COTD 3: Ferrari 365 GT4 2+2 / 400 / 412

It had to happen. I picked 2 esoteric choices for the first Car of the Day entries and so now I have to pick a Ferrari.
Sorry.
I’ve been nuts about Italian cars since I was a kid. Blame my parents. Blame Magnum PI or Miami Vice. Blame Beverley Hills Cop II. Blame Cannonball Run (One and Two, but mainly One).
However: in keeping with the spirit of these vehicular outbursts, I’m going to select one of the most unpopular cars to ever leave the Maranello factory gates – the 365 GT4 2+2/400/412 series.
Even at the height of the car boom of the late 1980s, these front-engined four seaters were tricky to shift. And this was at a time that people were paying over list-price for anything with a prancing horse on the bonnet and it was possible to sell a brand new car for a huge profit just by taking delivery of it.

You can trace the disinterest in the series through the history of 2+2s that the company have made (2+2 meaning “2-in-the-front/2-in-the-back”, or “not quite a 4-seater really, unless you’re really short or you don’t have legs”).
The wonderful 250GTE was the first mass-production car that Ferrari produced. An elegant but muscular saloon powered by the same V12 as the more sporty and desirable models but able to take the kids and the luggage to the summer house (at exceptional speed). It had the poise of a street rod but the simple and beautiful design details of it’s more valuable (now) siblings like the 250 GT SWB. Crucially, it’s a subtle car.
It’s easily in my Top 10 Ferraris, maybe even my Top 5. As someone who can name over a thousand minor variations in the marque and who wrote several thousand words (for no real reason) on the great “0846 debate”, this is high praise indeed. I really think about these things. I really am that much of a loser.
However, take a quick look online and you’ll see the majority of these lovely cars have been scrapped, with the mechanical aspects cruelly stripped out and used to build either replicas of more valuable models like the GTO or kept as spares for the real thing by wealthy vintage car racers. Recently an absolutely perfect condition GTE showed up on EBay minus its engine after it was bought at auction solely for items which were to be used as spares for a more financially valuable car. At least someone has the chance to salvage something from this one, elsewhere GTE body shells lie in coachbuilders’ backyards acting as accidental flowerbeds:



It’s heart breaking.

The 400 series (I’ll call it that for shorthand) has a similar story. Brought out in the early 1970s as a replacement for the 365 “Queen Mary” it roughly echoes the equivalent changes to Ferrari design of the period in that the curves and open lights of the older models were replaced with slightly more angular styling and sleeker, pop-up lights (see the 275 GTB to Daytona, or the Dino to 308GTB later on).
Today, it’s possible to pick one of these up for less than a Nissan Micra but the hideous costs of maintaining a 30-something year old, V12 engined Italian car mean few people are wealthy (or brave) enough to take the risk. Specialist breakers’ yards (such as http://www.eurospares.co.uk/) are full of these things. In fact, take a look at this widely circulated photo of the recovered wreckage from the tragic Lockerbie bombing:



That’s right; in the foreground is the remains of a Ferrari 400.

I can’t remember the last time I saw one of these things on the road, moving.
That is a pity, as that’s where they are in their element. Modern cars are designed with the photographic image in mind. Most people will see their first glimpse of a new supercar in print, not in the flesh. So you end up with cars like the Ferrari F50: it looks like a bazooka battleship on a glossy page but it just sits wrong on the road, ending up looking like the outpourings of a just-pubescent male in the back of his maths book.
The 70s period for design house Pininfarina acts as a textbook example of how to design a car that looks great on the road.



Recently I saw a first series Ferrari Mondial (a car similarly maligned in Ferrari aficionado circles) on the road and it looked fabulous. Squat, hunched forward, clearly defined and unfussy in detail compared to modern Ferraris. The 400 perfectly illustrates this line of thinking, though you can see why it isn’t universally considered a design classic.

