Buying a book for Christmas? Look no farther, says Kilian Doyle, than a trip to the past
STUCK FOR a Christmas present for your petrolhead uncle? Can't afford the Ford Capri Mk III that he's always dropping hints about? Help may be at hand in the form of The Best of Car, a compendium of articles from the late 1970s through to the 1980s.
The glossy, photo-laden pages of Carmagazine through those years - reproduced in all their glory here - are something of a potted history of British culture, tracing as they do the Thatcher years, the rise of the yuppie and the flash cars they drove.
Edited by Carwriter and occasional Irish Timescontributor Ben Oliver, the book covers a period of monumental change in the car industry, from the introduction of turbos to legislation making seatbelts mandatory to the first fuel crisis to the arrival of the Audi Quattro, posters of which covered the walls of every self-respecting schoolboy for years.
Reviews include the new Aston Martin Lagonda, which is an inexplicably hideous beast of a car, the Golf Gti, the Bentley Turbo R and the Porsche 991 Carrera.
Most enjoyable is a rare interview with Enzo Ferrari - described, bizarrely, as a big man with a "big fleshy nose" - in which he waxes lyrically about the metaphysics of car design and reveals he visits his son Dino's grave every day.
There is a feature on Nigel Mansell, who looks like a German porn star in a racing suit flinging a Lotus around a track, a guide to the best sunglasses to wear while cruising around in your Alfasud and rundowns of the birth of bodykits, furry dice and the hot hatch. Rowan Atkinson even gets to gush about his Lancia Integrale.
Hidden among all the supercar showdowns and tales of rally driving derring-do is a great article about the BMW E30 M3 which nearly sent me, cap in hand, to beg my bank manager for the wherewithal to buy one. You have been warned.
While most of the writing is brilliant, bringing the smells and sounds of driving a Ferrari F40 right into your living room, it must be said that some of the articles are as nerdy and detailed as a Haynes manual.
Does one really need to know about the air duct designs of a Lotus Esprit in order to make an informed decision on whether or not to buy one?
But then, they did things differently back then - a fact evinced, best of all, by the ads.
If you thought that the way people write about cars and car accessories has changed over the years, you'll be blown away by the way they used to try to sell them.
Amid the ads for aftershave, carphones the size of shoeboxes and new-fangled CD players is one for the Mini, which proudly boasts that it "nips in and out like Ronald Biggs".
Bizarre, but not as bizarre as the sales pitch for a brand of seat covers which features a pair of female buttocks tightly clad in a pair of hotpants so tiny that they'd make Kylie Minogue blush like a nun in a sex shop.
Another ad for springs shows them wrapped lasciviously around a scantily-clad woman playing the role of shock absorber. She'd smooth out your bumps, apparently.
Imagine the firestorm of ire that would unleash in this day and age - you'd have the advertising standards authority jumping down your throat quicker than a Lamborghini Countach goes down a runway.
Best of all is the excruciatingly awful ad for a Ford Capri, depicting it with lightning shooting out of its exhaust. At least, I think it's lightning; it may just have exploded.
They did that a lot, which is half the attraction - as, no doubt, your uncle will explain.
The Best of Car: The 70s and 80s, edited by Ben Oliver, Anova Books, £12.99 (about €15)