In October last year I wrote of the Ferrari 250 GTO, the classic GT car that sets the standard for all the others. At the time, I was unaware of YouTube but have been digging around and found several clips that enable us to experience the GTO more immediately.

Listen to the sound of twelve cylinders working in sweet harmony in these clips, the throaty voice of six twin-choke Weber carburetors, the awe-struck voices of the onlookers. It may be a forty year old design now but it still reigns supreme.

Tuning a 250 GTO with a little road test afterwards.

Just a GTO - it’s enough!

And this is what it sounds like in its natural home, the track.

And here’s an interesting little clip:

The Ferrari 250 LM, the mid-engined car that replaced the 250 GTO. Almost as desirable…

For a long time Ford in Britain were one of the most conservative of car manufacturers - tried and trusted was their motto. It was not until 1976, seventeen years after the birth of the Mini (which sent everyone else rushing to bring out similar spec products) that Ford dared to design a front-engined car with transverse engine.

Just occasionally, however, they seemed to have a rush of blood to the head and experimented with some strange ideas. The Ford Anglia of 1959 was one of these, heavily influenced by American styling and sporting a reverse-slope rear window that made it stand out like a sore thumb amongst other cars in their range.

To European eyes it looked strange and yet the car sold in large numbers. It was cheap, cheerful, nippy and handled pretty well for the time. Its great secret was the 105E engine - a little powerhouse that never gave up. But no-one seems to have told Ford; they must have thought it was the reverse slope window that made the car sell so well for, in 1962, they brought out the Consul Capri with the same feature.

The Capri flopped worse than the Edsel in America. In 1964 Ford gave up on it and concentrated their efforts on the much more conventional Cortina that was to prove their bread and butter for twenty years. The Capri name made a comeback as a cheap fastback with sporting pretensions in 1969 and this too proved very successful. But the reverse slope rear window was gone forever.

Yet those cheeky little Anglias really had something. Ask anyone who once owned one and they get a faraway, misty look in their eyes as they recall the good times they had in their Anglia.

Through the 1950s and 1960s, a horde of little cars competed at Le Mans for the Thermal Efficiency Index prize. The idea of this formula was to reward those who tried for performance without using oceans of fuel and the competing cars were invariably small, ultra-streamlined and powered by tiny engines. I have always felt that the drivers of these little wonders must have been very brave to head down the Mulsanne straight at their maximum 120 mph or so with the big cars screaming past at close to 200 mph.

A consistent entrant and winner of the class was the small French firm, D.B. - the initials indicating the partnership between two designers, Charles Deutsch and René Bonnet. When the pair split up in 1962, Bonnet started building cars under his own name with Renault supplying the engines.

And so was born one of the prettiest little GT cars ever - the René Bonnet Djet. It was one of the first production mid-engined cars and, thanks to its light weight, was as zippy as it looked. With only one liter of engine, it still managed a top speed of about 110 mph. Most were bought for racing in spite of being intended for road use.

By 1965 M. Bonnet was in financial difficulties and sold out to Matra, who continued production of the Djet and eventually rebodied it with one of the ugliest designs ever. As a result, the original Bonnet Djets are still regarded as the real thing.

Here’s a strange one - the Tatra 603. Made in Czechoslovakia, the 603 was actually well before its time when first designed in the fifties. The company has been going strong for almost as long as Benz, although they gave up making cars in the nineties, preferring to concentrate on their successful truck range.

But Tatra began its tradition of rear-engined vehicles in the thirties, even Dr Ferdinand Porsche “borrowing” heavily from Tatra designs in the design of his Volkswagen. The 603 was one of these rear-engined curiosities.

But the uniqueness of the 603 does not end with its unusual positioning of the power plant. The engine was an air-cooled 2.5 liter V8! Okay, it only produced 95 bhp but imagine all that weight swinging around behind the back axle. The handling was spectacular at speed as a result - but it did not matter too much since only the top party officials and factory managers could afford to have one. They were interested in luxury rather than performance and the 603 delivered in that area.

Those Czechs know how to put together a good car, in spite of the undeserved reputation of the old Skodas, and Tatra was no exception. The company holds a number of impressive records, as well as Dr Porsche’s respect - it is the third oldest car manufacturer in the world and was the first to introduce a body influenced by aerodynamics.