In photos it’s hard to determine its “face”. Its curious bi-level nose is the culprit – making it hard to define the crucial eyes and mouth recognition that makes a car appealing to us weird human types. That face recognition is why we see the Morgan Aeromax as cross-eyed, the Citroen DS as “Shark-like” and the Fiat 500 as unthreatening. The 400 is just confusing – from standing eye-level at least. It looks like it should solely have pop ups like a Bitter Coupe or BMW 8 Series; or a more defined and stepped up nose like the latter Pininfarina concept car the Ferrari Pinin, or other equally luscious Farina creations like the Lancia Gamma Coupe or the Fiat 130 Coupe. The Aston Martin Lagonda suffers from the same styling problem (among many others – though it too looks incredible on the road). Plus, the need for 4 seats makes it all look a little stretched and poorly balanced. In photos it’s only the rear ¾ view that appeals.



Put it on the road next to the cars of the time (or now) though or crouch down and look at one from a seated perspective and it looks fantastic. I remember going to the coast in Norfolk with my parents and seeing a black 400GT heading towards us on the other side of the road with its lights up. It stuck in my mind like a photo. The car’s width and poise make it look perfectly aggressive whilst still being strangely subtle (for an enormous V12 supercar). It is the absolute antithesis of the F50 and I am willing to stake money that it will age significantly better than either the current 599 or its direct descendant the 612 Scaglietti, both of which are too big, too ostentatious and too sloppy looking to really work. The 612 in particular looks like the early stages of an omelette. The angular, sweeping 400 is confident and bold in comparison and represents the perfect gentleman (or woman) express.

It’s also the only Ferrari I have ever been in. My late Granddad called me up to say I should pay him a visit with my Dad when I was about 13 or so. He took me to see a mechanic neighbour of his who had borrowed a late 70s 400GT from his work to offer rides to kids at a garden fete. I think it was registered APG 58T. It was £55,000 back then. You could get one for a tenth of that now. It was in a perfectly 70s metallic silver blue/green with tan leather inside. I went for a ride in it and it felt like it was taking off on the road between Northborough and Peakirk. I remember looking at the speedo and it saying 130 mph. Judging from Ferrari’s optimistic speedos it was probably closer to 100 but that’s still plenty on an A road in a car that weighs the same as a bungalow. It was a carburetted model too so the noise was deafening – even though this was supposed to be a more civilized Ferrari. It left quite a mark on me. The registration doesn’t show on the DVLA database as being taxed anymore. I wonder where the car is - probably languishing in a parts yard somewhere or, worse still, re-born as several hundred Coke cans.

So why is it so unpopular? I’d guess it’s because people who want a Ferrari tend to lust after one for years and it signifies that they have somehow “made it” when they own one. So they inevitably buy a red one and want it to be as striking looking as possible so the neighbours get the message. The 400 just doesn’t fit with that. For one, it looks terrible in red (a lot of Ferraris do, oddly) and despite its gargantuan power train and enormous grunt it’s hardly a sports car. It’s aimed more at the discreet Mafia boss than the freshly-famous pop star or footballer.
Its cheapness tempts owners new to the marque who then find they don’t have the pit of funds required to maintain it as it should be maintained so lots of these cars are in a serious state of disrepair now and with the values so low they’re more liable to be broken for spares than they are restored as working on a V12 Ferrari costs the same amount regardless of whether that car is worth 10 thousand pounds or 10 million. Which is a shame.

I went to a Ferrari car show recently and in amongst the sea of red wedges - all with their owners in red polo shirts with red golfing umbrellas - was a solitary 412GT in a deep bronze colour. It was driven by an elderly gentleman who rolled up – not in an explosion of exhaust noise and tyre screech but in relative calm – and sat reading the paper in it before donning his panama and leaving as quietly as he had arrived.

That is why the 365GT2+2/400/412 deserves a re-evaluation – it’s a car with real class.



