Retro

Once misunderstood, the Mercedes-Benz ‘Pagoda’ SL W113 went on to create and define an entirely new kind of car. Join us on a drive through its natural playground of nocturnal Mayfair as the icon turns 60.

Classic Cars reader Simon Biggs is a connoisseur of classic luxury saloons, so how will he find the pure early Citroën DS19 – and at 6ft 6in, will he fit in it?

Lesley Weller never considered herself a car enthusiast, but a Mercury Comet she saw in a TV show made a deep impression on her 13-year-old mind. After years of dreaming, ownership is now a happy reality.

Before Elvis changed everything, Cary Grant and Clark Gable defined American style. Sports coats and fedoras were the fashion, society centred around country clubs and the car to have was a big, luxurious straight-eight. Peter Rickinson is keeping that era alive with a 1948 Chrysler New Yorker…

Cute and cuddly, the Goggomobil Dart is one of the rarest of roadsters. Looks like it could have been, should have been, a prototype character for a Pixar movie about lightweight sportscars roaming the great Outback.

Panel vans are prosaic machines, best-suited for goods deliveries or carting the tools of a trade with a pair of doors and seating up front, window-less cargo area down back. Yet by Australia’s mid-1970s, packs of dollied-up, bright-hued panel vans had become cult cars from Bondi to the Back of Beyond. Ford, Holden and Chrysler all turned their hand to adding sporting pretensions stripes and fancy wheels and engine options to the humble van; a marketing, and styling, exercise to cash in on a young, and mainly male, fad for dressing up work vehicles for weekend leisure. Surfing and sex were the chief leisure activities facilitated by a fancy van out of work hours.

The V12 engine has long been a Ferrari signature tune, stretching back to the lightweight 125 S roadster of 1947, the first car to wear the famed marque’s badge. Designed in the main by engineer Gioachino Colombo, the 125’s short-stroke 1.5 litre engine produced some 118 horsepower in competition and was followed at the Turin show a year later by the first of the Ferrari 166s a roadster dubbed the barchetta plus a Berlinetta, or coupe.

We go back in time to sample a car you couldn’t officially buy but which could so easily have been built.

When Jack Reason fell in love with the BMW E9 he put himself on course to undertake a colossal restoration project. As you can see, it was well worth it...

In 1925, Bugatti offered a more customer-friendly version of its Type 35 Grand Prix car, which it named the 35A. Mark Dixon drives the prototype.

Five decades have elapsed since Mercedes-Benz launched the first S-Class. Glen Waddington drives the greatest of its type: the W116 450SEL 6.9.

The Basel-based supercar-builder Monteverdi was long shrouded in mystery After a lifetime of dreaming about it, Marc Sonnery finally gets to drive its definitive GT: the Berlinetta.

Take a rookie concours entrant, an obsessively restored Ferrari, a curious Octane editor and set them loose at Salon Prive. James Elliott reveals all.

Andy Willsheer introduces the ’Vette from the ’Net, a vehicle sourced sight unseen online, which has brought its owner a great deal of pleasure revisiting a long-lost love for Corvettes…

A chance sighting followed by persistence led Tamir Ali to purchase this 1961 Buick Invicta. Now it’s his daily driver and he’ll never sell it…