For one entrepreneur, the lure of Italian beauty with American power was not enough: it needed German build quality, too. The result was the Bitter CD.
The last Heron MJ1 — the world’s only fibreglass monocoque production car — was built after the factory closed its doors when the owner’s mum decided she needed a project.
Destined to become one of the fastest cars never to win Bathurst, Chrysler’s Charger was nevertheless New Zealand’s most successful standard production racing saloon, winning the annual Benson & Hedges 500 seven years in a row from 1972 – 1978.
Early MGFs have surely become some of the most collectable, with prices beginning to rise. For MGF and TF specialist David Koskela, the first of MG Rover’s open top sports cars hits a sweet spot, particularly in red.
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.
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.
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 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.
