NSU: The Company That Reinvented Itself Four Times, Then Died the Moment It Finally Nailed It Say “NSU” to most American enthusiasts and you’ll get a blank look, or maybe “isn’t that the rotary thing?” The Wankel. The Ro80. As if the company was born in 1967 to build one weird engine and then promptly … Read more
AUSA PTV: the Spanish carmaker that survived by killing its own car The first site dumper ever built in Spain ran on the engine out of a two-seat convertible. Manresa, 1960. Same engine, same carburetor, same shed, same men. The only thing that changed was who was paying: instead of a gentleman in a hat … Read more
Pininfarina, The House: Ninety-Five Years of Shaping Cars That Other People Built The Geneva Motor Show of 2012. Ferrari unveiled the F12berlinetta. A brutal car — naturally aspirated V12, razor lines, the last card played by pre-turbo Maranello. Nobody made much of it that morning, but the F12 was the last road-going Ferrari drawn by … Read more
Audi V12 TDI: The Greatest Diesel Ever Built, Killed By Audi America never got the Audi V12 TDI. That turns out to be the least interesting thing about it. Here’s the more interesting thing. The V12 TDI is not the Le Mans engine. It doesn’t share the vee angle, the displacement, or the architecture with … Read more
Porsche 542: The Car Studebaker Paid For And Never Built Studebaker wrote Porsche a check for roughly half a million 1952 dollars and got nothing out of it. Porsche used that money to build the assembly hall in Zuffenhausen that still turns out 911s today. The dying American company paid for the German company’s factory. … Read more
Ferrari Enzo: too much name for one car Ferrari did not put Enzo Ferrari’s first name on a road car to decorate the history books. It did it because the entire project had to answer for him. In 2002, Maranello could have followed the obvious sequence. F40. F50. Another code, another number, another supercar carrying … Read more
Mercedes-Benz T80: The Six-Wheeled Nazi Speed Machine Porsche Designed That Never Turned a Wheel Walk into the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart and you’ll find a black car nearly 27 feet long. Three axles, six wheels, two small stubby wings, an aluminum body built by an aircraft plant. No engine in the bay. No odometer to … Read more
Tramontana: the Spanish supercar built by the man who turned down Star Wars A designer once got the kind of offer most people would frame on a wall: come to the United States and design for the Star Wars movies. He said no. He didn’t want to build spaceships for the screen. He wanted to … Read more
Aixam Mega Track: the off-road supercar that arrived 25 years early The best-selling Lamborghini in history isn’t a Countach or a Miura. It’s the Urus, an SUV. The Porsche the internet lost its mind over a couple of years ago was the 911 Dakar, a jacked-up, all-wheel-drive 911 built to leave the pavement. The whole … Read more
Covini C6W: thirty years chasing a six-wheeled supercar In 1976, a Formula 1 car with four tiny front wheels won a Grand Prix and turned the motoring world upside down. It was the Tyrrell P34, and among the millions it fascinated was a young Italian engineer from a small town in the Oltrepò Pavese. For … Read more
Panoz: the nicotine-patch millionaire who chain-smoked and saved American racing There’s an irony so cruel at the center of this story that if a novel served it up you’d say the author overreached. The man who made his fortune leading the team that invented the nicotine patch — the device meant to help people quit … Read more
Shelby Daytona Coupe: six cars to take the world away from Ferrari Before Ford stormed Le Mans, before the movie, before the GT40 became a legend, a skinny Texan with a bad heart did something that seemed impossible: he took a world championship away from Enzo Ferrari. Not General Motors with its bottomless resources. Not … Read more
