Innholdsfortegnelse for July 2024 i Motor Sport Magazine

On May 1st motor-racing history was made, for Stirling Moss won the 1000-mile Mille Miglia, the first time in twenty-two years that this has been achieved by a British driver, and I had the very great privilege of sitting beside him throughout this epic drive.” So began what is one of the greatest pieces not just of motor-racing journalism but of all sports journalism ever printed. It is, of course, the opening paragraph of Denis Jenkinson’s epic 10,000-word retelling of the 1955 race across Italy in which he navigated for an otherworldly Stirling Moss at the wheel of his silver Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR, No722, using a Sellotaped roller-map navigation device. Moss completed the race in 10hr 7min 48sec hitting speeds of 170mph over rough roads, averaging a barely conceivable 98mph.…

MotoGP has never been harder fought than it is now. A decade of rewriting the rules, levelling up the grid and getting rid of any stragglers has seen to that. Therefore it shouldn’t be possible for a teenager to come into the premier class and immediately run at the front. But that is exactly what Spaniard Pedro Acosta – who has just turned 20 – has done . Acosta has been climbing to the class of kings for a while. In April 2021 he scored his first grand prix victory in his second appearance on a Moto3 world championship grid. After starting the race from the pitlane and completing the first lap in 23rd place. From that day in Doha there’s been no doubt he’s a super-talent – MotoGP’s most…

It’s been brilliant to watch Lando Norris finally take his first win. As he and the McLaren team have progressed over the past couple of seasons, it feels like the whole sport has been waiting for this day and in Miami he took an incredibly popular victory. Lando is a very likeable character, with his cheekiness and honesty endearing him to fans and the other drivers. It’s rare in F1 to see so many competitors genuinely happy for another driver to win a race and the reception from all his peers was wonderful to see. Now 24, he has matured and evolved. Up in the commentary box, we have the ability to tune in to the radio of all the teams so you get the unfiltered and live communications as…

GOOD CLASSIC TRACKS Imola was sweet relief for racing eyes after Bahrain/Shanghai/Miami – “I wish we had 24 of these on the calendar,” said Verstappen. OVERALLS HISTORIQUE Full respect to thrifty playboy Eddie Irvine for not buying new overalls, just using his old Jaguar garments for the Senna demonstration run at the Monaco Historique. LIGHT-UP LANDO Norris’s Miami win was the rare bright spark the championship needed – individual brilliance shining bright. STRAIGHT TALKING Newey made his feelings on the Red Bull saga clear when asked when it was he decided to leave: “As events have unfolded this year.” POINTS OF ORDER Albon scored Grove’s first 2024 points in Monaco! (Excluding Sargeant’s two penalty points in China, of course.) BAD TRUMP THAT The famously orange perma-tanned former US president visited…

There’s a lot not to like about the all new Mini Countryman, at least for traditionalists. First, it’s absolutely vast, the biggest Mini to date, an entire size category above its scarcely svelte predecessor. Second it’s not even built in Britain, but a BMW factory in Leipzig where other cars that share its platform, like the X1 and X2, are currently constructed. But what really got my goat? Not only is there no manual option, but if you want so much as a paddle to shift, you’ll have to pay extra for it. Nor is there any saving grace on the open road: the heavily hybrid-assisted three-cylinder motor is reasonably characterful but saddled to the considerable mass of the car, delivers only mediocre performance. And thanks to overly assisted, feel-free…

Portland International Raceway, Portland, Oregon, June 29-30 It’s been 10 years since the launch of Formula 1’s climate-conscious cousin, which is back in Portland, Oregon after hosting its first Formula E race last year. Over the 28 laps, 2023 winner Nick Cassidy will be defending his Portland prowess, but Porsche’s Pascal Wehrlein will be in pursuit as he continues to chase his first championship title. Cassidy, who now drives for Jaguar TCS, sensationally snatched first place in ’23 in his Envision Jag after starting in 10th. But it was Andretti’s Jake Dennis who ultimately took the world championship title, finishing the season with 229 points to Cassidy’s 199, as the two fought to the finish in a dramatic double-header finale. ABT Cupra’s Nico Müller endured a crash through Turn 9…

