Lifestyle

Richard Attwood

A co-pilot you actually can rely on...

The Good Italian

“You have great countries, and you have the country,” says Giancarlo Giannini’s character ‘The Prince’, referring to Italy in this beautiful short film from menswear brand Caruso. It reminds us why Italy might be the most ‘Classic Driver’ country of them all – the cars, the food, the architecture, the opera… we’re already planning our summer break (by road, of course). 

More than the sum of its parts...

A sharper form

Who could have guessed that Technics’ SL-1200 would be sold, unchanged, for almost three decades? It was a medium through which many different music genres – from hip-hop to house – flourished. With its powerful quartz-controlled motor, start-stop button and precise speed control, Technics made blending and scratching accessible to everyone. There was hardly a DJ, MC or producer who went without a ‘Twelve Ten’ in the 1980s and 1990s – music journalist Tom Terrell even called the unit “the most important instrument of the last two-and-a-half decades.”

While today the average couch potato can easily pilot a modern sports car, in the 1960s, a certain amount of fitness was required to hustle something like a Porsche 356, especially in treacherous conditions. Accordingly, the international Porsche ski meeting in Lech Zürs am Arlberg was a popular event at the time, and somewhere you could prove your athleticism out on the slopes. However, if you arrived in the hotel car park the following morning to find your Porsche buried deep beneath a blanket of snow, you might have needed to exercise some intellectual fitness as well.

An Alfa Romeo TZ2 on the hillclimb at the 2015 Goodwood Festival of Speed. Photo by Peter Aylward.