Retro
TG's Tom Ford argues that driving slowly in something compromised is actually brilliant
There is a point when you realise just how much convenience modern cars have to offer, how much ease of use, how much ambient comfort. Because I’m currently driving a car where the pull for second and fourth gears require you to smack yourself in the kneecap with a pretty-but-vicious aluminium armature that arcs from your right hand to between your legs where the gearbox actually sits, the curvature not being sufficiently scooped for anyone with limbs that fit anything over a 5ft 10-inch frame.
Vision is obscured by bits of gravel pried from the roadway by cross-ply tyres with similar grip characteristics as a greyhound on a highly-polished wooden floor – there is no windscreen – and the large wooden steering wheel prods out towards your belly-button, fouling thighs and causing you to use only the top half. Suspension kinematics are … rudimentary, yet weirdly effective, and grip for all phases of the experience – acceleration, cornering, braking – is largely arbitrary; you just kind of deal with it as it happens, rather than planning on having any. Skin exposed and freezing cold, in a car that has no airbags, heater, radio, comfort or regard for whatever anyone thinks, I come to a sudden realisation.
This is brilliant. This is the antithesis of ‘modern’ driving, and all the better for it. Because this is not particularly fast, or useful or even particularly good. But it feels special. And you can drive it to the shops, because the Dowsetts Classic Cars Tipo 184 is now road-legal. Although you can’t actually buy anything at said shops, because unless it fits in your pockets, you’re out of convenient luggage space.
Photography: Jonny Fleetwood
This all started with a day at the Top Gear test track that wasn’t so much wet as torrential. Performance Car of the Year 2021, with some of the finest sportscars from the past twelve months arrayed like the world’s shiniest, most expensive horsepower buffet. Ferrari SF90. Lamborghini Huracan STO. Porsche GT3, BMW M5 CS, even a Zenvo. And yet, parked up at one end was a vintage racecar homage that you can build at home. It costs £20k. It’s based on the humble yet glorious guts of a Mazda MX-5 NB (or Miata for the US) produced between ’98 and 2001, and it’s the only car that won universal praise. Apart from the really tall people. They hated it.
It takes a bit of explaining, but the Tipo is a real-life ‘production’ version of a car that TV presenter and mechanic Ant Anstead made for a TV show as a replica of the Alfa Romeo 158 Alfetta Grand Prix car that won the very first Formula race. Except this one, lovingly crafted by Darren Collins of Dowsetts, is a version that you can thrash to within an inch of its life without worrying that you’re defiling a piece of motorsport history – MX-5s being both largely reliable and not exactly rare.
When we tested the car at PCotY, it was a grand prototype, full of promise and a one-make race series for the UK and US, with promise of a road-going guise for fun usability, but that dream has now been realised. With the addition of the hardware necessary to pass UK IVA (Individual Type Approval), the Tipo now gets cycle wings, lights front and rear and proper indicators and the like, transforming it into the perfect Sunday driver – sympathetic add-ons that allow you to potter about on the road in a Tipo 184, gloriously having all of the fun at speeds that would make a modern sportscar feel horribly tame. Of course, it doesn’t set out to fool anyone, more just glory in the shapes and styles of the period. This isn’t an Alfa 158. There are lots of things ‘wrong’ with it, exactly none of which matter a jot. And yes, you can remove everything in about an hour when you get to the track if you want to feel more authentic – although it may take you longer than Darren, seeing as he designed and built the road kit.
Of course, because it’s an MX-5 – although it isn’t registered as such when completed, it gets a new VIN and ID plate – there’s nothing expensive to break that can’t be fixed. And because it’s a self-build, you’ll probably get to know its foibles in the 100-150 hours it’ll take you to assemble this life-size Meccano set. And there’s nothing to say that other classic/vintage bodystyles couldn’t be spun from this basic idea. Although you didn’t hear that from me.
This is not particularly fast, or useful or even particularly good. But it feels special
The thing is, the Tipo 184 has crystallised something that’s been bouncing around for a while now, and it’s about why we drive. It’s a feeling that seems to have been boiling up around the Top Gear office; popping up in vague hashtags (#savethemanuals) and grumbles from us oldies; that going fast might not be the be-all and end-all of what we enjoy about driving these days. With electric cars redefining acceleration into a bloodless, ultra-effective coup-de-grace to the idea of Top Trumps, it’s put ‘driving’ into a fresh perspective. No longer is the thrill to be found quite as easily in generating extreme G, but in the nuance and flavour of how you get there.
Classic car enthusiasts have long known about the joys of uncompetition; you drive for the sake of driving, rather than the result. In some circles, the more complex the act, the more satisfying the action. The management of foibles becoming a complex prayer and mundane devotions to a very singular god. Small ‘g’. This kind of driving has very little to do with speed. In something like the Tipo, if you want to drive even moderately quickly – and you’ll still be seen off by anything even vaguely warm – you have to concentrate. You have to be on point and fully involved. And it’s noisy, and smelly, and uncomfortable and intensely life-affirming. It’s about theatre, and fun, and colour.
Which is not to say that modern performance or electric cars can’t be exciting and useful. Just that while they provide one kind of solution, maybe we should be looking to the cars that distil the fun from fossil fuels in a more accessible, more concentrated format. Modern performance cars are largely fairly antisocial to use properly on a public road, and end up being a bit gelded by the idea that you need to retain your licence. Electric cars can’t – shouldn’t – offer bad caricatures of petrol, they should be proudly, profoundly embracing of their nature. I guess the idea is that we don’t use petrol to motivate us for the humdrum commutes, save it for the high days and holidays, the jaunts and the fun stuff. Classics do relatively tiny mileages. They have an insignificant impact on the environment. They’re also, right now, the most fun you can have in a car without risking your bank balance or your licence – and the Tipo stands neatly astride the idea of a classic car that’s got some vaguely modern mechanicals to keep it reliable. It’s the ultimate restomod, huge fun, for reasonable money. And that’s something worth celebrating.
Keyword: Opinion: cars like this road-going Tipo 184 are the future of driving