Value now: you can get a good one for £20,000

Pub quiz trivia fact: Jeremy Clarkson might have called it "awful in every way" and relegated it to an entry in the Top Gear Crap Cars book but Daft Punk didn't agree with him and made a black 412GT the star of their film Electroma in 2007:



Links:
Wikipedia
Online Forum
Octane Article
Registry

More Car Photos

Just added a whole bundle of photos from May 2010's Auto Italia show at Brooklands to my Flickr here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sumlin/sets/72157625622606229/with/5324285955/
by way of attempting to start clearing a backlog of pics from last year that are just sitting on my hard drive.






As you can see, I finally got to see a De Tomaso Mangusta as well. Maybe I need to write an entry about how I've never seen a million pounds in non-consecutive notes sitting on a pallet wrapped in clingfilm and then I'll stumble across one of those in a car park too? It looked just as good as I thought it would:

COTD 2 - Saab 900

Car Of The Day for today is the "classic" 78-93 Saab 900 series and more specifically, it's "Sven" - my 1986 Saab 900i Automatic.
I owned Sven between early 2004 and sometime around late 2005/early 2006. Registered D21 XJF, Sven was the 3rd and final 900 I looked at one Saturday afternoon. The first was a minty fresh 3-door 90 GL in grey but it looked like shifting out of my price range as the owner had it on EBay and wouldn't end the auction early. I remember he showed me a complete set of spare fuses in a Saab carry case that came with the car.
The second was a 900 Turbo in 2-tone black and grey. It looked amazing but just as I was about to lay the money down, the owner began nervously detailing worrying faults with the car until he bizarrely talked me out of the sale. Finally I went to see a metallic blue 5-door 900i Auto in Leicestershire somewhere and after a short test drive I walked away with the keys.
I'd wanted a 900 for ages. They're stereotypically architects' and Guardian readers' cars and I don't mind that. My Grandad had an absolutely killer 99 Turbo in black with the checkered alloys and a deep orange velour interior (registered "6 GOA" which is now on a Fiesta according to http://www.mycarcheck.com/). My friend Alex swore by them too and the band I was in borrowed his 900i one evening to shift some equipment and were won over by it's size, grunt and lovely velvety heated seats. When the head gasket blew on my shitty Citroen AX there was only one car that I wanted to replace it.



