Automotive

Automotive

Carrera 2

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At 5:30am my street is very much asleep. I jump into my 930 Turbo and off into the darkness, as I rumble towards dawn and a more modern driving experience. Sunrise comes and goes, along with the M32, M4, A420 and the M40. At 7:40am, I arrive at Silverstone and park the car, still feeling a little fuzzy from the early start. The Porsche experience centre at Silverstone is everything that you would expect from the Stuttgart manufacturer. The cylindrical building is clad in glass, with a showroom downstairs and a long sweeping parabola of stairs taking you up to a restaurant, overlooking the test track. After a much-needed cup…

Automotive

Bentley W12 GTC

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It may be named Continental, but the new Bentley is unapologetically British. From the moment that W.O. Bentley’s brand new, three-litre engine roared into life, in his London-based New Street Mews workshops, sometime during October 1919, his dream, his passion “To build a good car, a fast car, the best in class” started coming to fruition. This innovative engine, designed by ex-Royal Flying Corps officer Clive Gallop, had four valves per cylinder, and lightweight aluminium pistons. It was good enough to power Douglas Hawkes’s car, in the 1922 Indianapolis 500 race, at an average speed of 80mph. The 1920s were a golden decade for Bentley. Ettore Bugatti, his greatest competitor…

Automotive

Ferrari California

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Ferrari taken over to Europe to make sure that the natives are not ‘too restless’. Speed essential to report from the ground, so the latest Ferrari California 30 was chosen for the journey. It was to take four days, 1605 miles, and visits to Paris, Bordeaux, and Le Mans to confirm that the bad weather had not unsettled the natives, and that the entente was still cordiale. ‘Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough! It isn’t fit for humans now’, opined John Betjeman in his famous ten-stanza poem of 1937. Fast forward 75 years, and ‘we are fortunate now’ that the majority of the 850 factories that incurred his wrath…