Octane Magazine

MORE OFTEN THAN we would probably like to admit, amazing stories fall into Octane’s lap and a tentative email with a picture attachment sets in motion a chain of events that ends with you reading about a very special car. Every one of those easy wins

CHRIS TARLING/YELLOWDOG; JEFF BLOXHAM ■

Pre-31 July 1994 cars are invited to park at the museum for this year’s Easter Classic Car Day, which will feature live music and a barbecue. brooklandsmuseum.com Bicester Heritage holds its first themed car gathering of 2024. Entry is free for payin

Driving the unique Franco Scaglionedesigned 3500GT Bertone Issue 252 on sale 24 April Run for cover! Dodge Vipers let loose From the 1970s into the 1980s: why the G-series are the 911s to buy now Mumbai to Abingdon in an MG YT The Octane Interview: l

FERRARI HAS LAUNCHED an official tour of the Dolomites in the Autumn solely for owners of the 272 examples of the Pininfarina-styled twin-turbo V8-powered 288 GTO. Built for three years from 1984, the model is celebrating its 40th anniversary in 2024

There will be a Who’s Who of the world’s greatest motor manufacturers at Salon Privé London on 18-20 April at the Royal Hospital Chelsea. The raft of marques that will be on display includes Aston Martin, Brabus, Bugatti, Ferrari, Koenigsegg, Lamborg

I WAS ALWAYS going to be a petrolhead. My father Norbert worked for Paul Emery at his Fulham workshops and then joined Paul in the Grand Prix Midget scene, eventually buying and racing an Emery Dastle Mk7. We still have that car, which will get resto

FEW PEOPLE can claim to have marked the style of a decade in the way of Marcello Gandini. The ‘wedge shape’ trend of the 1970s was a Marcello Gandini trademark, typified by his Lamborghini Countach. Born in Turin to a musician father who hoped his so

IN STEPHEN BAYLEY’S feature on the Volvo 245 in Octane 246 (shame it wasn’t issue 245!), he talked about a lack of French curves when designing the side elevation of the 245. I’m sorry, but did he miss the gentle downward curve of the rear passenger

AT THE END of the 1980s, the decade of big spenders, the idea of a supercar was moving into a new dimension. The Jaguar XJ220, the McLaren F1 and Bugatti EB110 were in preparation and promised to bring race-car performance to the road. That raised th

More people have walked on the moon than driven a Schuppan-Porsche 962 CR in anger. For a brief time the world’s fastest and most expensive car – a snip at $1.5-1.9m according to authority Karl Ludvigsen – this remarkable Porsche-powered machine rose

YOU KNOW SOMEONE pretty well after 12 hours in a waiting room together. The scene was Fiorano, Ferrari’s test track in Maranello, the characters were Vern Schuppan and myself and we were working a photoshoot of Vern’s car around a French Ferrari deal

In the early 1900s, Fiat cars were a roadgoing status symbol. Their trademarks were state-of-the-art engineering and craftsmanship, and their status was enhanced by success in racing. Today we take the idea that competition improves the breed with a

IF YOU’VE BEEN to Le Mans and attempted to sleep, you can probably blame this man – and his many bright yellow Corvettes – for waking you up at 3am. For more than 20 years the Corvettes have been pretty much the loudest cars on the track, and Bedford

‘The nice thing about this car is that everybody gives you the thumbs up.’ We’re sitting in traffic in Beverly Hills – does anyone need to be told where that is? – and your average buttonedup Brit might expect that a heavily chromed, garishly flamed,

Nearly 80 years on, we still associate Bentley with Crewe, in north-western England. It wasn’t always thus; the hulking Le Mans racers of WO Bentley’s era were Londoners and, following Rolls-Royce’s take-over in 1931, Bentleys were built at the paren

COME WET AND chilly December in the UK, Europe and USA, the classic car scene goes into the workshops for spannering or general winter hibernation. But not in the United Arab Emirates! Boasting cobalt-blue skies, warm and dry weather with temperature

Well, goodness, won’t this be a jolly adventure. It is still dark, but our presence here is causing a sore-thumb resonance for other park-goers. Good morning, please don’t mind us. Jog on by. We will just unload the racing car and fire it up. Locate

For a company that has been building cars for 96 years, it is amazing how late in the day BMW forged its own identity and direction. Some would argue that it was really born only with the Neue Klasse. They’d be wrong, of course, but between the 328s

DAVID LILLYWHITE I’VE JUST LOOKED up my last Octane Cars instalment; it was in the October 2017 issue, and I was about to leave for what ended up being a year’s stint launching a new website before co-founding Hothouse Media. Now Octane is a part of

DAVID BURGESS-WISE LAST YEAR SAW the departure of the 1903 De Dion-Bouton (bottom right) and 1911 Pilain (above) to custodians new, and the arrival of the 1924 Sunbeam 14/40 coupé (bottom left). The Sunbeam is more usable, with weather protection, el

JAMES ELLIOTT WELL, THAT escalated quickly. Even though I knew that large sections of my Triumph were pretty rotten, let’s not forget that the main impetus for sending it to James Godrey-Dunne of JGD Classic Services (find his company on Facebook) la

