Comments

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Ian Chalk 1972 Lotus Elan +2 26 days ago

Hi Mike

I read this article with great interest, as I owned this very car a decade or so back. It looks excellent and I am more than a little envious. Hope it’s going well for you. I’d love to see it again at some point. Maybe see you at a car show or similar. Cheers!

Ian

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David Matthews 1965 Austin Mini Cooper 970S 1 month ago

What a bizarre second part to this article. The whole point of the 970 S was it’s over square high revving engine. The car driven and referred to as a 970S is nothing of the sort as it has the conventional long stroke 1275 engine bored out to be even bigger. If you set out to test a 970S you really should test a car with a 970 engine, that’s a basic requirement. All this is is a test of an old Mini with a colourful past, a mis-packaged journalistic hoax. No more than click bait.

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R,B 1974 AMC Javelin AMX 1 month ago

some miss led information here.

The car was bought in 1985 by a guy in Southall who spent a fortune on it, it was painted pink and had a full engine rebuild and sold in 1991. I should know it was my dad's car.

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Sam Dawson Sam Dawson 1989 Aston Martin V8 Vantage X-Pack Coupe 1 month ago

Different impressions

As a schoolboy I bought Motor or Autocar most weeks from the mid-Sixties to the early Seventies, carefully removing the road tests, which I still have. It’s fascinating to compare your and your readers’ impressions of classics with those of contemporary road-testers. With the Aston DBS V8, reader Jim Pace noted the heavy clutch, and that the car ‘churns away on the starter’ before firing, and commented that some areas of the interior were crude. In July 1971 Autocar noted a 50lb effort needed for the clutch and 45 seconds of churning to start the engine. That they made no comment about the crudeness of the switchgear says much about how such things have improved over the years. In the Autocar March 1968 test of the Jensen FF, its four-wheel drive and ABS system made the car remarkably advanced. On paper it’s surprisingly similar to my Bentley Continental GT. I’d love to compare the two side by side!

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Sam Dawson Sam Dawson 1971 Aston Martin DBS V8 1 month ago

Different impressions

As a schoolboy I bought Motor or Autocar most weeks from the mid-Sixties to the early Seventies, carefully removing the road tests, which I still have. It’s fascinating to compare your and your readers’ impressions of classics with those of contemporary road-testers. With the Aston DBS V8, reader Jim Pace noted the heavy clutch, and that the car ‘churns away on the starter’ before firing, and commented that some areas of the interior were crude. In July 1971 Autocar noted a 50lb effort needed for the clutch and 45 seconds of churning to start the engine. That they made no comment about the crudeness of the switchgear says much about how such things have improved over the years. In the Autocar March 1968 test of the Jensen FF, its four-wheel drive and ABS system made the car remarkably advanced. On paper it’s surprisingly similar to my Bentley Continental GT. I’d love to compare the two side by side!

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DAVID POPE 1989 BMW 325i Coupe Sport E30 1 month ago

Hello,


my father in law was the owner of F758 LMY for a few years until his death in 2000. A wonderful car. I hope the current owner is enjoying it.


David Pope.

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Chris Hayward MG 1100/1300 at 60 2 months ago

The MG was actually the second one in the 1100 range to be launched; the Morris came first, in summer 1962, with the MG in autumn the same year, but the Austin did not appear till 1963. I was the owner of the black car pictured above until about 2011 when I sold it and bought an MG 1300 Mk II the following January.

The unusual colour of the upholstery is called terracotta, and since 2017 I have owned a virtually identical C-reg MG 1100.

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Sam Dawson Sam Dawson 1986 Audi Quattro 10v/WR 9 months ago

Before it all came crashing down, the Eighties vibe gave us many colourful reasons to be optimistic, particularly the cars. Little wonder their appeal is growing now.

Quattro.

One word, instant picture in your mind – box wheelarches and squat, bodykitted stance; turbo, when that was a real badge of honour; clever, self-assured four-wheel drive. And red, had to be Tornado Red. It didn’t actually, but that’s how it seemed. This was the Eighties on wheels – self-assured, future-facing, successful. Not everyone enjoyed the brief, heady gold rush of the decade and for many it would end in tears, but for a while it was as if we were all infected by the feelgood factor. Just as the Sixties had an optimism that distracted Britons from the remnants of post-war austerity, the Eighties – once well into its stride – helped us forget the decay that characterised the Seventies.

