Driven to disaster: the Andrea Moda story

A new Formula 1 season has just begun, and to be quite honest I won't be bothering to follow it as I have long since lost interest in this now very clinical and costly sport. Instead, I'm looking back 25 years to a time when there were so many drivers competing that a pre-qualifying session was necessary just to trim down the numbers in qualifying proper, and all sorts of hopeless outfits wasted their time and money getting nowhere. Against some very stiff competition, the particular team I'm looking at are widely regarded as the worst ever to grace the sport. Life may have had the worst car, but did at least manage to turn up at every meeting with it in working order, something this team had difficulty with, although unlike Life they did actually once start a race. I'm talking about Andrea Moda, an outfit so staggeringly inept they have the dubious distinction of ending up getting banned after less than a season for bringing the sport into disrepute.

Andrea Moda really didn't belong in F1

From Unexceptional beginnings

Hagerty Insurance's annual Festival of the Unexceptional has already become one of my unmissable highlights of the car show season in its short existence, and I reported on the 2015 and 2016 events at the time. Its history goes back one more year though, as the very first Festival took place in 2014 before I started this blog, so here I'm going to look back at that inaugural 'Concours de l'Ordinaire'. Held at Whittlebury Park on Saturday 26th July 2014, the same weekend as the nearby Silverstone Classic, it appears to have originated from a realisation that there are so many shows for valuable and exotic classic cars but nothing for the bread-and-butter cars of yesterday that in many cases are actually now much rarer than the exotica.

A rare and exotic classic car. And a Porsche.

Unsung heroes: Nissan March Super Turbo

For the month of March, what could be more appropriate than a car called March? Everyone must know the Nissan Micra (or March as it's named in Japan) and it's definitely not an obscure car, but I must admit to being totally unaware of this particular version and have my friend Matt to thank for telling me about it. As soon as he mentioned what was under the bonnet, something you really wouldn't expect from such a car, I knew it was worthy of inclusion in the unsung heroes series, so here's the story.

It may look like a barried up Micra but there's something very unusual under the bonnet (image: Nissan)

The Volkswagen Group may be making headlines with their twincharged TSI engine range featuring both a turbocharger and a supercharger and claiming this to be a 21st century innovation, but this technology's first use in a production car was actually three decades ago in a limited-run and largely unknown high-performance version of the Nissan March. Here in the UK the Micra has an unglamorous reputation as the car of choice for pensioners, driving instructors and pizza delivery boys, so the Super Turbo will make you look at it in a more exciting way, but sadly it was sold only on the Japanese domestic market and is virtually unheard of in Europe.