You spin me right round, baby: the rotary engine revolutionaries
That’s it, go on, snigger. The Wankel rotary engine may have a crass-sounding name, but the cars it powered were anything but. With fewer moving parts than a traditional piston engine, the rotary was smoother, quieter, and – hurrah! – more revvy. Initially the idea of Felix Wankel in the 1920s, at the dawn of […]
The Motorbike Test
Growing up, I was surrounded by motorbikes all the time and from a very young age; my Mum would take me to local egg runs where there’d be convoys of biker after biker all donning their leather waistcoats and big motors. My first experience on the back of a bike was when I was 8-years […]
Mazda K360 – three wheeled evolution
The Mazda K360 truck may not look very evolutionary at first glance. But look beyond the lack of wheels, and you’ll find a smartly designed tiny truck that offered reliable (and dry!) transportation to the masses. It also influenced the firm’s first mass-selling passenger car playing a massive part in the automotive powerhouse they have […]
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 […]
Five days with a modified GT86…
“There are three Toyota GT86s, but we need a driver for the third to bring it to Japfest at Silverstone. You’ll get the car for five days if you’re up for it?” An intriguing proposition, and given that I’d never before driven a GT86, I jumped at the chance. However, I jumped at it without […]
Honda Motocompo: the cool commuter
Riding the current wave of retro classics are 1980s cars. But if you want a cool set of two wheels rather than four, hop on the bike that looks like a box, the Honda Motocompo. The 1980s. Brought back into focus thanks to smash hit TV series such as Stranger Things and movies like Ready […]
Honda Z600
My first car cost 5p. It was a 1974 Honda Z600 coupe, which should have been a vibrant orange – the only colour offered – but had been re-sprayed a horrid matt yellow. My dad lived on a River Thames houseboat and the Z, which belonged to a neighbour, had been flooded up to its […]
Teenage dream – Max Cotton
Let’s face facts: no-one can look back at being 13 with pride. Whether it was knuckling down to Year 8 Geography homework, mooning over our latest crush or getting really into a band, pretty much all of us spent that first teenage year doing something we wouldn’t even consider now. Max Cotton is different. Armed […]
Homologation Specials
When standard ‘road-going’ spec isn’t enough… The act of homologating a car is a scarce thing in modern racing. Back in the day though, it was a carmakers way of entering a motorsports series while giving designers and engineers a chance to go above and beyond on the wild factor – all with a pair […]
Driving the last JDM hero: the original Honda NSX
In the mid-noughties, the JDM hero car was pretty much dead. The Toyota Supra was long-gone, and bullet-fast acronyms such as GT-R and LFA had yet to emerge from Nissan and Lexus leaving buyers with a single choice – the original Honda NSX. How does a teenage JDM supercar compare in the modern era? Upon […]