Tomorrow at the Bicester Scramble we’ll be recording three live podcasts at the MSUK HQ with some brilliant guests:
09.30 Steve Cropley & Matt Prior
11.00 Julian Thomson
14.00 Alex Porter from Bring a Trailer
Any questions you’d like us to ask? And hopefully if you’re coming, see you there…
We tried to answer as many of your questions as we could in the other thread on this sub, and the few we didn’t answer during the discussion got dealt with quick-fire at the end.
Hope you find the discussion interesting.
Monday’s podcast will be on the subject of restomods. Why has the number of companies making them exploded in recent years? Is the market now oversaturated? Would you rather have the best original example in the world, or the restomod version – because the original will likely cost less? Or… if you had to go new and had half a mil to spend, would you rather go Revuelto or restomod?
Got any other questions on the subject you’d like Ti to answer? Fire away here.
In today’s (yes, a day late due to embargo) Ti podcast, Andrew and Dan interview James, Thomas and Francis - the hosts of the rebooted Amazon series The Grand Tour.
Comments on YouTube (usually not very forgiving) have been surprisingly positive so far.
Do you think they can recapture the chemistry that Clarkson, Hammond and May had? Critical to the new series’ success will be James, Francis and Thomas being true to themselves and not aping anything that came before, whilst understanding the heritage of the show. Based on our interview with them, we think they’re going to nail it.
What do you think? Do you think Amazon can do what the BBC couldn’t in replacing the famous trio?
In this week's Ti podcast we discuss the huge disconnect between the prestige supercar market and man on the street with a sports car in his garage.
Things properly frothed over at Monterey Car Week with records falling left, right and centre – some by almost double the previous mark. The most remarkable examples below (most RM Sotheby's but the Diablo was at Bonhams, the F50 and Enzo at Mecum, and the Cobra at Goodings Christies).
Diablo GT – $2,425,000
F40 – $8,365,000
LaFerrari – $8,695,000
288 GTO – $11,555,000
Enzo – $12,100.000
F50 – $14,575,000
Ferrari Daytona SP3 – $17,825,000
Corvette Grand Sport #003 – $18,705,000
McLaren F1 GTR 10R – $34,655,000
Ferrari Luce ‘Tailor Made’, chassis 0 – $40,000,000 (charity lot)
Shelby Cobra Daytona Coupe, CSX2300 – $42,905,000
What's the consensus on what's going on here? Are prestige supercars a new asset class, comparable to the art market? Certainly doesn't feel like any of these are going to actually be used as cars...
And do we think that this new asset class, whatever it is, is in a bubble - where purchases are driven solely by FOMO and the conceit that they won't ever stop going up?
Or is something more clandestine going on (rumours of money laundering being all over the internet)? Something that Ti certainly can't comment on without any substantial evidence.
One thing we certainly can comment on is how difficult it is to shift garden variety sports and enthusiast cars at the moment, with values being decidedly soft leaving many who bought 2-5 years ago now well under, now matter how much they may have restored or improved their examples.
All thoughts welcome...
Yesterday Ti toiled in the sunshine to shoot the photos and video for this story, coming soon. In the moorland of the Brecon Beacons, we brought together:
A Caterham 360R
Fist Grande Panda
Skoda Superb
McLaren 750S
and a Rolls-Royce Phantom
The question is, what on earth possessed us to put this seemingly unrelated collection together? Well, to our eyes, behinds, fingers and toes they all possess something very special in contrast to so many cars on sale today.
But what is it?
Answers on a postcard.
There’s no shortage of concours competitions to go to these days, but they tend to be populated exclusively with time capsule ornaments. And that’s not the Ti way. What if someone came up with the antidote to the traditional car concours…? Well, last night we did just that, with our inaugural Concours d’Appréciation.
We wanted cars that got driven, hard and fast, for tens and ideally hundreds of thousands of miles. Not basket cases desperate to be put out of their misery, but cars that had been loved not as an ornament, but for what they were designed to do.
