The Car Nerd with Jason Hassett

In 1999, a Mercedes racing car took off at nearly 200 mph, cleared the barriers at Le Mans, and landed in a forest. It was the third time in three days that a Mercedes CLR had left the ground. Mark Webber had already survived two backflips. His car had been withdrawn, the remaining cars had been fitted with extra front winglets, and the drivers had been told to avoid following other cars too close...

In 1994, a family estate car accelerated from 0 to 30 mph faster than a McLaren F1. It had 315 horsepower, permanent four-wheel drive, and a Porsche badge on the back. It was the Audi RS2 Avant. And it almost never existed. In the early 1990s, Porsche was fighting for survival. Sales had collapsed, its sports cars were ageing, and the company desperately needed outside manufacturing contracts. Mea...

In 1998, Mitsubishi entered the Dakar Rally with a 260-horsepower V6.But in Japan, you could walk into a Mitsubishi dealership and buy a Pajero with the same engine making 280 horsepower. The road car was more powerful than the racing car. And the racing car only existed because Mitsubishi had built the road car first. This was the Mitsubishi Pajero Evolution. A 280-horsepower, four-wheel-drive ho...

For decades, Alfa Romeo had built its reputation on one simple formula. A beautiful sporting coupé. An engine at the front. And power going to the rear wheels. Then, in 1994, Alfa Romeo brought back one of its most famous names. The GTV.Except this time, it was front-wheel drive. Underneath its extraordinary Pininfarina bodywork was a Fiat-derived platform, a sideways-mounted engine and suspension...

In 1995, Peugeot entered one of the most ridiculous racing cars ever built into the Spa 24 Hours. A family people carrier. With sliding doors. The Peugeot 806 was designed to carry children, luggage and shopping. But a small Belgian racing team decided to turn it into a genuine touring car. They stripped out the interior, installed a racing engine producing around 280 horsepower, and sent it to Sp...

Nine years. That's how long Tesla customers have been waiting for the new Roadster. In November 2017, Elon Musk unveiled a $200,000 electric supercar that promised to reach 60 mph in 1.9 seconds, exceed 250 mph, and travel 620 miles on a single charge. It was supposed to arrive in 2020.Then 2021. Then 2022. Then 2023.And somewhere along the way, it acquired rocket thrusters, SpaceX engineers,...

In January 1988, a television helicopter over the Sahara caught something that should not have been possible. Ari Vatanen was flat out in a works Peugeot 405 Turbo 16. Then an eleven-tonne truck appeared beside him. It drew level at more than 200 kilometres an hour. And then it pulled away. The truck was the DAF TurboTwin X1. It had two 11.6-litre diesel engines. Six turbochargers. Around 1,200 ho...

In 1999, the Museum of Modern Art put a Fiat Multipla on display beside the General Motors EV1 and the Toyota Prius. Top Gear named it Car of the Year. They also called it one of the ugliest cars on the road. Because underneath the face that made the Multipla a punchline was one of the cleverest family cars ever designed. Fiat had been given an almost impossible brief:Six adults. Their luggage. An...

In 1998, Toyota arrived at Le Mans with a car that barely pretended to be a road car. The rules said GT1 cars had to be homologated for the road. They also had to have luggage space. The Toyota GT-One had no boot. So Toyota pointed at the fuel tank. When the tank was empty, they argued, it technically counted as usable space. The officials accepted it. That loophole became one of the most outrageo...

In the mid-1990s, Audi took a sports car proposal to Porsche. Porsche passed. Audi built it anyway. Underneath, the new TT shared its basic architecture with the Volkswagen Golf Mk4. The firewall, pedal box, engine mounting points and much of the structure came from Volkswagen’s mass-market hatchback. But Audi wrapped it in one of the most distinctive designs of the 1990s, charged more than twice...

In late 1993, a Swedish race shop arrived at Volvo’s factory in Gothenburg to collect a bare 850 bodyshell. They wanted a saloon. The production line was building estates. So they took one. A few months later, Volvo announced that it would enter the British Touring Car Championship with an 850 estate — a car shaped more like a family holiday wagon than a touring car. Rivals laughed. Mechanics call...

In October 1974, a convoy of Soviet cars arrived at a former RAF nuclear missile base in East Yorkshire. Twelve years earlier, three American-controlled Thor missiles had stood on that same site, armed with thermonuclear warheads and pointed at the Soviet Union. Now it was being used to prepare Ladas for British customers. And fourteen years later, Lada would outsell Honda in Britain. The story be...

