The Playboy Cars

Before scanning the current world output of automobiles in search of playboy cars, let's get the record straight on just what we mean by that phrase. Among those qualities which justify the appellation "playboy car" are all those desiderata that might come under the quaint cliché "sex appeal." That is, a playboy car has dash and style, speed and zing, an atmosphere of luxury and/or sportiness, "alive" responsiveness and an overall air bespeaking the fact that it was personally selected to complement its owner's happiest self-image. But, quite possibly, one might more clearly spell out exactly what constitutes a playboy car in terms of negatives – most of them, not incidentally, qualities highly touted to the mass market.

A playboy car is not: exclusively designed for economical operation; an ideal family vehicle; a car stripped of all "extras" so as to make it a best buy in terms of safe-and-sane transportation; a car designed with the lady of the house in mind, in "decorator" colors, and mushy enough in handling to lull the baby in the rear-seat bassinet to sleep; a chrome-dripping status symbol in which more effort and money were invested in garish ostentation than in automotive excellence. Just as surely – and here is another distinction – a playboy car is not primarily a brutal-riding racing machine, nor is it calculated to stir the heart of the greasy-palm, dirty-fingernail contingent who are happier with a hot rod, or under their heap with a wrench. Not to belabor the point (in the event that we have not already done so), a playboy car is a gentleman's car, and yet it is one which will deliver to him those virtues of performance and appearance a man with a flair for good living will want. On the chart, pages 74-75, you'll find a selective sampling of models by various makers which comes closest to meeting the ideal criteria for playboy cars.

Stone me for a chauvinist, but the one item that raised my blood pressure (text continued on page 70) more than any other at the Earls Court Show in London this year was the new Sting Ray Corvette. I was able to contain my excitement at discovering that the Rolls-Royce now has twin headlights and a lowered radiator – a couple of bad mistakes, as time will demonstrate, I think. The new Triumph, the Lotus Elan – interesting, but nothing over which to smash one's piggy bank. But the silver Corvette coupe squatted there on its hardwood-floored platform sending out a soft but convincing message. In its ultimate stage – 360-horsepower engine, fuel-injected – this is a 160-mph automobile, and by far the best-mannered Corvette to appear. It is not a Ferrari-eater (and don't argue with me; Zora Arkus-Duntov. who made the thing, says it's not), but then, one has to face the fact that nothing on the road today will take a Ferrari Berlinetta. Tomorrow, maybe. Today, no, nothing. I don't like the fake air-intake grilles on the top of the Corvette's engine-box lid, and I don't like the go-nowhere speed-line indentations that have been stamped into the sides of the body, but that's the extent of my criticism.

In the way of other Chevrolets, the rear-engined Corvair Monza has a basic 80-horsepower engine, but a 150-hp Spyder version is available with an exhaust-powered supercharger, heavy-duty brakes and suspension. Wire wheels, too, if you want them; altogether, a most desirable package.

The fantastic amount of power to be had in nearly all U. S. automobiles today is backed up by handling qualities that continue to surprise Europeans, so long convinced that the soft, hopelessly unstable 1948 car is all the Americans know how to make. Peter Garnier, sports editor of the renowned British journal, Autocar, recently wrote, after an extensive testing of General Motors products in Detroit, "There no longer exists any justification whatever for the European conception of American cars as large, rolling, pitching 'land-cruisers' that are happy only in a straight line." Add to this the engineering superiority that the Detroit product generally enjoys over the European, and its longevity advantage over all but the highest-priced imported cars, and we can see that there are good things available in the Main Street automobile stores these days.

Three splendid examples are the Ford Thunderbird, founder of the "personal" car concept; the imitative but exciting Buick Riviera; and the not-at-all-imitative Studebaker Avanti from the atelier of Raymond Loewy, who appears to have set his face sternly against the silly double-headlight vogue. A suitable medal should be struck off for him.

The Avanti is by most people's standards a good-looking car, with some useful features built into it, not the least of them a concealed roll bar to hold the roof up in case someone turns the thing over. This can be done. The Avanti is not a gran turismo car, no matter what has been said about it: it's not all that fast, and it will not handle with the likes of E-Jaguars. Good-looking, though, and full of dash. Disc brakes. You can get them on any Studebaker this year, by petition.

