FERRARI MONDIAL

‘The poor man’s Ferrari’ say those with all the Ferrari merchandise. ‘Perfect,’ says Will Holman, ‘I’ll have half a dozen then.’

Abargain Ferrari? Well, you’re unlikely to find a more cost-effective route into owning a classic car with the world famous prancing horse badge. And despite mediocre reviews back in the day, the Mondial is a great car in any guise, and an even better one with the later four-valvesper-cylinder engine. That model is known as the QV, for quattro valvole. You see what they did there – everything sounds cooler in Italian. Take ‘spunga bagnata’ for instance. It means wet sponge. Told you.

Designed by Leonardo Fioravanti of Pininfarina, the Mondial entered the market in 1980. Available as either a 2+2 coupé or a cabriolet, it replaced the four-seater Ferrari 308 GT4, enabling the Italian firm to continue to market the two-seater 308 GTB/GTS, the car that donated its chassis and drivetrain to the Mondial. Thank you, Magnum PI. Carrozzeria Scaglietti supplied and built the bodywork, a combination of steel and aluminium panels that are fixed to a tubular spaceframe chassis. The result is a car that’s as light and stiff as it is beautiful, and one that handles exceptionally well.

Front and rear subframes hold the major mechanical assemblies, and while the 3-litre V8 engine might be able to trace its roots straight back to the V6 Dino engine of 1968, it still produces 214bhp and 179lb/ft of torque, enough for a 0-60mph time of around eight seconds. Handling was terrific too, but while the Mondial made all the right noises, the press and buyers alike complained that it just wasn’t fast enough. Perhaps the most damning review came from Car magazine, who wrote in 1981: ‘The long wheelbase gives the Mondial a decisive advantage over the 308 in straight-ahead stability; ...it turns with the poise of a dancer but only when you turn the wheel.’ Fussy beggars, these Ferrari fanciers.

Enter the Mondial Quattro Valvole, or QV, of 1982. With, as you well now know, four valves per cylinder, power leapt to 240bhp. Ferrari claimed that the combustion chamber design was based on that of its Formula One cars. How closely the Mondial’s cylinder head echoed the one in Gilles Villeneuve’s car is uncertain, but Ferrari did win the Constructors Championship that very year.

Regardless of engineering semantics, the result was a car that now pleased the kind of motoring journalists who write for magazines that adorn posh coffee tables. Before the acquisition of the extra power, the Mondial’s performance was pleasant but not supercar-ish enough for those who wanted to win bragging rights at the country club. The QV got these folk back on board.

Does any of this really matter to you or I? Not really. I don’t know about you, but I can’t remember seeing my country club membership card for, er, ever, so I’m really not bothered that the contemporary Porsche 911 Turbo might have been quicker to 60mph than a Mondial with a shonky old 2-valve V8. To me, it’s a pretty Ferrari sports car that feels special to be in and makes all the right noises. Despite the paltry two valve per cylinder count of the more affordable version, any V8 at 7000rpm gets my juices flowing quite nicely, thank you, Car magazine.

In fact, the idea that this is the Ferrari that ‘real’ Ferrari fans (they like to call themselves the cognoscenti – it’s Italian for prat) dismiss as a bit second rate makes me prefer it to the others. One of the less appealing aspects of classic car ownership, for me anyway, is the snobbery associated with it. I’ve met several Ferrari owners over the years and some of them have been wonderful people and great fun to be with while others can be a little, how shall I say this… a little ‘keeping up with the Jonses.’ A bit like those Triumph Acclaim owners if you know where I’m coming from. You can’t be like that with a Mondial because you own the poor man’s Ferrari. Good on ya – enjoy it.

[I’m not sure where you are coming from Will, but if you’re not careful with your comments about Acclaims, I rather suspect you might be going somewhere far from here! – Ed]

War changes everything or so it is said, but for MG, World War 2 gave it a reason to change very little. In the years that immediately followed the cessation of hostilities, several British car makers set their gaze firmly forwards, fairing in wheels, smoothing out profiles and applying a few technological tricks learned from recent aeronautical innovation. This spirit brought us marvels such as 1947’s Jowett Javelin, 1948’s Morris Minor and 1949’s Rover P4. But MG, which would wow the world with the beautiful, lissom and thoroughly modern MGA in 1955, simply filled the intervening decade with three successive generations of the T-series sports car that had begun with the TA Midget way back in 1936.

Of course, all manufacturers started off in 1945 by putting their pre-war models back into production as it was the only way to get restarted quickly, and MG would have introduced more modern replacements much earlier had its hands not been tied by being a small cog in a much bigger parent company’s machine. Fortunately, largely because of the war it could get away with sitting on its hands initially. The TA and TB Midgets, which MG made until it had to switch to military manufacture in 1940, proved very popular with servicemen. Legendary double amputee air ace Douglas Bader abused a TA from 1938 until he was shot down and imprisoned in 1941. If I correctly remember from reading a biography many years ago, he drove with the accelerator and clutch in reversed positions, as his left leg had a surviving knee.

