Where automotive icons live. We dive deep into the cars that shaped history, the posters on our childhood walls, and the machines that redefined performance and design.
Chaparral 2C and 2E: the car that drove the air with its left foot Bridgehampton, Long Island. September 1966. Practice for the second-ever round of the brand-new Can-Am championship. Bruce McLaren walks across the paddock and stops in front of the Chaparral pit. He stares at the white car parked in front of the truck. … Read more
A War Ace Designed It. He Made It of Plastic. It Ran 20 Years. Citroën Méhari: how a Normandie-Niemen fighter pilot, a shampoo sachet and the presidency of Citroën put one of the first thermoformed-ABS-bodied production cars on the road Deauville, 16 May 1968. Golf course. France is on fire. Paris is shut down. Students … Read more
The first journalist to drive it was also the last Bill Thomas didn’t know he was making history. Nobody at Bentwaters Park on August 19th, 2008 thought they were making history. They thought they were making a magazine feature. Top Gear had arranged a photo shoot with Mazda’s Furai concept at the former RAF airbase … Read more
The American supercar that needed the Space Shuttle to not melt itself In January 1995, Ford had an engineering problem that no car manufacturer had ever needed to solve before. The exhaust system of its most ambitious concept car generated so much heat that it could melt the carbon fibre body panels surrounding it. The … Read more
Marcos Mantis: I Held One of Britain’s Strangest Cars and Never Knew It Here is a thing about plywood. During the Second World War, the de Havilland Mosquito — one of the fastest aircraft in the sky — was built largely from it. Wood, glued and shaped by people who understood that light, stiff and … Read more
Maserati MC20: A 10 for Build, With a Thorn in the Ear There’s a thing the old Top Gear crew understood better than anyone: a car can tell you the truth about itself in the first second, before you’ve moved an inch. The MC20 has that second. You drop into the seat, pull the butterfly … Read more
Built by the company that makes every IndyCar. 855 kg. Focus RS engine. No doors Chris Harris drove it on Top Gear and seemed genuinely puzzled by it. Not in a bad way. In the way you get puzzled when somebody hands you something familiar and it turns out to be wired completely differently. The … Read more
Alfa Romeo Montreal: The Prototype-Engined GT That Arrived Late to Its Own Party Picture this scenario. You have access to one of the most exotic V8s ever produced in 1960s European motor engineering: a 90-degree, 2.6-litre, twin-cam-per-bank, dry-sump, cross-plane-crankshaft, SPICA mechanical fuel-injected unit, derived directly from the Tipo 33 sports racing prototype that Autodelta had … Read more
BMW 3.0 CSL Batmobile: The Car BMW Sold You With the Wing Dismantled in the Boot There’s a photograph that circulates in BMW collector circles of a German customer in 1974 taking delivery of his brand-new 3.0 CSL. He opens the boot. Inside, lying neatly across the carpet, are three pieces of black-painted aluminium — … Read more
The Italian company that builds every IndyCar, F2 and F3 chassis — and almost nobody outside racing knows the name Forget the F1 paddock for a minute. Walk down pit lane at the Indianapolis 500 instead. Every car you see — every single one of the 33 starters — was built by the same company. … Read more
Campogalliano: the Bugatti factory that’s been locked up with everything inside for thirty years Type “abandoned Bugatti factory” into YouTube and you’ll get hundreds of results. Drone shots over a vast blue complex outside Modena. Urbex channels with creaky soundtracks pushing through cobwebbed corridors. Hagerty journalists being walked around by a softly spoken Italian called … Read more
Bugatti EB110: the supercar that arrived ten years before the future caught up Ask most people under forty when Bugatti returned to building cars and you’ll get the same answer. The Veyron. 2005. Volkswagen. End of story. That’s wrong by about fourteen years and one country. Before the W16, before Wolfsburg’s open chequebook, before the … Read more