The honeymoon period lasted precisely 25 minutes. "The fuel gauge must be fucked" thought I, watching the needle visibly plummet as I sunk my right foot into the shagpile on the way home. Nope: 21 mpg if you're lucky. This thing weighed the same as a tank, was an automatic and probably wasn't in factory-fresh condition under the hood. No problems, I thought, what I saved in buying an older car could be used to fuel it. I remained optmistic. My friends and girlfriend all loved it too and christened it "Sven" on account of it's Swedish heritage.
The Sunday after buying it I took my housemates out to a car boot sale in it. The sun was shining, the electric sunroof worked nicely (as did everything electrical unlike my current Peugeot which electrically shits the bed almost weekly) and it felt like driving a beautifully engineered and very, very rapid tank. The automatic box took a bit of getting used to (Alex's was a manual though it was identical in every other way) but at least it meant I could pick my nose and drive in complete safety. And the illuminated floor-mounted ignition was the coolest thing imaginable.
Other drivers nodded and waved, we got to Calverton in what seemed like three minutes and went and bought some tat and a dirty burger. But come home time and Sven was dead. I may as well have put my key up my arse and turned it. Lucky for me that I am not more mechanically minded as my answer to this was to sit and try the ignition again and again for about 15 mins. Eventually (and as if nothing amiss had gone on), the engine fired and we were off.
Suspecting something hideous was occurring, I took Sven to the lovely folks over at Volsaab in Derby (I don't think they exist anymore). They couldn't find anything wrong with it and so started the biggest problem with Sven. Periodically, the ignition would be dead - nothing. Then give it a few minutes and it'd be fine. This is not so bad on a Sunday afternoon but when you're late for work it's agony. And when you give your car a persona and a name you can't help but feel "he" is just fucking with you on purpose.
I finally got to the bottom of the ignition problem after a drunken friend of a friend overheard me discussing it and declared he could fix it "in 5 mins". Which he did. Something to do with the starter motor.
But by then, Sven had all manner of other problems in the engine department that were slowly turning him from an excellent vintage car into a nice extension to my lounge in that he was very comfortable to sit in but didn't go anywhere.
I finally relented and put him on EBay where I received the princely sum of £31 from a mechanic and his Dad from Wales. The EBay listing fee was £22. I treated myself to a takeaway with the proceeds and bought an Astra Estate with blacked out Barry windows that smelled of cum from an "adult entertainer" I went to school with.
The last I saw of my Saab 900 was on Pullman Rd in Sneinton, where I lived and where I left the aforementioned mechanic trying to get it started to take it away. I didn't look round, I just gave him the keys, took the money and walked away. It was a sad moment. It wasn't there the next day so he must have got it moving. A quick registration check shows it's not around anymore though, unless someone with a sense of humour put a personal plate on it.
This has been my only (so far) foray into classic car ownership and it dented my wallet and my heart severely.
However, despite it being the oldest car I've owned, it was also the fastest as I found out when I nudged 120 on the A1 before looking at the speedo. Prior to that I thought to myself "Wow, the Saab's feeling nice today". It felt better and smoother the faster it went. Pottering over Nottingham's speedbumps seemed to be slowly killing it, but wind it up on a straight stretch of road and it barely wobbled. I slept in it's cavernous boot on several occasions (Simon Feirn once managed to fit a mattress in there for a good night's sleep in Norwich) and I'd never tire of it's gadgets or it's front-hinging bonnet. It's also the only car I've ever owned that drew admiring glances from strangers. I was once at a party and people were talking about how rubbish modern cars were. A young lady piped up that the only car she liked was "the blue Saab on Pullman Rd". I nearly choked on my Red Stripe.



So there you have it, COTD 2 is the Saab 900. I see a young chap driving a red one in Nottingham from time to time and a sharp stab of jealousy hits me as I notice him grinning in traffic. I don't think I'd ever ask him to loan me a fiver though. Or give me a ride anywhere important.



Value now: In 2006 it was £31.00 evidently. You can get a near-perfect one now for less than £2000 though.

Pub Quiz Trivia Fact: A 1989 Saab 900 SPG owned by Peter Gilbert of Wisconsin, was driven over a million miles, before being donated to The Wisconsin Automotive Museum.


Links:
Wikipedia
Saab Central
Saab Museum
Classic 900 Group on Flickr
For Sale in the UK
You Tube

Car Of The Day explained

COTD 1 - De Tomaso Mangusta

It'd be easy for the first Car Of The Day to pick something like the Lamborghini Miura SV or the Ferrari 250 GT SWB and don't worry, I'll probably be getting to both. But in the true spirit of the underdog I'm going for this awesome creation: the De Tomaso Mangusta.

De Tomaso are better known for the successor to the Mangusta; the Pantera (yes, that is where Anselmo and pals got their bandname). Fortunately, the Mangusta wasn't around long enough to sprout the bulges, skirts, wings and general penis-pump paraphernalia of the Pantera and let's be thankful. According to Wikipedia, around 400 of these cars were built, so these are rarer than the proverbial rocking horse shit. In fact, even after years of trailing car shows as a pre-pubescent, I am fairly sure I have never seen one in the flesh*

Named after the Mongoose (the only animal able to eat a Cobra - no coincidence), this prime example of short-gestation-from-designer's-cigarette-packet-to-production-car was designed by the splendid Giorgetto Giugiaro and made between 1967 and 1971. It seems to have been a bit of an influence on the AMC AMX/3 and the Delorean that came after it (the latter also designed by Giugiaro and sharing the gullwing-door design). Not to mention the Monteverdi Hai and the Maserati Bora.

