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BIOGRAPHY

An A–Z Exposé of Cars

CENTURY

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For my amazing daughter, Grace, because I always thought it would be cool to have a book dedicated to me. So now you do.

Introduction

As I’m sitting here writing this, I’m slightly distracted by the subscriber count on Carwow’s YouTube page. We’ve only got eighty subscribers to go to hit 10 million. I remember back in 2017 when we were about to reach the 100,000 subscribers milestone, and for some reason I was a little apprehensive. Would we make it? Then, some of the coders in a corner of the office thought it’d be amusing to subscribe and then unsubscribe, so when the number count finally reached 100,000, it shot back down to 99,997. It was pretty funny and very in keeping with the tone of what we do. But it all feels different this time. Nothing’s going to stop us motoring over the line.

Could I have imagined this as a nine-year-old from Walsall in a remedial class at primary school because the teachers thought I was dim? No. I remember a couple of other kids in that class – there was Lindsay, who used to eat her scabs. And then there was Ivan, who kept his dinner money in his mouth because he was worried that other kids would take it. I wonder what they’re both doing now. Who knows: maybe Lindsay’s a professor of haematology and Ivan’s a millionaire hedge fund manager. My senior school was a very average comprehensive. I did enjoy maths and science because I liked figuring out how things worked – I’d see a gadget and want to take it apart to see which components did what. I was in the lowest of the low classes for English literature, mainly because I couldn’t sit still long enough to read entire books. Yet, I ended up with an A for GCSE because

it was coursework-based and my mum did most of it. For the exam part, we were handed a poem to analyse and we were given several hours spread over two days in a classroom, under controlled conditions. Everyone was trying to read the poem and work out what the hell’s going on. Meanwhile, I rewrote the poem on a separate piece of paper, took it home and asked my mum to analyse it. I wrote down what she said and smuggled it in the next day. The English language GCSE , however, was exam- based so no one was helping me out in that room, but I got an A. Looking back, perhaps I could have got an A in English literature on my own had I put the work in. Maybe, in a way, I cheated myself.

Because I struggled academically at school – I found it very hard to concentrate – I explored creative ways to achieve what I needed to. That often involved taking the odd calculated risk, occasional mischief and a fair amount of blagging. And it wasn’t just a case of the ends justifying the means, because the means were entertaining. And that attitude has helped steer me to where I am today. It turns out that taking risks, being silly and blagging equips you well as a motoring journalist on YouTube.

In the 1980s, you were told that you needed to study the sciences if you were going to get a job. My sister had also gone down that route, taking the three sciences at A level, so that encouraged me along the same lines. She always knew what she wanted to do, aced her A levels, got into Cambridge University and became a vet. It took the pressure off me, because she’d done really well, so anything I brought to the table was a bonus. My teachers thought I’d fail my A levels because I wasn’t able to concentrate and messed about too much, so to spite them I bought a bunch of textbooks and memorised them. I ended up with the fourth-highest grades in my year and got into the University of Edinburgh.

I applied to do chemical engineering largely because I met a

chemical engineer who was making a lot of money. But I soon realised that the maths was beyond me so I switched to straight chemistry, which, annoyingly, seemed to become maths towards the final year. I didn’t have the patience to become a chemist. But I did have my resourceful, creative streak to call upon. I remember a big test involving ‘unknown’ chemicals, and it was our job to go away and deduce what they might be. What that means is there’s a label on a bottle, which they’ve struck through with a permanent marker so you can’t see it. So, rather than conduct a sequence of experiments to find out what the chemical was, I got to work finding a solvent that would remove the permanent marker pen but preserve the label. I was still using chemistry to get the job done but it wasn’t quite the problem-solving they were after!

In my final year at uni, recruiters put on these employment fairs to show you what their business is about. My dad was encouraging me towards accounting because it’d give me a good grounding in business and would pay pretty well, so I applied for a job at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). But something didn’t feel right: I was bored shitless. As soon as I qualified, I handed in my notice. I was into motorbikes back then, possibly to liven up the extremely dull work I was doing in the daytime, but then I had an accident and figured I’d be safer shifting my interest to cars. One of my mates at PwC had a girlfriend who was working as an editor on a local evening newspaper. She was the only person I’d ever met who spoke with passion about what they did. She genuinely loved her job, and that set something off in me. I realised that I was quite good at asking questions, finding stuff out and telling a story. So I ditched the golden handshake of a £45k role at a consulting firm for a job at a local newspaper. ‘What on earth do you think you’re doing?!’ said my dad when I told him the salary. It was £12k.