1970 Porsche claims the first of what will become a record number of victories at the Le Mans 24 Hours. But rather than its ‘hares’, the relative ‘tortoise’ 917K driven by understated Richard Attwood and veteran Hans Herrmann prevails in a rain-affected race of attrition. Action – and the era – is captured by a Hollywood film crew for a movie starring Steve McQueen. 1970 Jochen Rindt is crowned as the only posthumous Formula 1 world champion, after Ferrari’s Jacky Ickx – the sole driver within range of the Austrian’s points haul – retires from the US Grand Prix with a fuel leak. Rindt is mourned after losing his life in a practice crash at Monza, having lit up the season in the new Gold Leaf-sponsored Lotus 72. 1972 Graham…

1980 Audi reveals its Quattro at the Geneva Motor Show. Having already successfully lobbied to make 4WD legal for rallying, a Quattro appears on the Algarve Rally as a non-competitive course car. Had it counted, Hannu Mikkola would have won easily. A year later, Mikkola scores Audi’s first WRC victory and Michèle Mouton becomes the first (and still only) female winner, in Sanremo. 1981 John Watson ends McLaren’s four-year Formula 1 win drought at the British Grand Prix. More significantly, the MP4/1 is the first F1 winner with a fully carbon-fibre composite monocoque, as a new era is ushered in under the team leadership of Ron Dennis and John Barnard. Within three years, TAG Porsche turbo-powered McLaren is the dominant force in grand prix racing. 1982 Jacky Ickx and Derek…

Brooklands: birthplace of motor sport – and of Motor Sport. For years the Surrey autodrome, first race circuit in the world, was the centre of motor racing in Britain, and in 1924 it duly triggered the launch of this magazine as The Brooklands Gazette. Though we widened our horizons from 1925, every issue until the circuit closed in 1939 contained some news from the Track, on cars, people or races. There was always something going on and usually someone from MS was there to see it – frequently Bill Boddy, Brooklands’ arch proselytiser. Having devoured the first editions of The Brooklands Gazette and visited the track in 1926, WB’s first published article was in MS in 1930 – on the history of Brooklands. Already he was looking to the past.…

The automobile world has always been a male-dominated one. So it’s partly refreshing and partly ironic that one of the greatest motoring events on the planet has run like clockwork for years thanks to the leadership of a woman. Sandra Button had not long graduated from Washington State University in the early ’80s (with what proved to be a highly appropriate degree in business and hospitality administration) before she left her home town of Seattle and journeyed 1000 miles south to Pebble Beach to work in its golf and country club’s ‘special events’ department. This meant organising everything from prize-giving dinners to dog shows – but the occasion that always excited her most was the annual classic car Concours d’Elegance, the now world-renowned happening that was conceived in 1950 as…

It’s a given that wherever you find the best of motor sport, you’ll also find the name Rolex. The Swiss watchmaker’s presence on the race track encompasses everything from the Daytona 24 Hours and Le Mans, and from the World Endurance Championship to Formula 1. And it doesn’t stop with contemporary racing – because Rolex also backs the Goodwood Revival and, since becoming a partner of the Pebble Beach Concours in 1997, it has supported the entire happening now known as Monterey Car Week. Key to that is the Rolex Monterey Motorsports Reunion, an occasion regarded by many as the most important on-track gathering of historic competition cars anywhere in the world. Held at Laguna Seca across a single weekend each August, it is undoubtedly one of the most anticipated…

It’s the age-old daydream: pick an imaginary car budget and spend it in your head. Do you buy a brand-new sports car or invest your fictional funds in a characterful classic that’s sure to appreciate? For those lucky enough not to have to use the power of imagination to do that, there’s obviously a lot more to it in reality, and with either choice you’ll need a specialist such as Peter Best Insurance Services to have your back should the worst happen. So, from an insurer’s point of view, which represents the bigger risk: new or classic? “It’s a great question and there are a lot of factors to it,” says Ben Halcro, Peter Best head of sales. “If we are looking to insure a new £1m Ferrari and a…

One hundred years ago a man called Oscar Seyd decided that the world of motor racing needed a dedicated publication on the subject. Back then motor racing in Britain was centred on Brooklands’ track, so the title seemed obvious – The Brooklands Gazette. A first edition appeared in July 1924, the founding issue of what would soon become Motor Sport, today celebrating our remarkable century – a century which has seen the title gain much respect worldwide for its forthright opinions, rich mix of contents and authoritative reportage. Seyd, though, had other interests – a car dealership dating back to 1898 among others – and soon handed the reins to an enthusiast named Richard Twelvetrees who quickly widened the coverage and in August 1925 changed the title name to Motor…

