When Mattel launched the Hot Wheels brand in 1968 it probably had no idea the toys would make such a huge impact on automotive fans across the globe. The initial models, known collectively as the "Sweet 16," are among the most coveted by collectors, but it's the rare prototypes, those never meant to leave Mattel's HQ, that demand the highest prices.   Read the full article on Hagerty.com: https://www.hagerty.com/media/news/the-rarest-hot-wheels-is-worth-more-than-its-full-scale-counterpart/ ... View more

  An 805-HP F-150 to finally challenge the Ram TRX, Audi adds another cat to its litter, and a Japanese custom coachbuilder sells out its 2-year inventory in 4 days. Plus, Throwback Thursday looks at McLaren history. ... View more

Haynes, the company that has delivered in-depth repair manuals for cars and trucks for more than 50 years, recently announced that it would no longer be developing new print manuals. All of its back catalog of manuals will still be available, but all future projects seem destined for digital consumption only.   Read the full article on Hagerty.com: https://www.hagerty.com/media/news/haynes-repair-manuals-going-digital-back-catalog-still-remains-in-print/ ... View more

The specialty-equipment business that feeds the go-fast habit is a $46 billion industry. We salute some of the pioneers and their innovations that transformed jalopies into rods while building brands that are household names today ... Read the full article on Hagerty.com:   https://www.hagerty.com/media/magazine-features/these-6-performance-parts-are-true-hot-rod-heroes/ ... View more

As money moves around in the motorcycle world, there are models that get skipped over. With more buyers jumping into the collector motorcycle world and investors and speculators snagging up anything they think will be worth more tomorrow, it’s easy to think that all the good buys are gone. As a Hagerty valuation analyst and resident motorcycle collector, I don’t think so. There remain segments of all markets that present relative affordability and value for the dollar. In the collector car world, the motorcycle stands out.   Let’s look at four that have us wondering why they’ve lagged behind ...   Read the full article on Hagerty.com: https://www.hagerty.com/media/valuation/4-underappreciated-motorcycles-cruising-under-the-radar/ ... View more

Porsche is about to add “energy provider” to its resume.   Earlier in 2020, the German automaker caught us off-guard by announcing a significant investment   in the development, production, and distribution of a synthetic fuel that can replace gasoline. Porsche sees this project as a way to keep classic cars on the road when and if fossil fuels are banned around the world. Bolstered by funding from Germany’s Ministry of Economic Affairs and Energy, it’s shifting the project into high gear. It teamed up with Siemens Energy, among other partners, to begin building a pilot factory in Chile, and it plans to start distributing its synthetic fuel in the coming years.   Intrigued, we talked with Michael Steiner, Porsche’s research and development boss, and Karl Dums, its head of advanced powertrain development and powertrain strategy, to learn more about the project’s ins and outs.   Read the full article on Hagerty.com: https://www.hagerty.com/media/news/porsche-shifts-its-synthetic-fuel-project-into-high-gear/   ... View more

In February 2007 I was invited by Aston Martin to the Paul Ricard circuit in the south of France to drive some of its racing cars. Nice job, but not relevant to what we’re discussing here. Except that when we were done, they produced another car, a Vantage road car, and clearly a rather dog-eared prototype. “Have a go in that and tell us what you think,” they said. It turned out to have a V-12 engine under the bonnet. I told them it was the best Aston Martin I’d driven and they’d be insane not to make it.   I’m sure the top brass were more than capable of making up their own minds about such things, but two years later, there it was—the Aston Martin V12 Vantage. I still consider it to be one of the very best cars to wear the wings, and I don’t restrict that statement to the modern era, either. It’s one of the very best Astons in the history of the company,   DB5s and all.   Read the full article on Hagerty.com: https://www.hagerty.com/media/car-profiles/the-2009-13-aston-martin-v12-vantage-is-a-sure-fire-future-collectible/   ... View more

In the 1950s, Cadillacs the standard-bearers of American style. Featuring a long wheelbase and powerful OHV V-8 engines for comfortable, effortless cruising, the Eldorado was the pinnacle of personal luxury. Canadian businessman Reuben Allender was fond of Cadillacs and owned several himself, including a 1955 Eldorado. Allender saw the huge gulf in prices between the low-volume Eldorado and the new, small-block-powered ’55 Chevy Bel Air; he determined he could offer a product combining the best of each car and capitalize on a sweet spot in the market.   Read the full article on Hagerty.com: https://www.hagerty.com/media/auctions/el-morocco-the-eldorado-flavored-bel-air-that-never-took-off/   ... View more

