Duster_UK took these shots a couple months back. What a find!

Got some Lancia porn for you - I took the attached pictures yesterday (Sunday) after leaving the Barbican Arts Centre in the City of London. The car was parked on Chiswell Street EC1. I should explain that the City of London is the financial part, where all the banks are, the oldest part of London. There are some residential properties there, but as you can imagine it is seriously expensive. Being a Sunday the parking restrictions are relaxed which might explain how this Lancia came to be parked there (it also means I could take my own car into town - new Fiat 500 by the way).

On to the Lancia, which is of course a Lancia Fulvia 1600HF. The registration plate suffix is 'L'. which means the car was registered between the 1st August 1972 and the 31st July 1973. However as you can see the licence plate is black with silver letters in a non-reflective material, and only cars built before 1st January 1973 are permitted to still use this old style colour scheme. It's clearly badged as an HF, although I thought all the HF models had the larger inner headlights, I'm not a Lancia expert. The car looked to have a nice used patina but was in fine condition overall.

I also have a literal metric fuck-tonne of photos I took from a local classic car show last weekend. There is about 400 in all, although I have not yet sorted the good ones from the dross. However I do have some Jalopnik money shots in the form of a working Lucas coil under the bonnet of an over restored MGB GT, a mint TR6 with the bonnet up and jump leads attached, and lots of Lotus Carlton shots (including the under bonnet VIN plate identifying it as a Lotus model). There are various Rovers (a P4 and a P6), an Escort Mexico, some Triumphs (including a Herald and TWO Stags), various porrigdey Austins named after quaint English towns with cathedrals, an NYPD P71 Crown Victoria, a Buick Skylark (70's, I haven't identified the year yet).

Photos Credit: Chris Jackson/Getty Images

The 1957 Cadillac Eldorado Brougham, the 2009 Chevrolet Corvette ZR1 and now this: a Bedford ice cream van. All vehicles which have sprung forth from the garnantuan corpus of General Motors over the decades. They all are awesome. The Caddy and the Vette by default—the Bedford by the copious application of vehicular art.

Bedford Vehicles used to make trucks as the commercial subsidiary of Vauxhall, GM’s British offshoot, before dying a slow, ugly death. Scratch that: it’s lorries, not trucks. Military lorries, ambulances, mobile cinema lorries and the ice cream vans which still dot the British landscape.

Except they generally don’t look like this one, bagged on Prince of Wales Road in Camden Town, around the edges of a council estate (that’s British for project housing). Bedford vans don’t usually come in rich slatherings of bianco fuji paint with a hint of pistachio. Nor did the British commercial vehicle industry ever harbor an especially wholesome relationship with huge-ass chrome dubs. Or screw-on dual exhaust tips.

This lovely van was parked behind thick metal bars, so unfortunately, this is as close as I could get. And no, I had nothing to do with that discarded cone of ice cream. Sometimes, circumstances simply conspire to create car art. I’m sorry, scratch that: it’s lorry art.

London already has horrible traffic, the byproduct of living in a city designed before cars. On the occasional day where I had to drive a press car instead of a bicycle or motorcycle from my home in Ladbroke Grove to my office in Clerkenwell I could expect the four-mile trip to take at least two hours. I once did it in five-minutes flat on a GSX-R1000.

With the tube strike, all but three of the city's underground lines are closed, cutting off the only way non-daredevil commuters have to get from A to B. We're not quite as extreme as Michael Moore in our enthusiasm for increased public transportation in the US, but we hope to some day see it somewhere outside of Manhattan. We just hope that as it develops, we don't put all our eggs in one basket like London has. [via The Guardian]

One would have to be a better approximator of wheel diamaters than I to precisely state the size of its multi-dubs, but let’s just call them boop boop a doobs for the time being.

The Navigator is parked on Clapton Road in the London borough of Hackney, which became famous in the early 00’s as the most crime-ridden street in the United Kingdom. Taking the baton of Murder Mile from Ledra Street in Cyprus, the locale is described in an Observer article from April 2001:

Many of the Clapton Road shootings have stood out because of the levels of ruthlessness and brutality involved. Gunmen have pursued their victims in broad daylight, finishing them off at point blank range in front of streets packed with witnesses.