Buick's Riviera is a 120-plus–mph hardtop touring car of considerable charm. It shows impressive acceleration – 0 to 60 in about 10 seconds – handles reasonably well for anything so big – the wheelbase is 117 inches – and has brakes that appear well able to manage the weight. They are drums. Incidentally, the reason discs are not appearing on more American cars is that U. S. designers are not satisfied with the rate of pad wear they currently show on big and heavy cars. Brake wear, like frequent lubrication procedures, is something that is acceptable to many owners in Europe, who still like to fiddle with their cars. The American, who tends to equate luxury with convenience, would ideally like to have nothing to do with automobile maintenance.

Ford's Thunderbird has a few mechanical changes for the better – alternator instead of generator, for example, and 100,000-mile lubrication for the front end. It's quieter than last year's. There are three basic models, and the top-stowing arrangements on the convertibles are novel and intriguing still.

The biggest engine currently running any passenger automobile – 7 liters of it – is in the Continental, largely unchanged, and still a superlatively engineered and assembled motorcar. The engine puts out about 300 horsepower and the car carries a two-year guaranty.

Chrysler's Imperial has very nearly as big an engine, at 6.7 liters, and 20 more horsepower. While it may not quite be produced to the exacting inspection-and-test standards of the Continental, the Imperial is still a superior deluxe motorcar. The very fast 300 model is designated J this year. Few really fast cars are as comfortable as the 300J.

The Eldorado convertible by Cadillac still has fins, as well as the longest look in the world of the automobile, and a new, shorter, narrower, lighter engine. In some circles this motorcar has prestige that is stunning. I think it's six feet or so too long. However, driving a Cadillac is an Experience, when it's one with everything on it: air conditioning; Cruise Control, which means you don't have to bother keeping your foot on the accelerator; automatic dimmer for the headlights; adjustable steering wheel; and so on and on. From the same house comes the Pontiac Grand Prix, which isn't really that, of course, but offers formidable performance in its category, a 4-speed stick shift, bucket seats and accompanying grand luxe features, the whole rig turned out in first-cabin fashion.

The smallest production figures in Detroit are certainly those of the Ghia L 6.4, successor to the Dual-Ghia, a specialty car which is basically a Chrysler with coachwork by the Italian house of Ghia. Two a month are assembled in Torino. The new model uses the Chrysler "B" 6.4-liter engine, and basic running gear is Imperial. Ghia does only the body shell and upholstery; hardware is Chrysler.

There are those, and they are not few, who think the Ferrari the best automobile in the world. I incline to that view. There are quieter, handier, more luxurious, more comfortable motorcars in the world market – but for the maximum amount of everything desirable that can be, by intelligence, obsessive determination and the power of will, combined into one vehicle, it seems to me one must go to Ferrari. Blinding speed, the maximum luxury that can be blended with it, flawless road holding on the most sophisticated level, mechanical reliability that is astonishing, considering the flat-out performance the car will produce hour after hour under any condition of travel – and this without much maintenance bother – these useful and pleasant characteristics are available in a Ferrari to a degree unmatched in other motorcars. The Ferrari is the Bugatti of today, beyond any argument. Your local Ferrari dealer will speak to you in terms of $12,000 or $14,000 or $16,000 and he will prove to be selective, to say the least, in the matter of a trade-in, but you have been warned, thus you are armed.

The most useful Ferrari is possibly the 250 gran turismo 2-plus-2. Here we have a V12 3-liter engine producing a modest but genuine 240 horsepower, sufficient to make the machine do 125-150 miles an hour. This is a four-passenger car, and the rear seats, if not up to Cadillac or Continental or Imperial standards of acreage, are better suited to containing the human frame if the pilote decides to hurry. The baggage compartment aft is not meant to take bushels of apples to the cider mill, but it will contain all the impedimenta any four reasonable voyagers could wish.

Pininfarina designed the 2-plus-2 body and there isn't enough chrome on it to make a glitter in Arizona sunshine; the roof appears to be a floating cantilever springing up from the rear-wheel arch. A splendid machine. For four people, nothing better.