One bookend was a 1954 2CV whose paint could not be seen for rust but which, beneath, was in fine fettle and will be driven to Le Mans next year. At the other, a Porsche Carrera GT with 77,000 miles on the clock. In between, a Ferrari 599 GTB found in the desert with its engine on the back of a Toyota Hilux, an E9 BMW 3.0 CSL whose owner insists he'll be buried in it, and a 1992 Caterham Supersprint that's done over 100,000 miles, Finland to Spain and Houston to San Francisco.
Our winners: that Carrera GT, a gorgeous 1750 Alfa Romeo GTV that gets driven across the Pyrenees every year, and a Honda Integra Type R which has covered 131,000 miles since its owner bought it almost 20 years ago.
Add all eight generations of Golf GTI, the first UK public showing of the Longbow Speedster, and rumours of a 911 3.2 ClubSport with over half a million miles having escaped the concours enclosure to go feral in the grassy car park... and the event was a sparkling sell-out success in the sunshine.
Thank you to everyone at Bicester Motion, our partners at JBR Capital, every Ti contributor who entered into the spirit of it, and above all everyone who brought an interesting, well loved, well used car.
Want to come to the next one?
Photo credit: Toby Rea, insta: lensograph_tr
We have just a few tickets left for the Scramblers x The Intercooler event, featuring the inaugural Concours d’Appreciation, this Thursday (August 6th) running from 5-8pm at Bicester Motion.
We are celebrating ‘a motoring life well lived’ and along with the entirely arbitrarily judged competition, will have a large display of Ti contributors cars (as well as those contributors themselves) and other special displays. There will be food and ice cream trucks, and the weather looks to be perfect.
So if you’d like to come down (doesn’t have to be in an interesting car, but all the better if it is) then tickets are £10/pp. You’ll need to sign up for a free Bicester Motion account to check out but that’s a doddle.
(And if you thought all concours were snooty affairs obsessed with originality, think again. This one will celebrate the scars, stories and miles our finalists present, whether they be five grand specials, or two million quid monsters)
We’re pretty sure everyone experienced the joy of flinging their Scalextric car off the bank at max power, all those years ago, but who has actually driven one in the real world?
Many of the most famous ones no longer exist (for driving on, anyway) – Monza, Brooklands, Rockingham. And many of the others are in far flung places (like Indianapolis or Daytona in the US) or for testing purposes only (MIRA, Ehra-Lessien).
In tomorrow’s feature on Ti, we celebrate one particular lost and forgotten banking, and exactly what it’s like to boot it round there well over the design speed limit.
It’s quite a different experience to reaching and exceeding the limit on the level…
On the back of a new addition to the Ti long term fleet, on tomorrow’s podcast we will discuss whether a sporting SUV can ever be an enthusiast choice.
What does the wisdom of this particular crowd think? Do you own one? Would you consider one if it was ‘right’? What would ‘right’ constitute?
Or is it crosses and garlic?
Do share.
In this week’s podcast the Ti team discuss notorious widowmakers, and Andrew argues the Porsche 964 Turbo was the worst P-car he’s driven in this regard, due to the precarious relationship between power delivery, grip and weight balance. Doesn’t stop them being worth *all* the money now, though.
What’s the scariest car you’ve ever driven? Any that were fine in the dry but an absolute liability in the wet?
Dan Prosser’s assessment of the first RS Audis is in, published today on Ti.
Which is closest to peak car of this trio? Perhaps surprisingly, it’s the most modern - but it doesn’t feel the fastest of the three.
As much as there is a similarity in the bloodline, the difference in the way the powertrains deliver their thrust couldn’t be more different.
“Drive them back-to-back and the differences between the three smack you in the face. But so too are there similarities, or at least one really meaningful thread that runs between them all.
With engines mounted over or even ahead of the front axle line, and with four-wheel drive systems that always seem to distribute torque evenly between the four corners, these cars all belong to the solid, stable, secure school of motoring.
