Six cool cars from Classic Car Sunday

Aston Martin Lagonda

At the time of its release, the Aston Martin Lagonda couldn’t have looked more futuristic. Even now as a ‘classic’, those William Towns lines are still out of this world. Even on the inside, it was as if you could order an Apollo spacecraft control panel in your car. It was far from futuristic underneath, though, with a big gargling V8 and agricultural underpinnings. A fantastic sight at Classic Car Sunday and a fab contrast to all the curvaceous Astons of the 1960s.

De Tomaso Pantera

Sticking with the wedge theme, the De Tomaso Pantera. The original hot rod supercar was envisioned at the time as a sort of successor to the Ford GT40. Nothing could quite hold a candle to its bulging muscular shape and that roaring V8 could out-shout and out-gun any Six or Twelve Europe had to offer at the time. Glorious.

Ferrari 365 GTC

Not that it’s always about outgunning people. The Ferrari 365 GTC is peak 1960s Ferrari beauty, elegance and restraint. Combine that with a tuneful but not aggressively set-up Colombo V12 – one of the all-time great engines – and you have a recipe for classic car perfection in our book. Our pick of the entire attendance for a cruise around the South Downs.

BMW CSL

Before M, there came... This is a BMW 3.0-litre CSL and you wouldn’t miss it, would you? We’d hesitate to hold a dosimeter to that paint for fear that it might actually be giving off radiation. So gloriously 1970s. Then there’s the engine, the kidneys, the kink – so gloriously BMW. It’s cars like this that make you wonder just where it all went wrong in modern machinery...

Fiat Dino Spyder

Ah, the Fiat Dino, one of the weirdest cars in terms of how it came about. The short of it is that Ferrari needed to homologate its famous ‘Dino’ V6 but weren’t capable of churning out enough examples of its new junior supercar to fit the bill. Enter Fiat and a new sportscar built in higher numbers. Beautiful, isn’t it? The picture of a soft-focus supercar, with those delicate Pininfarina lines it could be a Ferrari roadster from a distance. We like.

Ford Escort AMR

Good gravy, this thing is cool. Just look at it! Those instantly recognisable Alan Mann red and gold colours, the unmistakable stout stance of a racing 1960s Ford Escort Mk1. It’s probably the car of this selection we’d most like to take for some flat-out laps of Goodwood.

Photography by James Lynch and Joe Harding.