Enzo Ferrari also delivers a Berlinetta, a lightweight, vitamin-packed, Adrenalin-injected coupe for sports-car racing. One of these will do you for anything: Le Mans, for example, or Sebring. Bring a letter from your driving teacher. Your local Ferrari dealer won't sell you a Berlinetta if he thinks you might be upset by the prospect of a hairpin corner coming up when you are doing 170 in a pouring rain, at night.

Turned loose in the Ferrari factory with carte blanche to keep everything they could carry out in half an hour, most of the knowing would scuttle about looking for armloads of 4.9 parts. Ferrari builds the 4.9 to order, and I suppose that a year that produced one a month would be a big year. The 4.9 is in every way an automobile of superlative performance. A 4962–cubic-centimeter engine is not big by U. S. standards – little more than a small Pontiac, for example – but it's huge in Europe and it's expected to put out in matching fashion: a 4.9 will reach 60 in 6.5 seconds, and, at the end of a standing quarter mile, which takes it 14.5 seconds, it will be passing 100 mph in 2nd gear, with 3rd and 4th still to come. Available any time is 165 miles an hour, the brakes are at first glance wildly oversize and the car sticks to the road in the acceptable Italian major-league fashion. Like most ultrafast touring automobiles, the Ferrari 4.9 has been designed to understeer, but the surplus of power on hand can be used to take it through neutrality to oversteer on demand. That's to say, for all conceivable noncompetitive over-the-road use, driver ability is the limiting factor in the 4.9's performance.

As to price, the elder Morgan's dictum applies: "If you have to think about that ..."

It is getting so that only graybeards who go back to 1946 remember it, but gospel once maintained that a car that would really put out at the top end of the speed range had of necessity to be a lumpy boneshaker at the bottom. A measure of the distance designers have come since then is such curiosities as the ability of the 6-cylinder fuel-injection Maserati to run at 10 miles an hour in top gear – and top gear is 5th. With reasonable care the motorcar can be made to accelerate from that speed in that gear all the way to 140. Of course, you'll do it quicker shifting like a busy bear; even if it's been years since you sat down to a 5-speed gearbox you ought to get to 100 in 20 seconds. Who cares whether you do it in 20 seconds or 18 or 22? The point of the exercise is that the thing will do everything: it will slide around town like a 3-year-old hearse, and it will run with the best the sheriff's men have to offer in any jurisdiction in the country. That is what an automobile is supposed to do. If it's low, menacing and mean looking to boot, good. You may like this about it or not, but for reasons which escape me, a black Maserati with black leather will attract more attention, in environs frequented by cognoscenti, than a red Ferrari.

If the 3500GT won't do you, Adolfo and Omer Orsi, who make them, will run you up a 5000, to order. The 5000, is a V8 and unless you are a better man than I am, there is about half an inch at the bottom of the accelerator-pedal travel that you want nothing whatever to do with. You can be doing 125 mph and still be in 3rd gear. If you start fiddling with the radio running in top gear you can look up and find a reading of 170. The fuel-injected engine puts out 325 (real) horsepower. It could be made to give 30 more, but that would seem pointless.

When a tight little group of payroll stick-ups made off with $173,600 in cash at London Airport recently, eye-witnesses reported that the rubber they laid down as they left the scene came off the rear wheels of a pair of identical blue E-Jaguars, leading one to wonder if that ultrafast two-seater will come to be a favorite among British free enterprisers, as the big front-wheel–drive Citroen was among the French a few years ago, indeed to such an extent that the Paris headlines usually called them "traction-avant bandits."

The E-Jaguar is a phenomenon of extraordinary significance in more ways than one. The look of the thing, aside from the unhappy cam-housing bulge in the engine lid, more than merely striking, is quite close to being beautiful, and the rear-end treatment is so sexy that I'm surprised a man can drive one up Beacon Hill in Boston without being arrested for indecent exposure. It's one of the very fastest cars in the world, and, considering what it will do, it's cheap. Remember, the two wildest things in the world are the 4.9 Ferrari and the 5000GT Maserati, $15,000 items (stripped, that is!), and while an E-type can't cope with them on a road circuit, it certainly can on the highway, where the last couple of burners can't be lighted. And you can buy an E for yourself and another one for your favorite bartender for the price of a 4.9 from Modena.

