Sometime in the middle of Lockdown 16, Octane received a press release about the most googled cars during the restrictions brought on by the pandemic. Typically, it was the sort of thing a PR company pops out at 9am on a Monday morning for its client, before ticking the box and getting on with the next job; the sort of largely contrived, slightly circumspect and unsubstantiated email that may spark a bit of conversation in the office (though such a thing didn’t exist at that stage, obviously) and will then be promptly forgotten. Its chances of being reproduced at any length in any serious media were pretty much zilch.
But one detail stuck with me, and it was that the soaraway winner (if you could believe the data) was the Citroen DS. Way more popular among the googlers than the E-type, Ferrari 250 GTO, Miura and even the Mini. That doesn’t necessarily surprise me — I waste a lot of my own time browsing the DS on French classified site leboncoin, after all — but it did remind me how beloved they are, the sort of car for which you have such affection that you are genuinely pleased for other people owning them, even if you can’t have one yourself. Genuine event cars, despite that wheezy engine, cars that have something for everyone, whether it be their futuristic aesthetics or their design and engineering bravura.
If you want the utilitarian simplicity of the ID or the comparative luxury of the Pallas, there is a DS for all tastes, and the model range transcends class and car snobbery in a manner that only a small handful of cars, including 2CVs and Minis, truly can.
I recall that in a previous time of disruption — the Eyjaijallajokull volcanic ash cloud that grounded Europe’s planes in 2010 — stranded comedian Bill Bailey bought a DS in Aix-en-Provence and drove it back to the UK as an enthralled Twitter followed his adventure. I also recall a more recent argument over whether to call those delectable rear lights ‘trumpets’ or ‘chip cones’, and Team Chip Cones (me) losing.
But most of all I remember speculating in print a decade ago whether you could really call yourself a classic car enthusiast if you had never owned a DS. It is such an important car that it is our collective burden to share both the glory and the pain of ownership. It should be a public duty, like jury service. I haven’t yet been called, but I am sure I will be.
I’ve been musing recently about what the future holds for smaller, shall we say more boutique car manufacturers in the face of everincreasing electrification. I’m thinking of brands like Atom, Caterham, Morgan and the like. What might their products look like, and will legislation create pockets within which they can thrive, or at a basic level even survive?
Most specifically I wondered what all this would mean for my favourite brand of all, Alpina. Before I managed to put pen to paper, or fingertip to keys, I read in the news that BMW had actually bought Alpina, or more specifically the branding rights (no shares were actually sold). I’ll be honest my heart sank, and despite trying to find positive angles about the ‘sale’ it’s not recovered since.
My childhood dream car, whilst on my early morning paper round, was an E36 B8 4.6 convertible. Most people would dream of an F40 or Diablo, but not me – that was where I set my sights. Sadly, that is a target I have missed ever since but at the tender age of 20 I did find an E28 B9 3.5, which turned out to be one of the UK press cars no less, advertised in the Dordogne region of France.
Like Bob, Elliott shares his thoughts about the future of Alpina.
Elliott morns the endof an era at Alpina...
Detail was completely lacking; the photographs were laughable but nevertheless I booked one-way flights for myself and my good friend, Justin, to get over there and try to get the car back home. The test drive consisted of our expat seller driving the car, fitted with two seats only as the rear seats were in the boot, down some French country lanes, ‘three up’ at over 100mph! The adrenalin was pumping. I was smitten, Justin in the back was very nearly sick. I paid. The car was mine. We had an eventful but never to be forgotten road trip back to Blighty full of incidents and funny moments and I’ve been hooked on the brand ever since. I adore the quietly spoken nature of the brand, the depth of engineering, the audacity to take what was once the ultimate driving machine and make it more focussed, and better. Of course, in more recent times BMW’s M division has taken the M product in an ever more extreme direction so Alpinas have become re-purposed for a slightly different market, but in so many respects they have emerged as better road cars for it.
