Octane Magazine

WHEN IT COMES TO TVR there has always been good insane and bad insane. After such a promising restart, the current farce – reborn company, deposits taken, factory won and lost, no customer cars yet built – is clearly the bad insane. The Cerbera obvio

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Thirty years since Le Jog’s first 1993 running by John Brown, people were racking their brains to think of another more destructive to the entry list than the 2023 event. The 1500-mile, 75-hour end-to-end reliability trial had one of the highest attr

In Palm Beach, Florida, Gilded Age mansion The Breakers hosts a Ferrari-only concours before classics and sports cars of all types mass at Mar-a-Lago resort. cavallino.com Ho Chi Minh City is the starting point for this epic trip for crews in pre-197

There is a packed schedule of events lined up for The Amelia Concours in Florida, on 1-3 March. The first day of the Hagerty event features the Broad Arrow auction preview, entrants’ tour, seminars, ride and drive and a Porsche driving experience. Th

WE BOUGHT OUR house in Palm Springs about 11 years ago and have lived here full-time for the last four. Before that we were in New York, which was great, but it was time for a change: Palm Springs has better weather, an easier lifestyle, and fantasti

I WAS CAPTIVATED by Glen Waddington’s description of his drive in a 1920 Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost on The Founders’ Run through Portugal (Octane 247) as ‘fundamentally, unrestrainedly life-affirming, and fantastic fun’. I recently completed a weeklong

Seems like a simple instruction, but it takes me a few seconds to gain my bearings in this unorthodox cabin. I had been briefed on the visual cacophony of unmarked buttons and dials by TVR guru James Agger only minutes earlier – with a pre-warning th

The clues are in the name: ‘A’ is namechecking Alfieri Maserati – the founding brother who died in 1932; ‘6’ refers to a sophisticated race-bred inline six-cylinder engine, ‘G’ means ghisa (cast iron) for the block material, and ‘CS’ denotes Corsa Sp

There was and there wasn’t a Lotus MkI, and today there still isn’t and yet there is. That sounds like something the Mad Hatter might proclaim in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland but, as the Hatter might also say, it really makes perfect sense when y

The clear air makes distances hard to judge, without the haze our brains might otherwise use as a distance cue. Mirages shimmer at the margins of this vast, expansive desert, and, beneath a cloudless cobalt sky, the white salt-plain is magnesium-burn

WHERE WOULD WE be without the humble domestic garage, not just as units to keep our cars in, but as the launchpads for some of the biggest global enterprises? Jeff Bezos ran Amazon from one, Steve Jobs and Woz founded Apple in one, even Walt Disney o

Like a mallard moving serenely across the surface of a pond as its feet paddle furiously below – metaphor for the way a Rolls-Royce Silver Seraph gets down the road as its engine room works silently but busily to move more than two-and-a-third tonnes

Cars are inanimate objects. They don’t hold political views. So you can’t really accuse the pale grey-green machine here of being fascist, although Benito Mussolini probably viewed it as such. He would surely have known about it, because it won the u

The fact that this Riley 9 Kestrel was built in 1934 is happenstance, but fortunate for the family who have known it for more than six decades because it represents the peak of its type. ‘Dad bought it in 1960, for my sister and myself to learn to dr

IT ALL STARTS with a rumour. ‘Did you hear Ed’s got a couple of Alfas to sell?’ says Benny, my mechanic here in Los Angeles. ‘A ’74 and a ’79.’ ‘Oh, really?’ I say, trying to play it cool. A week passes. I’m thinking the ’74. The car is not perfect,

NEW YEAR’S DAY is always a good excuse to take out an old car and blow away the cobwebs, so, when a friend tipped me off about an under-the-radar pub meet not far from my place in rural Herefordshire, I decided I’d give the Model T a run and explore

LAST NOVEMBER yours truly, along with Doris, my long-suffering Daimler Conquest, plus my equally long-suffering aide de camp Clive Berry, concluded our 2023 season of hillclimbing by entering Rallye Prescott, unusual in being the only meeting of the

DISAPPOINTINGLY, I didn’t manage to drive many miles in the Baur last year. It’s due for another MoT and, looking at the previous test certificate, I seem to have covered just 700 miles compared to 1500 in the year before that. Still, since I bought

