Fresh off its appearances at the 2023 24 Hours of Le Mans and the recent Le Mans Classic, the Mazda 787B will take center stage at the 2023 Goodwood Festival of Speed. This marks its return to the festival after an absence since 2015. As Goodwood commemorates the centenary of the inaugural running of the world’s most celebrated endurance race, the iconic Mazda 787B will join other esteemed Le Mans contenders and winners.

Highlights

• The 1991 Le Mans-winning Mazda 787B will be in action at the 2023 Goodwood Festival of Speed*.
• On Saturday 15th and Sunday 16th July, the Mazda 787B will be driven at Goodwood Festival of Speed by Johnny Herbert.
• With victory in 1991, Mazda became the first Japanese manufacturer to win the 24 Hours of Le Mans.

Drivers

The iconic Le Mans-winning car, adorned with the distinctive ‘Renown’ livery, will tackle the Goodwood hill climb throughout the Festival of Speed. Johnny Herbert, one of the triumphant drivers in the 1991 Le Mans race, will once again take the wheel alongside former Grand Prix driver Karun Chandhok and ex-Mazda IMSA factory driver Harry Tincknell, who will also have the opportunity to showcase their skills in the historic vehicle.

Rotary conquers Le Mans

The 1991 Le Mans victory represented a remarkable moment for Mazda’s rotary engine technology, which embodied the company’s relentless pursuit of innovation. When Johnny Herbert crossed the finish line on June 23, 1991, at 4 pm, it marked an extraordinary achievement. Mazda had not only become the first Japanese manufacturer to win the prestigious endurance race but had also captivated fans with the distinctive and ear-catching sound of its unique engine.

During its victorious campaign, the Mazda 787B completed 362 laps of the renowned French circuit with minimal maintenance. Across its 28 pit stops, the winning car only required a single oil top-up, a change of brake discs and pads, and a nose change. The 700bhp four-rotor R26B-powered 787B demonstrated the reliability, efficiency, and performance of Mazda’s rotary engine technology, relying mainly on fuel and tire replacements throughout the race.

The triumphant car was driven by Johnny Herbert, alongside fellow Formula One drivers Volker Weidler and Bertrand Gachot. Their race was relatively uneventful, with Weidler making impressive progress from the 787B’s starting position of 23rd on the grid. By 6 pm, car number 55 had climbed into the top ten, and at the halfway point of the race at 4 am, it was running in third place. With three hours remaining, the Mazda secured second place when the leading Mercedes-Benz encountered engine issues and retired from the race.

Overall victory for Japan

This turn of events left the number 55 Mazda 787B to continue its consistent performance and cross the finish line, clinching the overall victory for Japan. This achievement was particularly significant as Toyota and Nissan had been striving to win the prestigious race throughout the Group C era. However, it was Mazda, a relatively small manufacturer from Hiroshima, and its rotary engine that secured the first outright victory at Le Mans for a Japanese brand. Adding to the triumph, the Mazda 787B, designed by Nigel Stroud, became the first car with carbon brakes to win at Le Mans. The sister car, number 18, finished in sixth place, while the older number 56 Mazda 787 secured eighth place. Nevertheless, it was chassis number 002 of the Mazda 787B that etched its name in history with an exceptional overall victory at Le Mans.

More information HERE

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This Hustler is not an unsavory men’s magazine, nor is it Jackie Gleason playing a pool shark, nor a con artist, or even a hot Lotus Elan for that matter. The Hustler does look sexy like a Lotus Elan on steroids, and it moves right along as a sports car should, so this is no con job. The Hustler is a now scarce American-created sports car built by Ray Caldwell and his legendary race car company Autodynamics.

Today, vintage racer Bob Webber of Fairfield, Connecticut, own’s one of the few surviving Hustlers. Webber’s lemon-yellow Hustler has an interesting tale to tell.

The post The Hustler — 1967 Autodynamics Hustler appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

Caught napping by the Germans, who had been quicker to see the potential of the new rules, Alfa Romeo and Maserati introduced new and faster cars in 1935 that threatened to be sterner rivals in 1936. And the meteoric Bernd Rosemeyer was displaying uncommon skill at the wheel of his Auto Union. Major changes in the Mercedes-Benz equipment for the formula’s third year were clearly needed.

For 1936 the plan was to build an “SSK” version of the W25, a car that would be lower and shorter, especially at the rear. This would make it inherently lighter so it could be equipped with a new and more powerful engine without exceeding the weight limit. Conceived for this purpose by the Albert Heess engine group was a 60-degree V-12 using the same construction techniques as the M25 eight. Cylinder blocks were welded steel with integral four-valve heads. 

The first of these D-series engines was designated DAB because it had the same dimensions as the latest eight, the M25AB, 82 x 88 mm for 5,577 cc. The design office estimated that it would deliver 516 bhp on 2B fuel, the usual racing blend, and 598 bhp on W.W., pure alcohol.

In late summer of 1935 the first DAB engine was found disappointing, not in its power but in its weight. It scaled 650 pounds, almost 250 more than the various M25 eights. This only confirmed that the steel-cylinder construction, so suitable for the straight eights. After this discovery, dynamometer development of the DAB engine was slowed. In 1936 an early test report showed that it developed 570 bhp at 5,500 rpm, close enough for comfort to the design-office forecast.

In spite of the V-12 engine’s heft it was installed in a new 1936 chassis to find out if the resulting racer could be under the weight limit. Engineer Rudolf Uhlenhaut said that it could, but it was not well-enough balanced to be a successful road-racer: “Although the new car was within the 750-kilogram limit, it had too much weight at the front end. It was quite good for setting records on a straight road but quite unsuitable for the Nürburgring, for example.”

A straight-eight would have to be the solution. Jumping to the next letter of the alphabet, a decision was taken in mid-September 1935 to build an E-series engine, altering the letter/number sequence of its designation to make it the ME25.

By the end of November the Heess staff had completed work on this final expansion of the size of the original M25 engine within its 95-mm cylinder-bore spacing. Stroke, crankshaft, connecting rods and bottom end generally remained at the maximum to which they had already been stretched in the M25C while the bore was enlarged by 4 mm. Its dimensions were 86 x 102 mm for 4,740 cc. New cylinder forgings for this larger-bore engine allowed a valve-size increase to 37 mm. 

A new supercharger was designed with an enlargement in rotor diameter from 106 to 125 mm. Blowers of both 240-mm and 255-mm rotor lengths were prepared, the smaller one considered the standard size. They continued to use steel rotors while experiments with light-alloy rotors proceeded. New larger 36 mm intake-manifold sets were also readied for the ME25. The blower boosted through two carburetors and manifolds that were available in different diameters to tune the cars to specific circuits.

Orders were issued for the production of six of these new engines with six spare crankshafts, the parts to be ready on January 20, 1936 and dynamometer testing to begin on February 15^th. Though a late effort with a high element of risk, it was the only course open to the team. A later increase by four brought to ten the total of ME25 engines made. As a backup, all the available M25B and M25C engines were also made race ready for 1936.

M25C power units were used in tests to propel the first of the five new racing cars that were built, called the “Model 1936” or, more familiarly, the “short car”. The author prefers and uses the suitable designation of “W25K”. Two chassis were assembled and two were in component form in early October 1935 when testing began.

Ex-Benz man Max Wagner continued to direct the chassis-design side, directly under chief racing engineer Max Sailer and his still-youthful deputy, Fritz Nallinger. Seconded to Alfred Neubauer’s Sports Department to give liaison and technical assistance was an Untertürkheim veteran: ex-riding-mechanic Jakob Krauss.

The W25K incorporated several major changes. Its wheelbase was shortened by more than 10 inches to 97 inches, front and rear track remaining at 58 and 56 inches. This was made possible by a completely new transaxle design that had been in the works since the winter of 1934-35.

The new transaxle further lowered the car’s propeller shaft by placing the two gearbox shafts in a transverse plane below the final drive gears—a radical departure from the normal longitudinal shaft axis. Stacking these shafts one above the other and laterally beneath the differential cleared—for a lower-seated driver—the space ahead of the rear axle that the transmission formerly occupied.

The drive from the propeller shaft entered the gearbox at the center of its bottom shaft through a pair of bevel gears that could be varied one tooth or so either side of a one-to-one ratio. Four speeds and reverse were spaced along the two transmission shafts, to the left and right of the central bevel, still selected by sliding the gears into engagement with each other.

At the center of the upper shaft a pair of spur gears took the drive to the differential. These gears provided the normal ratio reduction, for example 3.69:1. On the W25K the differential choice was between a fully locked rear end, with no differential action at all, and the ZF self-locking cam-action diff.

First runs in the chassis took place in the late summer of 1935 in a W25-based mule at the ‘Ring and Bern circuit. They showed that the transaxle tended to become too warm. Attention was given both to its cooling, by means of ducting, and to its oil capacity, which initially was slightly more than half that of the 1935 transaxle. Monza trials also showed the need for a redesign giving higher torque capacity throughout the gearbox.

No longer were heavy pivots for swing axles attached to the sides of the differential. The W25K had an entirely new rear suspension. Toward the end of 1935 the W25 was finding it increasingly difficult to apply its steadily greater power to the ground. The shorter wheelbase of the W25K was intended to help by shifting more weight rearward.

The added power also aggravated another attribute of the earlier W25: if the rear end broke away in a corner it was extremely difficult to catch. The swing axles, judged at least partially at fault, were given up in favor of a design that worked well enough before: a solid axle.

It was a solid axle with a difference. To these Daimler and Benz men, with roots deep in the origins of motoring, it was an axle like those used on their Grand Prix models of 1908, like the racing Mercedes of 1913 and the Blitzen Benz. It was a dead axle, joining together wheels which were driven not by chains, this time, but by open shafts, each with two universal joints. It was an independent re-invention of what a later generation would come to call “de Dion” rear suspension after the French producer that used it in production models in the early years of the century.

The axle was fabricated of steel tubing in the shape of a broad-topped Y. The upper arms of the Y reached out, in plan view, to the wheel hubs, while the tail extended rearward to a ball pivot anchored to the rear end of the frame. The latter tapered inward to a point at that junction. This pivot was a critically important location point, taking both braking torque and transmission-drive thrust.

This unique de Dion configuration was adopted, said Rudolf Uhlenhaut later, because “Mr. Wagner wanted a good-looking car.” This was achieved so well that the dead axle was completely concealed. Indeed many observers still believe that Mercedes-Benz adopted the de Dion axle for racing in 1937 rather than 1936. It only became visible, in a new configuration, in 1937.

An additional means of guiding the solid axle was needed to cope with the lateral forces experienced in cornering. This guidance was supplied by a vertical fin fixed to the back of the transaxle casing. Within the crotch of the axle Y, riding up and down the sides of this fin, were two rubber-faced rollers attached to the axle tube.

Under the supervision of Dr. Maruhn, a theoretician who ran a general research department at Untertürkheim, a rig was built to test the rollers for durability. Under moderate load the first one lasted only 12 minutes. During tests of the first car at Monza in December they continued to be troublesome, leading to suggestions for armoring the rubber, enlarging the rollers and isolating the guide fin from the heat of the differential.

During the 1936 season the rollers were abandoned in favor of a steel-sided slot in the back of the transaxle, in which slid a bronze block attached to the crotch of the axle Y by a projecting ball pivot. This would set a style for de Dion lateral guidance that would last well into the 1950s.

Quarter-elliptic leaf springs with friction shock absorbers were retained at the rear of the chassis. The latter was founded on an extensively lightened box-section frame like that of the 1935 model. The front suspension was carried over almost unchanged within its tubular crossmember. Thanks to all the changes, especially the new transmission, the car’s center of gravity was lowered a remarkable 5.9 inches.

Brakes, to which screened cooling-air inlets and outlets were added during 1935, were also transferred to the W25K. For better cooling the rear-brake vents were fitted with a coarser mesh screen. Drums were given finer finning. Each brake was equipped with two grades of Iurid lining corresponding to the different workloads of the two shoes.

Designed by Josef Müller, the new body wrapped around this radically lowered car had an almost circular cross section, a long, slim tail and deep fairings concealing the front suspension and the adventurous new rear suspension. It was one of the handsomest racing cars ever built. When the cars first appeared for a presentation at the Berlin Auto Show in February they had a single oval radiator air entry. After testing this was supplemented by two additional grilles in the front fairings.

The left-hand grille was enlarged early in 1936 to accommodate an oil cooler, fitted to a Mercedes-Benz G.P car for the first time. It was judged so successful that oil coolers were added to the 1935 cars that were being carried over to the new season. Exhaust piping was newly positioned down at ground level, sweeping back on the left below the rear axle.

One reason the 1935 W25s were still on hand, apart from their value as training and backup cars, was that the cockpit of the shortened Model 1936 was so tight that Manfred von Brauchitsch couldn’t drive it comfortably. “In a car calculated down to the gram,” said Alfred Neubauer, “additional reserves for an extra-large driver are naturally impossible.” Offered one of the older cars for the season, Manfred instead contrived to squeeze himself into the new one except in the Eifelrennen, in which he drove a modified 1935 car.

After the first trials, changes were made to the body to give the drivers more protection from the wind. One W25K went to the Zeppelin wind tunnel at Friedrichshafen for an aerodynamic evaluation. Monza tests showed the need for an enlargement of both the main grille opening and the radiator itself.

All these early tests were carried out with M25C engines. In late February the first ME25 went on one of Georg Scheerer’s two dynamometers for a durability test. Its uncorrected output was 430 bhp on the normal fuel blend, equal to 449 bhp at 5,000 rpm with the standard corrections applied.

With a compression ratio of 8.65:1 and the 255-mm-long supercharger the ME25 gave its best-ever power of 473 bhp at 5,800 rpm, recorded during the Summer of 1936. Its typical output as prepared for racing with the 240-mm blower and a compression ratio of 8.17:1 was 453 bhp at 5,800 rpm with maximum torque of 465 lb-ft at 3,000 rpm. This was achieved on a boost pressure of 14.5 psi, exactly 1.0 bar.

Output was excellent from an engine that was even lighter than the M25C at 465 pounds. For the first time a Mercedes-Benz racing engine produced more than one horsepower per pound.

To spectators at Monte Carlo on April 13 for the first Grand Prix of 1936 nothing seemed to have changed except the smooth shape of the silver cars on the front row of the grid. Caracciola tiptoed through a rainy race to win after most of his teammates were sidelined by crashed at the chicane.

Not until they arrived at the fast, hot Tripoli circuit in May did the drivers have a chance to extend fully the W25K with its new ME25 engine. Comparing it with the same engine in the 1935 chassis and body, albeit with slightly different gear ratios, both had the same 175-mph maximum speed.

Caracciola complained of understeer, which was reduced by replacing the locked differential with a ZF unit.  The drivers were generally dissatisfied with both the roadholding and the steering, which still mustered a strong steering-wheel kick-back.

Technically the Tripoli race was as inconclusive as Monaco. One of the 255 mm blowers failed in practice so all the cars were switched to the 240 mm unit for the race. One car, that of new man Louis Chiron—a Monegasque and a close friend of Caracciola—suffered minor troubles that retired it.

The uncomfortable Manfred stopped on the circuit when his tank failed to feed all its fuel, a problem noted in the Monza trials but not rectified. And both Fagioli and Caracciola lost their front brakes after a pipe failure caused by the new mounting of the front-circuit master cylinder on the right-rear engine bearer.

The drivers found their cars very sensitive to the windy conditions on race day. Observing out on the course, Jakob Krauss thought they looked less steady on the turns than the Auto Unions. “Perhaps,” mused Neubauer afterward, “the longer chassis is better for fast courses.” 

A victory was achieved in another race in North Africa, at Tunis, when the leading Auto Unions crashed and burned. It was the last win to fall to Rudy Caracciola and the W25K Mercedes Benz.

At Barcelona Nuvolari’s Alfa beat the new cars in a straight fight. Here the sharp pitching tendency of the shorter chassis was especially bothersome. Pitching was also a problem at the subsequent Eifelrennen that saw all but two of the cars retiring and those finishing well back. Engine trouble struck there and in the subsequent race at Budapest, where all the Mercedes-Benzes failed.

The new engine, pushed hard at last, had shown a critical frailty. Cylinders in the forward block were too weak to handle the high specific output and had begun to fail. First the existing parts were strengthened, then completely new cylinders and blocks were made for the all-important German Grand Prix in late July. Before that race several of the engines were switched from 240 mm to 255 mm superchargers, two of which subsequently broke. Chiron crashed and one car limped home sixth.

After such a run of disasters any sporting team determined to be victorious would call a rapid halt and make some changes. So too it was with Daimler-Benz. The organization that had served it so well since automobile racing began was apparently no longer equal to the pace and intensity of Grand Prix racing in the 1930s.

The liaison between Alfred Neubauer’s Sports Department and the engineers in the central design office had always been direct. This changed with the creation of a new technical body that was specifically concerned with the racing cars. An offshoot of the Experimental Separtment, it was called the Rennabteilung, the Racing Department.

Placed in charge of it was a handsome young man who had been with the company only five years. Born of a German father and British mother, he had joined Daimler-Benz directly from engineering school as a carburetion specialist in the Experimental Department. The young man, whose arrival on the scene can only be described as marking a turning point in the racing history of Daimler-Benz, was Rudolf Uhlenhaut.

Uhlenhaut’s new group was made fully responsible for assembling, preparing and testing the cars, then turning them over to Neubauer’s sporting department for racing. Reporting directly to Fritz Nallinger, who headed the main Experimental Department, he was assigned the services of Jakob Krauss in charge of car construction and Georg Scheerer as head of testing and inspection. 

“Naturally we had a good design office,” Uhlenhaut said, “but the people there were cautious and our opinions often differed. However, if I wanted something I said so and they would generally let me have it.” He and his colleagues said what they wanted in their recommendations and requirements, expressed from mid-1936 onward in a blizzard of reports, memos and analyses generated by the new Rennabteilung.

It was too late to do much about the W25K, which Uhlenhaut tested extensively at the Nürburgring. Race entries at Montenero and Pescara were abandoned to try to get the cars ready for the Swiss G.P. on August 23^rd. There Fagioli broke a connecting rod, Caracciola broke the right side of his rear-axle tube and von Brauchitsch had cooling failure initiated by a piece of newspaper caught in front of the grille. Newcomer Hermann Lang eked out a finish in fourth place.

Caracciola had taken and held the lead—until Rosemeyer motored past him. “The drivers declared themselves as by and large satisfied with the roadholding, with empty as well as with full tanks,” Uhlenhaut recorded. “In this race it was clearly evident that the power of the Auto Union in the middle and upper speed ranges is far superior. To be able to hold the pace to some extent our drivers must constantly strain the engine to the limit and moreover attempt to gain back in the turns what they lose on the straights.

“A further participation in racing with the E motor seems to be useless,” Uhlenhaut concluded. Daimler-Benz management agreed with him. Entries for the Italian Grand Prix, the European season’s final event, were withdrawn. It was a heavy decision for the proud company. But the light shined on the technology of racing by Uhlenhaut’s new group would bring brilliant results in coming years.

The post Disappointing Arrow — 1936 Mercedes-Benz W25K appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

At Watkins Glen they said, “It looks like the box it came in.” Even that harsh judgement of the appearance of the new Chaparral 2J may have been too generous. However, handsome is as handsome does and in its astonishing way the 2J did handsomely.

A World Champion was sufficiently impressed with its concept to drive the Chaparral 2J at Watkins Glen in 1970 and set a fastest lap while running in very fast company. Although the 2J did not last long enough to get close to winning, it showed great potential and restored its developer, Jim Hall, to his well-earned status of the Wizard Technician of Group 7 racing. In the rest of the 1970 Can-Am season it revealed phenomenal pace.

The post The Astonishing Chaparral 2J appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

Much like other drivers that suddenly announced their retirements, it seems that Seb, as he’s affectionately known to friends and fans alike, decided to pull the plug while still achieving moderate success and bow out in a dignified fashion after over a decade in the sport to spend more time with his kids and extended family.

As he is one of the winningest champions at the pinnacle of motorsport, it is only appropriate that—as this chapter of his life closes and a future where he can focus on his family and other interests opens—we look back at just what made Seb one of the best ever.

This is a profile filled with examples of natural skill, heated moments with teammates and opponents alike, and some amazing drives that closed out the final years of the V8 era of Formula One with a bang. Quite hotheaded for a German (who are usually seen as calm, collected drivers on the F1 grid), Vettel’s career can be equally defined as explosive and determined, and we will explore all aspects of it.

Sebastian Vettel’s Early Years

Karting

Sebastian Vettel was born on July 3, 1987, in the sleepy countryside town of Heppenheim (Bergstraße), in the Hesse state of what was known then as West Germany, as the second youngest of four, with a younger brother and two olders sisters. While not the most affluent of families, the Vettels realized after putting him in a kart at the age of three in 1990 just for fun that he had a serious natural talent for driving, and they focused on registering Sebastian for local karting events and drop-in races.

By the time he was four, he was winning karting events, and became a fervent fan of what he dubs as the “Three Michaels:” Michael Jackson, Michael Jordan, and Michael Schumacher. He was fully intent on becoming a singer like his idol Jackson, until he realized that he enjoyed karting quite a lot (and that he also didn’t quite have a singing voice that would make him a pop star).

Instead, due to his natural talent and raw speed, in 1994, a seven year old Seb won a seriously competitive karting competition, with the grand prize being a meet and greet with Michael Schumacher.

This was his first encounter with one of his heroes, and despite the saying of “never meet your heroes,” 1994 was also the year that Schumacher won his first World Driver’s Championship. To a young Sebastian, he was an inspiration to both push hard for what he wanted—which was to win, but to also remain humble as possible, as Schumacher dedicated his first title to the man that was his main rival, the recently passed Ayrton Senna, for the trophy.

In 1997, at the age of 10, Vettel moved to the professional leagues and won both the DMV Karting Championship and the NRW German Championships back-to-back. Of course, this drew the attention of professional scouts for the newly formed junior academies of major Formula One teams, and in 1998 at age eleven, he was signed to the Red Bull Junior Academy.

With some serious backing behind his name now, Sebastian was able to move up to international karting events, and continued to win races. The highlight of his karting career, however, was his victory in 2001 at the Junior Monaco Kart Cup, racing in the top tier KF3 super karts.

This was a milestone for Vettel, as the kart track uses the entire lower half of the Monaco Grand Prix circuit, and was sanctioned by the Automobile Club de Monaco, who also run the entire Grand Prix weekend for Formula One. It was also an international cup overseen by the FIA, as it was one of the most prestigious karting cups you could win before moving to higher category open wheelers.

Formula BMW, Formula 3, & Formula Renault

In 2003, with support from Red Bull, Vettel was able to enter open-wheeled Formula car competition and joined the German Formula BMW ADAC series. He was placed in the Eifelland Racing Team and partnered with Andreas Wirth, a future endurance car professional racer. Despite Wirth being in his second season of Formula BMW, Vettel outmatched him at almost every event, consistently driving faster and qualifying higher.

In fact, during his rookie season, Vettel finished second in the Formula BMW ADAC Championship with five wins, five poles, and twelve podiums in nineteen races. Maximilian Götz, a future ADAC GT and FIA World Endurance champion, was the only driver to beat him.

2004, however, was the year that Sebastian Vettel made himself known as a seriously fast, destined-for-the-big-show driver. Switching to the Berlin-Brandenburg team, Vettel’s sophomore season was a display of utter domination, leaving every other driver in the field in the dust.

In a twenty race season, he won eighteen, and he was on the podium for the other two that he did not win. At that time in the FIA rankings, Formula BMW ADAC was akin to national Formula 4 series, and as the champion, Vettel had the option of moving up the FIA ladder.

The Next Step: Formula 3

He did so in 2005, signing to the German ASL Mücke Motorsport Formula 3 Euro Series team. As the cars were much faster, much more aero dependent, and much higher tech than the Formula BMW cars, Vettel struggled throughout the first half of the season to produce strong results.

He was consistently in the midfield, however, and after getting to grips with how much more finesse the F3 cars took to drive seriously fast, he was able to return to a front running position, often challenging a young British driver by the name of Lewis Hamilton for race wins. In the end, he scored five podiums from twenty races, while Hamilton went on to be the 2005 F3 Euro Series champion.

A highlight of his 2005 season was being invited to participate in two of the most prestigious F3 races in the world: the Macau Grand Prix and the Masters of Formula 3. At Macau, Vettel showed absolute determination and skill, coming in third behind Lucas di Grassi (2010 Virgin F1 Team driver and 2016 Formula E champion) and a young Polish wunderkind, Robert Kubica. At the Masters of Formula 3 event, however, he got mired in the midfield and finished a respectable, if midfield, eleventh place.

His performance did impress, however, and he was given a test day with the Williams Formula One Team later on in 2005 for his performance in the Formula BMW series, and after he won the Rookie Cup for F3 with 63 total points, the highest scoring rookie, he was invited to test with BMW Sauber Formula One. During both tests, he showed immense natural feel and speed with both cars, and was lapping within a few seconds of the professional F1 drivers for each team by the end of both test days.

This raw speed and feel for the car saw Vettel get his foot in the door in 2006 with BMW Sauber, as he was signed as their official test driver, while also participating in the 2006 Formula 3 championship. Not satisfied with just the test driver position and Formula 3, Sebastian also entered the European Formula Renault 3.5 Series, at that time a direct feeder series to Formula One.

He showed immense pace in Formula 3, trading the points lead in the championship with future F1 driver Paul Di Resta almost every race weekend. When he was put in the more powerful Formula Renault car, however, he blitzed the field, taking the win and second place in the first two races at Misano.

Reality Comes Crashing Down

It was during the 2006 Formula Renault 3.5 Series race at the legendary Spa-Francorchamps, however, that the first bite of the true dangers of racing hit Sebastian full force. In the front half of the pack during the first race of the weekend, Vettel was pushing hard, showing his pace and talent, when an accident happened in front as the cars crested Radillon after the famous Eau Rouge corner.

The crash resulted in shards of carbon fiber being scattered everywhere, and by pure chance, one of the airborne pieces of carbon fiber sliced across his knuckles, nearly severing his right index finger. The injury was serious enough that he was withdrawn from Formula Renault, and it was expected that he would be out of the cockpit for months.

The video of the crash does involve, well, a crash, so viewer discretion is advised—and instead of embedding the video, we’ll simply link to it here: Sebastian Vettel 2006 Injury At Spa.

To everyone’s surprise, seven days later at the Masters of Formula 3 at Zandvoort, the Netherlands, Vettel showed up with his finger wrapped in a flexible cast, and subsequently placed sixth in the race. He continued racing for the remainder of the 2006 F3 season, but due to his injury, was not able to match his pace from the first half of the year, which ultimately saw him come second in the championship.

Formula One: A Rough Start

The Call

2007 started off for Sebastian Vettel like many before him, with him entering a series and showing utter domination from the word “go”. For this season, he elected to participate in Formula Renault 3.5 full time, and won the German round at the Nurburgring. He was steaming ahead of the field in points, easily in command of the championship, when what many F1 drivers simply say is “the call” came.

At the 2007 Canadian Grand Prix, BMW Sauber driver Robert Kubica went through what was one of the most violent crashes that had been seen in the sport for nearly a decade, getting bumped off the track at nearly 180 MPH, hitting an access road that caused his front wheels to lift into the air, and smashing nose first into the inner barrier before the famous hairpin at Circuit Gilles Villeneuve.

The car literally shattered into pieces, the only not breaking apart being the extremely robust safety cell that surrounds the driver. After tumbling, spinning, and being exposed to high g-forces, as well as sustaining minor injuries to his feet, Kubica was out of competition for the foreseeable future.

As such, when it came time for BMW Sauber to travel to the next round at Indianapolis, they called Vettel up to the team. Although he had taken part in free practice sessions in 2006 for BMW Sauber, this was his first call up to the top tier of motorsports.

Despite the buzz surrounding his call-up, Vettel remained calm and provided a mature drive for the 2007 US Grand Prix, qualifying seventh and finishing a respectable eighth. This made him, at 19 years and 354 days, the youngest ever points-scoring driver in Formula One—a record he held for many years.

Red Bull/Toro Rosso

This performance showed that Vettel had the ability and skill to handle a Formula One car at race pace for an entire weekend and provide results. Still a member of the Red Bull Junior team, BMW Sauber and Red Bull Formula One came to an agreement shortly after the US Grand Prix, and Sebastian was released from BMW Sauber to be immediately signed to Toro Rosso, Red Bull’s junior and development team. He replaced the American driver Scott Speed, who had been released after the US Grand Prix for not providing expected results and being given all the chances he could have had.

This was it. This was the promotion to a team under the Red Bull banner he had been working towards for nearly a decade, and he finally had made it. But be it from youthful enthusiasm or coming to terms with the fact that his dream was “really happening,” at the rain-soaked 2007 Japanese Grand Prix at the Fuji International Circuit, things nearly came undone for him.

After working his way up to third behind Red Bull’s Mark Webber and the McLaren of race leader Lewis Hamilton, he lost focus for a moment during a safety car period and crashed into Webber, forcing both cars into retirement. This would have been Toro Rosso’s maiden podium, and one of Webber’s up-until-then best finishes—and with one mistake, he wiped out two nearly guaranteed podium finishes for the Red Bull camp.

Vettel’s One Weakness: The Temper Starts to Show

To say that Mark Webber was, in a word, “pissed” about Vettel’s mistake is an understatement. He did not hold back any criticism, and even went as far as to say that he thought that Vettel had been moved into Formula One too early. He was given a ten-place grid penalty for the following round at the Chinese Grand Prix—however that penalty was nullified after eyewitness video showed that Hamilton might have not been following correct safety car procedures, causing Webber to slow down, with the domino effect of the distracted Vettel hitting him.

Despite this, it seemed that Vettel’s confidence was shaken, and he qualified a dismal seventeenth. Yet, once the five red lights went out, the raw talent surged through. In a race of mixed conditions, Vettel moved all the way up the field to finish fourth, which caused Red Bull owner Dietrich Mateshitz to make the ultimately prophetic statement that he thought Sebastian would be a world champion in the next five years.

Despite being billed as intelligent, mature, and extremely involved in the technical side and small details of tuning the car to his driving style, the young German also started to show that he was, at times, quick to anger and that he had a particular temper. It is expected, to say the least, that when you’re one of the twenty best drivers in the world, your ego can be about as big as a hot air balloon, but most drivers keep it under control.