This is a brand that means something, that is more than marketing bluster and Instagram likes, mainly because Alpina does not really market itself – it lets its products do the talking.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not against larger corporate entities investing in smaller ones and giving them the financial firepower to do what they do best, and in some respects, you could argue that is, to some degree what the special relationship forged between BMW and Burkhard Bovensiepen over 50-years ago could be perceived to have been, but I don’t see BMW’s acquisition as that. This isn’t about giving Alpina the wherewithal to do what they do but even better.
Alpina will stop making cars at its Buchloe base in three short years and then what? Will Alpina just become another trim level for the mothership, or will BMW create a whole new range of vehicles under the Alpina brand? One thing is for sure though, BMW is a business that is all about chasing volume and Alpina has never been about that so we can expect a very different sort of Alpina to emerge.
It feels like a sad way to end Alpina’s story under the custodianship of the Bovensiepen family. The engineering knowledge and skills of the team at Buchloe were, still are, first class but I suspect those skills won’t be hanging around to become the plaything of a corporate behemoth. I could have seen a situation where Alpina was to BMW owners what Singer is to the well-heeled customer base of Porsche, an expert reengineering company for connoisseur clients. Re-positioned in this way there could have been a renewed purpose and a bright new future but instead who knows what will happen, but it’s definitely the end of an era, electrification has claimed a casualty that is dear to my heart.
Driving a Ferrari 250 GTO has been one of the high points of my career, as it seems to be for any motoring hack that has had the privilege (associate editor Glen Waddington has also driven one, though he doesn’t like to mention it… at least not more than once an hour).
‘Mine’ was actually a late car (4675 GT) from the Matsuda collection in Japan and it was a big deal at the time – early 2010 – because it was due to be the first to come up for sale at public auction for a very long time. that meant that a value would finally be ‘out there’ to end the speculation over how far prices might have risen. In the end, it sold privately before the RM sale so we had to wait another four years to have our curiosity satisfied, when Bonhams sold 3851 GT for $38,115,000 (£22,843,633 at the time) at the Quail. More recently, John Collins of Talacrest was openly asking £45m for the Bernie Carl car (3387 GT), and they have probably gone up a bit since then.
But the truth is that all these obscene numbers are irrelevant because a GTO transcends such trivialities. It is all about the experience, and few people have had more GTO adventures than Pink Floyd drummer and former Octane columnist Nick Mason, who paid a then world record £37,000 (yes, thousand) for 3757 GT in 1978. This must be the most storied of all GTOs, less for its first life with Jacques Swaters’ Ecurie Francorchamps (although third overall at both Le Mans and in the Tour Auto is not to be sniffed at), but for its life since 1978, whether that be multiple appearances in Historic racing or being loaned to journalist Mel Nichols, who kept it street-parked in London.
To mark the 60th anniversary of this iconic model, Nick has shared his memories and passion with us and in the process reawakened my own recollections of my GTO day in 2010. Truth be told, it was not as glamorous as it looked in the pictures. the shoot by James Lipman took place at Shoeburyness and the weather was so vile that we huddled together for warmth with our chaperone Max Girardo (then of RM), and for the cornering shots my then-colleague Martin Port had to lie in the footwell and hold the door closed. Yet it was still one of the greatest days of my working life. It’s all about the experience.
I haven’t driven the ‘new’ Ford GT. I was due to, but when the tour dates changed I couldn’t, so Mark Dixon got the gig. I was pretty jealous as a result, though as nothing compared with when, at Thruxton, he got to drive a GT40 and three generations of GT, the last of which I haven’t yet driven, though I was meant to – did I mention?
I have driven a few GT40s before, so the one that intrigues me from our cover story is that troublesome middle child, the difficult second album, that disappointing movie sequel rushed out a bit too quick to try and capitalise on a hit. Not that there was anything rushed about the 2004 GT, which came 40 years after the original, but it was a very different prospect, sharing visual cues with the original but little in tech or ethos. It was born as the XJ-S to the E-type but, when plagued by late deliveries (and being pilloried on the Top Gear TV show) and then tech issues, it threatened to become a laughing stock – Ford’s equivalent of the XJ220. And at $140,000, it didn’t even reach its production target of 4500 units.