After working at the local paper for a year, a friend of mine who knew how into cars I was showed me a job advert for a consumer writer on Auto Express magazine. I applied for it and got it partly because I’d studied business law as part of my accountancy training. This meant that when I was negotiating with car manufacturers about consumer rights, I was coming at it from a legal position. It turned out that I was really good at getting people new cars under the Sale and Supply of Goods Act 1994. Even from the get-go, I was always consumer-focused.

That job paid about £20k, which to be fair was some uplift from the job on the local paper, but the money didn’t matter. As a kid growing up in Walsall in the Midlands, I’d fallen in love with cars the moment I saw my mate’s dad’s Jaguar XJS pull into the drive. What a thing of beauty that was, even in the yellowy beige paint job that he’d gone for. No one was thinking about residual values back then – they went for whichever colour they actually wanted. It was a simpler time. Look in a car park these days and you’ll see fifty shades of grey.

When I was sixteen, my next-door neighbour bought himself a Triumph Spitfire – man, I loved that car. All I wanted was to pass my driving test as soon as I turned seventeen, and seeing as I’m a July baby, I was behind the curve already compared to my schoolmates. So my neighbour kindly took me out around the local trading estate out of hours so I could get used to the car. I didn’t want to put a scratch on it, so I used my dad’s car for the grunt work of actually learning. Things like hill starts, emergency stops and anything else with a likelihood that I’d prang it, I’d be in my dad’s Mini Metro. We’re talking a 1.0-litre engine with acceleration similar to those street-sweeper vans owned by the council. The interior was, let’s say, ‘minimalist’ and I’ve used napkins that were thicker than the bodywork.

My mum and dad each had a car, and slightly unusually for

the time, her one was a lot cooler than my dad’s. Hers was a Ford Fiesta XR 2i and even though the term hadn’t been used yet at that point in the late 1980s, that was a hot hatch. Eight-valve, fuel-injected 104hp engine, with alloy wheels and body stripes – that was the car you wanted at seventeen. Sure, we all dreamed of the supercars, but the XR 2i felt like an achievable aspiration. Not that I got to drive it that much. I was in the Mini Metro: the first crap car I became fond of.

Being a proud Scot, my dad was keen on saving a few quid wherever possible, so he gave me a few casual lessons in the Metro rather than having to shell out for an instructor. But that worked well for me, because we’d spend quite a bit of time together at the weekends. The car was the kind of environment where fathers and sons can bond, because you had a distraction to take the pressure off any kind of serious conversation that suddenly sideswiped you. It’s the reason why fathers and sons often have surprisingly deep conversations at the football. The focus is elsewhere.

But when the date of my driving test came closer, my parents organised four official lessons to teach me what I needed to know. Three months after my seventeenth birthday, I passed my test – first time – but that goes without saying. If I’d failed I wouldn’t be able to live that one down, doing what I do! And when I did pass, suddenly that Mini Metro was the best car on the planet, because it gave me something no other car has ever given me: that first taste of freedom. Everyone feels the same when you get into a car on your own after passing your test. You’ve spent weeks or months with someone else next to you telling you what to do and where to go. And then it’s just you, and you can go wherever you want. It’s one of most electrifying moments of your life. Only, I didn’t get to enjoy it for that long because I wrote it off within a month.

The silver lining was that it meant that I got to drive my mum’s Ford Fiesta XR 2i. After you’d driven a Mini Metro, the XR 2i was like a Bugatti. I was driving it around literally everywhere for about a year, at which point my dad decided that he’d prefer us not to be driving around in a fast car, so they bought a second-hand Fiesta Mk1 for me and my sister to ‘share’. My sister didn’t really drive it a lot, though, so I ended up ‘acquiring’ it. Presents to share somehow ended up in my room during our adolescence. Sorry, sis! ‘Our’ Fiesta was canary yellow, except for the primer grey door that announced that the previous owner had pranged it but couldn’t be arsed to pay for the spray job. That car – the Banana – took me everywhere. I hammered up the M6, fully loaded with stuff, towards my university halls in Edinburgh, including Keith, my royal python, in a tote bag tied up with a shoelace, curled up happily on the front seat.