This would come to the fore in the first four races of 2008, where Vettel scored four consecutive DNF’s (Did Not Finish), with retirements in the first lap for three of them. He was shown on TV broadcasts as throwing his fists around after hopping out of the car in frustration, and he was very brusque with the media. This famously got him in a bit of hot water with the Red Bull team, and after a “consultation” with the team bosses, he was much calmer at the Turkish Grand Prix, although again he seemed to lose confidence, finishing fourteenth.

Once again, after a confidence shakeup, Vettel returned to form at the 6th round of 2008, the Monaco Grand Prix. A track that is notoriously difficult to pass on, Vettel qualified seventeenth, yet was able to finish the race in fifth, scoring his first points of the year.

At the following race at Valencia, Spain, it seemed that something had been switched on in Sebastian, causing Toro Rosso’s technical director, Giorgio Ascanelli, to comment that suddenly Vettel had figured out how to drive a Formula One car consistently fast. This would again prove to be a prophetic statement, as the Toro Rosso Miracle was but a few months away.

2008 Italian Grand Prix

Monza. The Temple of Speed. The second fastest circuit that Formula One visits after Spa-Francorchamps. The holy ground of the Ferrari Tifosi, where the prancing horse is venerated and any Italian team that scores a point there is applauded. As Toro Rosso is Italian for Red Bull, and the team was based just down the road from Monza, it was a popular car with a seriously fast young star driver.

Of course, Monza is all of those things listed above when it is dry. However, the 2008 Grand Prix weekend was plagued by rain, and a wet track separates the great drivers from the legendary ones. Imagine everyone’s surprise, then, when during a rain soaked qualifying session, at 21 years and 72 days old, Sebastian became the youngest driver to ever achieve pole position, a record he holds to this day.

When it came race time on the Grand Prix Sunday, the torrential rain saw one of the few safety car starts of a Grand Prix. Because of his vantage point of being in pole position and not buried in the rooster tail spray from the extreme wet weather tires, Vettel catapulted away from the field and led the race nearly the entire way through.

In a mature drive that saw speed balanced with exceptional car control in the most challenging of conditions, Vettel crossed the finish line in first, 12.5 seconds ahead of the second place McLaren of Heikki Kovalainen.

At 21 years and 73 days old, Sebastian Vettel was the youngest driver to win a Formula One Grand Prix event, a record he held for 8 years. It was dubbed the Toro Rosso Miracle, “the race that was,” a coming-of-age for both the very young team and the young driver.

In fact, after Toro Rosso boss Gerhard Berger commented that Vettel could not only win races, but was destined to win championships, the German media gave him the nickname of “Baby Schumi,” a name he had no problem accepting as Schumacher was one of his childhood heroes. This race also saw the beginning of one of Vettel’s more controversial celebrations, where he would raise his right index finger—the one that was nearly severed—and emphatically pump his fist around.

At the end of the 2008 season, Toro Rosso had been cemented as a viable team, Vettel had proven to be a natural talent and a race winner, and subsequently he was named the 2008 Rookie of the Year at the Autosport Awards. However, as the saying goes, the story had just begun.

Red Bull & The Rise of the Champion

2009 & Leading the Charge

After David Coulthard retired at the end of the 2008 season, Vettel was promoted to the main Red Bull team—on the back of his 2008 Toro Rosso campaign giving the first win and the first pole position for the junior team since its inception.

The 2009 RB5 was an absolute beast of a car, with a screaming V8 engine revving to 18,000 RPM, and unlike many of the cars that were eligible, it did not run the new KERS (Kinetic Energy Recovery System) hybrid drive. It was as if the car and Sebastian had been made for each other, and he proved to be immediately a front runner the instant he first turned a wheel in anger on a track.

At the first round in Australia, Vettel was on track to place second, a podium in his first outing for the main team, when he crashed out after colliding with Robert Kubica as the two fought over second place. Two races later, at the 2009 Chinese Grand Prix, he went on to qualify in pole position, the first pole for Red Bull, as well as lead almost all of the race laps, giving Red Bull their first win in F1.

Vettel would go on to win at Silverstone, Red Bull’s home grand prix at the time, to the delight of the team and fans alike. At the Japanese Grand Prix, Vettel scored the second ever Red Bull pole position, and dominated the race, leading every lap to come home in first.

At the first ever final round Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, he won that race, and through his efforts across the season, came in second in the driver’s championship to Jenson Button. The Constructors Championship was also very tight, with Brawn GP, which would become Mercedes-AMG GP in 2010, beating Red Bull by just 18.5 points.

2010: The Year It All Came Together

2010 was a banner year for Formula One. With the birth of Mercedes-AMG GP, seven-time world champion and fellow German Michael Schumacher came out of retirement as the highest profile signing in many years to give the team an experienced, albeit older, driver as their lead.

The son of World Champion Keke Rosberg, Nico, was signed as the second driver for the team, forming an all-German ownership and driving team. Another driver named Nico also entered Formula One in 2010, the much loved “Hulk,” Nico Hulkenberg, who would go on to be one of the most successful drivers to never win a race (and a definite fan favorite).

It was also the year that saw the expansion of the points system to its modern style, with 25 points awarded for a win, 18 for second, 15 for third, and so on down to 1 for tenth, which allowed for more drivers to establish themselves as point scoring racers. What most teams had not counted on, however, was the fact that Red Bull Racing, using the award money from coming in second in the Constructors Championship, had developed one of the most dominant and technologically advanced F1 cars seen since the legendary Ferrari F2004, the RB6.

Sebastian immediately put the car on pole at the first round of 2010 in Bahrain, and led most of the race until a spark plug failure caused a misfire, and he dropped back to fourth. At the second round in Australia, Vettel again placed the RB6 on pole, but retired from the race on lap 26 after a brake failure sent him spinning off into a gravel trap. It was also in Australia that he was appointed as director of the newly reformed Grand Prix Drivers Association, as he had no qualms about being outspoken and direct.

His first win of the season came at the third round in Malaysia, where Mark Webber had secured pole with a brilliant and brave switch to slicks as the often rain soaked track was drying near the end of qualifying, with Vettel putting his RB6 in third. At the start of the race, he powered past Nico Rosberg in second, and moved inside Webber at the first turn to take the lead, and there was no looking back from there. With Webber coming in second, this was the first 1-2 finish in Red Bull Racing’s history.

Despite the successes, there was a rift starting to grow between Webber and Vettel, with the older, more experienced Australian, who was technically the primary driver of the team, feeling like the young upstart German was taking unnecessary risks to get to the front of a race, including passing dangerously close to Webber on multiple occasions. Despite the low-boiling animosity, the two were able to still race cleanly at the Spanish GP, with Webber first and Vettel third, and chalking up another 1-2 at the next round in Monaco, with Webber finally winning at the legendary race and performing his now classic backflip into the pool atop Red Bull’s paddock suite.

Despite both drivers being in good spirits about Monaco, the rift was firmly and permanently sealed in place at the next round in Turkey. As Webber had often commented, the two Red Bulls were running comfortably in first and second, with Webber in the lead, when Vettel made a dive-bomb passing move to take the lead of the race… or at least that was his intention. Instead, he crashed into Webber, spinning out of the race with Webber screaming on the team radio to the pit wall about Vettel’s impetuousness and impatience. Mark was able to continue, but would have to nurse home the RB6 with minor damage, dropping down to finish third.

Neither driver took responsibility for the collision, with Webber insistent that Vettel had tried to force a pass that was never going to work. Vettel countered that Webber had moved his car to block him, and the two never truly saw eye to eye after that.

They would trade wins and podiums throughout the rest of the first half of the season, both garnering enough points to be almost even in the top four spots of the drivers championship, mixed in with Fernando Alonso and Lewis Hamilton. During the second half of the season, however, a resurgent Ferrari with Alonso and new updates for the McLaren of Hamilton saw both those drivers win multiple races, with the Red Bulls often in second, third, and a couple of times not even on the podium.

By the time the season wound its way to the final race at Abu Dhabi, any one of Webber, Vettel, Alonso, or Hamilton could win the title if they won the race. Red Bull Racing was already the Constructor’s Champions with a solid showing at the previous round in Brazil, but coming into the final race, Vettel was 15 points behind Alonso, 7 points ahead of Webber, and if all three of them retired from the race and Hamilton won, he had a chance to take the title.

The race was a seesaw battle between Button, Webber, Hamilton, Vettel and Alonso, although with some excellent strategy calls from the pit wall, Vettel emerged from his final pit stop outside of any real challenge for the win of the race, with a ten second gap as he crossed the finish line to second place Lewis Hamilton, third place Jensen Button with the two most dangerous challengers, Alonso and Webber, finishing in seventh and eighth respectively.

Once the pit wall had confirmed that Vettel had enough points, firstly, Vettel’s race engineer confirmed the places as they finished, then called out “DU BIST WELTMEISTER!” Christian Horner, team principal at Red Bull, keyed up the radio next and spoke his now famous line, “Sebastian Vettel, you are the world champion!”

All the prophetic statements by all of the personnel over the years at both Toro Rosso and Red Bull Racing came true in an instant, and at 23 years and 134 days old, Sebastian Vettel became the youngest World Drivers Champion in the history of F1, a record that has not been broken since 2010.

Title Defense & Three More Years Back-to-Back

Vettel started the 2011 season with strong wins at both Australia and Malaysia, coming in second place at the Chinese Grand Prix third round as his radio was broken and he couldn’t communicate his tire wear to the team effectively. He also won rounds four and five, before his radio failed again at the sixth round in Monaco.

The pit crew were not ready when he entered the pit lane for new tires, which led to him both having a slow stop as well as being sent out on the wrong set of tires. He was able to hold Fernando Alonso and Jensen Button behind him until the race was red flagged near the end, allowing him to change tires under the red flag rules and subsequently win the race.

He came second at the Canadian Grand Prix. At the European Grand Prix at Valencia, the FIA implemented a ban on engine mappings, which many saw as a thinly veiled attempt to reel in Vettel’s massive points lead. Sebastian responded by recording his first hat trick of the season, with pole position, fastest lap, and the race win.

Another rule change at the next round at Silverstone targeted the blown diffuser aerodynamic device, which Red Bull had pioneered for 2011 and was achieving great success with. Despite the change, Vettel was able to hold off teammate Webber, who had ignored team orders and was pushing to take second place off of Seb. That second place marked another entry in the record books where a driver had placed no worse than second in the first nine races in the season, winning six of those races.

Vettel would finish fourth at his home Grand Prix in Germany, second at Hungary, and then was back on the top step at Spa-Francorchamps. He tied Ayrton Senna when he nabbed his tenth pole position in Italy, being only the second driver to have taken ten pole positions in two separate seasons, and he won from pole without much challenge.

A win at the next round in Singapore put him mathematically within reach of securing the title, and with a second place at the following round in Japan, he had accumulated enough points and was declared the champion with a shocking five races left in the season, marking him the youngest back-to-back champion in the sport’s history as well as the youngest to win two titles. With a win at the next race in Korea, he also joined Michael Schumacher as the only other driver at the time to win more than ten races in consecutive seasons.

At the end of 2011, Vettel claimed the record for the most pole positions in a season at fifteen, as well as racking up eleven wins, seventeen podiums from nineteen races, and a record setting 392 points in a season.

2012 was a bit of a different beast, which saw multiple drivers gaining ground and a highly competitive season unfold. At the Malaysian round, Vettel’s temper would once again get frayed after a collision with backmarker Narain Karthikeyan caused him to finish outside of the points. He snapped after the race, calling him “an idiot and a cucumber.”

By the time the season had reached the summer break, he was fifth in the driver’s standings and looking like he might not make it to a third title. It was, in fact, a deficit of 39 points to Ferrari’s Alonso with seven rounds remaining that was making things look grim.

What happened next is one of those second halves of a season drivers dream about. He won at Singapore, took a hat trick at the Japanese Grand Prix, and surged to within 4 points of Alonso as the latter retired during the race. Wins in Korea and India saw him return to the top of the standings, and by the time the season came to the final round at Interlagos in Brazil, he had a 13 point cushion over Alonso.

Things looked bad, however, when a first lap collision with Bruno Senna sent him spinning off the track and to last place. With a heroic drive, he recovered to sixth place to win the title by a scant three points—one of the narrowest margins a title has been decided by.

This placed Sebastian in rarefied air, joining names like Schumacher and Fangio as a triple title winner, as well as being the youngest triple consecutive title winner—a record he still holds to this day.

2013: Multi-21 & The Fall from Grace

By 2013, there was no denying that Sebastian Vettel was one of the best drivers to sit in a Formula One car. Yet, his title defenses and wins had been marred by his often explosive criticisms of other drivers, his single finger fist pumps that had started out innocently but were getting more and more in the face of other drivers as he did them, and his temper sometimes getting the better of him. It was after a third place finish at the opening round in Australia that the now infamous “Multi-21” incident happened at the second round in Malaysia.

Teammate Mark Webber had never won the Malaysian Grand Prix, and as the race unfolded, he held the lead on the road, with a hard charging Vettel closing in on him in second place. Sebastian made several dangerous passing attempts, coming close to contact with Webber on multiple occasions, which caused the Australian to radio the pit wall to literally ask what Vettel was doing.

In a now famous radio message, Red Bull told Vettel to go to engine mode “Multi-21, Multi-Two-One.” There was no such combination of knobs and dials on the steering wheel to set such a mode, however—as it was code for team orders to hold position and to not pressure Webber so that he could go for the win and Red Bull would get a 1-2 finish.

However, Sebastian blatantly defied team orders, to the point that he used KERS deployment and DRS (Drag Reduction System) on the front straight-on lap 46 to slipstream Webber and try to slingshot around him. Webber, incensed, closed the door and pushed Vettel to within a few inches of the pit wall while both were screaming down the road at over 180 MPH.

Four corners later, Vettel was able to cut around the inside of Webber to take the lead. This prompted the team principal, Christian Horner, to cut over the radio in a rare direct order and say “This is silly, Seb. Come on!” in the hopes he would obey team orders and return the place to Webber. Webber famously came on the radio and in a very dark tone reported “That’s good teamwork, yep”, with his rage barely restrained.

Vettel would go on to win the race, and further infuriating Webber, did his typical fists-pumping-in-the-air victory motions from the cockpit. This caused Webber to accelerate and cut across the front of Sebastian with mere inches to spare, which caused Vettel to have to brake hard during his celebrations.

After the two had climbed from their cars and were in the cool-down room before the podium ceremony, a visibly furious Webber looked at Vettel and simply said “Multi-21, Seb. Yeah. Multi-21.” During the post race press interviews, Webber was close to smashing the table every time he put down his water glass, and as soon as the interviews were done, tore from the room and headed straight to Horner.

This single incident permanently soured the already rocky relationship between the teammates, and Horner called an extremely rare sit down with each driver separately that night. He explained to Webber that he had been known to push to the boundaries of team orders, something Webber did have to relent on. The more vicious criticism was reserved for Vettel, though, explaining to him that he had taken a rare win away from Webber, who had been in the sport for a decade and only won a handful of races, and that in doing so he had not only hurt the teams image, he had also acted selfishly and egotistically.

Vettel, properly mollified after the full impact of his actions resonated in that he had done his teammate a serious wrong, flew back to the Red Bull Racing factory in the UK, where Webber was, and offered a full apology, which Webber accepted… barely. Vettel was not reprimanded by the team, albeit his management team had brought in lawyers in case any punishments were administered.

After Webber’s comments about Vettel’s racecraft emerged in the media, by the time the Chinese Grand Prix came around three weeks later, Sebastian would provide the most scathing withdrawal of his apology he could to the media: “Obviously I realized at that moment there was quite a conflict. On the one hand, I am the kind of guy who respects team decisions and on the other hand, probably Mark is not the one who deserved to win at the time. The bottom line is I was racing, I was faster, I passed him, I won.”

This caused such an uproar that Red Bull CEO and founder Dietrich Mateschitz personally called Mark Webber when he was between races back home in Australia to get a first hand oral and written account of what had happened. Rumors began to circulate that Webber might not hold his seat for much longer, which were summarily dismissed by Webber and Red Bull as a whole, with Mark even offering a tiny olive branch stating that he was “not an angel at certain other events here and there.”

This whole incident, including Vettel’s retraction of his apology and the fact that the company CEO was furious at him caused his rapid tumble from grace in the eyes of many. He would still race, and race hard, throughout the rest of the season, and won the last nine races of the season, including two more hat tricks back to back, becoming only the third driver to ever achieve that after Alberto Ascari and Jim Clark.

When the checkered flag fell on the 16th round in India, Vettel had become the youngest ever four-time title winner, including a new record as the youngest to win four titles back to back. Holding four titles also made him one of the top five drivers, ever, in Formula One.

During the remainder of the year after the Multi-21 incident and the subsequent drama, Vettel was very often booed by crowds, an act which the paddock and the other drivers frowned upon. Sebastian would admit to the media in 2020 that during the 2013 season, he had not tempered himself and the booing did get to him, causing to have serious doubts about continuing in the sport. This incident also provoked Mark Webber to retire from Formula One a year earlier than he had expected, and he went on to have a successful run in the FIA World Endurance Championship.

2014 saw Daniel Ricciardo take Webber’s seat after being promoted from Toro Rosso, but the damage to both Vettel’s confidence and image had been done. He struggled to get to grips with the new Turbo Hybrid V6 RB10 car, and when the curtains fell on the season, he earned another record, becoming only the second defending champion since Jaques Villeneuve in 1998 to fail to win a race during a season after their last title.

2014 also saw him released one year early from his Red Bull contract. Things had soured so much that Vettel had expressed interest in—and been accepted for—moving to Scuderia Ferrari to “begin anew” and help take the prancing horse back to the top of the championship like Schumacher had done in the 1990s and 2000s.

2015 to 2020: The Ferrari Years

Sebastian Vettel, like almost any other Formula One driver, had aspirations to race with, and win races with, the Scuderia since he was of a young age. Ferrari was and is a legendary name within the sport—the only manufacturer to still have raced in every race and every season since the formation of the first codified rules of Formula One in 1950. Legendary names had raced in the scarlet racing red machines, such as Fangio, Hill, Lauda, Surtees, Mansell, Prost, and, of course, Schumacher.

Vettel’s first appearance in a Ferrari was in November of 2014, after the final race of the 2014 season had finished, driving the F2012 V8 around Fiorano, Ferrari’s test track behind the main Ferrari road car factory. However, once the spring test arrived, it appeared that Vettel and Ferrari had pulled another Vettel and Red Bull, as the Ferrari SF15-T F1 car was extremely quick, stable, and suited Sebastian’s driving style perfectly.

This was demonstrated with a strong third position at the season opener in Australia, and then steamrolling to a win at the very next round in Malaysia. This was his first race win in over a year, and the first win for Ferrari for two years. A series of podiums followed, and Seb remained a viable championship contender, trailing Lewis Hamilton by only 42 points.

The second half of 2015, however, was when the unraveling of fate occurred. Despite a coming second to the roar of the Tifosi at the Italian Grand Prix at Monza, and gaining a pole position in Singapore and winning that race after Hamilton retired, Vettel was never able to claw back the deficit to Hamilton, and ended the season with three wins, thirteen podiums and a few pole positions.

Vettel declared it was “a miracle” that he came in third, and much as prophecy seemed to follow Sebastian around, his own words proved to be the curse of his Ferrari years.

2016: The Year of Crashes

2016 was unofficially dubbed the Year of Crashes, due to how many drivers collided with each other or the track furniture. It was also the season that solidified the less-than-amicable nickname for Max Verstappen, “Crashstappen.” Third place in Australia was followed by a very rare Did Not Start at Bahrain as the car died halfway around the formation lap.

At the Russian Grand Prix, Vettel famously gave Toro Rosso driver Daniil Kvyat the nickname of “the Russian Torpedo” after a suicidal pass attempt that saw the Red Bull hit the rear of the Ferrari instead of the planned dive-bomb down the inside. Vettel would later retire after Kvyat crashed into the back of him a second time, this time destroying his diffuser and damaging the rear wing, making the car undriveable.

At Mexico, Vettel went for a bold move to overtake Verstappen, but the Dutch driver weaved and then lost control slightly, going off track but rejoining it right away in a manner that did not give him a lasting advantage. Vettel’s temper flared and he went on a curse laden tirade on the radio about Red Bull, Verstappen, and the race director, Charlie Whiting. A visually mollified Sebastian immediately apologized for his comments during the pit lane interviews, especially as Whiting was seen by many drivers as very strict, but also very fair in a highly politicized sport.

The rest of 2016 followed suit, with Vettel getting two points on his license and a ten-grid place penalty for dangerously blocking Ricciardo during a divebomb pass by the Australian. Despite seven podiums, there were no pole positions and crucially no race wins, and he came in a distant fourth with 212 points to Ricciardo’s 256 points in the championship.

2017: A Return To Form—For A While

2017 started out for Vettel with a race win in Australia, his first win in a year and a half. As the start of the season continued, he led the charge with a win in Bahrain, multiple second place finishes, and crucially winning the Monaco Grand Prix.

This was important, as it seemed the promise of Vettel leading Ferrari to the top step again was coming true, and it was the first Ferrari win in Monaco since Schumacher in 2001. However, Vettel’s now infamous temper reared its head again in Azerbaijan, where during the Baku GP, under the safety car, he ran into the back of Lewis Hamilton’s Mercedes.

Claiming that he had been brake checked, he furiously drove up on Hamilton’s left side and intentionally turned into him, clashing wheels and being extremely lucky not to cause damage to either car’s wings or barge boards, crucial aerodynamic devices. This incident led to Vettel being issued the maximum in race penalty, a ten second stop-and-go.

The FIA investigation was thorough after the race, and the decision was reached that the penalty applied and served during the race was appropriate. Ferrari, however, felt let down that Vettel’s temper had shown in a scarlet red car, and Vettel issued a full public apology for the incident, taking responsibility and pledging to use personal time over the next 12 months to further educational opportunities at FIA sanctioned events.

By this time, Vettel was well ahead in the points, and looked to be on track to break Lewis Hamilton’s streak of championships. However, the second half of 2017 was a half season that Ferrari would probably like to erase from history. Apart from a pole and win at Hungary, all the other races were plagued by crashes (such as the infamous one at Singapore where the top three cars were wiped out before the first corner), reliability issues (such as his turbo failing during qualifying for the Malaysian Grand Prix), or simple and pure bad luck.

That last one happened in Mexico, when Vettel became the fourth driver in F1 to claim 50 pole positions, but he collided with Hamilton during the race, damaging his car, and because of the difference in the points standings, it gave Hamilton just enough points to claim the championship. This marked the first time in Vettel’s career that he did not win a championship in a season where he had led it at one point.

2018: The Fight for Five

The 2018 season was one of the most hyped up in the history of Formula One, as the media dubbed it “The Fight For Five.” For the first time since the inception of the sport, two four-time world champions were in competitive machinery on the same grid, Vettel and Hamilton. As before, Vettel took the lead with a win at Australia. That race also marked his 100th podium, and he became only the third driver to have led over 3,000 laps.

A series of pole positions and wins were dotted all over the first half of the season, with victories in Bahrain and Canada, and three back to back pole positions in Bahrain, China, and Baku. At the Canadian Grand Prix, Vettel’s win was his 50th win, and he became one of only four drivers at the time to achieve that milestone.

Then came what many now consider to be the turning point of Sebastian’s career, the moment it all went wrong: The German Grand Prix at Hockenheim.

Vettel was comfortably leading the race, and was looking at an easy win. However, a few laps earlier, he had been defending and battling to hold first place, and had done so over multiple sausage kerbs—raised tarmac that is meant to prevent a car from cutting too much of a corner or to direct it back towards the track. He had unknowingly damaged his front wing over a few of them, which resulted in enough of a loss of downforce, causing understeer. On top of that, it was raining and the tarmac was being rapidly cooled by the chilly storm.

So when Vettel came to the stadium hairpin section of the track near the end of the race, the wing finally gave up, which immediately dropped his downforce at the front. He turned the wheel left to go around the hairpin, but his Ferrari speared off the track and hit the wall.

A visibly upset Vettel could be seen pounding the steering wheel in sheer frustration, and was literally in tears on the radio to the pits, repeating “F**k’s sake! F**k’s sake… sorry guys.”

The season spiraled downhill from there. There was a win in Belgium—but contact in Italy (Ferrari’s home race) saw Vettel drop to the back of the field and only manage to recover to fourth. Things got worse in Singapore, where Ferrari’s allowed development upgrades for the car were fitted to both Vettel’s and Raikkonen’s cars, only for them to have the adverse effect of slowing the cars down.

Reverting to the old chassis at the US Grand Prix saw the car return to being competitive, but it was too little, too late. In Mexico, Vettel claimed his first podium at that race, but Hamilton secured his fifth title.

2019: A Changed Man

There were two major developments that marked the start of Vettel’s 2019 season. The first was that he had a new teammate in the massively talented, much younger Charles Leclerc. The second was that the Sebastian Vettel that showed up to race this year was a much calmer man.

It could be that he had a good talking to from the Ferrari management regarding his temper and the public image he was presenting of the Scuderia. It could be that he realized that his temper and bursts of anger caused him to make mistakes. No one really knows.

The Ferrari SF90 F1 was a complete rethink, taking the good from the previous few seasons, meshing it together into a car that many pundits and experts believed would be the car to finally return Vettel to the top step at the end of the year. However, Mercedes, with their W10 F1 car, had not deployed full power like Ferrari had during testing. As such, the speed and stability of the Mercedes cars stunned everyone in Australia, being so fast during the straights and holding so many Gs around the corners that the SF90 simply couldn’t keep up.

Fourth in Australia, third in China and at Baku. Vettel managed to claim pole in Canada, his first in 17 races. During the Canadian race, however, he suffered snap oversteer while defending from a hard charging Lewis Hamilton, crossing a grass median and returning to the track directly in front of Hamilton, effectively cutting him off. For the incident, he received a five-second time penalty for not entering the track in a safe manner, which he disagreed with vocally. He crossed the line first, but the five seconds dropped him to second.

In one of only two real shows of the old Vettel temper, once the top three cars were parked behind their position stands, with his own SF90 parked up at the entrance to the pits in protest, he switched the first and second place stands. He moved the first place stand to the empty spot where his car should have been, did his one finger raised fist pump to say “First place,” and then went off to the podium ceremony.

He was unable to run in qualifying for Germany, however he did manage to recover from the back of the field to second place. Ferrari’s home race at Monza was a disaster, with snap oversteer causing Vettel to spin at the Ascari Chicane, where he clipped Lance Stroll’s Racing Point as he reentered the track, causing the Canadian to spin out.

Vettel received a 10 second stop-and-go penalty for the incident and finished 13th. The only other good moment of the season came when both Ferraris ran extremely well during the Singapore Grand Prix, with Vettel winning, making him a five times winner at the track.

Retirement with an MGU-K issue in Russia and a pole position but a jump start that almost stalled his car in Japan were then overshadowed by the Brazilian Grand Prix. In the second of the only two moments of his old temper, a safety car restart caught him mildly unaware, and both Red Bull’s Alex Albon and his teammate Leclerc were able to pass into the first corner, Leclerc aggressively so.

This caused Sebastian to charge off after his teammate to retake his position, and while running along the right side of Leclerc, he seemed to steer slightly to the left. The cars touched, with Leclerc’s front right tire deflating so violently it broke the suspension, and Vettel’s left rear tire also explosively deflating, damaging his left rear suspension.

Leclerc speared off the course into the runoff area, and Vettel was able to limp the car a few more corners before his suspension completely failed and he had to pull off of the track. His radio spoke to his anger, as he screamed “Mein Gott muss das sein?! So ein bockmist aber auch!!!”

While there is a bit of slang in the radio message, it roughly translates to “My God, does this have to be?! Such bullsh*t too!”

Interestingly, Vettel did not walk back to the pits after he was forced to abandon the race, instead leaning against the tire barrier and rubbing his face forlornly. The mature, calmer Vettel had realized his temper had caused another mistake. He seemingly felt so badly about knocking both Ferraris out of the race, as well as losing any points the team desperately needed for the constructor’s championship, that he stayed at a nearby marshall’s post and watched the race from there, finally walking back after the race finished.

He finished fifth overall in the championship, and was outscored by Leclerc—only the second time that had happened to him in all his years in Formula One.

2020: End of An Era & The Global Pandemic

2020 was set to be a season of redemption for Vettel, having been humbled by the mistakes that had caused two major incidents in 2019. Preseason testing showed that Mercedes had a new steering system called DAS  (Dual Axis Steering), which allowed the driver to change the inward toe angle of the front tires during a race.

Inward toe angle is how much the tire is pointed inwards to the nose of the car, and you want to find the balance between a sharp angle for cornering, and a shallow or even neutral angle for the straights. DAS allowed for the driver to relax the toe angle during the straights, and it would return to the preset angle for cornering, all through an ingenious system that was activated by pulling or pushing the steering wheel to change the angles.

That same preseason testing also showed that the Ferrari SF1000 was a second and a half slower around Barcelona than the 2019 car. This was the cause of some uproar, because most of the other teams had complained in 2019 that the Ferrari team was outpacing Ferrari-powered cars on the grid by a shocking margin.

The FIA investigation was focused on the power unit, and after examining everything, there was no penalty applied to Ferrari. However, the technical regulations for 2020 were changed slightly, mandating that all cars needed to have a second bespoke fuel flow sensor that sent its data not to the teams alone, but also to the FIA and the race stewards.

In Australia, Red Bull was prepared to challenge the investigation’s findings if Ferrari placed on the podium, but that all came to a screeching halt as the Australian Grand Prix was canceled, and the season put on hold, due to the worldwide outbreak of COVID-19. A modified, shortened season, with the return of some tracks that had not been raced at in many years was hammered out so that there would be racing, but no fans would be allowed in the stands, and each team had to maintain extremely strict social bubbles to prevent possible inter-team transmission.

At the Austrian Grand Prix, Vettel placed 10th, and was also given a reprimand on his record for breaching the social bubble rule to chat with members of Red Bull, his old team. Vettel retired with wing damage after being struck by Leclerc during the opening lap of the Styrian Grand Prix, run on the same Red Bull Ring circuit as the Austrian race.

That is pretty much what the rest of the year was like for Vettel. His highest result was third in Turkey, but multiple non-points placings, retirements, and the fact that he felt that Ferrari was placing all their efforts into Leclerc led Sebastian to not negotiate for a renewal of his contract, with Ferrari announcing that his contract would not be renewed for 2021. By this point, Vettel was simply waiting out the days until the season was over, and ended 2020 in 13th place, his lowest ever placement in the championship standings.