Even today the car is something of a quisling, wedged between two Le Mans weapons that did their talking and cemented their reputation on the track, while this soft(ish), wide GT needed two parking spaces in the supermarket if you wanted to get the doors open. I remember that doyen of classic car writers Mathhew Carter having one, which I found impressive yet impractical, an opinion I couldn’t help but share after driving one. Gosh, we are hard to please, aren’t we? And not necessarily right. That 2004-2006 GT seems to be coming into its own at the moment. Just like the ‘pastiche’ BMW Z8 that was equally derided by the visual purity police when new. A new generation hasn’t understood that it is meant to turn its nose up at these cars and is embracing what really are blisteringly quick and technologically fascinating machines, which have been wrongly spurned for years.
Is the Ford GT really a Ferrari-beater? Well, a few were raced – the GT trounced all-comers in the 2008 FIA GT3 European Championship, though it didn’t publicly give Maranello a bloody nose at La Sarthe like its ancestor and descendant – but in the desirability stakes for sure. A GT starts at around £350,000, well over four times the price of Maranello’s slower contemporary rival middie V8, the F430.
It will come as no surprise that, being obsessed with cars, the Octane team spends plenty of time discussing the motors we would like to snap up while we still can, preferably when they are right at the bottom of their ‘depreciation curve’. Of course, all too often such discussions end with an internet search and the realisation that prices have bounced and we have already missed the boat. Possibly even more often, furious activity is followed by a cooling-off period and then it all turns out to have been a flight of fancy anyway.
We are all guilty of this, though associate editor Glen Waddington is in a different league — it is a very good thing he isn’t so fickle in real life — and I’ll bet plenty of you are, too. One day we might be salivating over Lada Nivas and Fiat X1/9s, the next strangled bad-taste Corvettes and Renault Twingos. Obviously, even the Octane old ’uns still like a bit of power beneath their feet, so cars with a bit of pep tend to come to the fore, whether the tepid hatches that seem unwittingly to have become my speciality (Alfa 145 Cloverleaf and Ford Focus ST170) or the JDM specials that Matthew Hayward is always ogling. Oh, and the hot Renaults. All of them. Always. For everyone.
Either way, these listings lustings usually tend towards the modern classics, perhaps simply because there are so many still to bottom out in a less mature market, maybe because we all mentally categorise them as a cheap daily driver to enjoy while we are still permitted to, or it might just be that there is such a glut of brilliant millennial drivers’ cars out there that can be picked up for a relative song today.
There are advocates for every one, of course, but all of us (even Glen) keep coming back to the Porsche Boxster, a mere 25 years old but already the saviour of the company and a sports car watershed, This is a car that would be no less impressive if launched today, yet can be bought for the price of the cheapest new car on sale.
Sure, plenty would prefer a Cayman S, but the extra spend is as hard to justify as for a Rover P5B coupe over a saloon, The Boxster ticks all the boxes for us and we reckon now is its moment, so that is why we celebrate it this month. If it doesn’t tick all your boxes, don’t worry: we have some alternative suggestions that might.
The word ‘retromod’ doesn’t really seem to cut it when the car you are updating is barely old enough to qualify for classic insurance. (Of course, the word retromod is horrible and shouldn’t be used anyway, but that’s another story.) Yet news that McLaren is doing a number on the McMerc (alright, the Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren) seems to really tap into the zeitgeist.
Even before Octane heard the news and Mark Dixon tested the sensational results, we had been discussing that this mightily impressive machine seemed to be one of those rare greats that slips under the radar. Not like the Jaguar XJ220, which even now tracks way below its contemporary rivals, all of which have taken off, even the Bugatti EB110 – but more like the XJR15, which languished in the doldrums for so long before savvy (and wealthy) petrolheads realised that, by reverse-engineering these Jaguar race-cars-for-the-road, you could have the next best thing to a McLaren F1 for a tiny fraction of the price.
All of which makes mention in our second McMerc piece – James Page’s superb analysis of the 722 GT – of a potential renaissance all the more tantalising. And to my mind probably brings that XJR15 comparison into even sharper relief. McLaren is pretty tight-lipped about the ‘project’ just at the moment, but we are justifiably excited. Bring it on!