As a kid, I was fascinated by snakes and I always wanted one. So, when I was eighteen and had a bit of cash, I bought one. Royal pythons are docile and placid, so it seemed like a good entry-level snake. I wasn’t prepared for quite how docile Keith was, though, remaining motionless for weeks at a time. There’s a low-maintenance animal and then there’s having a rock for a pet. When I tried to handle him, he’d just slither away into a dark corner. People were fascinated by Keith at university, though. The trouble was, he started rejecting dead mice so I had to get hold of live ones. But Keith wouldn’t go for the live ones either, so I found myself with a whole bunch of pet mice. I ended up liking the rodents more than the snake! Some of my friends and family members took them in as well, forming a kind of rejected rodents club. All the while, there Keith lay, doing almost nothing for many years. And then I returned from a holiday in 2015 and got the surprise of my life. Keith was sitting on top of several eggs. It turned out Keith was female and, apparently, some snakes

are capable of reproducing asexually. So I renamed her Penelope Keith.

In my Ford Fiesta Mk1 (with curled-up Keith beside me), you had to seriously plan an overtake, a bit like an HGV driver. You see that downhill coming and you floor it, blazing past as many people as you can, riding the momentum and then dropping back between the HGVs. That was the full Formula 1 experience to a nineteen-year-old. I did some silly stuff in the car – we’re all guilty of that in our first car – including giving in to the temptation to yank up the handbrake on a country lane. The car slid to the left, then swung to the right (hedgerow-assisted) and then came back to the centre. Everything was back to normal in a few seconds, and then the adrenaline kicked in. It made me want to experiment with the handbrake, and when you do, you won’t stop until you’ve nailed a handbrake turn. It’s one thing you don’t tend to experience any more, because almost everything’s got an electronic parking brake, except for a few cars like the Toyota GR Yaris, which I’ve got. The GR Yaris is essentially a rally car so it’s designed to do handbrake turns. So when you pull up the handbrake, it disconnects the rear axle, which means you can rotate the car easier. You can even buy the kit to relocate the handbrake from the normal position to near the dash, like a rally car, where it’s easier to pull. My kit is on the way from Japan now!

You were a lot more connected to the car you were driving back in the early nineties compared to nowadays. Everything needed pre-planning and a lot more energy, from the no-power steering to the wind-up windows and choke. The winter was a genuine problem. Sometimes the car wouldn’t start, and you’d have to figure out why. More often than not it was the points (an electrical switch that makes and breaks the ignition system circuit), which really didn’t like condensation. The starter motor on the Banana had a couple of teeth missing, which wasn’t a

problem unless the car had stopped with the teeth in the wrong position, because then the starter motor wouldn’t turn the engine. It’s usually no big deal, though, unless you’ve accidentally pissed off a really big guy who’s chased you to your car and you’re trying to get out of there pronto (true story).

All in all, the Banana served me really well. I didn’t have any major problems with it. It was cheap to run, and gave me the ability to go wherever I wanted, whenever I wanted. It completely changed my life. We had it for just over two years and I sold it for the same money my parents paid for it, which felt like a win. Believe it or not, though, I’m not very good at selling cars. I seem to be better at buying them – except for the first- generation Mazda MX -5 I bought in 1997. I feel like I’ve been making up for that shambles of a transaction for the last twenty-five years.

In the last nine years, I’ve carved myself a niche at Carwow. From the moment I started shooting content for the Carwow YouTube channel, I tried to deliver a different type of video: something accessible, engaging and informed, with a good sprinkling of silliness. It helps that I’m not really beholden to anyone – apart from the viewers I’m reviewing the cars for. I think perhaps I have a freer rein than other motoring journalists because Carwow understand the value of content. It means that I can say whatever I want about whichever car I’m test driving. Car manufacturers never know what I’m going to say. But I do have to tread a fine line between not pissing off every single car manufacturer that is prepared to lend me a car, while producing content that’s unique and different enough that people are going to want to watch it. And yes, sometimes that lands me in hot water, like with Mazda in 2020, when I said the Mazda 3 looked like a cat having a poo. Mazda still haven’t forgiven me. I don’t follow the textbook because I didn’t read the textbook. I just do what comes

naturally to me. That sometimes gets me into trouble, but I’ve got thick skin.

