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By Nigel Wigmore

It was one of those great moments in a motoring life that you appreciate because all of us seem to be constantly under the watchful eye of the politically correct.

Sure, no one should be racing cars on public roads these days and I adhere wholeheartedly to that.

However, I was at the wheel of the quickest new Kia Stinger, a model with a 3.3-litre V6 engine that produces 365bhp (that’s a lot) and sprints from 0-60mph in 4.7 seconds. So what are you going to do? Let’s just say my opportunity to put the Stinger through its paces came on a nice stretch of practically deserted dual carriageway. Continue reading →

By Nigel Wigmore

Another country – that place that might occupy our hearts and minds – often appears more attractive than the one we live in.

And yet there are many unexplored parts of our own country of which we remain blissfully ignorant.

I have been trying in recent months to put this right by taking road trips to places I should know but do not know at all. Continue reading →

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By Nigel Wigmore

There was a moment — like all the best moments in a lifetime of motoring it was unplanned and unrehearsed — when out of the motorway mist came the lumbering shape of an aged Lamborghini.

This Lambo, battering along in the outside lane, was no new flash one fresh from the dusty streets of Dubai but an elderly, silver Countach, the one with a V12 engine like a wardrobe tacked flat on its back.

As it passed my drive, a Jaguar XKR-S Convertible, the Lambo’s driver glanced across. It was an appreciative look: the Jaguar XK in French Racing Blue the epitome of the ultra-fast, modern, road-going sports car. Continue reading →

By Nigel Wigmore

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The magic of the Maserati name resonates across many decades of car manufacture in Italy, ancestral home of fabulous sports cars.

In the Sixties when the whiff of such exotic cars reached the eager noses of young British fans such as myself, the closest we got to even thinking about getting near a Maserati was something called Maserati air horns. Continue reading →

By Nigel Wigmore

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Rest assured that I had no intention of doing anything undignified such as “getting down with the kids” while at the wheel of this week’s drive, the hyperbolically named Vauxhall Adam Rocks S.

On the other hand, I do not see why people of a certain age cannot enjoy what young motorists are expected to love – small, zippy motor cars – as we did back in the day in those early GTIs.

Continue reading →

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By Nigel Wigmore

James Joyce, as I recall, predicted the chopping up of the English language. This avant-garde novelist had a fair crack at it himself in works such as Ulysses.

But hasn’t Joyce’s prediction proved correct, firstly in the short-form language that advertisers have thrust upon an unsuspecting world and latterly in the visual “Morse Code” of text messaging?

So certain words are shortened, distended, discarded and re-invented and long may this be part of our culture. Continue reading →