We all deserve a second chance I may not have always owned one, but I like to think I have always been a Lotus man. I suppose I can’t count my Westfield Eleven, but Elan, Elan +2, Elite and Elise have all been wonderful additions to the Elliott fleet over the years. And as soon as the kids are gone, or a pension matures, or the right Lotto numbers come up, I can promise there will be another.
Being a diehard Lotus fan can be testing, though. At times it has been rather like being a devoted England football fan – the talent is there for all to see, but somehowit is perpetually squandered until inevitable failure ensues. Not now, though. When Geely took over in 2017, I was shocked by the open distrust of the new owners, an overarching suspicion straight out of some 1950s movie. Yet look at what Geely has done at Volvo and what it is now promising to do at Lotus. Stability and investment? Lotus has never had it so good.
In the great automotive Venn Diagram, BMW and Porsche don’t tend to have a lot of commonality in their middle section. Occasionally they stand-toe-to-toe conceptually but, even then, so disparate are the German giants’ personalities and audiences that, like two heavyweight champs holding different belts and never quite setting up that unification fight, they don’t really slug it out.
There is one notable exception, though, and it’s a battle that has been raging for 50 years and counting. It’s not as if the CSL and RS were strict rivals in competition, but the homologation road versions were a different matter altogether. And, I would posit, two of the greatest road cars turned racers turned road cars that the world has ever seen.
These are cars about which every single true enthusiast knows (and readily shares) some element of pub trivia, just as they do with the GT40’s height-name confluence or the fact that Enzo Ferrari waxed lyrical about the beauty of the E-type. With our cover stars it will probably be the fact that, in its home nation, you had to buy your Batmobile with the very thing that made it a Batmobile detached and in the boot. Or they might reel off the siren call names for the vibrant hues on the Porsche colour chart. That such should-be-obscurities are so widely known is as verifiable a sign of legendary status as I can think of.
And the winner is...
Sometime in the middle of Lockdown 16, Octane received a press release about the most googled cars during the restrictions brought on by the pandemic. Typically, it was the sort of thing a PR company pops out at 9am on a Monday morning for its client, before ticking the box and getting on with the next job; the sort of largely contrived, slightly circumspect and unsubstantiated email that may spark a bit of conversation in the office (though such a thing didn’t exist at that stage, obviously) and will then be promptly forgotten. Its chances of being reproduced at any length in any serious media were pretty much zilch.
But one detail stuck with me, and it was that the soaraway winner (if you could believe the data) was the Citroen DS. Way more popular among the googlers than the E-type, Ferrari 250 GTO, Miura and even the Mini. That doesn’t necessarily surprise me — I waste a lot of my own time browsing the DS on French classified site leboncoin, after all — but it did remind me how beloved they are, the sort of car for which you have such affection that you are genuinely pleased for other people owning them, even if you can’t have one yourself. Genuine event cars, despite that wheezy engine, cars that have something for everyone, whether it be their futuristic aesthetics or their design and engineering bravura.
If you want the utilitarian simplicity of the ID or the comparative luxury of the Pallas, there is a DS for all tastes, and the model range transcends class and car snobbery in a manner that only a small handful of cars, including 2CVs and Minis, truly can.
I recall that in a previous time of disruption — the Eyjaijallajokull volcanic ash cloud that grounded Europe’s planes in 2010 — stranded comedian Bill Bailey bought a DS in Aix-en-Provence and drove it back to the UK as an enthralled Twitter followed his adventure. I also recall a more recent argument over whether to call those delectable rear lights ‘trumpets’ or ‘chip cones’, and Team Chip Cones (me) losing.
But most of all I remember speculating in print a decade ago whether you could really call yourself a classic car enthusiast if you had never owned a DS. It is such an important car that it is our collective burden to share both the glory and the pain of ownership. It should be a public duty, like jury service. I haven’t yet been called, but I am sure I will be.
