Scaglione’s replacement despite the small matter of him not having styled a car before.

Giugiaro rewarded Bertone’s faith by shaping an extraordinary array of beautiful cars, including the Gordon-Keeble (which Scaglione may have started), Alfa Romeo Giulia Sprint GT, Iso Rivolta and Grifo, BMW 3200GT and heaven knows what else, before leaving for Carrozzeria Ghia in 1965. He had a young family, and the new role offered him more money and a seat on the board. Nevertheless, his tenure with the Turin firm was a brief one, due primarily to him being unable to work with the notoriously contrary

Alejandro de Tomaso, who had assumed control in 1967. Giugiaro established Studi Italiani Realizzazione Prototipi S.p.A (later Italdesign) on February 13, 1968 in Moncalieri alongside engineer Aldo Mantovani.

Over the course of the next three decades, Giugiaro would become the biggest name in the automotive design world. His clientele included everything from start-up operations such as DeLorean to giants like Fiat and Volkswagen; Giugiaro admitted in later years that he was far more interested in shaping mainstream production cars than exotica.

Unlike other styling houses, Italdesign eschewed manufacturing cars – the exception being the BMW M1. Lamborghini was to have acted as subcontractor, only to go through one of its customary downturns after just four cars had been made.

Rather than let his design be sidelined, Giugiaro roped in a legion of small firms to establish a production line, but he said years later that it had been among his career’s most stressful episodes.

Rivals such as Pininfarina, Bertone and Zagato all struggled after major car brands brought production of niche products in-house, but Giugiaro’s willingness to look beyond the automotive world also contributed to the firm’s relative prosperity.

He was voted Car Designer of the Century in 1999, and inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame three years later. He and his son Fabrizio have since departed Italdesign for a new, smaller consultancy, and the greatest of the true greats is far from done despite now being in his ninth decade.

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174 Market Watch: From the 365BB to the 512BB and injected 512BBi, we look at Ferrari’s mid-engined Boxer

A C Q U I R E

M A R K E T WAT C H

Ferrari Berlinetta Boxer From the 365BB to the 512BB and injected 512BBi, this mid-engined coupé is a rare and desirable classic. Here’s everything you need to know about Ferrari’s first supercar W O R D S J O H N S I M I S T E R P H O T O G R A P H Y M AG I C C A R P I C S

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WHAT IS A supercar? It should be any model that’s very powerful, very fast, very dramatic and very expensive – but the cars on which the term has been bestowed over the years have mostly had another attribute. They have been mid-engined, just like the racing machines whose glory they seek to emulate. By this reckoning, Ferrari’s first supercar didn’t burst into public view – and onto suggestible schoolboys’ bedroom walls – until 1971.

But what a machine it was, and is. Rare, too, by comparison with the production numbers of today’s Ferraris, and even rarer now that half a century has passed since that unveiling at the Turin Motor Show and the start of sales two years later.

Ferrari’s Berlinetta Boxer – initially the 365BB, uprated to the 512BB in 1976, civilised into the fuel-injected 512BBi from 1981 and Maranello’s second roadgoing production car (the Dino was the first) – featured a flat-12 engine that was mightily impressive for the sheer amount of space it occupied, never mind its cylinder count and racing roots.

So here was a low, wide, twoseater coupé with the look of a concept car honed via the racetrack.

It replaced the 365GTB/4 Daytona as Ferrari’s flagship, and initially featured that car’s 4390cc capacity and even its pistons and connecting rods. Ferrari wanted its new machine to bask in the glory of the Scuderia’s Formula 1 successes, which at that time were based around a flat-12 engine configuration. There was also the matter of how to package so many cylinders behind the occupants while keeping the car’s tail suitably compact.

This stipulation meant that the long engine had to sit not ahead of the gearbox but on top of it, flying in the face of the designer’s ideal of a low centre of gravity. Using a flat-12 configuration minimised the problem; the crankshaft axis was almost two feet above ground level, but at least the centre lines of the cylinders and their heads were no higher than that. Nevertheless, it became fashionable to cast doubts on the Boxer’s handling integrity.

Wouldn’t it feel pendulous, with

ABOVE Boxer engine had its roots in F1, and went through various iterations in the BB series. savage oversteer on the limit and an ever-present threat of a spin should you be foolish enough to back off in a bend?

What was never in doubt was the pace potential. All three Boxer versions should touch, or even exceed, 170mph and reach 60mph from a standstill in about 5.5 seconds. The most muscular of the trio, according to a consensus of the various power and performance figures quoted at the time (Ferrari didn’t always agree even with itself), is the 4942cc 512BB with 360bhp at 6800rpm, but outright pace is much the same for all the models.

While the lighter 365BB’s 345bhp arrives at a higher 7200rpm, the 512BBi’s identical peak power manifests itself at a more relaxed 6300rpm. The 365 has the lowest maximum torque at 302lb ft, but the surprise is that the curve peaks at the lowest engine speed of the three; 3900rpm, even though the 512 motor’s capacity boost comes via a significant increase in stroke – normally an indicator of

‘A low, wide, twoseater coupé with the look of a concept car honed via the racetrack’

heightened low-end torque – and a bore increase of only 1mm. The result is that the three different engines offer a surprisingly similar driving experience, even though nuanced differences abound.

In 1984, the Berlinetta Boxer ceased production as the Testarossa supplanted it, still with the flat-12 engine but re-engineered with four valves per cylinder and a different type of belt drive for the four camshafts. The Testarossa brought a new flavour of exoticism with its strakes and slats, but it was also a longer, wider machine whose flamboyance contrasted with the BB’s tautly drawn simplicity and relative compactness.

The Berlinetta is something of a forgotten Ferrari, perhaps overlooked despite its pedigree as the world’s first roadgoing flat-12.

Owning one would make you a member of quite an exclusive club.

So, what are the benefits?

T H E VA L U E P R O P O S I T I O N First point: there aren’t very many Boxers to go round. Ferrari built 2323 of them, of which 365s were the fewest (387 examples including 58 right-hand-drive, UK-market cars) and the 512BBi the most numerous (1007 models, of which just 37 were UK spec). So, as the collector world wakes up to the breed’s simple and rather visceral charms, we’re seeing some high asking prices for the best examples.

Rarity, and the purity always associated with a model’s first incarnation, push values highest

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A C Q U I R E

D E M O G R A P H I C D ATA

VA LU E P E R FO R M A N C E

365BB sample size is a lot lower than other cars due to low quote and insured volume, which can skew the demographics

£1,000,000 1968-1973 FERRARI 365GTB/ GTS DAYTONA 1973-1975 FERRARI 365GTB/4BB

16%

1971-1972 FERRARI 365GTC/4

£800,000

1972-1976 FERRARI 365GT/4 2+2

47%

37%

£600,000

This is compared with 512BBs £400,000

20% 55%

25%

PRE-BOOMER UNTIL 1946

£200,000

BOOMER <1965

GEN X <1981

0 2010

3.12

56.6

The average length of ownership for a 365BB

The average age of a 365BB owner

YEARS

for the 365BB. The Hagerty Price Guide puts a concours example at £295,000 and a usable but needy driver at £165,000, compared with £237,000/£137,800 for a 512BBi and a little more for a carburettorfed 512BB. In the US, the gap is much greater, with a spread from $380,000 to $505,000 for the 365, and $168,000 to $289,000 for the 512BBi. Unlike in the UK, though, top 512BB examples actually make slightly lower prices than the lessdemanding BBi models.

If considering a car at the lower end of the price scale, bear in mind that a full restoration, if and when it is needed, could easily use up £200,000. That’s why, unlike with 365s, 512s have tended to be repaired rather than restored.