After a career spent kicking tyres, climbing into boots and drag-racing some of the world’s fastest and scariest cars, it felt like the right time to share my knowledge and stories in a book. In my videos, I try to be impartial and think about cars from a potential buyer’s point of view. Sure – there’s always going to be a little subconscious bias towards what you think looks good, what you value in a car and, ultimately, what you’d buy yourself.

Some of the manufacturers I love; some of them I really don’t; and some have especially memorable stories attached to them. You’ll find out the answers to the questions: why am I such a Porsche fan boy? How did I manage to wind up Renault? Why is it that I like BMW s and yet I’ve only owned one of them? Why does everyone love a Ford Focus? Which hypercar would I go for? What’s on my driveway? Why do I love a crapheap? Along the way, I’m lifting up the bonnet so you can discover what my life is really like as a motoring journalist.

Alfa Romeo

This whole hoopla about not being a car fanatic unless you love Alfa Romeos feels like it’s been driven by Jeremy Clarkson, who’s a big Alfa fan. I’m not an Alfa fan and I never have been. Yes, their cars have personality, a really good history and legacy, but if you like German cars you won’t like them. And I like German cars.

I’ve driven lots of Alfa Romeos and have liked some, but they’ve just felt like also-rans for as long as I’ve been into cars. Maybe if I’d have got into cars twenty years earlier, in the 1960s, I would have felt differently – when the Alfa Spider came out in 1966. Or if I’d been around in 1923 when Enzo Ferrari was winning grands prix in Alfa Romeos. In 1929, Enzo founded the racing team Scuderia Ferrari but all the Scuderia Ferrari drivers were racing Alfa Romeos. The first Ferrari car was a long way off. And the first car to feature the prancing horse badge wasn’t a Ferrari – it was the 1935 Alfa Romeo Bimotore, with the Ferrari logo painted on to the radiator cowl. Scuderia Ferrari was absorbed into Alfa Romeo in 1937, so Enzo Ferrari left in 1939 to found his own company the following year. Only he couldn’t use the Ferrari name for the company or any of his cars for the next four years because he’d signed a non-compete clause with Alfa Romeo. Not that any of that mattered, given that most of Europe was at war.

The first Alfa Romeo I saw in the flesh was an Alfasud (produced from 1971–1983), owned by a guy across from us. It was a great little

family car and a cool shape. The next one I really remember was the GTV 6 (their sporty coupé, produced from 1993–2004) parked in a driveway down the road in the early 1990s. The GTV 6 had an amazing interior with beautiful seats but it didn’t handle great and suffered from torque-steer (where power in a front-wheel drive car is applied unevenly to the drive shafts so the steering pulls one way or another). It looked great in my neighbour’s driveway, though, and I was able to get a good look at it seeing as it was constantly up on axle jacks in the drive while he fixed literally everything on the car. It was on those jacks more than it was on the road.

Alfa have struggled since the 1980s and their cars that have caught my attention feel like outliers. The Giulia Quadrifoglio came out in 2015 and was a really good car with an engine to match. They launched it at the Alfa Romeo museum in Milan while Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli sang Puccini’s ‘Nessun dorma’, in case you’d forgotten that the company’s Italian. The issue with the Giulia Quadrifoglio arises when you compare it to the competition – the BMW M4. The infotainment isn’t as good on the Alfa, you couldn’t turn the electric stability control (ESC ) all the way off, so it’s not as fun when you’re on track, and it didn’t have a dual-clutch automatic gearbox so it wasn’t as responsive. But the engine was great and it did have some cool features like a super-light carbon-fibre prop shaft, which sends the power from the engine to the rear wheels very quickly, so the acceleration picks up really well (as does braking response). Plus, the car looks beautiful. But there were also little things that annoyed me, like the way they’d positioned the door – too far forward – which makes it harder to get in and makes you feel like the dash is too far back. It’s things like that that make you want to play it safe and go with the BMW . And I think Alfa have suffered from that problem for decades. Specialised limited-edition versions of the Giulia Quadrifoglio, the GTA and GTA m, featured a lot more

carbon-fibre and carbon-ceramic brake discs but prices started at £150k. That’s not a typo. Yes, I am more likely to turn my head when I see the Giulia Quadrifoglio go down the road compared to an M4 but spending £150k on one? No. It’s a nice car to look at and a nice car to borrow, but it’s also a nice car to give back.

