This month’s Classic & Sports Car features the world’s most talked about McLaren F1 – the machine that suffered a near-catastrophic accident in August 2011 in the hands of famous owner Rowan Atkinson.
Actor and comedian Atkinson tells us about using the legendary supercar day-to-day, the accident that almost put an end to it and the painstaking £910,000 rebuild that brought the machine back from the brink.
Like the McLaren, the Osca 1600SP is a super-exclusive machine but, unlike the Woking hypercar, it never did race.
Underneath the sleek shell that gave it a theoretical top speed of 150mph, the SP hid advanced technology for 1962 such as a bespoke spaceframe chassis and a twin-cam ‘four’ fed by two Weber carburettors.
Marc Sonnery tells us what it is like to drive the lightweight sports car and explains why it remained relatively unknown until its long-overdue appearance at Villa d'Este in 2012.
A car that certainly did race, but with varying degrees of success in period, was Lancia’s fast but fragile LC2. Richard Heseltine first saw the sensational machine compete at the 1983 Silverstone 1000km, now he tells the story of the sports-prototype that was built to go head-to-head with Porsche, but on a much tighter budget.
Then, in a celebration of the underdogs, Heseltine takes a look at the oddities that competed in Group C.
