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
TVR CERBERA SPEED 12: THE CAR ITS OWN BOSS CANCELLED AFTER ONE DRIVE HOME Blackpool, late 2000. A wet evening on the Lancashire coast. Peter Wheeler, owner of TVR, slides into the driver’s seat of a prototype he’s been waiting four years to drive. The car costs £245,000. It’s been promoted as the machine that … Read more
BMW X5 Le Mans: The SUV That Beat the Cayenne Two Years Before the Cayenne Existed Hans-Joachim Stuck took a BMW X5 around the Nordschleife in June 2001. Seven minutes, forty-nine seconds, ninety-two hundredths. Three hundred and eleven kilometres per hour on the Kottenborn straight. The first SUV in history to break the eight-minute barrier … Read more
GMA T.50: The Car Gordon Murray Has Been Waiting 30 Years to Build Gordon Murray has spent his entire career proving one thing: that lighter is better. He proved it with 22 Grand Prix wins at Brabham. He proved it with the MP4/4, the most dominant Formula 1 car ever made. He proved it with … Read more
McLaren: Sixty Years of Building Cars That Hurt, From a Limp in Auckland to the Top of Formula 1 Top Gear’s Chris Harris once said that the McLaren F1 is the only road car that has ever genuinely scared him. Not in the way a Lamborghini Diablo scares you with its switches and its truculence, … Read more
AUDI RS2: The Audi That Porsche Built How a five-door family wagon embarrassed the McLaren F1 at the traffic lights Stand at a traffic light in 1994. To your left, a McLaren F1. To your right, what looks like a slightly aggressive Audi 80 wagon. The lights go green. For the first 1.5 seconds, the … Read more