He was able to gain a race seat at the newly formed Aston Martin F1 Team, partnering with Canadian Lance Stroll. Lawrence Stroll, Lance’s father and a billionaire, had bought heavily into Aston Martin as both the car maker and to create an F1 team, and he wouldn’t pair his son with anyone that had not won multiple world championships.

Vettel settled into the mentor role comfortably, having put his temper behind him, and helped develop Lance’s skillset, which has since been apparent in a few moments of brilliance by the Canadian.

However, with a car that was a mid-field competitor, and being—at 35—the second oldest driver on the grid behind Hamilton, the calmer, more mature Sebastian Vettel announced his retirement. He stated that he hoped to spend more time with his family, invest more time in his new found passion of championing for sustainable energy and fighting climate change, and quite simply because it felt like the right time.

Will Sebastian Vettel Stay in Motorsports in Some Way?

The answer to that question is a very strong “maybe”.

We say maybe, as Vettel recently confirmed that he will take part in single events during the coming years. These include the Race of Champions and the Formula One Legends races, as he owns a few classic F1 cars. He will also stay somewhat involved in electric and sustainable fuel racing development. However, it is very unlikely that we will see Vettel back in open-wheel Formula racing, as that chapter is closing for him come the end of the 2022 season.

As well, he has three young children with his wife Hanna Prater, with the oldest being 8 years old. With the travel and multiple weeks or months away from home to race in Formula One, he has outright stated that his first priority will be being there to see his kids grow up, as well as spend more time in general with extended family.

Honestly, when you’re a four time world champion, and had your head given a good shake before 2019, even for us, as fans of the sport, it just feels right. He achieved what he set out to do—to be a world champion. He led the charge with Ferrari, a team he always wanted to race for since the famous days of Schumacher, leading the team to 7 titles, four on the run.

Vettel is still young enough that if he wants to dedicate himself to an entirely new career, perhaps as an analyst for the German broadcasts of F1, or joining fellow German world champion and ex-F1 driver Nico Rosberg in his efforts to combat climate change and push sustainable fuels and electrification to new levels, he has the time to do so.

Whatever he ends up doing, we just know that for about 20 of his 35 years, Sebastian Vettel grew up racing, entered the top tier of motorsports, became one of only five drivers to ever win four or more drivers titles, and has more than earned his retirement.

The post Sebastian Vettel: Profile of a Champion appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

On New Year’s Eve in 1950, the first endurance race run at Sebring was won by a very unlikely car, a car with an engine that displaced just 44 cubic inches, put out 26.5 horsepower, and had only been entered the day before the 6-hour race was held. It was a Crosley Hotshot, and it took the overall win in a way that has likely not been repeated since.

Powel Crosley, Jr. and His Radios, Refrigerators, and Cars

The post Sebring’s Forgotten Man—1949 Crosley Hotshot appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

I don’t usually spend too much time on preamble prior to getting into the nitty-gritty of the subject car. However, in this case, I believe it is totally warranted to explore the background as this piece is a, if not the, pivotal point where not only a new marque of car was born, but this is where and when much of the groundwork of British motorsport as we know it today was instituted. The bloodlines, successes and failures of many of our post-war racing cars and teams are built on the foundation stones laid by the individuals responsible for the conception, design and building of ERA GP1.

When asking about those who made the biggest impact on British motor racing there would be many differing views dependant on the age of the person you’re talking to. In the main it’s a generational perception, my youngest son, in his thirties, would offer the likes of Nigel Mansell and Ayrton Senna, my eldest son, some ten years older, would mention James Hunt and Mario Andretti, for me it would be Jim Clark and Jackie Stewart. Time has that certain characteristic that draws a veil over those who have gone before, no matter their contribution, feat, or particular endeavour they almost become forgotten. Only scholars, or true enthusiasts in the field, can bring to mind many of those stalwart individuals of yesteryear, who have been all but forgotten.

The post Arrested Development—The Story of ERA and GP1 appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

Matt Figliola’s dad was much more creative than your average bear. He impressed upon his son the importance of attention to detail. Dad started Matt and his brother on a long list of hobbies: model plane building, RC planes, RC cars, and simple carpentry. If Matt built a model plane, it looked like the picture on the box when it was finished. It wasn’t just releasing the required piece from the armature it came on; it was sanding the edges to make it perfect.

It was that subtlety and nuance that Matt was aware of—even at eight years old. He learned it was all in the details. Matt was also big into electronics; at ten years old, Matt felt his clock radio’s sound was a bit anemic. He scrounged his neighbor’s trash for old HiFi equipment and started making auxiliary speakers for his clock radio. After a few visits to Radio Shack for parts, he was rocking.

Matt’s buddy John was the first in the crew to get a car, a Pontiac Sunbird. John enlisted Matt, and off they went to Crazy Eddies—with John’s hard-earned cash—and picked up some better speakers for his ride. This was how Matt was introduced to car audio.

Matt continued to modify the sounds in his buddy’s cars and then his own. His next step was finding part-time work in car audio shops around his home. He cut his teeth in the install bay and gained a ton of knowledge in a short period of time.

Matt’s parents were putting pressure on him to go to college, but after one semester at Pace University, he headed for the door. His parents were not pleased. “You have to go to school!” They settled on DeVry Technical Institute, where Matt started in the electronics program.

During the slog of a daily commute, he realized he didn’t want to be an electronics engineer. So Matt said goodbye to DeVry and made a plan to work for the top audio shops in New York. Matt finally landed at the pinnacle of car audio: UltraSmith in Manhattan.

UltraSmith was the go-to boutique shop for high-end audio for your high-end ride. The clients were well-heeled, so they could be given the best of everything. From the outside, this was Matt’s idea of the perfect shop.

The only imperfection was the owner—who was not a good person—so Matt was gone after five months. He soon found a great guy with a good shop in a bad part of town—the South Bronx. With his skills, Matt became the top guy doing all the custom installations. The customer base was different than the previous shop, but they had plenty of cash.

It was just as the Hip-Hop craze was landing, so major sound systems were going into cars. Hip-Hop also influenced the style of cars, and the shop got heavily involved in that. Matt feels there would never have been the 20-inch wheel without Hip-Hop.

After a 4th of July weekend, Matt showed up at the shop and was greeted by a sea of NYPD, DEA, ATF, and drug-sniffing dogs. He was interviewed on the spot. The authorities were sure the owner was involved with drugs. In the end, while the owner was clean and soon vindicated, it was guilt by association, destroying the business and leaving Matt out of work.

The Foundation of Audio Intellect

It was time to do something for himself. In the summer of 1991, Matt partnered with two brothers and started working out of their garage in what would soon become Audio Intellect. The trio found a dirt cheap space in a terrible part of Yonkers, NY, and inherited many of the clients from the now-defunct Bronx location.

Unfortunately, things got dangerous—the “perfect storm” type of dangerous. The shop was near the railroad tracks and was partially underground. If a gun went off, no one would hear it.

The shop had a particular client (a Harlem Kingpin) who was becoming increasingly erratic and making unreasonable demands. Matt was trying to ease the client out of the shop, but that was not well received. One day the client arrived with his muscle, pulled out the shop phones, beat the employees, and brandished guns. Not your standard day in the car audio world.

Two weeks later, an ATF agent, a district attorney, and a federal prosecutor walked in. Within days Matt was on the stand as a federal witness, and his client was put away for life. It was time to find a new and safer location ASAP.

The partners found an old gas station in Eastchester, NY, and set up shop. Just when the place was up and running, the brothers decided to go in other directions, so Matt continued on his own. Concurrently, Matt heard about a new trend coming out of the West Coast.

Companies were taking Tahoes and Suburbans and doing a full lux number on them—upgrading suspension, wheels, audio, and seating, adding every creature comfort possible. They were creating a non-limo limo, making the new creation as non-truck as possible while turning it into an elegant driving experience.

This would be a natural progression for Matt. Bruce Canepa was turning out these uber trucks and selling them to East Coast clients. In 1995 Tommy Mottola, the CEO of Sony Music, got wind of Matt and wanted him to take a look at his Canepa-built Suburban and Tahoe. This gave Matt a chance to see up close and personal how these machines were put together. The vehicles had serious quality, and he knew he could do this all day long and do it even better.

At this point, someone new came into his life: Todd Brown. Todd would turn out to be a key component in Matt’s new business growth, as he had connections to the type of customers who could afford the type of work Matt was doing and, more importantly, weren’t packing heat.

New Yorkers learned they didn’t have to go across the country for their custom rides, as the man they needed was right in their backyard. By 1997, Ai Design was well established as the place to go for your custom truck needs. They quickly outgrew the gas station and went in search of a new location.

Growing Ai Design Into a Full-Service Custom Shop

In 1998, Ai moved to its new industrial facility in Tuckahoe, NY. With the extra space, the shop could grow in other directions and deliver a wide range of custom work. With that came more equipment and more staff.

Over the years, new and different projects started rolling in.

A client brought in a 1969 Chevy Camaro pace car. All he wanted was a new engine and drivetrain, but after realizing the capability and creativity of the shop, he gave them free rein to create a one-of-a-kind restomod.

The firewall was shaved with all the wiring hidden. A modern interpretation of the interior was created from scratch. The console, dash (integrating modern audio and GPS,) door panels, and seats (modified Cadillac CTS chairs) were covered using the same colors and style of fabrics as in the original. Under the hood went a beast of a motor that put out 650 hp to keep the car on the road; a whole new front suspension was added with coil-overs. In the back, the Camaro was mini-tubbed to handle extra-wide rubber.

There was more to follow: updated lighting, automatic windows, intermittent wipers, great handling, and a killer audio system. All the things you would expect in a modern luxury car wrapped in the muscular lines of a classic Camaro.

Another client wanted to go even more old school and build a 32 Highboy roadster from the ground up.

A 32 body was ordered from Brookville Roadster, and work began. It was to be an open-wheel design with the stripped-down, clean look of a period hot rod but with modern power from a big block Roush 427R.

This was a hot rodder’s dream, but with the convenience and safety of power steering and power brakes. The interior is as plush as any Bentley with Wilton carpeting and beautifully stitched leather, and an engine-turned dash. The result is a refined rod that still has plenty of attitude.

Ai Design is in business to solve problems. A good client wanted a rare bird indeed—a B5 RS 4 Avant—to add to his growing collection.

The team got a hold of one, but the previous owner had slammed it to the ground and was running a set of 19s on it. Ai Design Sales Manager Ryan Offenhartz knew the client well, and together they decided to go in the opposite direction with the car, getting rid of the boy racer stuff and turning it into a safari-style all-weather capable hot-estate.

Ai installed a modified suspension system containing shocks with elongated bottom tubes. The firmer valving and revised spring rates now deliver proper dampening and road feel while eliminating excess body roll. This allowed the Audi to retain its handling while navigating nasty New England roads.

They reduced the wheel diameter to a more realistic 17-inch OZ  wheel. Ai built up two sets and mounted them with  Falken WildPeak A/T tires and UHP-rated Vredestein Wintrac Pros. For good measure, they added cross-drilled Brembo brakes.

The Über off-roader is wrapped in NATO matte green vinyl, withVisionX lights to cut through the darkest night. The front light bar is a work of art—designed in-house, first mocked up in 3D-printed plastic, and finally CNC-milled from a single huge hunk of aluminum.

After all that attention, the Audi will take on anything mother nature throws at it—and will do it with badass style.

The Ai Design Experience

When a client enters Ai Design, they are like a kid in a candy store. If they can dream it, Matt and his team of craftsmen can make that dream come true.

They might be working on a Lamborghini Countach getting a backup camera so the driver doesn’t have to attempt a full Balboni when they put the car in reverse, or maybe a Ponton Mercedes cabriolet owned by a prominent NY collector getting something it never had before—air-conditioning. And it will be totally invisible.

Invisible, reversible upgrades to rare and valuable cars are an Ai Design specialty. A client may wish to add a modern audio system but not do irreversible damage. Matt and his team will recreate existing parts and carefully box up the originals to be reinstalled if a future owner desires.

A 1954 Bentley R-Type Mulliner Fastback Coupe received painstakingly hand-crafted new dash panels to perfectly match the gorgeous original wood. A period-correct mesh panel was made to hide a bank of small speakers, tuned to create a remarkable sound. For an original 427 Cobra, Ai created a one-off Bluetooth-operated audio system that pressure fits under the dash and, while fully integrated, is also completely removable.

On one side of the shop, you’ll find an FJ60 Land Cruiser being treated to a new drivetrain and suspension while an early Hammer Mercedes awaits a new sound system and Bluetooth integration to the period-correct car phone. Meanwhile, a modified Subaru Crosstrek is getting electronic add-ons for a father-son one-lap tour of New England.

On the other side, Porsches, Ferraris, and Lancias await the special touch that only Ai Design can provide.

Matt Figliola: the Man Behind Ai Design

An interesting fact about Matt Figliola is he doesn’t consider himself a car guy. He is first and foremost an artist. This gives his and Ai’s approach to their work a different direction from other shops. They come with a broader perspective—not just car-centric—resulting in a different outcome than other builders.

Each project is a clean sheet of paper, with no repetition of ideas or design. There is a progression from the initial conversation with the client; Matt gets to know them and understand their motivation and desires, allowing Matt to design for his client, not himself.

From there, the process moves on to sketches and cardboard mock-ups, then 3-D modeling and 3D printed prototypes before the final product is decided upon. It’s all in the service of creating that one-of-a-kind solution to the client’s dreams. In all cases, the quality is uncompromising.

There is a saying. A man who works with his hands is a laborer, a man who works with his hands and his brain is a craftsman. A man who works with his hands, his brain, and his heart is an artist. Matt Figliola is an artist. A very methodical artist whose mission each day is to push the standard of excellence to new heights.

Matt has created an environment that allows each of his artisans to excel at their craft. A level of quality is maintained with no shortcuts or cutting corners in the pursuit of perfection. Each employee is selected with great care so they reflect Matt’s standards and can make Matt’s vision a reality.

He is also a conductor—each build is like a symphony, not a solo piece. Each creation is broken down into specific components and assigned to the individual who will take the greatest interest in that task and then do their best and most exciting work. With this approach, Matt gets the most out of his team.

Ai Design can’t be described by just one aspect of what they do. Their palate is quite broad. They are not just audio, restoration, fabrication, or custom vehicles; there are a wide variety of options when you arrive at Ai. What they do is deliver very specific work from unique requests.

Whether fully restoring a rare supercar, modifying a classic in a stealthy manner, adding horsepower to an exotic, or electrifying a vintage Jeep, every type of machine is welcome at Ai—that is, when you are ready to take a vehicle’s cool factor to the next level.

The post The Unique Vision of AI Design appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

Ferrari put the pedal to the metal in 1957 with new racing cars of magnificent four-cam V-12 power. In spite of Maserati’s V-8 response, Ferrari prevailed in what history would declare the final season for sports-racers of unlimited capacity.

The 1956 season of the World Sports-Car Championship saw Ferrari resuming normal service by taking the trophy. Its role as the season points winner since 1953 was interrupted only by Mercedes-Benz in 1955. Fully expecting Mercedes to carry on for another season, Ferrari armed itself with two 3.5-liter weapons for the 1956 season. One was the 860 Monza, a further evolution of Aurelio Lampredi’s four-cylinder 750 Monza. The other was a completely new V-12, the Type 130, displacing 3,491-cc (73 x 69.5 mm). With Aurelio Lampredi leaving in 1955 to join Fiat, the new twelve was designed under his successor, the youthful Andrea Fraschetti.

Assisting Fraschetti were two engineers of great experience. One was Vittorio Bellentani, who crossed Modena’s Via Emilia from Maserati to turn up at Ferrari. Also at Ferrari was Vittorio Jano. The legendary creator of such classic racing Alfa Romeos as the P2 and P3, Jano came to Maranello with the Grand Prix Lancias gifted to Ferrari during 1955. Although 65-years old, in 1956, the gaunt, bespectacled Jano was still a fount of creative ideas.

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However, throughout the history of motorsports, there have been innumerable amounts of tracks prepared, presented, raced on, and used for all levels of motorsport, yet only a handful are truly remembered as great tracks. In the United States alone, there are over 1,000 race tracks, but when you say COTA, everyone knows that that is Circuit Of The Americas. If you say Brainerd International Raceway, a few of the older folks will nod their heads as they remember the days of Can-Am, but most people will go “where’s that?” It’s in Minnesota, by the way, and is “famous” for having the single longest straight of any track in America.

Going international, you can mention tracks like Silverstone, Paul Ricard, Circuit de la Sarthe, Kyalami, and the like, and a lot of people that watch motorsports will know exactly what and where you’re talking about, and a rough layout of the track itself. Yet the question remains… what makes a track truly a classic, that everyone knows, even if they’re not into motorsports? To answer that, we’re going to look at three of the all-time greats.

Monza: The Temple Of Speed & How It Gained That Name

Officially Autodromo Nazionale di Monza, this historic track was originally built in 1922 just outside of Milan, Italy, and had two different courses that could be joined together to form a massive 10 km (6.2 miles) course. The “speed loop” of the original layout was a 4.5 km (2.8 miles) mostly oval track, with the “road course” running around the outside of it for a length of 5.5 km (3.4 miles). It was immediately popular, as the cars of the time could get up to near their top speeds on the speed loop, and since the automobile was still a relatively new invention, it was exciting to see these machines show just what they could do.

Throughout the years, the track has had multiple reprofilings, each of which unfortunately came about because of fatal accidents. In fact, one of the deadliest days in Italian racing history came in 1928 when 27 spectators and driver Emilio Materassi all died from a high-speed crash, which led to the track having slower speed corners added at the end of the massive back straight. Throughout all these reprofilings, Monza was still known as the place you wanted to go if you wanted to see the cars of the day reach their top speeds.

The track has not changed much since the last major reprofiling in the 1970s, with the only major change being the Variante del Rettifilo, the chicane at the end of the front straight, being made a sharper turn than before. If you watch a race at Monza, you can actually see the two previous layouts of the front straight in that chicane, with the original track being the run-off area that rejoins the track just before the Curva Grande, and the first edition of the Variante del Rettifilo being the run off on the inside of the left hand second corner. It may not seem like that large of a track, but the official track length as of 2022 is 5.793 km, or 3.6 miles on the nose.

The question is, however, why is a track with a grand total of 11 corners considered one of the most classic, one of the greatest, that has ever been laid down? The answer to that comes in two parts, the first of which lies with the name that the track has earned over the years: The Temple of Speed.

From a purely technical point of view, Monza is a brutal test of engine endurance, brakes, tire wear, and balancing aerodynamics. There are three primary straights in a lap, those being the start/finish straight from Curva Parabolica to the Variante del Rerttifilo, from Curve di Lesmo 2 to the Variante Ascari, and from Ascari to the Parabolica. During each of these straights, engines are at full power, wide open throttle, and if you include the Curva Grande as a straight, which is taken at full throttle in many racing series, a modern day racing engine is at full power for just about 75% of a lap.

Balanced against that is the fact that each straight and the Curva Grande all end braking zones where speeds sometimes over 300 KPH (186 MPH) need to scrubbed down to about 100 KPH (62 MPH) in under 200 meters, often under 100 meters in Formula One cars. What this provides for both drivers and spectators are excellent passing zones, where the bravest of the late brakers will either take the inside line of the corner or spear off into the runoff areas.

The other major reason that Monza is one of the most classic tracks of all time is that it is one of the best spectator circuits on the modern day racing calendar. By being, in a word, a “simple” track of straights, heavy braking zones, and amazing corners, there are plenty of areas around the track that grandstands have been set up, and the walking paths between these can also see the course through fences. The only restricted area is around the paddock, for obvious reasons, but otherwise you can watch races from pretty much anywhere around the track.

Of course, with a lot of fans, great views, some of the fastest speeds on a racing calendar, and most racing events being a full weekend of events, the atmosphere around the track is just the icing on the cake of spectator engagement. Adding to the atmosphere even more is the fact that Monza, when Imola is not used in the calendar, is considered the home track of Ferrari. As such, you will often find a large group of fans of the prancing horse grouping together, and collectively, they are known around the world as the Tifosi.

Anyone who has watched any F1 race at Monza on TV in the past few decades has seen one of the signature moments of “tifo,” or a visual display of support for a team by use of colors or flags, that occurs when the cars arrive on the grid before the formation lap. A gigantic Ferrari shield flag is unfurled in the grandstands and waved enthusiastically, often the focus of the opening shot of TV coverage, and can sometimes be accompanied by red smoke flares being set off around the track.

To bring it together, it is actually very simple math that makes Monza one of the greatest tracks of all time. On its own, as shown during the shortened F1 season in 2021, it is a challenging, high speed, technically demanding track that pushes machinery and driver to be committed to the race. Combine that with some of the most rabid fans anywhere in the world of motorsport, literally turning entire grandstands red in support of Ferrari. Add a dash of speed, mix vigorously with history, and bake for one race distance, and you have the perfect recipe for a classic track.

Spa-Francorchamps: Classic Because Of So Many Different Parts Being Perfect

While Monza is not the shortest track on many racing series’ calendars by far, it is a speck of dust next to the longest track that still uses all of its racing surface, Spa-Francorchamps in Belgium. Spa, as it is often called, is a monster of a track that is draped over a small mountain in the Ardennes forest of Belgium, and has an official track length of 7.004 km, or 4.352 miles. What surprises people even more is that this distance is half the original track length!

Designed in 1920, the original track layout combined public roads between the towns of Francorchamps, Malmedy, and Stavelot with a dedicated track surface that was located at the crest of a hill between Stavelot and Francorchamps, famous for its almost 170 degree hairpin turn, La Source. The original length of 14.982 km (9.310 miles) was widely regarded by drivers as a dangerous, fast circuit, and as such attracted those that wanted to show their dedication to going around it as fast as possible.

Unlike many other tracks that were reprofiled or redesigned after major accidents or fatalities, Spa was left unchanged until the late 1970s. Running out of money and with safety starting to become a major point in motorsports, the track finally had to acquiesce and the newer 7 KM circuit was drafted, and then built.

The new circuit, however, was still a very demanding course, and is often ranked by drivers of everything from touring cars to Formula One as one of the best courses on the calendar. It has the most elevation changes of any current F1 circuit, it’s the longest by far, and it’s also one of the fastest, with some corners being taken at wide open throttle.

Of course, you cannot talk about Spa-Francorchamps without mentioning the corner. Possibly the most famous complex in all of racing, Eau Rouge/Radillion is a remnant of the dangerous 14.9 km course. After plunging downhill on a straight, drivers need to quickly sweep the car left, then hard right as the car bottoms out due to compression, and then almost immediately turn left again as the car crests a small hill, going light and sometimes causing cars to spin out spectacularly.

A good exit from Radillon is essential because the next kilometer of the course is uphill, along the Kemmel Straight. This straight is a remnant as well of the old course, but instead of continuing out into the countryside, heading for Malmedy, a very fast series of essess called Les Combes slows cars down for the short blast to the constant radius hairpin, Bruxelles. Formula One cars will reach this point, about 2 kilometers (just under a mile) into the track in about 50 seconds after crossing the start/finish line.

From there, one of the two fastest corners on the entire circuit comes after a short left hander and a sprint downhill, the double apex Pouhon. In GT cars, there is a very short braking period and the corner is usually swept through in 3rd or 4th gear. Formula One cars take this corner by lifting ever so slightly off the gas to turn in, and then foot to the floor to scream through the second apex. A series of essess follows shortly in the Campus Complex, before the hard right hander at Stavelot that is the official start of sector three of the course, the back straight.

The fastest part by far of the circuit, as cars exit Courbe Paul Frere, they accelerate to top gear and top speed, taking the gentle curves in the road absolutely flat out, heading for the second most famous corner on the track. Blanchimont is a “gentle” left hand corner, but at over 200 MPH, it’s a sharp, hard left. F1 cars will take this corner absolutely flat, without a hint of a lift, and the driver will experience upwards of 3 to 4 lateral G’s. GT cars can take it almost flat, just needing a minor lift to get the nose turned in.

Finally, at the end of the circuit, there is the famous Bus Stop chicane, which, before the track was fully enclosed in a motorsport park, actually was a bus stop between Francorchamps and Stavelot. It has been reprofiled a few times, from a step out-step in chicane to the current tight-S chicane, but it is still a tricky corner because you are braking from maximum speed, and a lot of race-winning, last-chance passes are made here with some bravery and hard braking. After a quick blast down the start/finish straight, cars then go around the slowest corner on the circuit, La Source hairpin, and start the whole journey again.

So what makes it classic? Apart from two legendary corners, it is one of the most technically demanding courses for a driver, and is very difficult to set a car up for. You have sections where you want to have the minimum amount of drag on the car, but there are corners where you absolutely must have strong downforce or the car will spear off into the barriers. Despite the speed and difficulty, it is also a course with multiple passing zones sprinkled everywhere.

One of the biggest things about Spa is that it is so large, so spread out, that it is not uncommon to have different weather at different parts of the track. It could be sunny and warm at the start/finish straight, but raining heavily at the Campus Complex, and when it rains at Spa, it rains. Team strategists have probably used more Advil and Tylenol for the headaches that the circuit gives them than any other track, as a call into the pit lane is a huge roll of the dice. This is because the pits, at least in the endurance and GT configuration, are about 1.5 kilometers long, with the entrance at the Bus Stop, and the exit just after Raidillon.

Take the speed of Monza, add some wickedly fast corners, some challenging and technical corners, and a couple of moments around the course where you need to take your brave pills, and you have a circuit that will live on for eternity. Just Eau Rouge through Raidillon is enough to put this circuit here, but it was designed by people that knew what they were doing, and they made one hell of a circuit.

Monaco: The Ultimate Classic Track

Monaco. You simply say the name, and depending on who you talk to, they either envision the French Riviera, a city that celebrates and embraces excess, or the famous Monaco circuit layout, which is also sometimes called the Cote d’Azure layout. It’s that third one we’re talking about here, and when people say that Monaco has history, they are not lying.

Monaco, with the exception of 2021, has been a staple of the Formula One calendar since the start of the championship in 1950. While it has had some changes over the years, the basic layout, without the swimming pool complex or La Rascasse hairpin, has remained the same. The race is so popular, so famous that it is one of the races needed to achieve one of the most difficult milestones in motorsports, the Triple Crown.

To date, only one driver, Graham Hill, has been able to achieve the Triple Crown. To put your name beside his, you need to win the Indianapolis 500, the Monaco Grand Prix, and the 24 Hours of Le Mans. There are many drivers that have two of the races under their belts, and Fernando Alonso famously came very close in 2018 to achieving an Indy 500 win.

Yet, critics of the race state that it is slow, processional, with very few chances to overtake, and is too tight and too small for modern F1 cars. Being completely fair, every point they are making is absolutely true. The race can sometimes literally be won or lost in qualifying, and once the cars settle into their order, despite a lot of effort, it is nearly impossible to pass as the circuit just never lets up the pressure.

Yet, talk to a fan of F1 that has literally only watched one full season. Say Sainte Devote, the Tunnel, Mirabeau, the Loews Hairpin (formerly the Grand Hotel Hairpin), and that fan will instantly know the corner you’re talking about. It’s the one circuit that no matter how much or how little of a fan of F1 you are, you know the layout.

While both Spa and Monza are technical tracks that combine many elements into one to make a classic track, Monaco is a classic because it celebrates the spectacle of motorsports. Nowhere else in the world will you find a city that effectively shuts down for an entire weekend to watch cars effectively go in a circle around their streets. Sure, the racing might be processional and the overtakes are few and far between, but for the Monegasque, it’s the race.

It’s when you’ll see some of the most expensive yachts in the world tie up at the marina, overlooking the back section of the track. It’s when you will see some of the greatest drivers in the world attend multiple functions that you might just have been lucky enough to get a ticket to. It’s where you can be sitting just a few scant feet away from the most technologically advanced race cars in the world.

Another factor that makes it a classic track is that for many of the drivers, it’s their home grand prix. Once you’ve “made it” as an F1 driver, and you’re earning your multiple millions of dollars per season salary and getting all that sponsor endorsement money, it’s almost expected you’ll buy a condo in the city and live there. More often than not it’s because Monte Carlo, as a principality, has no income tax and is a tax haven for the rich, but it’s also because the city is so vibrant, with a character and personality that only exists in Monaco.

Every driver on the Formula One grid, if they were to only ever win once, want it to be Monaco. You are on it the whole way around, there is barely any time to breathe or adjust settings, and the margin for error is measured in millimeters. Get it wrong, and as the famous saying goes, “You’re going into the wall.” Get it right, and you become immortal. Ayrton Senna’s spectacular 1988 qualifying session, where he earned pole over “The Professor” Alain Prost by a scarcely believable 1.5 seconds, is still considered one of the greatest qualifying laps of all time in F1. Not just Monaco, across the entire history of the sport. He earned the title “The King of Monaco” for good reason.

Sure, the circuit might be classic in and of itself, but it’s the city, the people, the history, and one of the jewels you need for the Triple Crown that makes it a classic.

The post What Makes A Racetrack A Classic? An Investigative Look At Some Of The Best appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

First, there was the über SL, a lineage of front-engined supercars that started with the iconic 300SL Gullwing and continued through the SLR McLaren, the SLS and the AMG GT. The other one, a topic of this article, was a more sensible family of mass produced sports cars carrying the SL badge with pride.

Even though each SL has always been one of the finest roadsters money could buy, not all of them left the same impact and the dynasty has had its highs and lows. In wake of the introduction of the all-new AMG-developed SL which promises to bring new life to the struggling name, we will rank all Mercedes-Benz SL models from worst to best. So, let’s go!

7th Place – R232 SL (2022- ) Exempt From Competing

It’s no secret that the SL has had it rough in the past few years and the 2022 Mercedes-AMG SL is set to spin the wheel of fortune for the long-running dynasty. Officially named R232, this power roadster was developed by AMG, ensuring a much needed injection of fun to the nameplate that has fallen from grace in recent years. Its design follows the vision behind it, with the R232 looking sharper and more dynamic than its predecessor, hinting that the SL wants to restore its former glory of an exclusive, technologically advanced driver’s car.

Upon introduction, purists cheered at the notion of the SL keeping V8 power under its hood while also getting a rag top, yet on the other hand, the internet was quick to boo the entry-level 2023 SL 43 powered by an inline-four. Still, the four-banger has a lot to offer, producing 318 horsepower and 353 lb-ft of torque, in part thanks to using the F1-derived electric exhaust gas turbocharger, for the first time in a production car.