From the engineering artisans that brought you the re-imagined Callum Vanquish 25 comes a new pair of resto-mod Aston Martins. The R-Reforged Vantage V-12 Zagato Heritage Twins have been redesigned by the famous Italian styling house, rebuilt by the British engineering firm, and licensed by Aston Martin ... Read the full news on Hagerty.com:   https://www.hagerty.com/media/news/re-reforged-vantage-v-12-twins-celebrate-100-years-of-zagato/   ... View more

Ducati’s best-selling bike, the Monster, will come with more power and less weight for its next generation.   First launched in 1993, the Monster has sold more than 350,000 units thanks to its recipe of a big-twin motor, superbike frame, and naked styling.   For 2021 the Monster gets a bigger 937cc Testastretta twin-cylinder engine that weighs five pounds less than its 821cc predecessor and delivers a meatier 111 hp at 9250 rpm. The motor is tuned for improved torque across the rev range and is mated to a new gearbox with Quick Shift as standard ... Read the full news on Hagerty.com:   https://www.hagerty.com/media/news/ducati-debuts-lighter-faster-monster-for-2021/   ... View more

Audi is celebrating the launch of its rear-wheel-drive R8 in the U.S. with 30 Panther Edition models. Each Panther Edition will be powered by the same raucous, 532-horsepower, 5.2-liter V-10 engine and seven-speed dual-clutch transmission found in the R8 since the second-generation launched in 2015. To set these pioneering cars apart, they will only be available painted in Panther Black with carbon fiber side mirror housings, and they’ll all be fitted with 20-inch split-five-spoke wheels finished in black with milled red accents.   Read the full news on Hagerty.com: https://www.hagerty.com/media/news/limited-panther-edition-audi-r8-coming-to-america-only/   ... View more

Everyone who’s ever serviced their differential knows how much of a joy it is to work with gear oil. It’s pleasant smelling, easy to clean and … who am I kidding? This stuff is among the worst mechanical substances ever. When cold, it’s like a gelatinous skunk spray. Even worse, differentials are filled from the side through tiny plugs and, since the whole apparatus is tucked up into the chassis, the opportunities for spillage are plentiful. Today, we’re going to break down the principal behind another cleaning tool and create our own air-powered fluid pump using the bottle in which the diff fluid originally came.   You could easily replicate this with any jar or container that has a sufficiently large lid, but stay away from anything made of glass. Metal and plastic containers are ideal. Even a thin-walled two-liter bottle can hold around 150 psi safely (they’re often used in hobby planes and rockets as flyweight air tanks), so the thick plastic sides of the diff fluid jug will be just fine.   Read the full article on Hagerty.com: https://www.hagerty.com/media/maintenance-and-tech/wrenchin-wednesday-simple-air-powered-fluid-pump-for-nasty-diff-oil/   ... View more

The winter months can be a time of great annoyance for us car lovers. We tuck our cars and trucks away to protect them from the weather and road salt, only to sit around for months twiddling our collective thumbs, wishing we were out on the roads. Still, winter can be embraced with a little preparation—and not simply the putting-your-vehicle-into-storage part. Getting your interior spick-and-span is a great project you can accomplish with your classic safely stowed in the garage away from the elements.   Read the full article on Hagerty.com: https://www.hagerty.com/media/maintenance-and-tech/deep-cleaning-your-interior-is-a-prime-winter-project/ ... View more

Despite the prevailing thinking that EVs, by virtue of their relatively straightforward design, promise to be more reliable than gasoline-powered vehicles, a recent study by Consumer Reports reveals that even electric cars are subject to new-model hiccups.   Consumer Reports   surveyed the owners of 329,000 vehicles, and among the EVs that had “more than their share of problems” were the Audi E-Tron, the Kia Niro EV, and the Tesla Model Y.   Read the full article on Hagerty.com: https://www.hagerty.com/media/news/new-evs-suffer-reliability-problems-consumer-reports/   ... View more

BMW Group previously teased an electric version of Mini’s John Cooper Works GP in a recent mockumentary focusing on the iNext, but a new batch of official images of a wrapped prototype testing out on track confirms the upcoming performance EV. Naturally, very few Mini aficionados will be surprised by this development.   Externally, the battery-powered JCW two-door concept looks like a regular JCW GP that ran into a sheet of black plastic. There’s a covered-up round logo on the driver-side of the grille, which will likely mimic the emblem worn by the current Cooper Electric (which has also been known as the Mini Cooper S E EV and the Mini Electric. Clear as mud? Good.)   Read the full article on Hagerty.com: https://www.hagerty.com/media/news/an-all-electric-john-cooper-works-mini-is-on-the-way/   ... View more

  Ducati and Lamborghini co-develop a devil, the Mustang Mach-E gets a high-performance model, and Cadillac offers buyouts to its non-EV-ready dealers. Plus, You Paid What? ... View more

