IN GLEN WADDINGTON’S excellent article on the René Bonnet Djet, Octane 250, he mentions that Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was given a Djet when he visited the Renault plant near Paris in 1965. Apparently Gagarin was well aware of what was happening

I ACQUIRED THIS charming little Ruby in September 2019 after searching for it for a couple of years, because my father had owned it during the 1980s. I come from a family in the motor trade and we had garages in Newbury and Wantage, the latter set up

IT IS A VERY unfair truism that paintshops are the goal-hangers of the classic car world. But, like goals, paint is everything. Poor old James Godfrey-Dunne has been slaving away at my Triumph for almost a year just to give the paintshop a decent can

1:18 scale By Spark Price £169.95 Material Resincast It’s said that in the second half of the 1952 Le Mans 24 Hours, as the day was dawning, a fog descended thick enough that the drivers of the works Mercedes 300SLs had to open their gullwing doors i

SETTING UP A new auction in an unfamiliar location can often lead to unpredictable results, yet RM Sotheby’s judged its first ever Dubai sale perfectly, grossing $17,381,045 in one night. Despite poor weather forcing the Canadian auction house to pul

CAR DESIGNERS, or at least the ones with staying power, soon learn that it’s best not to focus on the false starts, dead ends and lost causes. They would go mad otherwise, a point not lost on Keith Helfet. ‘Whenever a large corporation is looking to

It would be easy to assume that everything is known about the most significant classic cars. And yet still there are gems that resurface from the realms of the long-forgotten. When they appear, you wonder how it might be that such an important piece

by Octane staff and contributors Other interesting cars we’ve been driving THE SITUATION APPEARS hopeless. Our two Grenadier 4x4s have driven some distance along this narrow forest track, only to find our way blocked by a fir tree knocked over by the

THERE’S ONE QUESTION that I fear receiving, and it’s the simplest one of all: ‘What’s going up in value at the moment?’ I hesitate, inhale deeply, then start to reply. ‘It depends…’ First, it depends on where you get your pricing data from. Auctions

I’M A LITTLE ashamed to admit that, since re-commissioning the Sierra Cosworth back to standard spec, the one thing I’ve done nothing about is the tyres. In my defence, they were Bridgestone RE002s that in themselves were perfectly respectable and ha

When I was a youngster, I devoured the Jennings series of children’s books, about an enthusiastic but trouble-prone schoolboy called Jennings and his gawky, geeky sidekick Darbishire. Set at a boarding prep-school in a cosy ‘lost England’ world that

What’s the longest trip you have taken in your classic car, with your entire family on board? Probably Milton Keynes to London in my case, and that was more stress than I could handle. Not fearing a breakdown in itself, but fearing their reaction if

The first time I sat in a McLaren MP4-12C, it was 2009 and I was in a preview room deep inside the McLaren Technology Centre, with Ron Dennis looking back at me through the windscreen. The man who’d overseen most of McLaren’s eight drivers’ champions

If the 12C was an opening shot to rivals as to what McLaren Automotive could produce, the one-off X-1 that followed it was an early and incredible demonstration of the skillset of McLaren Special Operations – or MSO. The first of MSO’s bespoke commis

NOT ONLY WAS the Murciélago a watershed moment for Lamborghini – showcasing that an Italian supercar could be every bit as wild under the watchful eye of Audi – but it also seems to have become more appealing with age. As the final model to make use

IT’S SPRING ON the Kent coast; time to peel off the Austin-Healey and Triumph Trophy’s dust covers, wheel them outside into the sunshine, and check the tyres ready for their first run of the new classic season. This year there is one difference: I ha

TIME FLIES WHEN you are having fun, but it’s rather sobering to realise I’ve been enjoying my Jaguar XK140 for 18 years. I keep a little black book in which I record all mechanical work done, with every pound spent, which proves that the XK has been

Although cyclists knew as early as the 1870s that adopting a tuck position made them faster, it took a long time for manufacturers to start making a real effort to improve bicycle aerodynamics. For a whole century, and in the face of diminishing retu

McLAREN MAY HAVE been swathed in some negative headlines and unwelcome speculation for quite a few years now, but it’s easy to forget that there was a time not so long ago when the company was not only unimpeachable but untouchable. Its utter dominan

One morning in 1971, Bill Bowerman, struck by an idea, stood up from the breakfast table and poured urethane into his wife’s waffle iron. It was the action of someone sure in the solidity of his marriage, and of a man obsessed with his pet project: t