Dream Cars: The Best Cars in the World - Hardcover

Andrew Frankel is a freelance automotive journalist and was for many years road test editor for Autocar magazine, where he is now a special correspondent. He is road car editor of Autosport, special correspondent to Classic & Sportscar, and a contributor to a wide range of other car publications. He recently co-presented a thirteen-part television series called Driving Passions.

INTRODUCTION

There is no definition of wha does, or does not add up to a dream car. It’s not that they go quickly; some of the most unpleasant cars I have ever driven have covered the ground at a terrifying rate. Nor can you rely solely on factors that are easy to quantify, such as price, or simple to spot, such as beauty.

Inconveniently, the fact that you and I may dream about them can also have little to do with the final selection. In the final credits of my dreams I tend to find myself riding off towards the setting sun in an arthritic Escort, not some low-slung slice of ultimate automotive experience.

Most frustrating of all to someone charged with providing a list of the dreamiest cars of all time is that you can not rely on the simple truth that a car is great as a qualifying criterion. The Ford Mondeo is an undeniably great car, transforming the lot of the family on the move, but it has no more relevance to this book than does a bunch of bananas.

And you cannot even exclude cars that are genuinely bad to help narrow the field. In this book there is at least one car that even I consider to be truly dreadful and there are two or more others that when released received mixed reviews, to say the least. I will not be the first to observe that being bad can be a desirable trait.

In the end, then, it comes down to gut feeling and, in this case, my gut feeling. If you are lucky enough to have fluked your way into a business where driving such cars also earns you your living, you soon learn that this feeling, which manifests itself usually as a tingle in the pit of your stomach, is the most precious tool of your trade. During the course of a year and perhaps a hundred car tests, you are routinely confronted with cars that, on paper, seem not to put a foot wrong but, out in the real world, fail to convince. Others seem to make no sense at all until you drive them and realize they possess a spark of something special that was not possible to predict. It is the ability to recognize and appreciate that spark that sets us apart from computers.

The next problem to be faced is that there are rather more candidates that fit comfortably into my gut’s definition of dream car’ than there is space for in this book. To be honest, I could have filled it, cover to cover, with Ferraris without even drawing breath.

For me, as millions around the globe, it was the Ferrari that lit the fire. My first memory of cars was being taken as a treat to the place where Ferraris are imported into the UK and sitting down surrounded by Daytonas and Dinos. I also remember the undignified exhibition I made of myself when it was suggested that perhaps it might be time to go home. I had never felt more at home in my life.

Of them all, it was the 250GTO that provided the first love and the feeling remains as strong today as ever. It was everything I had imagined a car should be: rare, indescribably beautiful, indomitable on the track and exquisite on the road. Blasting across open moorland while listening to the music of its classic V12 engine remains one of my all time great motoring experiences.

For a car that was, by comparison, mass produced, the Dino 246GT carried an unlikely amount of the GTO spirit. It looked almost as good and if it were not quite so quick, then it certainly sounded the part. Most importantly though, much of the Dino’s desirability stems from the fact that, while not exactly on the cheap side, nor is it so ludicrously expensive that the prospect of ownership is beyond the grasp of all but a few dozen people on the planet.

The F40, however, is likely to remain out of which, which, in fact, is no bad thing. It falls into that rare category of car that you cannot just climb aboard and, hoping you can handle it, head off over the hills. It is a car in which even the extremely experienced need to tread carefully. Once mastered, there is no other road car experience like it, but if the privilege is abused, there are few others on the road that will be as swift to punish the driver accordingly.

One of them, undoubtedly, is the Lancia Stratos, which, while not a Ferrari, at least relies on Ferrari for its power. The Stratos is an enigma, of all the cars I have driven, the most difficult to understand. Capable of being both mercilessly and endlessly rewarding, depending on its mood, it was one of the few road cars I remember approaching for the first time with a sense of fear. When driving it quickly in difficult conditions, you can never be truly certain what it was going to do next. Sometimes you would have a pretty strong hunch and act accordingly, but most of the time it was more a case of reacting.

Like the Stratos, the BMW M1 was conceived first as a competition car, from which road cars would be built to satisfy the prevailing regulations of the time. And while both were two-seater, mid-engined sportscars designed in the 1970s, the Stratos was built for the rally stage while the M1 was a racer, pure and simple. The road-going M1 made it onto the list because it was designed like an Italian supercar but built to the more exacting standards of a mainstream, quality German car maker. The theory was that the result would be a blend of style and function, and the practice agreed.

BMW turned to Lamborghini because, among other reasons, the Italian firm had beeb building mid-engined supercars for longer than anybody else. The first was the Miura, a car whose beauty and specification stunned the world when it was launched in 1966. Its memory lives on today as strong as ever in the Diablo SV. Lamborghini has never been idolized by its rivals at Ferrari, just twenty minutes down the road. Where Ferrari’s competition history is unapproachable, that of Lamborghini is patchy and largely undistinguished; while Ferrari has raked in profits for year after year, Lamborghini has almost always struggled for survival. Yet whatever the future might hold for Lamborghini, it can face it rightly proud that, from the day the Miura first broke cover, it has never compromised its values.

But if there is one car that, alone, can claim not to have sold out to anyone from the day it was first produced, long before the Miura was on Bertone’s drawing board, it is the Porsche 911. It has been in production for half a lifetime and its strengths are at least as valid today as they were in 1963. Yet from all those years of production, from the hundreds of model variants built in that time, just one stands alone as the definitive 911. It is the 2.7RS Carrera, born in 1973 and the progeny of a freakish alignment of all that ever was good in the 911. It is one of those rare cars that will tell you, after just a few miles at the wheel, that it is better than its makers could have ever intended.

The Porsche 959 was, strictly speaking, a 911 but one so far removed from the delicate sportscar from which it was derived that Porsche felt it best to rename it. Until the 959, despite certain claims at the time, no road car could come close to 320kph (200mph). A really good Lamborghini Countach might just reach 290kph (180mph), a 1984 Ferrari 288GTO was probably good for 303kph (188mph), though that was no higher than the speed Ferrari claimed for its Boxer back in 1971. But the 959 really would do 317kph (197mph) and with little fuss. Its crucial significance, though, is that without it we would never have seen the Ferrari F40 or the other 320-kph (200-mph) supercars that culminated, ultimately, in the 381-kph (237-mph) McLaren F1.