Their SUV , the Stelvio Quadrifoglio, is a similar story. It handles pretty well and it’s got an amazing engine (as it’s the same one as in the Giulia), but it’s the same price as an equivalent BMW or Mercedes, and there are little bits about it where you can tell that less money has been spent. It’s partly because the Quadrifoglio’s rear-wheel drive platform is just designed for Alfa Romeo. This means that despite the fact that they’re part of the Stellantis group (which also owns Peugeot, Citroën and Vauxhall among others), Alfa are not benefiting from the economies of scale achieved by sharing a platform, like say you can with a Peugeot 208, which shares a platform with the Vauxhall Corsa and Citroën C3. It means that Alfa’s competitors for this car, like BMW and Mercedes, which both sell their rear-wheeldrive saloon and coupé models in much higher volumes, have had more cash to splash on their cars – not necessarily in terms of the engine, or even the interior fit and finish, but more in the development phase when they thought the whole car through. It’s given them more time to check everything and make it as good as it can be.

Ultimately it all comes down to how much you’ve got to spend on developing a car. A good example of this is Hyundai. Recently, they’ve chucked money at developing their new ‘N’ line of highperformance hot hatches and it’s paid off. Alfa just haven’t got the cash.

Alfas have just been a bit two-dimensional. The issue is that their budget limitations mean that they never seem to create a fully rounded product. Either the looks or the engine (or

sometimes both) was epic, but the whole package felt incomplete. The 3.2-litre direct-injection V6 engine on the Alfa 159 is a work of art, with its shiny intake pipes, and it sounds incredible but it’s in a chassis that’s just meh. The 147, with that 3.2-litre V6 engine, was good. Mad but good. Again, though, the trouble arrives when you start thinking about the competition. I’d rather have a Renault Sport Megane because it was so much better dynamically. It was all about the engine in the Alfa but you felt like it was trying to get away from you, a bit like you were attempting to restrain a crazy Italian stallion, full of sound and fury.

Alfa do make pretty things but the ergonomics inside often aren’t great and the touchscreens are low- def. It’s things like that. And there’s the whole history of reliability problems. None of them have given me that feeling – when you sense the car is communicating with you while you’re driving. Bits were good working in isolation, but they didn’t come together as a team. A lot like Paris Saint-Germain when they had Neymar, Mbappé and Messi in the same team. Or England in the early noughties when we had Beckham, Ferdinand, Gerrard, Lampard, Scholes and Rooney. We should have won something but we didn’t.

Here’s a good example of Alfa dropping the ball. I remember seeing their 4C (mid- engined sports car, produced from 2013 as a coupé and 2015 as a Spider) when it was unveiled at the Geneva Motor Show in 2013. It had a 1. 8- litre turbocharged petrol engine with a dual-clutch automatic gearbox and, lookswise, it was a stunning, stunning car. Incredibly, it was carbon tubbed (i.e., the whole chassis was made of carbon-fibre) and no one, except a Formula 1 team or McLaren Automotive, makes a carbontubbed car. It was a decent price too, for a carbontubbed car, around the same as a Porsche Cayman. So far so good, right? Everyone was desperate for it to drive as beautifully as it looked. It didn’t.

I don’t know what they did to it, but the 4C managed to both understeer and oversteer. It was sketchy and, most importantly, it didn’t feel fun. It’s a bit odd when something that stunning isn’t fun. I’ve thought about buying a 4C many times. But I’d never end up driving it. I’d just look at it.

The Alfa MiTo was a front-wheel drive supermini (and competitor to the new Mini) that came out in 2008. It was brilliant, with its little turbocharged engine, and I thought, Here we go – people are going to buy these like they do the Mini, but they just didn’t. The Giulietta was a really pretty hatchback that Alfa produced between 2010 and 2020. The rear end on that was just stunning, but once again, when you get into the detail of reviewing the car as a whole package, it started to fall short. There was a period when you saw quite a few Giuliettas on the road but where have they all gone? It’s like there’s been some kind of Giulietta extinction event. It’s weird. Whenever I did see one, I used to try to catch up with it and sit behind it, just to look at it. It’s the only small family hatchback that I can think of where I would deliberately miss my junction on the motorway, adding another five minutes to the journey – which I’d never ordinarily do – just to keep looking at that car. I’m now going to consciously look out for Giuliettas to ascertain if I just haven’t been registering them or if they’ve actually disappeared. Maybe they’re up on axle jacks. Maybe they’ve just left my brain.

