The cars that dominated competition. The machines than borke records and left their mark on motorsport history.
Hoonicorn: a 1965 Mustang doing donuts on 1,400 horsepower of methanol Take a 1965 Ford Mustang Notchback. Steel body. The kind your dad watched go past the diner with fenders so wide they looked hand-drawn. Strip everything inside. Drop in a NASCAR-spec tubular chassis fabricated in Charlotte. Bolt up a 410 cubic-inch Roush Yates V8. … Read more
Ferrari 330 P4: The Most Perfect Reply To a Humiliation Ferrari never answered Ford with words. Ferrari answered with a photograph. Daytona, 5 February 1967, half past three in the afternoon. Three red cars crossing the finish line side by side, shoulder to shoulder, drivers revving their engines like men spitting in their rivals’ faces. … Read more
Ferrari 288 GTO and Evoluzione: The Last Ferrari Designed To Win Races That Never Raced There’s a room in Maranello’s engine department where a Ferrari is parked that shouldn’t exist. It has no licence plate. It has no race category. It has no calendar. It’s been sitting there for nearly forty years, preserved by the … Read more
Porsche 911 GT1: the legal loophole that won Le Mans Here’s the part most people get backwards: the Porsche 911 GT1 is not a road car they turned into a race car. It’s a race car they were forced to register for the road. Because if they hadn’t, the FIA wouldn’t let it onto the … Read more
LANCIA STRATOS: THE CAR THAT ONLY KNEW HOW TO WIN Here is the shortest version of the Lancia Stratos story: a small Italian company begged Ferrari for an engine, built the minimum number of cars required by the regulations, and won three consecutive World Rally Championships. Then its parent company killed it — not because … Read more
Lancia Delta S4: The Group B Monster That Killed Its Own Category The rally car that proved engineers could build machines no human could handle In 1985, Lancia unveiled a car that had no business existing. Not an evolution. Not an incremental improvement. A full-scale engineering assault disguised as a Lancia Delta. The Lancia Delta … Read more
Alfa Romeo 155 V6 TI: How Italy Humiliated Mercedes, BMW, and Opel in Germany’s Own Championship In 1993, an Italian team showed up in Germany with a sedan based on a Fiat platform, carrying a naturally aspirated 2.5-liter V6 that revved to nearly 12,000 rpm, and proceeded to win 12 of 20 races, the drivers’ … Read more
Renault 5 Turbo 2: The French City Car That Humiliated Supercars in the World Rally Championship In 1976, a Renault engineer named Jean Terramorsi had an idea that made no practical sense. He took the Renault 5 — the best-selling car in France, the car of mothers, students, and pensioners — and proposed ripping out … Read more
Ford RS200: How Two F1 Engineers Built Group B’s Most Advanced Rally Car From Scratch Every Group B car had a touch of madness. The Audi Quattro was a cast-iron block with a turbo strapped to it. The Peugeot 205 T16 was a supermini turned into a mid-engined missile. The Lancia Delta S4 was a … Read more
Porsche 917: The Most Terrifying Race Car Ever Built There are fast cars, there are terrifyingly fast cars, and then there’s the Porsche 917. This is a machine that hit 390 km/h on the Mulsanne Straight in 1971. In a car with the aerodynamic stability of a garden shed in a hurricane. With brakes that … Read more
MG Metro 6R4: When Williams F1 Stuffed a Purpose-Built Racing V6 Inside Your Grandmother’s Shopping Car Builds & Swaps | Not Enough Cylinders A Metro. The most ordinary car in Britain. Until it wasn’t. In 1980, British Leyland launched the Austin Metro. It was the car that was supposed to save the entire British car … Read more
Suzuki Escudo Pikes Peak: Nearly 1,000 CV, Two Engines and the Most Famous Car That Never Won The Fastest Car in Gran Turismo 2. The Most Intimidating Nickname in Motorsport. And a Victory That Hides a Twist. If you ask any gamer born between 1985 and 1995 what’s the most brutal car they’ve ever driven … Read more
