Cars

It’s a car that’s never been about excess or flamboyance. It was a car about answering the needs of the people. Compact, affordable, simplistic, and yet cleverly engineered and bursting with charm, the Volkswagen Polo has been a staple of European roads for exactly fifty years now, as well as recently being voted the ‘Best Car of the Half Century’ as part of the New Car World Championships. The Polo was born from a decade of upheaval. The oil crises of the 1970s demanded efficiency, while Europe’s growing urban centres needed smaller, more practical machines.

Early Porsche 911s, Series 1 Land Rovers, Jaguar E-Types or drive-forever 1990s Mercedes-Benzes – whatever your first taste of the wonderful world of classic cars may look like, the journey you go on with a car such as these is one filled with ambition, passion, sometimes a bit of frustration, but above all, a healthy dosing of enjoyment along the way.

It’s been a record-breaking week, one filled with drives along one of the world’s best public roads, a torpedo-shaped prewar marvel claiming Best of Show and a plethora of classics, supercars and future classics all fetching impressive figures as the hammers fell around Monterey Car Week.