‘The bodies were still in the car up until midday,’ said one shopkeeper who asked not to be named.

There hulks the big Linc, menacing in the harsh light of a flash fired off at night. And nope, it did not have a handicapped permit on display.

Photo Credit: Máté Petrány

The house was constructed on a bombed-out plot in posh Mayfair in the year Moss retired from racing after his epic shunt in Goodwood, which left him paralyzed and in a coma. After recovering, he moved into his new home where he’s lived ever since. And even almost half a century after its completion, it is still seriously Bond:

1. Ceiling lowers from the kitchen to serve Sir Stirling his giant bowl of soup? Check.
2. Control panel by couch regulates water temperature and amount in master bath? Check.
3. Inbox descends from office ceiling with documents to sign? Check.

But the greatest detail is a later addition: the world’s only carbon fiber elevator, which serves his private office. It was custom-made for Moss by the Williams F1 team.

Even though he’s turning 80 in a few months, he’s planning furiously ahead. He is in the process of constructing a new home quite a distance from Mayfair—in Fort Lauderdale, Florida:

“I want to make the new house as ecofriendly as possible,” says Moss. The building, which will be situated on a 2,300 sq ft plot by a canal in Deerfield Beach, north of Fort Lauderdale, will use Greenblock technology, which involves pouring concrete between layers of polystyrene to create thick insulated walls with very low U-values (meaning they have excellent heat retention). The roof will have two big stretches of solar panels for converting the Sunshine State’s greatest resource into everyday electricity.

While he ensures his house is kind to the planet, Moss is also taking precautions against the planet being unkind to the house – so it will be hurricane-proof and tornado-resistant, with virtually indestructible glass in the windows and no overhanging sections to tempt high winds. In the event of a power cut, the generator will kick in automatically, “to keep the wine cold and the air conditioning going”.

Being a Moss residence, the two-storey house will also feature one or two innovations. “I want a breakfast trolley that will run, all by itself, from the kitchen to the patio when I press a button,” he says. This will effectively be a robot, he explains, possibly guided by a magnetic strip in the floor.

He’s driven the Mercedes-Benz 300SLR, he’s driven the Maserati Birdcage and now this. What a character. Also: check out his paint-can-patterned suspenders!

Source: The Sunday Times, The Independent. Photo Credit: Cate Gillon/Getty Images, The Independent

I spotted what appeared to be a London cab parked in front of the hardware store, just around the corner from the '69 Citroën DS station wagon, the 1973 BMW 2002tii, and the 1953 Packard Cavalier. Naturally, I wanted to meet the owner of such a beautiful machine, so I hung around until he emerged from the store.

It turns out that he's the owner of Bear Paw Fiddles, an Alameda shop specializing in vintage violins and mandolins, and this cab is his work vehicle (those of you who drive Taurus or Lumina company cars, feel free to experience pangs of envy). This '37 Beardmore Taxi was built by the the William Beardmore Company in a factory converted to Spitfire production a couple years later, and it survived the London Blitz. It was brought to the United States by a Bay Area Jaguar dealership in the late 1950s, received a Nissan engine swap a decade or three back, and now calls Alameda its home.

This may be the roomiest back seat ever made. The Beardmore has proven to be quite reliable, but it can't really be driven on the freeway; the engine has sufficient power, but the windshield tends to implode at speeds greater than 40 MPH.

There is no way to get used to the size of Ferrari’s 612 Scaglietti. While most Ferraris—indeed, most supercars—tend to be larger in life than imagined, the Scag is a monster. Longer than a Mercedes-Benz E-Class and wider than an S-Class, it is the size and shape of a ballistic missile, especially in dark gray.

The size is a direct consequence of the car’s dual functions of high-speed handling and four-person capacity. Inside are four bucket seats intended to carry in comfort four actual people with eight lower extremities. This is unlike most 2+2’s where the comfortable ratio of humans and legs tends to be an unevenly distributed one to one. And while—unlike the Espada’s very comfortable rear seats—I have never had the opportunity to actually sit in a 612, those who have describe the rear seats as up to the task.

