Petrolicious

The test came in the darkest hour of the night. Somewhere in the black middle of Nebraska, a Mercedes SUV struck a deer.

Sutton Morris and Michael Torres could not swerve to avoid it, not while towing such precious cargo: a 1977 Ferrari 512 BB, due at the start of the Overcrest Rally in the Driftless Area of the Midwest.

The SUV was heavily wounded and leaking coolant, but not down. They limped it to a nearby Walmart parking lot, where Sutton bought bungee cords and fabric from the store and jerry-rigged the turbocharger cooling system in place. Sleep be damned, the fix stuck, and they trudged on.

For the Morris Motors crew, the ordeal had begun with a dream: purchase a 512 BB and prep it for Overcrest, not just so the owner, Tony, could fulfill a lifelong dream of owning one, but so the shop could care for and enjoy the car along the way.

“If this was a show car, it would not have come,” said Michael Morris. “We wanted this particular example because it’s got patina; it has been used. And that is also why it was purchased by Tony, because it can continue to be used and enjoyed.”

The car completed the entire course of the two-day rally and even put down a respectable time at the drag strip at the finish. By then it was covered in dust and grime, the true mark of a flagbearer of the spirit of driving and adventure.

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Words and Photography by: Vijay Sankar Anil

Three months ago Magnus Walker let 18 cars go. He kept 16 and, without looking, bought two more.

He calls it thinning the herd. “I kept what I was really connected to,” he says. The rest had done their job.

What came in was a 356, a car he was not hunting.

“I've always said I'm not cool enough to own a 356.”

The car was 15 miles away, on jack stands since 2019. The day he picked it up, the widow of its longtime owner came along. She had not seen the car since her husband died.

“It was this emotional full circle of the car being passed to the next custodian,” Magnus says.

He had it running within a day or two of tinkering. The engine turned out to be original to the car. The family never knew.

The digging is most of the point for him. The story usually is.

On the first drive, somewhere over Mulholland, the plan to pull the bumpers and hot rod the thing quietly died.

“I'm just going to leave it as is. I'm not going to touch anything on it.”

“I'm not in the space now where I'm all about outright performance and getting from A to B as quickly as possible. What's motivating me is the opposite, returning to basics.”

Photography by: Nicholas Coleman

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“The first feeling you get when walking into the facility was how personal the company felt.”
In 1939, Alois Ruf Sr. started the business as a small workshop and repair shop in Pfaffenhausen. After the war, his wife started the gas station next door.

“She ran the gas station while my grandfather ran the workshop and my dad, as a young boy would fuel cars with his older brother,” Aloisa Ruf says.

Alois Ruf Jr. took over the business in 1974 following the death of his father. By then, the workshop was already servicing and working on Porsches. In 1975, the first Porsche to be tuned by Ruf came to life.

Ruf went on to be approved as a manufacturer in 1982. Then came the Yellowbird CTR, the car that would push the brand to global prominence after recording 211 mph at Volkswagen’s Ehra-Lessien test track in 1987.

Today, three generations of the Ruf family are involved in the company.

“In the time I was at the facility, Alois Ruf Jr. was walking about with customers and interacting with the staff on one side while Estonia was busy on the other side. Aloisa, while showing me across the workshop still chatted to the staff and inspected the work going on.”

Ruf joined the tuning world as one of the pioneers, went onto become a manufacturer and forged their own path but they have not given up on their modest beginnings and are still based in the outskirts of Pfaffenhausen, 87 years later.

Excerpt from Issue 007 of The Petrolicious Post. Read the full story on Petrolicious.com.

Photography by: Jathu Thillai

The motor is an XK, twin-cam straight six with shims under the buckets and no variable anything. Jaguar chased displacement with stroke instead of bore. Long-stroke torque motor. Doesn't rev to the moon and doesn't need to.

Dual-spark race versions were making 400 on race gas years ago. This one is around 300 in a car that weighs about what a '71 911 weighs. Momentum car until you get back on the throttle.

The chassis is why it can take that. Monocoque with a trellis subframe bolted onto the front, discs on all four corners in the late '50s, independent rear. Nic puts it next to what the British were doing in aviation then, the same run that became the E-type.

People his age don't care about Jaguar, he says. Slept on. You put somebody in one and they walk away impressed.

Watch the film and read the full story on Petrolicious.com.

Photography by: Paolo Lekai

There's a pond behind Paco's house in Westport, Connecticut, with a frog in it named Green Lips the Third. He trained it. He stands at the edge of the water calling ribbit, ribbit until something moves in the vegetation, and out it comes, every time. The original Green Lips lives across the yard. It's a Jaguar XK 120, British Racing Green over a biscuit interior, and head on, low and wide with those two big headlights, it really does look like a frog.

Paco is close to 80 now. He's been on the same three acres since 1969, in a house people keep mistaking for a Frank Lloyd Wright. He designed it himself. For 40 years he ran an art gallery and frame shop in town, which is why people around Westport still greet him with "Hey, Frames." The barn out back once held 18 cars. "Thoroughbreds," he calls them. Divorces thinned the herd. "Every time I got divorced, I lost a Ferrari, a Porsche," he says. He sets the terms early, before anybody can aim a question at him: "This is not about a car. It's about a man and his cars. A little weathered, a little scratched. But you got to keep on driving, right?"

The property runs on its own logic. The sculptures scattered around the yard he calls installations. Inside, a Manhattan manhole cover that found its way into the back of his VW Rabbit on 57th Street one night, an event he files under drunken escapades, sits where furniture should be. The rear of the Rabbit scraped the whole way back to Connecticut. His kids' childhood shoes are nailed along a beam in the studio, every pair. Upstairs there's a bed built out of a 1963 Corvette, and every divorce settlement he's signed carried one non-negotiable term: the Corvette bed stays. He's kept a journal every day since 1963, sixty-some volumes of weather and pushup counts. "Everything has a meaning," he says, and then he says it again for emphasis.

Photography by: Jacob Hopkins

This is a Diablo GT, number 67 of 80 built in 1999, all of them for Europe. Wide carbon bodywork over a wider track, and a wing you could rest a mug on. It never got US certification. The regular Diablo made it to America. The GT stayed a rumor here, which makes one burbling down a shaded two-lane with a plate on it a strange thing to witness.

The engine does all the talking out here. It's 6.0 liters now, grown from the SV's 5.7, breathing through the the engine lid. 575 horsepower at 7,300 rpm through a 5-speed, with nothing driving the front wheels. As intended. Lamborghini had four-wheel drive sitting on the shelf, the VT had run it for years, and for the GT they left it off on purpose. Nothing vectors, nothing intervenes. Whatever the right foot decides, the rear tires answer for.

Underneath the carbon airbox it's still the 60-degree V12 Giotto Bizzarrini drew in 1963 for Lamborghini's first car. They stretched it and turned it up for damn near half a century and never started over, not until the design finally retired in 2010. What's working its way up this road is the old engine late in life, getting everything off its chest.

Watch Film: https://petrolicious.com/blogs/films/the-devil-in-the-trees-lamborghini-diablo-gt