Few other sixties convertibles have had enduring appeal of the SL Mercedes. Some how its styling seems timelessly elegant, undating. You don’t have to look at one of these cars very long to appreciate the excellence of the build quality. Swift and very comfortable, the SL was a sports car without the pain. This fact [...]

The 280 SE Cabriolet was the last big Mercedes Convertible for many years. It was also the last of a long line of W111/ W112 series drop head models. This was a line that date all the way back to back to the early 1960s. The 280 SE is a much rarer than most people [...]

Mazda had been lonely, but worthy, champion of the rotary internal combustion engine for some time, with the up market Cosmo coupe and the RX 7 sports car of the 1978. By taming the reliability problems, if not the thirst, of the rotary engine, Mazda retrieved its image and made the RX into a big [...]

The Bagheera had been a moderately successful car for Matra, so for the 1980s a successor was planned along the same lines, a mid engined three a breast seater with a glass fiber body. It emerged in 1980 as the Tail bot Matra Murena and featured many worthwhile improvements. It was available with a much [...]

Chrysler marketed the Matra Rancho as a multipurpose leisure vehicle and certainely its rugged Range Roverish looks suggested off road capability. However, the reality was that the Rancho was a clever marketing mans wheeze which, for a while, was a quite the thing to be seen in if you were cruising down London’s fashionable kings [...]

Matra’s main line of business was rocket launchers, anti submarine weapons and satellites, but the company decided to supplement its income with sports cars from 1964, first with the pretty Djet and the gawky M 530 and then the Bagheera, a higher volume model announced in 1973. If the line Bagheera had one claim to [...]

The Khamsin was the first traditional front engined Maserati. Styled by Bertone, the shape dated from 1972, and resulted in an angular and dart like coupe with an abruptly sawn off tail. An unusual feature was its glazed rear panel, with the tail lights held in suspension by the glass. Inside, the chunky dashboard lacked [...]

Matra was a big missile and armament manufacturer who had taken up production of the Rene Bonnet’s Djet, one of the first truly mid engined sports cars, in the early 1960s. By the 1967 they felt they were ready to introduce a car of their own design, the M 530. If the Djet had been [...]

Like Lotus with their +2 S, Jem Marsh of Marcos saw a market for a four seater sportscar to sell along side his 3 liter, 2 seater models. Stylist Dennis Adams, who had designed the Marcos 1800, was hired to shape the car, which became known as the Mantis. It is the best remembered for [...]

The 1964 engined 1800 was the first Marcos designed to sell to non racing customers. Designed by Dennis Adams, it cost more than an E-Type Jaguar, and sales barely broke the one hundred mark before Marcos moved to cheaper Ford power. Later Marcos models became less specialized, but the 1800 used its own glass, specially [...]