Retro

Retro cars road test

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1952 Jaguar XK120 Racer

This Jaguar XK120 was raced in the 1952 International Race of Champions at Silverstone by Prince Bira and after a life in the USA the recently restored car has returned to the UK.

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1967 Meyers Manx The Thomas Crown Affair buggy

There’s cool, and then there’s driving Steve McQueen’s dune buggy on a California beach cool. Mark Dixon does his best to live up to the legend.

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1968 Iso Rivolta GT (340)

Patination state. A ‘weathered’ 1960s Italian hybrid GT might not be most people’s choice as an everyday family classic, but engineer Peter Fareham is not most people.

Editor's comment
OLIVER BROOKWELL

‘I found the Iso Rivolta really interesting. I'd never heard of one before and something about a V8-powered Italian muscle car is just cool. I really liked the lines of the body, and the lacquered, ageing paintwork really suits the car and tells a story.' Oliver s photography accompanies James Elliott s words on this article.
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1930 Rolls-Royce Phantom II by Weymann

Rolls-Royce’s Phantom II defined luxury car supremacy in the early 1930s. Richard Heseltine drives a special Weymann-bodied example that escaped a premature death.

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1967 Citroën DS21 Pallas

«At a time when everyone fantasized about seeing a car fly over the earth, the most innovative of French manufacturers created the DS, a prototype halfway between a flying saucer and a car, but available for purchase on the market. Well, do you know what? Some even saw it fly… in the movies.

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1982 Volkswagen Golf GTI Mk1

After the distinctively cheeky character and idiosyncratic mechanicals of the rear-engined aircooled Volkwagens, getting into the firmly-bolstered plaid-clad drivers’ seat of this Golf GTI MkI feels like a total culture shock. Everything is angular, futuristic, hinting at computerised systems and digital precision, created in the same kind of ultra-rational post-oil-crisis idiom that produced things like the Porsche 928 and W126 Mercedes-Benz S-class. Only in-house stylist Herbert Schäfer’s contribution, the gearknob – Schäfer was a keen golfer – hints at any notion of fun. And yet in the Eighties, the Golf GTI would define driving excitement.

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1972 Volkswagen 1200 Beetle

It just means ‘People’s Car’, and yet Volkswagen signifies so much more. There’s no shortage of rivals with reliable, cheap utilitarianism at their core, but few have managed to unite counter-culture hippies and surfers with City yuppies and boy racers within their embrace. There’s every chance your first car was a battered Golf – the same thing Prince Michael of Kent uses as a runabout. To investigate this curiously classless appeal, we have gathered six VW icons. There’s the Beetle that began it all, and the Camper that kick-started the ownership cult. The Karmann-Ghia made a glamorous push upmarket, a theme that hit its zenith with the Corrado VR6. And then there’s the Golf GTI, the car that defined the hot hatch. We’ve also included a Lupo GTI, which proved that there was virtue in going back to basics after years of growth. So which will convert us to the cult of VW, and how do you buy your way in? Time to take the wheel and find out.

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1967 Volkswagen Type 2 Camper

Clambering aboard this split-window Type 2 Camper – and you really do have to climb up into it, it’s surprisingly high off the ground – the thing that surprises me most is how far removed from the Beetle it is. I know it’s built on that car’s floorplan and shares its engine and gearbox. But it’s testament to the ingenuity of VW’s platform engineering that the thing it reminds me most of is not a car, but the 201 bus to Stamford.

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1966 Aston Martin DB5 V8

To aid development of the Tadek Marek-designed V8, Aston Martin produced a one-off DB5/DB6 hybrid in early 1966 that was powered by the new unit. Despite being a well-used prototype, the car survived and we’ve driven it.

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1965 Aston Martin DB5 Radford Shooting Brake

Instigated by David Brown himself but hand-built by a London-based coachbuilder, Harold Radford, the DB5 Shooting Brake was aimed at Aston Martin owners who enjoyed outdoor pursuits and therefore needed more interior room. Just 12 were produced and we’ve tracked one down.

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1959 BMW 503 Coupé

With a price of 30,000 Deutsche Mark, the BMW 503 was extremely expensive even for affluent customers at the time. Unlike the 507, the 503 was offered as both a convertible and a coupe. Under the long hood, it had a V8 engine producing 140 horsepower, which was later upgraded to the 150 horsepower engine from the 507. The 503 remains a rarity to this day but has always lived in the shadow of the legendary 507. And both V8 models nearly bankrupted BMW.

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1946 MG TC

Purely by chance, one man became obsessed with record-breaker Goldie Gardner. Then his MG TC came up for sale...

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1962 and 1963 Aston Martin DB4 GT Zagato

To own an Aston Martin DB4GT Zagato is a privilege. To own two, well… Octane.

Editor's comment
DAVID ROSCOE-RUTTER
‘Not one, but two! Incredibly beautiful GTs yet with a surprisingly raw sports car feel, these two very special Astons drew plenty of attention and were a dream to shoot. I'll take one.' David's superb photography accompanies Glen Waddington s Aston Martin DB4GT Zagato feature on pages.

Celebrating a pair of unsung heroes


If the Aston Martin DB4GT Zagato isn’t Britain’s most expensive road car, then it must be there or thereabouts, presumably sparring with the XKSS for top spot in price and rarity. I can’t think of many others to rival the Ercole Spada-penned beauty that don’t have a significantly more racy bias. To see just one of these 20-off (if you ignore the seasonal raft of ‘Sanction’ cars) rarities anywhere, even static on a concours field, is a major event.


So how about two of the lightened and tightened Zagato masterpieces doing what they were designed to do and being driven? And for good measure let’s do some of that driving on a beach in north-west England in spring, when the weather hasn’t yet decided whether it wants to cling on to winter or slide into summer. Pretty special - probably unique - stuff and all very Octane, yet the fact that this story happened at all also says a great deal about long-serving classic car dealer and industry disciple William Loughran. He owns both cars and that’s pretty much unheard of.

To give you a left-field insight into the man, many of you will know that Octane is the power behind the Historic Motoring Awards. Well, a couple of years ago we wanted to introduce a new award to recognise someone who had navigated the classic car industry for a lifetime with barely a blemish to their name, someone who was not just an ambassador but could be held up as a beacon of honesty, devotion and good practice. We struggled with a name for the gong. It started off plainly as The Integrity Award and ended up morphing into the Classic Car Ambassador of the Year, which embodied the sentiment but was very slightly different. What remained constant throughout, though, was the single criterion for the winner and, in the words of Octane’s Sanjay Seetanah, it should be ‘someone like William Loughran’.

Talking of Sanjay, just last month in this column I briefly mentioned our everpresent advertising team, the dark ops of Octane led by Sanjay from Issue One. Well, such was the reader response that you can find out a lot more about him this month. In response to overwhelming reader demand we’ve made him the subject of Autobiography (basically the old Day In The Life page, but with less cereal and Horlicks) so you can all see what makes him tick - and why he is as passionate about classic cars as anyone on the editorial team.
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1937 Frazer Nash-BMW 319/55 Sport

Frazer Nash-BMW may be a mouthful but the 319/55 proves small can be beautiful. We drive the 55bhp 1937 sports car that introduced a German juggernaut to the British market, setting off an improbable chain reaction.

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1969 Mercedes-Benz 280SL Automatic W113

Classic Cars reader David Driscoll has always dreamt of driving a W113 Mercedes-Benz SL. Today we put him beneath the Pagoda hardtop of a reference.

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