It had a Ford V8 in the middle and it went how it looked: like a jet plane... in the sense that anything over 3 figures on the speedo and you'd need take-off lights due to it's almost 70/30 weight distribution rear to front. Like the Lamborghini Miura, it might have looked bad-ass but it really didn't get along with wind or corners very well.

Like it matters. Look at the thing. Like the Ford GT40 (and to a lesser degree the Lamborghini Espada), it manages to straddle a perfect line between the futuristic Italian designs of the time and the aggressive brutishness of American muscle cars. The gullwing boot doors are insane. I know for a fact that Giugiaro was 28 when he penned the Mangusta but I prefer to think instead of him as being around the age of 12 when he came up with the design and that the board meeting presentation went something like this:

Giorgetto (small child): "The engine is in the back under this huge glass window. So you can see it"

Suit (approx 45 yrs old) : "Why?"

Giorgetto: "Because it looks cool"

Suit: "How does the boot open?"

Giorgetto: "Like this..." (demonstrates glass gullwing-hinged boot doors on a model)

Suit: "Erm... how do you actually get access to the engine with the hinge for the doors running across it?"

Giorgetto: "Shut up"

Suit: "Also, it appears to only be 40 inches high. How will we build this and give the occupants enough head room?"

Giorgetto: "Shut up"

And so on.



It's barely higher than the height of the tyres, the rear wheels seem to intrude on the design making it look it's crouching as do the double lamps on the front (changed on some later US models to pop-ups unfortunately), partially hidden under the bonnet lip to give it the look of being permanently hunched forward like it's moving at speed even when it's stationary. Put simply, it's very, very cool. It's not aged so badly either.

According to the excellent Mangusta International website (run by the very definition of the word "enthusiast") under half of the production run still exist. The rest presumably ended up buried in a tree or under several hundred gallons of firehose water at the side of the freeway while the owner (imagine him in mirrored RayBans, smoking) phones his insurance company. Which is what supercars should be about: lunacy.

Value now: $100,000 ish

Pub quiz trivia fact: Kylie Minogue is driving a Mangusta in the video to Can't Get You Out Of My Head. It's also featured in the movie Kill Bill.

Links:

Wikipedia

Mangusta International (includes registry)

Registry at qv500.com

Guide at qv500.com

Mangusta on Auto Week TV show

(Click the pictures to go to the source)

