Petrolicious

Sometimes, very rarely, a car event manages to fuse multiple elements into seamless whole, one in which different eras and disciplines and use-cases are celebrated equally. A location such as Villa d’Este on Lake Como doesn’t hurt, either.…

The BMW M4 CSL is finally here. The Bavarian automaker’s competition and performance division, BMW M, is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, and while “the fastest letter in the world” is just as likely to appear on the trunk of a diesel-powered…

For a motorsport enthusiast, photographer, and traveler, there is hardly a better weekend than that of the Monaco Historic Grand Prix. Watching priceless pieces of the past dogfighting between guardrails on city streets is one thing, but here there is an extra…

Part beautiful, part brutal, completely captivating, these bulls form the bookends of one of the greatest legacies in the automotive world: the Lamborghini V12. What you’re looking at is the very first production Lamborghini with a dozen cylinders, the 350…

The ultimate Escort? It sounds like an oxymoron. There are so many, over so many years, from the World Rally Championship-winning Waldegård and Vatanen cars all the way to Ken Block's more recent Hoonigan creations. But burning rubber for YouTube videos…

A year after Fiat acquired Alfa Romeo in 1986, the Alfa Romeo SZ concept was shown to the public. The SZ (for Sprint Zagato) was the first sports car developed under Alfa Romeo’s new owner, but some of its underpinnings can be traced all the way back to the…

Photography by SSSZphoto…

The formerly Bologna and now Modena-based manufacturer Maserati, and the great racing drivers Juan Manuel Fangio and Sir Stirling Moss were a legendary trio. It’s a total cliché; write something about an old racing car and some old drivers, call it some…

My foot is flat to the floor, the nearly half-century-old pedal is buried as deep as it will go in the time-smoothed pile of the carpet. I find myself wanting to open the throttle even more, knowing full well that it won’t make a blind bit of difference the…

In the still-nascent years of the automobile, Ugo Zagato laid the foundation of his eponymous coach-building business in Milan, and in doing so set the stage for over a century of design excellence. From the very start in 1919, Zagato-bodied cars were…

The Model T and the Mustang, the GT40 and the Escort… Ford has made more than a few game-changing cars over the last century, and the RS200 is absolutely included on that list. It was only unleashed into the WRC on the 1986 Swedish Rally—late on the scene…

Just a couple of days before this shoot, there was snow on the streets of Barcelona. No, that doesn't happen too often. Actually, it nearly never happens. On the day of, it was cloudy and the light was flat; nothing like the gorgeous golden glow that this…

At the moment, there is no way for us to travel back in time, but until the laws of physics are bent upon themselves the best we can do is approximate parts of the past. Thankfully, not all time machines need to approach the speed of light to take us into…

Replicas come with the connotation of compromise, and in a certain sense that is simply a fact; you are getting part of the real deal in exchange for part of the cost. They may not share the same provenance or value, but these lookalike acolytes offer many…

The first thing that struck me when I saw this exceptional machine in the metal was the understated elegance of its appearance. It certainly does look like a fast Porsche, but its mature stature belies the fact that this is no ordinary product of Stuttgart. In…

The BMW E31 8-Series is one of the more unique road cars in the Bavarian brand’s history. They are elegant grand tourers that have aged well, and while they do require more fastidious maintenance and less-cheap parts than a basic car that gets it done, E31s…

Story by Alexander Byles…

Photography by Michael Shelford…