I’ve been musing recently about what the future holds for smaller, shall we say more boutique car manufacturers in the face of everincreasing electrification. I’m thinking of brands like Atom, Caterham, Morgan and the like. What might their products look like, and will legislation create pockets within which they can thrive, or at a basic level even survive?
Most specifically I wondered what all this would mean for my favourite brand of all, Alpina. Before I managed to put pen to paper, or fingertip to keys, I read in the news that BMW had actually bought Alpina, or more specifically the branding rights (no shares were actually sold). I’ll be honest my heart sank, and despite trying to find positive angles about the ‘sale’ it’s not recovered since.
My childhood dream car, whilst on my early morning paper round, was an E36 B8 4.6 convertible. Most people would dream of an F40 or Diablo, but not me – that was where I set my sights. Sadly, that is a target I have missed ever since but at the tender age of 20 I did find an E28 B9 3.5, which turned out to be one of the UK press cars no less, advertised in the Dordogne region of France.
Like Bob, Elliott shares his thoughts about the future of Alpina.
Elliott morns the endof an era at Alpina...
Detail was completely lacking; the photographs were laughable but nevertheless I booked one-way flights for myself and my good friend, Justin, to get over there and try to get the car back home. The test drive consisted of our expat seller driving the car, fitted with two seats only as the rear seats were in the boot, down some French country lanes, ‘three up’ at over 100mph! The adrenalin was pumping. I was smitten, Justin in the back was very nearly sick. I paid. The car was mine. We had an eventful but never to be forgotten road trip back to Blighty full of incidents and funny moments and I’ve been hooked on the brand ever since. I adore the quietly spoken nature of the brand, the depth of engineering, the audacity to take what was once the ultimate driving machine and make it more focussed, and better. Of course, in more recent times BMW’s M division has taken the M product in an ever more extreme direction so Alpinas have become re-purposed for a slightly different market, but in so many respects they have emerged as better road cars for it.
This is a brand that means something, that is more than marketing bluster and Instagram likes, mainly because Alpina does not really market itself – it lets its products do the talking.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not against larger corporate entities investing in smaller ones and giving them the financial firepower to do what they do best, and in some respects, you could argue that is, to some degree what the special relationship forged between BMW and Burkhard Bovensiepen over 50-years ago could be perceived to have been, but I don’t see BMW’s acquisition as that. This isn’t about giving Alpina the wherewithal to do what they do but even better.
Alpina will stop making cars at its Buchloe base in three short years and then what? Will Alpina just become another trim level for the mothership, or will BMW create a whole new range of vehicles under the Alpina brand? One thing is for sure though, BMW is a business that is all about chasing volume and Alpina has never been about that so we can expect a very different sort of Alpina to emerge.
It feels like a sad way to end Alpina’s story under the custodianship of the Bovensiepen family. The engineering knowledge and skills of the team at Buchloe were, still are, first class but I suspect those skills won’t be hanging around to become the plaything of a corporate behemoth. I could have seen a situation where Alpina was to BMW owners what Singer is to the well-heeled customer base of Porsche, an expert reengineering company for connoisseur clients. Re-positioned in this way there could have been a renewed purpose and a bright new future but instead who knows what will happen, but it’s definitely the end of an era, electrification has claimed a casualty that is dear to my heart.
That special experience
Driving a Ferrari 250 GTO has been one of the high points of my career, as it seems to be for any motoring hack that has had the privilege (associate editor Glen Waddington has also driven one, though he doesn’t like to mention it… at least not more than once an hour).
‘Mine’ was actually a late car (4675 GT) from the Matsuda collection in Japan and it was a big deal at the time – early 2010 – because it was due to be the first to come up for sale at public auction for a very long time. that meant that a value would finally be ‘out there’ to end the speculation over how far prices might have risen. In the end, it sold privately before the RM sale so we had to wait another four years to have our curiosity satisfied, when Bonhams sold 3851 GT for $38,115,000 (£22,843,633 at the time) at the Quail. More recently, John Collins of Talacrest was openly asking £45m for the Bernie Carl car (3387 GT), and they have probably gone up a bit since then.
