The Ferrari 250 GT Boano is an exceedingly important car in the history of the Italian marque, although it’ll probably never be as famous as the 250 GTO and the 250 GT Lusso, it was a Pinin Farina designed masterpiece that would follow directly in the footsteps of the 250 Europa GT – Ferrari’s first…
There is probably no motorcycle more closely associated with Steve McQueen than the Triumph Desert Sled, in fact the iconic images of him roaring across the Southern Californian landscape on a modified British bike will probably outlive the internal combustion engine. At the time of his death in 1980 McQueen had acquired over 100 motorcycles, and…
Ducati started out as a small and nondescript manufacturer of tubes, condensers and other components for use in radios. The original company name was Società Scientifica Radio Brevet Ducati and it was founded in 1926 by Antonio Cavalieri Ducati and his three sons, Adriano, Marcello, and Bruno. By the outbreak of WWII the company had…
The Vincent Black Shadow is a motorcycle that many in the motorcycling press consider to be the first “superbike”, although that particular term wouldn’t be coined for another 20 years after the introduction of the Honda CB750. The first Black Shadows were designed and built in England just 3 years after the end of WWII,…
By 1956 the Monte Carlo Rally was already 45 years old, and very well established as one of the world’s pre-eminent road racing events. Automobile manufacturers used it as a way to publicly show off the toughness and reliability of their vehicles, and played down the amount of mechanical work the driver and co-driver typically…
This is the last Pontiac Catalina “Swiss Cheese” Super Duty ever made, and exactly how it was snuck through the production process on the 2nd of April 1963 is a bit of a mystery. GM had issued a corporate edict three months earlier on the 24th of January 24 1963 that all race and racing…
The Ferrari 365 GTB/4 is almost universally known by its unofficial nickname – Ferrari Daytona. Ferrari have never formerly embraced the Daytona label, and even now it only gets a single begrudging mention on their official website. This moniker was first applied by the media in the wake of the dominant 1-2-3 finish at the 1967 24…
The Magic Midget is an early film from British Leyland about the MG Midget, a car that helped put MG on the map in the formative years of motor racing. At just over 18 minutes in length the film manages to cover quite a lot of ground, and it includes a huge amount of in-period footage…
Invicta was a pre-WWII British automobile company that didn’t survive the turmoil of the mid-20th century, it was a keen competitor with companies like Bentley and Rolls-Royce – and the Invicta S-Type you see here was possibly their finest creation. The secret to the world-beating performance capabilities of Invicta’s 4½-Litre S-Type was the low-slung body….
This Ford cutaway chassis was created for the 1939 New York World’s Fair, it was intended as a showcase of Ford’s famous Flathead V8 as well as a few other innovations, like the column shifter and 3-speed manual transmission. Ford had introduced the Flathead V8 in 1932 and it stayed in production until 1953 –…
The De Tomaso Mangusta was famously named after the Mongoose – the only animal that hunts and kills cobras. It’s widely thought that the name was a friendly jab at Carroll Shelby, whose AC Cobra had become the most famous (and successful) example of a European car with an American V8. Alejandro de Tomaso was…
In 1932 somewhere deep in the French countryside a project was underway to build an automobile with a slightly unusual method of propulsion. It isn’t known if the designer of the Helicon was a pilot or an aircraft engineer, but it’s clear that the car takes a significant amount of influence from early aircraft design.
