Dr Ferdinand Piech saw the Audi V8 as the next rung on the ladder to world dominance. But is it good enough to impress Will Beaumont on a typically wet day in Wales?
The Silken Touch Thirty-five years after this very XJR-9 scored Jaguar’s first Le Mans win since the D-type days, we relive the memories – then drive it on track.
There was great excitement in the 1970s and 1980s when Jaguar re-entered international motorsport. It started with support of Bob Tullius’s Group 44 outfit in the States followed by Tom Walkinshaw’s TWR team originally in the European Touring Car Championship with the XJ-S and later Group C endurance racing. But thanks to its five victories in the Fifties, for Jaguar the most important race had always been the 24 Hours of Le Mans. By 1987 and with TWR starting to become genuinely competitive in the World Sports Car Championship we knew there was a real possibility of us winning for the first time since 1957.
This former 911 Turbo press car has been given a new lease of life following two years spent in the workshops of Porsche indie, Mike Champion Engineering. We head to Oxfordshire and get behind the wheel...
This is not an Eighties car, I can hear the naysayers proclaim – and yes, the elegant E24 first edged its (shark)nose into public consciousness halfway through the Seventies. However, it’s here because it was the halo car for BMW’s Eighties ascent into the upper echelons of desirability. We have to strip back years of 2 Series Active Tourers and ratty 320Ds to uncover the BMW of old. The badge was a status symbol – king of the keyfobs at yuppie dinner parties. All the prestige of a Jaguar or high-spec Rover without the whiff of old-school England, and much sportier than a Mercedes-Benz. The BMW was engineered of the right stuff – its sharp, crisp lines a foil to British notions of luxury and prestige still predicated on more chrome, wood and leather than an MP’s secret cellar. BMWs were properly expensive too – sift through the price list of the era and the difference between a E24 635CSi Highline like the one seen here and the top-of-the-tree M635CSi E24 could swallow a semi-detached home in the Midlands. So E30 3 Series aside, Eighties BMWs were always a fairly rare sight; nowadays every third car seems to wear an ever-more gopping kidney grille.
Ready to go racing after an extensive two-year restoration, RLR 962-200 is one of the most historically significant Group C prototypes ever to wear the Porsche crest…
When Tweaked Performance’s main man, Gerald Morten was considering a project car, he just had to scratch the Mk2 Golf GTI itch that had been bugging him for the last 40 years.
Pundits will argue that the 1986 Ford Taurus was the car that really redefined American car design during the Eighties; but I would argue that its Thunderbird stablemate
After a complicated four-year restoration, you’d forgive Vitor Santos for locking this immaculate Polo breadvan away for special occasions. But where’s the fun in that?
Lurking beneath the bonnet of this beautifully-modeled E30 sits a twinturbo M57 diesel lump, and while this swap might seem like sacrilege, this unholy monster has the torque to convert even the most devoted petrol follower to the dark side.