The category of fast luxury sedans has (continued on page 132) (continued from page 76) never been densely populated, particularly in the small and handy sizes. Best thing going at the moment is probably the 3.8 Jaguar, successor to the 2.4 and 3.4 – the numbers having to do with engine size expressed in liters. It weighs a ton and a half, has a 107-inch wheel-base, and will crowd 120 miles an hour. The interior is standard British upper-class walnut, leather and carpeting. Since Jaguar took Daimler over, slightly more status, perhaps, comes with the Daimler sedan, identical with the 3.8 except for the traditional wrinkly Daimler radiator and the potent Daimler V8 engine. The V8 is a 2.5-liter, but performance is only fractionally under the Jaguar's.

The Mark X Jaguar, the big sedan, is a happy combination of speed and comfort and handling, indeed it is almost a unique combination. It touches 60 miles an hour in 10 seconds and will do an honest 115, offering notably luxury, security and good manners all the way.

Great Britain's entrant in the upper stratum of high-performance motorcars – Ferrari, Maserati, Mercedes-Benz 300SL, Corvette – is the Aston Martin, a limited production vehicle built by the noted gear manufacturers, David Brown, Ltd. Aston Martin has a remarkable racing record running from the 1920s to the present, and the cars reflect competition experience. There are three of them: the Aston Martin DB4, a four-passenger hardtop that became quickly well known a bit ago for its ability to go 0-100-0 mph inside 30 seconds; the DB4 GT, a two-seater, shorter, lighter than the standard and 60-odd horsepower quicker; and the DB4 GT Zagato, a competition car that can be used on the road, two people, an all-aluminum bumperless body in which weightsaving has been carried to the extent of using plastic instead of glass for the windows. Sixty miles an hour in 5 seconds, a terminal of say 155, given a little piece of straight to wind up on.

There aren't many better-looking cars than the Aston Martin. I happen not to like the steering of the car, which is absurdly heavy, or the gear shift, which takes a lot more muscle than I care to expend on such a trivial business. The car makes more mechanical noise – drive line, particularly – than I think is acceptable at its price level. Too, the Aston Martin's stand-up record does not compare brilliantly with the Ferrari's in flat-out long-distance running. Those things aside – stunning. Bring $10,000 and a checkbook.

France mayn't have been the birthplace of the automobile, but certainly it was its cradle. Great names abounded there: De Dion, Hotchkiss, Delahaye, Bugatti, Delage, Talbot, Voisin, Renault, Citroen, Peugeot – but today, of the big, high-striding fast cars there is nothing left that is all French. Still, the Facel-Vega comes out of France, and certainly it is a grand touring automobile deluxe. All right, you can't run it in a race, and what of it — the cars you can run in a race don't come with instrument panels in French-polished golden ash, either.

The Facel-Vega, currently the Facel II, is a stiff, sturdy chassis running a big Chrysler V8 engine that will take it to 50 miles an hour in 6 seconds and a bit and produce 130 mph for a top speed. It offers reasonable accommodation for four people, and rollicking room for two, with luggage accommodation on the American scale. Heating arrangements are to northern Minnesota standards. The shock absorbers are adjustable on the Armstrong system. You can choose between a 4-speed manual gearbox, the Pont-a-Mousson, one of the best, or the standard Chrysler automatic.

Daimler-Benz products are unusual in that all the cars in the line have independent rear suspension, and the range is unusually wide. The Mercedes-Benz 190D is possibly the most thoroughly refined diesel passenger automobile in the market, the 300SE is one of the most luxurious, and the 300SL one of the fastest. There is also the medium-sized 220S sedan and the very desirable 220SE convertible. The big 300SE ranks on the topmost level of the world's fine cars. The only Mercedes-Benz that seems pointless to me is the 190SL, the two-seater, which suffers from the serious defect of looking as if it would really go when it won't — it's too heavy for the power.

The 300SL, in limited production, has been unchanged in design for some time. It is rather out of fashion now, but it is still one of the most tremendous performers on the road, and the original 300SLs, the gullwing coupes, are already bringing premium prices as classics!

