This Buick had lived in South Africa and Holland before it was acquired by Mark Hatton, who has driven it all around Britain and to France. And it’s the perfect car for long-distance touring, as he tells Zack Stiling…
This Buick concept hinted at a future SUV/station wagon offering from GM’s Flint-based division; sadly what was rolled out a few years later had none of the bold vision of the concept…
CVT. It’s probably one of the most divisive acronyms in motoring today. For some, the CVT – or continuously variable transmission – is seen as a means of smoothing gearshifts and curbing fuel consumption. Others can only wince at the system’s tendency to turn their driving experience into a drone some affair punctuated with the sensation of gear slip and sluggish performance.
I make no secret at all of my love of Jaguar’s big saloon cars – especially those of the Eighties and Nineties, which I’ve owned in various guises since I was first able to scrape together the insurance premium in my mid-20s.
‘This is a very important car for DrivesToday readers/chirruped the chap from JLR when issuing the invitation to the first launch drives of the new, fifth-generation Range Rover. Only the fifth? Yup, pretty incredible when you consider that it has now been in production for well over 50 years. Even more amazing when you think that many people might consider at least a couple of those previous generations superfluous. Is this one, too? We will soon find out...
Count Alexis Wladimirovich de Sakhnoffsky made his reputation in Europe and his fortune in America. There he became the foremost advocate of, as he put it, ‘the illusion of speed’ in design — or, put another way, streamlining. With the likes of Raymond Loewy, Norman Bel Geddes and Walter Dorwin Teague, Alexis was part of a new breed of industrial designers that emerged in the USA in the 1930s and whose name, whether given to a refrigerator or a wristwatch, would give it added sales appeal.
Outside: raw carbon panels, track-oriented gooseneck’ wing, front splitter, massive gold- painted wheels. Inside: roll-cage, five-point harness, Race-Tex dash covering — plus a rev-counter redlined at 9000rpm. And our playground involves not a track but the sinuous B-roads that snake across the North Pennines in County Durham. Gulp.
Ok, so the wing on the back, BMW Individual Special Fire Orange paint, big, black wheels and so on were going to attract a certain demographic, but still I was a bit bewildered by how many thumbs-up signs came from young lads. And then a neighbour told me that her 14-year-old son knew the M3 GTS from Forza. A computer game, apparently.
It is incredible to think that the Mini Marcos was first launched in the mid-1960s, and its concept is slightly older if you factor in its inspiration the DART.