“There simply isn’t the equity in them,” explains Russell Smith, service manager at Ferrari specialist (and repository of some fantastic historic machinery) Bob Houghton

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YEARS

2011

2012

All Ferrari 365s (1968-1973 365GTB/GTS Daytona, 1971-1972 365GTC/4, 1972-1976 365GT/4 2+2, 1973-1975 365GTB/4BB) from the 1970s peaked in 2016 or 2017, and have

Ferrari, based in Northleach, Gloucestershire. We will be hearing more from Russell later.

T H E D E S I R A B I L I T Y FA C T O R What any Berlinetta Boxer offers is the archetypal and, strangely, agelessly pure looks of an ultimate 1970s sports car. To see a BB today is to be reminded how bloated and contrived looking today’s big Ferraris have become, and how handily this machine can fit along the twisting backroads denied to its descendants. As usual for Ferraris of the time, its body

‘All of the BBs – indeed all classic Ferraris – need to be used regularly and vigorously’

2013

2014

2015

2016

2017

decreased or been flat every year since.

In the past ten years the 365BB has gained the most out of the four, at 171 percent, then the GTC/4 at 133 percent.

was designed by Pininfarina; it has perhaps the largest front indicators ever seen, and a glass area sufficient to banish what can easily be a snag with a mid-engined layout – a poor view aft.

Inside, it’s all transverse seat ribs and leather surfaces, a low scuttle for a great view forward and, of course, the usual Ferrari open gate for the gearlever. There are detail trim differences between the various versions, but the vibe is the same.

And driving these cars? The 365 feels, and is, the lightest, which suits the engine’s revvy nature and the super-crisp throttle response from the six Weber 40 IF 3C carburettors.

The 512BB has more mid-range energy, but in practice is no less revvy, so it can be hustled along at a similar rate with a touch less effort, carbs snorting enthusiastically.

The BBi is the easiest of the three to drive, pulling without fuss and hesitation from low revs thanks to

2018

2019

2020

2021

In the past ten years the 365BB has seen larger percent increases and decreases versus the 512BB every year, except in 2016 when the 512 increased 65 percent and the 365 increased 50 percent.

its pair (one per bank) of Bosch K-Jetronic injection systems. A slight edge is lost from the throttle response, but the improvement in traffic manners, not to mention fuel economy (merely dipsomanic, rather than horrendous) might be worth it if you plan regular use.

That said, all of them – indeed all classic Ferraris – need to be used regularly and vigorously. Otherwise leaks occur, dampers and joints go creaky, valvegear dries out, seals deteriorate, electrical connections oxidise, tyres harden… these cars are not meant to be museum pieces.

And with a model as charismatic as a BB, why would you not want to hear that engine’s howl and feel the forces as often as you can?

And no, it won’t turf you into the hedge. Driven with a feel for the physics, sensing what the Ferrari is telling you and keeping the power flowing, it handles tidily and with great agility. Occasionally you’re

TIMELINE

1971

Prototype 365 Berlinetta Boxer revealed at Turin Motor Show as Ferrari’s first ‘full-sized’ midengined road car. This followed a long period of resistance from Enzo Ferrari, who upheld that very powerful road cars should be front engined.

1973

The 365BB went on sale, with a wet-sump engine and black lower-body panels. It replaced the frontengined Daytona, whose V12’s engine capacity the new flat-12 shared.

1976

aware of the mass behind you as you turn into a bend and before power is applied, but it’s a fleeting sensation eradicated by a well modulated right foot.

T H E N U T S A N D B O LT S The good news is that this is a very robust engine if looked after well, with diligent maintenance and regular oil changes. Talk of oil leads to the key difference, apart from cylinder capacity, between a 365 and a 512; the earlier, smaller powerplant utilises a wet sump, formed in the same aluminium casting that also comprises part of the gearbox casing.

“Engine problems are rare,” explains Russell Smith, “but these cars do need to be used. Otherwise the piston rings can get stuck and valve seats can corrode. Some smoke when starting from cold is normal in a flat engine like this, yet it must clear as soon as you drive

ABOVE Delightfully period cabin scores extra points if fitted with Ferrari-badged Pioneer stereo. it. Power dropped a little for the BBi, but it’s nicer in some ways, easier to start and a smoother drive.

Sometimes the fuel-metering units can get gummed up, leading to hesitations, hunting at idle or stalling at junctions. The best thing then is to send the units away to be professionally stripped and cleaned, a job which can cost £3000 including a new set of injectors.

“A buzzing sound behind your head is normal – it’s the electronic ignition pack. The system doesn’t give many problems.”

Unlike the powerplant, the transmission can prove fragile – in early cars at least. “Improvements were made to the differential as the car evolved,” Russell explains, “but the early examples can split their casing and strip the teeth. Parts are

very expensive, secondhand and very hard to find. If the transmission whines or howls, or there’s a permanent grumbling that varies with road speed, either get the transmission inspected or stay away from that car.”

The BB uses steel for the fixed panels, aluminium for the opening ones and glassfibre for areas such as inner wheelarches and the rear bulkhead, all cladding a tubular steel chassis. This is vulnerable to corrosion – lift out the ashtrays in the sills and check in the cavity thus revealed the state of the tubes within – and to accident damage.

“Inspect the shims on the lower suspension arms,” advises Russell.

“If there is an excess of them on one side, the chassis could be bent.”

There should be a proper metal lip at the bottom of the front wings ahead of the sills, forming the base of the wheelarch opening, and you want to hear a “nice, crisp steel

The Berlinetta Boxer was upgraded to 512BB form – the number no longer relating to individual cylinder capacity but instead, less esoterically, to 5.0 litres and 12 cylinders.

The enlarged engine had dry-sump lubrication and expelled its exhaust through four, rather than six, tailpipes. The tail-light count also dropped from six to four. Air-conditioning and wider rear wheels added to the weight, but performance was marginally improved. Other changes included a twin-plate clutch, a front bib spoiler, altered shutlines for the rear clamshell and NACA ducts in the sills.

1981

Tightening emissions regulations, especially in the US, caused the 512BB to be re-engineered as the 512BBi, with a pair of Bosch K-Jetronic continuous mechanical-injection systems in place of the quartet of triple-choke Webers. Power dropped a little; fuel consumption and emissions dropped more.

New millimetric wheels were shod with Michelin TRX tyres; bumpers and lower body sides were the same colour as the rest of the body in most examples.

1984

Berlinetta Boxer production ended after 2323 cars, replaced by the bulkier Testarossa with a new, 48-valve version of the flat-12 engine.

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17 7

A C Q U I R E

T H E D E TA I L S 1973-1984 FERRARI BERLINETTA BOXER ENGINE

FLAT-12, 4.4 LITRES (365), 4.9 LITRES (512)

POWER

345-360BHP

TOP SPEED

170MPH

0-60MPH

5.5 SECONDS

VALUES FROM HAGERTY’S PRICE GUIDE Lower price is for a usable driver needing work; higher price is for a concours example. Most cars for sale fall somewhere between these two extremes. Current values of the 365BB are an average of 171 percent higher than they were ten years ago, although they have dropped considerably from their peak in 2016-17.

UK £165,000 £295,000

US $380,000 $505,000

512BB

£138,600 £248,500

$169,000 $275,000

512BBi

£137,800 £237,000

$168,000 $289,000

365BB

sound” when you tap the sills.

While you’re checking, look for bubbles of electrolytic corrosion along the bottoms of the doors and between the bonnet’s steel frame and aluminium skin, too.