The first 6-cylinder Alfa Romeo in a dozen years is the new 2600, distinctly something of an event. This is a fast touring automobile of long pedigree and flawless behavior. There are three body styles: convertible, two- and four-door hardtops. They run in the 120-mph range that is required of anything aspiring to be called a fast touring car today, indeed they will run from 0 to 60 in a bit over 7 seconds and to a top of nearly 130. This is expensive, high-quality merchandise, requiring extended use for appreciation. You can use the brakes all the way down an Alpine pass and still expect to stop dead, on a straight line, at the bottom, and the celerity with which the car can be taken over the road depends largely on the driver's sophistication.

The idea of sticking a big American V8 engine into a light, roadworthy European chassis is one that has intrigued many down the years. One remembers the Allards of the late 1940s and early 1950s, booming along under the heavy beat of Cadillac and Chrysler engines, and almost unbeatable for a long time. The newest of these hybrids looks like being the best. It's the AC Cobra, Carroll Shelby's idea. Shelby is a sports-car driver of wide experience: a sports-car champion of the United States, a winner at Le Mans, and so on. A free-swinging Texan, Shelby takes the large view, as a rule. He wondered what would be wrong with stuffing one of the big, reliable Ford 8s into the light, strong, astonishingly roadworthy AC Ace chassis and then giving the package as much luggage room as possible and all the instruments for which room could be found on the dashboard. There was really nothing wrong with such a notion, as it turned out. The Cobra will do 100 miles an hour in 10 seconds, which is quite fast enough for me, and I imagine for you, too; it will show 114 mph at the end of a standing quarter mile, and you can have something around 150 miles an hour for top speed. Good-looking, too, and comfortable. You can have it in various stages of tune and option, for touring or racing, the latter setup, in its ultimate degree, making you competitive with anything anybody else has, for about $9000.

Other things being equal, I prefer a good-looking automobile to an ugly one, and I think that the Lotus Elite is no less attractive a two-seater than anything else on the world market. The Elite is smooth, almost wholly unadorned, most happily formed in line and bulk, and very small. The engine carries four cylinders and is by Coventry-Climax, whose grand prix engines have powered the remarkably successful racing cars from the same house that produces the Elite.

The car is quick enough, 110–115 mph available in the engine's standard form — it will accept a lot of tuning — but it is the road holding that stuns one at first; there appearing to be no limit at which corners may be entered. There is a limit, of course, but it is very high indeed.

There are numerous flaws to be noted in it. The body is all fiberglass, the smell stays with it a longish time, it's always noisy, sometimes wet; the windows are plastic and nonwinding. But, driving the thing, and remembering how lovely it looked as you came up to it, you can forget all that.

Another small car of which much is made is the Porsche. The Porsche is like the city of Madison, Wisconsin, or warmed sherry, or the writings of Ronald Firbank: it's the focal point of a cult, and the members believe there's nothing like it. Certainly the Porsche is a great automobile, designed by Ferdinand Porsche, one of the true towering figures of automobilism, and built by a son devoted to his memory. The car has other notable advantages: essentially the same model has been long in production, subject to constant evolutionary improvement – an extremely important circumstance, one that has marked nearly all truly great motorcars. Also, production is limited, and in the hands of craftsmen who do care – and whose work is nevertheless under stringent and repeated inspection. All in all, it would be most peculiar if the Porsche were not a great car.

The model called the Super 75 is the middle of the range, and perhaps the best for all-around use. Its engine runs 88 horsepower as compared with 70 for the model 1600 and 102 for the Super 90. The 75 will do 110 miles an hour, and because the design characteristics of its air-cooled engine include slow piston speed, it can be cruised all day at 100 without stress. The new 2-liter Carrera is in limited production. This has a 4-over-head-camshaft 130-net-horsepower engine and has been spoken of in awed terms by experienced testers. It is apparently free of the maintenance complexities that made the old Carrera such a drag to take care of, although it too was very rewarding to drive.

A list of the striking points in an inventory of the Porsche would be a long one; the car repays the most careful examination in an attempt to discover what gives it the air of bank-vault solidity combined with airy grace. The gearbox, for instance. It's an "enthusiast's" cliché to say "the gearbox is a delight to use," and, of course, as a rule that's errant nonsense. A gearbox is usually a flaming bore. Who needs it? But the fantastic smoothness of the Porsche unit is so tantalizing that the driver does find himself making opportunities to push it around. And there are many other such amusements on the Porsche, beyond any doubt one of the great all-time designs.