ROBERT HEFFERON IT WAS EITHER the best time or the worst time to decide to service the car myself. Fear had been holding me back. Maybe a spark plug will get stuck or snap; what if I over-tighten the sump plug? The fear of being without my car linger

NICK HENDRIX ONLY A FEW times has Lamborghini taken a no-bull approach to its nomenclature. ‘Sterrato’ translates as ‘dirt road’. Luxury bespoke cars are on the increase, and we all remember the LM-002 fondly, but designing a supercar specifically fo

GLEN WADDINGTON IN OCTANE 248 we learned that this is Jay Leno’s favourite 911. ‘At 60mph on a dirt fire-road, power-sliding with the tail hanging out is really more fun than you should be allowed to have,’ he said. Before concluding: ‘Sadly, by the

MATTHEW HAYWARD SITTING IN SUCH a gloriously old-fashioned, handbuilt cabin, it’s difficult to comprehend that this car was built in 2003. Around six months after this ‘Final Series’ Continental R Mulliner came into the world, the first Continental G

ELLIOTT HUGHES SUPER-SUVS ARE no longer the novelty they were. Everyone’s at it: Lamborghini, Aston Martin, Ferrari and Porsche, to name a few. Range Rover, though, was one of the first to blend supercar performance with SUV usability with the Sport

IN AUTOMOTIVE TERMS the Surrey town of Farnham, if thought of at all, is usually associated with Britain’s first Formula 1 World Champion, ‘Farnham Flyer’ Mike Hawthorn. Abbott coachworks may also strike a chord, with its elegant bodies on Lagondas a

ON 26 APRIL 1956 the SS Ideal-X, a converted World War Two oil tanker, left Newark, New Jersey, bound for Houston, Texas, carrying 58 pre-packed ‘trailer vans’: corrugated steel boxes measuring 8ft by 8ft by 35ft and designed to fit on a flatbed truc

THE AUDIENCE LIGHTS go down and the spotlight swings round. The host of Which Watch, ITV’s new Saturday night gameshow blockbuster, turns to you: ‘Name as many models of vintage Omega as you can in 30 seconds.’ Barely a moment, you’re straight in. ‘S

YOU REALLY ONLY have two options when you’re collecting late-1970s and ’80s Heuers: spend the next 20 years cramming about the almost infinite variations between pre-TAG, transitional and post-TAG models, let alone dial and case variations, or just b

In the autumn of 1925, workers were racing to erect a new arena in the Frederiksberg district of Copenhagen; it was due to open early the next year, with an international car exhibition. As Forum Copenhagen rapidly took shape, lighting manufacturer L

Enzo Ferrari was not renowned for his infectious good humour but even he must have cracked a smile when three of his cars – led by the first-placed 330 P4 of Lorenzo Bandini and Chris Amon, depicted here – finished the 1967 Daytona 24 Hours side-by-s

KYLE FORTUNE, Schiffer Publishing, £59.99, ISBN 978 0 764367 31 1 It’s hard to believe now, when McLaren has become such a firmly established element of the supercar scene, that its automotive division was only established in 2010, following a largel

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WITH TWO RIVAL auction houses – RM Sotheby’s and Broad Arrow Auctions – holding event-headlining sales at exactly the same time, nobody was quite sure how the Amelia Island/ModaMiami results were going to pan out. As it happened, both posted pretty s

For an enthusiast looking for something different, is this is the time to invest in a 15-20-year-old exotic as a weekend driver or second car? Of course, anyone who thinks that all the required repairs will have stopped by now on a car of that age an

Handbuilt from 1995 to ’98 as a hardcore homologation special to enable Porsche to compete in the GT2 class of endurance racing: this is the ultimate iteration of the air-cooled line. The best road-going 993 GT2s were a rare sight at auction in the e

IF YOU’VE EVER visited Carfest, then you will possibly have seen 1979 F1 World Champion Jody Scheckter behind the wheel of the Ferrari 312T in which he earned his title. The event takes place each year at Scheckter’s Hampshire farm, Laverstoke Park,

AROUND SIX YEARS after it was bodied new by Pininfarina, this 1960 Ferrari 250GT was sent to small coachbuilder Carrozzeria Sports Cars. The chassis was shortened and this interesting one-off body was fitted under the watchful eye of Piero Drogo, who

ECURIE ECOSSE MIGHT best be known for winning the 1956 and 1957 Le Mans 24 Hours with a D-type – as well as racing in one of the most recognisable blue liveries – but Scotland’s worldbeating privateer racing team had plenty of previous success with r

SOMETIMES CARS THAT weren’t an instant hit when they were launched, or even those that slightly missed the mark, can make for particularly interesting classics a few decades down the road. Take the fourthgeneration Maserati Quattroporte, for example.

I CAN REMEMBER like it was yesterday. It was 1948, I was three years old, and we were having to move because they were about to extend the Philadelphia Airport runway right through our house. My father stopped for directions at one of these old-time