The Tour had started earlier that week, with 22 cars setting out on a trip from chateau to chateau, in stunning French countryside and on incomparable RN roads of the type used as a route by the original Tour de France Automobile.
After many days of stormy weather, the normally immaculate cars looked as if they’d come straight from the race track or a rally stage in the early 1960s.
Mr. Fittipaldi, you are regularly invited to the Goodwood Festival of Speed. What are your impressions of this year's event?
While Bentleys are known as the ultimate British luxury cruiser, they are, at the same time, true drivers’ cars, built as solidly as an English castle and blessed with lavish power from their V8 and W12 engines. Now, a new design concept by Ben Knapp Voith aims to create a modern interpretation of what the Bentley Boys – those elite and adventurous gentlemen racers of the mid-1920s, who created such monsters as the 4½ Litre Blower – would build if they were alive today.
Fittingly, given the location, Dr Ulrich Bez was backed by a dazzling light display and pounding electronic beat when he opened a new chapter in the soon-to-be-100-year-old company’s history, introducing the first radically modified car to be made at Gaydon since the launch of the DB9.
Compared to the outgoing DBS, the AM310 Vanquish has all-carbonfibre bodywork, better interior packaging, a more powerful (now 565bhp) engine and a brand-new, One-77-derived interior.
And, when simply abbreviated to ‘LM’ (as in ‘250 LM’), need we say more?
Anyway, organised by the excellent Peter Auto, the biennial Le Mans Classic is for cars of the type that raced at Le Mans in period, and splits them into six grids (that’s plateaux, in your actual French) delineated by age: 1923-1939; 1949-1956; 1957-1961; 1962-1965; 1966-1971; 1972-1979.
Each grid races for approximately one hour, so, from 16:10 on 7 July you get 24 hours of action on the track (in fact it’s more than that – don’t complain, the more the merrier, we say).
Pininfarina died in his sleep at the family’s home in Turin on the night of 2 July. He was not only Honorary Chairman to the company his father created in 1930 (then called Carrozzeria Pinin Farina), but also a ‘Life Senator’ and former Member of Parliament in his native Italy.
It is, though, his automotive excellence that will be revered. Having graduated from Torino Polytechnic in 1950, he became General Manager of the family company a decade later and was appointed Chairman following his father’s death in 1966.
As anticipated, the Spider has a retractable hard top (RHT), with a folding roof system that can be used on the move (at speeds up to 30km/h), and a carbon ‘MonoCell’ chassis identical to that of the coupé. Because the 12C was originally designed as a convertible, no additional chassis strengthening is needed in the Spider, hence the open-top version weighs only 40kg more than its coupé sibling.
It was the CLS which famously started the four-door coupé market back in 2004. Now, one generation and eight years on, the sporty saloon has plenty of competitors, mainly in the form of the Audi A5 and BMW 6 Series Gran Coupé.
And the action, just 100 metres or so away on the hillclimb, matched it superlatively, giving what might well be 200,000 visitors to this year’s Festival something to smile about, admire, or just go “Cor, look at THAT!”
While many of the spectators were there to see the likes of Lewis Hamilton and Sebastian Vettel – the latter behind the wheel of both his F1 car and the latest high-performance Infiniti – do their smoky, tyre-burning stuff, there was much for the more considered visitor.
For now, McLaren is remaining rather tight-lipped on specific details, but has revealed this teaser photo. Classic Driver will bring you a full gallery following its official launch next week.