Add Cosworth, E24 635CSi, GTE and Testarossa – now there’s Eighties car culture defined. Rallying and saloon racing glory, the rise and rise of German car desirability, gritty suburban hero and a big showoff fantasy just one utilities share deal away from reality. Well, maybe. And with a bang, it was over, the symbols of excess treated with either ridicule or remorse, depending on how close you were to the cocaine and champagne when the party stopped. But now look at the cars, hotter than a hairsprayed stadium rock band at the peak of its MTV video chart posturing. Just without the dry ice.

If, like me, you were too young to experience the star cars of the decade firsthand, perhaps the rash of crash, jump and roll stunt-ridden TV shows and films was as close as you got. In which case, you’ll be enthralled by our interview with Jack Gill, the man responsible for so many of those iconic stunts from a time before CGI made it all safe and unreal. You’ll just have to forgive him for all those future classics he wrecked in the line of duty. But hey, without attrition we would appreciate the survivors less.

Whatever your view of Eighties excess, you have to accept it left a colourful mark on motoring history.

Eighties heroes of the rally stage and race track are hot.

+1
micdev42 micdev42 Trouble Shooter BMW's N43, N53 and N54 engines 9 months ago

Good write up, thanks. I'm in UK and a new 048 index 11 injector for my N53 325i is £450 from BMW. Yikes. The value of may car means that I can't justify spending £2700 on injectors that may still fail! And that's before I may need to deal with O2 and NOX sensors. Not sure what to do.

Separate note, where are the pictures you are referencing in the last paragraph?

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Votren De Este Votren De Este 1961 Austin Seven De-Luxe 10 months ago

Hi Viv

Please upload photos of this car in comments section

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Delywn Mallett Delywn Mallett 1971 Rover P6 3500S 10 months ago

Rovers Regret

The words of your reader chimed with me. I'm lucky to be old enough to have owned a Rover P6 first time around – a 1972, 93k-mile example that I bought in 1982. The V8 was the attraction but the abiding memory is of a car that was a joy to drive, coupled with a feeling that every trip was an adventure tinged with slight anxiety – would we actually make it? Of course we did, every time. But the character remained – flickering oil light, a thirst for coolant, optically clear inner wings and that rear suspension member whose rustedthrough anchor point provided an early rear-wheel steering effect.

Looking back over the 30-odd cars I have so far owned, from Jag to Smart ForTwo, the P6 provides the biggest aftersell regret. What a fabulous car! Even now it has so many styling features that, in my opinion, no other car has ever provided. And maybe there is a second regret – I saw a yellow SD1 (yes, with the orange seats) for sale in near perfect condition at an independent dealer in the mid Eighties for (if memory serves) £1600. How I wish I had bought it.

+2
Emma Woodcock Emma Woodcock 1978 Opel Monza 3.0E 10 months ago

OpelMonza vs. Rover SD1 Vitesse

The March issue brought back memories of a Rover SD1 (‘I knew it was rotten as a pear. It was scrap’) and Opel Monza (Everyman Executive). During the Eighties my friend Brian had a Monza 3.0E with a fivespeed manual and limited-slip differential, which was mainly fitted to the automatics. It was a metallic brown that still looked dirty after spending a whole day washing and Simonizing! I bought it because Brian had his eye on a twin-plenum SD1 Vitesse. At the time, some school buddies and I were keen on skiing – and we had the offer of a flat in Schladming in Austria for two weeks. Somewhere in Germany after quite a few petrol stops, Brian spotted on the map that the next section of the autobahn had a long straight. Soon after we set off from the lunchtime stop my passenger in the Monza dropped off to sleep while Brian accelerated quickly until the SD1 was a dot on the horizon – but not for long. I caught him up, the speedo reading just over 150mph. When we pulled in to top up the tanks, Brian was miffed at being caught up by his old car; my passenger was miffed that he had missed it all.

The Monza did suffer from snobbery; how can a GM car be better than a BMW or Mercedes-Benz? Well, it was. The only annoying thing was central locking that didn’t operate the rear hatch. If you dropped someone off and they had things in the back, you had to switch off and open the hatch with the key. It was one of the best cars I've owned; superbly comfortable and ideal to travel many miles, even off the motorway – and the limited-slip differential kept the tail under control out of wet roundabouts.

