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PROUD OF OUR PAST, PASSIONATE ABOUT OUR FUTURE.

Robbo’s Archives

Ever since I first began writing about cars in 1962, I've been fascinated by automotive design: the how and why particular cars look the way they do. I plan to use this 'archive' to explore some of these cars and people responsible for their appearance. Of course, it is inevitable that my contribution goes beyond design and into the zone of all things motoring, but that is where I intend to start.

Peter Robinson

John Zachary DeLorean

It’s now over 40-years since my first and only encounter with the controversial John Zachary DeLorean, father of the famous eponymous gullwing sports car. In February 1981, having organised to attend the Arizona launch of GM’s new ‘import buster’ J-car (the front-drive Holden Camira), a contact learned that Delorean planned the first public showing of its much-anticipated DMC sports car in Los Angeles.…

On the Targa with the Maestro

On learning that 88-year-old Nino Vaccarella died on September 23, I smiled quietly to myself. No, I’m not callous. I smiled because I was instantly transported back to that March day in early 1992 when Nino and I drove the Targa Florio course.…

The Ford Ghia Focus

Directly opposite my desk, sitting atop my model cabinet, is a voluptuous one-tenth scale clay model of an open sports car. It’s a daily reminder of a unique concept car about which on first sighting Giorgetto Giugiaro said, “it is not a car, it is a piece of art.” This is the Focus before the Focus.…

Just who did style the Hurricane?

The question of who designed the Hurricane supercar has been mired in controversy. Until 2011. Weird as it may have seemed for a car styled just 44-years ago, nobody was sure if the Hurricane was penned in Australia by Holden’s local designers working with their American colleagues on assignment to Australia, or was it, as some believe, drawn in GM’s Warren design centre?…

The Holden Hurricane

This story begins on Tuesday, March 4, 1969 in Holden’s Technical Centre, Fishermen’s Bend. And finishes almost 43-years later at Holden’s Lang Lang proving ground. As one of 31 press invitees to that Melbourne motor show eve preview of Holden’s top-secret Hurricane, I never anticipated driving the one-off dream car.…

Sydney to Perth (3 Times!)

Google maps tells me the distance by road from London to Moscow is 2890km. Drive a further 1130km east and you’re almost to the Ural Mountains. Or the same 4020km from Sydney to Perth or one side of Australia to the other: Pacific to Indian Ocean.…

50 YEARS AGO

History tells us Mel Nichol’s great HO Down the Hume story is a Wheels’ magazine original. Not quite. In fact, Mel’s still evocative words first appeared in the October 1975 issue of Sports Car World magazine, sister to Wheels.…

Life with Ferrari

When in September 1982, on a private visit to Italy, I first visited Ferrari, Il Commendatore Enzo Ferrari was still very much the autocrat, at least of the racing department. Maranello’s disparate road car range included the V8 308 GTB and GTS, the bigger, two plus two V8 Mondial, and two unrelated 12-cylinder models: the flat-12 mid-engine BB512 and the front-engine V12 400i.…

My First Grand Prix

‘The circuit is now open for Formula One practice.’ You’ve come halfway round the world to hear those nine magic words boom out across the pits. But now you wonder if the announcer can really be serious.…

Takaharu ‘Koby’ Kobayakawa

Takaharu ‘Koby’ Kobayakawa It is impossible to imagine how Mazda’s image in 1976 could have been more disastrous. Boat loads of rotary-powered RX-2, RX-3 and RX-4s were turned back across the Pacific after US sales plummeted in the wake of the first energy crisis.…

Bob Knight

The meal had been lavish, the wine magnificent, under the chandelier of the ancient dining room in The Welcombe Hotel, a grand old English country house just outside Stratford-Upon-Avon. It was clearly an occasion the image makers felt worthy of a new Jaguar.…

Tom McCahill

The Man Who Invented Zero to 60 ‘Uncle Tom” McCahill invented the benchmark 0-60mph acceleration test. British motoring magazines like The Autocar and The Motor performance tested cars over 20-years before Thomas Jay McCahill’s road tests appeared in the long defunct American magazine Mechanics Illustrated, but it was the American who made ‘nought to 60’ meaningful.…

Citroen

This is a mildly edited version of the talk AMHF board member Peter Robinson gave to the 51st National Citroen gathering in Bendigo on April 4. Good Evening….and thank you for inviting me to the 51st National Citroen gathering.…

Australia’s Greatest Motoring Writer – Bill Tuckey

This is a mildly edited version of the eulogy delivered by AMHF board member Peter Robinson at Bill Tuckey’s funeral in 2016. When Marcia and Stuart asked me to speak about Bill today, I was stumped.…

Not every press launch goes to plan…..