Miami GP Emilia-Romagna GP Monaco GP Ferrari senior engineer Jock Clear was asked recently if he thought Red Bull was beatable. His reply was as follows: “We know how big the gap to Red Bull is on paper, if you’re looking at delta lap times in the race, but as that gap gets smaller, as soon as it gets relatively close enough that you’re putting pressure on, that’s when actually they’re beatable. It’s not like you have to be faster than them to beat them. You have to be close enough that they start to make the same sort of tricky decisions that we all have to make every week. Then if they don’t have the perfect race strategy, you will beat them.” Big upgrades for McLaren and Ferrari in…

TEAM STRATEGY Although the Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix at Imola was a fairly standard one-stop event and there was no safety car interruption for once, the strategy intrigue wasn’t so much about pitstop timings as how to use the tyres. The weather forecast impacted heavily upon this, at least for Lando Norris. McLaren had chosen a set-up based around a Sunday forecast considerably cooler than what we actually got. It had a lot of front wing angle and the camber and castor angles were set quite aggressively in the expectation of the sort of cool conditions which typically induce graining and wear of the front tyres here if they cannot be worked hard enough. But race day was actually even hotter than the practice days, with a track temperature of over…

Back in 2003 I went to drive a new kind of Porsche. Writing in a Sunday newspaper I concluded: “Porsche has failed with the Cayenne. By any of its own terms of reference, be it that a car should look, feel or drive like a Porsche, it has missed by a mile. Porsche’s gamble is that, to its customers, this won’t matter.” The gamble paid off like few since a bloke won $39.7m on a single pull of a lever on a slot machine in the Excalibur Hotel in Las Vegas that very same year. In short order the Cayenne became the best-selling Porsche in history. Soon it was outselling all other Porsches combined; to this day the Cayenne remains Porsche’s most popular car and, I would bet plenty, its…

What is the greatest racing car of the past 100 years? It’s a question as easy to ask as its answer is hard to find. But in this, our 100th year, it’s just too tantalising a proposition to leave at the trackside. That answer is not the sort of thing that lends itself to statistical analysis, for while of course the car must be successful, wildly so, it must also appeal to an entire other dimension. To use a road-going analogy, Toyota has sold over 50 million Corollas in nearly 60 years, but you don’t tend to see it too near the top of lists of the world’s greatest road cars. So it must do something else. It must connect with something within you and me that cannot simply be…

Ihad an enormous enthusiasm and interest for motor sport when I was growing up in the 1950s. And even though my own competitive focus was on Olympic trapshooting for much of the decade, it was in many ways a formative time for my subsequent racing career; it set the tone. My brother Jim Stewart, or Jimmy as he was known, drove for Ecurie Ecosse, Jaguar and Aston Martin. He raced mostly in sports cars but he did drive some single-seaters too. I remember as a 14-year-old watching him at Silverstone in the British Grand Prix in 1953; he was going well, running as high as sixth for Ecurie Ecosse in a Cooper-Bristol when with a few laps to go he had a shunt at Stowe corner. He would have finished…

1960 Stirling Moss claims the first Formula 1 world championship GP win for Lotus in Rob Walker’s Type 18 at Monaco. He repeats the feat a year later, beating the ‘Sharknose’ Ferraris, before Innes Ireland finally scores a breakthrough victory for the works Team Lotus at Watkins Glen. Lotus becomes dominant. 1962 Moss’s career is cut short on Easter Monday when he hits the St Mary’s bank at Goodwood. He recovers but chooses to retire from frontline racing. A month after Moss’s crash, Colin Chapman wheels out the first full monocoque F1 car at Zandvoort. Jim Clark leads the Dutch GP before clutch trouble sidelines the Lotus 25. 1962 In a dramatic climax to the season in South Africa, Graham Hill clinches the first and what will be only F1…

I’m often asked what I consider to be the most interesting era of motor sport. It’s a tough question but for me it would have to be the 1990s. That’s the decade I found myself involved in three completely different activities: Formula 1, rallying and touring cars. At Prodrive, we started off with the British Touring Car Championship and I was one of the original four people who established TOCA. To my mind the 1990s were the heyday of the BTCC, although others may think differently and of course the series is still going strong today. But we had proper budgets back then and developed really interesting cars: the BMW E30 M3s with the likes of Frank Sytner in the late 1980s and then at the end of what became…