Original wheels will have a Ferrari stamp on the rim showing the tyre size. The BBi’s wheels, wider at the back, are metric, requiring TRX tyres which Michelin still makes in batches from time to time. Earlier BBs use Michelin XWX, which are also available again. Under the bonnet, check that the spacesaver spare wheel – still a five-spoke alloy, but narrow – is present, along with the tool kit stored by the right-hand wheelarch. “These cost a fortune if you can find one,” says Russell.

Inside the cabin, check that everything works – especially the light switches, which are very expensive to have re-made. A BBi’s original sound system has a Ferraribadged Pioneer radio/cassette player and graphic equaliser, which add value if still present. A nonfunctioning air-con system might

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ABOVE 365BB is understated, sleek and ageless – with the biggest indicators ever seen. respond to recharging with a modern ‘drop-in’ replacement refrigerant, which means it can retain the original seals. Russell advises caution if a seller claims a car has “been converted to R134a”, the usual modern refrigerant.

The chassis-number label that’s located on the steering column must match that on the right-hand rear corner of the chassis frame.

While at the back of the engine bay you’ll probably spot a stainlesssteel sports exhaust, which most owners fit. However, if a car is to gain Ferrari’s coveted ‘Classiche’

‘The Berlinetta Boxer is still entirely usable today and still impressively rapid’

certification it must have the scarce, expensive, four-silencer original system, made in mild steel.

Does the clutch feel heavy to operate? It shouldn’t, but it often does because some remanufactured parts have turned out to be incorrectly produced. Russell emphasises the wisdom of using genuine Ferrari parts where possible, and stresses the need for a service history – preferably from a well known marque specialist.

The cambelts need to be changed every three years, at a cost of £3500 including tensioners, for which the engine has to come out.

While there is access, it makes sense to check the shim-adjusted tappet clearances at the same time, and inspect the camshafts’ front seals and the water pump for leaks.

One final point. There’s a warning light located to the top left of the radio, which illuminates when the engine cover is released. If the cover hasn’t been latched down correctly, it could blow open.

“Check the light to avoid an expensive mistake,” warns Russell.

THE FINAL DECISION

A new Ferrari F8 Tributo is a fine piece of precision and power, and massively more efficient and sophisticated than a Berlinetta Boxer many decades its senior. But does it have the simplicity of line, the rarity and the pioneering charisma of the BB, a car still entirely usable today and still impressively rapid?

Which would more greatly improve your quality of life?

If you decide ‘Boxer’, we’d be right behind you. So, which one? The 365 is the pure machine, the original, perhaps the happiest blend of power, handling and brakes. And it has six tailpipes, not four, plus the black lower-body paint – seen less often on later BBs – that’s so period.

Against that, the 365 costs the most. Of the two 512s, the BBi is easier to live with but the carburetted car is the quickest of all the BBs, has the potential to deliver the biggest thrills and is usefully cheaper than the 365. The 512BB probably does best what a Berlinetta Boxer was put on Earth to do – but, frankly, we’d love to own any of them.

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A C Q U I R E

M A R K E T A N A LY S I S

Reflecting on interesting times The only constant in life is change, and the collector car market is no exception. Just how has it been affected by recent world events?

W O R D S DAV E K I N N E Y

MARKETS ALWAYS CHANGE over time, and for the collector car arena, 2020 was no different.

Despite all the challenges, the cancelling of events and the onthe-fly adjustments, the market continued to make modifications, both monetary and physical.

I know what many of you are thinking ‘cars and values’... don’t care! Well, you should. Why? Because your heirs care, including that disturbingly buffoonish sonin-law or the lawyer of your soon-to-be-ex-wife (or husband).

If those don’t apply, at the very least, the taxman cares.

Before we get to some of what happened in 2020, first let’s talk about the foundation – the building, if you will – of the business of collector cars and their markets. Automobile collecting as a ‘serious’ hobby took off in the years following World War Two, when more leisure time and the growth of the middle class fuelled a number of hobbies.

Fifty years ago, a top-quality coachbuilt Rolls-Royce Phantom II was worth approximately the same as a used Ferrari 250 SWB. Make that an alloy SWB. In 2021, only one of these cars is worth in the multiple millions – and, just so you don’t have to do the research, it’s not the Rolls-Royce.

While collector automobiles as investments have been a topic for about those same 50 years, luxury models as a whole have faded while sport-oriented cars have ascended. As times change, so do

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tastes. In fashion, in housing, in music, in lifestyles, in hairstyles, and also in art, including fine art, and automobiles.

Speaking of fine art, in the past ten to 20 years, the high end of the classic automobile market has adopted not only the language of fine art, but many of the sensibilities of fine art as well.

The builder as artist, the model as title or subject, and engineering (innovation, horsepower, build quality) as medium.

This is why, unlike just 20 years ago, a fine unrestored example of a top British, German or Italian sports car from the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and increasingly 1980s and beyond, is now, and will continue to be, worth more than a restored example of that very same car.

Provenance, once generally ignored or glossed over, is now often as important as the car itself; original bits are treasured and not replaced unless absolutely necessary.

In 2020, the marketplace for in-person auction sales changed.

Many specialists pivoted to onlineonly events, while some stayed with a hybrid of in-person and online sales. The collector car market adjusted well, giving a large boost to totally online sales platforms in the interim.

At the high end of the auction market, the top sales all belonged to a single marque, Bugatti, with the famed name filling all the topfive slots. (Of note, three cars, a collection of Alfa Romeo BAT concepts, no.5, no.7 and no.9,

+173.1%

ABOVE Jaguar XJR-15 has it all, and its credentials are reflected in an upwards trajectory in values. was the top-selling lot, bringing in $14,840,000 at an RM Sotheby’s sale in New York. As this is a multi-car lot, I am excluding it from the top ten here.)

Top sales one, two and four go to Gooding & Co in one single event – all Bugattis, and all in London. The top car, a Type 59 Sports, brought $12,681,550, while a 57S Atalante was hammered,

‘Market adjusted well in 2020, giving a large boost to totally online sales platforms’

including fees, at $10,447,150. Our number three top seller belongs to Bonhams, which sold a Bugatti Type 55 Super Sport Roadster at Amelia Island for $7,100,000.

Back to Gooding for the fourth car, a Type 35C Grand Prix, selling for $5,233,550, and rounding out the top five, back to Bonhams and its Paris sale, a Type 55 Two-Seat Supersport by Figoni brought $5,061,380. The 2020 total for that top five seems like plenty at a bit over $40,500,000. However, when compared with 2019’s top five total of over $52,000,000, it looks a good bit diminished.

With a little reading between the lines, there’s was a noticeable lack of cars selling above the $10,000,000 mark in 2020. The highest single sale reported in the US was a pre-pandemic lockdown Bonhams sale at Amelia Island.

Collector car dealers in both

+173.1%

1990-1992 Jaguar XJR-15

-17.9%

2014-2015 McLaren P1 -36.7%

2017-present Ford GT -16.8%

1956-1959 BMW 503

2021 Condition 1 Condition 2 Condition 3 Condition 4

-21.2%

1950-1958 Lancia Aurelia

-24.7%

2003-2004 Aston Martin DB AR1 1966 Abarth Simca 2000

-17.0%

1964 Ford Thunderbolt

-20.2%

0

$300,000

2020 Condition 1 Condition 2 Condition 3 Condition 4

$600,000

$900,000

$1,200,000

1953-1954 Buick Skylark

-21.5

2009-2010 Bentley Brooklands

-21.4%

1962-1966 Abarth Simca 1300

-22.8%

1973-1979 Bitter CD

+152.9%

1970-1973 Datsun 240Z

+41.9%

1956-1975 VW Karmann Ghia

Europe and the US generally reported a huge drop off in sales at the beginning of the pandemic and the resultant shutdowns. In March, April, May and, in many cases, into early June, business was slow. While a number reported that cars selling above the $1-2 million mark were continuing as normal in the second half of the year, only a few reported much action above those numbers.