In the words of the late-Bill Tuckey, Australia’s finest motoring writer, “When anything can go wrong with a new model press launch, it will.” Perhaps most famously, even for supposedly bullet-proof Toyota.…

Leonardo Fioravanti

Leonardo Fioravanti gripped me by the elbow and steered me to a point diagonally behind the red Daytona. I’d asked, apprehensively, “Is there anything you would change, if you could do it again?” This question, akin to suggesting another Leonardo alter the Mona Lisa, proposed reworking the voluptuous Ferrari GTB/4 Daytona?…

Audi Quattro Spyder

This was a private mother-and-son moment that transcended their roles as European automotive nobility. The proud engineer son and CEO of Audi, Ferdinand Piech, parading his new concept sports car to mum, Louisa Piech, on the first press day, Tuesday, October 8, of the 1991 Frankfurt show.…

Lambo Crash!

Crashing the first Lamborghini Diablo allowed out of captivity should have ended my attempt to work in Europe. Long before the career move from Australia really began to pay dividends such public humiliation – try keeping a Lambo prang quiet in an industry that thrives on ever more exaggerated gossip – could, rightly, have meant being denied access to supercars, the bedrock of any job based on driving and writing about fast cars, while living in Italy.…

Mazda-MX-5

Thirty years ago in Wheels magazine’s January 1990, which named the original Mazda MX-5 Car of the Year, I wrote: “I’ll admit I’m biased. You see, I love the MX-5. Mazda’s delectable little sports car is exactly the kind of machine I’ve been pleading for the world’s car makers to build for more than two decades.…

Ronnie Peterson

Ronnie Petersen, almost certainly the fastest Grand Prix driver of the 1970s, died after an horrific multicar pileup at the start of the 1978 Italian Grand Prix. Tragically, Ronnie – SuperSwede – was killed unnecessarily.…

Olivier Gendebien

One July day in the late 1960s, 12-year old school-boy Robert Gendebien returned home from his Belgium boarding school for the summer holidays. Over dinner with his father and two younger sisters Astrid and Colienne, Robert asked a fateful question. …

Franco Scaglione

Automotive historians, like historians in any field, occasionally commit unforgiveable errors. I’m hugely embarrassed to admit that in a 1991 Autocar magazine story, I killed off designer Franco Scaglione. Only to learn two years later that he had just died.…

Phil Irving

In 1966 a new set of regulations was adopted for Formula One racing. The 1.5-litre engine capacity ceiling for both normally aspirated and supercharged engines gave way to a 3-litre limit for NA engines, while supercharged units remained limited to 1.5-litres.…

Anatole “Tony” Lapine

Few travelling companions were as stimulating as Anatole ‘Tony’ Lapine, the Latvian-born American who ran Porsche design from 1969-1988 and died in late April, 2012, just weeks after the death of his predecessor Butzi Porsche.…

Rudolf Hruska: Mister Alfasud

Rudolf Hruska belonged to the old aristocratic school of automotive design. His was a simple philosophy – much ignored, he believes, in the creation of modern cars. “In my opinion,” the tall, elegant and impeccably dressed, Austrian told me in 1990, “when you set out to make a new product, you should start from fundamental principles.…

Russell Brockbank

Every motoring enthusiast has a favourite Brockbank cartoon. Usually, only after long and careful consideration: how do you choose between the dozens of his wonderfully simple yet astute sketches that so often provoke open laughter?…

Lancia’s Camuffo

On October 24, 1969 Fiat paid one lira (around 0.6cents) to gain outright control of Lancia. That one lira was merely a symbol of course, for Fiat also inherited Lancia’s debts – totally many hundreds of millions of lire.…

Denis Jenkinson

Upon discovering Denis Jenkinson – DSJ to the readers – in Motor Sport magazine (you know, the British magazine with the green-cover, edited by WB, William Boddy) in the late 1950s, he instantly became my hero.…

Carl Borgward and his Marque

Readers of this column undoubtedly know of Borgward, but I suspect most people under the age of 50 have never heard of the marque, let alone acquired any real knowledge of the German cars.…

Louis Klemantaski

The image is as vivid today as it was 60-years ago when, as a boy, I first saw the photograph and instantly knew that I would always love motor racing. Peter Collins’ head is in darkness, the peak of his flimsy helmet outlined against the sky.…

Julian Thomson

In 1989, when the Tokyo motor show moved 30km from downtown to Makuhari, the only practicable way from the city (where most of the press and manufacturers stayed) was by train.…

Holden’s Stylng Directors

Leo Pruneau, former head of design at Holden, is one of my favourite car people. In the 1990s Leo and I worked together as members of the Wheels magazine Car of the Year judging panel.…

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