Audi flexes its muscles at Le Mans, while Lewis Hamilton barges onto the F1 podium 2000 A year on from Audi’s Le Mans debut, its new R8 scores an emphatic win in the hands of Frank Biela, Emanuele Pirro and Tom Kristensen. For the last-named, the victory marks his second of an eventual record-breaking nine at the 24 Hours. When Audi briefly withdraws its factory team Kristensen guides the sister Bentley brand in 2003 to its first Le Mans win since 1930. 2000 At the fifth time of asking, Michael Schumacher scrapes the monkey from his back by becoming a world champion for Ferrari. He defeats Mika Häkkinen’s McLaren at Suzuka to clinch the title, the first in a special sequence. Five in a row and seven in total combined…

2010 With one eye on Mark Webber, the other on Vitaly Petrov’s Renault gearbox for 40 laps, Fernando Alonso and Ferrari contrive to lose the world championship in Abu Dhabi. Sebastian Vettel wins and takes the points lead for the first time, just when it matters most. It’s the start of the first Red Bull era, as Vettel goes on a four-year title run. 2012 A hybrid sports prototype wins Le Mans for the first time – allegedly. Audi’s R18 has a flywheel accumulator system and one of its two e-tron quattros wins in the hands of André Lotterer, Benoît Tréluyer and Marcel Fässler. Except the hybrid system isn’t working for most of the duration. “Our hybrid went one hour into the race, yet we still won,” engineer Leena Gade…

Don’t imagine that Brooklands was only about cars. With a landing strip down the centre, aircraft assembly and maintenance and a busy flying school were part of the daily mixture. Remember the moment in the 1965 film Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines when an aircraft crashes in a sewage farm? That sewage plant existed here and yes, aircraft did sometimes crash in it. The flying club house still exists outside the grounds of the Brooklands Museum. Then there were the motorbikes. Those vast concrete expanses and high bankings allowed for plenty of racing and record-breaking, and the museum has a large selection of two-wheeled power on display – some rolled out for our shoot. An entrant in the 1927 and ’28 motorcycle grands prix here, the Museum’s Norton…

1974 LAVERDA 750 SFC SOLD BY GOODING & COMPANY, £31,130 When talk turns to Italian race bikes, MV Agusta and Ducati are usually mentioned – but don’t forget Laverda. In 1971 the Breganze-based marque dominated the endurance scene with its 750 Super Freni Competizione, a mere 549 of which were built 1971-76. This was one of only 100 US export models featuring a high compression 75hp engine, larger Dell’Orto carburettors and triple Brembo disc brakes. To comply with regulations, the bikes were all fitted with speedos and turn signals to create true ‘racers for the road’. This beautifully restored example retained its factory frame and engine. 1963 OGLE SX1000 SOLD BY BONHAMS CARS ONLINE, £14,905 David Ogle’s makeover of the Mini Cooper wasn’t the best-looking car – but it was…

AVAILABLE AT MOTORSPORTMAGAZINE.COM/SHOP Not long to wait now. Your votes have been flooding in to help determine which of our 10 nominated competition cars from across the last 100 years can lay claim to being the true Race Car of the Century. While the tallies are rising, renowned automotive artist Martin Tomlinson, inset, has been busy creating artworks to immortalise each subject, with both the originals and limited-edition prints available at the Motor Sport shop. The latest completed works span two entirely different eras of the sport, and two entirely different disciples, with Colin McRae’s World Rally Championship-winning Subaru Impreza of 1995 and Tim Birkin’s 1929 Bentley Speed Six getting the Tomlinson treatment. “This is actually the first rally artwork I’ve ever done, and I loved creating it as it…

The Miami Grand Prix safety car for the Kevin Magnussen/Logan Sargeant accident was decisive in vaulting Lando Norris to the front and the foundation of his first grand prix victory. But there was some confusion about the sequencing and why the safety car picked up Verstappen and not race leader Norris. Some assumed that it had done so in error. But that was not the case. It was done this way because the priority was to bunch the pack up before it reached the accident scene. This maximised the time the track workers had to deal with the incident without risk of passing cars. Due to the position of various cars, for the safety car to have waited for Norris would have entailed waving the pack past before the site…

