Most suspension systems ask the same question - how do you absorb a bump? - and answer it with springs and dampers acting independently at each corner. Alex Moulton asked a different question entirely: what if the four corners of the car talked to each other? Moulton arrived at that
The sports car of the 1960s was not born from ambition - it was born from a specific argument about what a car needed to weigh, and the decade's finest small machines were built by people who had answered that question more radically than anyone expected. The argument
The only way to understand what BMC's licensing strategy actually was - and why it simultaneously looked like foresight and amounted to something closer to managed retreat - is to remember that the company spent most of its life outside the European Economic Community's tariff walls
When Ford's engineers bought a Mini in 1959, stripped it to its last bolt, and priced every component, they arrived at an uncomfortable conclusion: BMC was selling the car at a loss. That paradox - a revolutionary machine priced below its own cost to exist - says more
British Cars
When Sir Leonard Lord announced on the sixth of August 1959 that Innocenti of Milan would build British Motor Corporation cars for the Italian market, he listed the Austin A40, the A55, and the Morris Oxford. He said nothing about the Mini - because as of that morning, the world
Italian Cars
Asking Leonardo Fioravanti of Pininfarina to draw a sensible Ferrari was perhaps the most paradoxical brief in Maranello's history. Yet that was essentially the task handed to the designer in 1971, following growing criticism that the 365 GTC/4 - for all its talents - could not adequately
British Cars
Presented at the Olympia Motor Show in October 1929, the Bentley 6½-Litre Sedanca de Ville by H.J. Mulliner arrived at a peculiar intersection of two entirely different Bentleys - the one W.O. believed in and the one the aristocracy actually wanted to be seen in. It was