Lamborghini Portofino: Four Scissor Doors, Frankfurt 1987 If you drove a first-generation Dodge Intrepid, you drove the face of a Lamborghini. Chrysler built 645,281 of them between 1993 and 1997, and the nose on all of them traces back to a four-door Lamborghini prototype that was shown exactly once. The car is the Portofino, unveiled … Read more
Lamborghini Athon: 260 HP, No Roof, Turin 1980 Bertone brought a brand-new Lamborghini to the Turin motor show in April 1980. An open two-seater, futuristic, with a fully digital instrument panel and a single-spoke steering wheel. Lamborghini had been bankrupt for two years. A coachbuilder publicly unveiled a car for a client that was in … Read more
Lamborghini Bravo: 300 HP and 2,390 lb in 1974 A show car does not get driven. It is pushed onto the stand, lit, photographed and put away. The Lamborghini Bravo covered tens of thousands of test kilometers. American journalists drove it and published a verdict. And in April 1978, three and a half years after … Read more
Lamborghini Urraco, Silhouette and Jalpa: Eighteen Years of a V8 That Never Sold Lamborghini spent eighteen years trying to sell a small eight-cylinder sports car. Between the Urraco, the Silhouette and the Jalpa it managed roughly 1,255 cars. Ferrari, in the same segment with a single model, sold more than twelve thousand 308s. That is … Read more
Alfa Romeo 8C Competizione: The Alfa That Alfa Romeo Didn’t Build America got 84 of them. Maybe 90. Nobody has nailed that number down either, and that turns out to be the whole story of this car. The Alfa Romeo 8C Competizione was the car that brought Alfa Romeo back to the United States after … Read more
Ferrari F355: The Car Honda Forced Into Existence The most beloved Ferrari of the 1990s exists because a Japanese company embarrassed Maranello. That is the part of the story that gets skipped. People talk about the sound, the five valves, the Pininfarina lines. Far less gets said about the state Ferrari was actually in when … Read more
Alfa Romeo 33 Stradale: the most beautiful car ever made? There is a certain kind of claim that gets repeated so often in car magazines that it loses its meaning. “The most beautiful car ever made.” Top Gear has said it. Chris Harris has said it. Pebble Beach jurors say it every time a 33 … Read more
The Supercar That Dared to Be Comfortable: The Maserati Bora’s Secret French Heart Ask any supercar of 1971 the questions that actually mattered to an owner and you’d usually get a sneer. Can I climb in without wrecking my back? Can I drive it for two hours without going deaf? Can I park it without … Read more
Vision BMW Alpina: They Killed a Sports Brand to Build a Maybach There’s a video Chris Harris filmed years ago in an Alpina B7. He’s on an unrestricted stretch of autobahn, indicated needle past 280 km/h, and he keeps saying the same thing in different ways: this car is doing something the M5 cannot. It … Read more
BMW 507: The Most Beautiful Car BMW Ever Built Almost Killed the Company Walk into any decent auction in Monterey or Pebble Beach and one of these things will cross the block for two million dollars. Minimum. The Surtees car went for nearly five. People queue up for the privilege of bidding on something that … Read more
Ford Mustang GTD: the Mustang that wasn’t supposed to exist Three hundred and twenty-eight thousand dollars. For a Mustang. Read it again. No typo. A Ford Mustang costs, today, more than a Porsche 911 GT3 RS. More than a base McLaren 750S. More than an Aston Martin Vantage did not long ago. And the guy … Read more
MASERATI QUATTROPORTE: SIX GENERATIONS WITH THE ENGINE WHERE IT SHOULDN’T BE The sedan that stole a prince’s heart Picture this. Early sixties. Modena. An engineer named Giulio Alfieri has an idea that sounds like madness: take a competition-derived V8, drop it into a four-door car, and tell the world that a sedan can be the … Read more
