Everyone knows that great GT racer of the sixties, the Ford GT40. But does anyone remember the car that made it possible, the Lola Mk VI, or GT as it was more commonly named?

In the early years of that decade, makers of GT racers were slow to follow Formula 1 in designing mid-engined cars and Eric Broadley, founder of Lola Cars, decided to give it a try. The result was the Lola GT, the car that caught everyone by surprise in 1963. It was so good-looking and promised great performance too.

Lola entered it late for Le Mans that year and their rushed preparation meant that it failed to make the distance, although it was running amongst the leaders when it broke. The potential was obvious and we looked forward to the car challenging and perhaps beating the dominant Ferraris.

But it was not to be. Ford wanted to have a go at Le Mans and were working on a mid-engined design; but, when they saw the Lola, they dropped everything, bought the car and the services of its designer. Out of that deal came the Ford GT Mk I, a car that owed much to Broadley’s Lola GT. And the Mk I evolved into the GT40, of course.

So we never found out how good a racer the Lola would turn out to be. But it remains one of the prettiest cars ever to see the light of day!

Christie’s are going to be auctioning one of the only two 1939 Auto Union D-Types in the world. It is expected to fetch the highest ever price for a car of any sort.

The D-Type was Auto Union’s response to Hitler’s demand that German cars be unbeatable in racing. I’m sure we all have seen photographs of the rear-engined monster, a car so ferociously difficult to drive that only the truly talented (and brave), like Nuvolari and Caracciola, could drive it.

But what a gorgeous monster it is! As I mentioned in a previous post, its looks were to influence the design of the Audi TT Coupe, a distant inheritor of the Auto Union legacy. Like the Mercedes offering of the time, the D-Type met the challenge of racing with oodles of power but at least the Auto Union engineers made the fight against Alfa Romeo a little fairer by choosing a configuration for the time that made the car almost a death trap!

So, if you have a few million to spare, remember to put your bid in early.

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.