Max Schröder

Ladies and Gentlemen, may I present: The showstopper at the last Cars & Coffee-Meeting in Hamburg (Germany). This 1936 Auburn Speedster (no, “experts” on scene, it’s not a Bentley) is said to be the Hero Car from the 1980’s tv-show “Remington Steele”. The car is mostly stock, with the exception being a Ford V8 and matching automatic gearbox that were fitted to make the car easier to work with (something that is often done with TV-cars). The current owner chose to leave it that way, since the tv-series is part of the car’s history.

This car surely stood out at Cars & Coffee. It looks just like the vintage LeMans racecar, but a few differences (and the fact that it stood in a parking lot, completely unguarded) led to most people assuming that this is in fact a replica. Not that that makes the car less photogenic. All photos taken with a Canon 24mm f2.8 lens on a Canon EOS 700D, with a Phorex polarisation filter. #CCHamburg

A few years after the Cars & Coffee-Meets started gaining popularity in North America, similar events started being organized in Germany too. These are a bit smaller than those in the USA, but still manage to assemble a few hundred cars from all parts of the car-culture.

While I haven’t managed to contact the owner of the red Capri, the owner of the BMW found me through the event’s Facebook-page, letting me know that his car has a period-correct KHL Widebody-kit and is not the only E21 with a period-correct tuning-kit he owns. The car certainly deserves to be maintained the way it is, the company KHL ceasing to exist years ago pretty much put an end to getting spares or new kits.

This is a bit more elaborate than putting new wheels on the car, dropping it as close to the ground as possible and sticking a colorful wrap onto the car. The owner started with a V6 Diesel station wagon, cutting off the upper rear section below the windows. He custom-made the parts to form the rear bed, reinforced the chassis, and at last lowered the car and put some nice wheels on it. #TagunterCruisern

#TagunterCruisern

This car has become quite famous within a week or so, after being featured at a live-show by the German Tuning-Company and YouTube-Channel “JP Performance”. I think you have to respect the owner for choosing something so drastically different than the usual slammed VAG-car. https://www.facebook.com/camberjoe2.0/ #TagunterCruisern

#TagunterCruisern

#TagunterCruisern

Car-Limbo (lowest car contest) at a local car-meet. #TagunterCruisern

If my future Miata turns out to be one with the post-1995 dashboard (which can be fitted with a passenger airbag), could I just swap in the early “slim” one without the passenger airbag? Or did they change, for example, the chassis where the dashboard is attached as part of the facelift?

This rally legend started life as a well-maintained Audi Sport Quattro, before the German company KER Innovatec GmbH got their hands on it in 2015. They completely restored the car, and at the same time got it as close to the specifications of the car Walter Röhrl used to win the San-Remo Rally in 1985. That was the same car that was used to set a record time at Pikes Peak a few years later. I’m not going to go into the details of the conversion, the changes to the drivetrain alone fill a full page.

What you’re looking at is NOT an Audi 90 quattro IMSA GTO. It’s the A 90 IMSA GTO made by the German company KER Innovatec GmbH. They offer you to let you drop off an Audi 90 (made from 1987 to 1991) at their workshop, and they’ll turn it into the monster you see above. The conversion includes (inconclusive list): -Removing eventual rust from the chassis and reinforcing it -Replacing the rear windows with ones made of poly-carbonate -Replacing some bodyparts with copies made of carbon fiber -Welding in a rollcage

The Marcos GT is a british sportscar from the 1960s, which was made in Kenilworth (England) using handmade cars and American drivetrains. The 1500 GT shown here is powered by an inline-4 engine from Ford, while other versions had inline- or V6-engines from Ford. A handful of cars was also made with engines from Volvo and Triumph. This allowed the cars to combine the design and craftsmanship of a British sportscar with the reliability of the American engines.

Not wanting to accept that Volkswagen was happy with building the Karmann Ghia without any big changes for (by then) 10 years, Karmann contracted the Carrozzeria Ghia with designing a successor. A roofless one, just to make it more different. The designer who got the job was Giorgetto Giugiaro, whose previous project had been the gorgeous Maserati Ghibli. He used classic roadsters as an inspiration, but left the window frames in full for cheaper and easier construction, and probably to give owners a sense of safety.

Seven years into the life of the Karmann Ghia Karmann developed (notably without being ordered to do so) a potential successor to the Karmann Ghia. The car was presented to Volkswagen after half a year of development, but was quickly denied production. The simple reason? Shortly before this car was presented in 1962 Volkswagen had launched the “large” Karmann Ghia Type 34, which had cost a lot of money.

After the idea for an elegant coupe based off the Volkswagen Beetle was “born” by Luigi Segre, head of Construction at Carozzeria Ghia”, in March of 1953, the car you see on this page was designed and hand-build in Turin without Volkswagen’s knowledge. The makers went to great lengths to keep the project secret, reportedly even buying a Beetle from a local dealership rather than asking Volkswagen for one. Wilhelm Karmann got to see the concept car in October of 1953, and five weeks later they presented the car to the chief of Volkswagen at the time, Heinrich Nordhoff.

This 1991 oddball was not directly made by VW, but still sold through VW-dealerships. If you ordered a Polo Convertible with either the 55 or the 75hp petrol engine and paid 16.000 German Mark on top of the normal car’s price the finished car would be shipped from the factory to the Ingolstadt-based company Treser, whose employees would start by taking the new car almsot completely apart, before cutting the roof and pillars off and installing a retractable soft-top.

This very special Triumph Spitfire was made by Triumph for their Hong Kong-based importer ZF-Garages in 1964. The car is a single-seater race car powered by a 1500ccm engine and was first used for the Grand Prix of Macao on the 27th November 1965, hence the name. It was sold to the US in 1967, and the roll bar was replaced by the fin the car displays now at an unknown point after that. In 2001 the car started a long overdue restoration to get it into good condition.

This 1992 VW Beetle 1600i was converted into a capable rallycar by the German spare-/aftermarket-part provider “Werk34” for a Rally from Dresden (Germany) to Banjul (Gambia), during which it’ll be driven by the boss of the company. The unique part of the rally is that all participating cars will be auctioned off for charity once they reach the destination. The car was on display at the Bremen Classic Motorshow with the company noting that you can follow the work on the car and the eventual rally on their Facebook-page.

While Ferrari’s regular cars are everything but boring the company occasionally puts their prancing horse on a car that is just a little faster, a little louder, a little more powerful and a little more extreme than the others. And somehow, those cars are still road legal.

The Porsche 959’s development began as the “Porsche Projekt Gruppe B” in 1981, when the then-new managing director Peter Schutz was approached by Porsche’s head of engineering Helmuth Bott. Bott proposed a new generation of the Porsche 911 that would be developed from scratch, while, after great success in Le Mans, rallying would be an interesting field of motorsport to use to get a good public image.

When people talk about Bugattis they usually talk about two companies: -The original company, “Automobiles Ettore Bugatti”, which was founded in 1909 and made its last road car for a customer in 1965 (a Bugatti Type 101 with a body by Virgil Exner) after technically already ending operations in 1963 when the company was sold to Hispano-Suiza (with the ’65 101 being a car that took a long time to finish, with Ghia handing the (shortened) chassis off to Virgil.