AS AUTUMN ENDED, it was time to put the classics to bed for winter. This time things got more complicated because the weather forecast here in North Italy suddenly shifted from mild temperatures to below-zero conditions – and snow. A lot of snow. My

I SO WANTED to like this car. It’s an EV conversion of an original 1965 Ford Mustang and, while I’ll always prefer the visceral rumble of a V8 to the anaemic whine of an electric motor, I don’t object to such things on principle. Mustangs are not exa

‘ISN’T IT JUST a Continental GT in a nice frock?’ harped a particularly grumpy chum. A quick wang up the road shut ’em up. While the Batur does owe some of its innards to Bentley’s evergreen GT, what it does with them is something rather magical. You

YOU ARE WHO you pretend to be. There was a time when Spike Rhiando’s name was everywhere in the UK. It was unusual enough to be memorable, as were his tales of derring-do that could be found in boys’ adventure books in the late 1930s. Rhiando was one

A SCENE WORTHY of a Monty Python sketch was enacted on a runway at RAF Benson, South Oxfordshire, in 1961. A Morris Oxford with a series of road signs sprouting from its roof was repeatedly driven at speed towards a small grandstand containing a doze

THE MODERN SWISS watch industry isn’t known for impulsive change. Civilisations can rise and fall, but the diameter of a case will, perhaps, after much thought and discussion, alter by a couple of millimetres. Rolex is possibly the epitome of this ‘e

MOSTLY THANKS TO the internet, it’s getting much harder to snaffle a watch bargain. But these Chrono pages are here to point you to those dusty corners of Watchworld where there are still interesting things to be bought without requiring the sale of

Noel Pemberton Billing came to widespread attention soon after being elected as an MP in 1916: he ranted in Parliament and in his journal, The Imperialist, about Britain’s military strategy during World War One; he aired some far-out and shameful con

JOHN MAYHEAD, National Motor Museum Publishing, £20, ISBN 978 1 7396297 3 1 ‘Goldie’s problem was that he didn’t die in spectacular fashion, nor did he live to tell the tale.’ So summarises the author while attempting to explain why Major Alfred Thom

By GP Replicas Price £304.95 Material Resincast The 1966 US Grand Prix at Watkins Glen was significant for at least two reasons: it marked Jim Clark’s 20th World Championship win, and he achieved it in a Lotus 43 powered by the unreliable BRM H16 eng

THIS IS THE second Wolf of Wall Street Countach to have been offered at auction in as many months. The damaged car that was used to film the infamous crash scene failed to sell with Bonhams in Abu Dhabi in late November, but RM Sotheby’s has successf

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Said to be a matching-numbers example, and the only coupé of seven Aston Martins bodied by Bertone, this unique car was a class-winner at the Pebble Beach Concours in 2023. It was restored for the occasion by marque specialist Kevin Kay Restorations

NOTHING MADE A statement of power, wealth and success quite like owning a Duesenberg during the 1920s and ’30s. Most had fascinating owners, and this glorious 1929 Duesenberg Model J ‘Sweep Panel’ Dual-Cowl Phaeton by LeBaron is no exception, having

Ferrari celebrated its 40th anniversary in 1987 with the launch of the 201mph F40, the final road car signed-off by Enzo himself. Of the 1315 cars built, 213 were destined for the US, and these command the most at auction today. An F40 originally own

WITH A NAME like Lucybelle III, it’s clear that this little Porsche has a great story to tell – and it doesn’t disappoint. One of only 24 customer 718 RSK Spyders built, it was delivered straight to Le Mans in 1958 for the American racer Ed Hugus. Hu

ATTENTION TO DETAIL is an important thing when it comes to car restoration, but there’s room for different interpretations of what that means. While some prefer to keep things exactly as the factory intended, warts and all, others have a more perfect

FAST AUDIS HAVE always made great getaway cars, something that Hollywood director John Frankenheimer was more than aware of when he personally hand-picked the cars for his 1998 hit, Ronin. It’s easily one of the best car-chase films ever made, and th

MY FATHER SAID to me at an early age that cars are ‘an emotional purchase’. They aren’t financially smart things to buy or own – they are only a cost. But it’s OK because we love them. The proof of this was when I managed to drive non-stop for an hou