  Everywhere Tom and the Barn Find Hunter team travel, they play a game of getting and chasing leads to scope out where old cars are hiding. Tom usually has one friend or contact in each area he explores, and that person will connect him with a few promising owners or collectors. In the case of his San Diego trip a while back, that initial contact was Peter DaSilva. However, though Tom and crew were itching to hunt for the cars Peter had mentioned, Tom thought it would be fun to drop in on Peter's shop to poke around the piles of interesting artifacts he had amassed over years.   Read the full story on Hagerty.com: https://www.hagerty.com/media/videos/compact-shelby-gt500-barn-find-hunter-ep93/ ... View more

When AMC senior manager Frank Lipare opened his garage door in Manhasset, Long Island, to reveal a wide-shouldered, blue AMX, teenage Joseph Belfiore was dumbstruck. It was the mid-1970s, and he had sought out Lipare for advice regarding hopping up his own  1970 AMX.  The homebuilt race car before him was the meanest piece of American Motors machinery he’d ever seen. Little did Belfiore know that, decades later, he’d buy Lipare’s car—not once, but twice—and spend eight years restoring it in his own garage.   Read the full article on Hagerty.com: https://www.hagerty.com/media/car-profiles/this-unique-amx-scca-veteran-is-ready-to-rumble/   ... View more

Today’s featured car is a 1977 Chrysler New Yorker Brougham. Essentially an Imperial with a Chrysler body, a lower price tag, and a different options menu, the ’76–78 New Yorker Brougham was one of the last holdouts of true full-size luxury. In 1979, Chrysler debuted an overhauled and much smaller New Yorker, but the “Imperialized” cars are in a league of their own. They were offered either in coupe or sedan versions, both resplendent with frameless glass and razor-thin B-pillars, and were powered either by a 400- or 440-cu-in V-8 mated to a three-speed TorqueFlite auto.   This particular Wedgewood Blue example features the 400-cu-in option and belongs to Ken Tolksdorf ... Read the full article on Hagerty.com:   https://www.hagerty.com/media/hagerty-community/rides-from-the-reader-1977-chrysler-new-yorker-brougham/   ... View more

The 69th annual Detroit Autorama, originally scheduled for March 5–7, 2021, has been postponed until April 30–May 2 at Detroit’s TCF Center.   Read the full article on Hagerty.com: https://www.hagerty.com/media/news/2021-detroit-autorama-postponed-until-april-30-may-2/ ... View more

On December 2, 1985, Formula 1 team McLaren celebrated its second consecutive constructors’ championship win by forming a new company. McLaren Automotive would soon go on to build, arguably, the definitive supercar, and later become a small-volume sports car maker in the mold of Ferrari or Lamborghini. As the company celebrates 35 years we take a look back at a handful of the many highlights.   Read the full article on Hagerty.com: https://www.hagerty.com/media/automotive-history/celebrate-35-years-of-mclaren-automotive-with-these-5-icons/   ... View more

Hot-rodders love to smash boundaries, but not everyone wants to completely transform their stock classic. While old cars ooze character and style from an earlier age, they often lack modern luxuries and safety protections that are found on even the most basic of new cars. Is there a middle ground where you can keep all of the things you love about your classic but employ some newer components to improve the things you don’t?   Read the full article on Hagerty.com: https://www.hagerty.com/media/lists/6-subtle-stealthy-upgrades-to-modernize-your-classic/   ... View more

Italy’s most powerful car ever, the Pininfarina Battista, is undergoing final high-speed testing at the Nardò  Technical Center. The Porsche-owned facility features a 3.8-mile handling circuit and a 7.8-mile banked oval where speeds well in excess of 200 mph can be achieved.   Read the full article on Hagerty.com: https://www.hagerty.com/media/news/watch-the-pininfarina-battista-blat-around-the-nardo-ring/   ... View more

The Aston Martin Lagonda was designed to be the very best of British; a flagship with performance and technology that put mid-1970s Rolls-Royce and Bentley to shame. It would be the car to save Aston Martin (a phrase that has been used time and again over the company’s century of struggles) and tycoons the world over would line up to buy one.   Well, that was the theory anyway. In practice the William Towns-designed wedge almost bankrupted the company. It cost a fortune to develop, with the advanced electronics reported to have cost four times as much as the rest of the car. Its LED dashboard, which was later replaced by a supposedly more reliable cathode ray tube display, was a nightmare. No less than 40 touch sensitive switches adorned the interior, all just waiting to go wrong.   Read the full article on Hagerty.com: https://www.hagerty.com/media/news/are-you-brave-enough-to-bid-on-this-1989-aston-martin-lagonda/   ... View more

