Want to spend 7 minutes feeling good about the world? Watch this superb new film from Petrolicious.
It features one of the nicest guys you’ll ever see driving one of the nicest little Alfas you’ll ever see. It’s a car he built himself and he did such a good job that he ended up working for one of the best custom car builders in California – Singer Porsche.
Sit back, pump up the volume and enjoy.
I was watching a Harry’s Garage video last night and it prompted me to the fact that I hadn’t put together my video for my Porsche 968 CS yet. Bad me!
OK, I’m no Harry Metcalfe when it comes to enthusiastic presentation. I have to get a little more comfortable in front of a camera. But here it is: my Porsche 968 CS.
The video goes for about 8 minutes and I hope you enjoy it. Apologies in advance for the rattly audio during the driving sequence. It’s my GoPro housing. I need to find a solution for that.
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One of the good things about living in Hobart – that winding hillside road is only about five or six minutes away from the city centre.
Good times are never far away! 🙂
The car is an Alfa Romeo Sprint Speciale from 1965 and it was built especially for the La Carrera Panamericana race through Mexico. There’s plenty of driving footage to see and it’s a wonder to behold. In fact, it’s so wonderful it makes you wish there was no owner’s story to tell. Just give me more driving!!
For me, this video sums up the soul of Alfa Romeo. I hope he calls in the stylists and the engineers and says “This is your brief. Do this for a modern Alfa Romeo”.
That’d be fine by me.
Put it on widescreen and turn the driving footage up loud!
Jay Leno gets all sorts of cool stuff coming through his garage. Most of it he owns, but occasionally he brings in someone else’s car to show it off. Such is the case with this Lancia Fulvia Sport.
The video is around 25 minutes long and provides a great overview to the Fulvia, albeit with the alternate Zagato body.
For those unfamiliar, this is basically the same as my Fulvia, but Lancia had Zagato build some bodies for them until 1972. This is one of those cars. Mine is the regular coupe made by Lancia itself (they made a sedan called the Berlina, too, but that’s another story).
Anyway, the main difference is in the body styling. Underneath, it’s basically the same car.
Enjoy.
I’ve had Gavin’s 1982 Alfa Romeo Alfasud Sprint Veloce parked in my front yard for the last few months. The best part of the deal is that I had his OK to drive it once or twice a week – just to keep it lubricated, of course 🙂
The car left our humble abode this afternoon. It’s heading back to Melbourne tomorrow and it’ll either be sold or restored a little more.
I wanted a keepsake so I whipped out my iPhone this afternoon and shot a quick video walk-around of the car in the fading light.
I had an Alfasud Sprint in the late 90’s. It was silver with a brown interior, just like this one. It didn’t run anywhere near as good, though. The last few months have been as nostalgic as they have been thrilling.
Here’s the video. Please accept my apologies for the quality, but hopefully it gives you just a small sense of the car.
Petrolicious has come a long way in a short time. They started with nice videos of passion-worthy, but very obtainable cars like the Datsun 510 and early Nissan Skyline. In just over a year, they’ve proved themselves worthy of being trusted to film one of the most valuable cars in the world today – a Ferrari 250 GTO.
Well done, sirs!!
The following is a feast for the eyes and especially for the ears. It’s a nice little history lesson, too, directly from the son of one of Ferrari’s own factory drivers. The driving footage and accompanying soundtrack from just after the 4-minute mark is perhaps some of the most drool-worthy motoring film I’ve ever seen.
A couple of asides….. keep an eye on the windscreen wiper from time to time, and watch how the speed makes it wiggle. Also, is this the most beautiful gearshift housing ever placed in a car?
Put it on full-screen, turn up the sound, and Enjoy. Again and again.
This is a long one – just over one hour – so set aside some sofa time with your favourite beverage and a few biscuits.
Living The Porsche is essentially a long-form advertisement for Autohaus Hamilton, a Porsche specialist workshop in Sydney, Australia. But describing it that way and failing to give you more would be a huge injustice to what is a fantastic Porsche film.