Car Of The Day explained

*UPDATE: http://honeyisfunny.blogspot.com/2011/01/more-car-photos.html

Car Of The Day - Intro

I've written about cars on this Blog before so I'll save the confession/explanation about being a massive petrolhead. Put simply, I love car design - specifically between the mid 1960s and the early 1980s. Modern supercar/sports car design is all about either technical excellence or extreme ostentatiousness but there was a period where car design represented an almost pure and maybe even naive striving for true creativity. Unhampered by safety constraints, fuel consumption worries and little details like practicality, car designers of the 60s/70s were let loose with a brief no bigger than creating something wonderful that people would want to drive and hope to own. I like that optimism.
Now it seems we'll never see cars like this again. Sure, there seems to be another hypercar released every week that costs a million dollars but they're all hideous and 90% of the time are just driven around as gigantic visual bank statements by their owners and say more about the unfair division of wealth in the world than the creativity of the designer or the individuality of the owner. Seriously - how can anywhere be in recession when someone can spend a million dollars on a car?
Plus, the car is the enemy despite the fact most people have one and lots of people have more than one. Much as it pains me to admit it, Clarkson and the Top Gear folks have at least got something right when they rail against "eco mentalists". I'm anti-some-cars. I'm anti people using them when they don't need to. I'm anti people doing the school run in a Range Rover or buying a BMW that does 190mph and 12mpg and driving themselves, on their own, to work in it everyday. But make a car that is beautiful to look at, fun to drive and with a sense of occasion and people will do everything they can to keep it running. It might do 8 miles per gallon but the owner might only do 2000 miles a year in it. What's worse: someone doing 100,000 miles a year in a Prius that they scrapped their old car to buy and was made on several different continents using components shipped/flown to the factories that themselves churn out pollution OR someone buying, say, an Aston Martin from the 1980s that was handbuilt (and all the parts are still available) and only doing 5000 miles a year. It's crazy.
So: owning an exotic car back in the 60s or the 70s was very different to now. Not just politically. The cars were frequently hard to drive, unreliable and poorly supported in terms of after-sales care so driving and maintaining something like a Ferrari or a Maserati was a labour of love, even into the 1980s. The idea of a car as an investment was laughable also and cars that are now worth several million dollars were used for blasting around country roads for fun and repaired with a hammer by devoted owners who were deemed crazy for buying them.
Modern cars (with a few notable exceptions) are too big, too garish and too over engineered in comparison to appeal to me. You really shouldn't be able to potter to Waitrose in a Lamborghini. Not without it catching fire anyway.
Since I was about 12 years old I've thumbed the For Sale ads in classic car magazines and mentally selected my ideal money-no-object purchases from those available. I still do it now.
So, I'm taking a further stand for the automobile with Car Of The Day: a random and not completely regular look at cars that always make my fantasy garage when flicking through Classic & Sportscar on the bog. I have no mechanical knowledge, save for the experience of what has gone wrong on my own cars, so this is based mainly on sights and sounds.
If you own one of the cars featured, be sure to get in touch. Likewise if the photos used belong to you: I'll try and credit where I know who took the photo but that's not always possible.
I would like to point out that I drive a 1999 Peugeot 306 HDI Meridian Estate in metallic red. It is called "The Pig". I think this actually makes me more qualified to talk about dream cars, seeings I have ten per cent of fuck-all chance of actually owning any of them. Enjoy.

#1: De Tomaso Mangusta
#2: Saab 900
#3: Ferrari 400

Italian Car Photos

Now showing at Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sumlin/sets/72157623398758364/

I'm Becoming James May

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/columnists/jamesmay/6408789/Its-Ferrari-time.html

Has James May been reading my Blog?
I guess, unlike me, he can afford one at least.

Jeremy Clarkson

Very beautiful, very cold and you're not allowed to touch anything

If you've got over 2 million dollars spare at the moment then you can buy what I thought was the coolest house I'd ever seen in the 1980s. 370 Beech Street in Highland Park, IL. Don't recognise it? How about now:



No? Try this:



Yep, it's 'Cameron's House' from Ferris Bueller's Day Off, aka the Ben Rose House. My housemate Gareth is in the property market at the moment but alas, it's slightly out of his league and a little too far out of Nottingham for the work commute so it's all yours. I think they replaced the windows.
Read all about it here: http://www.redfin.com/IL/Highland-Park/370-Beech-St-60035/home/17625146

And no, it wasn't a real Ferrari. And yes, that's Richard Edson (former Sonic Youth drummer) who plays the car park attendant:



Here's some photos from Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dancphotography/sets/72157618307384257/

In Defence Of The Car

I said I would write a bit more about my liking for the automobile and so here we go.
I was insane for cars - and specifically Italian cars - in my youth. I dragged my parents and my mates round to many car events. I even met Nick Mason from Pink Floyd once and I didn't give a shit about his day job back then, he was famous to me as a collector and racer of Ferraris.

Author, philosopher and social commentator Jeremy Clarkson once described his love of cars as a sort of admiration for someone's desire to make an object that exists for no really good reason other than to make people's lives a bit more enjoyable. It's a good way of looking at the car and particularly fast, extravagant cars that might get the 'eco-mentalists' (as Clarkson calls them) up in arms.