A bit like Fiat, Alfa Romeo’s press launches back in the noughties summed up the company well. The whole event would take up three days of your time but you’d only be in the car for three hours. I’m not sure they wanted motoring journalists to really test the cars. One example was with the facelifted 166, which was billed as an executive saloon. This was the kind of car that you want to test by cruising on the motorway and then on a few twisty country roads because it’s an Alfa and it’s supposed to

handle well. Well, they launched the facelifted 166 in the centre of either Berlin or Barcelona – I can’t actually remember, but wherever it was, I spent the entire time driving it in stop-start traffic. Imagine a car manufacturer thinking it was a good idea to fly dozens of motoring journalists to the busiest stretch of the North Circular in London. After spending three hours in traffic, Alfa took us for dinner and we were all sat around these tables with one seat left between us and the next motoring journalist. It was really weird because we had starters, then main courses and no one had explained what was going on with the empty chair situation. Then a door opened and a procession of glamour models walked in and sat in each of the empty chairs. It was so awkward. It was like one of those boys’ nights where you leave the club and are shepherded along by a chorus of encouraging ‘waheys’ towards a lap dancing club. It’s tragic.

Until around 2012, ‘stand girls’ would be a regular furnishing feature at major motor shows to encourage punters towards particular manufacturers. We’ve all moved past this now, thankfully. Car manufacturers are still in the business of making sure motoring journalists are having a great time at a press event or a launch, though, because if you’re teetering on the edge of a three- or four- star review, being in a good mood can make the all-important difference. And if someone’s happy, they’ll probably write more positive copy. In the noughties, one car manufacturer routinely put on UK launches of a car in a foreign country. They did the metrics on it, and realised that if the weather was good and the route they chose was along quiet, smooth and scenic roads they’d probably get a higher average mark from each journalist. Other manufacturers soon followed suit. So they’d fly you out on a two- day trip and on the first day, you’d travel, drive the car for a bit, then you’d have coffee, have a chat and sit down for a nice dinner. The next

morning, there might be some event in the morning like clay pigeon shooting or quad biking. Then you drive the car some more before they fly you home. All in all, you’ve had a very pleasant couple of days and you’ve only got to put together an 800- word review. The internet ended all this though. With a need to get things online immediately and produce not only written but also video and social content, no one has the time to have fun on a car launch.

In the noughties, free gifts, known in the trade as ‘the blag’, were handed out to motoring journalists. You’d come back from the launch and other journalists would ask you not just whether or not the car was any good but also if the blag was too. They’d range in value and quality but would typically be electrical items, clothing, that sort of thing. I remember getting a pocket digital camera at a launch that was decent, but the car was less so and I gave it a bit of a kicking in my review. In fact, sometimes I think the gifts made the journalist even harsher on the car to sort of prove the point that they couldn’t be bought.

I think the last blag I got was a pair of Bowers & Wilkins headphones at an Aston Martin launch but that linked to the stereo in the car. It wasn’t just random free stuff. I remember hearing of one famous blag in the eighties or nineties where, instead of a goodie bag, the journalist got to keep the car. It happened because it would have cost the manufacturer so much to export the car back that they just decided to cut their losses. It was a cheap, crappy hatchback and that presented the journalist with an awkward dilemma. Should I refuse the gift and offend the manufacturer or be polite and drive this shed back home?

BEST CAR LOGOS OF ALL TIME

1. Ferrari – The Prancing Horse on the canary yellow background (the colour of the coat of arms of Enzo Ferrari’s hometown of Modena) is undoubtedly the most famous car badge of all time. And for good reason.

2. Mercedes – In some ways it’s even better than Ferrari’s logo because the three-pointed star is so simple. I love the position of the emblem on the bonnet of older Mercedes, acting like a gunsight.

3. Lamborghini – I love the fact that Lamborghini’s raging bull logo was born from Ferruccio Lamborghini’s vendetta against Ferrari.

4. Jaguar (the Growler) – Jaguar had two or three logos but the Growler – the head-on design of the animal growling – was so cool, as was the name. Such a shame they ditched it with their recent rebrand. What a mistake (like the rest of the rebrand).

5. Abarth – What’s cooler than having a scorpion on the front of your car? A great emblem.

6. Alfa Romeo – What is it with the Italians with their brilliant badges? A serpent swallowing a man is madness, but I love it.

7. Corvette – It’s got the chequered flag on it. Nuff said. Does exactly what it says on the tin.