Cars

Historics has joined the long list of auction houses adapting to the new post-coronavirus normal. However, while online and telephone bidding will be available, the collector car sale poised to take place on 18 July will take place at a physical venue: Windsorview Lakes in Datchet, just west of London. We’re told that the scenic location is expansive enough to stage the saleroom itself and all 59 cars due to be sold at a safe, social distance for all involved. Well done to everybody at Historics for pulling this one off so soon.

The fastest four-door in the world 

Generation 4x4 

It’s been 25 years since JJ Lehto, Yannick Dalmas and Masanori Sekiya defied the odds to win the 24 Hours of Le Mans outright in the Ueno Clinic-sponsored McLaren F1 GTR. It was the first and only time a manufacturer has won the French endurance thriller on its maiden outing – that it was able to do so with a road-born GT car and not a purpose-built prototype made the feat even sweeter.

If you could concoct your dream concours d’elegance, how would it look? Naturally, the location is of paramount importance – we’d prefer somewhere sunny, obviously, but also a destination in which one wouldn’t get bored spending a day or two either side of the main event. Cars are, of course, a must, but we’d settle for a smaller, higher quality and more diverse selection of, say, 25 that really reflect the event’s location. 

Twenty-three outright victories. Forty-four podium finishes. Seventy thousand racing kilometres, across five continents. Fourteen hundred hours of restoration. In a discreet warehouse on the industrial outskirts of Turin resides one of the broadest and most historically significant collections of ex-Works rally and post-War GT cars in the world, assembled over the course of two decades by the late Luigi ‘Gino’ Macaluso. 

The Meyers Manx Dune Buggy is so much more than the sum of its modest, predominantly VW-sourced parts. It’s a symbol of beach-born bohemian freedom, which admittedly we haven’t experienced a lot of so far this year. Thanks, Covid-19.