The other factor in the 612’s immense length is the engine, which is mid-mounted. But unlike with the traditional mid-engined layout—where the engine is between the cabin and the rear axle—the Scag’s 5.7-liter V12 sits low behind the front axle, similar to the supercharged V8 in the Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren. And like the SLR, the 612 has a nose—or substitute your favorite metaphor based on human anatomy—any self-respecting Frenchman would be proud of.

Mounting an engine midships is done to reduce weight in a car’s extremities, lowering its moment of inertia. This comes in handy when you take a corner fast, so I called Nino Karotta, the only person I know who has actually driven a 612 Scaglietti (if you’ll remember, Nino was the guy who showed us how to become a Formula One driver in one day).

The 612 he drove was in an environment rather alien to a leviathan GT—the Hungaroring, a racetrack in a dusty valley on the outskirts of Budapest, home to the Hungarian Grand Prix. He described the experience as similar to what happens when you take any very powerful but heavy car to a track. That while it’s very fast, capable of huge powerslides and much better composed than, say, a large V12 Benz, it is ultimately too soft and too heavy for proper track work. Unlike, he said, the Ferrari 599 GTB, which he drove on the same day and described as a sharp, violent track animal.

We had better find a more suitable environment for the 612 then. And remember: we’re looking for family use here. So let’s head to Regent’s Park, 487 acres of Central London flanked by white stucco houses where rich people live and exercise.

While Central London is perhaps not the perfect location to strecth a 550 HP grand tourer’s legs, nothing beats it when it comes to arriving home. The car is understated, elegant, majestic, no Italian waving of hands apparent in its flowing lines, inspired by a one-off Ferrari 375 MM its namesake Sergio Scaglietti created in 1954 for Italian neorealist film director Roberto Rossellini’s wife Ingrid Bergman.

An elderly couple then arrive in a Citroën C3—this is a very small French car—and maneuver into the space in front of the Ferrari.

They turn out to be the parents of the Ferrari’s owner, a dapper man who has by this time emerged from his house. My mate Máté and I are soon in the midst of a family cavalcade, admiring the lovely Ferrari.

Also in tow is a young girl, Orelia by name, who climbs down from her grandmother’s neck. This is it then: a real, live kid who actually rides in the back of a Ferrari! Our conversation as I remember it:

“Hi Orelia, my name is Peter.”

“Hi Peter.”

“So how is it riding in a Ferrari’s back seats?”

“It’s great. I sit there with my two sisters.”

Roominess? Check!

“And when you go for a ride, do you go real fast?”

Substituting for words, she offers a huge, jubilant nod. We wave our goodbyes. A few steps later, her father reaches down to pick a white strand of thread out of the Pininfarina logo on the left fender.

Gentlemen, a Jalopnik midlife plan is emerging here. Make a quarter million bucks, get a Scaglietti and a fine woman, sire children, then transport them in style and at speed.

And if you have dogs (or elephant guns), go get that Maserati Quattroporte wagon.

Photo Credit: Balázs Fenyő (Ferrari 599 GTB), Máté Petrány and the author (612 Scaglietti)

It is no faster than foot traffic but draws a lot more attention in spite of its silver paint-job, camouflage on a gray London day.

A man follows in a dilapidated van and we strike up a chat, short enough to fit into the timeframe allotted by a red light. The crux of our conversation? He likes R8’s! He likes them even more than his own van, in fact.

Don’t we all, don’t we all. German infighting is a beautiful thing indeed.

London’s Chelsea has, as opposed to New York’s version, little to do with alternative forms of human sexuality and a lot to do with conspicuous displays of consumption. Chief amongst them is the public use of large cars, especially SUV’s: hence the term Chelsea Tractor for these vehicles.

The typical Chelsea Tractor is the Range Rover. While Jeremy Clarkson has argued about its merits as the perfect city vehicle—citing “when you put money in a meter, you rent an entire parking bay, so you may as well use all of it”—such a monolithic hunk of a car is a rather poor choice for Central London’s narrow and cramped streets.

