The beautiful rare Murena GT
rare as hens teeth shooting brake by Murena
Citroen DS
A friend said it looked like General De Gaulle’s nose on wheels, and certainly the Citroen DS23 EFi I briefly owned had a Gallic beakiness. Film lovers might remember The Day of the Jackal, starring Edward Fox as a hit man attempting to assassinate De Gaulle. One scene involved him machine gunning a big Citroen. […]
The Picasso approaching half a million miles
All bow down to the 500,000-mile #PassThePicasso… Reliability – it’s not what the Citroen Picasso will be famous for. Typically, a fairly cheap car from France in the early naughties conjures up images of cars ‘shakin that ass’ all the way to the dealership for the latest recall or blown headlight bulb. Or worse. This […]
Renault Turbo
Put on those rose-tinted glasses and think back to the glory days of turbocharged Renault cars competing on the track and tearing it up on the roads. The company was the first to win in Formula One using a turbocharged engine, fittingly, at the French Grand Prix at Dijon in 1979. Jean-Pierre Jambouille brought the […]
The Originals
Having an idea is one thing. Turning it into reality is, however, apt to be somewhat more challenging. But for anyone or anything that succeeds in breaking new ground, enduring fame is assured. Or is it? We look at four cars that not only broke the mould but also shaped new ones, yet which (with […]
Bugatti Veyron
The Bugatti Veyron was an unashamed loss-making attempt to be the first road car to get over 1000PS, and it wasn’t easy. Crashes in testing, massive issues with getting enough cooling to various hot bits and a look that wouldn’t be an engineer’s first pick meant it seemed like it might not quite make it. […]
Renault Safrane Biturbo: the ultimate 1990s French supersaloon
In the early 1990s, Renault wanted to rattle the cages of the rival German manufacturers, who ruled when it came to both speed and power. The only way to do this was to go extreme, and they did, with this, the Safrane Biturbo. At the time, the BMW 540i and Audi 100 S4 were ruling […]
June Calendar Car – Alpine
Lucky recipients of a 2019 Influx calendar enjoyed thirty days of this blue beauty – here’s a bit more information about this particular Alpine A110 from the owner himself: “The car is a sought-after original Alpine A110 1600s from 1971, built in France for the Italian market as a road car. “It was purchased by […]
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 […]
Matra Rancho: the green car
Its makers considered it to be a voiture verte and marketed it accordingly, but if you were to look at the Matra Rancho with 21st century eyes you’d probably conclude it is no more a green car than it is a contender for victory in the Indy 500. After all, it’s as aerodynamic as a […]