This Thames van project started out as a rotten shell with no interior or running gear. Over the course of nine years, it’s been raised from the ashes and reinvented in period restomod style.
Instigated by David Brown himself but hand-built by a London-based coachbuilder, Harold Radford, the DB5 Shooting Brake was aimed at Aston Martin owners who enjoyed outdoor pursuits and therefore needed more interior room. Just 12 were produced and we’ve tracked one down.
The 296 is ferociously fast and fiendishly clever but Enright asks if the supercar still has a place in today’s world. Ferrari’s incredible 296 GTB offers an opportunity to consider how far the supercar has come and whether the genre still retains its Lustre.
How could an E28 M5 with a factory-option body kit possibly be made more desirable? As you can see here, the answer lies within some period tuning magic.
The politics behind racing are sometimes more intriguing than the on-track action itself. When the VW Group acquired Bentley from Vickers in 1998, it immediately set about picking up the pieces of a brand that was by then reduced to a poor cousin of Rolls-Royce. This mission found further fervour through the painful reminder that not only had VW lost the bid for Rolls-Royce to BMW; but the latter would also win Le Mans the year thereafter.
On the one hand, a turn-of-the-millennium tuner build; on the other, a Puma-swapped toy. Mike Julien’s taking a diverse approach to doing what Ford never did with the Mk4/Mk5 Fiesta platform.
In January 2000 we were all breathing a sigh of relief that the Millennium Bug hadn’t actually caused all the world’s computers to crash and the planes to fall from the sky. And in Ford’s ever-fertile design hub, there was no time to dilly-dally or rest on any laurels; they were right onto the next big thing and, somewhat improbably, they managed to predict the existence of apps a full seven years before smartphones arrived. The vessel for that impressive prediction was the car you see here, the radical 24.7 concept.