More troublesome than even the Range Rover is the widespread use of Porsche Cayennes, for the simple fact that while Range Rovers are great looking cars with their butch British looks, the Cayenne is a eyesore. One night, a city has even displayed an example in stretch limo form, which I fortunately did not photograph, but you get the idea.

Aside from the eponymous tractors, another major feature of Chelsea is its floral diversity. Every square foot of land not covered with Range Rovers, Cayennes or buildings has flowers sprouting in lush abandon. Random street corner parks are covered in thick swaths of wildlife and restaurant windows are planted with masses of tulips.

Which are excellent weapons against Porsche Cayennes. One only needs a photographic lens with a mild zoom, a wide aperture and the focus set to as near as possible to blot every single Cayenne into an aesthetically pleasing smudge. Observe—and reproduce (90mm, f/2.4, focused to 0.9'), at will:

In the preface to the book Speed, Style and Beauty about his bollocks car collection, Ralph Lauren wrote that his first car was a Morgan. He chose it because, as he put it, it was driven by the kind of people who leave the canvas top down even in the driving snow. Lunatics, in other words, but lunatics of the most agreeable kind.

Morgan is, of course, a British carmaker, and in its home country, an even more poignant example of said lunacy is on display: a Westfield Seven parked right out on the street.

With patches of moss thriving where the front fenders meet the hood—an environment made especially pleasant by the warmth of the exhaust pipe and the regular rains that soak London. The next one, in fact, was about to arrive.

It is no wonder Britain once built the world’s mightiest empire. Who else would be tough enough to drive a car in the city whose driver’s seat is millimeters from the asphalt and requires you to embark kayak-style: foot-ass-foot, that is.

These are also the people who have their water pipes running on the outside of walls. Toughness and lunacy are, indeed, not very distant cousins.

But as far as those cupholders go? You already know the answer.

On a lovely autumn day in 2006, I folded myself out of the back seat of my friend Larry’s Lamborghini Espada and had a revelation: I have just found the perfect family car.

Orosz, get your head out of the mushrooms, you might be thinking, the Espada is a 40-year-old Italian rustbucket, but see, it all makes sense. The car is Marcello Gandini’s trickiest design—the svelte coupé profile obscures two flawless, roomy back seats, either of which will accommodate my 6'2" frame with ease. Fitting a child seat in there would be a walk in the park.

The Espada also makes a very pleasing noise, is not very expensive at around $40,000 for a driveable example and most importantly, it comes with a cubic mile of style. Based on my rudimentary knowledge of developmental neurophysiology, a child exposed to such a stylish means of transport in her formative years will develop impeccable taste. And a sense for the benefit of extreme speeds.

To test my theory, I went for a stroll in Knightsbridge, London’s perhaps poshest neighborhood. Specifically, the streets around the famous department store Harrods, where the local ultra-rich do their weekend shopping.

Ferrari 456

The first car I ran into that fit the bill was a midnight blue Ferrari 456. This is very similar to the Espada in that there is a V12 up front, two doors on the sides and four seats on the inside. Ferrari introduced it in 1992 as the replacement for that eyesore 400 and made around 3000 of them until the 612 Scaglietti took the stage as Ferrari’s resident leviathan.

It’s a beautiful, compact car, and in spite of the fact that the good people of Knightsbridge receive ultra-high doses of supercar every single day, it still drew looks. The inside is your typical all-leather Ferrari affair—but it showed no signs of occupation by minors. Little wonder: the rear seating area is way less voluminous than that of the Espada. You would need to have kids with very short limbs to feel comfortable back there.

The Knightsbridge crowd thought the same: a couple stopped by to consider it as perhaps their next family ride, but upon seeing the interior, they promptly walked off.

Ferrari 599 GTB

Of course unless you have twins or more than one child, you won’t need a four-seater right away, and if you live in Knightsbridge, your spouse probably has her own supercar. What you need is a grand tourer. And show me a grander tourer than the Ferrari 599 GTB.

It was parked in front of the World’s Easternmost Krispy Kreme Franchise: a favorite haunt for those who have gotten hooked on this wonderful Southern suspension of fat and sugar, yours truly amongst them.