The Swedish Volvo P1800 (the word means "I roll" in Latin, right?) was a major sensation of the 1960 New York automobile show, but minor production difficulties prevented its appearance in quantity until 1962. (The body is made in Great Britain and the car assembled there.) Production is limited, European demand heavy, and the car will never become common currency.

It appears only as a hard-top two-seater, a pair of small extra seats in back. Nothing else has quite the same line as a Volvo, and it looks very much what it is: fast but solid. It is not ferociously fast – 105, 60 in 14 seconds – but there is nothing overstressed about it and it will deliver that kind of performance indefinitely. It is very carefully made. The standards enforced by Volvo purchasing agents are well known to European suppliers for their stringency and their high rejection rate. Out of the pieces they keep the factory hands make a sound, pleasant, fast two-seater, one that should go for a very long time, at less than $4000.

It's a rarity, but very nice: the big Citroen convertible. I think this is one of the most striking soft-top automobiles in the market. Several years old now, the DS-19 Citroen is still well advanced mechanically, and it offers one of the most startlingly smooth rides over a rough surface ever devised. Your friendly Citroen dealer may not have a convertible on the floor when you visit him, but he can get one for you, if you bring money, and you will drive it a long way before you meet another.

There are wealthy British families that have never owned anything but Rover motorcars, and that has typified the reputation of the machine: luxurious and built to last forever. The facts that the car was fast, for a medium-sized sedan, and handled pretty well, too, have been overlooked. To demonstrate these facets of their car, the Rover people have lately taken to running the Three-Liter, the top of the line, in British and Continental rallies, and with remarkable success even in such brutal events as the Liege-Rome-Liege. The body of the Three-Liter sedan has been redesigned in the interests of lightness and grace; a two-door "coupe" has been added.

The Rover company is one of the few small independent producers left in Great Britain. Its remarkably progressive attitude is demonstrated by its origination of the gas-turbine automobile, which it ran first in 1950. The current version of the turbine car, with which I have some experience, is a delightful motorcar, all the bugs shaken out of it, that could go into the market tomorrow.

It's fashionable to say that the Rolls-Royce ("Rolls" is an unspeakable vulgarism, but they often say "Royce" at the factory) is not as good as it used to be. It's true that it isn't as elaborate as it once was, when all the holes in the chassis were hand reamed and fitted with tapered pins instead of rivets; when the radiator shutters opened and closed according to the water temperature; when the wheels were fitted on splined hubs, and so on, but the necessity for all these things has passed.

The Rolls-Royce has at the moment no real competition, in that similar American cars do not succeed in providing that air of utter solidity – a manor-house-on-wheels effect – that Messrs. Rolls-Royce achieve by design, finish, masses of walnut and leather, back-seat cocktail cabinets with cut-glass decanters, and so on. In outward design the Rolls-Royce is certainly well behind the times. In mechanical practice it is no longer an innovator, to put the matter mildly, and I think we may expect to see root changes reasonably soon, particularly if Daimler-Benz modifies the 300SE into something fully competitive.

The material that goes into a Rolls-Royce cannot be bettered and the craftsmanship that forms the material is still superb. A 50-mile ride in a Rolls-Royce is as rewarding an experience as land transport offers.

The Bentley, as everyone who reads must by now know, is identical with the Rolls-Royce except for the radiator shell. This difference also accounts for a $300 price spread, the R-R radiator being handmade – and formed of planes that do not run dead level, by the way, but only appear to, a discovery made by Greek temple architects. If you wish to rush about at high speed in luxury (the Rolls-Royce does about 101) you can buy the distinctive Bentley Continental, which will do 125 or so, and in something approaching utter silence.

Wholly unostentatious, completely beguiling, the small front-wheel-drive Lancia Flaviais for the man who wants luxury in his personal transport but does not require that mere passers-by know he has it. The Flavia is known to be a status symbol only among the innermost of the ins.

