Andrew Frankel

England

Hack for hire. Autocar, MotorSport, Goodwood and others, now also The Intercooler: https://t.co/XFmKJOs8Rn and on Twitter: @_theintercooler

Articles

How has the Porsche 911 Carrera T not been around for years?

6 days ago | goodwood.com | Andrew Frankel

I think Porsche used the ‘T’ again 30 years later because for all it lost, there was one thing the 911 T won. And won big. The 1968 Monte Carlo rally, courtesy of one V Elford Esq. Of course, Vic’s competition car was a very long way removed from anything a punter could buy off a forecourt, and the only reason the ‘T’ was used for homologation was that it had lost so much content it was the lightest 911 on sale. But a win is a win.
Racing's lost circuits: Gnoo Blas - Bathurst's 'scary' rival

2 weeks ago | motorsportmagazine.com | Gordon Cruickshank |Andrew Frankel |Paul Fearnley |Tim Scott

Rivalry is one of the prime tenets of motor sport. But in the case of the long defunct Gnoo Blas circuit in Orange, 177 miles west of Sydney, motor racing was simply the common factor in an intense contest with the neighbouring city of Bathurst, just 35 miles back down the road. Bathurst and Orange had populations of similar sizes, around 18,000 each in the early 1950s, but Bathurst had one thing that Orange did not – Mount Panorama.
Lamborghini Revuelto: Rambles with a Revuelto

2 weeks ago | motorsportmagazine.com | Andrew Frankel

As a child, Lamborghini was the evil empire. I was a Ferrari man and the only explanation I could find to explain why Boxers and Testarossae always lost comparison tests involving the Lamborghini Countach was that those who wrote them were quite clearly wrong. Then, years later, I started driving them myself and found little reason to change my mind.
Those US tariffs explained

2 weeks ago | motorsportmagazine.com | Andrew Frankel

The single-biggest headache faced by the UK car industry in relation to Donald Trump’s tariffs is that no one knows almost from one day to the next what he’s going to decide to do – or not do, making future planning almost impossible.
The best and worst cars of James Bond

2 weeks ago | autocar.co.uk | Andrew Frankel

James Bond and his cars are closely linked. Ever since he first roared into action over 60 years ago, master spy Commander James Bond has taken his choice of company car almost as seriously as his choice of hand gun, champagne and, er, companion. So it’s far from reassuring to see just how many dodgy, dire and occasionally disastrous choices he’s made.
A century of the Rolls-Royce Phantom

2 weeks ago | goodwood.com | Andrew Frankel

There is no question that some were eager for it to fail. BMW’s stewardship of Rover had not gone well and, they argued, if it handled the Rolls-Royce brand with the same crass care then Rolls was already as good as dead anyway. But BMW defied its doubters and produced a car that proved it not only understood exactly what a Rolls-Royce needed to be, but that it understood far better than the marque’s previous custodians who’d near enough run it into the ground.
2025 Aston Martin Vanquish review: V12 GT is glorious

1 month ago | motorsportmagazine.com | Andrew Frankel

Hurtling across a mountainside at some unmentionable speed in the new Aston Martin Vanquish, I was moved to wonder whether it is possible actually to have too much of a good thing. I mean what could be better than a mighty V12 howling away in front of you, spinning obscene power down a carbon-fibre shaft to a gearbox between the rear axle driving the rear wheels alone? Well, yes, that gearbox could have manually selectable ratios, but that particular horse bolted many moons ago.
Andrew Frankel: Is petrol fashionable again?

1 month ago | motorsportmagazine.com | Andrew Frankel

Far from rushing towards electrification, it is well known that every ‘legacy’ manufacturer with a history steeped in petrol and diesel cars has jammed on the brakes so hard I can hear the ABS from here. And in one regard, at least one of them appears to be heading in the other direction. For Mercedes-Benz is developing an all-new V8 engine. This, you will recall, is the company that forsook a 4-litre V8 for a 2-litre straight four in the latest AMG C-Class and was surprised that people objected.
Flat out in Fangio’s championship-winning Alfa Romeo 158 | Frankel’s Insight

1 month ago | goodwood.com | Andrew Frankel

28th March 2025 Andrew Frankel It is the most important Alfa Romeo in the world. It is the car that won Juan Manuel Fangio his first Formula 1 World Championship in 1951; it is also the most recent Alfa Romeo to win an F1 race, despite the fact its design was nearly 15 years old at the time. The year before it won every single round of the inaugural Formula 1 World Championship (I’m not counting the Indy 500), a feat not repeated to this day.
10 cars that robbed others of their glory

1 month ago | autocar.co.uk | Andrew Frankel

One of Winston Churchill’s more prescient predictions was that “history will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.” And it was, no doubt in some part because he did. Few would argue that Churchill was less than a very great man, but I expect his reputation today would be rather different if, despite his efforts, he’d not been able to hold back the dark forces that had swept across Europe. History is written by the victors.