I'm as appalled as anyone when driving along down the M1 looking at a procession of very large, expensive, uneconomical BMWs, Mercedes' and the like bomb past me with one person sitting inside. Motorway driving isn't fun. Sure, it should be comfortable but buying a flashy car to do the daily commute is exceptional twattery. Same goes for vulgar displays of wealth - gold plated Lamborghinis bought with oil money that will never venture beyond a lap of the block round Harrods are equally aggravating. And don't get me started on tenuous, personalised number plates. If you want to write your name on your car, just write it on it. Maybe put a price tag on it too.

They say the automobile will successfully end the world within 150 years of it's invention. Not necessarily through pollution but through other knock-on effects, the main one being obesity in it's drivers who take a 3 and half litre saloon car a half a mile round the corner to pick up a takeaway.

However, things weren't always this way. Ferrari (like a lot of sports car makers) started life as a racing team. The road cars were a sideline to fund competition. And the early road cars were literally beaten out of metal by some guys in a shed. Extravagance didn't come into it. What mattered was speed and efficiency. Usually at the expense of attention to detail, comfort and reliability. What matters about those cars is what occurs inside them, between the driver and the machinery. If that all sounds a bit POWER and homoeroticism then think of it as a contrast to modern supercars - where what matters is outside them, between the driver and the people looking at him or her.

The 1980s changed all that. The classic car market experienced a boom so colossal that it was possible to make a 100% profit on a brand new Ferrari just by driving it out of the showroom. It changed people's attitudes to older cars. Rather than being charismatic machines for racing and for fun, they now became investments. It also gave people a motive to dig up the rusted remains of pretty much anything and rebuild it, meaning long-lost cars were suddenly re-emerging in perfect condition and giving a perfect real-life example for the metaphor of "Grandpa's Broom". It culminated in Lord Brocket, who played polo with Prince Charles, pulling an insurance scam by dismantling and burying some of his classic car collection in order to fake a robbery. Classic cars back then were currency.

In the 70s if you drove a Ferrari you obviously had a bit of money. But the cars could be a pain in the arse so it was assumed that, by sacrificing a bit of reliability and comfort in the name of style, you at least had some taste. The 80s changed that because suddenly the most vulgar display of personal wealth available was a classic car. It also seemed to infiltrate the Ferrari designs of the time too. The Testarossa is undoubtedly a striking icon of the 1980s but is it beautiful? Nope. Compare it to it's predecessor, the Boxer, in it's original 365 BB form and it's like comparing a marathon runner and a bodybuilder. Because I grew up in the 80s I still find cars like the Testarossa or the Lamborghini Countach exciting but as pieces of design they're going to need a few decades yet before they can be separated from the money-grabbing era that spawned them. For me, the last truly beautiful Ferrari was the 308 GTB. And even that grew bulges and wings over time.

Anyway, it's perfectly acceptable for a chap of my age to know plenty about guitars (for example). I know plenty about guitars and whilst it's jovially referred to as geeky from time to time, it's accepted as being OK. Same goes for records. You can identify a first press from a re-press and as long as you don't get too 'real ale' about it you're OK. But mention cars and you're fucked. Somehow, it's not cool in the circles I move in. They represent crass displays of money and macho one-upmanship.

I want to make a stand for the automobile. Not the modern automobile. Not four wheel drive people carriers. Not German limousines. Not hot hatches. They have their place but they're not for me. I want to defend cars built for no other reason than it would be great to build them. Individual, sometimes unique objects of design genius. Built for a purpose but never at the expense of beauty and sometimes made worse as a machine because of it. Silly items of extravagance and joy that take on personalities of their own and are treated by people not as investments but in the same way they might affectionately treat a family pet. Cars owned by people who are quite possibly mental for doing so. Old Italian cars seem to have these characteristics in spades and it's what drew me to them as a pre-pubescent.

So there you go, I like cars and I'm proud of it.

