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
Fiat S76: the Beast of Turin, the car that terrified its own drivers You’ve probably seen the video. A monstrous, ancient car sits on the grass at Goodwood, someone hand-cranks it, and it erupts — sheets of flame shooting sideways from open exhaust ports, a noise like artillery fire mixed with a warplane engine, spectators … Read more
Rover P6 3500: the engine Detroit threw away and Britain made immortal Every gearhead in America knows the Buick 215. Or thinks they don’t, until you tell them the story. It’s the little aluminum V8 that Buick and Oldsmobile built for their compacts at the dawn of the sixties, the one that powered the Buick … Read more
Studebaker: the last independent Detroit couldn’t let live There’s a grove of 5,000 trees near South Bend, Indiana, planted back in 1937 so that from the air they spell out a single word: STUDEBAKER. You can still find it on Google Earth today. A whole automaker reduced to a piece of landscape gardening you have … Read more
Doble Steam Motors: the car that nearly killed petrol Sit down. I’m going to tell you this one workshop-bench style, because the story is worth telling slowly. Electric? No. Petrol? No either. It’s a steam car. And the company that built it is called Doble Steam Motors. I’ve just typed those numbers and I’m still … Read more
Spyker 60HP: The 1903 Car That Beat Audi, BMW And Land Rover By 80 Years Top Gear once put together a list of the most innovative cars of all time. Chris Harris has spoken at length about the cars that shaped what we drive today. Every motoring journalist worth their salt has, at some point, … Read more
The three-point seatbelt: Volvo’s most expensive decision and the patent that saved a million lives You’re alive because of a Swede who designed ejection seats Look down. Right now. The strap across your chest, the buckle by your hip, that V-shape that pins you to the seat without breaking your ribs. That’s the work of … Read more