Porsche is a company dedicated to racing and most of their cars have been built with racing in mind. They’re engineered in such a way that nearly every Porsche model is a potential racer that can be used every day. OK, perhaps not some of the more recent money-spinners, but I digress….
This film has some regular road warriors in it, but most of the people profiled here do run their cars on the track, either in club racing, rallying or something more serious. The community buy-in to the Porsche racing ethos is no gimmick, as you’ll see.
Living The Porsche documents the experiences shared by this group of Autohaus Hamilton customers – their cars, their love for the brand, their build stories and yes, for some of them, their racing stories.
The primary focus is the 911, but I was pleased to see a couple of 968’s get a look in, too. If you’re into Porsches, this film is time well spent. Look past the early references to the business and you’ll see a group of truly passionate people that love their cars. If you’re a car nut, you know that’s exactly the way it should be.
If you’ve been on a tour of a modern car factory, this old video about Porsche is going to make you giggle. If you’ve got even a basic awareness of modern health and safety protocols, it’ll blow your mind. Either way, it’s super-interesting and a great look into quality car building in yesterday’s world.
This is a video tour showing the build process for the Porsche 356. Think Megafactories, 1950’s style. While everything’s basically done by hand there are still some extraordinary machines and the commitment to quality is evident throughout.
I think we might have just learned exactly when you should quit what was once a good thing.
Ken Block has released his Gymkhana 6 video, continuing a five year tradition of entertaining driving, copious amounts of tyre smoke and unabashed pre-Christmas product promotion.
Here it is:
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What do you think?
I can remember when Block’s videos were jaw-dropping and even quite funny. Personally speaking, this one felt like The Godfather III – it’s watchable, but not even close to the films that came before it.
When the TV show Happy Days was in its waning years a few decades ago, they had Fonzie on water skis jumping over a shark to create some tension and (they hoped), some interest. This is now considered the Gold Standard in doing ludicrous things in order to maintain interest.
Mr Block might want to consider doing his next Gymkhana video at a water park because Gymkhana 6 is more than just a bit tedious in comparison to episodes 1-5.
In fact, it’s not even as entertaining as a tribute/parody from a guy calling himself Ken Box, who whizzes around a warehouse in a Crazy Cart wrapped in a cardboard box.
Enjoy.
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I know. It’s all a bit frivolous and light weight. Feel free to make your arguments that I’m jumping the shark myself by writing this post.
I’ll try and get to something more engaging soon, I promise.
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It’s natural that people tend to be comfortable with what they know if it’s functional and does what they need it to do. There’s rarely a need to explore the finest quality product available unless you’re deeply interested in that certain something.
I’d be quite happy with a watch, for example, but some people won’t settle for anything less than a Rolex or a TAG Heuer.
I used to think that companies like Ford and Toyota built generic cars, companies like BMW and Mercedes built real quality and further down the road, Ferrari and Lamborghini built real exotic quality. To a large extent, that’s mostly true.
Then I visited Koenigsegg, whose in-house capability and dedication to building the best product possible makes everyone look generic.
It’s all about what matters to you. You seek out the quality that you desire, whether it be as a potential owner of something or just as an interested party and an admirer.
It’s only in the last few years that I’ve gained a real appreciation of how hard it is to engineer something that is bespoke for a particular creation. Mass production has us all used to the idea that we can only change or customise a small part of anything we are looking to buy.
There are people who don’t work that way, however. People who don’t just build things. They create things. People who can take the familiar and make it special.
I know they’re just one of a large number of custom shops, but their work struck me as not only being top quality, but pretty tasteful as well (which is not something you can say of some of the more well known custom shops that end up with their own reality TV shows).
I wish Petrolicious had got a few more customer cars into this video for a larger exhibition of Ringbrothers’ work. The small sample you see in this video is enough to whet the appetite but I’d really love to see more of what they can do.
Well done, Ringbrothers. The more I see stuff like this, the more I love the idea of a car as a piece of art. This is craftsmanship.
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