Cars

#5 Aston Martin Lagonda:

Fittingly, the concept made its debut today at the Nürburgring Nordschleife during the 2013 ADAC Zurich 24 Hours. The CC100 Speedster Concept lapped the daunting ‘green hell’ with Dr. Bez at the wheel, accompanied on the track by none other than Sir Stirling Moss in the DBR1 in which Moss and Jack Fairman won the 1959 1,000km sports car race.

Designated the W222, the latest generation of Mercedes’ flagship saloon promises to be the safest, most luxurious and most intelligent S-Class of all time. Building on the still-impressive feature roster of the previous model, the new car scans the roads and surroundings ahead using numerous cameras – automatically adjusting the damping and lighting to suit. Tick the right boxes on the options list and you could allow the adaptive cruise control to keep an eye on things while your seat mimics a hot-stone massage.

The first ABS

W108/109: The 'old S-Class'

So says Head of Volkswagen Group Design Walter De Silva, of the car he has designed for “hyper-sophisticated people”. The Egoista represents hedonism taken to the extreme, he tells us. It is a car without compromise. “It’s as if Ferruccio Lamborghini were saying: I’m going to put the engine in the back, I don’t want a passenger. I want it for myself…”

When the the last chequered flag dropped at Brooklands following the outbreak of WWII, few could have anticipated that the occasion would mark the end of serious motorsport in Britain for almost a decade. Even with the conflict over, fuel rationing, lack of cash, lack of cars – and rather more pressing matters such as the rebuilding of a nation – kept racing on the back burner until 1948 when the first post-War meeting was staged at Goodwood, Silverstone was inaugurated as a circuit and things suddenly began to grind back into life.

Preceding these somewhat billowing-bodied convertibles was the famous ‘Spa Special’ – the first Aston Martin produced post-War (using elements of the design from the just pre-War ‘Atom’ prototype) and one that won its first race when driven by St. John Horsfall and Leslie Johnson at the 1948 Spa 24 Hours.

1953 Aston Martin DB2 Drophead Coupé