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Nigel Boothman Nigel Boothman 1936 Cord 810 Westchester 11 months ago

Well, Graham, as was pointed out last month, Car of the Year last year was run no differently from any of the previous 30-odd years. It’s a concours competition, always has been and is judged on points awarded to each individual car, awarded by three separate independent judges that are all tallied up at the end on Sunday afternoon prior to the announcement of the winner. If any car in any condition was eligible to enter, what criteria would one use to choose such cars? How would they be judged, or would it just be a case of spinning a roulette wheel? As for having two categories for restored and original, only one of the cars last year could possibly have qualified for the ‘original’ category, which means it would have won that category simply on merit of having been the only car within that class! As for featuring ordinary or ‘normal’ cars that’s something we regularly do. Out of the four cars featured last month (April) three would easily fit into that category: the 1979 Trans Am, low mileage, all original and unmodified, the 1954 Chevrolet Bel Air, again a nice clean, straight car, unmodified and the 1970 Lincoln Continental, again low mileage, good straight condition and not hideously expensive to buy… We could fill the magazine with cheap ’n’ cheerful Chrysler 300s or V6 Camaros all day long, but when presented with the opportunity of featuring something as unique and rare as a 1936 Cord, it would seem a no-brainer to feature the latter!

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Dan Bevis Dan Bevis 1936 Cord 810 Westchester 11 months ago

Unless you have a bottomless pit of money to throw at your car, it appears to be you don’t have a chance to even qualify. This to me does not give the person with his pride and joy, keeping it on the road with a limited budget, any chance of being recognised. This also brings up another issue to me. The magazine puts nice cars in, but I feel the budget-restricted owners are being left out. It would be nice if you did features on what I class as normal people with normal cars. By this I mean cars as they came from the factory and kept that way. Not expensively restored and modified. There must be a lot of American car owners that agree with me. The various local meets I go to certainly have a vast array of this type of car, but we don’t appear to see them in your site.

+1
Dan Furr Dan Furr 1996 Ascari FGT/Ecosse 11 months ago

Selling the Ascari Ecosse

Your article about the Ascari Ecosse brought back mainly happy memories of my time at Ascari Cars’ base in Banbury. I joined to take responsibility for sales and marketing activity for the yet-to-be-launched KZ1.

The team in the factory had been pulled from all parts of the automotive and motorsport sectors, and I personally had spent a number of years within the retail motor industry, latterly running MG Rover’s site on Park Lane (we were selling the SV and SV-R) as the flagship dealer.

Klaas Zwart was very focused on motorsport and as part of my interview process I flew to Spain, where Klaas took me at speed around the Race Resort Ascari track. I think collectively we did very well with what little we had and the KZ1 was a world-class product. However, when I joined the company it soon became clear that the KZ1 wasn’t going to be customer-ready for quite a while.

I concentrated on promoting the brand and getting it on the radar of high-net-worth individuals in the meantime. The factory was a perfect setting for tours, as one side housed Klaas’s Formula 1 collection, which included numerous Ferraris and the two-seater Arrows, while the road cars were on the other. Languishing in the corner here was the yellow ex-demo FGT — the car, later repainted blue, in your feature [above] — which was basically little more than a shell.

During one of the tours a Canadian chap called Kenny Schackter showed an interest in getting it back on the road and a price was agreed with a very ‘flexible’ delivery date — my first sale of a roadgoing Ascari! An immeasurable amount of time was spent on preparing it, helped by technicians who had worked on the FGT and Ecosse at Blandford Forum so knew the car intimately. The production Ecosse had a luxury leather-lined interior but the consensus between the customer and ourselves was that it should be more raw and track-focused. As I recall, Kenny was very happy with the finished article.

It was a real shame when it all came to an end as I do think we could have been another Wiesmann if we had sourced the KZ1 engines directly from BMW. The costs to build the car certainly exceeded its £235,000 ticket price, which ultimately finished off the road car product in Klaas’s eyes.

+1
Votren De Este Votren De Este 1962 Ferrari 400 Superamerica SWB Coupe Aerodinamico 11 months ago

Creating demand — or frenzied desperation — by telling people they can’t have something is not the modem sales technique that it is often portrayed as. Sure, watch, yacht and ‘luxury goods’ companies have perfected the technique of Obscene Pricing Demand Creation post-millennium, but anyone who has ever raised kids will tell you that the basic psychology behind it is as old as the hills. Guess what: it works in reverse, too. Even in the business world, it goes back to the invention of conspicuous wealth and with it the emergence of enterprising souls who would generously provide succour for those who had so much money that they didn’t know what to do with it.

