For the next four days the Mazda Leguna Seca racetrack will be awash with elegance, transporting viewers back to a time when auto racing was the epitome of class and drama.
Put the words “Mercedes” and “convertible” together, and you’re all but guaranteed a highly desirable luxury automobile. Turn the clock back to the late 1960s, and you could only be talking about the 280 SE, the marque’s flagship image model at the time.
Naming a road car for a classic racecar would, for some marques, be a risky proposition. You probably won’t find too many objections, however, to Porsche’s putting the “718” badge on its redesigned Boxster and Cayman models.
Usually, we hold our Texas event in November, when it’s still warm and sunny but there’s not much going on in the rest of the U.S. vintage car world. This year, knowing that the famous Hill Country spring wild flowers would be especially brilliant thanks to El Nino winter rains, we scheduled our Texas Bluebonnets for April 3 through April 8.
The Corvette long carried a stigma of crudeness versus the Europeans, and the Chevy bowtie just doesn’t carry the status of a Porsche crest. That reputation had been eroding since the late 1990s, though not everyone noticed. Today, any Porsche 911 driver not looking at the new Stingray with just a twinge of horsepower envy ought to check his pulse.
As the first production car to bear the Bugatti name in thirty-five years, the EB110 had big shoes to fill. The 560 horses produced by its 3.5L V-12 fit snugly into those French racing boots.
This is the perfect weekend to take advantage of the meek March temperatures and brush up on all things automotive. While there’s a lull in major car events as many are still sleeping off Amelia or gearing up for the New York Auto Show, there are still local opportunities to get that weekly injection of petrol.
The Diablo’s design was more elegant than the Countach, which had become festooned with all manner of body add-ons, including a rear wing that looked like a Boeing 727’s horizontal stabilizer. Like the Countach before it, the Diablo also grew a young fan base and became a poster car in many boys’ bedrooms.
Gooding & Company’s Amelia Island auction is the penultimate sale of collector cars in this year’s Amelia Island weekend festivities. The docket is headlined by an estimated $32,000,000 worth of Jerry Seinfeld’s Porsches.