What does rural northwestern Ohio have in common with Australia, besides the fact that they both have Outback Steakhouses? (I know, I know;   I want to believe.) It’s simple. Many ecological niches that are occupied by tarsiers, pottos, lorises, and lemurs in most of the world are occupied by specialized marsupials in Australia. (For more information, but no further clarity on what a “potto” might be,   read this.) This is because Australia has long been mostly isolated from migratory and invasive species. Or at least they were until humans brought their cats to the island—but that’s a different story.   In Ohio towns like Marysville, Anna, Indian Lake, and elsewhere, nearly all of the jobs are provided by Honda and its suppliers. So you might find an electrical contractor’s shop with three   Ridgelines   out front, or a pizza-delivery place that uses Fits exclusively. The jobs that are done by other cars in other places are all given to Hondas here. You also get the unique phenomenon of the rural shack with ten broken-down Civics in front of it. Maybe they aren’t broken down. Or you might see a fellow who looks like he’d be perfectly at home racing stock cars in Georgia—except he’s an   SCCA legend who only drives Hondas.   Read the full article on Hagerty.com: https://www.hagerty.com/media/advice/ask-jack/ask-jack-accord-ing-to-civics/   ... View more

Among the many, many complaints Americans had about the Yugo, the econo-hatch’s lackluster performance was among the top faults that sunk the little Soviet-built Fiat 127-copycat here in the States. Build quality and reliability issues aside, the glacial acceleration just never really clicked with a crowd that was less caring about its low price and reasonable economy.   In juxtaposition to its original state of being,   today’s Craigslist find   remedies a major shortcoming with an out-of-the-box ’86 Yugo with a not-so elegant solution: a 500-cubic-inch Cadillac V-8   at each end.   Read the full article on Hagerty.com: https://www.hagerty.com/media/news/this-yugo-has-double-vision-two-cadillac-500s/   ... View more

Part of the charm of vintage cars lies in tiny aesthetic details that showcase the dedication of their designers. Modern cars may be faster, more reliable, and more likely to sip fuel than to guzzle it, but they often lack the personality of their retro predecessors. Emblems are one way that even run-of-the-mill economy cars were once given a splash of pizzazz—not to mention the high-power, stylish coupes that came packed to the gills (grilles?) with flashy trim.   Here are 17 of our favorite emblems from America's Big Three, from the '50s to today.   Read the full article on Hagerty.com: https://www.hagerty.com/media/lists/17-of-our-favorite-american-car-emblems/ ... View more

Ex-racing machines are rarely found in public hands, especially from the top tier of motorsport. Factory-backed race efforts retire machines year after year, and the machinery seemingly disappears into the ether, only occasionally to be found in the wild. And if one is found, it’s often a shell of what once was, merely a handful of parts from the original machine.   This Ducati GP3   listed on eBay   seems to buck that trend. The GP3 is a product of a rule change, like most race machinery. The top tier of motorcycle GP racing opened the rulebook to four-stroke 990cc machines to run alongside the two-stroke 500cc bikes that had been the only design on the starting grid in 2002. This was enough to draw Ducati to join the newly renamed MotoGP class that was mainly comprised of Japanese manufacturers. The two-rider team of Troy Bayliss and Louis Capirossi was the first to roll the Ducati out of the pits and onto the track in 2003.   Read the full article on Hagerty.com: https://www.hagerty.com/media/motorcycles/italian-unobtanium-this-ducati-gp3-could-be-yours/   ... View more

Two decades before Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson, and Dorothy Vaughan broke through racial and sexual bias to make history at NASA in the 1960s—a feat celebrated in the 2016 movie   Hidden Figures—there was Beatrice Shilling.   Shilling, known as Tilly to her friends, was a remarkably gifted British engineer who in 1936 was recruited to serve as a scientific officer in the Royal Aircraft Establishment (RAE), a position she held until her retirement in 1969. Shilling’s decision to join the RAE had a lasting effect not only on her life but also may have saved the lives of pilots and soldiers in World War II.   Read the full article on Hagerty.com: https://www.hagerty.com/media/people/two-decades-before-hidden-figures-engineer-beatrice-shilling-made-british-aviation-history/   ... View more

Audi has recently completed a review of its motorsport programs and has made a series of moves as a result. The big news is that Audi will return to the Le Mans 24 Hours with a new Le Mans Daytona hybrid (LMDh) car in 2023. The LMDh cars, based on the Le Mans Prototype 2 (LMP2) cars, are effectively the replacement for IMSA’s current Daytona Prototype international (Dpi) cars. The LMDh cars will feature manufacturer-produced body kits and drivetrains, along with a standard hybrid system that features a Williams Advanced Engineering battery and Bosch electric motor.   Read the full article on Hagerty.com: https://www.hagerty.com/media/motorsports/audi-returns-to-le-mans-in-2023-enters-the-dakar-rally-for-22-and-leaves-formula-e/   ... View more