You can bet that there were a number of privately brokered sales at the extreme high end ($10,000,000-plus) of the market, and no one I spoke with seems to be calling these sales brisk.

For many top-end buyers and sellers, 2020 was a wait-and-see year. If a transaction was not needed, it was delayed.

Back to value changes in the past year. One of the most notable 2020 increases in value, according

$1,500,000

+53.4%

1967-1971 BMW 1600

+39.3%

1946-1947 Cadillac Series 62

-23.2% +353.7%

1958-1971 Subaru 360 1964-1970 Renault 8

+59.2%

1964-1968 Marcos 1600

+41.4%

1946-1947 Hudson Super

-17.3%

1984-1989 Toyota 4Runner

+49.8%

1958-1959 Edsel Corsair

2021 Condition 1 Condition 2 Condition 3 Condition 4

-20.3

%

1972-1981 Panther J-72

-67.9%

1972-1984 Lancia Beta

2020

+44.1%

1981-1989 Lincoln Town Car

+79.8

1992-1998 Volkswagen Golf Mk3

+48.4%

Condition 1 Condition 2 Condition 3 Condition 4

%

1989-1993 Cadillac DeVille

+68.7%

1975-1980 Volvo 244

+81.4%

0

$25,000

$50,000

$75,000

$100,000

$125,000

$150,000

M AGNETO

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A C Q U I R E

M A R K E T A N A LY S I S

-36.7%

RIGHT Latest Ford GT has slipped in value as more come onto the market.

to collector car insurance specialist Hagerty, was to the Peter Stevensdesigned Jaguar XJR-15. With a total of just 53 completed by the JaguarSport collaboration between Jaguar and Tom Walkinshaw Racing, it is said to be the world’s first-ever carbonfibre-bodied road car. In fact, it is a road-legal race machine that one could say is the spiritual successor to the Jaguar C or D-type.

The XJR-15 has the full dance card ticked: a race series, limited production, startling performance at the time of its introduction (early 1990s), expensive when new, excellent looks, V12 power and a variety of famous names associated with it (indeed, Peter Stevens later went on to help pen the McLaren F1).

It should be noted that the XJR-15 had a rather large reunion event at Goodwood in summer 2019, and that type of ‘top-of-mind’ moment never seems to hurt values.

With a new cost of £500,000, you

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can expect to pay upwards of £1,000,000 to acquire an excellent example today, with very few barriers to higher values in sight.

The CD, built by Americanpowered German marque Bitter, has also seen a bit of an uptick in value. Long disparaged as an also-ran among some much more valuable Euro-American automotive alliances, it appears that the CD might be having its day in the sun. Still coming in under the £60,000 mark, a nicely sorted one can be a well behaved grand tourer, and as they are quite rare, you are unlikely to see another on your travels.

Rarity is often seen as a component of value in collector cars, but certainly not in every case. Witness the Volkswagen Karmann Ghia, a model that survived in production for three decades, from the mid-1950s until the mid-1970s. Unlike the previous two cars we have discussed, these are not rare, with over 445,000

built. According to Hagerty, they are up a full 53 percent in value in just a single year, with top examples selling at or even above the £45,000 mark.

While there were only two collector cars on Hagerty’s radar that decreased in value by more than 25 percent, one was notable for being the latest version of the Ford GT, built from 2017 onwards. The issue is simply one of supply and demand, as Ford prevented original owners from selling their example for at least two years after purchase. A few famously (or, more appropriately, infamously) slipped out before the

‘Rarity is often seen as a component of value in collector cars, but certainly not in every case’

sales restriction period passed, and brought a huge return.

While last year an excellent, delivery-mileage example of the GT might have cost the new owner $1,600,000, today that same car may be available at $1,050,000 – and with Ford’s blessing, if the first caretaker had passed the two-year ownership point. Another exotic that saw a recent decrease in value is the 2003-2004 Aston Martin AR1; a superb example has lost almost $100,000, sinking to just below $300,000.

One big surprise for those of us who follow 1950s BMWs would be the recent decline in value of the 503 model, a handsome gran turismo from 1956 to 1959. A total of just 413 Albrecht Von Goertzdesigned examples were built in both coupé and drophead form. A show-quality example is estimated as dropping in value just shy of 17 percent to $414,500. I say we should just call this a buying opportunity and move on.

20 years ago, this very car won its class at the 24 Hours of Le Mans piloted by Olivier Beretta, Karl Wendlinger and Dominique Dupuy. In dominating fashion, it achieved the highest finishing position ever for an American GT class car finishing 7th overall. Le Mans was just one of eight victories on the road to a 3 year sweep in which Viper Team ORECA won the ALMS Championship. Now, GTSR C31 is offered exclusively by LBI Limited in search of a new caretaker to carry on its winning legacy.

PHOTO BY JOHN BROOKS ©

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A good reproduction of the prototype Ferrari built to A time-warp Ferrari’s highly collectible fiberglass 308. a top Compete at Leexample Mans,offitted with a 150cc engine giving speed of 20mph, disc brakes, key start, working lights, GRP Classiche certified, numbers matching, wearing original paint, body, interior withIncludes diamond stitch andhand-stitched displaying a mereleather 7,486 miles from new. factory inserts, example was restored in the late 1980s tools,this manuals, sales slip, and jack in original delivery box. and is in C a H collection A S S I Sfor a C few 3 1years, working order but has sat in recommissioning recommended before use.

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WAT C H E S

The making of an icon While we’re in a McQueen/Le Mans kind of mood, our Sotheby’s watch specialist looks at the famous Monaco W O R D S J O N AT H O N B U R F O R D

YOU REQUIRE ONLY a passing interest in watches or horology to know that the 2010s have been the decade of the steel sport watch, both vintage and modern. Led by the Patek Philippe Nautilus, Audemars Piguet Royal Oak and any number from the Rolex catalogue, demand and limited supply have resulted in eye-popping appreciation.

These timepieces’ ‘beach-toboardroom’ flexibility, robustness, understatedness and propensity to develop character and beauty with age – combined with the entry into the market of a large number of collectors who grew up idolising previous wearers such as Steve McQueen and Paul Newman – go some way to explaining this boom.

As such, many are now unobtainable to your average collector – and with early A-Series Royal Oaks and Ref 3700 Nautiluses consistently exceeding $100,000 at auction, collectors look elsewhere for value.

This has led to increased interest, scholarship and demand for what were considered lesser brands, such as Heuer, Universal Genève, Gallet and Zenith. Of these, Heuer has had the most interesting few years, highlighted by significant sales from the Arno Haslinger collection in London in 2010, to a market peak around 2017 and market correction in 2018-19, to the 2020 sale of one of the eight Heuer Monacos worn

by McQueen during the filming of Le Mans for in excess of $2 million.

Heuer has existed since 1860, making many timing instruments including pocket watches and dash

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timers. Yet it is the post-war Jack Heuer-era watches, predominantly steel chronographs, that have driven the brand’s popularity. The Autavia and Carrera are often the most headline grabbing and numerous, but it is the unique-looking Monaco – the square, waterproof, automatic chronograph – that I find the most interesting.

Heuer and Breitling both announced the development of the automatic chronograph in March 1969. The two brands had teamed up with Hamilton to develop the Chronomatic (Calibre 11) movement, beating Zenith with its El Primero and Seiko’s Ref 6139 to

ABOVE Earlier examples like this 1969 model are among the most collectable of all the Monacos.

the punch by a matter of months.