For those inclined towards a more traditional SL experience, the SL 63 and SL 55 both offer a 4.0-liter twin-turbocharged AMG V8 tuned to produce 577 and 469 horsepower respectively. The R232 SL has garnered nothing but positive reviews, exactly what Mercedes-Benz needed, but it’s still early to find it the definitive place in history.

6th Place – R231 (2013-2020) – What SL?

First off, let’s say that this Mercedes-Benz SL is not a bad car per se. However, if you can’t remember seeing this car in flesh or if you are completely oblivious to its very existence, we can’t blame you, because the R231 SL was definitely the least present and the least recognizable of them all. But why is that so?

In short, it was a cannibalistic in-house competition that got the SL to its lowest point ever. Stuck in the middle between the ultra-capable AMG GTC roadster and the opulent S-Class Cabriolet, the R231 SL was struggling to get its market share, especially with the younger audience. Moreover, despite all weight reduction compared to the previous generation and regardless of Mercedes-Benz keeping the V12-powered SL65 AMG version, the R231 SL was universally perceived as a sedated cruiser.

So, just like the R107 in the late 1980s, it was a go-to car for well-off retirees, a loyal but hardly ideal clientele. Unlike the R107 though, the R231 never shined as an SL, and as such it occupies the last place on our list.

5th Place – W121 190SL (1955-1963) – The Boulevardier

A baby version of the 300SL Roadster, the W196 190 SL was a cheaper ticket to the Sport Leicht show, but at what cost? Unquestionably, the 190SL was drop-dead gorgeous, sharing many design cues with its bigger sibling, but a glimpse underneath the curvaceous sheet metal soon uncovered that the connection between the two was nothing but skin deep.

To save costs and keep the 190SL somewhat affordable, Mercedes-Benz built it on a W121 sedan platform, a far cry from 300SL’s purpose-built tubular chassis. The twin-carbureted inline-four engine was related to the 300SL’s fuel injected straight-six, yet it produced measly 105 horsepower, sufficient to keep it running in a respectable manner, yet not enough to make it a sports car.

Even when it was fresh on the market, the 190SL was written off as a boulevardier, lacking power to match the stunning looks. Mercedes-Benz eventually experimented with more powerful options, but none of them ever reached production, leaving the 190SL’s full potential unfulfilled.

While it could have been more powerful, the SL is regardless remembered as one of the brand’s icons and is a sought after classic with an everlasting appeal.

4th Place – R107 (1971-1989) – The Dinosaur

After the W113 Pagode wrapped, Mercedes-Benz started transforming the SL into a stately open-top grand tourer by expanding the engine palette to feature V8 engines. That being said, the third generation named R107 was the next big milestone for the SL name.

It was a result of the brand’s growth and a definitive return to the very top of the automotive industry. The R107 headlined the brand’s new design direction, sporting flush horizontal headlights and even more streamlined silhouettes than the Stricht 8 range. With a fresh face and power to match, the R107 was just the right car for the moment, but its misfortune was in what turned to be bad timing for the whole automotive industry.

The R107 might have gotten off on the right foot, but it fell victim to the big oil and safety crisis of the early 1970s. With a then-uncertain future of convertibles, many manufacturers resorted to developing T-tops or simply selling their existing drop tops. So, like many other ragtops from the era, the W107 was out there for just too long.

With chrome-or-federal bumpers in an era where cars were getting sharper and simpler, this SL nurtured the brand’s geriatric appeal all the way to 1989 and no refreshes could hide its early 1970s design. Its omnipresence during the era and a connection to soap opera characters is why the R107 now walks a thin line between an icon and a cliché, hence its place on the list.

3rd Place – R230 (2002-2011) – The New Millenium SL

A successor to the universally acclaimed R129 SL, the W230 had big shoes to fill, and to a certain extent it did. The all-new design language wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea though, and neither was the introduction of a hard retractable top, but still, the SL proudly carried the brand’s new visual identity, more organic and considerably different from previous conservative forms.

A thorough 2008 restyling gave the W230 an extra edge, as the updated fascia was more assertive than the original design, which in turn extended this SL’s market span until it was eventually discontinued in 2011. The update also brought this generation’s ultimate modern classic, the hardcore 670-horsepower twin-turbo V12-powered SL65 AMG Black Series.

Extensively lightened and made more responsive by performance wizards from Affalterbach, the SL65 Black Series blurred the line between the SL and the über-SL range. Alas, the W230 declined the SL nameplate into obscurity.

2nd Place – W113 (1963-1971) The Trailblazer

As previously mentioned, the W121 190SL was more of a shower than a goer, something Mercedes-Benz had to address for its successor in an era where the power-hungry America started demanding more than just the looks. In 1963, Mercedes-Benz presented the Stricht-8, a new, modern and streamlined range designed by Paul Bracq to become a new chapter in the brand’s post-WW2 rebirth. Among them was the second generation SL, a car radically different from the underpowered predecessor.

The Mercedes-Benz W113 got more adequate fuel injected straight-six engines displacing 2.3, 2.5 and 2.8 liters as the Pagode evolved throughout its production span. With an all-new unibody construction, bulletproof engineering and power output ranging from 150 to 170 horsepower, this SL was a capable sports car for the era, whereas Bracq’s design gave it tons of style, both with the top off and a pagoda-shaped removable hard top.

With the W113, Mercedes-Benz set the course for all future SLs and the fact that the Pagode is now a daily drivable, reliable and fun classic all makes it the second greatest SL of all time in our books.

1st Place – R129 (1989-2001) – The Great Rebirth

The R107’s long rein left consequences not only on the SL, but the whole brand’s image. To address this, Mercedes-Benz started replacing its aging line-up throughout the 1980s, rejuvenating it by introducing the W201 baby Benz, a car that aimed at younger buyers. In 1989, an all-new SL joined the ranks, spearheading Mercedes-Benz into a brighter future. The R129 was a quantum leap compared to the R107 both in terms of design, performance and technology and as such it easily set a new industry standard.

Throughout its year production span, the R129 was offered with the most diverse engine palette of all the SLs – inline-six, V6, V8 and for the first time ever, a V12. On top of it all, it has aged gracefully in every manner, from Bruno Sacco’s masterful design to crisp analog driving sensation that originally made it one of the era’s defining automobiles. Of all the SLs, the R129 is considered to be the most versatile and balanced one and the impact it made on when it was originally released defined modern-day Mercedes-Benz

To us, Mercedes-Benz R129 is the very peak of the SL class, but we would like to hear your opinion on both the 2022 Mercedes-Benz SL and all other SL cars that preceded it!

Mercedes-Benz SL Class Collective Shot

The post Ranked: Mercedes-Benz SL Models appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

Sometimes a slogan doesn’t mean very much. Take for example Exxon’s “Happy Motoring” or Pontiac’s “We Are Driving Excitement” – given the ever-increasing price of gas and the recent demise of an entire GM brand, these slogans may ring hollow in many ears. However, at Philadelphia’s Simeone Foundation Museum, home of a car collection that was personally selected over the course of 50 years by a man passionate about sports racers; their tag line – “Celebrating the Spirit of Competition” – tells you just everything you need to know about what’s inside.

Birth of the Grand Sport

While love for Corvettes may be one of America’ strongest automotive passions, the marque’s real “Faithful” lose their bearings when it comes to the Grand Sports – especially the original few built in secret in 1962 by Corvette chief engineer, Zora Arkus-Duntov. To the un-initiated, it may be difficult to explain this crazy attraction for racecars that never really won anything important. Even Doctor Simeone, current owner of #002 – the most original of the original Grand Sports – struggled with his decision to buy a car that lacks a serious competition history. But this love for the breed exists and there are none better than our subject GS002 Corvette.

The post The Perfect American Sports Car— 1963 Corvette Grand Sport appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

While it can’t be denied that all-wheel drive adds extra weight to cars, it also has benefits that outweigh this setback. When cars are pushed to their limits, extra torque on the front axle allows for more traction, making drivers feel more control over their automobiles.

In regular driving, having power on both axles also makes sports cars more dependable in suboptimal weather, making them enjoyable throughout the year. Thanks to all-wheel drive, these ten cars you can find on the market offer sublime performance and control in sun, rain and snow.

#1: Subaru WRX

An all-time all-season classic, the Subaru WRX STi has proven itself in every weather condition imaginable—both as a rally superstar and a roadgoing sports car. The secret behind Subaru’s unstoppable performance on all surfaces is its trademark symmetrical all-wheel drive combined with a boxer engine.

While the engine improves handling by having a lower center of gravity, the AWD system continuously sends power to all four wheels, redistributing torque to the opposite side should some of them lose traction. Subaru offers its sublime all-wheel drive as standard across the whole range, but its most famous application is definitely in the WRX range.

The all-new 2022 WRX has just hit the market, and with it, Subaru brought the sad news that it won’t make a STi variant based on it. So, while we’re waiting for what will quite possibly be an all-electric WRX STi sometime in the future, let’s see what the petrol-burning WRX has to offer.

The previous generation departed from the Impreza range, and for 2022, the gap between the two is even bigger—with the WRX now sporting a muscular look with an assertive design underlining its special place in Subaru’s lineup. As for the power, the WRX sports a 271-horsepower turbocharged 2.4-liter four-piston boxer with 6-speed manual.

In addition to symmetrical all-wheel drive, the WRX sports specially-tuned suspension to ensure optimal control regardless of road conditions. Add the starting price of $29,105 to the equation, and the WRX is once again guaranteed to offer a lot of bang for your buck.

#2: Porsche 911 Carrera 4 GTS

As long as the requirements match, it’s hard to imagine a list of sports cars without a Porsche 911 on it. From the 964 generation up to 2006, Porsche has been offering its quintessential sports car with PSK, an all-wheel drive system from the 959. From the 997 generation, Porsche started using PTM or Porsche Traction Management, a system originally built for the Cayenne SU.

Of course, PTM was thoroughly recalibrated for the 911, making the iconic car even more usable—helping their owners drive them throughout the year, even in conditions where rear-biased weight distribution would be more worrisome than fun. Since 2006, the 911 uses PTM or Porsche Traction Management, an active all-wheel drive system with electro-hydraulically controlled multi-plate clutch working in unison with other driving dynamic systems to distribute torque to the front wheels when necessary.

Today, Porsche offers the Carrera 4 in base, S and GTS trims, while PTM comes as standard in Turbo and Turbo S models as well. Our choice goes to the GTS variant for being the most sensible (yet still quite driver-focused) 911 you can drive during the whole year.

The 3.0-liter twin-turbocharged flat-six is good for 480 horsepower, and depending on your personal preference, it can be mated to 8-speed PDK automatic or a 7-speed manual. The GTS sports wider track, while Chrono Pack and lower ride height with adaptive dampers come as standard, underlining the car’s vigorous nature.

At $144,000 for the coupé, $149,500 for the convertible, or $156,800 for the Targa, the 911 4 GTS is not the cheapest ticket for an all-wheel drive Porsche experience, but it is the most balanced blend of engaging performance and daily usability.

#3: Nissan GT-R R35

The outgoing R35 Nissan GT-R was famous for its giant-killer reputation, courtesy of its state of the art twin-turbocharged 3.8-liter VR38DETT V6 and extremely capable all-wheel drive that gave it extra edge around the corners in all conditions. The ATTESA E-TS all-wheel drive is quite unique, as it features two carbon fiber driveshafts, with the main one sending torque to the 6-speed dual clutch rear transaxle and a limited slip differential.

By default, this system is strongly rear biased, with 98 percent of torque on the rear axle, making the GT-R act like a rear-wheel drive car in most driving situations. When complex electronics sense the need, the system diverts up to 50 percent of torque to the auxiliary drive shaft via a wet multi-plate clutch system. That way, the GT-R is under total control in all conditions—slippery roads included.

In its final form on the North American market, the GT-R comes in two guises. Starting at $113,540, the 565 horsepower GT-R Premium is a sensible choice (and the one you’ll find way more usable, considering its original purpose). For almost double the price though, the GT-R Nismo is a domesticated GT3 race car, sporting extensive use of carbon fiber panels, bespoke track-tuned suspension, Brembo carbon ceramic brakes, forged wheels, and a bump to 600 ponies.

While it’s highly unlikely that any of these will ever be daily driver cars, let alone in the colder parts of the year, the very idea that one can do it is downright amazing.

#4: Acura NSX Type S

If the mention of its name got you startled, we can’t really blame you—since the NSX flew under the radar for the better part of its production cycle. Introduced in 2016, the second generation NSX showcased Honda’s hybrid aspirations in the sports car segment, with the rear mid-mounted 3.5-liter V6 and a front Twin Motor Unit.

Needless to say, the NSX Sport Hybrid SH-AWD uses electric motors to independently send torque to each of the front wheels, while the internal combustion unit powers the rear wheels. This way, the NSX benefits during spirited driving, but what makes it weatherproof is how adjustable it is to one’s daily needs. When put in Quiet mode, the NSX can act like a regular commuter, whereas magnetorheological dampers respond accordingly too, offering a soothing ride for two occupants.

Limited to 350 examples worldwide, 300 out of which are in the United States, the Acura NSX Type S enjoyed numerous upgrades over the regular one—if there is any such thing as a “regular” NSX. The engineering team raised the combined power output from 573 to 602 horsepower through fitting the internal combustion engine with bigger GT3 Evo turbos and new fuel injectors, as well as recalibrating the Twin Motor Unit.

The emphasis was put on performance, so the NSX Type S boasts reprogrammed transmission, a retuned chassis and suspension, improved aerodynamics, and lighter forged wheels with Pirelli P-Zero semi slicks. Now, chances are, most of these instant classics will spend their life in garages, but that still doesn’t deny the fact that Acura built these cars to handle unforgiving weather with ease.

#5: Jaguar F-Type AWD

Smaller, sportier and more agile than any 2-door Jag we remember, this feline completely rebranded Jaguar’s sportiest segment, departing from opulent grand tourers into smaller, more agile and fiery sports cars. The F-Type came as just another refreshment that contributed to Jaguar’s rebirth as a modern company in the premium market, but a palette of spirited engines wasn’t the only trick Jag had up its sleeve.

Starting from 2016, the F-Type became available with optional all-wheel drive, and even though the move seemed blasphemous at the beginning, the idea of engaging the front axle turned out well. In the end, what cat uses only its hind legs, right?

For the starting price of $81,500, the AWD F-Type offers a supercharged 5.0-liter V8 with 444 horsepower on tap, while the $105,300 F-Type R with standard AWD will push the output up to 575 horsepower with a 0-60 sprint in 3.6 seconds and a top speed of 186 MPH.

The F-Type is one of the most exciting driver’s cars you can buy in this price range, and its all-wheel drive adds a layer of security without sacrificing much fun by only applying up to 30% of torque to the front wheels when needed.

#6: Audi RS6

Ever since the 1980s, Audi has been renowned for its rally-bred quattro all-wheel drive with a Torsen center differential distributing torque to both axles, providing stability and control in even the most unforgiving conditions. Now standard across the range, quattro was long an option on all but the range-topping models—the famous S and RS cars.

While the R8 could’ve been the obvious choice, our vote goes to the RS6 Avant, because it offers far greater daily usability (and it’s also the first RS longroof offered on the American market). As for the quattro, it’s electronically controlled and 40:60 rear biased, while maximum torque split is 85:15 front or rear, depending on the situation.

With a base price of $116,500, the RS6 sure does not come cheap, but a combination of its 591-horsepower 4.0-liter V8, lightning fast Tiptronic transmission, and RS-tuned adaptive air suspension more than makes up for the cost, offering both an unstoppable all-season mechanical force and a practical family hauler in one car.

#7: BMW G80 M3 Competition xDrive

Now that the public has gotten over the grille issue, the latest BMW M3 turned out to be pretty amazing, hitting all the right go-fast buttons out there. The press and the public unanimously concluded that it offered both sheer power, superb body control, precise steering—and above all, fun and a sense of engagement. For the 2022 model year, BMW brought an upgrade that introduced all-new dynamics to the M3 and M4 duo.

Available on the 503-horsepower Competition model only, xDrive adds power to the front axle for the first time in the M3 range. The xDrive system distributes power from the 3.0-liter twin-turbocharged straight six between the axles via an electronically-controlled multi-plate clutch.

The system is bespoke for the M3 and M4 and is rear-biased, continuously powering the rear axle and distributing torque to the front wheels when other electronic monitoring systems find it appropriate. That way, the traditional M Car experience is still present, but enhanced with minimal compromises.

#8: Bentley Continental GT Speed

The first Bentley released under Volkswagen’s ownership, the 2003 Continental GT brought a lot of refreshing alterations to the conservative brand. Most famously, the grand tourer got a 6.0-liter W12, Volkswagen Group’s idiosyncratic take on a compact high-performance engine. The W12 was originally mated to Torsen-based all-wheel drive, another novelty for the Crewe-based company.

From its introduction to this day, Bentley’s bestseller evolved, getting numerous improvements and performance-focused variants, one of which has actually held an official ice speed record since 2011. Piloted by Juha Kankunnen, the Bentley Continental GT Supersport achieved 205.48 MPH on the frozen Baltic Sea, proving how superlative its all-wheel drive system is in conjunction with the massive engine.

As of now, the Bentley Continental GT Speed is the most driver-oriented model in the range, sporting the latest evolution of the 6.0-liter W12 and active all-wheel drive to make full use of 650 horsepower and 664 lb-ft of torque. The torque is split equally, but up to 97% of it can be diverted to the rear wheels.

Truth be told, a small bump in horsepower and unchanged torque rating don’t sound like much on paper—but stiffer chassis, electronic limited slip differential, retuned suspension, and the introduction of rear-wheel steering all make the opulent grand tourer more drive-focused (and surprisingly lively for a 5,500 lb car). For those who can shell out at least $274,900, the Bentley Continental GT Speed is a plush grand tourer that can handle more gracefully than any of the numbers suggest.

#9: Lamborghini Huracán EVO

The first time Lamborghini equipped one of its sports cars with all-wheel drive was in the Diablo VT, which got a modified drivetrain from the LM002 Rambo Lambo, but the most widespread use was in the entry level sports car range, namely the Gallardo and its successor, the Huracán. Being related to the Audi R8, the Huracán shares its basic layout with the German supercar, but it’s fine-tuned for a sense of greater exclusivity.

A facelifted and upgraded Huracán EVO is one of the modern wedge wonders, offering way more than the social media clout it’s often associated with. When not going to the Moon, it makes full use of its 640-horsepower 5.2-liter TFSI V10 and 7-speed Doppia Frizione dual-clutch transmission.

The all-wheel drive system is managed by Lamborghini Integrated Vehicle Dynamics or LDVI the torque splits between the axles in 70:30 ratios, but an electronically-controlled multi-clutch system can send all torque to the rear wheels or split it up to 50:50 when necessary.

Thanks to its all-wheel drive system, the Huracán EVO is, in theory, a very forgiving and civilized car—but considering its price tag and aura it radiates, most of them will sadly only be driven around during the sunnier parts of the year.

#10: Toyota GR Corolla

Equipping hot hatchbacks with some form of all-wheel drive is truly nothing new, as many legends—starting from the Lancia Delta Integrale all the way to the Golf R and more recent 3rd generation Ford Focus RS—have all had it in some form. However, the latest pocket rocket with power on all four wheels is something truly special.

While most rear-biased all-wheel drive systems on this list are there to make sports cars livable during the seasons, the all-new GR Corolla has it with the sole purpose of blasting it around on all surfaces.

The GR Corolla was born from Toyota’s motorsport offensive and extensive know-how, which first gave us the GR Yaris. Just like its smaller stablemate, the GR Corolla is a true engineering masterclass showcasing the power of three: three hundred horsepower from a three-cylinder engine and three ways to split torque between the axles. Also, there are three exhausts, but that’s something we’ll just have to get used to.

Anyway, Gazoo Racing upped the turbocharged 1.6-liter 265-horsepower inline-three to 300 horsepower, again mating it mated to six-speed manual transmission, which distributes torque to both axles via GR-Four, a smart all-wheel drive system using two open differentials front and back and electronically controlled multi-clutch pack.

In Normal mode, the torque is split 60:40; Track mode gives it a 50:50 torque split, while Sport mode splits it 30:70. The base Core trim offers Torsen limited slip differentials as an option in the Performance package, while the more focused Circuit Edition will have them as standard (alongside a host of other upgrades, including a carbon fiber roof).

To sum it up, being a bigger, more practical and more powerful sibling of an actual WRC homologation special, the GR Corolla is most probably the ultimate all-season all-wheel drive sports car—and worry not, it will come to the States by the end of 2022.

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In Italy, a country that’s home to numerous small, specialized companies making exotic sports and racing cars, few can compete with SVA in their combination of obscurity with exotic engineering. Turin’s SVA flourished briefly at the end of the 1940s and produced at maximum two cars and a few more chassis. Yet the dazzling design of one of them, a single-seater, well-deserved its presentation by leading publications around the world.

SVA can best be viewed as a spiritual offshoot of Turin’s Cisitalia. That company, brainchild of industrialist and passionate car enthusiast Piero Dusio, created a sensation with its thrusting initiatives at a time when Italy’s major carmakers were struggling to recover from the privations of the wartime years. With its 1,100-cc single-seaters and sports cars Cisitalia was a shining star, attracting the best drivers of the day including Germany’s Hans Stuck and the unforgettable Tazio Nuvolari.

The post Savonuzzi and his Spectacular SVA appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

Despite some people arguing that the BMW lineup might have recently shifted focus from its nimble, fast, and powerful sports cars to more luxurious and eco-friendly ones, that’s hardly fair.

There’s no denying that car manufacturers, in general, have had to pull up their socks to save the environment, but that isn’t necessarily bad news for speed aficionados. Current BMWs are still some of the highest performing machines of all time, and if you look at its pipeline, BMW continues to make fast, fun to drive, powerful machines that every car enthusiast yearns to drive.

So what are the fastest BMWs to hit the roads up to today?

Currently, the fastest street-legal BMW is the 2022 BMW M5 CS, which can sprint from 0–60 mph in an astonishing 2.9 seconds and deliver a top speed of 190 mph.

When tested at the Nürburgring, Auto Sport test driver Christian Gebhardt managed an impressive lap time of 7:29.57, despite the added distraction of the glove box flinging itself open twice during the lap. Now, let’s look at 5 other fast-as-hell Beemers.

• M3 Competition xDrive Sedan
• BMW M4 GTS
• 2021 BMW M5 Competition
• 2022 BMW M8 Competition
• 2022 BMW M5 CS

5. M3 Competition xDrive Sedan

When the G80 M3 Sedan and G82 M4 Coupé debuted in 2020, the duo instantly overthrew Bangle-era cars as the most controversially-designed cars in BMW’s modern history—but nobody dared to question their performance.

As M cars always do, the M3 and its M4 coupé sibling turned out to be ultimate driver’s cars, offering thrilling performance with a 473 hp twin-turbocharged 3.0-liter straight-six and an extensive amount of upgrades compared to non-M variants.

The Competition models brought more distilled performance with the straight-six unit uprated to 503 hp and 479 lb-ft of torque. The final evolution of Competition models (so far) adds xDrive, and despite these cars being around 100 lb heavier than their RWD counterparts, all-wheel drive significantly aids to their overall performance.

In terms of straight line performance, the M3 Competition xDrive can get from a standstill to 60 mph in 3.4 seconds as per BMW’s claims. However, the press concluded that the factory sheet is conservative about this sedan’s acceleration numbers as some journalists recorded times of under 3 seconds.

4. BMW M4 GTS

A proper street-legal track tool, the F82 M4 GTS embraces the M philosophy of utilizing cutting edge motorsport technology to achieve maximum track performance in a car that can still be driven on public roads.

With production officially limited to 700 vehicles (and unofficially to 803 customer cars), the M4 GTS made quite a lot of news in the car world, setting a blisteringly fast 07:28 Nürburgring lap time—and putting all BMW’s claims into measurable, highly impressive numbers.

This car’s secret lies in tremendous weight-saving, getting it as close as practicable to the power-to-weight ratio of a race car.

Furthermore, the 3.0-liter six-cylinder engine borrowed from the M3 and M4 was optimized to squeeze out 493 hp and 443 lb-ft of torque. A 7-speed DCT enables quick shifts, sending torque to the rear wheels.

With just 300 examples officially destined to be sold in the USA, the M4 GTS is going to be a hit on the collector market in years to come—so getting your hands on one is a wise investment move that will yield big returns.

On the other hand, snatching one to blast it around a closed course is a great idea too, since the M4 GTS is one of the greatest modern BMWs ever made.

3. 2021 BMW M5 Competition

The M5 has been a staple M Car since it was first released back in 1985. When it was unveiled, it set a benchmark for family friendly sports cars—and now, after many years of constant development, the sixth generation M5 has maintained its presence at the forefront of high-performance sedans.

The 2021 M5 Competition is not a completely new M5, but actually a midlife facelift in which BMW altered the F90’s appearance by slightly reshaping the grille, installing sharper front and rear bumpers, and revising headlamp and taillamp design.

Under the hood of the F90 M5 is a twin-turbocharged 4.4-liter V8 mated to an eight-speed automatic gearbox. In the M5 Competition, this powerplant generates 617 horsepower and 553 lb-ft of torque, which can launch the M5 to 60 mph in only 3.3 seconds.

The transmission on the M5 Competition is an advanced eight-speed M-Steptronic unit sending power to both axles via xDrive and an M-Differential aiding in high-speed cornering. The fun bit, though, is that the M5 can be switched from AWD to rear-axle biased with the flick of a switch, resulting in most torque being sent to the rear wheels!

The M5 Competition is 0.3 seconds quicker than the standard M5 and tops out at 190 mph, making this the fastest mass-produced BMW M5 to date.

2. 2022 BMW M8 Competition

Launched initially in May 2019, this one held the mantle for the fastest BMW model available until the #1 car on this list came along. Like the M5, the M8 is another car sending power to all wheels, resulting in phenomenal straight line performance.

The updated 2022 2-door coupe receives the same twin-turbo 4.4 liter V8 as the M5 Competition, though certain tweaks have been made to make it outperform the sedan. The BMW M8 Competition’s engine is mated to the same eight-speed M Steptronic transmission, powering all four wheels with an option to switch all-wheel drive off and let the transmission send all its horses to the rear axle wheels.

The engine produces 617 horsepower and 553 lb-ft of torque. With this powertrain, the M8 is amazingly fast, reaching 60 mph from a standstill in just 3 seconds flat. The added M Driver’s package also entitles the buyer to a day-long high-speed driving course at a BMW Performance center and raises the speed limiter to 189 mph.

1. 2022 BMW M5 CS

Images courtesy of BMW

The post Top 5 Fastest BMW Cars appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

Vintage racing can also serve as an arena for someone to hone their driving skills and enjoy a weekend at the track, making new friends and visiting with old friends. While the demographics of the participants lean towards older individuals, there are a number of young people who have discovered it as well. Most simply enjoy their time behind the wheel of a vintage race car, but for some it may also serve as a path to higher levels of racing.

Such is the case with 22 year-old Horatio Fitz Simmon, the subject of this article—who is an active vintage racer but also has aspirations of becoming a professional race driver. From a very early age, he has thought of nothing else but race cars, racing, and becoming a professional driver. As you will see in the following paragraphs, his background and activities have been focused on that goal, choosing vintage racing as his entry point to race cars.

A Racing Environment

To say Fitz-Simon was brought up in an environment which influenced his interest in racing would be an understatement. He was not only born into a family where cars and racing were a focus but also lived in a house with a strong connection to motorsports.

Horatio was born in Towcester, Northamptonshire, England, the youngest of five children (two brothers and two sisters) a short distance from Silverstone Race Track and into a home originally part of the Hesketh Estate. You might recall the name Hesketh, which was the name of a Formula 1 team of the mid-1970s whose driver was one James Hunt.

Horatio’s Father, Ian, had a keen interest in racing, which he pursued in a Porsche 911 competing in the Porsche Classic Cup. Ian also dabbled in the car brokerage business, so young Horatio was exposed to a selection of sports and racing cars at a very early age.

Horatio’s two older brothers, taking after their father, took up racing for a period of time but decided they were not as interested in the sport as their father and moved on to other activities.

To California & Karts

When Horatio was two years-old, the family moved from their native England to Northern California, where they have lived for the past 20 years. Ever since he can remember, Horatio liked going fast—whether it was on a tricycle, bicycle, or kart. One of his earliest memories after arriving in their new home was of a Mclaren M10 F5000 race car his father found and purchased.

Horatio recalls, “I would spend hours in the car moving the steering wheel from side to side, pretending I was racing, and soon set a course—amply aided by VHS videos of epic battles between James Hunt and Niki Lauda”. He soon realized all that he wanted to do in life was race and began pursuing his parents relentlessly to let him have a go in a kart.

Horatio finally received his kart on his fourth birthday, when his father took him to Sear Point Raceway. A new 50cc kart was purchased, and Horatio had his first experience on the track turning laps by himself. He loved it;  the die was cast.

Over the next several months, Horatio spent many hours practicing on the track during test days, but it wasn’t until early 2005 that he had his first experience racing other drivers.

It was at Sears Point in the rain where he began circulating around with kids in their bigger karts—yet Horatio was keeping up with the faster drivers. Going through a tricky set of corners, he spun out in a puddle and slid under a trailer parked alongside the track.

Had it not been for the karts engine impacting the trailer first, Fitz-Simon could have suffered serious head injury, but he came out with just a damaged helmet and a headache. Witnessing the incident was his father, and it scared him to think what might have happened. That was the end of Horatio’s initial foray into karts.

Back Karting in the Deep End

Five years later, his father acquired a used 80cc kart, which he and Horatio rebuilt. The kart was not competitive but was useful for practice, and Horatio spent hours running laps at local tracks to hone his skills.

This was followed by a 125cc kart, in which he had his first competitive racing experience. He soon found he was a few years older than most of his competition in the 125cc class (who had begun racing at an earlier age).

With his family’s full support, he spent many weekends at the track practicing and racing a full schedule in the Gatorz Challenge of America Series. As a rookie driver, he jumped in at the deep end, competing against many of the best drivers in America.

Showing a glimpse of his talent, Horatio qualified on the front row of his first race—which attracted the attention of PSL Karting, a CRG (kart manufacturer) factory team from Canada. He finished the year with his first pole position, six podium finishes, 3rd place in the Redline Oil Series Championship standings, and fourth place in the SKUSA Summer Nationals. All this led to an offer of a factory ride with PSL Karting for 2013.

