Imported Classics: Porsche Carrera, The Little Yellow Job
Cars with style and backstory have always had a way of drawing people together. And for Charles Evans they have been the building blocks of a dynamic community and part of an important process of healing. “I’d always been a bit of a car nut,” 57-year-old Londoner Charles Evans tells me. “I was into custom […]
Audi QUATTRO: REVOLUTION
Take On Me. Ah Ha. I prod the Blaupunkt. The audio brand itself seems transposed from another dimension. Could it be that somewhere deep in the stereo’s analog wiring, lodged in some dusty circuitry – a mulletted Scandinavian male model’s lilt is freeing itself from thirty plus years of entrapment? Course not. Magic FM always […]
Alvis Lives On
Are you sick and tired of SUVs here there and everywhere? Do many of today’s cars with their ‘samey’ looks leave you cold? Are you a lover of seriously ‘old-school’ motors? You know, the kind of characterful vehicles that were almost as individual as people? If you are, and you have some cash to splash, […]
Mid-engines for the masses
These days, buying a new mid-engined sports car is an expensive business, with even a base model Elise or Boxster costing somewhere north of £40,000. But it wasn’t always like that… For over four decades, there was always at least one relatively affordable mid-engined sports car available to tempt new car buyers. We’ve already talked […]
Avantime
Very few people can claim to have owned a road-legal spaceship. As it happens, I’m one of them. Okay, okay, it wasn’t really a spaceship, though it definitely had an otherworldly air to its appearance. And it did produce occasional ‘aren’t you Han Solo (I liked that one)/Chewbacca (no comment)/Buck Rogers?’ comments from a motley […]
Starion
As an increasingly old git I look back on my life with a sense of ‘why did I do that?’ bafflement. These thoughts range from foot-in-mouth social encounters that still make me blush to some of the cars I’ve owned. A skanky Mitsubishi Starion coupe that came my way in the mid-1990s is a prime […]
TT turns 21
It’s hard to believe that the Audi TT turns 21 this year. You’d never guess that this fresh-faced coupé dates back to the era of Cool Britannia and the Spice Girls, but it first appeared in 1998. In fact, its roots stretch even further back, as the production car is a remarkably faithful facsimile of […]
Smart Roadster and Roadster Coupe
For sports car enthusiasts, things just ain’t what they used to be, what with ever more strictly policed speed limits, tighter controls on emissions, high fuel prices and, er, imaginative rates of Vehicle Excise Duty to contend with. Although rumours of the sports car’s demise are somewhat premature, the days of the big-engined, gas guzzler […]
Alfa Romeo coupés: the power of three
It’s a sad state of affairs when a coupé is glaringly absent from Alfa Romeo’s model range, particularly in light of the marque’s track record of producing sporting cars with an abundance of brio. Thankfully, Alfa Romeo has announced that a coupé version of the much-admired Giulia saloon will be launched this year. So whilst […]
Has the world forgotten about 1990s coupés?
It was the 1990s. Curtains haircuts were in, the New Romantics were out, and The Simpsons were on everyone’s TV. And if you were any sort of follower of fashion, you had a coupé on your driveway. This was an unexpected turn of events. In the late 1980s, outside the realms of serious performance cars, […]