So much so that I scanned in over 100 old pictures I took with my first camera, a Canon Sure Shot, in the late 80s and early 90s. They're all here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sumlin/sets/72157613495977507/

If you've read this far you're obviously not completely opposed to the idea of the car so here are a few to look at:

Ferrari 308 GTB

I need someone to loan me £35,000. Or give me it, that'd be better actually.

I'll get round to writing about the full depth of my closet petrol-head-ness some other time. Put simply though, I love cars. Not all of them I might add. Modern cars do nothing for me (with the possible exception of the recent Maserati GT). But the mid 1960s to late 1970s work by Italian design house Pininfarina made my 10 year old self go all funny and it still does now. Leonardo Fiovaranti's work for the company represents a pinnacle of design for me and out of the amazing shapes he dreamt up, the Ferrari 308 is still the top of my list.

It was conceived as a replacement for the "junior Ferrari", the Dino. Like the Dino, it wasn't even meant to be badged as a Ferrari until a last minute change of plan came about.

I think I could draw one of these in side profile with my eyes closed. As time went on (and also as more of these relatively cheap Ferraris wound up in the hands of people with more cash than taste) the 308 grew unsightly bulges and appendages, but the first version - the fibreglass-bodied 308GTB - is still the high point of sports car design to my eyes. Even now, most mid-engined sports cars follow the 308's flying buttresses and curved flanks as a blueprint. Ferrari themselves have based all of their 'entry-level' cars on the 308 in some way since and even the 'super-Ferraris' of the time, the 288GTO and F40, were based on the humble 308.

Concious that it wasn't the fastest or most spectacular car they'd ever produced, prototypes and 'press' cars at the time were always in subtle colours like silver, blue or brown to accentuate it's pretty lines. The 308 was a rarity - a Ferrari that didn't look best in red. That hasn't stopped most of these cars ending up 're-sale red' over time though. Blame Magnum PI.

When I was a kid I had lots of pictures of Ferraris on my walls. The 308 I wanted most though was the demonstrator model from the photos of the time when the car was launched in the UK by importers Maranello Concessionaires. It was a silver fibreglass-bodied car with a deep red interior.

Which brings me on to why I need £35,000. The very same car is for sale: http://www.classiccarsforsale.co.uk/classic-car-page.php/carno/54920

Exactly as I remember it. NPA900P. No one has thought to add a picnic table rear wing, re-paint it red or put some 'bling' alloys on it. It's exactly as it left the factory and went onto my wall.

I accept Paypal or cheque.

As an aside, if anyone out there lucky enough to own a 308, or in fact any interesting car, wants to swap letting me have a go in it for a one-off illustration of their car printed on heavyweight paper stock then get in touch. I'd love to draw some cars again, though I would wager I was better at it when I was 10:

I HATE CARS

After spending the last month or 2 defending my re-ignited interest in the automobile (more of that at some other time), my bad luck continued today in car-form as though to taunt me.

On the way back from dropping off broken PC number 2 (see previous post), my car suddenly developed a nasty clunking noise. This grew into a juddering, mechanical grind within minutes and a brief hoist onto the ramp at the garage confirmed that not only were my brake discs about to go, my exhaust was on it's way out too.

I tend to think of amounts of money in terms of the things I could buy with them. This little trip to the computer repair store has just cost me a 1970s Marshall JMP Super Bass.

They say things come in threes though so let's hope that's it now.

Roadrunner Once

No other song is guaranteed to bring about the instant destruction of someone's front room than this. Last night DJ Guts spun this, leading to a tissue paper lampshade globe suddenly turning into a beachball and as if by magic, it was no longer the middle of winter. Awesome Super 8 film too...

Film Poster Illustrations

2 different finished ideas for a poster for a UK independant film that's in the making. The team behind it would like to keep the title and details secret for the meantime so the text has been removed. As you can see it features the 'mobile cathedral' - the Citroen DS - in the South Of France.
If I ever make any money from designing anything then French Classics better be ready...