These early examples, boasting the ‘Chronomatic’ text on the dial, left-sided crown and midnightblue dial, are some of the most rare, collectable and desirable Monacos. Later versions read ‘Automatic Chronograph’ instead.

Over time, multiple variants were developed using Calibres 12, 13, 14 and 15, offering a small running second hand and GMT among other functions. A manual Valjoux-powered version arrived in 1974, with the crown now on the conventional right side of the case.

When looking at early Monacos, as with all watches from this era, the basic principles to adhere to remain condition, originality and rarity. Which characteristics trump the others depends on your collecting style, but here are some things to look for. Monaco cases are a combination of brushed and polished steel. Once the very sharp angles are softened or lost due to

polishing and restoration, they are impossible to replicate, so look for unpolished examples with original proportions and textural finish.

Compare the vertical brushed grain on the case sides and between the lugs, and check for clarity of the serial and reference numbers engraved between the lugs (if not present, it’s likely a service case).

A sunburst brushing effect on the case back should read ‘Tool No. 033’ in reference to the tool Heuer developed to remove the case back. Even better, this may be concealed by the original sticker.

Early dials are a darker blue, with prominent brushing and white subdials. Non-serif fonts and typeface indicate repainted or refinished dial. The original lume plots and hands will go a pumpkin colour (if yellowed/white, presume it’s been re-lumed), and the plots will often bleed into the dial paint.

Bracelet and accessories? Look for those with the original steel

MOTORING ART

bracelets (made by Novavit SA) and stamped Heuer on the clasp.

The fragile, original red boxes can degrade, but if present, ensure they’re correct (does the front say ‘Automatic’?). In general, though, don’t fixate on the box/papers. A good ‘naked’ Monaco is preferable to a poor example with accessories.

Ones to look for? At the top of the market is The Dark Lord, a manual-wound, PVD-coated Ref 74033N made in tiny numbers circa 1975. In 2010, the Haslinger Dark Lord sold for a huge $82,500, but it’s since settled between this and $40,000. Also, early Calibre 11 Chronomatic Ref 1133 should be found in the $25k-45k range, and more common but most iconic Ref 1133B ‘McQueen’ Monacos have settled in the $12k-18k range.

It’s lazy to call the 2016-18 price increase a ‘bubble’, but there was an inflation due to concentrated interest in the brand leading up to 2017, combined with a lack of highquality examples available. There’s been a correction since the peak, but the market does seem robust and deeper than some expected.

The increase in prices boosted the number of examples coming to market – that these were often not great examples contributed to this correction – but outside of the steel AP/Patek/Rolex market, Heuers and specifically Monacos rightly remain long-term collector favourites.

Jonathon Burford is vice president and specialist at Sotheby’s watch department. For its ongoing Watches Weekly sales see www.sothebys.com.

Motor sport poster boy Geo Ham set the style for a generation with his iconic GP artworks, which remain highly collectable today WOR D S RU P E RT W H Y T E

THE DRAMATIC ILLUSTRATION of a blue Bugatti, with its scarfed driver charging from the tunnel into the Mediterranean sunshine during the Monaco Grand Prix, must be one of the most famous GP poster images not just of the 1930s, but of all time.

Geo Ham was just 32 when he received this first of many commissions from the Automobile Club de Monaco, for illustrations to adorn posters in what was to become the jewel in the crown of GP racing. Georges Hamel was born in Lavel, France in 1900. He retitled himself Geo Ham when he started his career painting for L’Illustration, a Parisian newspaper that ran weekly from 1843 to 1944, for whom he worked until 1940.

This flamboyant artist, lifelong aficionado of the motor car and part-time motor sport competitor could reflect on his personal relationship with the subject matter by sitting in a racing car to experience, live, feel and breathe speed. He could capture the danger and pace, as well as the technical accuracy, of such a machine like no other.

In 1934 Ham shared a Derby L8 with Louis Villeneuve at the Le Mans 24 Hours. He soon put

his artistic skills to use designing exotic bodywork for French coachbuilder Figoni et Falaschi.

The flamboyant designs with wings streaming up from the chassis evolved into a series of roadsters – the Delahaye 135 and 165, and Delage D6, among them.

The style of the ‘painter of speed’ became instantly recognisable. From the 1930s through to the 1950s, Ham’s artwork was seen on posters created for the Monaco GP, Le Mans and pretty much every other circuit in France. Every race, every launch of a new car, every event, every winning moment; they were all recorded by this one man.

Ham’s posters were often visually spectacular, and sometimes took liberties with reality to produce the greatest dramatic effect. This was perfectly demonstrated by the poster for the 1956 Prix de Paris, showing a stylised racing pilot... with signature scarf blowing in the wind. Ham liked to immortalise the drivers as much as he immortalised the cars.

His love for Le Mans remained throughout his career, and in a series of watercolours commissioned for a lavish book

by Roger Labric, Ham recounted the history of the epic 24-hour race at La Sarthe. Many of the original paintings adorn the walls of the Automobile Club de l’Ouest to this day.

His illustrations were important for documenting not only the transformation of the car industry, but also the development of aviation. He was equally famous for painting aeroplanes and motorbikes.

He died nearly forgotten, as the humble paintbrush was overthrown by photography and film. Yet today, with our visual overload of manipulated images, a dramatic Geo Ham artwork still does something a camera never will; it creates feeling, passion and emotion that can be achieved only by the input of a human hand.

Hugely appreciated among collectors, his posters can now command many thousands of pounds. Let’s be honest – what petrol-head wouldn’t want to display on their wall a fantastic, art deco-styled vision of man and car speeding around a track? I have several!

Rupert Whyte runs Historic Car Art, www.historiccarart.net, selling original works and posters.

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A C Q U I R E

AUTOMOBILIA

The little things that really matter

1970 World Champion Jochen Rindt sitting on his Lotus 49, detailed with clasped hands, dangling goggles and spark-plug wires. This one-of-one piece was made well over 20 years ago.

High collector demand for these exquisite small-scale racing dioramas reflects the craftsmanship that goes into creating them WOR D S A N D P HOTO G R A P H Y M A R S H A L L B UC K

THE AMAZING AND captivating works from Racing Dioramics have to be among the best-kept secrets in the field of specialty car models for collectors. The two partners behind the magic are Crittenden Rumford and Nestor Spinelli. I own four of their fantastic works, and am hoping to acquire a few more… if and when I find any.

California-based RD specialises in classic Grand Prix and roadracing scenes (mini dioramas or vignettes) in 1:43 scale. It made its first examples in the mid-1980s, and in 1990 it started creating these for collectors. Current prices vary from $450-650, although some can be higher depending on details and degree of difficulty.

Considering the work involved and the rarity of each piece, these miniatures represent great value.

Today, RD builds commission work of all eras, and some limited runs of only ten to 15 pieces per edition. Its waiting list is a long one, hence it is not accepting any new diorama commissions. However, a number of driver figures are currently available to order, as are separate, jewel-like helmets. That is, if you don’t wait too long...

RD’s bespoke dioramas are far superior to mass-market creations.

Each scene depicts a genuine point in time from auto-racing history, and these vignettes are truly miniature works of art. Crittenden has an amazing ability to give life to her figures, and her partner Nestor’s great talent to create the rest of the scene and build the cars

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makes for a winning combination.

Crittenden tells me that, for the cars: “Nestor uses existing kits and modifies them if needed. Sometimes he makes his own. The drivers are hand carved and painted, and custom fitted for each diorama. We don’t make many of any one subject; usually one-offs, a handful at most.” Remember, the cars shown here are only about 3.5in long.