The mechanical specifications of the car give engineers the impression that someone was trying to find ways of spending extra money on it. It would take a paragraph of gobbledygook to explain the refinements of the front-wheel-drive apparatus, perhaps the best ever built. The Flavia driver moves surrounded by refinements undreamt of by lesser Romans: when first turned on, the headlamps will always be dimmed, no matter how they were left when turned off; the center button in the steering wheel doesn't blow the horn, for which other arrangements are provided; it flashes the headlights.

The Flavia is undoubtedly a 10-year car, and it runs in a silence previously undreamt of by small-car designers, and known only to the largest limousines deluxe. A milestone.

Another desirable rarity is the Lancia Flaminia gran turismo convertible. This is a V6 two-seater, with room in the rear for luggage or small children, a 14-second 0-to-60 time, and a top around 115-120, all this delivered with the road holding, appearing to border upon the weird when one comes to it for the first time, that has been legendary in Lancias since the 1920s.

The Italian likes to drive as if there were no tomorrow, whether he's conducting a Lambretta or a Maserati, and so the ideal small sedan for the Italian market is something good-looking, uncluttered, that will go, handle and stop. The Fiat 1200 Spyder is such a vehicle, one of the formidable range produced by the giant Italian factory, culminating in the big, luxuriously equipped 2300, carrying such basic necessities as a hot-air blower on the rear window, a foot pedal that turns on the windshield washers and puts the wipers through a measured cycle, seats that fold down into a bed, and so on.

The four-passenger Caravelle by Renault was enthusiastically received in Europe as perhaps the first practical fast touring car in the lower price range. It is in fact a very good thing: a four-passenger coupe mounting a pleasantly sculptured body, a brisk engine mounted in the rear. The Caravelle S is brilliantly up to date in such points as a factory-sealed cooling system and it has disc brakes on all four wheels, unusually effective ones at that. The car's 85 mph performance can be used freely.

Donald Healey is a versatile, energetic designer of mature years who was winning majorEuropean rallies in the 1930s. Just after the war he produced the Healey Silverstone, which had a mild acceptance, and the Nash-Healey. His association with the Austin has been most rewarding, resulting as it has in the Austin-Healey and the small and lively Sprite.

The present Mark II Austin-Healey is a neat compromise between the "real" sports car, the all-out competition kind, and the fast convertible. Fast convertible devotees may like the A-H better than sports-car types, on the grounds of gearing, refinement and a feeling that a 3-liter engine ought to put out a little more. Still, the Austin-Healey is not a slow car, delivering 60 in about 11 seconds and getting close to 120 before running outof breath.

The Triumph two-seater is about 10 years old. As the TR-2 and TR-3 it did well in scores of competitive runs of one kind or another. I thought it a stark, uncomfortable, boy-racer kind of thing, but the TR-4 has been lifted to a civilized level of comfort and it still does go. It has windup windows, lots of luggage room, a top that's waterproof in anything up to a gale – it will take you a week to learn to put it up, but never mind –and even a heater that heats. It's remarkable to find these amenities built into a medium-price British sports car, bearing in mind that British motorists are still at a level of development at which 80 percent of them, in a survey made at the end of 1962, stated a fixed preference for floor-mounted gearshifts – not in sports cars only, but in everything! Wind-up windows and all, the TR-4 will get 25 miles to the gallon or so, without being too much babied, and say 110 miles an hour.

Three other cars that come to mind in the same category are the new MG, the MGB, the Sunbeam Alpine and the Sunbeam Harrington Le Mans. The Alpine is a brisk and good-looking two-seater and the Harrington Le Mans modification is a higher-powered (104 horsepower asagainst 85) version with a four-seater body of original and intriguing form.

The MGB is the current representative of the honored line that began in 1924 and of which the TC Midget is best remembered in the United States. The MGB is a thoroughly refined automobile, fast and steady and yet with nothing stark about it. It does come close to the old ideal of a sports car: something equally suitable for a date and for competition. The current MG Midget is smaller, running on a 950-cc engine which gives it a 90-mph top speed. It has all the easy responsiveness that has endeared the make to two generations of drivers.

Though the kinship between an MG Midget and a Lincoln Continental may seem on the surface somewhat more distant than that which binds a catboat to a cruise ship, there does exist that uncommon bond which connotes the playboy marque – a flair, a breeding, a purpose particularly suited to the mobile man whose predilections call for urbane transport.