In 1988, four men from McLaren were stuck in an airport after the Italian Grand Prix when a conversation began that would change road cars forever. McLaren dominated Formula One. Gordon Murray believed that knowledge could be used to build something completely different: not a racing car with number plates, but the greatest road car ever made. There was no top-speed target. No turbochargers. No tr...

In 2001, Jaguar launched the car that was supposed to transform the company. Ford had spent billions rebuilding Jaguar, but the brand was still selling nowhere near enough cars. The answer was Project X400: a compact executive saloon designed to take Jaguar directly into the territory dominated by the BMW 3-Series, Mercedes C-Class and Audi A4. There was just one problem. Underneath, it was based...

In 1983, Mercedes built a car that BMW couldn’t answer. The 190E 2.3-16 had a Cosworth-developed cylinder head, sixteen valves, and a set of world endurance records before customers had even taken delivery. BMW’s chairman walked into Motorsport, turned to engineer Paul Rosche, and gave him one instruction: build a sporting engine for the 3-Series. Fourteen days later, the first prototype was runni...

In 2001, Renault built a hatchback that could barely outrun the hatchback it was based on. The doors were standard Clio. So was the roofline, tailgate and badge. But the back seats were gone. In their place sat a three-liter V6 from a family saloon, mounted sideways directly behind the driver and sending its power to the rear wheels. Renault had taken inspiration from the legendary 5 Turbo and cre...

Group B Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlRHygh59386nA5Cost2pUW4p3OkNMlK7 In 1984, British journalists watched a rally car charge toward them on a cinema screen. Then a real MG Metro 6R4 burst straight through it. Behind the driver sat a Rover V8 with two cylinders literally cut off — because the real engine still didn’t exist. Austin Rover had decided to turn one of Britain’s mos...

Group B Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlRHygh59386nA5Cost2pUW4p3OkNMlK7In January 1983, high in the mountains above Monte Carlo, men working for Lancia went out onto frozen rally stages in the middle of the night. They were spreading agricultural salt across the ice. Not because they were cheating. Because nobody had thought to write a rule saying they couldn't. Lancia was p...

In the summer of 2000, evo magazine strapped timing equipment to a British sports car almost nobody had heard of. It hit 60 mph in 4.1 seconds and 100 mph in 10.2—beating the Porsche 911 GT3, evo’s reigning Car of the Year. The Porsche cost £76,500.The Noble M12 cost £45,000.And its rear lights came from a Ford Mondeo. The M12 was built by Lee Noble, a self-taught engineer with no degree, almost n...

In 1974, a four-door Japanese family saloon entered the most destructive rally on Earth. The East African Safari Rally covered roughly six thousand kilometres of flooded public roads, volcanic dust, mud, rocks and mechanical punishment. Porsche led—until its suspension collapsed. The car that came through to win was a Mitsubishi Lancer driven by Kenyan mechanic’s son Joginder Singh. It was Mitsubi...

In 2009, Glass’s Guide examined more than six thousand three-year-old cars in Britain to find which had lost their owners the most money. Second, third and fourth place were all Rovers—a brand that no longer existed. But the worst depreciating car wasn’t a Rover. It was the Alfa Romeo 166.An Italian executive saloon with double-wishbone suspension, one of the greatest V6 engines ever put into a ro...

In 1993, the man who saved the Swiss watch industry decided to reinvent the car. Nicolas Hayek imagined a cheap, colourful electric runabout that people could personalise like a Swatch—small enough for two passengers, city streets, and, in his words, “two cases of beer.”Volkswagen dismissed it as an elephant’s roller skate. Mercedes-Benz agreed to build it. The result was one of the cleverest, str...

Group B Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlRHygh59386nA5Cost2pUW4p3OkNMlK7In the Ford RS200, the engine sits behind the driver—but the gearbox sits ahead of him, down by his knees. Power travels the entire length of the car to the front, then turns around and comes back again. Ford built it this way to create the most perfectly balanced rally car possible. It spent more than £10 mi...

In 1972, a Grand Prix engineer who tuned Formula One cars for Graham Hill and Jackie Stewart sat down to design a cheap runabout for people who couldn't afford a real car. The result? A lightweight, three-wheeled fibreglass hatchback with an all-aluminium engine that saved its parent company and gave working-class Britain affordable independence. Yet decades later, this clever piece of enginee...

In 1993, Subaru was on the brink of collapse, burdened by crashing sales and oddball engineering. But out of this desperation emerged a compact, turbocharged blue-and-yellow icon that would permanently rewrite the rules of modern rallying. With a flat-four boxer engine and symmetrical all-wheel drive, the Impreza transformed Subaru from a struggling Japanese automaker into a World Rally Championsh...