But the truth is that all these obscene numbers are irrelevant because a GTO transcends such trivialities. It is all about the experience, and few people have had more GTO adventures than Pink Floyd drummer and former Octane columnist Nick Mason, who paid a then world record £37,000 (yes, thousand) for 3757 GT in 1978. This must be the most storied of all GTOs, less for its first life with Jacques Swaters’ Ecurie Francorchamps (although third overall at both Le Mans and in the Tour Auto is not to be sniffed at), but for its life since 1978, whether that be multiple appearances in Historic racing or being loaned to journalist Mel Nichols, who kept it street-parked in London.
To mark the 60th anniversary of this iconic model, Nick has shared his memories and passion with us and in the process reawakened my own recollections of my GTO day in 2010. Truth be told, it was not as glamorous as it looked in the pictures. the shoot by James Lipman took place at Shoeburyness and the weather was so vile that we huddled together for warmth with our chaperone Max Girardo (then of RM), and for the cornering shots my then-colleague Martin Port had to lie in the footwell and hold the door closed. Yet it was still one of the greatest days of my working life. It’s all about the experience.
I haven’t driven the ‘new’ Ford GT. I was due to, but when the tour dates changed I couldn’t, so Mark Dixon got the gig. I was pretty jealous as a result, though as nothing compared with when, at Thruxton, he got to drive a GT40 and three generations of GT, the last of which I haven’t yet driven, though I was meant to – did I mention?
I have driven a few GT40s before, so the one that intrigues me from our cover story is that troublesome middle child, the difficult second album, that disappointing movie sequel rushed out a bit too quick to try and capitalise on a hit. Not that there was anything rushed about the 2004 GT, which came 40 years after the original, but it was a very different prospect, sharing visual cues with the original but little in tech or ethos. It was born as the XJ-S to the E-type but, when plagued by late deliveries (and being pilloried on the Top Gear TV show) and then tech issues, it threatened to become a laughing stock – Ford’s equivalent of the XJ220. And at $140,000, it didn’t even reach its production target of 4500 units.
Even today the car is something of a quisling, wedged between two Le Mans weapons that did their talking and cemented their reputation on the track, while this soft(ish), wide GT needed two parking spaces in the supermarket if you wanted to get the doors open. I remember that doyen of classic car writers Mathhew Carter having one, which I found impressive yet impractical, an opinion I couldn’t help but share after driving one. Gosh, we are hard to please, aren’t we? And not necessarily right. That 2004-2006 GT seems to be coming into its own at the moment. Just like the ‘pastiche’ BMW Z8 that was equally derided by the visual purity police when new. A new generation hasn’t understood that it is meant to turn its nose up at these cars and is embracing what really are blisteringly quick and technologically fascinating machines, which have been wrongly spurned for years.
Is the Ford GT really a Ferrari-beater? Well, a few were raced – the GT trounced all-comers in the 2008 FIA GT3 European Championship, though it didn’t publicly give Maranello a bloody nose at La Sarthe like its ancestor and descendant – but in the desirability stakes for sure. A GT starts at around £350,000, well over four times the price of Maranello’s slower contemporary rival middie V8, the F430.
Fancy a bit of internet window shopping?
It will come as no surprise that, being obsessed with cars, the Octane team spends plenty of time discussing the motors we would like to snap up while we still can, preferably when they are right at the bottom of their ‘depreciation curve’. Of course, all too often such discussions end with an internet search and the realisation that prices have bounced and we have already missed the boat. Possibly even more often, furious activity is followed by a cooling-off period and then it all turns out to have been a flight of fancy anyway.
We are all guilty of this, though associate editor Glen Waddington is in a different league — it is a very good thing he isn’t so fickle in real life — and I’ll bet plenty of you are, too. One day we might be salivating over Lada Nivas and Fiat X1/9s, the next strangled bad-taste Corvettes and Renault Twingos. Obviously, even the Octane old ’uns still like a bit of power beneath their feet, so cars with a bit of pep tend to come to the fore, whether the tepid hatches that seem unwittingly to have become my speciality (Alfa 145 Cloverleaf and Ford Focus ST170) or the JDM specials that Matthew Hayward is always ogling. Oh, and the hot Renaults. All of them. Always. For everyone.
