Steve Cropley Poring over Murray’s masterpieces
MY WEEK IN CARS
MONDAY
Joined the great and good at Gordon Murray’s ‘One Formula’ exhibition, staged both to mark the master-designer’s 50 years of building cars and to open his new HQ at Dunsfold. This was a private event (Murray’s band of petrolheads and engineering geeks aren’t crowd-handling experts) but if an event’s depth and fascination count, this was good enough for the Science Museum.
There were two sides to the display: Gordon’s Garage, comprising several dozen cars and motorbikes the designer had paid good money for, and a bigger collection of the awesome racers and supercars for which he is so famous. Have to say the garage was my favourite: almost every car was so tiny and so light that an original Mini, parked among them, looked big. Murray pronounced his one-and-only Ferrari, a Bertone-designed 308GT4, “a bit of an embarrassment” at 1150kg.
TUESDAY
Friends have just paid a whisker under £17,000 for a 10-year old, 60,000-mile, 500bhp, full-history Porsche Cayenne Turbo and are delighted. If you want proof of the enduring nature of Porsche quality, they keep telling me, find a well-owned Porker SUV. A decade ago, the company was so obsessed with proving to the world it could build cars other than sports cars that it put its soul into this first performance soft-roader, and it worked. A short blast proved the Cayenne T had aged well dynamically too, my peeled-back eyelids proving the 5.1-sec 0-60mph capability was still there. The 171mph top speed we took on trust.
My pals are a bit sensitive about having chosen an SUV, and the thirstiest petrol model at that, but they put up what strikes me as a plausible defence: this car already exists – someone has to own it.
WEDNESDAY
Found myself in Lymington for a meeting, so afterwards I called in at the National Motor Museum, Beaulieu, whose exhibits I haven’t enjoyed for about a year. They get refreshed regularly and to me the place had a new look. I find Beaulieu especially brilliant for its collection of ‘early primitives’ and for a beautifully curated exhibition of land-speed-record cars, which does much to explain why land-speed record breaking has endured into the Bloodhound era.
It was especially heart-warming to be reunited with a car I regard as an old friend, though I’ve never even sat in it. It’s the eye-popping 1935 Auburn 851 Speedster, a car so packed with star quality that, when viewing it, I can’t understand why I’m not standing shoulder-to-shoulder with professional car designers trying to understand what makes this thing so damned imposing.
Every car was so tiny and so light, an original Mini parked among them looked big
SUNDAY
To Hyde Park to watch colleague Jim Holder depart atop a 1900 6hp Daimler Type A on the London-brighton Run for veteran cars. This one was to occupy a somewhat trying seven hours.
Few entrants think about modern motoring while on the Run, which makes Holder’s postevent observations especially far-sighted: “EX10 is very much a car: four wheels, an engine, clutch, brake, accelerator, four gears and even room for four (or five, but for the fuel, water, oil and tools we carry). There’s even a round steering wheel. Not everything we take for granted today was a given but this Daimler has surprising similarities to modern cars. That realisation distils the oftquoted creed that the car industry is, courtesy of electrification and autonomy, about to undergo its biggest change in 100 years…”