Outside of karting, Horatio and his Father attended as many vintage car races as their schedule would allow. This added exposure to racing further heightened his interest in racing and becoming a race driver.

In only his second year of competitive karting, the 2013 season was a breakout year for Horatio, producing even greater results. Racing as a factory PSK Karting driver, he was the California Redline Series Champion and the Gatorz Challenge of America Vice-Champion, with seven pole positions and ten race wins, plus 13 Podium finishes and eight lap records. He was ranked 5th in his class in the U.S. and topped it all with being named a driver for Team USA Rotax World Finals.

Once again, his racing prowess attracted the attention of a factory team; this time it was Sodi Kart USA (a leading kart manufacturer based in France). He was offered a last minute drive in the U.S. Rotax Grand Nationals in New Orleans and caught a redeye flight—arriving just in time for qualifying and his race. In the final (and against 40 of the top drivers in the U.S.), he finished 5th and set the second fastest lap. The future was looking bright.

A Sudden End to Racing

For 2014, Horatio moved up to the Junior Rotax Series in karts that were bigger and faster than what he had been racing previously. In his first race, he finished fourth in the first round while setting one of the fastest laps—but unfortunately, this wasn’t enough to secure a factory team ride for the season.

Racing at this level as a privateer without sponsorship was cost-prohibitive, so Horatio was forced to abandon his aspiring career—A crushing blow after his series of successes in such a short period of time.

Cars & Planning

With karting not dominating his time, Horatio focused on school—all the while thinking of how to get back to racing. While attending a local high school, he spent his spare time buying classic British sports cars, which he would repair and sell for a profit.

He also spent a summer rebuilding a used Porsche 911 SC (a duplicate of the one his father had raced) for his own use. This was a great learning experience for developing his mechanical skills, which would come in handy in the future.

He also spent time with his friends, zipping around the back roads near his home in the Porsche with an occasional day at the track. However, never far from his thoughts was the desire to race again, with one idea foremost in his mind: go to where the real racing action was for an aspiring driver—England.

After graduating from high school in 2018 (and with a plan formulated to rekindle his racing, along with funds derived from his car selling business), all he needed was to pick the right time to enact his plan. During this non-racing period, he also spent time making as many contacts in the automotive world as possible, hoping those contacts might benefit him in the future.

When he turned 19—and after a quick stay in the hospital for an appendectomy (on his birthday no less!)—the opportunity to visit the U.K. materialized.

Back to the Old Country

While recovering from the hospital stay, his father said he was planning a trip to the UK to arrange for a service for his recently deceased grandmother. Horatio persuaded his father to take him along, which would accelerate his action plan.

His first step before leaving home was to make arrangements to obtain the Association Racing Drivers Schools (ARDS) license, a must have for anyone wanting to race in the UK. Shortly after arriving in the UK, he took the course at Silverstone Circuit and obtained the all-important ARDS License.

A conversation with his ARDS License Instructor turned out to be the impetus for his first race in the UK. The instructor (also the Chief Instructor at the Silverstone School), after learning Horatio wanted to become a professional race driver, told him “you’re wasting your time, go and become a soccer player. You’re closer to making the Premier League than getting to Formula 1”.

He then told Horatio that if he wanted to find out how good he was, he should enter the Walter Hayes Formula Ford Festival—where he could judge his talent against some of the best drivers around. Horatio logged this challenge in his memory and would accept it in due course.

The Big Move

After the short stay in the UK, Horatio and his father returned to California, where Horatio spent the next couple of months biding his time and finalizing the details of his plan to return to the UK. His goal was to be in the UK in time for the British Grand Prix at Silverstone in July.

He recalls, “I quietly contacted one of my Father’s UK friends and arranged to rent a room from him in a town called Leamington Spa, which is a convenient short train ride to Silverstone Race Circuit. I next sold my Porsche and other personal possessions and bought a one-way airline ticket to the UK. All this without revealing my plan to my parents”.

Horatio’s Father Ian recounts how the family learned of Horatio’s intentions.“One night at dinner, Horatio announced he was going to become a racing driver, a statement he repeated. He was going to England in about a week. He then proceeded to lay out his plan. Of course we knew of his interest in racing, but this still caught us a bit off-guard. On his own, he made all the necessary arrangements and had his bags already packed—and by gosh, he did it!”

Tea, a Mentor, & an Introduction

Early in Horatio’s kart racing days (and through his father), Horatio had met someone who would turn out to be a very special individual. His name was Howden Ganley, an ex-factory Formula One and LeMans 24 Hours driver who happened to live not far from the Fitz-Simon home in California.

Horatio’s father had sought Howden’s advice on several race cars he had acquired and introduced him to Horatio. Ganley’s experience of moving from his native New Zealand to England at 19 years old to pursue his dreams of becoming a professional race driver certainly struck home with Horatio. Their friendship grew, and the two would link up again when Horatio moved to the UK. It was Ganley who would help jump-start Horatio’s efforts to make the right connections in UK racing.

After Horatio arrived in the UK in early Summer 2019, he settled into his attic room at his father’s best friend’s home. His next contact was with his aunt, who was a track manager at the Silverstone Circuit—where she arranged a job for Horatio serving tea to customers in the British Racing Drivers Club during the British Grand Prix.

Horatio says, “This was a wonderful place to make connections and meet all sorts of important racing people. Fortunately, Howden, a regular attendee to the British Grand Prix, was present and introduced me to many key people whom he thought might be able to help to get my foot in the door”.

One of the introductions was to Richard Dutton, principal of Fortec Racing—a well known racing team (British F3, F4 and former Formula Renault). Dutton invited Horatio to come to the Fortec Facility to have a look around and try out the racing simulator.

The simulator was a good opportunity to show the team his potential ability. The test went very well with his laps clocked at the same time as the Fortec team driver—and this was in front of the whole team who had watched. Impressed, Dutton invited Horatio to the Donnington Race Circuit for an actual track test in an F4 car. Things were moving along unexpectedly fast.

Two weeks later, Horatio found himself at Donnington, sitting in an F4 car for the first time and about to head out onto the track. No pressure here! At the conclusion of his laps he was told he had lapped eight tenths of a second faster than the team driver and was running at race pace. The team offered him a factory ride in the British F4 Series for the next season, but there was one major catch—he had to find quite a large amount of sponsorship money to secure the ride. Unfortunately, this proved to be unattainable and made even more difficult with the effects of the pandemic. As a result, there would be no F4 ride in 2020.

While attempting to find a team to race with, Horatio was able to supplement his income by becoming a driving instructor at the Silverstone Racing School and the Jonathan Palmer Racing School—both of which offered ample daily track time, which was worth more than his paycheck to him. He would continue as a driving instructor upon his return to the UK in 2021.

Finally a Race

With just enough money for a plane ticket home and possibly buying some track time, Horatio recalled the ARDS instructor’s comment about racing in the upcoming Walter Hayes Formula Ford Festival. However, there wasn’t much time to find a ride, so he immediately began telephoning everyone he could think of in search of a race car.

All efforts were unsuccessful, until the last call to a race team located at Silverstone—Classic Team Merlyn, whose head man, Mike O’Brien, Horatio had served tea to at the British Grand Prix. In short order, an agreement was reached to race a 1972 Merlyn (the oldest car in the race) against a large field of newer cars and experienced drivers.

The race was held in pouring rain, but Horatio overcame a slow start to move up the field, even passing his ARDS Driving Instructor (!) to finish fourth. For the Final the next day, the course was dry and the racing very competitive.

He had several good tête-à-têtes with the frontrunners, eventually finishing third—a great accomplishment in his first race in an outdated car at a very prestigious event. It had been a whirlwind six months in the UK, and Horatio had proven he could race with seasoned UK competition, so he was looking forward to the 2020 season.

CSRG & Historic Formula Fords

Over the winter months, Horatio worked hard at arranging a ride for the next season (and building his bank account to live on and pay for his racing). His plans were interrupted by the pandemic as travel overseas was severely limited, forcing a delay to fly back to the UK.

Analyzing the situation, he decided on a different course of action for the coming season—instead of pursuing a ride in an F3 or F4, he would focus on Historic Formula Fords. This decision was based on several factors:

• The cost to race Historic FF versus F4 was much less and within reach.
• The cars were professionally prepared by teams with full support.
• There were drivers from all over the UK, Europe, and beyond.
• It was an excellent way to hone driver skills without tech aids found on modern race cars.
• There was a full schedule of races at well known race tracks.
• Success in Historic cars would provide visibility and the chance to link up with higher level teams.

In the meantime, he and his father acquired a Winkelmann Formula Ford and entered the Cross Flow Cup race with the Classic Sport Racing Group (CSRG), to be held at Sonoma Raceway in April. The car needed work just to get it running reasonably, well but with Howden Ganley’s help, they made it ready for the race.

After sorting out some minor problems at the track, Horatio started at the back of the pack behind 36 other cars in the Qualifying race and finished ninth. In the final, he was running in third place before the clutch failed—however it had been a fun weekend and a good way to keep his skills sharp.

A Short Season

With COVID continuing to wreak havoc with commercial air travel and entry into countries restricted, Horatio realized there was no chance to secure a team ride for 2020. He finally arrived back in the UK in July, but without any firm commitments for a ride.

Fortunately, his father had purchased a 1972 Merlyn Formula Ford, which enabled Horatio to enter the Oulton Park Gold Cup in the Historic Class as an unsponsored driver. He successfully ran two races with two fifth place finishes.

He was then able to secure a ride in a more modern Spectrum Chassis Formula Ford (FF) with the Kevin Miles Team for the remainder of the season. He ran in the British FF Championship, finishing with two DNFs due to mechanical issues.

Next, it was time to move on to the Brands Hatch FF Festival to finish fourth and DNF (clutch). Unfortunately, he felt the team was not doing their best to support him, so he departed and entered his own 1972 Merlyn FF in the Walter Hayes Trophy at Silverstone.

Horatio completed both races finishing with two fifth place finishes. It had been a shortened, difficult season but he was gaining experience with each race.

Having watched Horatio race at Silverstone, Mike O’Brien contacted Horatio to talk him about joining his Classic Team Merlyn (CTM) for the 2021 HSCC Historic FF season. They came to an agreement, so Horatio departed for California and the winter break knowing he was set for the coming year.

A New Challenge

With testing beginning in March of 2021, Horatio returned to the UK in February to link up with CTM. The plan was to race a full schedule of eight race weekends at historic British tracks including Silverstone, Cadwell Park, Brands Hatch, Donnington Park, Oulton Park, and Mallory Park.

He was provided with a 1972 Merlyn Mk20A FF as his team car with the hopes of receiving an updated engine early in the season. Unfortunately, the new engine did not appear until the last race weekend—resulting in his car having mechanical issues throughout the season.

Despite these problems, Horatio persevered and had a great season, finishing with the most podium appearances of any other driver and never finishing lower than third (with the exception of the first race of the year at Snetterton).

The final race of the 2021 HSCC Classic Formula Ford Series was held at Silverstone and would present Horatio with a new challenge. He would not only race his familiar Merlyn FF but also a Lotus 22 Formula Junior (FJr), a car type he had never driven before. It would be a busy event, including a total of five races over two days—three in the FF and two in the Junior.

With a chance to advance in the Historic Formula Ford Championship standings, Horatio had great results in the first two races of the weekend, with a second and first (including pole position and a lap record) moving him into second place in the Championship standings with one race remaining.

Unfortunately, despite running a good race among the leaders, he ran into bad luck when he was penalized for an on-track incident. The penalty cost him a chance at winning the Series Championship—but nonetheless, he finished third in the final season standings, which was still a great year for his first full season of racing on unfamiliar tracks against top competition.

The results of the two Formula Junior races in the Lotus 22 FJr were amazing considering he had never driven a FJr before. Team owner Mike O’Brien had agreed to let Horatio race the car just before the race weekend, which he knew would provide a different driving experience and a great opportunity. A Friday practice session allowed Horatio time in the car to learn its characteristics—lighter and faster, but with less braking power than the FF (good to know in a race!). On Saturday, he qualified the Junior on the pole and set a lap record on his last lap.

Racing in the rain one day and dry the next, Horatio took pole position and established a lap record; not bad for a first drive in an unfamiliar car! He won the first race, and after a long duel with the eventual winner in the second race, he finished second—fantastic results for a first time driver in a Formula Junior.

This concluded his first full racing season in the UK (and a very successful one at that!). Leaving the UK to return to California for the winter, Horatio was very much looking forward to the 2022 season and a chance to build on the experience and success he had gained racing with Classic Team Merlyn.

The Velocity Invitational

It may have been the end of the season in the UK, but not in California—there was still one major vintage race to participate in: The Velocity Invitational, a prestigious meeting held at Laguna Seca in November. With a last-minute entry and acceptance, he raced a recently-acquired Lotus 26R. Adapting to the 26R quickly, Horatio won the GT Class qualifying race, then doubled up with a win in the final. Another good weekend at the track, this time to finish off the year.

During his off-track time at Laguna Seca, Horatio enjoyed the ambiance of the event and endeavored to meet as many people as possible to expand his number of contacts in the racing community. One such meeting was with Zack Brown, Head of McLaren’s Formula One effort. One never knows what might develop from such a casual meeting.

Plans for 2022

Over the winter months, Horatio’s main task was to put together a schedule of races for the coming season. Horatio focused on selecting specific events that would help expand his driving resume in a variety of prestigious historic settings and several different cars. Racing once again with Mike Davis’s CTM, he hopes to enter the Goodwood Members Meeting, the 60th Anniversary of the Silverstone Classic, the Oulton Park Gold Cup, the Lurani Trophy Races in Europe, and the Goodwood Festival of Speed. In the U.S., he is planning on entering both the Rolex Monterey Motorsports Reunion and the Velocity Invitational, both at Laguna Seca.

In addition to their recent acquisition of a historic Lotus 22 FJr, the Fitz-Simon Family stable also includes a Winkelmann FF, Lotus 26R, and Merlyn FF. The plan is to race the 26R and the Junior in the U.S. events and possibly in selected races in the U.K. However, to start the year off, Horatio is headed to Sweden in March for something quite different—ice racing. Overall, if the schedule falls into place as planned, it will be an exciting (and very busy) year in the burgeoning career of Horatio Fitz-Simon.

Photo Gallery

The post Vintage Racing with a Twist appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

There are few tuning companies in the world who are universally entrusted with the enviable (and sometimes unenviable) task of making a Porsche car better than it was when it came from the factory. E-Motion Engineering LLC, a California-based Porsche Tuning Specialist, is one such example.

The prospect of achieving the status that comes with this territory will make just about any wide-eyed and ambitious tuning shop—even an already-reputable one—salivate. Optimism is important, but that’s easy enough to have on tap and certainly not all that’s truly required for such an undertaking.

These kinds of opportunities are only revealed to those with the necessary arsenal and experience to pursue perfection. Having the audacity to pull something like this off needs to be rooted in something tangible, and in the case of Joey Seely—owner of E-Motion Engineering—he certainly has the required credentials to have a crack at it.

While I’m not going to comment on the politics rampant within automotive tuning culture (as if I’m in the know, which for the most part, I’m not), my personal experience with the Porsche community—particularly for 911s—is that it is a predominantly cooperative entity.

Tuning companies around the world often collaborate successfully with each other, releasing products or packages that are compatible with—and complimentary to—one another. It’s nice to see, especially in a world that seems to be succumbing to widespread tribalism.

Building a Legacy

This communal approach to enhancing our love of P-cars even has the manufacturer’s blessing—so much so that Porsche is paradoxically active in this arena, despite what figures like Dr. Frank Walliser and Andreas Preuninger may light-heartedly remark about this particular relationship on occasion.

In fact, the legitimacy of it all was recently cemented when Porsche announced that long-time tuning outfit and racing partner Manthey Racing would become part of the Porsche Tequipment catalogue. Suffice to say, there’s real meaning behind pursuing a career in tuning Porsche road cars, as it could extend above and beyond just catering to customers who want to individualize their vehicles.

Circling around to my earlier point; very few have the resumé required to pull this off in any case. But if there’s anyone else who can achieve this rank, it’s Joey at E-Motion. He’s even said as much, revealing that he would like to be regarded in the same camp as the RUFs and Mantheys of the Porsche world one day.

More importantly, he’s been backing those ambitions with his work—work which Porsche themselves are well acquainted with and just as impressed by.

The E-Motion(al) Journey

E-Motion as an entity actually precedes Joey’s reign, with the tradename and premises previously owned by Jeff Zwart—another big personality in the automotive scene, particularly as it pertains to the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb. As you might suspect, the two were already familiar with one another before everything changed hands, with Joey having been the brains behind Jeff’s Pikes Peak winning 911 GT3 Turbo.

Significant as that transaction ultimately was, Joey’s path into his Costa Mesa, California base of operations began long before any of that was in the works. To understand this, we have to trace Joey’s steps as far back as his days with Peterson Motorsports—a racing team which competed in ALMS, IMSA and 24HLM—where he was an engineer who worked on their championship-winning 996 GT3 RSR (aptly referred to as “White Lightning” for a number of seasons in the early 2000s).

Joey earned his keep and staked his reputation on being a suspension-tuning guru, and would eventually take those very transferrable skills to the production car space. First he would have a stint with BBI Autosport (another California-based tuning company), before setting up his own shop in what we know today as E-Motion Engineering. Over this time, while continuing to be regarded as a suspension specialist, E-Motion has also been gaining distinction for their complete builds. The rest as they say, is history.

An Insider’s View

Or is it? A tour of the shop (lots more on that in the video below) would suggest otherwise, as it’s the future of Porsche street car tuning—through Joey’s eyes, of course—which looks to be the main headliner here. As a former photography studio, the space continues to be impeccably kept up and is unusually spotless, as if it continued to serve the goals of its previous tenant (who may as well have been a medical surgeon, too).

The pristine and white-lighted disposition inside the building is certainly conducive to a well-functioning operating room—for all things organic or otherwise—which makes it difficult to fathom whether or not a car has done anything except been parked there, if even that. Rest assured, there’s real work being done on some very real cars, all of it is in plain sight, and Joey is more than happy to show you around if you’re so inclined.

Let’s face it: words alone were never going to do justice for what needs to be seen with your eyes. For those of us not able to make the trip in person, Larry Chen—internationally renowned automotive photographer/vlogger—has you covered with the video below:

Feature Projects

At the moment, you can expect a composition of mostly Porsches, the majority of which are 911s—modern and vintage—and the occasional oddball (but equally delightful) build thrown into the mix. The one pictured below is a great example.

Here are some of the company’s most notable projects:

Project Nasty

This amicably-named red Porsche 964 also happens to be Joey’s personal car. The origins of this project date back to Joey’s time at BBi Autosport, evolving into what has become his reliable (albeit wild) daily driver. Stanceworks did an awesome feature on the car, which you can read here. Or, if a video is more your thing, check out the one below:

Pikes Peak Porsche 935-19

This is Jeff Zwart’s current Hill Climb car. While it no longer has a completely exposed carbon body—it has since been wrapped in Martini livery—it is as impressive a machine as one could ever hope to pilot. This 935-19 was even featured on Porsche’s official newsroom in 2020, with specific mention being made to Joey and E-Motion Engineering’s role in overseeing the operations.

Porsche Cayenne Overland Builds

Between building the ultimate street car for his clients and providing Jeff a platform from which to dominate at Pikes Peak, Joey still finds time for projects that are a little less ‘ordinary’. That being said, you can still expect the same quality, attention-to-detail, purpose and dedication that any other car that comes through the shop would receive. These Porsche Cayenne Diesel Overland builds just ooze charisma, so some would argue that they got more love than any other of E-Motion Engineering’s projects.

Company Info

Website: https://emotionengineering.co/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/emotion_engineering/?hl=en

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EmotionEngineering.co/

Rennlist profile: https://rennlist.com/forums/performance-modifications-forum/1259823-emotion-engineering-at-your-service.html

The post Company Feature: E-Motion Engineering appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

I have been road racing since the early 1980s and vintage/historic racing since the late ’80s; always in 105 series Alfa Romeos. But I remember, back in the early ’90s, racing with this little blue sports racer called a “LaBoa”. When I say “racing with” I mean I saw it briefly at the green flag, then again when it came around to lap me.

The post Italo-American Serpent — 1964 LaBoa MkII appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

In the 1950s, home-made, one-off sports cars were being created everywhere across the country, the majority of them emerging from suburban garages built by weekend racers, mechanics, engineers and dreamers. The results of these efforts were mixed; some cars were crude creations cobbled together by shade-tree mechanics that were downright ugly, some were beautifully crafted but rarely ran well or competitively, others were simply rebodied and lightened production cars. Many of these cars were never finished and their discarded carcasses show up today on Craigslist or eBay every so often, pulled off the boulevard of broken dreams hoping to find a benefactor to finish them.  Collectively, these racers and sports cars were referred to as “Specials”.

Every so often a very talented, creative and dedicated person would engineer and build a Special completely from scratch, (body, chassis and suspension) in their garage and build it well. Such a car is this curvaceous special.

The post Standers Family Affair—1953 MG Special appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

That is, until now.

We were contacted by CarAndClassic.co.uk (alternatively CarAndClassic.com), the second largest classic car sales site in the world, and the largest of such sites in the UK and EU, with an offer we couldn’t refuse. That offer? A one-on-one interview with CEO and Director Tom Wood, about what makes his site work so well, and the hard work that goes on behind the scenes of a major sales and auction site.

A Brief History Of Car & Classic

Around the turn of the century, after the dot-com bubble had burst, the internet had settled down a little, and a tiny company called Google had just started their search engine site, Car & Classic was formed. From the very start, it was intended to be a quick and easy site for buyers, sellers, and fans of classic cars in the United Kingdom to visit to either list their cars, look for one to buy, or simply peruse the listings with dreams in their heads.

Little did they know at the time what Car & Classic was going to grow into. By the 2010’s, not only was the site pulling over 1.25 million unique views per month, it had grown beyond being UK based and was now serving the entirety of Europe, the Baltic States, and Scandinavian Arc. Millions of dollars worth of classic cars were being bought, sold, and traded through the site each year, and it now had a dedicated staff of customer service agents, network development professionals, and a dedicated server infrastructure to keep the site highly available.

In 2017, Tom Wood, an engineer by trade and a classic car collector by hobby, after a few years of continuous attempts, was finally able to buy the site and company. He had seen it stagnate a little in its development, and bought in at just the right time to reinvigorate the site, add the auction element to it, and take the site global. To say that he and his team of employees have pulled it off is a mild understatement, as under his guidance, Car & Classic is now the second largest classic car sales and auction site in the world.

Meeting Tom Wood, CEO & Director of CarAndClassic.com

Tom Wood has had many titles in his time. Engineer. Automotive tech pioneer. CEO many times. He’s even been referred to as “the next Richard Branson” when it comes to tech entrepreneurship. Yet, besides all that, he is one thing above all else: Absolutely mad for classic cars.

This is because throughout his developmental years, he was exposed to classic cars almost daily. He developed this perfect madness in one particular memory, that of helping his dad change the engine, not just the oil, the engine of a 1931 Austin Seven when he was 8 years old. He also started to learn how to drive at about the same age, and as he puts it, “It’s in the blood now.”

He bought Car & Classic in 2017, and hasn’t looked back since. It has grown exponentially under his leadership, and we were more than happy to be able to have a one-on-one with him regarding the inner workings of one of these massive sites, as he is a man with the same passion that anyone reading these lines today shares.

Interview with Tom Wood of Car & Classic

Our interviewer for the day was Simon Bertram, a content writer for Sports Car Digest and sister automotive content sites. While he is not your average classic car collector, he does know the collecting lifestyle from other hobbies. He does love documentaries, especially those that go into the Porsche, Bugatti, Ducati, and other factories about how cars and bikes are assembled, so he was enthusiastic to say the least about this interview!

Note: Portions of the full interview have been selected and edited for clarity and conciseness.

Simon Bertram (SB): 

First off, allow me to thank you for taking the time out of your schedule to be able to give us this exclusive look at just what makes Car & Classic tick!

Tom Wood (TW): 

My pleasure.

Simon Bertram (SB): As with all interviews that we do, it’s not just about the site and the cars on it, but also the people behind it. So, a quick history of you and your love of cars?

Tom Wood (TW):

I trained as an engineer, and I’ve been running businesses for about 15 years now. But, I’ve had this passion for cars, especially classics, since a very young age. What got me started was my dad, as it is normally people’s dads that get them into it, and I was helping him change the engine of a 1931 Austin Seven at around the age of 8. I also started to learn to drive in that car as well, so it’s in the blood.

I guess I’m lucky enough, over the past four years, to combine my passion for engineering and business with my hobby, which is classic cars, when I bought Car & Classic. We’ve seen some awesome growth since that point, so I guess I’m doing something right!

SB: 

On that point in particular, what kind of growth have you overseen?

TW:

I don’t really remember how many people were in the company in 2017, but today, we have a team of about 70 all over the world. We are still centered in the UK, of course, but as part of expanding globally, we have people from as far as the USA to Australia in there.

SB:

Also, I don’t think I was changing pretty much anything except the game on my NES when I was 8 years old, so that’s a bit of a step up!

TW:

(laughs) Well, I had some help. It was more about being able to pull them apart and see how they work than anything, and it was an Austin Seven engine, so I could probably have picked it up when I was 8 as they are not very big. I’ve always loved to tinker with cars and play around with cars and engines so I’m really lucky now to be able to have a collection of classics and also help out others build their collections through my work.

Much like any of us, Tom started out like we did. Something about the automobile drew us to them. For some, like Simon, it was driving them, especially competitively, from go karts all the way up to touring-class race cars. For Tom, it was the engineering, the mechanical, “what does this lever do?” level of curiosity and interest that informed the direction of his lifelong passion with classics.

At this point, Tom went a bit more into detail about the history of Car & Classic, which is outlined at the start of this article under the “A Brief History Of Car & Classic” heading, so that part of the interview has been omitted. A point of interest did come up, however, which is that since its inception to now, Car & Classic, at least in the “For Sale” section, has always been free.

By “Free,” Tom emphasized that it was free. No one has ever been billed or charged for listing their car on the site, and the site takes no cut from any privately organized sale. The site relied mostly on ad revenue and traffic to the site in the past to sustain itself, and has since added a small fee from auctions to help sustain the development and deployment of features, as well as expand.

It is at this point that the deep dive into what really happens behind the scenes of a major sales and auction site began. After a quick overview of what we were looking for in the deep dive, Tom figuratively opened the doors to the office for us to peek through with some pretty big binoculars.

SB:

So, the first part of our deep dive is all about the surface layer of the site, what the visitor sees. What would you label the site as, in general?

TW:

First and foremost, it’s a sales listing site. We do have the auction aspect of it, but the biggest part of Car & Classic are the listings. When we do post up auctions, we have them over 7 days and at any one time, we have between 200 to 300 auctions running. We also have a small part of the overall team that promotes content to the front page of the site based on a number of factors, but, being a classic car site, it’s usually rarity, an excellent example of the model, or an auction that is really grabbing traction with site visitors.

Something that is not overly apparent on the site that we facilitate is that we have a seamless escrow system whereby Car & Classic assumes the financial risk of the sale of the car, but that’s an entire discussion to have later on.

SB:

Sounds like a great time to talk about the auction side of things, as that seems to be the more involved part of the business. The first question is either a pretty in depth one, or a short answer, which is how do you source cars to go up for auction? Do you actively search, wait for people to contact you, et al?

TW:

It’s important to realize that the majority of our business is in sales here, as we have most of the classic cars for sale in Europe going through Car & Classic. This helps with the auction side, as people come to us, they know the brand, they know the best place to sell a classic car across Europe, so they will list their car for free, through our “For Sale” ad wizard on our site that is very easy to use.

That wizard asks for all the pertinent details of the car, such as year, make, model, condition, how much you want to sell it for, detailed description of the car itself, similar to how most For Sale automotive sites work. Where our wizard deviates is that through that journey of listing their car for sale, they are given the option of “Would you like to sell your car within 7 days?”

They do have to pay a commission for that, which is 5% plus tax, same as many other auction sites out there. As part of that commission, we will come out, or send out a representative, to inspect the car, take 200 or more pictures of it, and have the car written up professionally by one of our writers. They also get the benefit of our secure escrow service, and all of this happens on average within 48 hours of selecting you would like your car to go to auction.

In that way, the vast majority of our auctions are created through sellers choosing the auction option. We also have a small team of experts that will constantly look at For Sale listings, and if they notice something special, like the 1987 Toyota AE86 we set an auction record with a little while back, they will put the listing on a hold and contact the seller to see if they want to go through an auction instead.

The last way we source auctions is through dealerships and managed collections. If we notice a classic car has been sitting at a dealership in say, Oxford, and is a desirable car but the dealership doesn’t have the internet presence we do, we’ll contact them and make them the same offer of selling the car within 7 days, same commission rate as everyone else. Managed collections are the other way around, where a private collector with an agent for their collection will have their agent contact us, and if the car meets all the criteria, basically classic, desirable, collectible, and the like, we’ll get maybe one or two cars a month that way.

As you can see, the biggest part of Car & Classic is that for the vast majority of its business, it is totally free. You take pictures of your car, describe it honestly, put up the ad, enter your contact information, and your car is listed. It is important to note that your contact information is never shown publicly on any listing. Instead, there is a “Send an email” form built into each ad, so if you are interested, an email with an @carandclassic.co.uk address is created and emailed to the seller.

By integrating the option to turn your For Sale ad into an auction while creating the ad is a bit of inspired genius, or at least that is the opinion around the SportsCarDigest office. It is inoffensive in that it is simply an option while creating your For Sale ad, not a big flashing “MAKE YOUR AD AN AUCTION!” popup, and a 5% commission plus taxes is extremely reasonable, especially when many in-person auctions set their base fees at 10 to 20% sellers commission, and 10 to 15% buyers fee, before the car even starts the process of changing hands.

That, of course, leads to the much teased-about talk of Car & Classics other major benefit for sellers and buyers, the seamless and secure escrow service.

SB:

So you’ve been teasing the escrow service for a few minutes there, I can tell it’s something you’re really excited about providing. Let’s get to it, shall we?

TW:

(laughs) Yes, it is something that I’m really proud of that we offer!

When you choose to have an auction made, and after we’ve taken the pictures and written up the car, the listing goes into what we call “pre-live” mode. This lasts anywhere from 3 to 7 days, of course agreed upon with you, where the listing is there, people can register interest in it, they can ask questions about the vehicle, some of which we answer on your behalf, with us contacting you for ones needing more specific information, and watch the auction for when it goes to live mode. This means that any prospective buyer does not pester you or contact you directly, as we do not share out your contact information.