Either way, these listings lustings usually tend towards the modern classics, perhaps simply because there are so many still to bottom out in a less mature market, maybe because we all mentally categorise them as a cheap daily driver to enjoy while we are still permitted to, or it might just be that there is such a glut of brilliant millennial drivers’ cars out there that can be picked up for a relative song today.
There are advocates for every one, of course, but all of us (even Glen) keep coming back to the Porsche Boxster, a mere 25 years old but already the saviour of the company and a sports car watershed, This is a car that would be no less impressive if launched today, yet can be bought for the price of the cheapest new car on sale.
Sure, plenty would prefer a Cayman S, but the extra spend is as hard to justify as for a Rover P5B coupe over a saloon, The Boxster ticks all the boxes for us and we reckon now is its moment, so that is why we celebrate it this month. If it doesn’t tick all your boxes, don’t worry: we have some alternative suggestions that might.
The word ‘retromod’ doesn’t really seem to cut it when the car you are updating is barely old enough to qualify for classic insurance. (Of course, the word retromod is horrible and shouldn’t be used anyway, but that’s another story.) Yet news that McLaren is doing a number on the McMerc (alright, the Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren) seems to really tap into the zeitgeist.
Even before Octane heard the news and Mark Dixon tested the sensational results, we had been discussing that this mightily impressive machine seemed to be one of those rare greats that slips under the radar. Not like the Jaguar XJ220, which even now tracks way below its contemporary rivals, all of which have taken off, even the Bugatti EB110 – but more like the XJR15, which languished in the doldrums for so long before savvy (and wealthy) petrolheads realised that, by reverse-engineering these Jaguar race-cars-for-the-road, you could have the next best thing to a McLaren F1 for a tiny fraction of the price.
All of which makes mention in our second McMerc piece – James Page’s superb analysis of the 722 GT – of a potential renaissance all the more tantalising. And to my mind probably brings that XJR15 comparison into even sharper relief. McLaren is pretty tight-lipped about the ‘project’ just at the moment, but we are justifiably excited. Bring it on!
We all deserve a second chance I may not have always owned one, but I like to think I have always been a Lotus man. I suppose I can’t count my Westfield Eleven, but Elan, Elan +2, Elite and Elise have all been wonderful additions to the Elliott fleet over the years. And as soon as the kids are gone, or a pension matures, or the right Lotto numbers come up, I can promise there will be another.
Being a diehard Lotus fan can be testing, though. At times it has been rather like being a devoted England football fan – the talent is there for all to see, but somehowit is perpetually squandered until inevitable failure ensues. Not now, though. When Geely took over in 2017, I was shocked by the open distrust of the new owners, an overarching suspicion straight out of some 1950s movie. Yet look at what Geely has done at Volvo and what it is now promising to do at Lotus. Stability and investment? Lotus has never had it so good.
Two definitions of legendary status
In the great automotive Venn Diagram, BMW and Porsche don’t tend to have a lot of commonality in their middle section. Occasionally they stand-toe-to-toe conceptually but, even then, so disparate are the German giants’ personalities and audiences that, like two heavyweight champs holding different belts and never quite setting up that unification fight, they don’t really slug it out.
There is one notable exception, though, and it’s a battle that has been raging for 50 years and counting. It’s not as if the CSL and RS were strict rivals in competition, but the homologation road versions were a different matter altogether. And, I would posit, two of the greatest road cars turned racers turned road cars that the world has ever seen.
These are cars about which every single true enthusiast knows (and readily shares) some element of pub trivia, just as they do with the GT40’s height-name confluence or the fact that Enzo Ferrari waxed lyrical about the beauty of the E-type. With our cover stars it will probably be the fact that, in its home nation, you had to buy your Batmobile with the very thing that made it a Batmobile detached and in the boot. Or they might reel off the siren call names for the vibrant hues on the Porsche colour chart. That such should-be-obscurities are so widely known is as verifiable a sign of legendary status as I can think of.