When we first clapped eyes on Nick Ponterio’s incredible Mk2, we had no idea it was the same car that graced these pages almost a decade before, albeit in a very different guise.
Before the SUV and the minivan there was the station wagon. One can arguably state that when it comes to the station wagon America has done it bigger and better than anyone else. Originally conceived as a doorless people and cargo mover on a truck platform in the early 1900s, by the middle of the 1920s Ford had added some civility to it with the introduction of the Woodie. That refinement continued after World War II as wooden bodies gave way to steel panels and a foundation based on passenger car chassis.
The “backstory” on just about every hot rod is where the real story lies. Frankie Klepadlo of SoCal is no different, as the real story on his ’30 Ford five-window coupe began years ago. Frankie’s ’30 Ford chopped and- channeled coupe has finally made the road after six years of painstaking effort. But the backstory tells us it began a long time before that. It’s best to hear this story from Frankie himself.
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.
Welcome to the 90’s — where you could buy a Tamagotchi, supersize your McDonald’s fries, google the worth of your collectible Beanie Baby, pick up a Nirvana CD, and still make it home just in time to watch Friends on NBC. For petrolheads especially, the decade was nothing short of legendary.
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.
The original M3, based on BMW’s handsome E30 Three Series, arrived with flair and fanfare at the 1985 Frankfurt Auto Show. Here was a well-revised, well-sorted E30 built as a homologation special to challenge the likes of the Cosworth-engined Mercedes-Benz 190E W201 on the racetracks of Europe. While sharing its main components with the road-going Three Series, as per Group A regulations, the M3 was lighter and stiffer and quicker.
As a young 18 year old my first car was a Mazda 1300. I had the big dream that my next car would be a Ford Falcon XY GT 351. My brother told me I was mad, you will kill yourself and so the search of an alternative ended up with the purchase of an Italian Lancia Beta Coupe. This is where my love of Fiats and Lancia’s came from, sharing a common twin cam motor and very easy to work on while offering enough performance and driving enjoyment.
The great melting pot — America. A country whose rich diversity is reflected equally in its car culture, imbued for generations with the international tastes of its enthusiasts. While the nation’s love of American muscle is unmistakably loud and proud, it also embraces and celebrates the gamut of everything weird and wacky from the motoring world.
The final iteration of the Biturbo family – the Ghibli II Tipo AM336 – was launched 30 years ago. While it blew through the 1990s with plenty of praise, it breezed over most people’s heads. Today, we investigate how it’s going down a storm with a new generation of enthusiasts.
The new open-top F171 296 GTS aims to deliver the same sensational driving sharpness as its fixed-roof GTB sister – but how well does it actually perform?