Live is just that, live. People can bid, when the vehicle hits your reserve price, it’s considered sold, but the final value has not been determined as we won’t cut an auction short. We’re very transparent about that, you can see on each auction listing when a vehicle has not yet met reserve with a big “Reserve price not met,” or when it’s 10% or less to the price,  “Reserve price nearly met” line under the bidding form.

At the end of the 7 days, the auction ends. We have a built-in anti-sniping tool, where if a sudden bid comes in within the last two to three minutes of the auction timer, the auction automatically extends two minutes. When the hammer has finally gone down, this is when the secure escrow comes into play.

The seller receives an email saying, in effect, “Congratulations, your car sold at or over your reserve price.” The buyer, on the other hand, receives an email saying “Congratulations, you’ve won the car, here are the Car & Classic escrow account details.”

For sake of demonstration, let’s say that the final bid is $20,000. The buyer then must transfer that $20,000 into our escrow account, in full. This can be done via wire transfer, international money order, or several other methods. We then put that money on hold, if needed, for the funds to clear, as some methods need from 1 to 5 days for the sending bank to actually say “yes, these funds are real and are now in your possession.”

We implement this to prevent fraudulent transfers from occurring, and, in reality, take the risk of the funds being fraudulent from your shoulders to ours. We have insurance on the escrow account, so if the funds don’t clear, you’re not suddenly without your car and $20,000 in the red.

Once the funds have cleared, we send you, as the seller, an email saying “congratulations, the buyer’s funds have cleared, here is the buyer.” You are then automatically introduced to the buyer, and it is at this point only that your account emails are shared so you can speak directly to each other. Pretty much, you don’t even get bothered by the buyer until the buyer has, in effect, paid for the car through our escrow service.

From there, the buyer can either arrange to come and collect the car in person, arrange transport of the car, and both seller and buyer have to go through the legal steps beyond our control to transfer the title of the car. I want to emphasize that we are still holding the funds in trust, so the seller knows that the buyer has actually paid the proper and total price of the auction.

After all that, both buyer and seller have to click a link in an email that is sent out that covers our legal duties and responsibilities, and that they are both happy with the condition of the car, the fact that the title is transferred, effectively it’s the “the keys have changed hands” moment of the auction.

It is then, and only then, after everything has been authorized, that we release the funds. It is also at this point that we collect the 5% commission for the auction, and if the auction was in the UK, we also collect UK taxes.

SB:

From what I gathered from that description, Car & Classic does put themselves at a position of risk in terms of being the mediator or arbitrator between the buyer and seller, both financially and in reputation. What happens when a car, for example, is sold with its condition listed as near mint, but the buyer goes to collect the car and it’s had its nose caved in from meeting a lamp post at speed?

TW:

Of course, there are times when the seller might be slightly dishonest, or the buyer, as you describe, arrives and the car has been crashed, as you said. You hit the right word in your question in that in those cases, the buyer might say “I don’t want to buy this car anymore, it’s been crashed,” or “The car is not in the condition it was represented in on the auction,” and we step in as the mediator due to having the funds in our trust.

Depending on the situation, we’ll either cancel out the sale, refund the buyer with no financial penalty, and send out someone to get updated photos and an updated description of the car for another auction, or mediate a new price between the seller and buyer.

We do, as you said, assume the position of most risk because, frankly, those commissions are what keep Car & Classic fully staffed and 99% available.

Note from the interviewer: For those not familiar with web marketing and web sales, “99% available” is a term that means that any website has multiple redundancies. In effect, it means that there are at least two, if not more, hosting server clusters, on separate power grids, a primary and a secondary. The secondary is constantly updating its database every few minutes from the primary cluster, quite often over very high speed fiber optic connections, and if that primary cluster goes “Dark” (loses power, loses network, suffers a dedicated denial of service attack, et al), the secondary cluster automatically kicks in to take responsibility and keep the website up.

This is what almost every one of your favorite websites actually looks like “in the flesh:” row upon row of server racks, each of them redundant with multiple failovers, in a climate controlled data center. Image via Shutterstock.

The term is 99% available, because there is no way to ensure 100% availability even with the best of plans and redundancies. Because of the technology and networking needed to keep this type of availability, it costs a hell of a lot of money to keep a website 99% available, often in the tens of thousands per month, and for massive sites, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars per month.

TW (continued):

In my opinion, we should only get paid once we’ve done a good job for you, both you and the buyer are happy, and the car has started the process of going to its new home.

SB:

As Car & Classic is starting to reach globally, I do have a follow up question about the escrow service and taxes, in what kind of tax, for example, would you collect if I sold my Ford Fiesta ST here in Canada through Car & Classic? I use my own car as an example because it is a “modern classic” thanks to the efforts of a little UK motoring show called Top Gear.

TW:

(long laugh) I remember that show, and that episode, actually.

To the point of your question, in that case, as also happens in Europe, we only collect the 5% commission, calculated to the closing rate of the currency in question on the previous business day.

SB:

So, in effect, if a car was sold on, say, the Isle of Man, you would collect the UK VAT, but if it sold in the Republic of Ireland, there would be no tax?

TW:

Yeah, exactly. We’re a UK business, so the only taxation that we need to satisfy is that of the UK government. If you’re outside of the UK, as you said in a great example the Republic of Ireland, we don’t collect tax then because there is no legal need to. The only place outside of the primary UK we would collect VAT would be the Crown Dependencies, where you provided the excellent example of the Isle of Man.

This is a refreshing take on things, if we are to be honest here. With many of the auction sites that have been running for a while, or have recently popped up (with a few exceptions, of course), the moment that the auction is gaveled, the site hands off responsibility for the transaction of funds and title and all that to the buyer and seller, and will often have an upfront fee determined by the reserve price or book value of the car in question which is non-refundable.

To have a site put in an escrow service, assume the majority of the financial risk and cover it with insurance, and act as a mediating party in disputes is definitely a different way of doing things. This, at its core, is what we think keeps Car & Classic relevant in a world where auction sites, prompted either by the fact that the global pandemic gave people the time to build their sites, or for the established ones, people listing their cars for sale to cover bills and emergency costs, are seeing massively increased traffic.

As well, Car & Classic has their reputation on the line with every For Sale ad and every auction. To collect their part of the pie, that thin 5% slice, only after everyone is satisfied with the transaction, sale, condition, legal requirements, and the like is a stance that takes, to put it bluntly, some fortitude to maintain. You absolutely have to trust in the process you’ve developed, hold true to it with every sale, and also keep the majority of the site completely free to use and trust in the traffic for ad revenue and auctions for commission revenue to keep the site going.

Web-based businesses, as a few readers may have first hand knowledge of, are not cheap to run, and the fact that Car & Classic has stayed active for just about 20 years speaks to the absolute necessity for maintaining their reputation to keep the lights on.

With the deep part of the dive over, that of the auction process through the site, we did have a few fun end-of-interview questions to let both Simon and Tom indulge in a little classic car appreciation session.

SB:

You mentioned before, and I made a note here about it, that you set an auction record with a 1987 AE86 Toyota Corolla?

TW:

Yes, we did. It was memorable to us because it showed that even if I don’t know about it, each and every genre of vehicle, from the family hatchback to bespoke race-derived sports cars, have their classics.

What happened with that specific car was that a lovely lady, who had bought the car and drove it sporadically, finally wanted to sell it. She went through Car & Classic and created a For Sale ad, and didn’t elect to go through with an auction.

It was one of our car experts that spotted the listing, and I remember them putting the hold on the listing and telling me that we had an extremely rare classic on our hands, an unmodified, completely-original-as-stock car. As much as I don’t understand why the AE86 is such a desired car, I do remember the excitement in the voice of my expert, so we reached out to her, and told her that she should definitely consider putting the car through as an auction because it could generate far more than what she was asking for it…

SB:

If you’ll indulge a little Japanese classic geekery here?

TW:

Sure!

SB:

The reason that the Toyota Corolla with an AE86 designation is so valuable is that they were a special version of the 1980s Corolla known as either the Corolla Levin in Europe, the Corolla GT-S in North America, and the Corolla Sprinter Trueno in Japan. They were special because they had longitudinally mounted engines and were rear wheel drive, instead of the transverse mounting of many Japanese small cars that were front wheel drive.

They also used one of the “Toyota Golden Trinity” of massively over-engineered engines from the 80s and 90s, the 4A-GE inline four. The other two you might have heard of, the 2JZ-GTE from the Mark IV Supra, and the 3S-GTE from the second generation MR-2. Anyways, the 4A-GE was made by Yamaha and Toyota in a joint project, much like the engine that was made for the Lexus LFA in the mid-2000s, and while it came out of the factory with 115 HP, tuners soon discovered that with just bolt ons, they could push the engine to over 200 HP reliably. It was eventually discovered that with the standard block and manifold, you could push the engine to almost 230 HP before you needed to start replacing internals.

That made the AE86 a very hot commodity in the Japanese market itself, as well as around the world in JDM imports. They also naturally have a slight oversteer handling tendency due to being extremely lightweight and the weight balance of the car being mostly forward, making them into amazing drifting and powerslide cars. This popularity exploded in the mid-1990s as well, with a Japanese manga (comic book) and anime (Japanese animation) known as Initial-D, where the hero protagonist of the series, which was all about touge racing, drove an AE86.

Bringing it to the point, almost every AE86 out there in the wide world of Japanese imports is modified, fettled, tuned up, or in some way changed from stock. To have a completely bone stock AE86 with an untouched 4A-GE engine at its factory power tuning is like finding a needle in a haystack, in a farmers field of haystacks, and you’d have to choose that specific field of haystacks out of a hundred other fields.

TW:

Well, that makes things make sense then! I never knew that, and now I do. Always something to learn new every day!

I guess that’s also why when that auction went pre-live, all of a sudden there were car sites, magazines even, reaching out to us about the car. We’ve rarely had that much traffic hit our site before an auction went live, and when it did, it skyrocketed past the reserve price in the first couple of hours.

When it ended, it eventually sold at over £42,200 ($57,700 USD) and it was a global sensation. That auction alone drove up our site visits beyond the normal 1 or 2 million page visits per month well past the 3 million mark! Now that you’ve explained why the AE86 we auctioned was important in terms of the history of that model, that makes complete sense too…

While this sale was not the largest in terms of money brought in or rarest cars, it is one of the most appreciated auctions of a JDM classic in recent years. The paint may be slightly faded, the exhaust pipe was in need of a little love, but it was mechanically sound and, of major importance to collectors around the world, no matter who you are, it still has its original, numbers matching engine.

As far as we are aware of here at Sports Car Digest, the only other AE86 that has ever been sold at auction that can match this one in terms of rarity and price is one that was auctioned in Japan in the mid-2000s, after having been discovered in a car collector’s massive garage/warehouse, where it had only the factory miles on the clock, and the seats were still in their 1980’s Toyota plastic wrapping. The appeal, despite it being “just a Japanese car,” can quickly be appreciated, especially for someone that wants a totally factory spec AE86, which is rarer than a modified one these days.

The conversation, sparked by the talk of rarer cars to see on the road, rotated then to Simon’s own little rare car, a 2017 Ford Fiesta ST. While not rare in any way, shape, or form in the UK and Europe, where sporty hatchbacks are far more common, it is considered a fairly rare car in North America. This led to a discussion about how things would go if Simon wanted to sell his car through Car & Classic, as a North American seller.

According to Tom, the process is largely the same as was discussed during the deep dive portion of the interview. Simon would list the car on the website, and during listing would have the option to post the free sales ad, or have the car put through the auction process. The major difference is locale.

The online sales form that Simon would use to start selling his Fiesta ST if he wanted to

This is where Car & Classic is headed to next, as it has already, in Tom’s own words, “cornered things pretty well in Europe.” It is already a company that serves a continent’s worth of nations, and it is Tom’s dream to see Car & Classic become one of the top, if not the top, sales and auction sites in the world, and serving the global automotive collector and sales communities.

As such, in Simon’s case, he would list his location as Canada, and would put up his listing in Canadian dollars, as the site automatically takes care of conversions to Pounds Sterling and back again to local currency depending on what country you are visiting the site from. He would upload all the pictures he has or has taken of the car, list any modifications, service history, the usual.

The only hitch in the works, and something that is often left to the buyer and seller to set up but that Tom has expressed interest in helping smooth over, is shipping. If someone in the USA bought Simon’s car, it’s as easy as a drive down to deliver it and a flight back home for him. Now, if someone in, say, Germany wanted a Canadian-spec Mk VII Fiesta ST, the sale would happen as per normal, but the shipping would be, in no uncertain terms, a bit of hell to set up, as selling cars across oceans can involve major, time sensitive deadlines for delivery to and from ports, hefty insurance on the shipping, and more red tape than one could wrap a hundred Christmas gifts with.

That said, the fact that Car & Classic already takes the risk in the auction side of the site, as well as setting up an escrow service that is handled totally in house to keep it secure and able to receive and transfer large sums of money without bureaucratic interference already makes it one of the best sales and auction sites in the world. Now, all Car & Classic needs to do is actually conquer the online sales and auction world, and if there was anyone that has the drive, the background, and frankly the outright passion for collectible and classic cars to do it, it is Tom Wood.

Simon also wanted to add that despite the Bond villain level of world domination that Mr. Wood is pursuing with Car & Classic, he is genuinely an enthusiastic and pleasant CEO to talk to. Some CEOs are known for not liking interviews, others will stick to the agenda and notes and not deviate outside of business talk at all, but Tom was really outgoing and enthusiastic the moment the word “car” was mentioned the first time, and he truly is as much of a maniac about things with four wheels that go vroom as the rest of us!

The post Car & Classic: A Deep Dive Behind The Classics Scene With CEO Tom Wood appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

A Dramatic Turn of Events at the F1 Race in Abu Dhabi

FIA capitulations aside—don’t worry, the video below will get into that—you couldn’t have written a better script for how things turned out; something which surely makes the lives of the producers for ‘Formula 1: Drive to Survive’, as easy as they could’ve hoped for.

The scenario of a championship riding on the outcome of the last race of the season, with both Hamilton and Verstappen tied on points, set up the most exciting finale possible. At least that would’ve been the case for the more neutral fans—of which there has been a large intake due to the popularity of the aforementioned Netflix docuseries.

Despite destiny taking us on a path towards an eventual winner-takes-all final showdown, both the drivers’ and constructors’ championships were ultimately won (and lost) over an entire season. It’s hard to argue that over the course of 22 rounds, that either one of Hamilton and Verstappen wouldn’t have been a deserving champion—there was always only going to be one winner between the two, and to be fair, that’s exactly what happened. So in that regard, there’s nothing to be shocked about with all things said and done.

But we can certainly analyze how and why things unfolded as they did in Abu Dhabi, and in my opinion, Youtuber Driver61 has presented the best interpretation of it all.

Driver61’s Perspective on the F1 Race in Abu Dhabi

In real life, Driver61 goes by the name Scott Mansell. He also happens to be a well-respected race driver and coach who has a background in engineering, helping to tie his racing skills together with a solid technical foundation.

His channel has close to 750,000 subscribers, with his content covering a wide range of motorsport topics which include breakdowns of F1 races, analysis of pro driver techniques, an encyclopedia of race car parts (and how they work), and tutorials on how to be faster at the race track (both in the real world and on a simulator).

Here’s Scott’s spot-on analysis of the key moments at Yas Marina circuit, and his commentary for one of the most epic and controversial Grand Prix races in Formula 1 history.

BONUS ROUND: We’ve also decided to share some of the best memes and tweets related to the 2021 Abu Dhabi GP.

Max Verstappen passes Lewis Hamilton on the final lap of the season's last race to win his 1st World Championship.

Netflix: pic.twitter.com/SJZLkLEQT2

— Joe Pompliano (@JoePompliano) December 12, 2021

Explaining in football terms how Max Verstappen won the 2021 F1 World Championship: pic.twitter.com/eLXLXKtozF

— Footy Humour (@FootyHumour) December 12, 2021

Latifi seeing Hamilton after the race #AbuDhabiGP pic.twitter.com/59X7sqHtEj

— Elena (@elekall7) December 12, 2021

pic.twitter.com/KPQrN13zr9

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 12, 2021

*Lewis Hamilton leading with 10 laps to go*

Professor: And this is where Latifi comes in pic.twitter.com/dopzOGH6Y0

— ‘ (@SherzCapone00) December 12, 2021

The post Driver61 Provides Analysis of Championship-Deciding F1 Race appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

This was somewhat of a quagmire of things coming together—drifting as a motorsport was in its prime and gaining traction outside of Japan (particularly in the United States), while JDM car culture was also in a golden age.

The concept of ‘touge’ racing was just beginning to blossom in the western hemisphere (à la Initial D and Best Motoring), and this episode decided to produce a mish-mash of all those things; professional drifters racing Japanese time attack cars, using grip-style driving, in a tandem format, at an American venue. The clashing of many different worlds all at once.

Since that moment, I’ve been a fan of Yoshihara and have been following him on his social media accounts throughout his Formula D career. The drift legend recently announced his retirement from the competition, though it appears that he is hardly finished being involved with motorsport as a whole.

What’s Next for Yoshihara?

According to his latest Instagram posts, Yoshihara is now a driver for Spoon Sports USA and remains available as a hired gun for other performance shops such as Turn 14 and Evasive Motorsports, where he races in competitions such as Global Time Attack and Pikes Peak International Hill Climb. If I’m being completely honest, I’ve been even more fascinated with his exploits as a circuit/time attack driver than as a drifter, despite the latter having been his primary means of employment.

One of the highlights of his career was his 2011 season, during which he also starred (as himself) in a year-long documentary web series called Behind the Smoke. The series provided a behind-the-scenes perspective of what things were like for Yoshihara during the Formula D competition. He would go on to win the championship that year as well, which has remained his only one during his now-concluded drifting career.

Yoshihara’s Road to Drifting Fame

Being the best of the best at something during any point of your life is impressive enough, but this is more particularly the case when considering that Yoshihara’s path to glory wasn’t as smoothly paved or straightforward as most top motorsport drivers today. While Yoshihara was involved in drifting early on, it seemed like his life was on a more reserved trajectory as he settled for mainstream jobs in telecommunications and transportation, while still living in Japan.

Things would take a sharp turn (pun intended) in 2003, when Yoshihara was invited to compete in the inaugural Formula D (D1) season in the United States. Although he never competed professionally in drifting at this point, his reputation back home was enough to go on and he would accept the offer to move abroad and pursue his true passion. During his rookie season, Yoshihara still managed to finish within the top half amongst 32 total drivers, representing Pacific Rim Motorsport in a Nissan Silva S13.

Carrying that momentum into the 2004 season, Yoshihara would go on to finish 2nd overall in the championship and receive an individual award for ‘fastest entry speed’. He would achieve multiple top 5 finishes over the next several seasons (including the aforementioned 2011 title), switching allegiances to RMR Racing along the way in 2008, where he piloted a Pontiac GTO alongside teammate Rhys Millen.

2009 would see more changes, when Yoshihara signed for Falken Tire, first driving a Lexus IS350 under their banner before switching to a more successful—and eventual championship-winning—Nissan 240SX platform.

Yoshihara would jump into a Subaru BRZ for 2014 and remained competitive thereafter, although he was not able to reach the blistering heights set earlier in his professional drifting career. In the later stages of it, Yoshihara was hired to compete in other race series where he attained immediate success driving a Toyota 86 in the 2019 Global Time Attack and 2020 Pikes Peak International Hill Climb.

Yoshihara finished both of those competitions with class wins (along with an overall win and the fastest lap in GTA). He continued to prove his mettle as a complete race car driver, with Mine’s president Michizo Niikura once describing him as “…not a drifter, but a great racing driver who also knows how to a drift”.

See You Around, Yoshihara

In addition to racing, Yoshihara also judges various drifting competitions and also provides instruction for aspiring drifters on occasion. As he remains heavily involved in motorsport, Yoshihara is also a spokesperson for multiple automotive organizations and brands.

We all wish Dai the best in his retirement, but don’t be too surprised if you manage to catch him at future drift events in some sort of capacity. Thanks for all the memories, Yoshihara-san.

The post Drift Legend Dai Yoshihara Announces Retirement from Formula D appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

Lotus founder Colin Chapman was undoubtedly gifted at what he did, admittedly some of his cars were better than others but in general, when Lotus built a racing car it was a good one.

The Type 23 design was, in hindsight, one of the really good ones.  Introduced at the UK racing car show in January 1962, the 23-sports racing car was based on a widened version of their existing Lotus Formula Junior chassis. These first 23s were fitted with a 4-speed transaxle and available with various engine options, including from under 1.0 liter up to 1500-cc, to allow its use in various capacity sports car classes of the time.

The post Near Perfect—The 1966 Lotus 23C appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

Without any doubt, the pioneering RS4 ticks all the right boxes for becoming a cherished modern classic, so let’s dig into its origins and technical details and see what exactly makes it one.

History & Development of the Audi RS4 B5

Audi’s first foray into the performance longroof segment was the RS2. Based on the Audi 90 Avant and built alongside Mercedes-Benz 500E in Porsche’s factory in Zuffenhausen, this supercar beater single-handedly kickstarted the superwagon craze in Europe while also saving Porsche in its toughest times.

In addition to putting Audi and its quattro all-wheel drive into the spotlight once again, the RS2 also established a new high performance badge. A tier above the sporty S cars, RS stood for RennSport or racing sport and was initially restricted to A4 and A6, until Audi eventually expanded RS models to a larger portion of its lineup. The rights to wear the RS badge were, in fact, so exclusive that the gap between the RS2 and its successor was five years.

By the time Audi quattro GmbH started developing the next RS car, the company from Ingolstadt completed its transition into the upmarket, introducing a new alphanumeric nomenclature to underline its newly attained status.

The 80 and 90 lineup thus became the Audi A4 and the range debuted with a rejuvenated design. Looking considerably more modern than the competition, the A4 was on par, or even better than its rivals at BMW and Mercedes-Benz. Alongside the revolutionary A8, it became the car that shaped the Audi brand as we know it today.

Three years after the A4 premiered in November 1994, Audi introduced the 261-horsepower S4 sedan and wagon, powered by a 2.7-liter twin-turbocharged V6 unit based on the 90° 2.8-liter V6 found at the top of the A4 range.

The S4 was met with universal appraise for its brisk performance and obedient quattro all-wheel drive. As such, it was just the right foundation for the new RS model.

As Audi grew and Porsche gained financial stability through the Boxster and the 996 911, the production of the RS4 was handled in-house at the Neckarsulm factory. The majority of engineering was carried out within Audi quattro GmbH department, whereas Cosworth, one of Volkswagen’s many 1990s acquisitions, took care of the engine development.

The RS4 was built from 1999 to 2001 in 6030 copies, and was available in Europe and selected global markets in both LHD and RHD variants. It was priced at around $60,180, an equivalent of $99,910 in today’s money. Unlike the S4 though, Audi didn’t bring the RS4 to North American soil, which will make it a highly desirable collector car—just like the RS2 has become in recent years.

Chassis, Bodywork & Interior of the Audi RS4 B5

Producing a direct successor to the RS2 in signature longroof body style, Audi Sport took on the A4 Avant shell, reinforcing the steel unibody skeleton and fitting bespoke body panels to improve its aerodynamic efficiency and differentiate it further from the S4, which only had a set of new bumpers.

That being said, the front wings got noticeably wider and so did the rear section including the doors, as well as door sills, leaving only the hood and the roof the same as on the non-RS cars. These substantial changes resulted in increased drag, with RS4 having 0.34cd compared to 0.30 and 0.31 (for the A4 and S4, respectively).

The front bumper featured three functional openings feeding fresh air to the radiator and side-mounted turbo intercoolers, as well as air extractor vents on the sides. At the back, the bumper got a more aggressive design with three decorative web-like inserts, a nod to the hood scoops from the Sport Quattro, and an opening for elliptical twin exhaust ends—a feature that later became signature for RS cars.

High impact colors were a special treat too. Not counting special order colors, the RS4 was sold in six shades: Black, Avus Silver, Imola Red, Goodwood Green, Misano Yellow and Nogaro Blue, arguably the most popular shade today.

Inside, the RS4 got carbon fiber trim, satellite navigation, and electrically adjustable Recaro bucket seats in leather or leather and Alcantara. The instrument cluster had an analog speedometer etched to 310 km/h or 200 MPH, a rev counter etched to 7000 RPM, a Voltmeter, a fuel gauge, and a simple central digital screen displaying vital information in real time.

In the Clubsport package, this superwagon got lightweight Recaro Pole Position buckets with 5-point harnessing and an Alcantara steering wheel and gear shift knob for increased grip.

Engine & Transmission in the Audi RS4 B5

For the powertrain worthy of the RS badge, Cosworth was entrusted to re-engineer the EU-spec AGB/AZB 90° V6 from the S4. The 30-valve 2.7-liter twin-turbocharged unit was a bulletproof foundation, and the engine development team was given free reins to hone it to perfection.

To achieve substantial power gains, Cosworth engineered the new AlSi7Mg aluminum alloy cylinder heads, giving them increased intake and exhaust ports and an enlarged air duct cross section. The engine block was fitted with stronger connecting rods, the pistons got dished heads, and the new crankshaft was forged out of higher grade steel.

The underside got a two-section oil sump keeping the engine lubricated during high G force maneuvers. The engine management unit was a revised Bosch Motronic ME 7.1, and the RS4 featured drive-by-wire electronic throttle control.

As an upgrade over the S4’s KKK K03 twin-turbo setup, the RS4 got BorgWarner KKK K04-26 parallel turbochargers with two side mounted intercoolers, running at 16 psi.

Thanks to these alterations, the RS4 got a sophisticated, highly capable powerplant that produced a whopping 375 horsepower at 6,200 RPM and 325 lb-ft of torque between 2,500 and 6,000 RPM, with the redline set at 7,000 RPM.

Unlike the sporty S4, which left a choice between a six-speed manual and a 5-speed ZF tiptronic automatic, the fully focused RS4 came equipped exclusively with a 01E FDP six-speed transmission with a traditional shifting pattern.

By default, the center Torsen differential split the torque between the axles in a 50:50 ratio. However, if needed, it could redistribute up to 66% of torque to either front or rear axle. Some sources also claim that Audi installed an 80:20 ratio Torsen differential as well.

Straight line performance-wise, the 3,571 lb RS4 B5 could sprint from a standstill to 60 MPH in 4.9 seconds, an impressive number even twenty years later. It could reach an electronically limited top speed of 155 MPH and an unrestricted top speed of 179 MPH. Still, it wasn’t just brutal straight line power delivery that made the RS4 stand out.

Suspension & Handling for the Audi RS4 B5

To make the RS4 B5 an all-round capable performance car in quite an unsuspecting longroof guise, quattro GmbH rehauled the aluminum front MacPherson and rear multilink suspension—lowering the car, stiffening the shocks and dampers, and installing thicker anti-roll bars both front and back. Clubsport trim lowered the suspension 15mm further, with stiffened shocks and dampers and harder bushings.

Due to having a heavy front with a weight distribution of 60:40, the RS4 was prone to understeering—and during the years, owners resorted to aftermarket suspension to balance out the weight bias.

Brakes, Wheels, & Tires on the Audi RS4 B5

Beefed up body panels and wide wheel arches enabled Audi Sport to fit 9-spoke wheels measuring 18×8.5 inches front and back, wrapped in 255/35 ZR18 Dunlop SP Sport 9000 high performance tires.

When the RS4 went on sale, it was under scrutiny as many owners reported wheel buckling even when crossing minor obstacles at regular traffic speeds. Audi didn’t address this issue officially, but independent research concluded that the wheels were purposefully cast out of aluminum alloy with lesser tensile strength to absorb impact from the road and lessen the stress on the suspension, preventing severe damage.

For more efficient stopping power, quattro GmbH developed a set of 360mm ventilated floating cast iron discs with double-piston floating calipers in the front and 312mm ventilated discs gripped by a single-piston floating caliper at the rear.

The Audi RS4 B5 as a Collector Car

Twenty years later, the RS4 has aged perfectly and is now hailed for its analogue character and immersive driving experience. However, in between its launch date and today, this über-wagon was also highly regarded for its tuning potential. Twin-turbocharged and overengineered, the Cossie 2.7-liter could extract hundreds of ponies more with a few simple tweaks.

Needless to say, the market for unmolested and modified examples is limited, driving the prices upwards all the way to an equivalent of $60,000 for pedigreed cars in pristine condition. Given that US-bound enthusiasts still have to wait for a few years to legally import it, the prices are expected to go north pretty soon.

Legacy of the Audi RS4 B5

Not only was the RS4 a worthy successor to the RS2, but it was an instant classic in its own right. With almost 400 horsepower on tap, it offered sublime supercar-like performance matched with the practicality of a family hauler.

After the RS4, Cosworth and quattro GmbH teamed up once again, transforming the C5 Audi A6 into the monstrous 4.2-liter twin-turbocharged V8-powered RS6 Avant. As Audi sold the legendary British engineering outlet in 2004, these two superwagons remained the only Cosworth-powered Audis ever created.

While it’s not the pioneering RS car, the first RS4 was perhaps the most important one, as it was the one to introduce the RS badge as an integral part of Audi’s new, more mature identity. Today, the RS4 is in its fourth generation and is a classic in the vast RS lineup, owing it all to the 1999 giant killer.

The post [In-Depth Review] Audi RS4 B5 appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

By digging into its origins, we’re here to see what makes this front-wheel drive Alfa Romeo so special and why it is worthy of the exclusive GTA badge.

Background & Development of the Alfa Romeo 156 GTA

GTA was a denotation so seldomly used in Alfa Romeo’s history that its mention has almost mythical properties. It stands for Gran Turismo Alleggerita, or lightened grand tourer and was applied to a selected few Tipo 105 Giulia coupés during the 1960s and the 1970s.

For these featherweight race cars, Alfa Romeo’s Autodelta racing outlet used aluminum body panels and magnesium wheels, clear plastic instead of glass as well as other tricks to keep them lighter, nimbler and quicker than the competition.

Upping the engines’ performance too, GTA Giulias were formidable contenders on race tracks throughout Europe and prestigious road cars for the most daring Alfisti around.

Alfa Romeo lived through its golden post-WW2 era rather gloriously. But the late 1970s and the 1980s took its toll on the company, leading to Fiat’s takeover in 1986.