Enzo Ferrari was the master of that. Just as Mike Salmon’s famously snobby dismissiveness of potential customers converted many a wavering visitor to Maranello Concessionaires, Enzo sometimes made it very difficult to buy his cars. The ploy didn’t work on everyone, of course — to which we owe the existence of Lamborghini — but personally vetting potential owners to his incredibly expensive range-topping 400 Superamerica was a stroke of genius. No wonder it made the cars as coveted then as they are cherished now. And rightly so: maybe the true measure of a model’s greatness is how seldom examples come to market.

You can’t accuse Ford of adopting the same technique with its more celebrated supermarket approach to shifting units. Even so, coming from an era when more ‘experimental’ models such as the Probe and Cougar were brutally shunned by buyers, the Puma in original 1.7-litre form (the Racing doesn’t have the same effortless innocence) rapidly won petrolhead hearts and minds. Hard to believe that this sublime three-door coupe has reached the quarter-century, but it was wonderful to reunite designer Ian Callum with his baby.

Then, as a timely reminder to Puma fans that greatness will shine through regardless of origins, badge, even sales psychology, someone paid just shy of £600,000 for a Ford. Admittedly, it was a one-of-500 RS500 (there were 5545 Sierra Cosworths overall) and as good an example as you are likely to find, but even so...

Obviously that price was insane, especially against an estimate of £120,000-180,000 at the Silverstone Auctions Race Retro sale, but remember it takes two people (or more) to bid a car up at auction and that means there is at least one other person out there who was prepared to spend one bid less than £590,500 on such a car.

You can count on seeing a lot more RS500s coming to market very soon.

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Andrew Roberts Andrew Roberts 1970 Rover P6B 3500S prototype 1 year ago

P6B prototype recalled

Your article on the Rover P6B prototype (Solihull Secret) reminded me of spring 1967, when I was working in the London office of Pirelli which bought a 3500S prototype car from Rover for tyre testing. When I later joined the technical department, I became aware of its reputation for speed and ability to rip the front bearing and oil seal out of its ZF five-speed manual gearbox at frequent intervals, about 3000 miles as I recall. The engine was basically Buick, I think, but maybe souped up.

Around 1967 a member of the public wrote to Motor or Autocar and said, ‘I was driving up the M1 in my 2000TC and was overtaken by another 2000TC. It was lefthand drive, green, had Solihull plates and was driven with spirit. I took my car to over 100mph and then the other driver waved, changed up a gear, and shot off over the horizon. There is clearly a new Rover in development’. I understand Rover was furious. I was granted a test drive in 1970. The test drivers advised, ‘If you’re in a hurry, try first, third and fifth gears; otherwise second and fifth is fine. There is so much torque you wouldn't believe it!’ I drove off from Burton on Trent onto the A38 slip road and booted it. Wow, what an effect. There was barely time for gear changes.

It was one of about five of equivalent specification. They were left-hand drive with glassfibre radiator cowls. One other went to a competitor tyre company. I turned down the opportunity to buy the car because it was dubious regarding spares. I think it went to the Measham car auction and made about £200. When the production P6B came up for sale I expressed an interest but the senior executive to whom I reported was not eligible for a V8, so he prevented one of his managers (me) from buying it.

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Dan Bevis Dan Bevis 200bhp 1982 Ford Fiesta XR2 turbo Mk1 1 year ago

Very cool old Fiesta Slipper

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Votren De Este Votren De Este ​Porsche 2030 electric plans 1 year ago

However, I can tell you what we currently know about Porsche's plans for electric cars and their approach to interior design.

Porsche has been making moves towards electric cars, with the introduction of the Taycan in 2019, which is an all-electric sports car. In addition, they have also announced plans for an all-electric Macan SUV in the future.

As for the interior, Porsche has always been known for its high-quality and luxurious interiors, and this is likely to continue with their electric cars. The Taycan, for example, has a minimalist and modern interior with a large curved display that combines the instrument cluster and infotainment system.

Porsche has also emphasized the importance of sustainability and eco-friendliness in their production processes, and this is likely to be reflected in the materials and design choices for the interior of their future electric cars.

Overall, while we can't know for sure what Porsche's all-new electric car and interior will look like in 2030, we can expect it to reflect their commitment to luxury, performance, and sustainability.

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