American service personnel stationed in Britain also took to the T-series MGS, although this influence is sometimes overstated in terms of both its speed and size. However, it is true that many servicemen exported either their car or their predilection back home with them in the post-war era, providing MG with a ready reason to extend the life of the model. 1945’s TC was exported to the USA in right-hand-drive form, and was so well received that it evolved into the TD in 1950, this time available as a left-hooker.

To its credit, the TD did carry a degree of innovation. Instead of the skinny, 19in diameter wire wheels of the TC, it wore 15in steel rims. Thanks to borrowing from the Y-type saloon, it benefited from the independent front suspension system that would survive until 1980 in the MGB. It also had the Y-type’s rack and pinion steering. As a result the TD is noted for crisp handling and sharp turn-in.

The engine remained unchanged from the TC, but then it was a perfectly good motor. The XPAG was derived from a 1938 Morris overhead-valve unit. Displacing 1250cc, in the TD it employed twin carburettors to produce 54bhp. Despite hauling a car that weighed 941kg it was a reasonably lively performer, largely thanks to its free-revving and tractable nature.

The switch to ‘modern’ wheels created a degree of aesthetic tension in a car that was otherwise a pre-war style. The wings sit lower than on previous models, and the body is wider. It is easy to think ‘kit car’ at first glance, but once your perception adjusts, the TD reveals itself to be a genuinely pretty machine. It looks good with the hood up, too.

Inside, this car is really rather splendid. The TD came with a Rexine covering (that matches the upholstery colour) on a plywood dash which rises and falls majestically before the driver and passenger. In front of the pilot are the two main dials, while subsidiary dials and switchgear are laid out on a shapely central plaque. The passenger gets a glove box and a grab handle. The symmetrical nature of the dash makes a conversion from left to righthand drive easy. This is significant for UK buyers because out of a production of almost 30,000, about 24,000 TDS were sold in the USA. In fact, only 1656 were originally registered in the UK.

The TD is currently underappreciated, and it is quite possible to find a good car for far less than the £25,300 that we’ve allocated for an excellent example. Despite the advantages conferred by the independent front suspension and modern rack-and-pinion steering, its more antediluvian predecessors outstrip it in value, perhaps in part because they were produced in much smaller numbers. Its successor, 1953’s TF, is also markedly more expensive. If you want to follow in the tin footsteps of Group Captain Sir Douglas Bader – who had a penchant for championing the underdog – an MG TD could well prove the smart way to invest in this sector of British motoring history.

Iwas lucky enough to own a Quattro back in the days when they were a cheap secondhand car, and about 20 years ago I rang the local Audi dealer trying to buy a part for it. The dealer asked me which car I had. I told him it was a Quattro. ‘Which one?’ he replied. ‘The one,’ I told him. He asked whether it was an 80 or a 90. I tried to explain that it wasn’t either, it was simply the original Audi Quattro. I wanted to tell him it was also the reason he had a job in the first place.

It’s amazing to think that just 20 years after Audi’s masterpiece turned the world of rallying on its head and changed the company’s image from that of a left-field manufacturer of slightly odd cars for architects and weirdybeardies into the manufacturer of the decade, somebody working for a main dealer could be unaware of any of it. Make no mistake, he must have been living under a rock. Anyone else with the slightest interest in cars knows what an Audi Quattro is. Before it blasted onto the scene, and four-wheel-drifted its way around World Rally Championship stages, the Ford Escort Mk2 was still the car to beat. But rear-wheeldrive and a live axle were swept aside by the Quattro’s fivecylinder turbocharged powerplant, permanent four-wheel-drive and allindependent suspension.

The Ur-quattro (Ur means original in German) first reached the market in late 1980 and remained in production throughout that decade. And it made everything else the company had produced since World War 2 seem rather staid, too. The Audi’s 2144cc, five-cylinder, turbocharged engine pushed its 200bhp to all four corners via an innovative, permanent four-wheel-drive system, a piece of inspired thinking that was dubbed quattro in a flash of marketing genius. Mounted longitudinally, the iron block, alloy headed powerplant also sported an intercooler, and was considered so exciting that marketing types the world over added the ‘turbo’ moniker to anything they wanted to imbue with an image of power and exclusivity.

As is the way of the world, the Quattro gained capacity and power over the years. It was first bored out to 2226cc, which gave the same power and torque outputs but at slightly lower engine speeds. Then in 1989 the five-cylinder engine got a new 20-valve DOHC cylinder head, which added 20bhp and a little extra to the top speed – although a friend of mine once got an indicated 147mph out of my 10-valve car on the Nürburgring, so I’m not convinced this latter improvement is of any practical purpose. (I wasn’t in the car at the time, by the way.)