No CAD or any sort of 3D modelling is used, which makes the oh-so-accurate faces and period garb, down to clear goggle lenses, all the more remarkable. The folds in clothing, the positioning of arms, hands and bodies, even the girth of some drivers, perfectly replicate the racers in action. Or they could be standing, or waiting in the cockpit for a race to start. No matter the pose, they have life.

Each car is hand built – some from rare, limited-run European kits long out of production – and beautifully finished. Many custom details are added, with some featuring wire wheels hand-laced by fellow master modeller Vincenzo Bosica. Each detailed display was, and still is, created by hand.

Over the years RD has produced a few thousand pieces, the majority custom made; one, two or three of a kind. Most are genuinely one-offs.

Previous limited-edition series ran no more than 30 of each, often less.

As for collecting, while you’re unlikely to find one of RD’s full dioramas right now, here are a few tips. As mentioned, it also produces 1:43 limited-run driver figures and

Stirling Moss driving the 1955 Mille Miglia-winning 300SLR, with navigator Denis Jenkinson. Three were made 20-25 years ago, using a kit from Provence Moulage or Starter – both now defunct.

One-off depicts Luigi Musso smoking a cigarette in his 801, waiting for the start of the 1957 French GP. His clothing is period correct; RD built the Ferrari from a Renaissance kit.

helmets. In the past it also made several 1:18 scale drivers – long sold out. The 1:43 figures run from the 1950s to around 2016, and are numbered limited editions of just 25 each. To date, there have been 151 figure editions, 76 of which are sold out. For each, Crittenden creates one original master, which she then moulds, casts, assembles and detail paints. These are made on a ‘to order’ basis, and cost from $75165. Waiting time is several weeks.

The helmets are custom made, with no edition limits. For any not

seen on www.racingdioramics.us, collectors just let Crittenden know what they need and she’ll see what she can do. Prices range from $2875 each, depending on the graphics involved or other level of difficulty.

After more than 30 years, demand is higher than ever for everything RD makes. That’s a true testament to the excellence and desirability of its work.

Marshall Buck edits AutoMobilia Resource magazine, dedicated to automotive memorabilia. Find it via www.automobiliaresource.com.

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LEGAL ADVICE

Examining history Did you know that an abundance of hi-tech forensic testing techniques are now available to help determine a car’s provenance?

W O R D S C L I V E R O B E R T S O N , H E A LY S L L P

THE FIRST MILLE Miglia took place on March 27, 1927; a 1000-mile round road race from Brescia via Rome. Fast forward to April 3, 1938, which saw Alfa Romeo Type 8C 2900Bs finishing first, second and third. The event was overshadowed by a devastating crash involving a Lancia Aprilia, which claimed the lives of ten people. The next day, Italy banned all road racing.

In 1939, the Reale Automobile Club d’Italia organised the alternative Mille Miglia Africana in North Africa, which took place on March 26. Alfa was prominent once more, entering a team of Type 65 6C 2500SS Corsas. The race was won by Alfa works driver – and Mussolini’s chauffeur and cousin – Ercole Boratto, driving chassis no. 915 006.

Mid-afternoon on December 2, 2002, I took a call from a friend and client, asking if I could spare a few hours that afternoon. While out shooting, he’d made a snap decision to buy a car being auctioned at Olympia.

I sped to the auction with firm instructions. When Alfa chassis 915 006 came up for consideration, I jumped into the fray with the first bid, but the price soon escalated beyond my set limit. Knowing my client had a good sense of humour, I continued bidding. Fortunately, my competitor promptly pulled out, and my client acquired 915 006 at just £500 beyond his stated ceiling.

The Tipo 256 had been entered into, then withdrawn from, Bonhams Monaco sale the year before. The Olympia catalogue stated that: “The original ‘915 006’ no longer exists,

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and this 6C 2500SS is not the only car subsequently constructed to be stamped with the famous chassis number, there being another, differently bodied example in Alfa’s Arese museum in Italy.”

Of course, provenance is all, so it’d be trite to suggest that these remarks regarding a competing chassis can’t but have had a severe effect on value.

The Alfa had been inspected for my client, so he bought with his eyes open on the basis that he considered he’d obtain a lot of car for the money – but he was still intrigued to know exactly what he had acquired.

Looking at the catalogue again, there’s reference to the chassis being cross braced. This would have dated the build as of post-war manufacture, circa 1947, while the engine was described as a “correct unit”.

Well, 915 006 was despatched to the workshops of respected Alfa restorer Jim Stokes, where Metaltech Consulting Services was engaged to undertake chassis chemical analysis, optical emission spectroscopy and metallographic examinations.

Steel was trepanned from the cross bracing and one main chassis rail, and compared with samples trepanned from three other pre-war

‘Maybe it’ll become standard practice to have a certificate of authenticity as part of a car’s history’

ABOVE 6C 2500SS ‘915 006’ may not be totally original, but at least buyers know what they’re getting.

Alfas of known date. Metaltech reported that the rail and crossbracing samples were different in composition, structure and hardness, and that: “The cross bracing may have been added at some later date to stiffen the chassis, and was softer and lower-carbon steel.”

Subsequently, Caparo Testing Technologies forensically examined the chassis for residual sub-surface deformation or compression marks.

It said: “No evidence of secondary deformation marks or latent number indications were apparent, either associated with or adjacent to the numbers present. The numbers were clearly visible after etching.”

Such evidence tends to support the conclusion that the alterations to the chassis were undertaken after 1939.

Tito Anselmi’s 1993 book Alfa Romeo 6C 2500 records the engine number of chassis 915 006 as being 923 802. Again, Caparo reported that no evidence of secondary deformation marks or latent number indications was apparent.

What of the competing chassis in the Arese museum? The engine is no. 927 037, which ought to reside in chassis 916 600, completed on May 30, 1951; most definitely post-war.

The purpose of this tale has not been to determine the provenance of 915 006; others will be best placed to do that. It is to demonstrate contextually the range of testing

facilities that are available when considering any high-value car’s provenance. If there is any hint that the structure is not original, or that the numbers might not be correct, further enquiries must be undertaken.

It may prove effective to engage local specialists, and for particular marques, overseas experts, too. I’m involved in a dispute that’s rumbled on for several years, and which may shortly be filed in the New York Supreme Court. If settlement can’t be achieved, the outcome of the case will almost certainly turn on the forensic evidence that’s been carried out.

Advances in forensic techniques have made accessing such services more cost effective. Vin-Print, for example, offers on-site scanned digital images of a vehicle’s VIN, chassis, engine and gearbox numbers, for less than £1000. So it may be cost effective at any value point to obtain proof certain of a vehicle’s identity. Perhaps we may see the day when it becomes standard practice to have a certificate of authenticity as part of a car’s history and provenance.

My client sold 915 006 in 2013, which was a minor tragedy because the car went like hell and handled beautifully. This reminds me of the night stage of the anniversary Targa Florio, when we arrived at a town in the centre of the island at midnight with the temperature still at 30ºC. As we approached a 90º turn in the main square, an unseen hand thrust a very cold, plastic, litre bottle into my hand. I couldn’t get the top off quickly enough and took a long swig. Vino rosso frizzante; delicious and only in Italy.

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COLLECTIONS

Mixing friendship and business...

It’s the people you meet along the way who make your classic car journey really special.

Treasure them; they won’t always be around

WITH THE PASSING of my friend Tony Merrick just before Christmas, and learning of another loss on the same day, I realise just how lucky I’ve been to know and meet the people I have. Many have shaped the way I think and do things. It can be as simple as Tony showing me how to pour a jerry can without it burping fuel over everything (for which I thank him silently every time I do it), or helping me out when I needed it.

