Audi Rally Cars: A History
It wouldn’t be an overstatement to say that Audi completely revolutionised the way rally sport is played today. Prior to the 1980s, rally cars were either front or rear-wheel drives. But a rule change request from Audi asking if four-wheel drives could be allowed to compete changed the face of rallying in just a few […]
Fistful: Cosworth rarities
It’s sixty two years now since Mike Costin and Keith Duckworth launched Cosworth Engineering in a greasy corner of London. Since then the engineering firm has provided the connective tissue of some of the world’s finest and most winning sports cars the world has ever known – and has collaborated with a wealth of mainstream […]
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 […]
Audi Rally Sport: The People
The game-changing Audi quattro made its UK debut in London in 1980. We caught up with former members of the Audi UK Rally Team recall how it changed the world. Harald Demuth – Rally driver Two-time German Rally Champion Harald Demuth helped develop the quattro, campaigned Group B and 80 versions in the UK and […]
Off road riding: The freedom principle
Do you remember the first thing that made you dream of motorbikes? For me it was the final sequence of Bruce Brown’s 1972 epic homage to American motorsport On Any Sunday. I can’t remember how I came across it – probably via my hip uncle who as well as a Chevy impala, a mk2 jag […]
Off-road culture: True Automotive Freedom via the knobblies
The problem with roads is that they have rules. The good thing about offroad culture is that there aren’t as many.
Whether you like it or not the road is in itself a piece of administrative coercion. No matter what kind of machine you drive or ride the freedom these things represent is curtailed, limited, palsied. It’s one of the contradictory truths of international motoring.
This is directly contrary therefore to the huge majority of the aesthetic of marketing. The motoring industry universally tempts us with promises of freedom, transcendence. We are beckoned to this brand and that via a series of spurious images hardly any of which stand up to scrutiny in this crowded urban world.
This is, then, where the beauty of offroad riding and driving comes in. Sure, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Green Lanes, for example, have well-administered rules and regulations concerning what you can and cannot do.
Flat out in Hyundai’s R5 rally car
Forget Formula 1, with its narcolepsy-inducing races and prima donna drivers. For pure, undiluted motorsport, rallying remains the king. Real roads, brutally fast cars and an almost infinite range of conditions make it a very different challenge to the sterile world of circuit racing. To get a taste of what’s involved we’ve come to a […]
Mud, Blood and Rage.
As I felt the unmistakable sensation of blood pouring out of my arm, I wondered if it was worth it. Picture the scene – there I am, lying prone on a hospital bed after being rushed into A&E. I’m really not well, and the Doctor attending is attempting to ask me questions about my symptoms […]
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 with Paddy Hopkirk
Half a century separates two memorable drives in Minis old and new. Same driver, same exuberant enthusiasm. Strapped into the driving seat of a bright red MINI Cooper S is someone whose driving credentials far exceed those of his contemporaries. He has driven half way round the world, all the way from London to Sydney […]