The three engine variants were given individual codes, and these are how enthusiasts now refer to them: the original 2144cc 10v engine was WR, followed by the 2226cc 10v MB and the 2226cc 20v RR. But there’s no point or need getting tied up worrying about peak power figures; the Quattro was never about outright grunt anyway, its forte was coping with the sort of adverse conditions that world rally champions found themselves in, and so traction and handling were always far more important than sheer thrust. Many years before the Audi was even a twinkle in the eye of VAG’S engineers, Alec Issigonis’ Mini had proved the advantage of never having to lift off the gas for corners. The Quattro emulated this by channelling twice the Mini’s total power to each wheel, on snow, ice, gravel and anything else that would leave lesser cars flailing.

And it worked better than Audi could have ever hoped. From the early 1980s through to the end of the legendary Group B rally car era, Quattro variants won 23 World Rally Championship events in the hands of legends such as Michèle Mouton, Hannu Mikkola, Walter Rörhl, and Stig Blomqvist. The final tally included two outright World Championships and another two as runners-up. And despite being designed as a low volume specialist car, nearly 11,500 road-going Quattros were produced by the time the model was retired in 1991. Audi have been dining out on its near mythical status ever since, albeit apparently without the knowledge of some of those people now working for the company.

Ah, holy grails. In my personal opinion any Mini is a fine car, but a Cooper 1275S is the absolute apotheosis of this amazing British machine. It’s the big cheese. It is also incredibly expensive, and while the underlying mission of this special feature is to highlight cars that are currently good value, we have included the Cooper 1275S because just occasionally something is worth paying top money for. Having said that, this Mini is unlikely to ever drop in value and it will certainly never lose its appeal.

Very soon after the Mini’s 1959 launch, people began to take note of its dynamic brilliance. The tiny terror handled like nothing anyone had driven before. Inevitably, it soon began to appear in motorsport events at clubman level. That September, world champion Formula One builder John Cooper was loaned a Mini from BMC’S press fleet and drove it to the Italian Grand Prix at Monza.

On his return, he unveiled his idea of a performance Mini to the company, and the rest is motoring history.

The Cooper 1275S is essentially a homologation special. Cooper created two of its S models with two classes of motorsport in mind. The 970S would compete in sub one-litre events, while the 1275S would qualify for racing in 1300cc classes. It was a remarkable achievement to wring a 125% increase in power over the base model from the A-series engine. It was a still greater feat to do so while keeping the car relatively reliable and driveable. This was a production car after all, not simply a racer.

Cooper pulled off the trick by increasing the engine’s bore and stroke, and using a bigvalve head and high-lift cam. He fed the beast via twin SU carburettors. The car had twin fuel tanks as standard for good reason – it was thirsty when driven hard. But then it was producing 76bhp, and healthy torque. Many people rate the 1071cc A-series as the most tractable version, but the 1275 is very useable indeed.

As a result it was hugely popular as a road car. This was, in many ways, the GTI of its day. My father, an enthusiastic participant in clubman motorsport events, recalls that in his motor club members would lust after four distinct cars. ‘It was pretty simple,’ he told me recently. ‘You either wanted an E-type, a Healey 3000, an MGB or a Cooper S. Nothing else mattered.’

This was, for its time, a quick car. It could sprint to 60mph in 11 seconds and had a top speed of 95mph. But even better, it had the mid-range flexibility to make full use of its prodigious grip, knife-edge turn-in and outrageously brilliant handling. You could drive it as if your hair was on fire on road or track. Owners fell in love with the Cooper S instantly, and the lesser models sold well as a knock-on effect. The Mini is often described as classless, because although it is a distinctly spartan vehicle in terms of specification, its appeal is absolutely universal. Prince or pauper, you couldn’t fail to grasp its visceral appeal.

The S had better brakes and wider wheels than the basic Mini, but it was little better equipped inside because this car was all about the driving. However, while the incredibly basic interior still had the minimal trim and equipment of the base car, it did benefit from a couple more dials in the central instrument binnacle.

These days, almost any 1275S will have been restored at least once. Its value is such that many are receiving very high-end conservation works these days. If you are going to pay this kind of money for a car, it is worth painstakingly seeking out a really, really superb example. This is, after all, an investment piece. But it is a purchase worth making. Even better, buying a 1275S will reward you sensorily too, and it will be hard to resist driving one at every opportunity. It will be even harder to resist driving it in the manner Cooper intended. Thrashing your Mini gleefully may not be the best way to protect a fiscal entity, but, you know what – life’s far too short to deprive yourself of the pleasure.