The List: Cars
Question:
what is rear engined, rear wheel drive, and enjoyed
significant race success in the 1970s? You might be forgiven
if your immediate reaction was to answer ‘Porsche 911’, as
this seems to be the default choice when the words
‘rear-engined’ are uttered; Porsche has ploughed this
particular furrow for many years, during which time, all of
its competitors have, metaphorically speaking, abandoned the
field in favour of something far easier to manage...
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The Silver Screen may be able to make an icon of a car, but it
cannot make the proverbial silk purse from a sow’s ear,
despite numerous attempts over the years to do just that. The Bond franchise provides an apt example of this; no
007 connections, hidden heat seeking missile launchers or
high speed car chases ever added any lustre to the lumpen
BMW Z3. The man himself will forever be associated with Aston Martin,
and specifically, the silver DB5, leading, one suspects, to
the erroneous assumption by many that the British Secret
Intelligence Service has a limitless budget set aside for
the purchasing of luxury goods...
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f your only experience of the World Rally Championship has
been the televised coverage during the past decade, you
would be forgiven for thinking that it has always been about
ugly four wheel drive Japanese saloons taking improbable
angles around forest tracks with serious looking
Scandinavians at the wheels. But it was not always this way. Before the Imprezas and
Evos, before the Group B Quattros and Lancias, before even
the rear wheel drive Escorts there was the Alpine A110...
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Although Audi was not the first manufacturer to produce a
four wheel drive road car, the public perception of the brand is inextricably linked with the notion of all four wheels being driven. This is primarily due to the legacy of one car: the Audi Quattro
Coupe, or Ur Quattro, as it is rather pretentiously
described by car enthusiasts eager to differentiate it from
the company’s more prosaic Quattro – badged machines...
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It
is left hand drive only, has a dogleg gearbox that makes
stop start driving seem like a particularly arcane form of
torture, and possesses the sort of boxy styling that would
not look out of place on a Lada, but the BMW M3, in its
original E30 guise is a true modern icon and has earned a
place on The List through a combination of sublime
handling... click here for more
Despite having the unpromising combination of French
build quality and a temperamental Italian mini-supercar V6,
the SM has earned its place on The List by being a kind of
automotive equivalent of Concorde; the epitome of the
Seventies’ love affair with style dictated by speed...
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It
is hard to think of a car as doomed from its very beginning
as the DMC-12. Taking away even founder, John Delorean’s arrest for alleged drug offences shortly before
the company’s bankruptcy, or the stories of ill-fitting
gullwing doors trapping occupants in the cockpit, the
DMC-12, built in, of all places, Northern Ireland, always
seemed to be destined for a short and inglorious life...
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The
unusual combination of French styling, large American
engines and price tags high enough to guarantee the kind of
exclusive clientele that included Stirling Moss and Pablo
Picasso, enabled Facel Vega to carve out a unique niche in
the car market in the 1950s and 1960s...
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Homologation. It sounds like a rather boring,
bureaucratic word. Something beloved of paper-shuffling
European Union officials in Brussels, perhaps. To a car
enthusiast, though, it has completely different
associations; it hints at limited edition versions of cars
designed principally for use in motorsport, like the BMW M3,
or the Ford RS200. And so to the Fiat Dino, a car that owes
its existence to homologation regulations...
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Shaped like a brick and about as accelerative as one too,
the Land Rover seems an unlikely candidate for The List.
Additional descriptive adjectives, such as underpowered and heavy hardly seem to clinch the argument in
its favour either. 4x4s are unnecessarily large and
complex beasts driven only by people who display a selfish
lack of regard for other road users, right? Well, in some
cases, maybe. The Porsche Cayenne springs instantly to mind,
as do any of the luxury 4x4s from Germany. But the Defender
is different...click here
for more
Most
car manufacturers follow a fairly conservative approach when
developing new models; they have focus groups and marketing
departments to tell them what the modern motorist really
wants, which in most cases seems to be airbags, greater
space and the ability to survive 60 MPH head-on collisions
(presumably because at some point they see themselves
driving into another vehicle at such a speed.) The end
result of this is, of course, a dramatic increase in vehicle
mass. Cars such as the Volkswagen Golf have almost doubled
in their kerb weight over the past twenty years...
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What
prestigious sports car manufacturer and former Formula 1
team has produced everything from the wondrous to the
hideous, has flirted with bankruptcy, and has had more
owners than your average twenty pound note? And one last
thing, in case you were about to answer ‘Lotus’ – it’s not
from the UK... click here for
more
t
is unlikely that even the most ardent Porsche fan would have
predicted, in the mid 1960s, that the company would still be
producing a car with its engine, ‘in the wrong place’, over
40 years after the first 911 rolled off the production
line... click here fore more
Starting with a clean sheet of paper, it is unlikely that
many automotive designers would sling a large, heavy engine
out behind the rear axle, giving a high polar moment of
inertia to the vehicle, and the subsequent ‘interesting’
handling. But, then, not many designers can lay claim to
having sketched out a blueprint for a sports car that would
not only remain fundamentally unchanged for three decades,
but that would outlive and outsell the very car that many
believed was designed to replace it...
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Life
for the aspiring British supercar builder can be hard. Not
only are you generally lumbered with a resolutely unromantic
surname, usually prefixed with something even worse, like
“Lee” or “Trevor”, after which to name your creation,
(hardly suitable to compete with the Enzo Ferraris of the
world) but you are also referred to, often derogatorily, as
a ‘kit car manufacturer’... click
here for more
