Octane Magazine

KING OF PORSCHES? It’s a bold claim, granted, when you look at the Stuttgart marque’s rich road and (especially) track career, but if you work on the basis that the more replicated a car is the more iconic it is, then this roadster is definitely in t

IT IS RIGHT to remember that France was the birthplace of motorsport, much of which then took place on public roads. Roads were easily requisitioned for closure and no need was envisaged for a specific closed circuit, as had been built at Brooklands,

A class featuring iconic British car designs is set to be one of the star categories at the London Concours, which takes place at the Honourable Artillery Company in the heart of the City of London on 8-10 June. Now in its fifth year and swapping its

Letter of the month YOUR COVER feature in Octane 215 brought back some very happy memories of my position as ‘head of Lotus Cars’ during the early stage of S1 Elise and Exige production. The Julian Thomson-designed Elise K-series 118 car was in produ

Sometimes, when a famous and valuable old racing car has a whole lot of history and the pundits are hinting at such huge values that the zero key seems to be sticking on the keyboard, it’s better to clear the head of all that noise. Then your mind ca

There’s not much that hasn’t already been said about the Lancia Delta HF Integrale. Every bona fide petrolhead knows that this compact family hatchback, designed by Giugiaro, won the World Rally Championship six times, back-to-back, between 1987 and

WITH HIS UNRULY mane of white hair and toothy grin, there’s something of the ageing rock star about Rodger Dudding; a combination of Brian May and Roger Daltrey, all rolled into one burly frame. But Rodger has built up a fortune that would put most r

In its day, Lotus’s Type 72 was probably the most advanced car on the grid, and it remains one of the most remarkable cars in F1 history. Its ground-breaking design – carried out by Lotus founder Colin Chapman with Maurice Philippe – features inboard

She is beautiful. Even from a distance, she makes you stop and stare. The lines, the curves: everything attracts your attention. The closer you get, the better she is: so refined, every detail adding to an almost perfect whole. She is not young, and

OLD CARS, EH? When they don’t work properly, it’s all part of the character. After all, car manufacturers didn’t really have a clue back then, and neither did their customers, who just accepted their lot. So when an old car doesn’t work quite faultle

I first saw this car on a visit to Beckenham-based Aston Martin specialists Pugsley & Lewis in late 2019. Tucked away in an outbuilding with a monstrous 7.3-litre V8 Vantage for company, it looked heartbreakingly pretty. Freshly restored, it was the

WHERE TO GO & WHAT TO DO IN 2021 CLASSIC ICE DRIVING ESCAPADES IN AUSTRIA WHY EVERYONE IS TALKING ABOUT ZOUTE TACKLING THE NORTH COAST 500 IN A DEFENDER ■

1-2 May Donington, UK doningtonhistoric.com 1-8 May Starts/ends Marrakesh, Morocco zaniroli.com 20-23 May Salsomaggiore Terme to Reggio Emilia, Italy granpremioterredicanossa.it 20-23 May Amelia Island, USA ameliaconcours.org 21-23 May Based at Bices

Scotland isn’t so much a country that you drive through, it’s largely driven over. There are that many hills, Munros, mountains and peaks, that your first question when choosing a car for any kind of road trip north of the border should simply be: ‘W

There has always been a correlation between the coastal playgrounds of the rich and cars and motor sport. Even in the earliest days, when cars were only just making the leap from their mere existence mattering to their actual performance counting, it

Bewilderment. That’s all that hits me after first seeing skijoring in action. Before I visited the last GP Ice Race in February 2020, I was unaware that there was actually a name for the act of being pulled around by a car while wearing a set of skis

WHEN COVID-19 pitched up last year and made itself at home, all rally organisers were presented with the same problems, but none responded in quite the same way as HERO, which has faced down the pandemic with optimism and invention. Scheduled events

FOR A BRIEF PERIOD in early 2020, it was easy to assume that the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance would just go ahead as planned, partially because of what we then knew about Covid-19 (next to nothing), and partially because of what we knew about the

FIGURES FROM the Canadian Government show that 679,000 Brits visited the Great White North in 2019, which sounds like a lot until you learn that seven times as many holidayed in the USA that year. Relatively speaking, then, Canada is unexplored by us

IN 2011, FOLLOWING a competition that attracted 100 million votes from around the world, the Amazon Rainforest was declared one of the New Seven Wonders of the natural world, to the surprise of everyone who assumed it must surely belong to the origin

RALLY THE GLOBEwas established in 2018 to do exactly that, but the club (it is run as a not-for-profit for the benefit of its members) has inevitably been forced to pump the brakes on a series of events intended to take crews right around the world.

DELWYN MALLETT BACK IN Octane 200, I wrote that uneven firing on my ‘rat rod’ Studebaker’s straight-six had left me scratching my head about the cause. The car was street legal other than in the lighting department, so figured I’d replace the time-ra

THE EVENTS of recent years have prompted much debate, a lot of it intellectually dishonest, about Britain’s place in the world. But in one narrow sense at least, the country has become a global power – staging concours d’elegance to rival any you mig

JAMES ELLIOTT IN MARCH 2019 I drove my Jensen Interceptor Mk1 to Autostilo (autostilo.co.uk) in Potters Bar and left it there, with an agreement that the car would be made ‘solid and presentable’ for a set fee. For full transparency, that ‘if and whe

MASSIMO DELBÒ PICNICKING IS not an Italian tradition but, ever since I visited Scotland during my first trip to the UK in 1986, I’ve loved the idea. So much so that, when I got back home, I dug out my mum’s long-forgotten picnic basket, which had not

