This may seem a strange choice for Auto-Exotica; the Renault Dauphine was hardly a collector’s classic or a ground-breaking innovation that changed the face of motoring forever. But it has something that no other car can lay claim to: it was the car I learned to drive in!

It was my mother’s car (my father’s at the time was a Rover 90 - a classic of sorts) and I am glad, looking back, that it was the accidental choice for my formative driving days. What made it special as a first car was that it was rear-engined. There can be no better introduction to driving than a rear-engined car, especially if you are in your teens and fancy yourself as God’s gift to the driving world.

Because rear-engined cars are fundamentally safe; they will spin like a top if you overdo a corner but, unless you’re driving a Volkswagen Beetle, there is no way you’ll ever turn one over. Beetles flip because they have swing arm rear suspension - as the car leans away from the corner, the swing arm forces the wheel under the car until eventually it can go no further and, at that point, the car turns over.

Not so the Dauphine. I learned to “hang the tail out” around corners, holding the car balanced at the exact point between spinning and turning, and occasionally I would lose it and do a fancy pirouette down the road - but never was it anywhere near flipping. As a tutor for opposite lock, it was better than a skidpan.

This particular Dauphine was unusual in one respect; it had a big letter “G” on the rocker cover. Now, knowing that the Renault tune-up specialists in France were named Gordini, I became convinced that somehow one of their engines had found its way into my mothers car. Because it was fast, much faster than it should have been and quicker than its natural competition, the Ford Anglias that abounded.

The Dauphine should have been pretty quick anyway - it was nothing but a tinny body with plastic trimmings inside and the sound of its slamming doors would echo in the empty space of its innards. So it was light and did not need a brute of an engine to get it up to speed. The extra power, real or imagined, donated by that “G” on the engine gave my mother’s car a performance that made it a joy to drive, especially as it handled so well (if you enjoyed oversteer - and what red-blooded boy racer doesn’t?).

Of course, there were all the usual foibles of French design of the time - the whippy gear lever and blatantly plastic steering wheel - but I forgave it all because it was such fun to drive. Years later, when I encountered driving on ice and snow for the first time (it does not snow in Zimbabwe), the lessons that old Dauphine taught me came in very handy.

So I don’t care that the Dauphine probably doesn’t belong amongst the illustrious company of these pages. It was my first love, after all.

I do like the oddities of the automotive world and they don’t come much odder than the cars produced by the German DKW company. For a start, they were committed to the two-stroke engine and all their cars had the familiar clatter of that engine. Not content with that, they were the first to build a three-cylinder engine and it was used in almost all of their their cars.

Why two-stroke and why three cylinders? I would have to guess that they just liked being different. But it was a very effective difference - their engines were so light that they proved very handy in competition vehicles and DKW was a big name in rallying in the 50s. There was a strong rumor at the time that DKW stood for Deutches Kleine Wunder (little German wonder), a fitting enough accolade to the car and more accurate than the real meaning: Dampf-Kraft Wagen (steam-powered vehicle).

The car I remember from the early sixties was their 1000S, a fairly normal-looking family saloon, apart from that distinctive racket from the engine, of course. The Deek was common in Africa at the time and, even today, there is a thriving fanbase in South Africa. But the multiplicity of models and variants were to prove too much for the company to support; in 1964 they were absorbed by the Volkswagen Group and they ceased production of one of the most idiosyncratic cars on the road.

Many of these strange adventures in the automotive world were to prove ahead of their time. The two-stroke engine has been killed off by clean emissions legislation but the idea of odd-numbered cylinders has been reborn and lives again in the many five-cylinder engines of today. So it is good that we should remember DKW and the German engineers who insisted on doing things differently. The Wikipedia has a very good history of the company for those who are interested.

One of my latest great finds on the net is the free photo site, Bigfoto dot com. All the photos are supplied by amateurs who just like to see their work being used and all they ask is that credit be given to the site. And yet the quality of the pictures is excellent.

While digging through, I found some photos that illustrate this in the context of cars and I couldn’t resist showing some of them to you. The beauty is in the details!

Porsche introduced the 904 in 1964 with the sole purpose of racing. To meet the terms of the homologation rules, they had to build a hundred road-going examples. Such was the demand for the car that they produced twenty more in 1965.

The engine was the inevitable Porsche flat-4, although some of the later cars had the flat-6 and just a few, for racing by the factory team, the flat-8. The car had a fiberglass body and was very light as a result - it won the Targa Florio in 1964 as well as many other races. But the reason I write about it here is that it looked so good; to my eye, it is by far the best-looking Porsche ever built.

Who cares that it is way beyond our reach and probably impractical as a road car? It’s as pretty as a picture and deserves to be remembered. And it was the first step in an evolution that led ultimately to the all-conquering Porsche 917. Now that is progeny to be proud of!