A Brief History of the Ferrari 288 GTO The Ferrari 288 GTO was destined to compete in the borderline-insane world of Group B racing. The FIA introduced the regulations that would define Group B in 1982, and it triggered an arms race amongst automakers that is often referred to today as the golden age of rally….
The Troy Roadster is the most famous of the one-off custom builds created by Wally Troy in the 1950s. Stylistically it looks like a cross between an Indy car and a hot rod, which is likely exactly what it was supposed to be. I have a feeling that if you had described a Lotus Seven to…
This car was one of the Scuderia Ferrari Works entries in the 1955 Mille Miglia – a challenging 1,000 mile race across Italy held on public roads. It was originally a 3.7 litre vehicle with 280 hp and a kerb weight of 850 kilograms, Paolo Marzotto was the driver but he didn’t get far – the…
Original, unused Group B rally cars come up for pubic auction exceedingly rarely. In fact I can’t think of even one in recent memory. So you’ll appreciate the amount of interest this 1985 Mazda RX-7 Evo Group B Works car is likely to attract when it rolls onto the auction block in London this September. The Mazda…
There are few forms of motor racing quite as fun go-karting. Karts usually aren’t that quick, but they’re typically cheap to run and maintain, accidents are unlikely to kill or maim you, and if you break down the walk back to the pits is usually only 100 yards or so. Many top notch racing drivers…
A Brief History of the Pegaso Z-102 The Pegaso Z-102 was a technologically advanced sports car built by the Spanish in a Hispano-Suiza truck factory between 1951 and 1958. It’s difficult to know exactly how the risky Z-102 project managed to get approved by the accounts department, but the fact that the chief technical manager of the company was…
The L88 Corvette is a vehicle spoken about among the Chevrolet cognoscenti with the kind of hushed reverence usually reserved for matters of state diplomacy or religion. With 560+hp on tap right off the showroom floor there weren’t many American cars that could realistically compete with the L88 – as is evidenced by the long…
Vehicles used in James Bond films typically become almost as iconic as 007 himself, the most famous are the Astons of course, but he’s also given popularity boosts to the Lotus Esprit, a number of BMWs, the Toyota 2000 GT, the Sunbeam Alpine, and even a 1971 Ford Mustang Mach 1. The most recent James…
The Aston Martin DBR1 is likely to become the single most expensive British car of all time when it rolls across the auction block with RM Sotheby’s next month in Monterey. Estimates are in the $20+ million USD range at the moment, and some say that might be a little on the conservative side, after…
With 306 bhp and a kerb weight just a smidge over 1000 kilograms, the 1964 Shelby Cobra with its 289 cubic inch Ford V8 had performance figures that set the world alight in the mid-1960s. The impact the Cobra had on the automotive world was so significant that it’s now (surely) the most copied and…
A Brief History of the Iso Grifo 90 The Iso Grifo 90 was built as a life-size wooden model designed by Marcello Gandini in the early 1990s, it was commissioned by Piero Rivolta, who believed the time was right to bring the Iso marque back from the grave. Rivolta commissioned Dallara to develop the chassis and…
The 1939 Frazer Nash-BMW 328 you see here wasn’t actually completed until 1946 – it had been ordered as a rolling chassis by the British Frazer Nash company in 1939 but the outbreak of WWII had seen all 4 chassis impounded by British Customs and Excise until a year after the war ended. A Brief…
