Jaguar D-Type

There was a time when the Jaguar name didn’t mean aging lawyers and blue-haired matrons. Jaguar D-TypeThere was a time when Jaguars were driven by courageous young men who took them to the very edge of their very high limits. And there was a time when Jaguar was a force to be imagined in the most grueling road racing of all, the 24 Hours of Le Mans.

Britain came out slowly from the wreckage of World War II, but by 1948 Jaguar’s William Lyons was chomping at the bit to kick his company up into a higher gear. His daring stroke for the 1948 Earls Court Motor Show was a show car that would become the XK120 sports car.

The swoopy two-seat roadster whose shape, fable has it, Read more . . .

BMW M1

Red BMW car

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The principle was simple. In the mid-1970s,  BMW was doing very well in its battle with Ford in the European Touring Car ranks, so the authorities who were at the company decided that it would be a good idea to step things up a notch and attack the much more prestigious arena of World Sportscar racing.   After all, Frankfurt-based Porsche was reaping plentiful amounts of prestige from its dominance of that well-regarded series, and Munich-based BMW presumed it had the expertise to knock Porsche off its throne and grab some of that prestige for itself.  Matched up to BMW, Porsche was a relative upstart. There was simply one catch.

At the time, BMW didn’t produce a car that had nearly the capabilities required to compete in the heavy and  hot  caldron of World Sportscars, a series that had spawned the  Shelby Cobra Daytona Coupe and the Ferrari 250 GTO among others. A builder of well-respected coupes and sedans, the Bavarian manufacturer didn’t even build a vehicle that could legitimately be dubbed a “sports car.” Despite that, its brass decided, rather quickly, that it should be a player in this highly evident, highly competitive arena. In essence, BMW had given itself two separate ventures. Building a successful race car to compete with the top-ranked Porsches was intimidating enough, but Read more . . .

Lamborghini Countach

Speaking about hardship, they say whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. In the late Sixties, Ferruccio Lamborghini was enduring a string of hardship, despite the fact that his Miura was the darling of the automotive press. Lamborghini CountachThough once honored by Italy’s president as a “Knight of Labor,” a  label that brought with slightly more esteem than being named a “Kentucky Colonel,” his manufacturing plants were plagued by ruinous and long strikes. Communist agitation was everywhere, and the streets were often blotted by the chianti red of rioters’ blood.

Infancy concerns

Closer to home, the Lamborghini Miura seemed a victim of its own victory, like a precocious child that can’t quite adjust to adulthood. Read more . . .

Jaguar XK120

During his early years in the English midlands,  William Lyons gave little inclination that he would eventually attain legendary status for the creation of sports cars. Jaguar classic carThe son of an Irish musician-turned-piano-repairman, Lyons was a motorcycle  fanatic who was fond of racing his Harley-Davidson in local events during the gloomy  years of the First World War. He wasn’t particularly enamored of working the piano shop, so his father helped him acquire an apprenticeship with Crossley Motors, a Manchester-based car builder. But at just 17, Lyons was not ready to settle into the drudgery of the machinists business. Read more . . .

Ford Thunderbird

The conventional wisdom says that the original Ford Thunderbird was a direct response to Chevrolet’s launch of the Corvette. Classic car Ford ThunderbirdThe Corvette was displayed  at the 1953 Motorama, and immediately Ford designers pulled out their drafting pencils and went to work. But the real story is that the Ford Thunderbird was just the kind of car that many designers dream about, so when the formal call to work on a 2-seater came from management,  Ford designers just reached into their desk drawers. Read more . . .