And here, in the tantalizing cloud of frying donuts, my theory was proven. In the passenger seat of the Ferrari was installed a child seat! Pardon the lack of a polarizing filter:

Unlike the Espada, the 599 is definitely not a reasonable choice. You will be charged a quarter million dollars to own this rocketship with its archways of aerodynamics. But consider: putting your child through a good college and graduate school runs up a tab very much in that neighborhood—and there’s no guarantee that she’ll have a happy and productive time.

Alternatively, you can spend that money on a 599. Her hearing will develop in a vat of high-strung V12 engine noise. Her sense of balance will be trained by the sudden instances of acceleration and deceleration produced by the 611 horses up mid-front and the humongous carbon ceramic brakes in the corners. She will smell gasoline and premium leather. All in all, the perfect way to nudge her central nervous system in the right direction.

As I was considering all this, the smell of Krispy Kremes became overpowering. I followed my zombified brain inside and introduced four glazed donuts into my body. A few minutes later, giddy with the sudden overload of sugar, I stumbled outside to see the Ferrari already gone. Inside traveled a small child, her brain happily soaking up every component of that magic which Ferraris are made of, constructing all the right synapses for a balanced adulthood.

Next up, we’ll look at a Ferrari 612 Scaglietti and a real, live kid who rides in the back.

Photo Credit: Balázs Fenyő (Lamborghini Espada) and the author

At slow speeds, they are hefty, unwieldy bastards which heavily task your musculature to operate their controls. Find a bit of a straight though, or a road with long, flowing curves, get up to around 80–100 MPH and like hydrofoils, they suddenly find themselves in their element. Becoming agile, powerful tourers happy to take you across continents in speed and style.

The above example, pristine like none of its kind I’d ever seen, was thundering through Central London, hunting for that elusive piece of road to stretch its legs on.

What its driver thus did not need was a gym membership.

Photo Credit: byrdiegyrl/Flickr (hydrofoil boat) and the author

Said previous model was the second generation Honda Civic Type R codenamed EP3, a proper bunny slipper of an ultra-hot hatch. Its ridiculously unassuming 2650-pound body concealed a 2-liter VTEC engine good for 200 HP and redlined at a blenderworthy 8,600 RPM. But the good bits were found in the unpowered rear, which used a fully independent double wishbone suspension, making for spectacular handling.

The Slipper Civic was retired in 2005 to make way for the Spaceship Civic, possibly the greatest looking hatchback ever made. But when it debuted in Type R form, the smile sagged off everyone’s face. While the car put on 140 pounds, it retained the same engine—and adding insult to injury, it lost the double wishbones for cheaper torsion bars. Those who have driven it say it’s a letdown, even if the VTEC engine trumpets above 6,800 RPM with the exact same manic ferocity as before.

What to do then, what to do. Try this:

The Honda mothership, sneaky bastards that they are, developed another new Type R solely for domestic sale, called the FD2 (as opposed to the European FN2). It’s an altogether different car—for one, it’s a four door sedan, not a three door hatch. The engine makes 225 HP instead of the FN2’s puny 201. And it has the double wishbones in the rear, along with all sorts of bits and pieces trickled down from the NSX. The FD2 is a taut white menace, looking every bit the street racer it is.

As it’s Japan-only with right-hand drive, it’s best to get and use one in Britain. You can pick one up from Litchfield, a UK import specialist, for £23,000 ($33,000). And, of course, move to the UK to drive it.

Photo Credit: rumpleproofskin/Flickr (Mk.2 Type 2), nikosthemelis/Flickr (European Civic Type R) and the author (Japanese Civic Type R)

Perhaps. But it’s also worth noting that in London, men are clearly not afraid to wear colors. And I mean colors: pink shirts, red socks and floral ties, of which there are whole racks in elite department stores.

Such an arrangement, combined with the Roller pictured above, would be jarring in most locales. But here, under London’s permanently overcast skies, it all makes perfect sense. Making a stand against the weather which, while responsible for the island’s remarkable horticultural productivity, can also make life here rather dreary.