Under Fiat, Alfa Romeo was thoroughly transformed, and in 1992, the rear-wheel drive 75 was eventually discontinued in favor of the 155 sedan, marking the penultimate step towards a complete switch to front-wheel drive production models in 1994, when the aging Duetto was replaced by the Tipo 916 Spider.

Even with its identity shaken down to the core and abandoned for survival’s sake, Alfa Romeo didn’t ever lose its beauty. In the second half of 1990s, though, it needed a new forerunner to break away from the wedge design language.

That car was in development from 1993 and was internally known as Tipo 932. Three creative houses applied for the new design: Giugiaro’s ItalDesign, Pininfarina and Alfa Romeo’s own Centro Stile with Walter de Silva.

In 1997, the Milanese company presented a new compact sedan named 156. Walter de Silva penned a modern, delicate design with a pinch of Tipo 105 Giulia cues and an unmistakable Alfa Romeo DNA.

The 156 was an instant hit, winning the 1998 European Car of The Year by a landslide. It put Alfa Romeo back in business in great style.

Under the beautifully sculpted sheet metal, the engine bay could accommodate a transversely mounted Busso V6, and being so, the 156 displayed potential for a performance variant. The development of the range-topping 156 GTA was carried out in-house with inputs from engineers at Maserati.

At the time, the European market was populated by a few V6-powered front-wheel drive performance cars like the Mondeo ST, Opel/Vauxhall Vectra GSi. But despite their performance, these cars couldn’t offer what Alfa Romeo did: style, charm and a sense of exoticism.

Indeed, the 156 GTA not only felt, looked and sounded more exotic—but with the price being the equivalent of $50,000, it really was in a league of its own.

The Alfa Romeo 156 GTA debuted at the 2001 Frankfurt Motor Show alongside the Busso-powered 147 GTA hot hatchback, Alfa Romeo’s answer to Volkswagen and its Golf R32.

Between the introduction at the 2001 Frankfurt Motor Show and 2005, Alfa Romeo produced only 1,973 sedans and 1,678 sport wagons. A small portion of both was offered in RHD, making them some of the rarest modern day Alfa Romeos.

Given that Fiat pulled the Alfa Romeo brand from North America in 1995, the 156 GTA never got to North America—but weirdly enough, it was officially on sale in Australia.

At the 2002 Bologna Motor Show, Alfa Romeo presented a GTAm concept car with an 300 hp 3.5-liter Busso V6. But it sadly never reached production, just like the Autodelta Sportwagon GTA 3.5 shown in Geneva in 2005.

Now, let’s look deeper into this impossibly handsome sports sedan and see exactly what it had going for it.

Chassis, Body, & Interior of the Alfa Romeo 156 GTA

Just like its direct predecessor and a number of cars in Fiat’s family, the Alfa Romeo 156 was built on the Tipo 3 platform, thoroughly modified to make the 156 a unique place in the range. Walter de Silva’s sleek coupe-like bodywork with concealed rear door handles complemented the smartly engineered underpinnings perfectly.

In improving the aerodynamics for the 156 GTA, designers took the cultured approach, focusing on the underbody section. To reduce body lift, this car features an underbody lift-reducing splitter doing the aerodynamic work of a trunk-mounted wing without compromising the car’s perfect silhouette in the process.

To distinguish itself from the rest of the range, the GTA model was graced with an unique functional body kit as well. The front splitter got three massive intakes to feed the uprated Busso V6 with fresh air, and the rear also got a distinctive bumper with air extractors.

The side skirts also got wider, contributing to the car’s downforce. In addition to generating more downforce, the 156 GTA had a drag coefficient of 0.30, lower than the base model’s 0.31 cd.

Even though Giugiaro’s ItalDesign gave the mass produced 156 a substantial facelift in 2003, the GTA model stayed true to de Silva’s original design throughout production.

A kerb weight of 3,108 lb (compared to the 2,712 lb of the base model) meant that the 156 GTA wasn’t exactly a lightweight car, though it was lighter than other V6-powered models in the range.

With key bits of interior changed to further strengthen the bond between original GTA cars and their modern day resurrection, the cockpit was an ode to the carefree 1960s. The steering wheel was unique to the model and the seats were leather wrapped, stitched in a horizontal bar pattern, and offered increased lateral support.

Details like aluminum pedals, Peltro grey metalluro trim and ball-shaped 6-speed transmission further contributed to the car’s sporty character. The dashboard, already greatly inspired by the Tipo 105 and its bulging periscope-like dial casings, got new instrumentation, generously etched to 300 km/h and 9000 RPM.

Engine & Transmission in the Alfa Romeo 156 GTA

Like its mass produced counterparts, the 156 GTA was powered by a transversely mounted Busso V6—but for this special car, Autodelta did its bid to create a truly bespoke powerhouse.

The unit started off as an all-aluminum 24-valve 3.0-liter 60° V6 from the big 166 sedan and with redesigned pistons and crankshaft, Autodelta bumped the displacement to 3.2 liters. In addition to increased stroke, the GTA-spec Busso got revised intake and exhaust ports, a revised engine oil radiator, and a retuned Bosch Motronic ME 7.3.1 engine management system.

The end result was the output of 250 hp at 6,200 RPM and 221 lb-ft of torque at 4,800 RPM, all followed by a blaring Busso soundtrack. The top speed was electronically limited to 155 MPH.

In addition to being internally reworked, the powerhouse was also adequately decorated, featuring chromed ports and an inscription on the engine cover.

The 3.2-liter Busso was mated to six-speed transmission—and in addition to a classic stick shift, the 156 GTA could also be ordered with 6-speed Selespeed gearbox with the same gear ratio, offering a different driving experience thanks to shifting paddles placed behind the steering wheel.

Suspension & Handling of the Alfa Romeo 156 GTA

The series production 156 owed its exceptional handling to a double wishbone setup at the front and rear MacPherson strut configuration. For the GTA variant, the suspension got a complete overhaul, resulting in lower stance, wider track and a stiffer ride.

To achieve that, the engineering team reinforced the lower beams of the wishbones, installed a bigger anti-roll bar and stiffer shocks, and installed a specially designed steering wheel strut.

The rear suspension was thoroughly recalibrated too, with a bigger anti-roll bar, different attachment points, as well as stiffer shocks, springs and bushes.

In addition to a bespoke engine, steering was Alfa Romeo’s biggest point of interest when developing this car. At the time, Alfa Romeo 156 GTA boasted the most direct steering ratio among mass produced cars.

Autodelta reworked steering geometry, making a switch from 2.1 to 1.7 turns from lock to lock. The effort gave the 156 GTA more precision, offering its drivers a greater feeling of control and a sensation of driving a racing car.

This bit of prestige came at a price though, because the sports sedan had a notoriously big turning circle.

Brakes, Wheels, & Tires in the Alfa Romeo 156 GTA

Alfa Romeo offered the 156 GTA with a set of 17×7.5-inch aluminum wheels with the teledial design unique to Alfa Romeo cars of the era, all wrapped in 225/45ZR17 Michelin Pilot Sport specifically designed for this car.

During its production span, the Alfa Romeo GTA came equipped with two sets of brakes. Initially, it was fitted with 305mm ventilated steel rotors with twin-piston Brembo calipers in the front and 276mm at the back, but upon receiving customer and press feedback, the braking system was revised and the sports sedan got larger 330mm front rotors that could cope with stopping the nose heavy car more efficiently.

The Alfa Romeo 156 GTA As a Collector Car

When introduced, the 156 GTA was hailed for its charisma and all-round performance, becoming an instant classic.

Still, depreciation hit it hard and it spent years in obscurity, being hunted down only by Alfa Romeo devotees until recent years when it gained wider interest. That also meant an increase in price was unavoidable.

Today, a pristine Alfa Romeo 156 GTA can set you back upwards of $40,000—although there are less costly options around.

Legacy of the Alfa Romeo 156 GTA

By producing the 156 GTA, Alfa Romeo proved that a thoroughbred sports car can follow a formula different from the front-engine-rear-wheel-drive-transaxle one.

Despite not being a perfect Alfa Romeo by purists’ standards, the 156 GTA was an important stepping stone for the next generation of sports cars that brought the company back to its roots.

After the 159, Alfa Romeo reinvented itself and revived the rear-wheel drive sports sedan by presenting the Giulia and its high performance offsprings, the Quadrifoglio and the GTA/GTAm duo.

That being said, the Alfa Romeo 156 GTA occupies a unique niche in the brand’s history—forming a bond between the original and the contemporary GTA insignia.

All photos by Djordje Sugaris.

The post [In-Depth Guide] Alfa Romeo 156 GTA appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

Its otherworldly appearance might have earned it the name Il Mostro, but having been created and honed by some of the most revered names in the industry over just 19 months, the Alfa Romeo SZ pressed all the right buttons for an exceptional sports car.

There are more than a few reasons why this special Alfa Romeo is finally getting some much deserved recognition from the wider public, so let’s dig into its origins to see how the most infamous Alfa Romeo ever became an unlikely hero.

History and Development of the Alfa Romeo SZ

From the people’s carmaker Fiat to the great Ferrari, collaborations between car manufacturers and coachbuilders have always been commonplace in the Italian automotive industry. Most famously, these artisans have been creating unique pieces out of existing mechanics for automotive shows or special clients, but they more often provided design, consulting and manufacturing services for low volume production cars.

One of those creative houses was Zagato, long known for its trademark double-bubble roofline, which it never abandoned once from the razor sharp 1970s all the way to the 1990s. In addition to turning radical ideas into existing forms, Zagato also researched technologically advanced materials like glass fiber composites.

To understand how a radical creation like the SZ came to be, we need to go back to 1986, when Alfa Romeo became a part of Fiat. Beforehand, the Milanese company was highly regarded for building exclusive sports and race cars, successfully campaigning them in numerous racing series worldwide. Still, the company faced troubles after the late 1960s, and unfavorable economic circumstances throughout the automotive world during the 1970s left an even bigger toll, forcing Fiat to adapt in order to survive.

By the time Fiat bought Alfa Romeo, the Milanese manufacturer had already tried turning to more affordable front-wheel drive models and mass production. Unfortunately, these moves didn’t always yield results—for example, there was the forgettable Alfasud and the Arna, an unholy alliance between Nissan and Alfa Romeo.

In the process, Alfa Romeo gave up on exclusivity and its image of a bona fide sports car maker, struggling to keep the flame alive through sports cars like the Alfetta GT/GTV and Tipo 33 racing machinery.

After the 1986 merger, Fiat had to assure the public and the connoisseurs that Alfa Romeo could thrive under their new ownership. So to build the SZ, Fiat’s leadership commissioned Alfa Romeo Centro Stile, Zagato, and its own in-house team, the Fiat Centro Stile to pitch the messenger of Alfa Romeo’s redemption.

In the end, it was the Fiat Centro Stile which penned the design, whereas Zagato was kept as an outside contractor for its composite material know-how and a historic bond with special Alfa Romeo cars.

The prototype broke cover at the 1987 Geneva Auto Show as the Alfa Romeo ES-30 (which stood for Experimental Sportscar 3.0-liter). It was built around the Alfa Romeo 75’s underpinnings.

Both the name and the shape suggested it would just be an engineering and design study, but in 1989, Geneva saw a production variant virtually identical to the 1987 show car, destined for a limited run of 1000 examples. The car was named simply SZ, harking back to the Sprint Zagato and Sport Zagato cars from Alfa’s glory days.

Its price tag was an equivalent of $55,335 in 1989 money—less than the contemporary Ferrari Testarossa, but more than a baseline Porsche 911, and it never sold in the US. In spite of the SZ’s hefty price tag and divisive looks, all 1036 cars sold from 1989 to 1991.

In addition to that, Zagato built a roadster variant of the same car, named the RZ. But unlike its hardtop counterpart, the topless Zagato didn’t meet its production goal, selling only 278 out of 350 planned examples.

Though the automotive public was favorable to the ES-30, it was quick to bash the SZ as a production car, but the Il Mostro (as it was soon called) was never intended to be embraced by the masses. Debatable looks were no issue for those who wanted what Alfa Romeo was best at providing—a sublime driving experience.

So, what was the recipe that made the Alfa Romeo SZ one of the greatest driver’s cars in recent history? And is its styling actually one of the purest expressions of the era’s zeitgeist?

Chassis, Body, & Interior of the Alfa Romeo SZ

In constructing the SZ, Zagato provided Alfa Romeo with its novel production methods, assisting in development of the body and providing final assembly at Terrazzano di Rho. Just like the ES-30, the SZ was built on a steel chassis, sharing its wheelbase with the 75 sedan, with glass fiber composite-reinforced resin body panels glued onto it.

The body panels were produced by two companies, French Stratime and Italian Carplast. Keeping the center of gravity low, the roof panels were aluminum and the rear spoiler was constructed in carbon fiber.

The construction wasn’t particularly weight-efficient, with the SZ tipping the scales at 2777 lb—around 20lb heavier than the Milano—but the adhesive-bonded panels provided exceptional rigidity, playing a major role in the car’s all-around performance.

The SZ’s zesty body put function over form, dividing the automotive public. While the majority wondered how Alfa Romeo could produce a car so far away from its usual beautiful forms, some thought its nonconformist character was just what the industry needed.

With six square-shaped headlights, the front end somehow conformed to conventional beauty standards, whereas the rest of the car steered into the radical. The high and ascending shoulder line contrasted with tiny side windows, the curved front windshield just emphasized the car’s unusual character, and the boxy tail end abruptly cut right behind the rear wheels to give the SZ an imposing presence from the back.

There was a common misconception that the SZ’s body was designed by Zagato, but in fact it was brought to life by Robert Opron and Antonio Castellana—Opron’s assistant, who polished the initial sketches, penning the final CAD-assisted design both for the ES-30 concept and the subsequent production car.

A brilliant designer who sadly left us in 2021, Robert Opron was best known for work in his native France, where he famously worked for Citroën and Renault. However, he also served as one of Centro Stile Fiat’s head designers from 1985 to 1992.

Throughout his career, the creative Frenchman was no stranger to unorthodox yet ultimately lovable forms. His portfolio included the likes of the Citroën SM and Alpine A310. Now that we’re able to observe the SZ from a less-biased perspective, we can agree that it is not only a milestone in Opron’s extensive career, but in the whole design world as well.

When put in a wider context, the SZ becomes an object of art, transcending the automotive plane. In the 1980s, Italian postmodernism reached its pinnacle and broke through into the mainstream, pushing tedious classical beauty out of the spotlight in favor of the avant-garde.

Ettore Sottsass and his Memphis Group challenged every possible aesthetic norm with their colorful childlike designs—and so did Aldo Rossi with his subdued, yet equally influential art, architecture and household objects. This epoch provides essential context for the SZ.

Comparing the SZ with something like Rossi’s 1989 Parigi armchair, with its curved black armrests and vivid red seating section, one can’t help but put Opron’s most disputed design right where it should be: high among the purest postmodernist designs coming from 1980s Italy.

Officially, the SZ was exclusively finished in Alfa Romeo’s trademark 130 Rosso Alfa with a matte grey roof—save for one all-black example built for Andrea Zagato. Still, as it usually goes with carrozzerias, some clients managed to specify their cars otherwise. Some sources claim that at least one car had a red roof, while two Japanese exports reportedly left the factory in yellow.

The interior blended race car aesthetics with splashes of luxury embodied in tan Zagato-designed monolithic leather-clad seats, door cards and matching soft carpeting. On the other hand, a sportier theme was reflected on the driver-oriented Fablon dashboard and a simple leather-wrapped three-spoke Momo V36 steering wheel specifically designed for this car.

Given that the trunk could fit only a spare tire and a basic toolbox, the storage space was limited to just the shelf behind the leather clad seats. The idea of fitted luggage—which was displayed on the Geneva show version—was abandoned, leaving the section behind the seats empty and prompting owners to find their own solutions.

The owner of this particular Alfa Romeo SZ took matters into his own hands, producing a fitted luggage set inspired by the Geneva auto show prototype set.

**Note: The photographed example (No° 844) has red turn signals inspired by one of pre-production design proposals, a stainless steel exhaust with two double exhaust tips, an Alcantara-wrapped steering wheel, a leather-wrapped handbrake and gear shifter cover, and a ball-shaped gear shifter knob.

Engine & Transmission of the Alfa Romeo SZ

The Alfa Romeo SZ’s powertrain was a proven combination of a longitudinally mounted engine and a transaxle, a layout that could be traced way back to the pre-turned-post-WW2 Alfetta Grand Prix racer, the Alfetta sedan, the GTV coupé, and (finally) the Milano/75.

Inside the SZ, the 60° all-alloy 3.0-liter Busso V6 in SOHC 12-valve configuration was paired with Motronic ML 4.1 multipoint direct fuel injection.

Alfa Romeo’s racing division (Alfa Corse) uprated it to 210 horsepower at 6,200 RPM and 181 lb-ft of torque at 4,500 RPM by installing a more aggressive camshaft, new intake and exhaust manifolds, a larger air filter, and more effective engine oil cooling. The photographed example has its output upped to 235 hp and a 167 MPH top speed.

The transaxle was a 5-speed unit with a conventional shift pattern and a 25% self locking differential, and it gave the car an ideal weight distribution of 50:50. The engine and the gearbox were mated via a hydraulic single plate clutch, which was reinforced midway into production.

In straight line performance, the Busso gave the Il Mostro a 0-60 sprint in 6.7 seconds, while its aerodynamically efficient shape of 0.30 cd pushed it to 152 MPH. But the SZ offered way more for discerning drivers.

Suspension & Handling of the Alfa Romeo SZ

Now, this is where things get really interesting.

When the SZ first saw the light of day, it set a surprisingly high benchmark for handling. When pushed to its cornering limit, the SZ could withstand up to 1.1 lateral Gs. With newer tire compounds, the SZ could reportedly handle up to 1.4 G, an even more impressive feat considering the fact that it’s a 30-year old car.

To put that into perspective, a regular commuter could handle 0.9 Gs. Some modern cars that can achieve the Il Mostro’s 1989 result are Ferrari 488 Pista, 997 911 GT2, and Lamborghini Aventador SVJ, all clad in modern high grip rubber.

Apart from its body designed for ground effect, the reason for such impressive amounts of grip was the fact that the suspension tune was not carried over from the roadgoing Milano but was instead lifted from the Alfa Romeo 75 Group A/IMSA touring car and softened by Alfa Corse just enough to keep it more user friendly.

The person responsible for this brilliant, highly capable setup was Giorgio Pianta—a racer, manager and development driver whose expertise helped fine tune legendary cars like the Fiat 131 Abarth, Group B Lancia 037, and the Delta S4.

An upgrade over the Milano and its front torsion bars, the Il Mostro got a double wishbone suspension in the front and a refined De Dion axle at the back. The De Dion axle might have been an ancient setup in theory, but with perfect weight distribution between the axles and virtually no rear overhang, it gave the Il Mostro predictable and obedient rear end movement when pushed to the limit.

To make the race-spec suspension more usable in real life, the engineering team installed hydraulically-adjustable Koni dampers, making the ride height around 2 inches higher in seconds at the click of a button on the center console.

This way, the Il Mostro could cope with bumpy roads, kerbs, or any other obstacle it might have encountered in daily traffic. These active dampers were also the only technological driving aid in the SZ, as it famously lacked ABS or any form of stability control.

Brakes, Wheels, & Tires for the Alfa Romeo SZ

The Alfa Romeo SZ was offered with a single wheel design. Produced by performance wheel specialist Speedline, the two-piece aluminium wheels measured 16×7 inches in the front and 16×8 inches at the back and were wrapped in Pirelli P-Zero tires measuring 205/55ZR16 (front) and 225/50ZR16 (rear).

Stopping power was granted via ventilated steel discs on both axles, measuring 284mm at the front and 250mm in the back. Shaving unsprung mass off the rear wheels, the engineering team kept the rear brakes inboard—just like on the Alfa Romeo 75.

The brakes are regarded as the SZ’s weakest point, so many owners resorted to retrofitting bigger and more effective front rotors and calipers, which also called for bigger wheels. The pictured example rides on a 17-inch CNC-machined replica of the original 10-hole wheel design. That way, the owner could fit AP Racing four-piston calipers with Ferodo DS 2500 pads and custom made brake rotors.

The Alfa Romeo SZ Trophy

It’s a little known fact that the SZ & RZ duo had its own one-make racing series in 1993, celebrating Zagato’s 75 years in the business. A total of 13 cars (including Andrea Zagato’s car) competed with minimal preparations on an 8-race schedule.

Given that the Il Mostro was homologated by the FIA, it also entered the Campionato Italiano Supercar GT. Interestingly, some of Opron’s early sketches envisioned a car with a racing-style number on the door panels, so Alfa Romeo SZ fulfilled its creator’s original vision.

The Alfa Romeo SZ Today

As a collector car, Alfa Romeo SZ stands among the brand’s most collectible modern classics, offering the distilled driving dynamics of a legendary race car perfectly coupled with a truly unrepeatable design. Now that postmodernism is getting more widely accepted and universally embraced, sensibilities toward the SZ have switched from disdain to adoration.

This switch in attitude came hand in hand with a recent price surge. The finest examples will cross the six-figure threshold, while many others will likely linger in the $50,000–$80,000 zone.

If you’re on the lookout for an SZ or its RZ topless twin, Europe is still your best bet, followed by Japan and the United States. A general rule of thumb is to avoid the earliest examples if you intend to drive your SZ regularly, as those suffer from teething issues—particularly related to body panel quality control.

Legacy of the Alfa Romeo SZ

Just like the Montreal, the 8C, or the 4C from Alfa Romeo’s more recent days, the SZ is one of those standalone chapters in the company’s illustrious history. But, even though it didn’t produce a direct heir, Il Mostro still influenced Alfa Romeo’s future sports cars.

First of all, there was Walter de Silva’s 164 Proteo concept, a softened take on the SZ/RZ duo. This design exercise laid out some styling cues Pininfarina used in designing the GTV sports car, giving it a wedge-shaped shoulder line and a single-strip stoplight—two features Il Mostro brought to Alfa Romeo’s lineup.

The six-unit headlight theme reappeared on the 159 sedan and the Brera coupé too, ultimately proving that the SZ was indeed an inspiring car to those who knew how to approach it.

More than any other era, the late 20th century has taught us that art is provocative, divisive, and even unsettling. As such, it evokes a wide spectrum of emotions, so whatever your first reaction was to Il Mostro, take heart in the knowledge that it was an honest reaction to a genuine work of art.

All photos by Djordje Sugaris.

The post In-Depth: The Alfa Romeo SZ appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

Out of the shadows of World War II and its aftermath has come an unique Alfa Romeo sports car flaunting stunning design and engineering. It also reveals secrets that contributed to the design of Enzo Ferrari’s post-war V-12.

Among the many pleasures of Alfa Romeo’s 111^th-year celebrations is the surprise unveiling of a magnificent 12-cylinder road and racing prototype. Alfa was a lusty youngster of 31 years when it built an unique sample of a car that could have carried it to racing successes had war not intervened. But traces of its engine design remain visible in the V-12 powerplants that brought Enzo Ferrari post-war glory.

The post Casualty of War—1941 Alfa Romeo 12C Prototipo appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

It might not have been the prettiest, but the BMW M5 E60 is by far the wildest sports sedan ever to wear the blue and white roundel. Nearing twenty, this astonishing Bavarian has come to be respected even by the loudest naysayers and there are quite a few reasons why.

Diabolically high running costs are definitely not listed among this car’s positives, but the supercar-grade 500 horsepower V10 surely is worth emptying one’s pockets now and then. The E60 M5 was not just a special 5 Series—because in fact, they all are. It was a special M Car, and that accolade is something much harder to earn.

Even if you already know a thing or two about this ultra fast orca whale of a car, it’s time to refresh your memory and remind yourself why it’s worth catching the last train for this oddly cut gem. If not, stay with us and see what you missed about one of the greatest performance cars of the early 21st century.

Background & Development

BMW M GmbH was founded as BMW Motorsport in 1972 as the company’s racing division. Before there was the M5, the M Division fiddled with the E9 coupé, creating a hugely successful 3.0 CSL homologation special.

The first M Car was another homologation model, the M1 coupé and then in 1979, BMW Motorsport modified the E12 generation 5 Series into the M535i, creating the first M Car intended for road use rather than being built for racing requirements.

The E28 generation had another M535i and then, in 1985, the first true M5 was born by combining the underpinnings from the M535i and M1’s M88 straight six. In the following two generations, the M5 evolved from a straight-six E34 into V8-powered E39 M5. All three generations of the M5 defined the sports sedan market segment, helping BMW cement its position as the ultimate driving machine.

The success BMW garnered throughout the 1980s and the 1990s culminated with the 1994 buyout of the Rover Group, with the Bavarian company getting access to Land Rover’s all wheel drive technology, thus creating the X5 crossover in 1999. In between these two events, BMW started working on the entirely new, more radical range of vehicles, trail blazed by the E65 7 Series in 2001.

The development of the new 5 Series began in 1997, finishing in 2002 and premiering in 2003 in both North America and native Europe. The E60 M5 itself debuted in 2003 as a concept, reaching production in 2004.

During its production span from 2004 to 2010, BMW M built 19,564 sedans and 1,025 E61 Touring cars (offered only in Europe). Out of those sedans, just 1,364 had optional manual transmission, and those cars are quite desirable on the collector market both in the US and Europe.

BMW M5 E60 Chassis, Body, & Interior

Having adopted unibody construction in the 1960s with the Neue Klasse range, BMW continued on building the majority of its cars using the same principle, and the E60 was no exception. Its skeleton was constructed from various grades of steel with aluminum front wing supports, roof and body panels. The center of gravity was moved downward and the nose-heavy front was lightened, helping the 3869 lb M5 achieve 53:47 weight distribution.

The polarizing design was widely attributed to Chris Bangle, but that is true only to a certain extent. While Bangle directed BMW towards deconstructivism, thus reimagining its conservative design language, the E60 and its E61 wagon counterpart were in fact penned by Davide Arcangeli.

An immensely talented young designer, Arcangeli joined BMW’s ranks from Pininfarina, but sadly lost the battle with leukemia in 2000 at just 30 years old, not living to see the E60 reach its production form. To honor Arcangeli as a brilliant designer and a beloved friend, the rest of the team was adamant about keeping the E60’s original design intact.

The M5 was available both in sedan and wagon body styles, and the E60/E61 duo was eventually redesigned in M GmbH, where Chief of exterior design Karl Elmitt did his bit to differentiate it from the regular 5 Series in both form and function. The alterations were delicate but highly effective; for example, the front bumper got three air intakes to cope with the V10’s increased need for air and achieve more effective brake cooling.

Next, slightly wider front wheel arches got functional grilles, letting out built-up air inside the wheel wells and decreasing front lift. Moreover, the side skirts got more aggressive, while the rear end was finished off with a bumper accommodating quad tailpipes, BMW M’s signature feature since the E46 M3 and E39 M5.

To help minimize the increase in drag due to a bigger frontal area, square side mirrors were replaced with aerodynamically efficient almond-shaped ones. The final and most subtle change was the sedan’s trunk lid, which featured a smaller and deeper licence plate cutout and no keyhole (due to the M5 having an automatic trunk).

Inside, the M5 was generously equipped with a long list of standard features, including first generation iDrive, satellite navigation, and a sporty anthracite headliner. The M-specific details included a multifunctional three-spoke steering wheel with blue and red stitching, a speedometer etched to 200 MPH or 330 km/h for the European model, a tachometer with a moving redline indicator correlated to the engine temperature, a special head-up display, and M Sports seats with optional active lateral support.

For this car, BMW also offered plushier M Comfort seats with optional cooling, made from perforated Nappa leather and providing active lateral support.

BMW M5 E60 Engine & Transmission

The E60 M5’s standout feature was the S85, a 5.0-liter aluminum alloy 90° V10. Unlike other S-Code engines which were high performance variants of BMW’s production engines, this unit was unrelated to any other production powerhouse.

The engine was developed from scratch by M Division, using the basic architecture of V10 engines BMW developed as an engine supplier for Williams. Backing up these bold claims, the S85 engine blocks were cast in the company’s light alloy foundry in Landshut, where their F1 engines were made.

The S85B50 had four valves per cylinder, ten individual throttle bodies and M Double-VANOS variable valve timing. It produced a total output of 507 hp at 7,500 RPM and 384 lb-ft of torque at 6,100 RPM, redlining at 8,250 RPM.

While in regular use, the V10 was tethered to mere 400 horsepower, unleashing additional 107 ponies at the click of a button. This transformed the overpowered executive commuter into a potent track weapon.

To keep the steady supply of oil, the engineering team conceived a complex lubrication system consisting of four oil pumps, and two oil sumps. That way, the supersedan could handle up to 1G lateral and 1.3G longitudinal when braking hard without the engine experiencing oil deprivation.

The state of the art engine was mated with Getrag SMG III, a single-clutch seven-speed automated manual gearbox sending torque to the rear wheels via a locking M differential. The gearbox allowed the driver to shift the gears manually on the floor mounted lever or metal paddles behind the steering wheel, while the DRIVELOGIC system gave the driver a choice between six shifting speeds in the manual S Mode mode or five in automatic D Mode.

Catering to its North American customer base, BMW introduced a 6-speed manual as a no cost option from 2007 model year onwards. The unit was based on the V8-powered E60’s 6-speed manual and provided a more immersive driving engagement at the expense of a slower 0-60 time and lack of ability to disengage the Driving Stability Control (DSC) system.

Not many customers ticked this option though—so as previously mentioned, only 1,364 cars sold until the end of production in 2010.

BMW M5 E60 Suspension & Handling

When it came to keeping the M5 firmly on the road, BMW M GmbH redesigned the regular E60’s independent suspension into a lightweight, yet highly durable system made almost entirely out of aluminum.

The E60 M5 got revised front and rear subframes, stiffer bushings, and anti-roll bars in the front and rear—plus additional cooling for the gearbox and the differential via NACA ducts on the front thrust plate and cooling fins on the differential cover at the rear.

The E60 M5 came standard with adjustable electronic dampers, and the Electronic Damper Control (EDC) offered three grades of stiffness and responsiveness: Comfort, Normal and Sport. A button next to the gear lever let drivers choose the suspension response, although it could also be navigated through iDrive.

In addition to adaptive dampers, the E60 M5 also featured adaptive steering. The system dubbed M Servotronic adapted to the EDC settings to offer corresponding feedback on the steering wheel.

