Sport

From blown diffusers to front-tyre-warming, toe-angle-adjusting steering columns, both born then banned in the past two decades, Formula One has been defined by relentless rule-bending engineering innovations since its inception. However, the most primal of them all doesn’t even hail from this century; it supersedes carbon fibre as F1’s go-to construction material in the 1980s.

Due to Jaguar’s dominant victory of the 1951 Le Mans 24 Hours race with the C-type, success the following year seemed a certainty

Firsts seldom come in fours. However, as an embodiment of the representative quantum leap taken over its competitors of the era, at the 1965 Indy 500, the Lotus 38 heralded just that.

Lurking in the shadows of the poster children of the Group A generation of DTM cars – the Mercedes 190 E and E30 BMW M3 – the Audi V8 quattro DTM is easily forgotten.

Few race cars are quite as loved as Tim Harvey’s 1992 BTCC 318iS E36/2. Today, the car lives on as a period-perfect racer in New Zealand…

Not a household name today, but Tony Brooks remains one of Aston Martin’s most accomplished drivers.

As neither Mitch Evans nor Sam Bird have been able to secure the Formula E World Championship (held in mid-August at the Berlin ePrix: see news, p6), it means Teo Fabi remains Jaguar’s final champion after winning the World Sportscar Championship 30 years ago

Roy Salvadori was one of Aston Martin’s most important drivers throughout the Fifties. We look at his long and successful career.

In 1983, Porsche 956s performed the unprecedented feat of winning every single round of the World Sports Car Championship. Forty years on, drivers and engineers recall the dawn of a Group C titan.

To mark the 100th anniversary of Carroll Shelby’s birth, we look at the career of this iconic American who won the 1959 Le Mans

Due to the global economic downturn of the early Nineties, Jaguar and its racing partner, TWR, had already pulled out of the World Sportscar Championship at the end of the 1991 season and then the American IMSA series the following year. But with the team contemplating a return to the Le Mans 24 Hours in 1993, three V12-powered XJR 12Ds were entered into the Daytona 24 Hours in late January as a way of gathering race experience with the cars.

Despite Ian Appleyard dominating the Alpine Rally throughout the early Fifties with his cream XK120, registration NUB120, since the Monte Carlo Rally’s rules at the time demanded cars over 1ó litres had to be four-seaters, it meant he had to ditch the sports car in favour of a MkVII instead. For his first Monte in 1952, Appleyard ordered a brand new example, registered PWN 7, but due to poor weather he, together with his co-driver wife, Pat (who was also the daughter of chairman of Sir William Lyons) finished a lowly 53rd. He would use the car again for that year’s Tulip Rally in April when he came home a strong second.

We’re talking about the best rally cars of all time. The World Rally Championship (WRC) was never more exciting and chock-full of memorable machinery as it was during the Group B era of the 1980s; a time when the cars were considered more wild and outrageous than their F1 counterparts, coining the phrase “Formula 1 for the forest”.

Jaguar may have pulled out of The World Sportscar Championship at the end of 1991 but it had one last season in endurance racing; the 1992 International Motor Sports Association’s GT series in the US. As with the WSC, Tom Walkinshaw Racing oversaw Jaguar’s IMSA entries and used a variety of cars for the 15-race series, including the V12-engined XJR-12 for the 24-hour events, plus the V6 turbo XJR-14 and its XJR-16 replacement for the others.

The truth is reliably stranger than fiction, and with the near-mythical motor BMW M built for Gordon Murray’s extraordinarily neat BT52 Formula 1 racer there’s almost as much strange fact and fiction as there was boost. (And there was a lot of boost.)