Now, this may not be a concern in the majority of the United States, but in cramped European downtowns, where swirling masses of pedestrians, bikers, cars, Range Rovers and buses vie for tiny amounts of space inherited from medieval times, a car you can park perpendicularly suddenly makes a lot of sense. Doesn't matter whether it's a G-Wiz or a Smart. Additionally, they're also usually more fuel efficient.

On the other hand, I did see a G-Wiz take a corner the other day. It was frightening to watch. The suspension provides insight into just what happens to all the discarded chopsticks produced by the city’s countless noodle bars.

It is with a particular sense of dread caused by the looming and disused industrial structures that I approach the Tate Modern, housed in the Bankside Power Station on the River Thames. It's from a bygone age when power was generated right in our backyards. And smoke belched from massive chimneys.

Step inside and you can spend an hour a day or a whole week strolling the cavernous spaces and looking at weird shit. Some is crap and some deeply sad and touching. Some exude a great, vibrant, manic energy.

Like any of Jackson Pollock’s canvases. Which are fun to look at, but the real fun is in imagining the killer time Pollock himself must have had as he had days upon days to do nothing but run around and wreak havoc with paint.

You then bump into a rusting Volkswagen Type 2 bus.

It is rusty in a very aesthetic way but is clearly no more and no less than an old German car. Streaming out from the back is a team of sleds, each equipped with a searchlight, a heavy felt blanket and a big block of what appears to be fat and which is, in fact, fat. This is where things get interesting.

The installation was created in 1969 by the German artist Joseph Beuys and is called Das Rudel: The Pack. Beuys based it on a particular day in his Luftwaffe career, when, on a March day in 1944, his Stuka was shot down over the Crimea and he was rescued by Crimean Tartars. He recalled the story decades later:

The last thing I remember was that it was too late to jump, too late for the parachutes to open. That must have been a couple of seconds before hitting the ground. Luckily I was not strapped in—I always preferred free movement to safety belts… My friend was strapped in and he was atomized on impact—there was almost nothing to be found of him afterwards. But I must have shot through the windscreen as it flew back at the same speed as the plane hit the ground and that saved me, though I had bad skull and jaw injuries. Then the tail flipped over and I was completely buried in the snow. That’s how the Tartars found me days later. I remember voices saying “voda” (water), then the felt of their tents, and the dense pungent smell of cheese, fat and milk. They covered my body in fat to help it regenerate warmth, and wrapped it in felt as an insulator to keep warmth in.

Of course you don’t know any of this as you enter the room with the Vee Dub bus and the sleds. All you can sense is a jubilant freedom as you look at all those sleds, clearly well-equipped for a Russian winter—or any winter. They move in a pack, happy, focused, supremely adapted to their environment, and they even have built-it snow brakes, operated by hand levers.

You would trust your life to this focused pack of sleds. You could ride any of them wherever there is enough snow to glide across, whether in the Yukon or in Chukotka. And you can just feel that great, overwhelming freedom, the freedom of an open road, an endless landscape, and a well-adapted vehicle.

Das Rudel will elevate any gloomy day. Come see it if you’re in London.

Photo Credit: ChicagoGeek/Flickr, Lothar Wolleh and the author

Here I am in London, walking its myriad streets and turning my head to the occasional air raid rumble of a TVR Tuscan at full throttle, and I meet the boss of my boss Ray Wert, Nick Denton, publisher of this fine motoring magazine, on the High Street in Hampstead Village. We go into Maison Blanc for an espresso. Bad idea.

It will only become apparent an hour later that we should have waited for an outside table to free up. As we chat about all manner of things I will not mention here, a preep-preep-preep in my pocket indicates an incoming message, which I leave for later checking. Half an hour later, we finish our coffees and I leave Nick to head home with his father. Here is the message, which I now check:

A Maison Blanc előtt épp most ment el egy GT40.

It’s from my friend Máté, an incredible treasure chest of local petrolhead information, and I have a vague notion that his Hungarian will not need translating.

Although in retrospect, those Jurassic Park-style ripples on my not particularly good double espresso observed midpoint were no doubt caused by the GT40’s 7-liter V8 rearranging matter along the High Street.

What a city. And what a comically unlucky way to time a meeting.

Photo Credit: Máté Petrány