GLEN WADDINGTON SPRING HAS SPRUNG. And that means it was MoT time. As usual, the BMW flew through with no advisories. Of course, it hadn’t seen much use recently. Our last trip out as a family had been to Silverstone Circuit in the run-up to Christma

ROBERT COUCHER THE JAGUAR IS almost done at Twyford Moors in Hampshire, with the improved engine and new clutch now back in the car. Everything has been linked up using new seals and connectors, and you might be able to spot the 30 shiny new copper w

MARK DIXON LETTING A CLASSIC stand idle for a long period is never a good idea, but the Covid crisis meant many of us didn’t have a choice. As the lockdown eased, I became ever keener to get the Mustang out of hibernation; not just to get the oils ci

JEREMY TAYLOR IN BOLOGNESE DIALECT, Sian (pronounced ‘see-ann’) means ‘lightning’ and therefore qualifies as a decent moniker for Lamborghini’s first proper foray into electrification – if you ignore the 2014 Asterion concept. Despite sharing a good

IT WAS FORTUNATE for Adolphe Kégresse that, for much of the Romanov rule of Russia from 1613, French was the lingua franca of the court. When Tsar Nicholas II, recently smitten with the automobile bug, decided in 1905 to hire a personal chauffeur wit

FOR TWO DECADES Miss Veedol glided along the highways of Europe on an imaginary ribbon of ice. During the 1950s and into the ’60s, no self-respecting German truck driver would consider his vehicle fit for the road unless it sported a Veedol ‘blonde a

BACK IN THE 1970s, when smoking was cool and before clipboard-fondling became a lucrative career choice, cigarette companies gave you things if you smoked their products. You could, for example, collect their cigarette cards of famous sportsmen, mona

IF THERE WAS any justice in Watchworld (spoiler – there isn’t), everyone would be raving about Omega’s Flightmaster and wondering what all the fuss is about the boring old Speedmaster. Moonwatch schmoonwatch. The Flightmaster will do everything a Spe

Book of the month If ever a car model could be considered to have had a charmed life, it is surely the McLaren F1 GTR. First, because neither chief engineer Gordon Murray nor company boss Ron Dennis initially wanted the F1 to be used for racing in an

There was a time when impact-bumper 911s were kept marvellously cheap thanks to the snotty attitude of Porsche purists, but even in those days we never came across a deal as good as this one: for 120 quid Lego will sell you not only a 930-generation

By Spark Price £143.95 each Material Resincast This pair of Porsche models is so nice that we found it hard to choose between them… and so may you. Will it be the red-and-white winner of the 1970 Le Mans 24 Hours or the Martini-liveried car that won

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BARRETT-JACKSON DOESN’T do small, and its $105million bonanza at WestWorld of Scottsdale on 20-27 March re-affirmed that. The sale of 1054 vehicles was headlined by the 1966 Shelby Cobra 427 Super Snake (above) at $5.5million. CSX 3015 is one of two

Only 1672 Turbos were produced, all left-hand drive and finished in Polaris (silver) or Chamonix (white). A five-speed gearbox, sunroof and Mahle alloy wheels were among the few options available. Increasing values in recent years saw the best exampl

The era immediately after World War Two was also the end of America’s ‘coachbuilt era’. As only a handful of bespoke builders survived, for luxury and performance marques the owner-driver era was starting. Finding late-’40s and early-’50s coachbuilt

SQUIRRELLED AWAY in a private Southern California collection since the mid-1960s, this 1955 Ferrari 250 GT Europa is thought to be one of the most original and best-preserved examples left anywhere in the world. As the first of the roadgoing Ferrari

THE FATE OF Mitsubishi’s struggling UK operation has, sadly, been sealed for some time, and a stark reminder comes in the form of Auto Auction’s sale of the company’s treasured heritage car collection. The new auction house, fronted by racing driver

FOLLOWING ITS EPIC victory with the GT40 at Le Mans in 1966, Ford decided that it would be a good idea to build a very small number of roadgoing 4.7-litre road versions. Known as the MkIII, it would be the ultimate domesticated GT40, with a detuned 3

HOT HATCHES have always been a particular French speciality, but Renault has enjoyed an almost unbroken chain of greatest hits. Any ‘Top 10’ list will most likely feature at least half-a-dozen Renaults, and somewhere near the top of that list will be

HAVING MY PHOTOGRAPHS published in Octane really was the start of my career. I graduated from university in the summer of 2013 with a degree in Design Craft, specialising in silver-smithing and metal-smithing, but I still wasn’t sure what I was going

The Greenbrier Concours, in West Virginia, will have a Hollywood feel this year thanks to the addition of a Movie Cars class, including ECTO-1 from Ghostbusters. greenbrierconcours.com There will be grids for everything from pre-war sports cars to ’7

There was a time, before World War Two, when American car manufacturers were simply leagues ahead of everybody else. The quality, reliability, style and performance of American cars were much better than what was on offer from their European counterp

The 2021 Phillip Island Classic went ahead under Victoria State Government Covid-19 regulations on 5-7 March with the 350 entries restricted to four pit crew apiece and performing in front of just 1000 spectators a day. However, given that Victoria h

THE CHALLENGE of ‘Net Zero by 2050’, coupled with the Government’s announcement that the sale of petrol and diesel cars will cease in 2030, is a serious concern for classic and historic vehicle enthusiasts. Everyone is quite rightly asking what fuels

OF MORE THAN 30 older cars I’ve owned, three have been replicas, starting with a brace of Cobras – including a toolroom 427 sideoiler – before I bought this XK120 C. If I had to pinpoint my golden period of motoring, it would be the early ’50s. For a