When I first started working for Bernie Ecclestone, I knew enough to get by. I’d done a few restorations, and had spent my life driving and fixing crap old cars, but once I was dealing with serious machinery, I realised I needed help and advice.

Some people didn’t want to help, some wouldn’t unless they were getting something out of it, and some were just plain unfriendly. Yet even they taught me a good lesson; to deal only with people I liked and got on with. The upshot of this realisation was that many of the people who first did work for me became great friends, and still are today.

One of the first jobs I had to do for Mr E was to bring all the Brabhams back from Donington, where they’d been on display and in storage in the museum’s cellars for years. Bernie told me to ring Tom Wheatcroft and tell him he wanted the cars back – and that there was a charge for using them.

I’d heard of Tom, and fretted about the call, especially as I wasn’t sure how I was going to mention the fee – not knowing it was one of BE’s jokes. I shouldn’t have worried.

Tom roared with laughter and said: “Oooh tha’ booger! I’ll tell him what

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’e can do with ’is charge.” I then knew I was going to like him.

He and I would ring each other, and tell stories and laugh like mad about all manner of nonsense. A week before he passed, Tom called when I was on a train. We chatted away, but it hurt for him to laugh, and because I knew I might not speak to him again I missed my station and carried on talking. “Look after yourself,” he said, and I got out at the next stop.

There are too many people to mention, but a few stand out. Tom and Tony, of course, Dick Crosthwaite and John Gardiner, Jim Stokes, Rick Hall, Gregor Fisken, Malcolm Barber and Michael Kliebenstein have all been pivotal in making my life with Mr E fun, interesting and instructive.

Rick Hall had finished rebuilding the engine of the BRM V16, which Mr E had just bought. I wanted to go testing in it, but Rick didn’t have any manpower to help. He gave me some instructions, and I took it to Brands.

It was breathtaking to drive; 600bhp-plus on those skinny tyres, and loud... so very loud. It consumed 50 litres of straight methanol in ten laps, using 10,000 of the 12,000rpm available… God, it was quick! All was well, and I returned to Biggin Hill to ring Rick and tell him of the day –

‘Many of the people who first did work for me became great friends, and still are today’

ABOVE Pay it forward; correct black Ferrari 312 rev counter was a thank-you gift for a good deed done. but I thought I’d have some fun. I said it was going well, but it started to smoke from the right-hand bank, and then the temperature gauge went right up to the stop and then seems to have stopped working altogether. I added that I carried on going until it started to run rough as I ran it out of fuel at really high rpm.

I could hear Rick trying to work out what terrible damage I had done, perhaps by running all the coolant out of a blown head gasket until it stopped. “What d’you mean smoke?”

“How many rpm?” Eventually I could no longer contain myself. I started laughing until I was crying.

Rick’s impressive string of industrial language lasted for ten minutes.

Rick got his own back some time later, when I rang him after denting the BRM’s nose. “I have a bloke looking at some trucks near you.

Give it to him, and I’ll get it repaired.”

After three weeks, I rang to see how it was going. Rick said: “Hi Robert, I thought you were going to send that nose up to me?” “What do you mean?

I gave it to your truck bloke?” I said.

“I have no idea who he was,” countered Rick. “He was just a bloke.”

How was I going to explain to Mr E where the nose of his very expensive car had gone? “But you told me to give it to him,” I whinged, gutted. “Got you!” said Rick quietly. He had, too.

We had a good laugh – and, of course, the nose was repaired beautifully.

An Italian friend of mine had been having an awful time in business,

and was at a very low ebb. I was taking a car to an event in Italy, and asked him to come along and translate for me. He brought a friend, Lorenzo, who collected rare Ferrari spares.

We had a fabulous time, and later a package arrived from Lorenzo as a thank you. He’d given me the correct rev counter for our 1966 312, which had a white dial instead of black.

Jim Stokes was building a 156 Sharknose, and asked to look at the fuel-pump arrangements in some of our Ferraris of the same age. While doing so, he remarked that the white dial was correct for the Sharknose, so I paid the favour forward by swapping the white one there and then for the black dial. Now both cars were correct.

A while later, my MG NA Magnette single-seater had two exhaust valve seats come loose. The only person I could trust with this tricky job was Jim, but I was a bit broke and wasn’t sure if I could afford to have the job done. He said he’d have a look.

A few weeks on, Jim rang. “The job is done. No charge; the man whose Sharknose I’m building has paid for the materials as a thank you for the gauge, and I’ve given you the labour as you saved me months of work as I didn’t have to make a new one.”

How lucky I’ve been to drive so many amazing cars, and work with and count as friends so many amazing people. Even if every so often one of them leaves us behind, I still have the stories. As you know, with dotage comes anecdotage. The machinery is poorer without these people, though.

Former Ecclestone Collection manager Robert now runs Curated Vehicle Management. See www.c-v-m.co.uk.

STEVE THEODOROU/OPUS

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LEFT A fit but exhausted Sam takes a break during an LMP1 stint for Aston Martin Racing back in 2010.

HISTORIC RACING

How to stay fit for combat Do you lose concentration towards the end of a race? It’s probably because your heart rate has risen too high – and the key to avoiding that is the right kind of exercise WOR D S SA M H A NCO C K

AT THE PEAK of my physical preparation for the 2012 Le Mans 24 Hours, I once trained for a total of ten hours in a single day; four intense workouts of two-and-a-half hours each, with roughly four hours off in between. Starting at 3pm and finishing at approximately the same time the following afternoon, the idea was to replicate the stints I might have to drive in the race, in order to prepare both mind and body for the challenge ahead.

Psychologically, the idea was a roaring success. Having proven to myself that I could get out of bed in the dead of night to run 15 or so miles, having already swum, cycled and weight-lifted my way through similar sessions just a few hours earlier, made me feel invincible, as though I could handle anything the world’s greatest endurance race might throw at me.

Physiologically, however, it was a disaster. In my infinite wisdom I scheduled this self-annihilation just

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a few days before travelling to Le Mans, and I arrived with a stinking cold. So much for the fitness gains...

Nine years on, it’s hard to relate to this version of myself. The physical demands of my now predominantly Historic racing schedule are far less than those of the World Endurance Championship. It’s fair to say the training pedal has gradually lifted with each passing year, and the snug fit of my race suits confirms that I can no longer ‘get away with it’. So with the new season (hopefully) just a couple of months away, I have decided it’s time to get back into a proper training regimen and shed some excess ballast.

But what kind of fitness does a driver require for Historic motor sport anyway? Many of the races are short in duration, and the forces generated by older machinery are nowhere near those of contemporary kit. Does fitness even matter? It’s a reasonable question, and depends

largely on your ability, the cars you drive and your race-stint lengths.

While 1950s or 1960s models, for example, might not have much adhesion by modern standards, driven properly they often require an even greater work rate at the wheel.

Over a long stint this can become tiring, especially when trying to deftly balance the car on the throttle and retain a light grip on the wheel while bracing against lateral cornering loads. A few laps in a Cobra around a chilly Goodwood may be effortless, but an hour or more in the baking heat of Portimão can soon catch up with you.

Of course, some cars, some circuits, are more tiring than others.

But the key is to acknowledge the subtle changes that can occur as even low levels of fatigue set in – something I witness often from the passenger seat while driver coaching.

First, the body tenses to counter the forces. Grip tightens, wrists stiffen, elbows lock, shoulders shrug and teeth grit. Inputs become less precise, more aggressive, body temperature rises and brows bead.

Soon, mistakes appear as if from

‘Historics often require an even greater work rate at the wheel than modern equivalents’

nowhere, pace slows and frustration sets in. This further increases the mental overload, and physical fatigue quickly follows. It’s a vicious circle.