Jody Scheckter went through an F1 transformation like few others. Branded a grand prix enfant terrible when he debuted in 1972, seven years later Scheckter was the sure hand on the tiller Ferrari needed as he paired up with the mercurial Canadian, Gilles Villeneuve. Four decades on from his first F1 world championship win at the ’74 Swedish GP, F1 Retro looks back on an entertaining and intriguing Lunch With… interview featuring the inimitable South African. “In my early days I was very wild,” he admits. “We’d take my Renault R8 on a borrowed trailer 1200 miles to Rhodesia and back for a race, and do the trip in around 20 hours non-stop.” Arriving in the UK as a Formula Ford hopeful in ’71, by the end of the following…

Sometimes a car comes along that makes you feel all warm inside, even before you drive it. I’ve always loved the punchy BMW saloons short of the M cars, and six months recently spent in the latest M340i Touring did nothing to harm that view. They have gutsy motors and keen handling, but are not only more affordable but far quieter and more comfortable than their vaunted M stablemates. And it’s exactly the way I felt about the new 550e, right up to the moment I drove it. Some things it does predictably well, the ride and refinement requirements mentioned above satisfied in full. The interior is not BMW’s best and the touchscreen infotainment is about averagely irritating but that could all be forgiven. What’s harder to swallow is that…

The career of the great Jacky Ickx will be familiar to many, not least for encompassing six Le Mans wins – a record that stood until 2005, when Dane Tom Kristensen achieved his seventh victory. In addition to his triumphs at La Sarthe, Ickx demonstrated his remarkable driving talent with two World Sportscar Championship titles, eight race wins in Formula 1 and, in 1983, first place in the gruelling Paris-Dakar Rally with a Mercedes-Benz G-Wagen. Less well known is his prolific record in the Mille Miglia historic as the co-pilot of Karl-Friedrich Scheufele, the car-loving co-president of watch and jewellery house Chopard. Scheufele runs the business with sister Caroline and, back in 1988, he established Chopard as lead sponsor of the Mille Miglia recreation. But it was a piece of…

Your take on the stagnant and frequently predictable nature of Formula 1, and the excitement of Formula E in comparison [The Editor, May], which is definitely not predictable, was spot-on! But it was in the final paragraphs which talked about the failed Andretti bid to enter F1 that left me annoyed at F1’s self-serving nature towards money. It is clear that the anti-Andretti brigade are quaking in their boots at the prospect of a team who, if given an entry, would rock the establishment to its core. Keep up the solid work. MIKE HAYDEN, DONCASTER Well done to David Collins for stating what many would surely agree with [Letters, June]. It has always seemed to me that both Senna and Schumacher were lovely people who totally changed character, for the…

Briefly, it feels like it might get away from you. When the turbos light up and the needle of the boost gauge flickers, then hurls itself around the dial, you wonder if you’re going to be able to contain it. You have to think so fast, because if you don’t the fact you’d never be allowed to drive another factory Porsche race car would be the least of your problems. And yet despite a level of performance that would be completely alien to anyone other than a modern F1 or LMP1 driver, once you’ve recalibrated your brain even a Porsche 917/30 at full chat can be handled. I’m not saying mastered, nor anything close. While it’s not in the least easy, it is still many times easier than its specification…

1950 The Formula 1 World Championship takes its bow at Silverstone on May 13, as Giuseppe ‘Nino’ Farina becomes the first (post-war) world championship grand prix winner. Pre-war ace Luigi Fagioli and Britain’s Reg Parnell make it an Alfa Romeo 1-2-3 in a race run over 70 laps and lasting 2hr 13min 23sec. Later, at Monza, Farina is crowned the first F1 world champion too. 1951 Jaguar lands the first of its five Le Mans 24 Hours victories scored in the decade, as a works C-type driven by Peter Walker and Peter Whitehead finishes a full nine laps clear of a privately entered Talbot-Lago T26 and 10 ahead of a works Aston. The victory puts Jaguar on the international map and breathes new life into Le Mans as the race…

Thruxton, March 30, 1970, European Formula 2. My second race on the British mainland. I turned up with a private Brabham BT30 with a couple of ex-Roy Winkelmann engines, completed qualifying on the Goodyear tyres that were supplied, and ended up on the front row of the grid for one of the heats alongside the so-called king of F2 Jochen Rindt and Jacky Ickx. A surreal experience. That weekend in the first months of a new decade, my car had a tube frame, treaded tyres and fairly rudimentary aerodynamics. It was not a lot different to what my forebears had been driving 10 years earlier. Look at that period and slick tyres were the first ‘big thing’ when F1 adopted them for 1971. Aerodynamics didn’t change things dramatically in the…