If you crave balance and throttle adjustability, you’ll need something else – like a BMW M-car. Yet I was surprised by how little I missed the more expressive character of those cars from across Bavaria.”
In today’s podcast (amongst many other things) we discuss the new manual version of Ferrari’s front engined V12 super GT.
Which if you haven’t heard about it, is a manual stick that selects your DCT gears, in co-operation with a ‘clutch’ that tells the computer to make the engine behave like you’ve pressed the clutch. In theory it should feel just like driving a Ferrari open gate manual. That’s certainly the PR line.
Is it the best of both worlds? Or an unsatisfying imitation?
Thoughts on a postcard. Or just a post…
The press launch for the (slightly controversial) new drop top GT3 is next week.
Ti will be heading out to the Swabian hills south of Stuttgart to get behind the wheel and experience it in the flesh.
So the question is - what do you most want to know about it? Let us know and we’ll endeavour to answer your questions as soon as the embargo lifts (7th July), or sooner if it’s not an embargoed topic!
A quick recap:
503bhp
1497kg
6 speed manual
4.0 N/A flat six revving to 9000rpm
Carbon fibre body panels and anti roll bars from S/T
PCCB & Magnesium wheels from S/T
0-62mph: 3.9 seconds
Top speed: 195mph
Price: £200,500
Ti Top Tip
Did you know that heat is a far bigger deal for your battery’s longevity than charge level?
But combine the two together and it’s kryptonite for your electrons.
As a rule of thumb, the rate at which lithium-ion ages roughly doubles for every 10°C. So if it’s 35C, and your car is in the sun - the effective impact on your cells might be 16x of that at 15C. (Assuming sun impact raises temp on vehicle to 45C)
A pack cooking in full sun at 80% charge is quietly losing more life than one sitting at 90% in the shade. So, in rough order of usefulness:
• Park in the shade, or a garage if you’ve got one. Easily the most effective thing on this list, and it costs nothing.
• Don’t leave it sitting at 100% in the heat for days. Full and hot is the one genuinely unhappy combination. If it’s going to stand unused through the hot spell, leave the aircon on for a bit to drop the charge level.
• Time charging to finish near when you’ll actually drive. Energy that goes straight into the road does no harm; energy left soaking at the top of the pack at 35°C does a little.
• Pre-cool the cabin while it’s still plugged in. You chill the car off the mains rather than the battery, and you climb into something that isn’t a kiln. Everybody wins.
For the PHEV crowd, a worthy reassurance: most manufacturers already hide a chunk of the pack from you - your dashboard 100% isn’t the cells’ true 100% - so there’s a built-in margin and no need to fret day to day. But a heatwave with the car parked and full is exactly the moment that buffer appreciates a bit of help.
Admittedly battery aging i slow, cumulative punishment. But why would you want to speed it up?
And for those with classics with dashboards that melt - windscreen sun visor for the win.
Anyone else having any heatwave related car woes at the moment?
In this week’s pod we discuss the great undoings of many a motor - whether it’s the engine, chassis, interior or gearbox. What are your top picks?
The reactions on YouTube so far have been that we were far too harsh on automated manuals, particularly BMW’s SMG variety. Have you ever driven one - what did you think?
Behind the scenes on a Ti shoot in the very wet Welsh mountains today. The origin of Audi RS put to the test. Might it also shed some light on the era of ‘peak car’?
Which is your favourite of this epic trio?
Today at the Titanic slipways in Belfast, over 90 DeLoreans from all over Europe have congregated as part of Eurofest, celebrating 45 years of the car.
We’re expecting 120 cars at Stormont on Saturday 🔥
This week is Le Mans week, so to celebrate it we have a new Heart & Soul video dropping tomorrow on the Jaguar XJR-8, the car that finally ended the dominance of the Porsche 956 and 962, and today Alex Brundle has written a fantastic story of what the Le Mans experience is like from behind the wheel.
What have been your favourite experiences / memories of Le Mans? In which era do you think the racing was at its peak?
All thoughts and comment welcome.