The E60 M5’s Driving Stability Control had a unique M Dynamic Mode which effectively disengaged the DSC allowing the driver to push the car to its limits.

Once activated, all settings regarding DSC, EDC and the engine’s power output could be activated or deactivated via a M button on the steering wheel.

BMW M5 E60 Brakes, Wheels, & Tires

Ventilated and cross drilled steel rotors came as standard, measuring 374mm in the front and 370mm back, gripped by twin-piston sliding callipers. Carbon ceramic rotors were a very rare optional extra.

For the North American market, the E60 M5 had one wheel design, the 10-spoke Style 166M produced by BBS, measuring 19” x 8.5” front and 19” x 9.5” back, with Continental Sport Contact 2 tires in 255/40/19 and 285/35/19 respectively.

On the other markets, BMW offered the M5 with optional 19” x 8.5” front and 19” x 9.5” BBS Style 167M forged double five-spoke rear wheels (pictured), also wrapped in 255/40/19 and 285/35/19 Continental Sport Contact 2 rubber.

BMW M5 E60 Legacy

When the E60 M5 hit the press, it was criticized for its clunky SMG and too many complicated electronic aids, forming a public image of a car too detached from the real M experience despite its phenomenal V10.

On the upside, this supersedan emerged in the golden age of V10 engines, marked by the veteran Viper and newcomers like the Porsche Carrera GT, Lamborghini Gallardo and a trio of Audis sporting its engine: R8, S8, and last but not least, the C6 RS6, the M5’s head-on competition. Displaying an abundance of naturally aspirated power in a refined manner, the M5 made an everlasting mark in this exclusive club.

Moreover, the fact that no BMW besides the E63 M6 sported the V10 before or after it makes the E60 M5 a remarkable car in the vast M family. As BMW incorporated turbochargers, dual clutch transmission, all-wheel drive, and even more electronic aids in subsequent F10 and F90 M5 models, the E60 M5 turned out to be the last somewhat visceral M Car, closer in spirit to the E39 M5 than to its successors.

Its idiosyncratic character and historical importance caused the latest surge in prices, especially for the scarce manual variant. It’s safe to say that the E60 M5 has matured well, becoming a highly collectible piece of modern performance history.

In retrospect, all of this car’s drawbacks can easily be attributed to the spirit of the era it was made in, and the E60 M5 is now loved exactly for what it is: perfectly flawed.

The post In-Depth Review: BMW M5 E60 appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

Many things have moved forward in the past 30 years, not least of which is how people buy and sell their cars. Several major websites now host thousands upon thousands of cars for sale or auction, and within the online auction community are known as “churn sites.” The problem is that for most of the 21st century, there hasn’t been an alternative—until Collecting Cars, that is.

Collecting Cars: A Solution To An International Problem

Edward Lovett, founder and CEO of Collecting Cars, has been in the car business all his life, as his family owns and runs the Dick Lovett’s Dealership in the UK. Edward has taken note of how classic car auctions have been sticking to the same format they were using back in the 1990s. The only difference these days is that you don’t have to wait for the info packet in the mail, you download it off the auction’s website.

This struck him as odd, as while the rest of the world had raced towards the digital age and embraced the online platform, classic car auctions, especially the big ones like Pebble Beach, Scottsdale, and Barrett-Jackson are still operating the same as always. It didn’t make sense to him, when there was an entire world of potential buyers and sellers just waiting for the right tool. At that moment, Edward realized that if the tool didn’t exist, he would make it.

Collecting Cars was formed in October 2018, and development of the online classics tool began in earnest. After going live in 2019, the first transaction across the site was a Range Rover Classic LSE for £12,800 (~$17,500 USD) in June.

Things exploded from there, with the first major milestone of £1 million in sales coming in only 3 short months later, in September 2019. The next milestone of the company earning £1 million in revenue was realized only 4 months later, in January 2020 . Since then, neither Edward or Collecting Cars have looked back.

Interview With Edward Lovett, Founder & CEO of Collecting Cars Auctions

Note: Selected portions of the interview have been selected and edited for clarity and conciseness.

Edward Lovett, Founder and CEO of Collecting Cars

Our interviewer for the day was Simon Bertram, a content writer for Sports Car Digest and sister automotive content sites. While he is not your average classic car collector, he does know the collecting lifestyle from other hobbies. He only wishes he could afford to buy the one car that has held his eye from the first day he saw one—and one day, if it comes up on Collecting Cars, he just might.

Simon Bertram (SB):

As always with these interviews, thank you for taking the time out of your schedule to sit down with us here at SportsCarDigest.

Edward Lovett (EL):

(With a small laugh) I literally live, eat, breathe cars, so it’s not really taking a moment out as it is just sharing what I love to do!

SB: 

We really do like to get a background on the people we interview for our website, to understand first the person behind the business, what drives them, what they’re like, so that it’s not just a “here’s their website, enjoy.” Would you be able to provide us with a quick summary of Edward Lovett, the Founder?

EL:

Well, firstly, I am Edward Lovett. My family business is called Dick Lovett’s, and that’s in its 54th year now. I was born and bred in the car business, as Dick Lovett’s is a franchise dealer for Porsche, Ferrari, BMW, Aston Martin, Mini, etc., in the southwest of England and employs about 800 people. I’ve been in and out of that business for most of my life, although I’ve been travelling the world for the past ten years buying and selling collectible cars.

Given the fact that I make the pilgrimage to Pebble Beach every August, winding the clock back 5 years, one in ten conversations included talk of an online auction website. The next year, one in five. The year after that, every conversation brought up one of the big auction sites in the US. When I returned from Pebble Beach in August 2018, it was very clear that there was a big gap in the market in the UK for something along that business model. 

So, I chose a name, chose a web developer, and proceeded on the journey. 8 months later, the first auction started in the UK through Collecting Cars.

When this is what you grew up and into learning about, it’s no wonder that someone like Edward would have the right mindset and the timing to create a global auction platform.

While there was definitely a background for Edward to build out from, it was through his “hobby,” (although it seems a bit casual to call travelling the world buying and selling collectible cars a hobby)), that he found his inspiration. As the saying goes, “What’s meant to be will always find a way,” and the UK’s premiere collectible car auction site was born through Edward’s realization of what was missing.

He goes on then to discuss how at first, there were only three employees at Collecting Cars, including himself. They had very humble and modest expectations—and at first, those expectations were met with decent, if small, sales of more affordable collectibles. However, once word got out that there was a collectible car auction site centered in the UK, the traffic started to flow.

A simple, easy to understand logo, but one that also stands out.

From closing the first auction in June of 2019 to January 2020, Collecting Cars made their first £1 million, which made Edward extremely happy. However, what came next was beyond even his wildest dreams. From January 2020 through December 2020, Collecting Cars sold through over £45 million worth of collectible cars, including some that were listed with six figures after the Pound sign.

SB:

That is some serious growth! How have things been in 2021, what with all the pandemic lockdowns and the cancellation of so many car shows and auctions in 2020 and the first part of this year?

EL:

I can tell you that year-to-date, January to October 2021, Collecting Cars has sold through £125 million worth of cars. Pounds Sterling, of course.

SB:

Wow. Yeah, that is what you would call explosive growth!

EL:

(Laughs) Well, there’s also not just three of us now either. There’s 56 of us now, and we’re looking to bring in more people as well, globally. Web developers, car experts, UI/UX experts, we’re looking to build this out into not just one of, but the premiere collectible car auction site!

SB:

From humble beginnings to pushing to be the biggest and best, I guess that’s what makes the best businesses succeed! To take this on a slight tangent, what do you think about your past experiences helped make the online auction site dream come to fruition?

EL:

Well, I wouldn’t say that I’m old, nor would I say that I’m young. Over the course of the last 10 years, I’ve done a huge amount of business over the phone, email, WhatsApp, even previously to Collecting Cars I was operating my own business which was called International Collectibles, where I was buying and selling collectible cars around the world. The experience that I brought forward from all that is that no one came to see the car in person before buying it.

It was all done through email and the phone—sending pictures to them of areas of interest, and maybe one or two would come out to the car for a final inspection before buying it. It was very clear from the outset that I didn’t need to add additional cost by having a showroom or storage warehouse. The key thing is that you can transact online.

I think the other experience that really made things work was building up trust. Through International Collectibles, I was often dealing with a few regular clients, and they trusted me that I was telling them all the good and bad about the cars they were looking to buy. I do have to admit, with a background in car sales and dealerships, building up that trust was just as hard as it is for everyone else, but once it’s earned, it sticks.

A lot of auction sites have come and gone in the last 24 months, because they popped up without building up their contacts and building up trust. They didn’t get the listings, and therefore they disappeared. Because Collecting Cars came out of the background of both being a car dealer and a trusted agent for private collectors, we knew right away that we needed to gain that trust from the selling public, and so far, it seems we’ve got it.

This is something we at SportsCarDigest completely understand. You don’t come to SportsCarDigest to read about the latest and greatest news in the classic car world just because it was the first link in Google. You come to SportsCarDigest because we tell it like it is, we’re always 100% honest, and we value the trust that you put into us to do the research, do the digging, and get to the truth of every article we post.

Simon agreed wholeheartedly, and Edward elaborated on the process of how a car is sold through Collecting Cars. Every car, no matter if it’s a Bugatti Veyron or a Mazda Miata, is listed for 7 days. They also always suggest emphatically that a bidder has the car inspected, and ask as many questions to the seller as they feel they need to be sure about the condition and quality of the car.

Anything and everything that has four wheels and an engine is welcome to be sold through Collecting Cars, as long as someone out there would like to collect it!

Also, to ensure that the seller isn’t facing undue pressure, Collecting Cars curates the auction listings so that for any one auction period, only one of that car is listed. This is why there is a “Live Auction” section on their website, and a “Coming Soon” section next to it. This way, if a bidder is pushed out of their budget early in the bidding process, they can start looking at the next car coming down the pipeline early, and start to gain that feeling of trust in the seller.

Edward states here that Collecting Cars endeavours to be as transparent as possible, within common sense. They won’t step in between a bidder and seller until a deal is finalized, and even then, it’s only to make sure all the paperwork, title, money, and such is transferred correctly. It is an auction platform like no other, where they are not curating the actual car itself, holding it in a warehouse or on a showroom floor.

To put it in simpler wording, the curation is in providing the auction platform itself. You are guaranteed a fair shot at selling your car without competition from another of the same car during the same auction period. You have an intermediary agent in Collecting Cars that can help with listing, selling, bidding, buying, and transferring cars, but for the rest of the time, they’re working hard behind the scenes to make your auction experience as smooth and uncomplicated as possible.

Although there is one thing that Edward didn’t talk about that I know some other auction sites do, especially those dealing with rarer cars…

SB:

I know through watching multiple auctions like Pebble Beach and Barrett-Jackson online, sometimes the seller doesn’t want to be known. Does Collecting Cars have any type of consignment system in place to protect the identity of some sellers?

EL:

We don’t, as the platform, have anything set up like that. What we do have, however, is a network of partners around the world that will take on the consignment from the seller, and list it under their own name or their company’s name. We also use that same network of partners if the seller isn’t wanting to manage the sale themself.

It’s part of being global now. It’s all about networking, and through my own past connections and new opportunities, we’ve built up a great network of trustworthy partners. We have two major offices, one here in the UK and one in Los Angeles, but we also have physical offices in Sydney (Australia), Munich (Germany), Toronto (Canada), and London (England). In the next six months, we’ll also have a Scandinavian office, and one in the United Arab Emirates.

We have a physical presence in all of those areas, so if anyone wants to sell through us but wants to keep their privacy, we work with them in those areas to make the sale happen. As I like to say, we’re a global business that operates locally.

This is the second reason that Collecting Cars is a global classic car auction site like no other. By establishing a local presence in major markets, they are able to not only source collectible cars and build local partnerships, but also provide that personal touch, that little extra bit of attention to detail and client care that builds up that all important trust.

Another important (and very often misunderstood) business practice that Collecting Cars uses to build up their reputation and trustworthiness is that they do not aggressively advertise. We’ve all had the experience of searching for something on the internet, or clicking on an interesting link on Facebook, only for the ads that appear on websites and social media to suddenly be all about that thing you looked up.

Collecting Cars, on the other hand, will advertise that they are a collectible car auction site, and that’s about it. They won’t chase you around the internet with targeted ads, nor do they spend millions of dollars trying to have the biggest flashing neon sign. By having a dignified physical presence around the world and staying out of your hair digitally, Collecting Cars relies on the oldest and most powerful advertisement of them all: word of mouth.

Having done over £125 million so far in 2021, we think they might be on the right track. Of course, it also helps when a true classic, modern or not, sells through the website and brings eyes onto it because of a sale…

SB:

This is a question I ask every owner, founder, chief officer, et al, of any auction website: Are there any sales that were memorable to you, personally? In the sense that you liked the car, you were amazed at the final bid, and the like?

EL:

There is one. We sold a Porsche 918 Weissach Edition from Los Angeles. Those are extremely rare cars to come up for sale in the collector market, and the fact that we were able to be the platform it sold through was an incredible experience.

The lethal looking 2015 Porsche 918 Spyder Weissach Edition.

SB:

Do you remember how much it sold for?

EL:

It went for just over $1.4 million US dollars.

SB:

That is an amazing sale to be a part of. Did the LA office go out and look for cars for sale, or…?

EL:

No, no. With that one, the seller contacted the office and left a message. We were very quick to get on the phone with him, as our office in LA is in West Hollywood, and the car itself was actually about half a mile away. We met with the owner, agreed on a reserve price, took the photos of the car, listed it, and sold it.

Something else about us, especially being an online platform, is that we charged him exactly zero dollars to do all that for him. When the car was sold, we charged the buyer $5,000 as a buyer’s premium.

If you were to bid on that car at an in-person event, and if it sold for the $1.4 million it did through us, you would on average pay about $150,000 in buyer’s premium alone, and the seller would pay anywhere between 5% to 10% of the value of the car in seller’s fees—so you could easily go over $250,000 in premiums and fees just to get the car across the block and sold.

And we charged $5,000 from the buyer only.

SB:

Any other cars that excited you?

EL:

Being honest with you, I am as excited about a car we sell for $10,000 as I am about a car we sell for $1 million. I’m just proud to provide the platform for people to auction their cars through, with bidders from Hong Kong to the UK, from New York to Auckland. So, in a way, every car sold is memorable, because it means that we’re providing people with a platform they trust to sell and buy through.

The rare naked carbon interior option for the Porsche 918 Spyder, available only with the Weissach Edition.

It’s hard to convey in an article, but during this part of the interview, we could see in Edward’s eyes that he really, truly meant what he said. There are some business owners you will come across who, at the end of a long day, while doing an interview after closing time, will answer your questions but not seem invested in the actual discussion.

Not so with Edward. Every answer was delivered with enthusiasm, and when he spoke of every car being memorable, it was reflected in his entire demeanour: leaning forward, smiling, that little sparkle in his eyes when he mentioned being proud to have made a platform that more and more people are choosing to use. It’s not the sparkle of making a ton of money, or the sparkle of ego.

The sparkle in his eyes is about absolutely loving everything he’s doing. This is a true car guy first, and a businessman second. Edward is happy with pretty much anything that has four wheels and an engine, enjoys every aspect of buying, selling, and loves providing a platform for others to do the same.

In the end, it’s why we’re all here on SportsCarDigest, isn’t it? We all share that passion—that certain something about the engineering, the design, the feeling of enjoying, admiring, and driving the cars we do.

It’s not just a way to get from point A to point B for us; it’s all about enjoying the journey as you slide the gear lever into first and let out the clutch to start the car rolling down that long, welcoming stretch of pavement that some call “the road” but many of us simply call “home.”

Additionally, Edward did mention after the official interview was over, with a little smirk, that there may be some expansion in the near future to cover specific vehicles that are sometimes auctioned on Collecting Cars but don’t really fit there (something about a website regarding Collecting Motorcycles, and another about Collecting Race Cars).

He wasn’t entirely certain that they already had those domain names registered and were migrating the platform to fit those two vehicle types. Of course, Edward said all this with a hefty wink and grin.

The post Collecting Cars: A Global Auction Site Like No Other appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

The heart of Chrysler’s NASCAR race program throughout the ’60s was the mighty 426-cu.in. Hemi-engine (so named for its hemispherically shaped combustion chambers). This big-block powerhouse gulped air through a single 4-barrel Holley carburetor and belched exhaust out of 3”-diameter stainless headers. With as much as 650 horsepower on tap, the venerable Hemi-engine saw competitive service in the NASCAR ranks from 1964 through the early ’70s.

The Hemi-engine was packaged into production Dodge Charger and Plymouth Satellite bodyshells and race prepared by the shops of Ray Nichels in Highland, Indiana. In race trim, Chrysler’s NASCAR stock cars weighed in at 3800-lbs. and featured adjustable torsion-bar suspension with twin shock absorbers at the front and a Chrysler live axle with floating hubs at the rear, supported by heavy-duty leaf springs and twin shock absorbers on either side. The Hemi-engine’s 650 angry horses were transmitted to the rear axle via a standard Chrysler 833 4-speed as used in the company’s heavy truck line.

Birth of the Aerowar

In order to fully appreciate the Chrysler Aerocars, it is important to understand the events that led to their creation. Up to the late ’60s, NASCAR had managed to remain a relatively low-tech series with the same cars being raced that could be bought off the showroom floor. However, major manufacturers like Ford, General Motors and Chrysler had seen the power of “Win on Sunday, sell on Monday” and were now throwing tremendous amounts of engineering know-how and money towards winning stock car races and the NASCAR championship. From this hotbed of competition, a war of sorts broke out between the two dominant forces of the day, Ford and Chrysler. This came to be known as the “Aerowar.”

The opening shots of the Aerowar occurred in 1967, when Richard Petty dominated the NASCAR Championship driving his boxy, 426-cu.in. Hemi-powered Plymouth Satellite GTX to a remarkable 27 wins out of 49 races. For 1968, Chrysler entered a revised version of the Dodge Charger and the Plymouth Satellite into NASCAR competition. Though not revolutionary, the new designs appeared sleeker and more streamlined than the previous year’s championship winner. However, on the other side of the trenches, Ford knew that if it was going to be even remotely competitive in ’68, it was going to have to make major improvements to its under-powered, Ford Fairlane-line racecars. Since Ford’s conventional tunnel-port 427 motor was no match for the powerful Chrysler Hemi, Ford looked for the “unfair advantage” by making major inroads into the aerodynamics of its cars. Ford’s new sleek, fastback design dramatically improved performance without the need for increased horsepower. The result was a walkover – with Ford handily winning the ’68 NASCAR championship.

Earlier in the ’68 season, Chrysler engineers began to take a hard look at why their cars were being trounced by the underpowered Fords. Mechanically, the Charger and Satellite were reliable and enjoyed one of the most powerful engines of its day. Upon careful examination, however, the Chrysler engineers determined two major areas where their cars were aerodynamically at a disadvantage. The first problem area was the Charger’s recessed grill, which was creating a tremendous amount of drag and lift at the front end. The other problem was the rear window area, which appeared from the side to be an aerodynamically efficient fastback design, but was in fact two hollow C-pillars flowing to the back with a near-vertical back window nested in the center. With these problem areas discovered, Chrysler engineer John Pointer began sketching cures for the aerodynamic deficiencies. These cures included a narrowed-and-sealed grill insert to deflect air around the car’s nose, as well as a sheet metal cover over the C-pillars to create a true fastback design at the rear. These changes were tested at the Wichita State University wind tunnel and proved to be a significant improvement over the previous design. With this data in hand, Chrysler executives then approved the production of 500 street-going versions, which would be the minimum production number necessary to qualify the new design for NASCAR competition. This new design for 1969 was renamed the Charger 500.

While the Charger was modified and improved for the ’69 season, Chrysler executives opted not to modify the Plymouth variant, the Road Runner – thus rendering it an uncompetitive “lame duck” for the ’69 season. This decision did not sit well with Plymouth stalwart Richard Petty, who had brought so much success to the Chrysler division. Petty threw down the gauntlet and insisted that for him to remain with Chrysler, he would have to switch over to the new Dodge. Chrysler called King Richard’s bluff, directing him to race the uncompetitive Plymouth. Much to their dismay, he made good on his threat and walked. Not only did he walk, he walked right over and joined the enemy at Ford! This defection was a terrible blow to Chrysler, but not half as terrible as the blow they would receive at the 1969 season opening race at Daytona.

While Chrysler had been busy improving the Charger, Ford had created significantly improved versions of the Fairlane and Montego, known as the Torino Talladega and the Cyclone Spoiler II. These new designs were penned by famed stylist Larry Shinoda and constructed by famed racecar builders Holman & Moody. With drivers like Richard Petty and Cale Yarborough, the Ford juggernaut easily won the season opener at Daytona and continued to dominate throughout the majority of the ’69 season, much to the dismay of the Chrysler executives.

In response to this embarrassing battle loss, the Chrysler engineering team went back to the drawing board – and back to the wind tunnel – to wrench more aerodynamic efficiency from the Charger 500 before the end of the ’69 season. Again, John Pointer worked on the project, this time with the help of Dodge engineer Bob Marcell. As before, the airflow over the nose and the rear deck were determined to be the problem. What was needed were more drastic measures. The first change was to create an enclosed and pointed nose cone to allow smooth penetration of the oncoming airflow. While the new design did create smoother penetration, it also created significant lift due to much of the airflow being diverted underneath the car. So a sizable chin spoiler was added to counteract the lift. This new design created over 200 lbs. of front-end downforce when tested in the Wichita wind tunnel.

Turning their attention to the rear of the car, the design team determined that in order to balance the tremendous downforce now made at the nose of the car, they would have to add some type of a rear wing. Different wing heights were experimented with, but ultimately, a height of 23” was used because it enabled the rear decklid to be completely opened (a necessity, considering the new wing configuration would have to be included on all street cars built to satisfy NASCAR’s homologation requirements). In its final form, the adjustable rear wing could generate over 600 lbs. of downforce at superspeedway speeds.

Rounding out the revised aerodynamic package was a pair of rear-facing vents (or scoops), which were added to the tops of the front fenders. The often-speculated purpose was for the exit of trapped air in the wheel wells, when in fact the extremely wide scoops were cut into the fenders to provide additional clearance for the tires when the car squatted down on its suspension due to the increased downforce at high speeds. After a long summer’s worth of work, Chrysler felt that it finally had the aerodynamic artillery that it needed to claim victory in the Aerowar.

The newly revised Charger 500, now known as the Dodge Charger Daytona, was amazingly completed and homologated in time for the September race at the new Talladega Superspeedway. Fortunes for the new Daytona looked promising when Charlie Glotzbach, in the Chrysler engineering-sponsored Daytona, won the pole with an all-time NASCAR speed record of 199.466 mph. Unfortunately, safety problems related to the newly constructed track resulted in a large number of drivers, led by Richard Petty, to boycott the race. With a complete absence of any Ford competition (due to the boycott), Charlie Glotzbach’s substitute, Richard Brickhouse, went on to easily win the event and claim the Daytona’s first superspeedway win, albeit under dubious circumstances.

If the Daytona’s speed and questionable first victory bolstered Chrysler executives spirits, reality would soon set in as the Ford team returned to regular competition. While the Charger 500 and the new Charger Daytona were more competitive than in ’68, they were still not able to dominate like the Chrysler team had hoped. Oddly enough, most of the Charger’s victories came on short ovals, not on the superspeedways that it was designed for. While the Charger won 22 races in the 1969 season, it was still bested by Ford and the Torino Talladega of David Pearson, who won 11 events and had 42 top-five finishes to claim the NASCAR crown. However, the winds of change were soon to blow in Chrysler’s favor.

In both racing camps, the 1970 NASCAR season was to bring significant change. For Ford, this change would be a reorganization of upper management, which resulted in a whopping 75% decrease in the manufacturer’s NASCAR racing budget. At Chrysler, the change would come in the form of an all-out effort to get Richard Petty to return to the Plymouth fold. As early as June 1969, Chrysler executives were negotiating with “The King” to return to racing a Plymouth. As in 1968, Petty’s response was that he wanted a winged Plymouth similar to the new Charger Daytona. Finally, a deal was struck and the design team had to go back to the drawing board to design a winged version of the Plymouth Road Runner. At first glance the project would have appeared to be quite simple, however, subtle body configuration differences between the Charger and the Road Runner necessitated major redesigning of most of the body panels to make the car aerodynamically work as a whole. Additionally, NASCAR had recently changed its minimum homologation numbers from 500 units per year to 1000! So, in the course of less than 6 months, the Plymouth crew had to redesign and manufacture 1000 updated Road Runners, now known as Superbirds, to qualify for the 1970 NASCAR season. Amazingly, sufficient cars were produced to qualify the new Superbird for the season-opening race at Riverside, California, in January.

The opening race of the 1970 season was, oddly enough, a road race, held at Riverside Raceway in Southern California. A number of Charger Daytonas were present, as well as the new Superbirds being driven by the likes of Richard Petty and road racing star Dan Gurney. The Chryslers again showed great promise in qualifying, with Gurney capturing the pole in his Superbird; however, an action packed race enabled A.J. Foyt in a Ford Torino to snatch the win away from second-place Roger McCluskey in his new Plymouth Superbird. This would prove to be one of the few victories that Ford would enjoy all year.

The second race of the season was the all-important Daytona 500 and Chrysler was determined not to leave the track, yet again, empty handed. In an all-out effort to ensure victory, Chrysler fielded no less than 18 Aerocars for the famed Florida event. As the green flag fell, pole-sitter Cale Yarborough, in a Ford, led for the first 30 laps until an ailing motor forced him to be devoured by a pack of Daytonas and Superbirds led by Charlie Glotzbach. Dodge Daytonas led the majority of the race until lap 192, when Pete Hamilton’s Superbird took the lead. Despite a challenge from David Pearson’s Ford in the final laps, Hamilton went on to win the Daytona 500, scoring the Superbird’s first NASCAR victory and beginning an unprecedented win streak for Chrysler.

1970 proved to be Chrysler’s long-waited-for year in the sun. After Daytona, Richard Petty won the next race at Rockingham in his Superbird, followed by Bobby Allison’s victory in a Daytona at Atlanta. By mid-season, Chrysler drivers were on a streak, winning 19 straight victories, including Dover, Atlanta and Trenton for Richard Petty, another Talladega victory for Pete Hamilton, and a significant win for Buddy Baker in the Southern 500 at Darlington. By the the end of the season, Daytona and Superbird drivers had claimed 38 victories out of 47 races, with Bobby Isaac taking the coveted NASCAR Grand National title in his K & K Insurance-sponsored Dodge Daytona. After three long years, Chrysler had clawed its way back to the top of the NASCAR heap.

Elated with their hard-fought success, the Chrysler team returned once again to the drawing board to improve their Aerocars for the upcoming ’71 season. However, NASCAR kingpin Bill France, Sr. wasn’t happy with the new “aerodynamic” direction that his series had taken. Resultantly, he decreed that for the ’71 season and beyond, any special aerobodied stock cars would be limited to an anemic 305-cu.in. of engine displacement. With this new rule in effect, one of the most interesting and exciting periods in NASCAR history drew to a hasty conclusion.

The Chrysler Development Car, DC-93

The history of motorsport is filled with “firsts” and “bests,” but few Chrysler cars carry a heritage like the one featured here. The Charger Daytonas of 1969 did claim race wins, but this example was the very first car ever to officially top 200 mph on a closed course circuit. On March 24, 1970, at the recently opened Alabama International Motor Speedway (AIMS) in Talladega, factory driver Buddy Baker set an official lap speed of 200.447 mph with it. That, however, is just the start of its history.

A Chrysler “Development Car,” this Dodge carries Serial No. DC-93. Rebuilt by Nichels Engineering from a Charger 500 press car, assembly of this as an aero test car was overseen at the company’s “Woodward Garage” race shop by Bob Tarozzi at the direction of Larry Rathgeb just as Charger Daytona development was getting underway. Known in test documentation as the “blue car” and authenticated by Chrysler Racing Engineer George M. Wallace on April 7, 2001, it was first driven by Paul Goldsmith in the 1969 Daytona 500 as a Charger 500 model before being converted to test use. Driven as No. 88, Charlie Glotzbach sat on the pole for the inaugural Talladega 500, in September 1969, in DC-93, qualifying at 199.446 mph, itself a world record. As a result, Baker was tagged to drive DC-93 to deliberately attempt to top the 200 mph barrier six months later at the same track during a private test.

Among the other drivers of DC-93 were Bobby Allison, Dan Gurney, Bobby Isaac and James Hylton, but the proven chassis was longest-used by Iowa racer Don White in USAC Stock Car competition, driven for several seasons before retiring it in the mid-1970s. After extensive research, historian Greg Kwiatkowski located the car and purchased it from White in 1998. Eventually, the result was a comprehensive multiyear restoration by Ray Evernham and his team in Mooresville, North Carolina.

Of historical note, DC-93 was in use when the first tests of the actual Daytona Charger aero package took place at the company’s Chelsea Proving Grounds in July 1969, attaining Wallace’s documented 205 mph. The Daytona package on DC-93 resulted in a zero-lift vehicle with a drag coefficient of 0.29, and further testing resulted in many innovations used on future Chrysler circle track vehicles. This included directional fins to direct airflow to the radiator, underbody paneling from the nose to the K-frame for better aerodynamics, Chrysler’s first use of a dry sump in NASCAR, engine bars added from the shock towers to the firewall for chassis stiffening, and refined cowl air induction though the base of the windshield.

Exterior aero enhancements by Chrysler Engineering added a body rake to the chassis by 1.5-degrees and flared quarter panels in front of the rear tires for better aerodynamics, the steering gear attached for better handling and more speed, and the entire front end “drooped” forward of the front tires for less drag. Inside the race-based interior, the square fuel tubing can be seen on the right-side floor pan that was originally used to attach temporary data recording equipment, and an innovative rear axle cooler for better efficiency.

Painstakingly researched before work began, this accurate restoration includes a 426/575 HP Hemi EX-144 V-8 engine complete with a Holley Dominator carburetor on a bathtub Hemi intake, the car’s “Put a Dodge in your garage” front air plate and period speed parts. It is backed by a 4-speed manual transmission, and the car has period-correct body parts, paint, racing wheels and a Letter of Authenticity from George M. Wallace verifying the provenance of DC-93.

This rare piece of Dodge and NASCAR history has recently been offered for private party sale.
Click here to view the listing.

Specifications

The post Aero Warrior—1969 Dodge Charger Daytona   appeared first on Sports Car Digest.