I finished working for Chaparral in September 1979, although I had been based back at my father’s house in North-west London since about October 1978. I designed the Chaparral 2K in my father’s front room with another base at BS Racing in Luton, where it was made. Having finished the Chaparral I decided the next move for me was to get back into Formula 1. My deal with Jim Hall was that I would be recognised as the chief designer at Chaparral but when I arrived at the Indy 500 in ’79 I saw a massive billboard showing Jim Hall, Al Unser and the Chaparral with the caption “Master of Ground Effect”. I thought, “That’s not right, not the deal,” and went to talk to Jim. I told him, “That’s…

1991 The British Touring Car Championship adopts a single-class structure for the first time. The 2-litre era banishes the crowd-pleasing, flame-spitting Cosworth RS500s, but kick-starts a global touring car racing boom that lasts throughout the decade as manufacturers flock to take part. Will Hoy is the first champion of the new-look 2-litre BTCC in a BMW E30 M3. 1992 Nigel Mansell finally becomes F1 world champion at Williams; its ‘gizmo’-laden active-ride FW14B and Renault V10 power are a dominant combination. Mansell is crowned by August in Hungary – only to walk away from the team for 1993 when it signs Alain Prost. His subsequent IndyCar campaign in which he becomes champion is considered the greater achievement. 1994 F1 is rocked at Imola when first Roland Ratzenberger is killed in qualifying,…

One thing that was particularly interesting during my time was improving performance through the blown exhaust. We’ve played with exhaust positions at various times over the years. The regulation change that came in 1995 was that you weren’t allowed to see the exhaust exiting from underneath the car, so most people responded by either putting the exhaust out the back, which is what we did at McLaren in 1998 and ’99, or through the top bodywork, which is what Ferrari started doing in ’98. Around that time I realised you could position the exhaust exit underneath to blow the diffuser, within the so-called boat-tail so it couldn’t be seen, because it was shadowed by the plank when viewed underneath. So that’s what we did for the 2000 car and it…

Bugatti Type 35C Over the second half of the 1920s, the Bugatti Type 35 was one of the most successful race cars both with the factory team and in the hands of privateers. It is said that T35s won more than 1000 races in period. The T35C development was introduced in 1926 and used a Roots supercharger to boost the power from Bugatti’s 2-litre overhead cam engine. Bugatti sent a team of four works T35Cs to Spain for the 1927 San Sebastian Grand Prix, run over the 11-mile Lasarte road course. It was a daunting 430-mile race run in the heat of July and the T35C of Emilio Materassi won in just under 5hr 30min, averaging nearly 80mph, as the factory team dominated the race. Following the grand prix, the…

The Pebble Beach Concours is best known as the ultimate venue in which to see the world’s finest classic (i.e. ‘old’) cars in one place but, as concours chairperson Sandra Button explains elsewhere in this issue, despite a strong emphasis on the past, the event is certainly not stuck there. And this year marks the 35th anniversary of the decision to move with the times by introducing the now hugely popular Concept Lawn feature, a display dedicated to cars of the future by manufacturers of the present. Located on the putting green in front of The Lodge, the Concept Lawn offers contemporary marques the opportunity to give the public a glimpse of the type of cars they might be driving in the near (and not so near) future and of…

The phrase ‘ultimate track-day car’ will be familiar to anyone who regularly scans the adverts in search of race-ready exotica – but it could be a description that’s wholly justified in the case of this Ariel Atom on offer at Andreas Hicks’s young Klasikó dealership. No sooner had the original Atom gone into production in 2000 than it began to establish its position as the utmost racer with which to take part in the fast-emerging track-day scene. The combination of a Rover K-Series engine offering up to 190bhp, an all-up weight of just 612kg and a doorless, roofless, screenless tubular frame that guaranteed razor-sharp handling made it a difficult car to beat. And, despite its Mad Max appearance, the car’s road-legal specification and good, low-speed manners meant it was as…

A question we’re often asked here at The Signature Store is: how do you get an F1 driver’s autograph if you can’t afford to go to a race? It’s a great question because access to drivers is extremely limited to the public, and often only available to those in privileged positions. But there are ways if you’re smart and patient enough. The first thing I’d suggest is: wait until they race in something else. Series like the WEC, GT World Challenge Europe, IndyCar… they all act as a brilliant post-F1 career option, and all offer amazing access. At series like WEC or GT racing you can simply wander to the back of the garage and grab your favourite driver whenever they’re available. IndyCar is similar with its ‘family racing’ concept…