The Lister Motor Company has made “continuation” examples of the “Knobbly” Lister-Jaguar. An auction house has claimed that a car it was selling was the prototype Knobbly, so the Knobbly has become important. After the Knobbly came the Costin, but before the Knobbly there were three Lister-Jaguars best described as “Lumpy” though they had not...
At the end of June, a commercial tribunal, in Bologna, Italy, handed down a stunning decision that could have massive implications for the collector car world. And yet, I’ve hardly seen a mention of it in anywhere in the automotive media world. The case in question was a lawsuit, brought by Ferrari, who was suing to stop a small Modenese shop from building replicas of the haloed 250 GTO. Say what you will about Ferrari, but for decades they have been one of the most aggressive auto manufacturers, in terms of asserting their intellectual property rights. Unauthorized use of the…
This year is the 60th anniversary of the Morris Mini-Minor and Austin Se7en, and the Goodwood Revival will feature some examples once owned by stars of the period, including the odd Beatle. The Mini was praised for being egalitarian, which fitted the mood of the time when social barriers were perceived to be crumbling and...
Anyone who has studied literature will know about footnotes and the glossary of terms because the language is constantly changing. When Charles Dickens referred to a “chairman” he did not mean a nabob on a board of directors, he meant a guy at one end of a sedan chair. As governments become ever more keen...
I have admired Tazio Nuvolari all my life and so has just about every other motor racing enthusiast of my generation. My friend Murray Walker, the British television Formula One commentator, often likes to say he saw the Flying Mantuan race, but I was born too late to enjoy such a spectacle. So I did the next best thing: I read everything I could about the diminutive Italian. But in spite of all that reading, one thing remained a mystery to me: the gold tortoise that became Nuvolari’s trademark. Of course, I knew the Italian poet and dramatist Gabriele D’Annunzio…
We are frequently told that Formula One is at the cutting edge of technology, but that has been true only occasionally, most recently with new heights being reached in the thermal efficiency of engines. This is something we cannot see and how it is achieved is something that not all of us can understand. Most...
Most people when launching a new product normally try to come up with a new name to reflect innovation. Then it comes to cars, however, there is a trend to resurrect a name from the past so we have had Allard, Connaught, Osca, Lea-Francis, Jensen, Invicta, Spyker, Ermini and that is just scratching the surface. It does not matter that the original went bust, sometimes several times and that is also the likely fate of the revival, people will revive defunct names. Sometimes, not always, the new project has bought the rights to the old name because old companies…
Tucked away in a little potato-farming town, 250 miles south east of Buenos Aires, is one of the most important motor racing museums in the world, a tribute to the little town of Balcarce from the man whose life story it tells. It is the Centro Tecnologico-Cultural y Museo del Automovilismo Juan Manuel Fangio, which...
What’s the single most important component, for maximal performance, on a racecar? The engine? Suspension? In the grand scheme of things it’s probably the checkbook(!), but that’s really outside of the car. As odd as it may seem, I’ve come to the conclusion that the racing seat probably contributes more to the success or failure of any given racecar than any other piece of equipment. Recently, I had the good fortune to get to test drive the fire-breathing, Quadrifoglio version of the Alfa Romeo Stelvio for a week. True, it is a street car, but with 500-plus horsepower and credentials…
This man was a motor racing whirlwind, journalist, author of seven motor sport books, vintage car fan, ran driving courses for the British police and was the founder, president or vice-president of some of the UK’s most prominent motoring and racing organizations. And he kept up that pace until he died at the age of...
Once upon a time in a bar…well, near a bar…I was talking to a couple who had just bought a new Bentley, a name so famous in motor racing circles that even I, not normally given to huge enthusiasm for motorway cruisers, started asking questions about the technical specs. “Actually,” the friend told me “until...