Inexperienced drivers are, of course, more susceptible to this than old hands, who use far less of their mental capacity to keep a car on the road. But while a seasoned racer may get away with a lack of athleticism in some Historic categories, there are plenty of other classes that will test even a decorated champion.

Historic F1, Group C and relatively modern Endurance Legends cars, for example, can all be extremely physical if driven to their limits.

High downforce, huge mechanical grip and, for the sports cars at least, the hot, closed cockpits, all place significant demands on the driver.

Slowing the pace a little can dramatically reduce the forces, but who wants to do that? The illprepared, however, may eventually have no choice. Unable to cope with the cornering loads during a long race, the hips start twisting, knees lean excessively, the steering loads up and, sooner or later, the neck gives in. Easing off offers the only respite.

So, how to avoid such pace-sapping fate? Well, dusting off my old training diaries, I can summarise thus: To prepare most drivers for just about anything Historic competition is likely to throw at them, a primary foundation of cardiovascular fitness – complemented by a strong core, excellent flexibility and, where necessary, a conditioned neck – is necessary. It doesn’t really matter how you achieve this – running, cycling, swimming, whatever – as long as you focus on endurance over speed or brute strength. You don’t need to dead-lift twice your bodyweight, nor run 100 metres in 12 seconds. You just need to be able to keep your heart rate down while at the wheel, such that the brain remains able to compute the highspeed scenery unfolding ahead.

I used to wear a heart-rate monitor while racing, and at my fittest I remember averaging about 125bpm over a two-hour stint in a prototype. These days, I’d be happy with anything under 150bpm.

Now, where did I put my trainers?

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CHASSIS NO. 885356

1962 XKE SERIES 1 3.8L FLAT FLOOR/WELDED LOUVERS FHC Rotisserie restored, numbers-matching, 100 point JCNA National Champion.

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CHASSIS NO. 875180 SERIES 1 OTS

Rotisserie restored, Numbers-matching, Concours-ready.

CHASSIS NO. 875132 SERIES 1 OTS

Rotisserie restored, with no expense spared, ready for showing.

1961 XKE • CHASSIS NO. 875781 • SERIES 1 OTS

Rotisserie restored, recent 100 point JCNA show winner.

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Norbert Singer’s first job at Porsche The now-legendary engineer was tasked with improving the reliability of the 917, with the company’s first-ever Le Mans win at stake EXTRACT FROM NORBERT SINGER, MY RACING LIFE WITH PORSCHE 1970-2004, PUBLISHED BY SPORTFAHRER AT €75

MY FIRST JOB at Zuffenhausen was to look at the suction of the fuel tank in the 917. After that, I had to create a more efficient gearboxcooling system. But I couldn’t increase drag with more air vents, as the Ferrari 512 was already a bit quicker down the straights. The gearbox was located in a tangle of tubes in the frame, which made adding larger cooling ducts a tricky task.

Piëch rejected the idea of a different oil cooler for the drivetrain for two reasons: it would have required a large, additional opening in the bodywork, and – most importantly – the pump would have cost power. He wanted a simple, effective solution, as transmission cooling was a serious issue. We knew from runs on the chassis dynamometer that there could be problems after ten to 12 hours.

Porsche had missed out on a Le Mans win in 1969 because of a defective wheel bearing. The second-placed car driven by Hans Herrmann and Gérard Larrousse had spent 33 minutes in the pits.

For Piëch the aim was clear: “We have to win Le Mans.” Meanwhile, my task was to make a plasticine model of my transmission-cooling system – but everyone was too busy to help me.

There was so much work to do before Le Mans that even colleagues who normally worked on the development of the road-going 911 were now building racing cars, and nobody had the time to help out the new engineer.

Eventually Klaus Ziegler, a

committed ‘meister’ (master craftsman) from the composites workshop, offered to help. I formed the plasticine model myself on a test car, in order to guide it through the tube work for a perfect fit. My model turned out better than expected.

The solution was two small NASA ducts and thick air piping that I modelled into the car. We were a small team that constantly had to find solutions to these kinds of problems. The normal process was to design a model, build it, then move on to the negative mould and finish up with the part itself. In this case, however, due to constraints on time and capacity, we immediately made a model and then manufactured the part. Testing, and further changes if needed, followed. And it was all done to the mantra of ‘by tomorrow at the latest, please’.

For the Targa Florio and the Nürburgring, we developed the 917 and the 908/03 concurrently, because Piëch demanded evidence of everything. When we said that the 908/03 was better on certain tracks, his response was: “Prove it!”

So we took both the 908/03 and the 917 to both Sicily and the Nürburgring, which required a lot of preparation work. The first half of the year was always crazy, between developing, constructing and testing new cars – while a racing programme was running at the same time.

In 1970 I didn’t go to Le Mans.

Making phone calls was quite difficult back then, so it was not easy to keep up to date. I followed the

ABOVE Norbert Singer carved out a legendary career at Zuffenhausen, working on everything from the 917 to the 911 Carrera RSR and 956. race on the radio. Vic Elford started from pole position, with a 3m 19.8s lap in the 4.9-litre Porsche Salzburg 917. It was 6.9 seconds faster than his time from the previous year, with an average speed of 242.7km/h. In the race, Vic set a lap record with a 3m 21.05s. He and Kurt Ahrens ran in the top three until Sunday morning, when they were sidelined with valvetrain damage.

John Wyer’s team had won the race the previous two years with the Ford GT40, but this time luck wasn’t on their side. Pedro Rodríguez only lasted 80 minutes before retiring due to a damaged connecting rod.

Mike Hailwood crashed in wet conditions. Jo Siffert was leading when he missed a gear at 2am and over-revved the engine.

Hans Herrmann and Richard Attwood won a turbulent, weatheraffected race in the 4.5-litre Porsche Salzburg short-tail 917. Theirs

wasn’t the fastest of the seven 917s in the field. In fact, after the first hour they were sitting ninth. But they made up position after position before taking over the lead at 3am on Sunday morning, when all the faster cars had run into problems.

I’m happy to say that none suffered any gearbox damage.

Willi Kauhsen and Gérard Larrousse finished second in the 917 long-tail, followed by Helmut Marko and Rudi Lins in a 908.

After years of waiting, racing cars from Zuffenhausen locked out the Le Mans podium. Just seven cars made the finish of what was the wettest race anybody could remember. A Porsche 914/6 finished sixth behind two Ferrari 512s. A 911S was seventh.

Needless to say, we were incredibly happy, especially for Hans after he’d come so close the year before. Now after his great win, he retired from active racing. For Gérard it was his second time in second place. In 1973 he would finally take his first win alongside Henri Pescarolo in a Matra-Simca.

Magneto (ISSN No: 2631-9489, USPS number 22830) is published four times a year – in February, May, August and November – by Hothouse Publishing Ltd. UK. Magneto is distributed in the US by RRD/Spatial, 1250 Valley Brook Ave, Lyndhurst NJ 07071. Periodicals postage paid at South Hackensack NJ. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Magneto c/o RRD, 1250 Valley Brook Ave, Lyndhurst NJ 07071.

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1955 JAGUAR D-TYPE XKD 526

We are proud to present The ex-Leaton Motors, Bill Pitt D-Type Jaguar. Recently documented in a dedicated Porter Press book and ooered for sale in superb condition after CKL Developments restoration together with the unique original hard top, ďŹ tted in period for its victorious 1961 GT Championship season

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1968 Ferrari 275 GTB/4 by Scaglietti Chassis no. 10987 Offered after nearly five decades of single-family ownership and retains its numbers-matching engine and gearbox.

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